TUESDAY FREE MOVIE NIGHT REBORN

7:30 p.m., the first & third Tuesdayz of the month. Don't buckle beneath relentless crushing despair and put an end to your empty life just yet... instead, visit the Iron Rail to enjoy FREE MOVIES in Spanish (with English subtitles) and stick around afterwards for Spanish convo. Burnish those language skills like you've been meaning to!

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NOV 3
El día de la bestia (1995, España)
Dirigida por Álex de la Iglesia. ¿Qué pasa cuando un cura, un roquero satánico y un presentador de un show de la tele traten a evitar el apocalipsis que venga con el paro del anticristo? ¡Hilaridad! Con el Diablo como estralla invitada. 666.
Directed by Álex de la Iglesia. What happens when a priest, a heavy metal head and a tv show host try to stop the birth of the antichrist and the coming apocalypse? Hilarity! With the Devil guest starring. 666.

NOV 17
Machuca (2004,Chile)
Dirigida por Andrés Wood. Un drama histórico centrado sobre tres niños durante a la revolución del Allende y el posterior golpe de estado por Pinochet en 1973. Pro-bablemente, va a llorar por el fin.
Directed by Andrés Wood. Historical drama centered around three kids around the Allende revolution and the subsequent coup by Pinochet in 1973. You will probably cry by the end.

DEC 1
Plata Quemada/Burnt money (2000, Argentina)
Dirigida por Marcelo Piñeyro. Dos mercenarios gayes y calientez en el año 1965 estropean un atraco a un banco, intercambiando disparos y miradas provocativas de pasión. Super elegante.
Directed by Marcelo Piñeyro. Two hottt gay mercenaries in 1965 botch a bank robbery in Buenos Aires, exchanging gunfire and smoldering gazes of passion. Muy Classy.

DEC 15
Película de Disney/ Some Disney Movie (EE.UU)
Dirigida por una Corporación. Disney hace lo mejor doblado (hay que entrar a las cabezas de los jóvenes de todas las lenguas). Entonces vengan y vuelvan a vivir una memoria sórdida de su niñez y cantamos. Hay varios, entonces vamos a hacer el voto.
Directed by a Corporation. Disney does the best dubbing (got to get into the heads of kids no matter the language). So come relive a sordid childhood moment and get to not sing along (unless you’re fluent that is). Got a couple of ‘em, so we’ll vote.

JAN 5
El Topo/The Mole (1970,México)
Dirigida por Alejandro Jodorowsky (Holy Mountain) hace su cosa y haciendo la locura. Una película de sicodélico del oeste. Más hay alegoría y sátira de la historia de México y La Iglesia Católica añadidas. Y también algo del occidental y los yogis, obvio.
Director Alejandro Jodorowsky (Holy Mountain) is doing his thing and making craziness happen. Psychedelic western cult flick. Plus some allegory and satire of Mexican history and the Catholic church thrown in. Oh and some eastern yogi stuff, of course.

JAN 19
!Ay Carmela! (1990, España)
Dirigida por Carlos Saura. Todavía otra película sobre La Guerra Civil en España, y como las otras es muy buena y todavía algo distinta. Un grupo republicano de vodevil se encuentra en el territorio fascista donde son forzada a actuar. Travesuras chifladas y la muerte de una España libre sigan.
Directed by Carlos Saura.
Yet another movie about the Spanish Civil War, and like all the others so good and still something different. A Republican vaudeville group finds themselves in Fascist territory where they are forced to perform. Wacky hijinxs and the death of a free Spain ensue.

NOT ANYTHING

Sobriety is so awful, and it's so awful in such uncool ways. It's waiting, always waiting, and you're the only magazines to read, you're the unattractive wallpaper pattern, and you're the climate control that displeases and the TV that's loud and the receptionist who won't make eye contact. You're stuck in yourself waiting for nothing, nothing, it really sucks. I mean drinking makes one fat and clownish and more monstrous than usual and ruins one's life but there are far worse things than ruination. Ruination is at least something, and sobriety is nothing, nothing, nothing, every fucking tick-tock moment.

It's a howling absence of pleasure's possibility, an absence that makes the multifarious other absences in one's life sing in sympathy, chiming in until every dog in the neighborhood's barking. Emptinesses, shortfalls, absences, keening like cavities, a cacophony crowding ever into one's attention, the wind whistling through them all. God, one longs for the absence of absences, but of course there are things to be done.

Another moment endured, another minute survived, another hour harrowed, another afternoon undergone, another weekend withstood finding ways to get by, and no reward waiting, nothing waiting but nothing, more of it, a fucking wall of it falling over you every second, burying you again and again, and you're clawing through your life like it's quicksand, but it's not-- it's not anything.


...Fortunately, one can sometimes find solace in a good book. The Iron Rail is open every day from 1 to 7 p.m.

FRED GOTS IT

The National Guardsmen near the Rail are now painted over. Why and by whom? A righteous patriot who found the depiction offensive? Some total weirdo making an ironically complex gesture of anti-art? The building's owner, afraid of thieves stealing his wall? Fred himself, using his penis as a brush? Doesn't matter. Really, really doesn't matter. All that matters is that it's greyed over. Fred is greying, and all greying accrues to him.

I liked the Guardsmen stencil-- hell, I loved the piece, even more than I love Banksy's other work-- but the half-assed buffing of the artwork does resolve the tension of how long it would last and what would become of it. Vulnerability is part of what makes Banksy's work and all graffiti exciting. Now it's grey again, or mostly grey.

We've reached a point where we can pretty much ascribe public artwork's inevitable reversion to grey to a natural process. It's no longer an insult, no moreso than litter on your stoop or mold spots on your linens. Call it an environmental quirk, endemic to the area. Fred has made himself the status quo, but he isn't just the status quo, he's ours. He's us. Banksy visited, graced our city with several glorious artworks, more than one of which specifically critiqued the Grey Ghost... did you really think some foreigner, some out-of-towner, would be allowed the last word over New Orleans' own Duke of Desaturation?

Maybe you're tired of Fred, and tired of hearing or reading about him. Only two more short paragraphs.

No-one can still deny Fred's tireless labor has created our city's contemporary visual reality. It's a distinctive, recognizable look, as pervasive as summer heat. It's locally characteristic, full stop. The WWL radio promos like to say, "As New Orleans as the St. Louis Cathedral." "As New Orleans as Filé Gumbo." As New Orleans as Fred Radtke.

I should be funnier, but I don't want anyone to mistake my tone. We might as well own this, and we might as well recognize the buffing of Banksy's National Guard stencil for what it is: an assertion of authentic New Orleans ugliness destroying a colorful, beautiful contribution from someone from somewhere else. It happens every day, and in ways much worse than paint on a wall. Don't try to distance this from yourself. If you love our city, go pose for a snapshot in front of the eradicated Guardsmen. There's your postcard: New Orleans 2008.

MUSINGS

There are many reasons to destroy society as it stands, but reducing social organization to the atomic structure of interpersonal relationships simply isn't enough; those also must be boiled away.

One never really knows where one stands with friends, don't you find? Maintaining cordial relations is a strain. A wrong word, a thoughtless gesture or a moment of human selfishness can compromise a relationship that took months or years to build. A vivid enmity, on the other hand, is as constant and reliable as the sunrise. When you deal with people overtly committed to destroying you, there's no mistaking where they're coming from. Viciousness is a consistent quality, one which rarely disappoints.

Too, a long-standing hatred has nuance, a richness and texture the bland truce of friendship can never achieve. What is friendship, after all, but a suspension of natural hostility, a temporary absence of distrust? The only things that make a friendship interesting are the subliminated cruelties it conceals, the papered-over hurts, the suppressed resentments-- the unfriendly elements.

One "knows" one's friends, and how tiresome we quickly become to one another. How quickly familiarity breeds contempt. Friends tell you things about themselves, tawdry truths, cold porridge. With an enemy, you are cut off from tedious interpersonal intimacies, safe in both directions. You get only their malevolence, from which you may seek to deduce the shape of the mind beneath. Their dislike and their efforts to hurt you function as psychic lingerie, simultaneously hiding and revealing, hinting, limning, alluring.

One's enemies seldom have difficulty identifying what it is they dislike, and isn't that refreshing? Hatred is more genuine, fundamentally more honest. Don't the things your enemies virulently despise about you ring far truer than the nebulous, patronizing crap your friends claim to like, if and when they bother to say so? Who really "gets" you, those who flatter and indulge you, or those who declare you monstrous and take action from there? Between two people who can't stand each other there can even arise a grudging respect, but at that point the relationship has strayed into perversity and should be terminated. A moment to savor the rewarding nature of this respect is acceptable, but a moment only.

Everything about friendship (or love, dare I say) is tragic in the classical sense. Tragic, because it is hubristic to suppose we can get along, or be endured. Tragic, from the deluded optimism of the outset to the bewildered obsequies concluding it. The only heroism available to a friend is to suffer on a friend's behalf, or to endure outrages a friend perpetrates. Not very stirring, unless you're a masochist. An enemy provides all sorts of opportunities for thrills, and even a hatred conducted in low-level, cold-war ways brings a frisson impossible to disentangle from sexual excitement. What will happen? How far will it go? How crazy will it get? This dynamic is heightened by the inconvenient but inarguable fact one's enemies tend to be vastly more sexually appealing than one's friends. Why this is, only science could explain.

Admit your weariness with navigating the minefield of "friendship." The wasted energy, the misunderstandings, the inevitable betrayals-- what a drag. Only in the fertile, bottomless draught of hatred do ingenuity, creativity and all the nobler parts of our nature find the sustenance they need. Being loved inspires complacency; being hated spurs us to action. How I wish I was surrounded only by those who hated me! What a luxury it would be to inhabit a world peopled entirely by enemies.

Ha! Ha!

Yes, what a delicious luxury.

NEXT TIME: MY THOUGHTS ON PARENTING

MY NEVER-ENDING BATTLE AGAINST THE INSATIABLE THIRSTIES

Sobriety isn't hell, not after the first week or two. It's merely purgatorial. It's an undifferentiated dispiriting twilight; it's standing in line at the registry of motor vehicles, forever. It's uncut existential tedium, and it makes me want to GET LOST IN A GOOD BOOK AT THE IRON RAIL BOOKSTORE AND LIBRARY, OPEN EVERY DAY FROM 1 to 7 PM!!

See how I tied that in, there? Total magic.

Soon I will begin posting poetry I have written.