“In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.” - William Burroughs
(letter, 1953)
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“ O bitter is the knowledge that one draws from the voyage!
The monotonous and tiny world, today
Yesterday, tomorrow, always, shows us our reflections,
An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom!”
- Baudelaire,
“Le Voyage,” Geoffrey Wagner translation
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I’m in London in June when they fly war planes at the Queen to celebrate her Jubilee. Duran Duran serenades her at Buckingham Palace, and horses pull a golden carriage that carries her hologram.
That same month in Lisbon there is a festival celebrating Saint Anthony, the patron of sardines and mass marriage. People erect wooden stands to fry the small fish. The structures fill the cramped, winding streets.
The cities are safe, and the people are mostly polite. They seem to live well-adjusted lives.
I meet a Japanese girl outside of Athens, Greece who has partied with an American actor Haley Joel Osmond. It takes a while to deduce the actor’s identity from the low resolution cell phone photo and her vague description. He sees dead people, she finally says, and everything becomes clear.
I’m in Germany when the overturning of Roe V. Wade reaches the news. The locals shake their heads. Their faces show something between disbelief and pity.
There is a growing list inside my phone. I keep adding to it, but I no longer know what it’s for:
Waffle House, Miles Davis, deserts: real and rhetorical, Holly- wood, multiculturalism / “variety,” death drive, James Dean, Greyhound, fireworks, gold rush...
In Geneva a chef cooks us an elaborate meal before the show: green beans and scalloped potatoes sautéed in a cream sauce, shredded and marinated carrots, artificial meat, bread, salad, glasses of red wine. The sound system at the venue is incredible. Afterward, everyone who has performed is given his own hotel room down the street, complete with a free breakfast. This is made possible by some long-standing handshake deal with the hotel’s owner, and some government funding. The whole thing is enough to give you a perverse sense of American pride, if only for a moment.
Precarity can create a sense of violent urgency in the arts that is hard, and maybe undesirable, to simulate. There will never be a European G.G. Allin, for instance.
In Berlin we drink warm beer in an ornate park somewhere near a road named after Karl Marx. A pair of performance artists, wearing business suits and smeared with paint, struggles with a series of ropes in our periphery, soundtracked by gently throbbing electronic music. 50-or-so spectators watch from a patio, sipping wine and cocktails. My German and American expat friends talk about how expensive Berlin has become. They speculate about the next new place. Leipzig, Marseilles, Athens?
In France they make flat sandwiches and call them tacos. I drink a cloudy glass of Pastis and watch a Parisian performer play melodramatic pop music while draped in a Bob Marley flag. The next afternoon, we visit Jim Morrison’s grave. A fence has been erected to prevent tourists from getting too close. I open a bottle against the edge of an anonymous tombstone in tribute. We miss the flight to Italy that afternoon. Instead, we wander a desolate Paris suburb in the summer heat. It feels like a karmic payment for disrespecting the dead.
People in these places ask me what America is like today. I tell them it is getting worse and more expensive, simultaneously. The sense of decline is palpable to U.S. citizens from all walks of life. It’s like a turnpike where the toll keeps going up but the potholes are never repaired. Most of these people I’m with don’t drive, though, and I keep this analogy to myself.
I return to the States in time for the 4th of July. The fireworks are loud and terrify all the dogs, but the display is beautiful. From a third story rooftop it looks like Manhattan is on fire.
That same day, an emo rapper guns down civilians during an Independence Day parade outside of Chicago, killing seven. Journalists note that, in hindsight, some of the shooter’s artistic output seemed to hint at a forthcoming violent act. One of his music videos depicts a classroom scene reminiscent of the one in Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy.”
A few deadly Tik Tok challenges have made the headlines since I was gone. The angel of death challenge encourages participants to jump in front of large trucks. The blackout challenge involves choking oneself to unconsciousness on camera. (This one originated years earlier on another platform, but it’s experiencing a summer revival on Tik Tok.)
Publisher V. Vale was born in 1944 in a Japanese internment camp in Arkansas. His mother and father were a nightclub singer and womanizing actor, respectively. As a boy he would spend afternoons in the California desert, reading and daydreaming. He’d read gun magazines and mail order catalogs and Wisdom and the Greek classics. He’d pretend to explore the jungles of South America on a horse. At night he would lie awake with one ear on the cheap mono radio he redeemed from the side of a cereal box, listening to the blues.
I’m standing in a foggy nightclub in Greenpoint that sells $12 mixed drinks in plastic cups. The Germans invented the Luger, a friend is telling me, and he’s nearly yelling, both to compete with the throb of mindless techno and because he seems quite passionate about the subject. It’s a beautiful machine that shoots perfectly straight but becomes useless when dropped in the mud, he says. The Allied Forces won the war because they made the Spitfire plane with mud in mind.
I return to the list, adding “mud” just before the phone dies.
food desert, bomb makers’ kids, Springsteen, the blues, soda cups, Oklahoma, Milwaukee, “low stakes” (?), Showtime at the Apol- lo, sand, mirage, mud.
Night becomes early morning. I take the wrong train leaving the club and eventually find my way home as the sun creeps up.
It’s 2010 and I’m in Atlanta driving around delivering pizza. My workplace is adjacent to a large, brightly-lit Kroger parking lot. Slowly gentrifying, it is still known as the “Murder Kroger,” and a few stragglers of its previous life as a hub of street prostitution continue to wander around. DJ Drama is on the radio. He premiers rap songs that still feel intimately local, just having graduated from strip club rotation to the airwaves. Soon, many of the songs will reverberate through popular culture, self-propagating like viruses for decades or more. (Wacka Flocka Flame’s “O Let’s Do it” comes to mind as an example.) Drama plays the tracks and hypes them up a bit beforehand. There’s a sense of locals-only gossip about it, which somehow impacts me even though I’m so far removed from its world.
I live in a mostly-empty hippie enclave owned by a young widow just outside the city’s perimeter. The upstairs neighbor is a retired Burning Man attendee with a Prius, an RV, and several chickens. Sometimes I wake to the sound of him practicing a Balinese style of music called “monkey chant.” In the evenings I drive around the city and catch glimpses into customers’ homes and lives from their doorways like some kind of observing alien. I’ve just developed a renewed appreciation for marijuana, which does not have proper names yet, at least not the kind you buy at the Republican gay bar nextdoor to my job. DJ Drama’s voice on the radio, enhanced by the vapor of mid-grade weed, provides a powerful illusion of connectivity.
I wake up and find a charge. There are a few other additions to the list that I don’t remember entering.
...stubborn cowboy momentum, space tourism, The Model T (car), The Model T (gay bar), idiot beauty, firework’s flash, war against the practical world.
America is like a teen affirming itself out loud, performative but unsure. There is no long game. To take up arms against the practical, in this setting, is foolish and brave.
I visit another friend who shows me the new radio he’s expecting in the mail. It’s a 144 Mhz transceiver that should be able to pick up Russian numbers stations and other vague tones from far away places. I’m a little relieved, because his radio interest seems to be eclipsing his Twitter fixation. He has just returned from South Carolina, where the sky is less crowded and the frequencies are easier to access. He plays me some recordings of what he was able to pick up, mostly subtle pulses and faint squelching sounds. The theory, he explains, is that the numbers stations were used by Russia during the Cold War to transmit coded messages to embedded Soviet agents abroad.
The radio can simulate the sudden appearance of an outsider. A voice makes its way through static, haunts the listener. Communication across a divide, a border. Connectivity, or invasion. Other dimensions and new frontiers. Sharing and cross-contamination. The myth of an undiscovered world.
Billionaires are buying up space real estate. Everyone is looking for a new frontier.
H.G. Wells used inter-planetary invasion as an analogy for European Imperialism when he wrote War of the Worlds. The novel would later inspire scientific research leading to the development of actual rockets. When Orson Wells’ performed his radio broadcast of the book, everyone thought it was real.
The stories we tell are reflexive and self replicating. There is truth in them, and fiction, too, and we repeat both, along with our embellishments, and make them more true, and they evolve and trickle down, or out, and continue to reproduce on their own.
My phone has started to compose and send text messages autonomously. It’s like some form of divination. When I begin to write, each keystroke multiplies, assembling new words and phrases. Sometimes real words emerge, even sentences. Sometimes it adds emojis. Maybe it will begin to send the list, or fragments of it, to my list of contacts, inundating them with my half-formed thoughts. Maybe the recipients will complete my thoughts for me.
If you want the illusion of connectivity, maybe you have to put up with the haunting.
The soldier, the hero, the starving artist, the myth of an untamed frontier. Connectivity, invasion. Conquistadors seeking something new, something that has yet to be ruined, and then ruining it.
Meanwhile, the ghost of the old contaminates the new.
Maybe the bold and poisonous “frontier spirit” contains its own antidote.
The unidentified station plays on. Morse code, coast guard, baseball, preachers, ghosts, aliens, soldiers, cowboys, commentators; there is no telling. Strangers speaking across a divide or a desert expanse. When words appear, they’re mostly indecipherable, marred by static and hiss.
My friend has been working 50 hours per week, saving up. “I’ve got a new one coming in the mail,” he says as we listen carefully to the noise. A mess of radio wires runs the length of the wall.