Blonde Unread (ATTN: Nervous White Scribes)

CAN THE SUBALTERN SCREAM?

Late Usamerica’s in another tedious round of “Cancel Culture” dialogue¹.

Like most contemporary dialogues — fuck it, let’s scare-quote for accuracy: “dialogues” — it’s the mindless repetition of rehearsed talking points in post-factual bad faith pwnership-oriented eyeroll argumentation, endless appeals to being Right, Actually, Obviously; correct-thinking, mentally and spiritually hygienic, One of the Good Ones, gooble gobble, one of us.

Now, If you’re a chancy Gregorian, you believe that it’s Two-Thousand-Twenty-Two (2022), and as such:

Every emergent issue’s a topic about which you should possess immediate expertise.

           Workless understanding.

                    Slacker satori.

    Of course.                   Of course.

And so:

“Cancel culture doesn’t exist!” says The Committed Leftist (if we were using all the scare-quotes we should² this would be a haunted motherfucking house) from the nerf prison block confines of the contemporary Internet.

Perhaps a handful of people click a heart on it, and a number goes up.

Perhaps they aren’t even “people.”

(jump-scare quotes)

Naught but wailing, toy guns blazing.

      and

The next door neighbor installs a Ring camera.

 and

A policeman’s wretched heart grows three sizes.

    and

The whisper network panopticon expands.

        and

Telecom execs press flesh and shark grin.

 and and and

    YOU CAN BE MADE TO UNDERSTAND

         that your platform’s a trapdoor,

  the soapbox’s as anomalous as it is anachronistic,

         IT IS     UNUSUAL     AND     NOTEWORTHY    that

I Can Bang On Here About Mostly Whatever

      (except for the things I can’t . . .)

 THIS IS YOUR ACTIVATION PHRASE.  YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO.

              👁

    PROCEED.

       PROCEED.

          PROCEED.      PROCEED.     PROCEED.

       PROCEED.

          PROCEED.    PROCEED.

       PROCEED.

          PROCEED.

    PROCEED.

       PROCEED.

    PROCEED.

       PROCEED.

          PROCEED.          PROCEED.       PROCEED.

          PROCEED.  PROCEED.     PROCEED.

       PROCEED.

          PROCEED.

  PROCEED.

       PROCEED.

        

in the event that You, Too are a Late Usamerican hostage in an insurrection-proofed commercial corridor masquerading as a city, being abstractly killed a million times over by various layers of actively hostile, antagonostic pseudo-representative government — let me tell you! — it may be to your benefit to open your fucking eyes and ears and behold the fallen state of the spectacle:

 Rigid, insincere dialogue — delivered unconvincingly and without conviction.

          Thoughtless thoughts and empty prayers in bumper sticker world.

We see you.

(they don’t)

We hear you.

(they don’t)

Any spectator much less a Spectacularist such as myself would have to be an absolute pig’s ass to pretend that the current environment for e.g. criticism, art-making, etc. is anything other than rife with insincerity — lifeless as it is listless.

    THE ALL-SEEING ◬ EYE’S A GOUGE-GULCH,

                 THUMB-PERFECT,

                              waiting.

BLONDE UNREAD   

“Am I even allowed to write that movie?”

      (EXT. COFFEE SHOP)                     (EXT. HUMAN BODY)

             Well,

    of course you can —

You can write anything you’d like,

   provided you don’t show it to anyone,

       and it’s not somehow discovered by a malicious entity.

But that wasn’t what the young screenwriter I was hungover-eavesdropping in-on’s concern was for:

      He was looking to 

        GET PAID $$$

     Li’l buddy wants to eat and live inside, and he wants to get it from art.

                                                     Relatable!

Shit, Li’l buddy.                            Shit.

So he’s got A Tale to Tell, or so he thinks, “his” or otherwise, and he’s got a very contemporary sort of anxiety about it:

  “Can I do this?”

       What is permissible?

And he’s thoughtful, and I admire him for it — this is a neighborhood full of screenwriters, and I overhear a lot of their conversations willingly or otherwise, whollotta otherwise; and frankly most of them shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the Arts&Letters; but these boys are talking to each other with a genuine concern for the response of a hypothetical Other audience; and I’m warmed by it.

He’s got red curls and he’s identified himself as Jewish, but that doesn’t mean that every single person on the planet’s gonna be thrilled if he writes a film with a non-white lead.

His friend, with whom he seeks counsel, is olive-toned with dark hair. 

“White, I think” in the low-stakes street taxonomy.

I sit with a gravel-voiced rabbi, each of us in a colorful half-broken Adirondack chair, backs to the buzz of Hollywood Blvd., intermittently exchanging brief snatches of conversation about my time in the schmatte trade (a conversation-saver when he’d asked me if I were a Jew — I am an interfaith bridge-builder, and my religion is beauty) as the young writers wondered aloud at their granted permissions.

          And I felt bad for them, being sympathetic to their concerns.

I am after all a person who possesses ambitions that are better-compensated and therefore necessarily, definitionally “more mainstream” than a small-audience substack.

But right now I’m Outside.              Way Outside.

     And I love it, in a sense.

I’d like to stay out here and build on the property, really. I’ll be infill. That’s fine.

  I know the houses along the bluffs are taken.

  I know the bluffs about the houses ain’t faking.

     I know the score and its keeper, and he’s no brother of mine.

Hollywood, CA    2.15.22

---

“You’ve got to think of it as the ocean.”

The rabbi smiled.

I sat up from the waist, leaned-in.

“That’s fucking crazy. I always say that. I call it ‘riding the wave of the unwanted.’”

We’ve been discussing the frequencies at which our voices most naturally operate.

              Both of us,

       we’re often eaten up by hungry background machinery.

the traffic, ceaseless:

Whirs and hums and scrapes and skrrts and blahblahblah and uhhhh and ooooh and some escaped interstate sound from somewhere hops the barriers, enters the arena.

Roared out.

To me:

Unwanted.

Cars cars cars cars cars.          Vroom vroom vroom vroom vroom.

Big old bummer hum.

I hate it.

It makes it difficult for me to speak with other people on the street.

It makes it difficult for me to hear.

“Until COVID,” I hadn’t realized the extent to which I had been reading lips.

“Until I’d allowed myself to read about neurodivergence issues,” I hadn’t realized the atypical extent to which I experience Enormous Levels of Sound Sensitivity — the sort of thing that can control your breathing, your movement, your very thought — or that the sound sensitivity thing with the texture things with the movement things with the function things with the . . . JUST MIGHT BE INDICATIVE of “something,” though I’m reluctant to submit myself for Pokemon qualification and do not seek to “treat” myself,

         if you’d like to treat me,

              I’ll gladly escort you.   💙💙

---

Before I left, I introduced myself to the young writers, excusing myself for interrupting. I told them that I appreciated their concern, and that they are not alone in finding the current cultural environment insulting, stifling, constraining, and so on. Told them I have regular discussions with people about the subject — all kinds of people, which we’ll be getting to.

I recommended that they read the book Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl & Cynthia Ward.

“It’s quick and to the point, Nisi Shawl in particular gives it to you straight, and it was written prior to the contemporary bullshit paradigms and crucibular decreasing-return rat-race shankings.”

The redhead, somewhat caught off-guard by the well-meaning recommendations of a reckless and vulgar stranger, took a note and pledged to seek it out.

Sincerely, I think.

I hope that he does, and I hope you might also consider it.

Since we are here, now, and this here’s The Platform, now, I’m gonna recommend the book to you too, because I know that the people reading this are unusually likely to be artists, writers, “creatives” (another term I REJECT) or otherwise media-critical, thoughtful, curious sorts.

Permissibility is a valid and necessary personal inquiry and as a person who’s spent life seeking-hoping-failing to find peace with my place in a many-times-over segregated superimposition of dwellings, neighborhoods, cities, states, countries, worlds, ideologies, scenes, conversations — this book is the most concise, detached, and sincere approach to the subject that I have found, standing in stark contrast to the actively unhelpful, self-injurious, opportunistic lockstep convenience-speak that defines the Babel Tower cuneiform crumble hopelessness of “social justice” politics³ and rhetoric c. 2022 A.D.

The book grew out of a workshop, and initially appeared as Transracial Writing for the Sincere, which in our fallen times sounds semi-sarcastic but is — should you risk sincerity! — something that can be understood as a nested call to action —

You want to do something?  Do it.  Don’t fuck around.

You’re sitting around Very Pale writing some lazy shit that sounds the way a bigoted white racialist⁴ c. 1991 thinks Black Americans talk, that reflects poorly on people who aren’t you, in a society of screen-watching confused captives in the cave, where the symbol and the referent are continually confused, and where — in the (unlikely) event of your output’s success, it may materially worsen the lives of members of that group?    Fuck you.    Obviously.    Fuck you.

  Fuck you      a million times over       for a million reasons.

You’re sitting around nervous as shit because you can’t tell if it’s alright to write a lead who isn’t your physical double?

   That puddle of piss beneath you’s the drowning you deserve.

Los Feliz, Los Angeles, CA   2.21.21

---

Now, since I’m Outside I get to⁵ talk about things in terms that are unresolved. Because you can’t cancel me. You never permitted me.

Never admitted me.

        Let a vampire inside, first —

then maybe you’ll become a stakeholder.

I didn’t get to the point in life that I could comfortably discuss the particulars of Manhattan garment building interiors with a rabbi in Los Angeles by asking politely.

With some significant exceptions⁶, next to no one helped me.

I was actively discouraged⁷, exhorted to follow a more conventional path.

I refused, and for that I suffered.

The food and the shelter didn’t come easily or consistently. But I kept after it.

            And eventually I would suffer for my successes⁸.

First:

I found unlocked doors and back-doors and doors that gave way to kicks or a ducked shoulder, and I muscled my way into rooms in which I “had no business,” and I made it my business through chiffon-sheer effort will and ambition, whatever luck I could steal:

                 unblinking,     unapologetic.

   EQUAL. EQUAL? EQUAL,

                You think I’ve never wandered a fucking desert before?

        Let’s walk,