Screenplay: Providence's Wildebeest

This is an excerpt from a screenplay by the legendary Ingvar Stig Ogvsbrotkulniiskaa. This was his last work before his death in 1994 of lutefisk poisoning and also exposure. Notably, it is the first screenplay ever to require audience participation in the form of sound effects during the diabetic baby fight scene, which was nominated for a Golden Ice Pick at the Kirovsk Novelty Film Party in 1993. His works focused largely on the unknown and some of the known, though in some cases he also included the marginally familiar as well as some of the fairly obvious (though this was rare and indeed included merely as satire). In retrospect, there is a clear progression of political views in his works from pure ignorance to ignorant indifference to confused apathy that has made his film adaptations of newspaper articles compelling for so many disaffected youth as well as the illiterate.

Mr Ogvsbrotkulniiskaa was known for translating his works into many different languages himself, a remarkable talent in its own right especially since it is almost a certainty that he only spoke Finnish and a few words of Russian (enough, it has been rumored, to get him arrested by the MVD once in 1958 for public lakeside pessimism in Novgorod; he was later released following revocation of his ice fishing license and a promise never to return).

Now, I include the author's own English translation of the first scene of Providence's Wildebeest, a powerful condemnation of cowardice and theft and a loving collage of stunningly poignant dialogue. In this, the opening scene, we learn that knowledge is ignorance and age is meaningless in a world where years are frozen to the ceiling like icicles that may fall at any moment and hurt someone--or worse, cause an insurance flap.

INT. ROOM -- NIGHT

The room is dark. There is 1 window through which light from a street lamp comes. But even the light is dark. A man sits at a table. We see him from behind. The door opens behind us and a yellow rectangle briefly dances on the man's back around the silhouette of another man. The DOOR CLOSES.

MAN #1

(Staring out the window, motionless.)

I knew you'd come.

MAN #2

(Still out of view. He has a deep, aged voice.)

Quiet. You know nothing.

We see MAN #1 jump out of his chair and face MAN #2, and now we see that MAN #2 is dressed in a black three-piece suit and thin black tie set against an agonizingly starched white shirt. He is smoking an ivory pipe filled beyond the bowl-brim with rarefied yak hair.

MAN #1

(Wide-eyed, panting, savoring the smoke.)

Your yak hair is magnificent.

MAN #2

Indeed. Your sense of smell is profoundly uncanny. My yak hair is cut fresh morningly with a pair of cheap aluminium scissors. It was the way of the ancients.

MAN #1

(Starting to pace.)

You abuse your position sir. You know it and I know it.

MAN #2

(Slaps MAN #1 with a velvet undergarment from Belgrade.)

Silence. I've brought you here for more than your sassy insolence.

MAN #1

(Weeping.)

You promised me that which was undeliverable. I should have known!

MAN #2

You had the longing of a broken heart. Fool! Yes, you should've known that the banana-Nutella-banana crepe you desired was not attainable.

(He removes his spectacles and peers into MAN #1's nostrils.)

No man has the acumen to place Nutella between two layers of banana. No man would dare to even try. Cardinal Greigel von Nusselkopf-Schokolade himself was excommunicated for merely slicing a plantain near some cocoa not a half-century ago. That for which your loins pine is implausible.

MAN #1

(Removes an unconscious wildebeest from his pocket and now wears a look of horrified indifference on his gaunt face.)

You leave me no choice, old man.

MAN #2

Come to your senses child!

The streetlight flickers and the sun rises immediately. A glass of orange juice from the countryside appears on the table, which we now see is made of wax. We can also now see that MAN #1 is MAN #4, to whom we have not yet been introduced. We gasp.

MAN #1/MAN #4

You bastard!

MAN #2

(His handkerchief is ablaze and he savors the acrid smoke like a connoisseur.)

You have brandished your last wildebeest, ignorant roach!

MAN #2 waters his suit with the orange juice. A beautiful plant sprouts from his lapel and flowers before our eyes. It bears an ugly poisonous fruit which kills MAN #1 with a blow to the spine. The sun sets and the streetlight flickers on and we fade to black. MAN #2's VOICE can now be heard, menacing, old, and decrepit.

MAN #2

It was not hate that was this man's undoing, nor was it love. It was apathy. And a vicious genetically-modified apple with an unlicensed firearm.

END SCENE

When Yignaz Boroslovosibirskov directed this masterpiece in his film of the same title in 1993, it is said that he exhausted his body's supply of tears and resorted to a lacrimal gland transplant to regain his ability to weep (he has since died of complications of immunosuppressive therapy for graft rejection). The entire film was shot on location on the smooth side of an ancient mud-brick wall in Kamchatka in glorious black and grey for a grainy look that pummels the heart with relevance and gravitas. The writer of this note himself has only just recovered--after 15 years and 3 colonoscopies.

HMR, December 27, 2008

Helsinki

Goethe and the proverbial substance

In its finality, the cul-de-sac of knowledge impresses those who've been disappointed by education as the mode and mark of social evolution. It is where, in order to learn more (that is, to drive through the proverbial living room of the proverbial house at the end of the cul-de-sac and out into the backyard and through the proverbial fence and into the darkness beyond, perhaps into a ditch or ravine of some sort where we might meet an early but satisfying proverbial death), we must peer over our shoulders at what we learned before we turned into the cul-de-sac o'proverbs after we bought 'cigarettes' at the proverbial corner store when the (proverbial) man said something kind of profound but not so much really because he was selling cigarettes at a corner store and of course every once in a while he'll say something that's not completely bereft of substance as he exhales. That sort of thing makes me feel warm inside.

That reminds me of the time when Goethe and I were camping in a totally appropriate male-bonding sort of way, making 'smores and conversation and dispensing wisdom and recyclables (and recyclable wisdom) across arcades of sparks and embers. He was sugar-high and said something like--and I am translating his medieval German--'Yo Cauliflower, monkey library Simon as scallops handbanana cheek absolute yellowcake* sportyshine leaf-faucet National Public Radio fork.' I'm paraphrasing; my medieval German isn't as superbly excellent as my English.

My memory does fail me at times, but this time I am fairly certain that what G-Tonez was trying to tell me was that we must reflect upon our past if we are to avoid living hand to mouth. To me this just sounds like an elitist assault on the decent hard-working hunter-gatherers in society, especially the ones who have amnesia. But even though he probably meant collective and mostly scientific memory--the (proverbial) shoulders upon which we stand before we can advance as a species--social memory is no exception, I think.

The problem is that memory does fail, and social memory is no exception. One might say that, because of the sheer noise involved in the laying down of memories on a social scale, it is impossible to nuance them with those subtle (and essential) features that temper the imagination and tame the reflexes. Indeed some social memories occupy such an inflamed corner in our collective mind that even accessing those memories tends to lead to wildly impulsive, base, even animal responses. Case in point: September 11, 2001. Despite it not being the first nor the worst event of its kind, our self-proclaimed keepers of the social memory (journalists, politicians) have wrapped us so tightly and rigidly in the inflamed axons of its memory that to move one way or another, to reach into our pockets for nuance, becomes impossible at least as part of the mainstream discourse.

Whenever I use words such as 'mainstream' and 'discourse' I know that I've gone too far and need to shut up.

* I would like to stay off the no-fly list, please, because I have places to go from time to time.

Emotional meteorology

Warning: This post contains brain violence and emotional nudity. Also, it is ridiculous.

Last night, I was taking a mercury bath and had a thought, maybe. I don't remember. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that I wish I knew how to talk good about my feelings. Like, I want to be able to go from feeling a feeling, to noticing that I am feeling it, to figuring out what feeling it is, to deciding whether or not I like feeling the feeling, to being able to make the words with my brain that would stick to the feeling and make it so that when someone asks me what I'm feeling I can say something that makes sense like, 'hungry' or, 'my heart hurts because I missed the Golden Girls on the TV box.'

That was a bad example. I should come up with a point before bringing forth the examples.

See, I wish I knew how to make points. They told me in school that it was like whittling an arrowhead from a piece of obsidian. Not a big clumpy piece like one you would find buried in a river bed but the nice flat smooth pieces you find in cowboy skeletons that were once part of the circle of life on ocean floors 50 hundred million years ago.* Case in point: I was having a conversation on (in?) the subway and a dude came up to me and told me to get to the point. It was none of his business, so I was like, 'why don't you get to the point?' Really. I wasn't talking to him or to anyone in that car so it was none of any of their businesses. I was having a great conversation nevertheless. Mobile phones don't work in (on?) the subway.

So I gave him the old Garrison Keillor, 'No, no, it's a different story, about a pontoon boat.' And then my studio audience laughed. With me, not at me. 'Ha ha' and not 'hee hee,' as it were.

So to get back to what I was talking about before: some people have what those same people like to call 'emotional intelligence.' As far as I can tell, it's like the force, except it is missing some forcey things the most lamentable of which are levitation and deadly (but peace-loving) skill with a hybrid light saber.

Sometimes I wish I were able to identify the things that I know I must be feeling and to describe them in the same way that I can describe other things that I like such as juice. (Oh my gosh have you had it? It's delicious.) People who have this emotional intelligence feature are ever-aware of their own emotional climate--and they can sense the emotional meteorology of others.

Even though it sounds like a load of goat cud, I wanted to raise my 'emotional IQ,' as it were. One of my good friends claims that he is one of these feeling Jedis. Let's call him 'Linda.' I thought that, since I've been calling him by a girl's name, this might have something to do with why he's so good at keeping in touch with himself. (Don't even.)

So for two weeks, he called me 'Janet' at my request. We would go out for sushi, and I'd say, 'Hey Linda, pass the wasabi.' Then he'd say, 'Janet, I think you're being passive aggressive.'

'Can you shut up and grab me that white tuna** from the conveyor belt? You always get the good seat you bastard, where you get to see what's coming upstream while I have to keep asking you to feed me like a fessacchione. Ooh, wait, is that a $4.00 plate? Forget it. By the way, that's active aggression, right? How'm I doing? Good?'

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I wish I had wider shoulders so that I could wear a double-breasted pea coat without people thinking that Manute Bol had an albino midget son with a homeostasis problem.

* Note: this is not true at all.
** My second favorite variety of sushi in the world, after eel kabayaki nigiri.

Frustraturbation

I had begun writing a list of trivial things that annoy me (for no good reason) because that is the sort of person I am.

1. Parsley.
2. Asymmetry.
3. Mustaches.
4. Red hair.
5. Loose collars.
6. Loose ties.
7. Loose morals.
8. Loose faucets.

I was still calm. I wanted to dissect a little deeper into my shallowness. I started a new list.

1. Surgeons.
2. 'Sontimeter.'
3. Starting sentences with 'basically.'
4. 'Aks.'
5. Uninformed use of vernacular.

A little twitch started in my right little finger. This normally happens when I get worked up, drink coffee, or play a video game that I don't like just to reassert my juvenile masculinity and check that my testosterone still works.

I wanted more than just a twitch. I wanted sweat, palpitations, heartburn, and aching tension in my shoulders and lower back. I wanted neurological mayhem, tsunamis of dopamine ravaging my basal nuclei, inappropriately frantic and useless messages telling my brain to do inappropriately frantic and useless things with my muscles. And pain.

And so there came into being a new list. A terrible list. A list to end all lists, to line up the other lists against a wall and shoot them in the head.

1. Irresponsibly executed linguistic maneuvers--these include poor syntax, inappropriate idioms, and incorrect use of plural forms when the singular is intended and vice versa.

What started out as item #1, 'irresponsibly executed linguistic maneuvers,' quickly ballooned into a worryingly elitist tirade against the marginally educated masses who take language for granted:

As untrained as novice swordsmen, they brandish diction clumsily and with disregard for its sharp edges, its elegance, and the potential power it affords when executed with even just moderate skill.

These are the people who stir immiscible metaphors together like drunken chefs. They stagger around their prose like saturated winoes, trying to bring one end of an idiom towards the other and missing their mark completely. Instead of respecting the gravity of language and treading lightly but purposefully, they bumptiously bang words together like cavemen trying to make fire by trial and mostly error.

You might be one of these people. Do you know the difference between 'He only cuts wood' and 'He cuts only wood'? Do you say 'criteria' when you mean to say 'criterion'? How about 'phenomena'--have you any idea how to properly use this word without hurting yourself? Sometimes there is one 'auditorium,' but there may also be two 'auditoria.' I'm not even going to mention 'data' and 'media,' but I just did because I am annoyed and feeling so good right now.

Do you say 'comprises of,' 'myriad of,' or 'bored of'? Do you mistake 'advise' for 'advice' (and vice versa)? Do you eat 'brussel sprouts'? Do you wait 'as time progresses'? Do you 'take a different tact'? Do you not know how to spell 'ad nauseam'? Do you do things 'as best as' you can? Do you post 'quotes'?

You might as well be dipping your quill in poop and scribbling your silly letters directly onto your underpants.

Why am I so worked up about this? It's for absolutely no reason at all, which is far more reason than I need. Frustration is at the heart of ecstasy. The doubtful anticipation of climax is the heightening of the sensorium, the hypnotic progressive blurring of whatever once distinguished bliss from pain. As emotions flurry--love, hate, anger, pleasure--they all become shadows of each other as we speed down (or up) the oily asymptotic ramp that promises everything but delivers nothing, faster and faster, slower and slower.

I'm so frustrated that I don't know what I'm talking about anymore. Oh, yes!

Oh, by the way, all of this was in an English accent.

Domo arigato Mr. Moschino

I've got a secret I've been hiding under my coat. I starve my brain for blood every morning using a 100% silk Versace noose that is home to a delicate menagerie of biological opportunistic bastards (of the highest caliber) that I've collected during my travels through other people's nasty bits. My dilemma is this: how do I look presentable, and yet demand more of this season's catalog by not killing people who touch me?

I have considered the collarless shirt. Elegant, simple, no WMDs, and quite frankly, sexy. And I'm nothing if I'm not a sexy son of a blastula. But my neck is half a meter long and a size 14 1/2, so the collarless shirt makes me look like a closed tufted umbrella with an Adam's apple. Still sexy, but come on, add 1 crucifix and stir and I'm Father Late-for-Baptism. (Yes, of course the shirt will be black. That's how I roll.)

The bowtie. A timeless accoutrement that is as infused with suave lightness as it is heavy with brainiosity. Each bowtie comes with a spray bottle of 10 extra IQ points applied straight up the nose where you can smell the ideas.

No, the bowtie is not really timeless, rather wherever it goes it drapes everything within 2 meters of its frilly ends with a thin dusty coat of 1925 and a nice lacquer of pre-depression art-deco Gatsbitude (you're not going to get this stuff anywhere else, I speak a quaint dialect of northern arse, 3, 2, 1, never mind).

The bowtie offers the dull shirt an opportunity to charleston its way into the limelight. That might make the shirt yellow and accentuate my sweat stains (which are almost as sexy as my remarkably toneless ass) but every day wearing a bowtie is a day of greatness and respect.

Certainly the bowtie is more difficult to weaponize.

There is a simpler option. If Yossarian can get a medal pinned to his naked chest in wartime, I could certainly get used to the feel of stethoscope rubber around my bare neck and pens tegadermed to my chest hair.

You know what else is timeless? Styx.

The problem's plain to see/
Too much technology/
Machines to save our lives/
Machines dehumanize.

This of course makes so much more sense if you take out all these words and add different words that are more relevant. Actually I just like this song because I'm old skool and I kick it like hitops in 1983.

And I found a Moschino bowtie that matches my chest hair. Domo arigato, Mr. Moschino.