KENTUCKY MEAT SHOWER #18: HORSEHAIR WORM: THE EPIC
Haunt by Apathetic Ghost-- Horsehair Worm: The Epic -- "Straight Up" by Future
Scene: duplex apartment formerly Sad House now called People’s Temple. Under care of PE Management, the offices of which are in an abandoned deli found on Cary Street, and business is conducted a few blocks away at a Mini Mart. It is a house of angles all higglepiggle.
Scene: living room. The door has a tag on the frame that reads. “don’t forget to close me and smile!” A hole in the ceiling patched with a shrug. Living room litter: Magic cards, obliquely usable devices, crumbs. A blue rug breaks up the brown but a brown table stamps its feet on its back like liberty over the tyrant. In the hallway, light cuts through gaps in floorboard. A large red piano like a horsepill in a horsethroat chokes the space and narrows the hallway.
Scene: kitchen. . A door to the basement stays at constant lock. Opening fridge to find shelves with broken banisters. Inside snus on top of Chinese food packets. At closer inspection the shoddy craftsmanship of the kitchen becomes apparent. The countertop has modern tiles beneath old cabinets and a small island of tile between the oven and sink. Atop the fridge a floatsam/jetsam collection of bread, mandarin oranges with a microwave barely on-top of it. A small kitchen counter wearing a bricabrac arrangement of consumables: bread, potatoes, onions.
Scene: stairwell to basement. Unreadable graffiti, markings of its former ownership. Who knows what the graffiti is a sigil for now but the ritual was never completed and nobody cares to complete it now. The stairs are a vague threat to deposit you onto a hard concrete floor. Drums and amps in 4-3 football formation. A hole in the floor, water trailing towards it.
Scene: stairwell to back yard. Up and out goblinike to see a barely there yard. Dead grass. Two unattended birdfeeders on a crippled tree. A pipe with no apparent purpose takes you up to the balcony, nice enough to tempt the previous resident of the room that resided there to take the room.
Scene: balcony. Paint splattered vinyl yellow chair and a door that opens on its own.
Scene: office. Formerly a bedroom for a very miserable man. Now a nice office space with a Bolivian wall-hanging and a devil playing guitar and a poster from a Lucinda Williams/Drive-By Truckers show. A blind kitten bobs and weaves his head to make sure he’s safe. A broken frame, glass in icicle shards atop a custom Blade Runner poster on the miserable man’s former desk. His bookshelf, full of Marxist doggerel and Faulkner and the haute comfort food of MacDonald, Chandler, others still left waiting.
Scene: bathroom. Toilet finally repaired, with barely enough water for the entire bowl, obviously pulled from a commercial store. Curtains drag the floor like fancy dress. Polka dot shower curtain.
Scene: stairs. A lazy corkscrew, the wall of which includes a large tapestry of a cactus on a pink background. Inside a hollow post paper towels are stuffed into nails crooked as everything else inside this house. At the bottom of the stairs: former miserable man’s clothes rack, now a house coat rack. Above in the ceiling a shoddy job of ceiling repair: two colors of white.
Scene: bedroom. From opening, a pile of dirty clothes and opened scented candle boxes. It is a room that has the pretense of being put together: a pink tapestry hangs above a bed with flowered sheets, printed on it a cowboy riding a horse inside of a doubled circle emblazoned with YEE above and HAW below. Typewriter, converted into a lamp with a stemless wineglass and a bag of Purina cat food on pine nightstand. The floral pattern continues with an old dresser, a small belt of flowers between the top handles. But it’s marred by a recently emptied Ikea bookshelf box, papers on the floor, and a desk that temporarily houses two coats and permanently three plants: a kalanchoe, a tall snake plant in a squared planter, and a sanseveria that blooms out like an artichoke aching to be devoured. A red resin Maitreya Buddha sits below them. In the little bit of a corner left a litter box. Along the window sills: foliage. A hanging pothos basket, a struggling money tree plant next to a Chinese evergreen. The next window has a trio of Bath and Body works candles, an umbrella plant, a christmas cactus, and an aloev era plant held up by a lucid jasmine green garden stake. Two bookshelves flank a computer desk stacked with tobacco, more magic cards, and a stack of legal pads. Eight dollars in five and three ones are thrown down like a sort of refuse. Two creative bronze speakers pumping Cryptik’s “Kill Me Slowly”. There sits a man, beard wild, hair in thick mats and glasses. He is tattooed, close to heavily, with the handle of an ornate pocket knife jutting out of the left arm and a gorilla in a sailor cap smoking a cigar on the other. Lower right arm there is a Virginia tattoo with the ACL railroad bridge, purchased for a Mattaponi Reservation fundraiser. He looks to the right to see outside, a vague sense of paranoia over his whole body. There he sees it: on the graffitied wall of High Education, a headshop, are two accusing eyes, angry but begging on a purple face. He thinks: it’s like Barney the Dinosaur is eyefucking me. Then he remembers his favorite Robert Stone line.
“In my country, we have a saying-- Mickey Mouse will see you dead.”
The accusing eyes of Barney the Dinosaur are enough to stay alive in this room, but he is realizing the haunt all along was those eyes. He pokes his head out to see all across the walls of the head shop are the furious eyes, not reddened stoned eyes, but tough purple eyes glaring right into his windows.
Scene: living room. With roommates he is watching Paprika, the Satoshi Kon film about a psychiatrist using an earpiece to jump inside her patient’s dreamtime. Through the grey curtains of the living room on an overcast day suddenly sun busts through the windows. It is almost 8 pm. He and the roommate look out onto the street and pause the movie. A yellow haze has descended onto the city, putting everything around them in a sepia tone, the yellowish film haze. The poverty filter, used to communicate the seediness of Caracas, Mexico City, Bangkok. He walks upstairs to the balcony and opens the door.
Happy Wednesday. Kentucky Meat Shower has returned.
HORSEHAIR WORM: THE EPIC
To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.- HP Lovecraft, “Nyarlathotep”
There is no ideology on its face safe from this. Though it’s aesthetic burrowing, it supersedes and vulgarizes the thought and leaves it a husk. It most resembles a horsehair worm, but beneath that, we’re talking about the spectacle. But just as the Godhead and its parts must be delineated, we must do the same to the spectacle.
So let’s name it. We are talking about “the epic”, which we will differentiate from “epics”. Beowulf, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms are epics. They are not the epic. An example of the epic will be linked.
Here’s the tweet. The context we need is this: for liberals, the battle between Jen Psaki and Pete Doocy, with Pete Doocy often being made a fool of (give me a quarter and his ear and I could do it too), has been turned into an inexorable pun: a Psaki Bomb. What we see here is that the play fighting of two ideologies, centrist liberalism and modern American conservatism, despite combat that often shapes the tenor of American life for decades, has been reduced into a concentrated and cheap form like crack cocaine, with heels and faces readymade and the pops built in, applause piped in from prior successes and stars. But what is most unique about this is the air of self-congratulation. In accepting the existence of the Psaki bomb, Dave Bautista is congratulating himself for accepting by calling upon the authority of Jen Psaki’s divine smiting of Pete Doocy and feels like he, too, is dropping a Psaki bomb on Pete Doocy. Because Dave Bautista is on the winner’s team, he has the ability to congratulate himself. This is the epic: the exaltation of a subject so as to celebrate ourselves.
Now, on the other side of the aisle. The dawn of the Age of the Epic (which can only dawn during the society of the spectacle) may have been Donald Trump’s proclamation: “we’re going to win so much you’re going to be sick of winning.” In this statement, Trump declared that victory was inevitable, that those exalting him would win to the point they’d be sick of it. The goal was to make everyone sick: its final victory was boredom. What he imagined as a boredom was instead a soul sickness. Trump’s election was, via exaltation, a celebration of the emptiest urges in American society. The epic, in its elevation of acts not worthy of the tag, puts us into a constant soul-sickness and an aesthetic dyspepsia brought on by looking beyond the horizon and only seeing our faces, looking back dumb. It is this dumbness that the epic aspires to, a narcotized refractory period. Barack Obama had epic moments. Trump was a President of the Epic.
There is no moral belief to the epic. It merely asks for puppets. From a vantage point Jen Psaki is epic, as is Donald Trump, as is Ryan Reynolds, as is Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, as is Vladimir Lenin, as is Francisco Franco, Pinochet, Gonzalo, Marcos, Obama, Palin, Gritty. The epic asks to assume victories not yet won. It feels so good it feels bad. It seeks to eradicate materialism to create the perfect subject, a narcotized consumer purchasing only images. The epic is not Che Guevara or a Che Guevara t-shirt. But put sunglasses on Che and a blunt in his mouth and you have the epic.
The apotheosis of the epic is the gigachad meme. If you feel like you’re having a stroke reading the sentence “the apoethesis of the epic is the gigachad meme”, you’re healthier than I am, but allow me to introduce you to how much worse your life can get. The gigachad meme is a meme where a yoked man grins and captioned something to the effect of “why yes, I am x, how could you tell.” (He is named chad because of some unfuckable twit crying about women wanting to fuck Chad Thundercocks or some stupidity). The point to the joke is put something true about yourself in the place of the x. How blunt of an exaltation can you get, and by that exaltation, how much of a celebration of the self there is? You can put anything in the x. “Why, yes, I’m a welder.” “Why, yes, I am a Broncos fan.” “Why yes, I have a diaper fetish.” The image is not arbitrary, but the caption is. All that matters is that image and the feeling and the temporary feeling of superiority. And in an age of image, a yoked man who enjoys everything from the history of the Fourth International to hot sauce is a God.
It even has a way of dealing with its opposites. When “epic” as an interjection was coined, it came with it an interjection for what ever was not epic: “fail”. These are not opposites, these are the side of each coin. Fail carries within its failure a vision of success. In fact, the straining for the epic creates fail. And as the epic exalts the subject that we celebrate ourselves through, fail damns the subject we put ourselves against. Our litany above of Lenin, Franco, etc, too can all be deemed with fail depending on the vantage point. Context is jettisoned and we only have vulgar and dumb tribalism adhering to image like baboons to the herd mate with the reddest ass. The differences of Lenin and Franco are not differences under the gaze of the epic. Through its flattening that becomes flattery of those who take on the victories there is not actual principle beyond the all American urge to feel good all the time by both casting “epic” for what we love and “fail” for what we hate.
Fail, in its stuffy schoolmarm tone registers disapproval of the venture. Urban Dictionary, really as good as any dictionary in this sphere, nails the definition to the wall. Fail is “either an interjection used when one disapproves of something, or a verb meaning approximately the same thing as the slang form of suck.” The word we should key in on is disapproval. If epic is the approval, fail is the disapproval. Its connotations have been recorded, and can be called upon if there’s doubt. Interjecting “bad” does not equal interjecting “fail”, as fail is already tinged with disapproval, just as epic is tinged with approval. But there are times when interjecting “bad” can count as another mask of the epic.
We must go back to Donald Trump. Witness how Donald Trump saying “wrong” into a mic during a debate with Hilary Clinton became an infamous gif. But in the sphincter like o of his face as he speaks that simple word what comes through him is the epic. It’s not hard to imagine, were Trump a more culturally savvy presence, that instead he would say “fail”. And where we find that fail could be said, we find the epic not far off. This even extends to its newest form: cringe versus based. To interject either, we are again in the same thing, parasitic forms zombified by their infection.
In an age of image, there is nothing that can fight it off other than a destruction of that age. Until then, everything solid will turn epic. The goal, amongst others, is to lick shots at the grand image. It is webs of context. From here to eternity.
I will never be epic.
“Straight Up” by Future
When you name yourself Future you have guaranteed that when somebody hits play on one of your songs they look into to see what is beyond the horizon. Even moreso when the Dungeon Family bestows it onto you. After all, before Future, Future was Meathead.
Pluto is an album ensconced in the golden hue of reminiscence. In the basement of VCU’s Hibbs Hall, I’d sleep between a class on postcolonial British literature and a Modernist lit class. I’d push the armchairs together and sleep in them in a sort of makeshift bed. It was an odd time where I had spent the first half of the semester nocturnal, writing and reading at night, sometimes until 6 or 7 in the morning inside of the Cabell library. I’d often wake up to people flashing cameras in my face or taking pictures. When I’d wake up, I’d throw on “Straight Up”.
“Straight Up” is a bit of pop excellence. The way Future strings together awkward lines that exist between the heartfelt and the meath-eaded and the Nard and B beat that sounds like a spaceship taking up was a little bit of serotonin I needed. What I did not know, of course, is that in several years, Future’s musical hedonism would darken.
Listening to “Straight Up”, just on a whim, there’s a line I could not avoid hearing. “I’m on the molly, I don’t fuck around with those xans.” In a few years, he would be in a high profile breakup with Ciara of “Goodies” fame and releasing a quintet of projects (Monster, Beast Mode, 56 Nights, Dirty Sprite 2, and Purple Reign) where even the turn up songs sounded like vampiric drams.. Throughout, drugs haunted the proceedings, not in the way DARE said they would, but in something more human and frail. Those songs felt like parties where the hell of street life and the ravages of addictions only showed their faces in odd glances. Future was no stranger to hedonism in his earliest days, but this was hedonism hiding a belief there wasn’t a future to build to, just fleeting pleasures. In the penultimate song of that five album run, he would rap/sing “I can hear the perky’s calling.”
That was a Future I did not know was on the horizon during the days of Pluto. During those days, a leg crossed my lap in the back of a grad student’s car and I felt desired for the first time years. Future’s gift to his then fiancee Ciara, a slow jam called “Body Party”, bled into his trap power ballad “Turn On the Lights”. It was the only time college felt like the best days of my life.
In just a few years, when I was living on my own dime for the first time somebody I trusted with the intimacy I was supposed to save for only a special person took the most explicit advantage of me. I cast that trust into the Stygian depths of “Codeine Crazy” and “March Madness” on repeat, sometimes playing off the tinny speakers of an iPhone, sometimes in earbuds while I tried to soothe myself from the vision of my reflection staring back accusing, glanced off the pool at the bottom of that chasm, my trust bobbling amongst leandark water. I didn’t think about “Straight Up” or “Turn On the Lights”. I imagined what it was like to float on a sea of codeine in a twin mattress I pulled off the streets.
It can be viewed as a sort of grim irony a man introduced himself to the pop world at large by saying he wasn’t fucking around with Xanax in five years would be howling for percocets to get off his trail, but I reject that. Art knows before the person does; in the koan that constitutes a single rap couplet there can be a kernel of future demises and achievements, and that they are often accidents, lines that sound like filler just because they rhyme, but function as a sort of Freudian mistake: an insight into crucial issues bubbling around the skull. Somewhere Future knew in his ecstasy there was a capacity for pain.
Can you listen to a song that shows you where you will be years from now? When I listened to “Straight Up”, was I ever taking the offshoot of a line and making it cognizant that Future and I would find ourselves on similar journeys in a few years? Or was it just something I listened to? Did I know deep down we’d both find ourselves in a pit, him releasing what he excavated and me cradling my phone in my bed while “Codeine Crazy” plays? And did I just not listen to “Straight Up” close enough to know the future was always here?
Until next time,
C. Sloce