Only Lovers

"Only Lovers Left Alive." Very strange. Very beautiful. Jim Jarmusch sinks his teeth into the vampire movie genre and comes up with a mouthful of meditations on celebrity, family, and creativity. Starring Tilda Swinton as the HVIC Eve and Tom Hiddleston as the moody rock star Adam who looks great with his shirt gaping open at all times. Brief appearances by Mia Wasikowska as the petulant faux daughter, Jeffrey Wright as their twitchy blood drug supplier, and John Hurt as some kind of godfather. What would it be like to be married forever? Pretty fun, it seems. There are lovely plays with names (I loved the passports especially). It's not all show, though. My favorite scene is when the trio makes a rare trek out to a local Detroit nightclub, and Adam witnesses how the mortal zombies dance when his track plays. It's hypnotic and perfectly captures a piece of the tortured artist's existence: That he must isolate to create but in doing so cuts himself off from the world that spawned his art. Everyone is impeccably outfitted. I demand a sequel.

Is This Mic On

I thought I would try some live writing today.

I think Warren Ellis used to do something like this, but I'm not sure.

I'm listening to Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Amazon, YouTube, Pitchfork).

It is approximately 12PM EST where I am located.

I will be writing until 1PM EST unless I keel over and die in the interim.

I write in the CMS, and you can read it here.

You can take a look, go away, and come back, or refresh the page, I suppose.

If I don't like something, I'll delete it, so things may appear and then disappear.

I haven't done this before, so bear with me, or don't.

If you get bored, read this from Ellis on carnography.

I'm drinking this tea and ate lunch already.

I forgot the dog needs a walk.

[THE VICE MAN]

Two Ways of Looking at a Beginning

For my first draft of the opening passages for THE VICE MAN, I tried it two different ways. First, I tried it with a male central character. Then I tried it with a female central character.

Here's the first pass at the open with a man as the main character:

"He opened his eyes, and there was the camera hovering in front of him, reflecting his face back at him: his head like Edvard Munch’s The Scream, his sea foam-colored skin, his green eyes blinking at the sunset bleeding in through the windows.

He could not remember a time when he was not being recorded, even though he knew it had happened, years ago, because there were a few photos of him that did not include the hovering ball that appeared in every one after he was, say, five.

He yawned, and the tiny drone zoomed in for a close up; his jaw snapped closed; the ball jumped back. He stood up, stretched his arms to the ceiling, and pulled up his underpants."

Here's the first pass at the open with a woman as the main character:

"Suzanne Flesh opened her eyes and regarded the floating drone hovering before her. Slowly, it migrated south.

'Hey!' she yelped and pulled the sheet up to cover her breasts."

This is the current version of the open with a man as the main character:

"The detective opened his eyes.

The drone hovered above him.

He could see his reflection in the silver eye of the fist-sized globe: his morning stubble, his seafoam green pallor, the dark circles under his eyes.

He could not remember a time when he was not being recorded, and he did not know there to be one."

You can follow along as I work on THE VICE MAN here.

The Vice Man

I'm working on a piece of fiction. You can read along as I work on it here. It's called THE VICE MAN.

It's about a detective with a drone sidekick who's looking for a dead girl, a place called the underground where scramblers live, and what happens when you forget who you are.

Here's an excerpt:

"The detective opened his eyes.

The drone hovered above him.

He could see his reflection in the silver eye of the fist-sized globe: his morning stubble, his seafoam green pallor, the dark circles under his eyes.

He could not remember a time when he was not being recorded, and he did not know there to be one."

[THE VICE MAN]

Immortality

My name is on the Wikipedia entry for pornography. I HAVE FUCKING MADE IT. My work here is dunzo. http://t.co/mPj1ZmSa9I

— Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) October 14, 2014

What I Blog

Dave Winer, "inventor of the blog," wrote an interesting post recently about having spent the last 20 years blogging. He noted: "Blogging makes you unemployable." I like this idea very much.

I got recommitted to blogging not long ago, and while sometimes it seems pointless, I think I'm getting at something, and whatever that something is appears to be working.

I think blogging is about making a commitment to yourself: I have something to say, I am someone, I deserve an audience.

For iconoclasts, it's a way of insisting upon your point of view of the world.

To me, blogging is placing my hands on the chest of authority and shoving as hard as I can.

I had a friend when I was young. Her father was a brain surgeon, I believe. One time, I went over to their house, and there was a regular white bucket in the kitchen. Someone removed the lid from the bucket. There was a human brain floating in it.

That's what a blog is: a brain in a bucket, and you beholding it.

The Act of Killing

Last weekend, I watched "The Act of Killing," which is pretty much one of the most astounding movies you will ever see. Usually, in a movie built on surprise or fear or astonishment, it's a roller coaster ride of emotion: sometimes you are up and sometimes you are down. I was gobsmacked from beginning to end. My jaw was unhinged. My eyes were round. Is this really happening? Did he just say that? Is this real? Yes, it is. In short, the film follows a group of executioners as they revisit the crimes of their past, but they do so in a world that glorifies their murderous histories. In a way, it reminded me of being on a porn set where something considered very "not normal" by society is considered very "normal" in this otherworld. In the case of porn, people are having sex for money while someone films it. This is all very of course. This is all very no big deal. You see the same throughout "The Act of Killing," when a man dances where he has killed people with wires around their necks, and a neighbor talks about finding his dead father under a barrel, and a man recounts raping teenage girls. It is very easy to think of them as Other. But are they? In America, killers are heroes.

The Beach

The last time we were at the beach, we didn't swim. The intention was to swim, but a storm or a tropical disturbance of some sort the night previous had churned the water into a filthy mess. The sand was covered in broken seashells, and there was an occasional palm frond that had been thrown up onto the beach. The weather was pleasant, but the heat had dissipated, and most of the people on the beach were wearing light jackets and shoes. There were no manatees or dolphins to be spotted. On the way back, we looped through the wooded preserve, where we followed animal tracks of unknown origin, examined blooming plants with explanatory signs, and were hidden from the rest of the world.

In the Future of Breast Cancer

In the future, your little black dress will have a sexy cutout that reveals your portacath, or, after treatment, the scar it leaves behind. In the future, your IV bag filled with liquid chemotherapy will bear the logo befitting your economic class (Walmart, J.Crew, Louis Vuitton). In the future, the GM breast implants for your reconstruction will not be optional but required. In the future, your surgical oncologist will appear on QVC hawking his or her branded line of scalpels. In the future, your cancer stage will be trademarked. In the future, you will travel to Las Vegas for treatment, and there will be an entire hotel and casino filled with bald women playing high-stakes games of risk, and you will feel at home amidst the malignancies.  

A Writer's Desk

A couple weeks ago, I bought a new desk. Previously, my desk didn't look unlike my new desk. Except it was cheap. It had cheap drawers, and a cheap feel, and when I got too excited, it would wobble. Since writing is my occupation, it doesn't seem like a very good idea to have the bedrock of one's career consist of something as unstable as sand or reeds in the wind or poorly made furniture. It took me a long time to find this new desk. It is not my dream desk, but I sat down at it in the store, and it seemed to work. I said to the saleswoman, "It's kind of like that guy you meet, who has a good job and probably won't break up with you. It will do."

Great American Novels

The reason there aren't more Great American Novels written by women: Women aren't sociopathic enough. Engineered for empathy required to take care of small, squirming child bodies, women lack the ruthless, guiltless, narcissistic drive required to produce a masterpiece. Instead, women are distracted: by men who need, living room drapes, the hollers of children. Men tune out: wanting wives, bad carpet, succubi. It is important to note that the act of writing lit-er-a-ture is not confined to the author's relationship to the page. Instead, this sort of high-level literary excretion demands total immersion. The writer must be consumed: by his ideas, his thoughts, his words. Put another way, like Ouroboros, the Great American Novelist consumes himself. Men refuse to live in the world so they may live in their own world. That is the world we see in their books. Women allow the world to tear them from the imaginary, their desperate hands and idle minds grasping at the air for a long lost purchase.

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What's Inside

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about what it's like having cancer -- or, rather, what it's like not having cancer after you've had cancer. After that, I received an email from Todd Wineburner, about his cancer experience. I'm sharing his email here, with his permission, because he does a far better job of describing what cancer leaves behind.

"Several years ago, I patched your official head shot onto a bunch of famous nude artworks and sent them to you and you published them on the Reverse Cowgirl's blog. I've always appreciated that. I've appreciated your writing, too, and your recent entry about your bout with cancer really resonated with me. At about the same time I sent those pictures, I went through a bout with cancer of my own, and I think I know the exact feeling you're talking about. It's like there's a remnant of something still circulating through your body and your life, even though you know you're in remission (there's no cure, they tell me)--even though you know that you've lived to the point where the chance of a recurrence is barely measurable. I don't know that that feeling goes away, sadly. Your friend has a luxury in being able to laugh at your concerns and I think you'd be within your rights in defining that as insensitivity. I understand that she probably intended to ease your fears, but she needs to appreciate that for us and other survivors, a concern about cancer is not some vague, undefined apprehension about something we saw on the news. It's about taking a shower every day and encountering the places where a doctor changed us. It's about the memories of the absolutely surreal and disconnected feeling that comes from the anemia you get when the chemotherapy kills a significant percentage of your red blood cells. In my treatment, I had a massive exploratory surgery to check my lymph nodes. Like comedian Tom Green, my intestines were lifted out of my body and put back after the nodes between my kidneys had been checked. This is standard procedure for testicular cancer and they explain it all to you before they operate, but what they don't prepare you for is the day when your bowels start working again and the sensations are different--the pressures are in different places, the growls aren't the same at all. You've been rearranged at the most fundamental level. I still feel that way--rearranged. Not that it's debilitating, or even something that I think about often; things are just different than they were before the cancer and I guess they always will be. I guess they have to be. I've never really talked to anyone about this before, but I've never really seen anyone write about that strange sense that doesn't even really have a word to describe it. It's not disappointment, of course. With serious illness, there can always be more than one outcome and I think we both got the preferable choice. It's not really longing, either, or if it is, I'm not quite sure what it is I'm supposed to be longing for. It's just that strange sense that everything in my life changed when I had that cancer, except for the fact that everything pretty much stayed the same.

Thanks so much for your writing. It's great to occasionally find shared thoughts that let you know you're not nuts for feeling the way you do (or at least you're not alone). If you find a way to define this bizarre feeling, I hope you write about it. I wish you well. I'll keep enjoying your work and if I make any breakthroughs, I'll let you know."

Under the Skin

What a goddamn movie. What a motherfuckin movie. What a great fucking movie. I could not love this movie more if I married it, impregnated it, and lived with it in a backwater trailer. One of the most painfully stupid things about TV critics, movie critics, and book critics these days is their stupid, insipid, lazy desire to/insistence upon fucking recounting the plot of said subject for you. Why the fuck would I want to know the plot if I hadn't seen/read the fucking product yet, you underpaid roadkill? Besides, what's plot anyway? A skeleton worth breaking. That's what plot is. "Under the Skin" has no plot. It has a woman who stalks and kills men the way men stalk and kill women. She is an alien; she is Scarlett Johansson. For those who care, she is naked several times, and she is so moody in the face, so pouty in the mouth, so dripping with weirdness that it will either turn you straight or gay, depending on your gender/sexual orientation. Or bi. What have you. The point is, I loved this movie. The director: Jonathan Glazer, who did "Sexy Beast," which is one of My All-Time Favorite Movies. (The second one, "Birth," was too disturbing for me, someone who likes to be/constantly is disturbed or in a state of disturbance or is attempting to disturb someone or something.) It's based on a book, like that matters. Also: erect penises sinking into black tar pits. Very odd. Very foreign. Very familiar. A man with a giant head. The only movie to accurately depict what it's like to be a woman. Thank you, Mr. Glazer.

Beachy

Beachy. #florida pic.twitter.com/cxjVyxJHTB

— Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) September 26, 2014

Consider the Dog

Earlier this year, her brother by another mother and father died. You'd think, judging by this photo, she's sad about that. She isn't. She recognized that for what it was: the freeing up of more resources for her. Now, as the only dog, she gets all the cookies, all the dinners, all the cuddles. She doesn't even like to cuddle. She likes chasing balls on deserted train tracks, and drinking filthy rain water, and my husband. I figure I'm her next target. If she can get rid of me, she'll have him all to herself. And all the cookies she wants, to boot.

Whither Le Sex Shoppe?

After I landed at LAX, I steered clear of the highways and drove through the city. I wanted to see what had changed. At the east end of Hollywood, I pulled over to the curb and tried to figure out where Le Sex Shoppe used to be. Once upon a time, it looked like this. Before that, Charles Bukowski was known to patronize it. Above, you'll find what's left. I mean, I think. I wasn't even sure, as I stood in the street, taking photos and trying to avoid getting hit, where it had been. I kept looking for a trace of it, but it had vanished, it seemed.

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Le Sex Shoppe, Hollywood, CA / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin

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Florida Foreclosed

Foreclosure, Naples, FL / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin

What's more interesting than the subdivisions of affordable suburban tract homes in Florida that went to apocalyptic hell in the wake of the Great Recession are the mega-mansions worth many millions that to this day sit in a state of lush green decay like concrete block Miss Havishams. Once upon a time, you can see by their Zestimates, they were worth $1M, $2M, $3M and more. In dated photos on listings that have long since expired, before banks came along and foreclosed on them, you can see them at their thousands of square feet glory: the many-tiered tray ceilings with custom lighting, the acres of travertine set on the diagonal, the luxury showers that accommodate three at a time. Today, they are worth half their previous values or less than that. Tucked between neighboring homeowners that wish they didn't exist, their filmy windows gaze blankly at those who bother to peek over their dilapidated gates. Inside, you wade through the flooded swamps that were their manicured lawns, peer inside at their ceilings falling from leaks that make puddles on their granite counter tops, gaze into the putrid vats that used to be their swimming pools with spas and wonder where, when, and how it all went so wrong. The families aren't totally gone: the aluminum baseball bat left on the greening lanai, the stuffed yellow duck forgotten in the dust, the box of letters filled with unpaid bills from banks looking to collect and Happy Father's Day cards addressed to a head of household who must have found, to his surprise, his American Dream had fell to rot, and who, not knowing what to do, simply left.