The Couch

I

I am what is called in the business (the business being “psychoanalysis”) an analysand. This is to say that I routinely arrive at the office of a man or woman with a privileged understanding of the myriad underlying sources of human anxiety and I allow him or her to practice the craft of identifying these sources. All this is done in order to help me to arrive at an eventual goal which will grant me some release from the roots of these common human anxieties. Lacan observes that the analysand has the achievable aim before him or her of becoming an analyst him/herself through the “talking cure,” thus appropriating the insights and methods of the therapist and becoming capable of mapping the coordinates and origins of his or her psychic idiosyncrasies and quirks, including those pernicious, ineffectual, and benign. Now, I am a long-time analysand (five years on the couch), and though the the goal in question still eludes me I am confident enough in the value of the search for it that I regularly grant the analysts I visit the right to probe, question, and grill me, and in turn, I commit to removing the veil of customary politeness or reserve and promise to hand the analyst the truth. Without this, the undertaking of psychotherapy is likely to be ultimately fruitless: a sterile battle of wills.

The Lacanian cultural theorist, Slavoj Zizek, correctly identifies the analysand-analyst dynamic as being permeated by paradox (I’m being quite liberal with my interpretation as I don’t have the text in front of me). You dis-close to the analyst all matter of intimate biographical details, deeply buried instances of your personal history which inexplicably retain a privileged position in your memory-banks. As Zizek insightfully points out it takes years of intimate friendship to acquire the ability to divulge such carefully-guarded personal information to a confidant, and even then, most of the time, one stops short of allowing a friend the access to one’s deeply private universe, access one theoretically allows the analyst (who has ostensibly no personal commitment in your well-being) without so much as a struggle.

Whether the relationship between the analyst and analysand, which is defined by the practice of one-sided full disclosure and temporary and willful submission of agency, results from the patient’s self-interested desire for greater freedom from agents of discomfiture and unease or from the internal logic of the therapeutic collaboration is an open question I can only guess the answer to.

II

The “couch-session,” though it has become such an easy target for jokes present in everything from television-sitcoms to highly-esteemed works of literary fiction has a quality bordering on the transcendent to the practicing analysand.

“Confession,” one of the sacraments of the Catholic faith, is essentially bound by its religious context and otherworldly project, to assuage one’s more temporal difficulties only epiphenomenally. The priest is concerned primarily with absolution, and only ever secondarily with helping one healthfully come to grips with the traumas which attend moments of moral iniquity. The spiritually fretful Catholic or High-Church Episcopalian who goes to his parish priest to describe his misdeeds in full expectancy of absolution, may experience something like the sensation of purgation that follows complete self-depiction in the company of the analyst. Of course, the penitent kneeling beside the grill and the father on the other end of the booth have a narrower agenda than the full-fledged self-disclosure of the analyst-analysand, but I think there is a definite similarity between these two exercises in catharsis. It would be interesting to find out if the practice of regular confession deters some potential analysands from attempting psychotherapy or if frequent visits to the booth provide an obstacle or a means of easing patients into a situation which is altogether quite distinct from others you come across in daily life.

Make a bee-line for the borderline

I never really dug Madonna growing up. All through my childhood, adolescence, and up to this present, er…liminal period of little consequence (are your 20s really just a stopgap between more significant periods of your life?), she was always irrelevant to my own experience. Of course, she hovered around perpetually in the pop-cultural stratosphere; the name, the brand, the image, the astonishing good looks, they were all impossible to ignore in the media-saturated fin-de-siecle. I knew portions of the Madonna legend, but only hazily, which was just as well, because modern-day myths like Madonna’s are never supposed to be absorbed as a coherent whole. They’re best taken in in fragmentary tales and half-truths made more mystifying by the absence of facts.

My previous, casual encounters with the Ciccone corpus never motivated to explore her work further. A friend of mine, avowedly a convert to the material girl’s gospel, had once recommended the American Life album she released in 2003. I suppose it was meant to be a come-back (isn’t every album an artist releases after his or her 30s?), but it just left me more convinced there was nothing there for anyone who didn’t already “buy” into the shtick. Fandom makes listeners insensitive to the missteps and moments of mediocrity in the catalog of the artists they worship. Madonna-fans are, as far as I’ve seen, proof of this. The ones I’ve met are always indiscriminate about the songs they like, as if the tunes are somehow less important than the fiery devotion they feel for the icon herself.

The piety of Madonna-fans and the omnipresence of the artist they love makes it hard to look at the singles and long-players out of context. Even when she’s not there, her specter is, inhabiting the disposable, chintzy chassis of uninspired copyists like Lady Gaga, who cannot help but bring her to mind and would probably not have gone multi-platinum if she didn’t, and lifeless R&B android Rihanna. There are certainly many other musicians who package a potent, easily identifiable image alongside their compositions (Springsteen, Bowie, Prince, etc.), but I think the media’s obsession with Madonna’s personal life and persona-transformations make it seem to the casual listener that the music must be of secondary importance, maybe even superfluous to understanding Madonna. If you’ve seen Madonna’s video, why bother listening to the song it promotes in isolation. If you’ve seen pictures from her book-length paean to self-expression through nudity, Sex, there’s no reason to listen to the thematically related Erotica.

Well, I’ve never been interested in unearthing information about Madonna for its own sake (regardless of how much about her I’ve learned by staring defenselessly at a TV screen), but motivated by the desire to find out if there was “something” significant to discover about Madonna behind the canonized, conical bra and other moments of media-transcendence, I decided to peel back the layers of her legend. I found there were songs of hers I had never even known existed, and tellingly, many dated from the very beginning of her career. Her was an opportunity to hear Madonna as they did in 1983, when her MTV-appearances hadn’t yet begun to take precedence over her recorded work in the public imagination. Obviously, it’s impossible to divorce yourself from your historical time and place, and there was no way I could “journey” to ‘83 and listen to Madonna in quite the same way people who had never heard her name uttered outside of an art-history class had, but I could at least reenact the experience more easily through these tracks gathering dust at the very back of her discography.

And, you know what? The search paid off. I’m convinced the singles and album-cuts from Madonna’s self-titled debut are all gems. Before the world-music touches, high-budget schmaltz, or overreaching of later work (I’m thinking the video to “Like a Prayer” and its overblown soundtrack), Madonna did disco for the ’80s, pure and simple. These early 80s songs have no vague political ethos to puxh and don’t exhibit any delusions of operatic grandeur. They’re synth-heavy bubblegum done right, with a unique edge which, though less striking than, say, that of “Like a Virgin,” clearly separates her from other 80s dance-pop-peddlers like Stacey Q or the girls of Bananarama.

Even at this stage of the game, though, Madonna was courting controversy, as the video to the superb “Borderline” single points out. Yet, perhaps because she was still a fledgling, rising star just beginning to springboard from the underground, there is none of the gratuitous envelope-pushing that would come to define Madonna’s mini-movies. Here, she’s vulnerable, fighting to break out of gender-constrictions she seems only to be beginning to confront, and not altogether successfully. It’s a great video for a meant to sell an even greater song and not the other way around (unlike so many other 80s artists, Madonna wasn’t yet tailoring songs to visual concepts…but this too would come to pass, as we’re all well aware).

The lyrics to “Borderline” are…well, vague, but in a way that encapsulate a nascent world-view equal parts sexual liberation and naivete…the kind of stuff disco anthems are made of. Madonna, whose delivery was still shakey at this point, was clearly not in the business of wowing the public with vocal acrobatics, but boy, could she emote, imbuing lines like “I don’t want to be your prisoner so baby won’t you set me free” with honesty and desperation.

I suggest anybody interested in finding out what Madonna was up to creatively before her conquest of all media outlets and her permanent entry into the collective unconscious ought to check out these songs. All fans of excellent, catchy, soulful 80s-disco or synth-pop would also gain from listening to the debut Madonna lp.

A margin of error for two…

To err is human, all too human, and I’m as guilty of peccadilloes of omission as the next carbon-based biped schmo. Maybe more. Yet, the particular instance of mortality I want to confess to has little to do with a stingy conscience, and more to do with an overabundance of loose talk, a glut of gab. It’s the direct result of an excessively nourished theorizing instinct. My greedy little speculation-gremlin sometimes becomes pretty voracious and to sate his appetite for the uncanny he transforms into his alter-ego, fuzzy-wuzzy fantasy. I let loose his reins and allow this to occur, completely willing to go along for the ride.

In any courtroom, my observations about the recent petrochemical refinery explosion and its pernicious effects on our aquatic cousins would have been deemed immaterial: street-corner prophesying inspired by a perfect storm of smoke and journalistic wildfire. Headlines about terrorism, sabotage, and predictions of insurrection titillated my bored imagination. The image of a GULF storage facility bursting into flames alongside that of hundreds of fish bobbing belly-up in a lagoon was emblazoned in my gray mattereventhough I hadn’t actually seen it. The idea that there was a brotherhood of malcontents fighting some misguided crusade for the wrongfully-jobless with willfully reckless acts of destruction stirred the cauldron further, and the possibility of government dissimulation sweetened the deal. Growing up, I became acquainted with many dystopias courtesy of the Sci-Fi channel, HP Lovecraft, Philip K Dick, and other masters of paranoid prose, and I’ve become adept at decoding the symbols that are meant to signal impending societal meltdown in speculative fiction. They were all there, in living color. Economic downturn, general strikes, mass-unemployment, civil unrest, and the image of a huge industrial structure ablaze on the television screen to be seared into the collective unconscious of an already hostile populace. Hell, the ominous black smoke-cloud right outside my house could have been spewed by the fevered mind of Don Delillo. But, because I was satisfied enough with these signifiers of doom to confidently report that I was now a citizen-spectator in a banana-colony hurdling to its own home-grown Armageddon, I didn’t stop to make the distinction between fiction and fact. This wasn’t some fantasy-nightmare, this was real life, and however frequently the latter may resemble the former, it isn’t as structured by genre-conventions or authorial logic. This became apparent when a plot-twist was delivered with graceless suddenness to my own front-door.

I read the front page of the paper and then the relevant story within. The press’s confidence in the criminal scenario had vanished and the headlines confidently declared that officially the CAPECO petrochemical refinery had burst into flames unaccountably. This was the new reality, the brief period of competing explanations and discursive chaos had been tidily succeeded by a new consensus. It was unanimously confirmed that there was no party to blame for the disaster except ill fortune. Clearly, to advocate the “terrorist” explanation was now to openly declare oneself a lunatic, a conspiracy-theorist, and a UFO-chaser.

By printing those big black words in a trustworthy, reliable typeface, Puerto Rico’s journalists turned their backs on me. While I was relieved that a disaster had been proven to be an isolated shake-up, rather than a harbinger of anarchy to come, I also felt betrayed. Whereas the night previous my theorizing was the product of a sane and healthy mind, to the Puerto Rico Daily Sun I had suddenly become an irrelevant wacko. I had nothing to do with their careful fact-checking and quantifiable evidence. I felt like the lone remaining fire-worshiper in a village that had embraced an unfamiliar, foreign god overnight. Once a member of the elect, I was now an embarrassing relic from a less enlightened era.

Surely, Wittgenstein or Thomas Kuhn would have something erudite to say about this definitive phenomenon which turned everything I’d uttered about the CAPECO explosion into incoherent babble. The same words I’d read myself in the papers, the authority of which was to be taken for granted by thousands of citizens, would only fall on deaf ears if I repeated it now.

Maybe this apology has morphed into more of a confessional with trace amounts of soft-headed amateur sociology, but I remain committed to making the honesty of my contrite feelings very clear. If only to avoid from now on the uncanny sensation of being coughed up and forgotten by the restless zeitgeist after feeding off of the strength he gave my ill-formed suspicions.

What if….vol. 1

I often fantasize about making my own biopic. Not an auto-biopic, that would be unconscionably narcissistic, just a regular life-history writ large on the silver screen. I can’t think of any creative ventures that would satisfy me as much as immortalizing one of humanity’s legendary heroes, innovators, or inglorious bastards in celluloid. The thing is, unless the personality being brought to the screen is better served by chasteness or modesty (I’m thinking a story about a Zen monk adapted by Ozu with typical intimacy), the fictionalization of a person’s true story is almost by definition an epic undertaking. The characters from real life who make perfect biopic material usually lend themselves to grand yarn-spinning in mythmaking technicolor or on the scale of a mural. Big lives require big movies, which means bravado and, usually, a bunch of money. That’s why you don’t see many “guerrilla” biopics made shot on a shoestring budget with a mini-DV camera.

For this reason, in my movie-making fantasies, I have certain preconditions that need to be met for the whole matter to come out right.

First of all, it would be a warts-n-all affair. No Beautiful Mind hagiography please. In depth-research would be conducted by muckrakers who’d cut their teeth at Counterpunch. Every last biographical detail would engender an exhaustive project unto itself. Then, with a team of choice cinematographers and funding presented on a silver platter (provided, no questions asked, by major film studio execs I would have hypnotized to do my bidding a la Heart of Glass), the thing would be given shape. All filming would be done on-location; hell, with the available carte blanche budget, we’ll have to be creative in order to justify the generous financial support and shoot on all seven continents (not to mention deep-sea fantasy settings). Of course, the buzz about the project would attract innumerable parties. I would be able to handpick an enormous cast of players consisting of everyone from upstart unknowns to long-forgotten, dearly departed Cassavetes regulars reanimated through the magic of science.

With this small army of loyal creatives at my disposal I would be able to breathe life into my cinematic bildungsroman. Of course, eventually some of the integrity of the adaptation would be chipped away to make room for my grand cinematic vision. The muses, after all, shouldn’t be tethered to something as trivial as the truth! Hell, maybe to make a decent J movie about a schizoid mathematician, which A Beautiful Mind arguably is, Ron Howard needed to get rid of some of that pesky reality to make way for some fireworks. There are too many divorce scenes in dramas these days, anyway.

The question still stands: who would the biopic be about? Whose life will be exploited and embellished for the sake of this greatest story ever told (and its inevitable HBO miniseries-spinoff?) I could render the frenzied, addiction-eroded life of R.W. Fassbinder in broad, frantic strokes or I could devise a sumptuous period-piece about Stendhal to rival Merchant-Ivory’s adaptations of Edwardian novels. Then, there are stylistic matters. I could film the entire arch of a life from start to finish in one take or take a particularly decisive week in a person’s history, full of pivotal moments, explosive drama, and unexpected turns, and splice into a bajillion split-second close-ups disjointedly hanging together by harsh jump-cuts.

Hell, I think I’d do better fantasizing about being a maverick millionaire and selecting some inspired auteur to do the job for me.

Well, I’m exhausted, time to have an Oreo cookie and a glass of lemonade.

You’ll thank me….in dreams

I’m changing venues. My old bluggeridge resides here, awaiting exhumation:

discoinfernogoesblog.blogspot.com Yeah, that URL might have been too long, but I also like to think it was also pretty long.

At any rate, don’t expect any dramatic shifts in content. This blog will still be primarily concerned with dissecting the ephemera I obsess about, and I will continue to provide my fresh and inspired (read: FRESH AND INSPIRED) perspective on the most banal subjects. After all, I haven’t matured very much since I decided to make the leap to wordpress, if anything I’ve regressed.

Oh, before I forget and get caught up in the usual trivialities, an amazing thing happened last week in Puerto Rico where I operate, by which I mean, where I’m a certified brain surgeon (I mean, aren’t I blowin’ your mind right now? Imagine what I can do with a scalpel and some WD-40!).

So, what took place, you ask? Last Thursday at 12:30AM, an explosion turned a local GULF petroleum refinery, which was being used as a storage site, into a massive fireball. I didn’t need the news to let me know about it, from my living room I felt the tremors that rippled outward from the petrochemical plant and heard the roar that followed. In a town I rarely go to, 21 out of 40 petroleum storage tanks had been turned to burning scrap-metal, yet it all seemed to be happening right on my block.

From the conflagration emerged a sludgy, billowing smoke-cloud, which traveled from the site of the incident and its attendant, raging fire all the way to my house 45 miles away. A day later, a dark, murky gas-snake still writhed over the lagoon my condo overlooks; two days later, it turned purple. Three days later, it had thinned out, but the sky was still pock-marked with patches of crimson and violet that made everything look sickly. Oh yeah, that same day, another explosion shook the fuel depot; it may have been an isolated, separately ignited burst or the aftereffect of the first one.

Most regional media outlets assert that foul play is probably at the root of both explosions, but the government remains tight-lipped, although, it cautiously acknowledges the possibility. 20,000 people have been laid off by the government. A massive general strike took place just a week before the explosion. Now, I’m not saying the present economic and social crisis wasn’t ineluctable, but massive redundancies in the public sector coupled with terrible recession could very predictably lead the personally affected or disaffected to vandalism or worse. To further grant credence to the suspicion that a criminal hand was at the reins of all this, graffiti referencing the explosion has been found on the wall of a major tunnel in San Juan and certainly hints at premeditated sabotage. How else to interpret this?

FEMA is sending aid to clean up the refinery. Still, the explosion may have already caused some major damage. Hundreds of fish and other marine wildlife are dead in the San Jose lagoon, which the smoke-cloud made a final lunge over, before vanishing. Now, a specialist dedicated to the upkeep and rehabilitation of the lagoon says otherwise, but it just seems er…fishy that these carcasses emerged in such close proximity to noxious fumes and that their death coincided with fall-out of the event in question.

You be the judge, but I am anticipating a lot of similarly “ill-timed” coincidences.