Daylight savings kicked in today. Every year, on falling back, I think of one particular night in my life. It’s one I actually think about often, but am absolutely guaranteed to think about when the time changes.
It’s 1994 or 95, and I’m studying film at CU Boulder. Part of studying film at CU at the time was taking Stan Brakhage’s survey classes — I don’t remember anymore what they were actually called — which amounted to just watching films for two hours. This was always an evening class. It started at 7pm.
One December evening I arrived at class a full half-hour early, which may have been the only time I was early to any class over the course of my college career. It was an absolutely frigid night, and I didn’t have anywhere else to go, so I just stood in the hallway outside of the classroom. Stan’s office was directly above the classroom, in an odd sort of loft space that was accessible by a stairway that went only to that one room. And he was up there, talking on the phone. I think we might have been the only two people in the building.
I could hear him, of course, as if he were standing next to me. If you ever had the pleasure-slash-terror of hearing Stan speak, you know how his voice carried, even when he was speaking gently. Which he was not at this particular moment. In fact, he was arguing with his wife. And what they were arguing about, as far as I could tell after guiltily and desperately eavesdropping for a few minutes, was his reluctance to continue seeing his therapist. He was adamant, and after going around and around about it for a while, I suppose his wife must have said something like “But WHY NOT, Stan?” and he answered with a sentence that, coming out of Stan Brakhage’s mouth, struck me as probably the single most unassailable thing I had ever heard or ever would. Which was:
Abraxas. Adocentyn. Apollyon. Ariel. Ars Notaria. Azael. In the Angelic Conversations of Doctor DEE (q.v.) Azael is the interpreter of God. What did “q.v.” mean? The first thing to do after staring again long into the vast ruins pictured on the endpapers front and back—broken antique torsos, huge headstones covered in clearly cut but unintelligible words, toppled pillars sunken in grass, arches, urns, capitals, obelisks—was to turn to the page whereon he had found the name of his secret lodge or club … it wasn’t far from the front, in an entry on Alchemy … the book almost fell open there, so stared at was the page.
On Selvaggina, Go Back into the Woods, John Balance introduces “Amethyst Deceivers” by talking about Debbie Harry wearing this shirt, and expressing his deep desire to have one of his own. Now Balance is gone and you can buy this shirt at Hot Topic. The world gets shabbier by the day.
In a more practical way, this was how Doctor Dee often encoded: he kept a huge number of stock phrases in various languages, which would be substituted for the key words of the secret message. The word “bad” could be enciphered by “Pallas is blessed of charm” or “You are admired of women, Astarte,” or “A god of grace enthroned.” If the same phrase were in Greek, it meant a different thing: “crown” perhaps, or “stealthily.” Whole fictions could be constructed out of these phrases, they were designed to fit together with standard couplings to yield long tedious and half-intelligible allegorical fantasies that actually meant something brief and fatal: The Duke dies at midnight. In fact the great trouble of the method was that the encoding was always so much longer than the message.
Late at night, unraveling such a one, Doctor Dee would sometimes think: All creation is a huge, ornate, imaginary, and unintended fiction; if it could be deciphered it would yield a single shocking word.
This: a person who is really, really annoyed by the lack of projection and staying power exhibited by L’eau de Tarocco, particularly in this stupid roll-on, which seems like such a good idea but just doesn’t work well at all due to the air bubble that forms right by the ball every time you turn it over. And this shit was expensive. And I’m complaining about this while wearing a CRASS t-shirt.
I had a rough weekend. On Saturday morning I heard “Pure” by The Lightning Seeds on the radio. I hadn’t heard it since, say, 1990. I listened to the whole thing, for old times’ sake, while the knowledge slowly dawned on me that it might actually be the single most insipid pop song ever recorded. Of course, it’s also virulently catchy. Then, later that night my household decided to watch an ostensibly visually stunning Hollywood blockbuster to break in our brand new, very very big HD TV. We knew it was going to be terrible. We did not know just how terrible.
And of course, I couldn’t get the damn Lightning Seeds out of my head the whole time. Now I am obsessed with the idea of making a video for Pure out of footage from Avatar, in hopes of making a pop culture artifact of the purest, most concentrated terribleness ever known. I can see the whole thing in my mind. The only character who would appear would be that blue chick. Cut after cut of her huge eyes, smiling coyly, narrowing flirtatiously, widening in horror as things explode in the background.
But I can’t make this thing, because I know if I started I would never finish, as I would descend into madness and turn inevitably to cannibalism like the narrator of “The Rats in the Walls”.
Zach Hooker, In Case of Emergency, Break Cat, 1995, 7.4 cm x 4.5 cm x 4.5 cm, found objects (toy cat, yarn, Xanax)
Although it represents the entirety of Hooker’s sculptural output, In Case of Emergency, Break Cat nonetheless spent the years between 1996 and 2011 tragically incomplete and shut off from view, as an actual emergency shortly after the piece’s creation forced Hooker to give the Xanax away to a panicky roommate. Fortunately, this was accomplished without actually breaking the toy cat. In November of 2011, the artist undertook conservation work on the piece, having received a prescription for Xanax in advance of some long-haul air travel. The restored piece now sits on Hooker’s desk, where it belongs, just in case.
