There was a sense of excitement about the pandemic when things were new. I remember the exact moment when the apocalyptic thrill forst hit me. lt was a Thursday night, end of the work week. I left the office at 7PM and walked towards home along Salame road in South Tel Aviv. The weather was dry and unusually windy. Uncertain of its own direction, the wind lifted up little tornadoes of trash and threw them in the faces of pedestrians. That sand storm added a tangible quality to the mysterious virus threat, the feel of which was still unclear at that stage. Panic, however, was not the sensation that fueled me. Instead, it was a sense of brazen antagonism towards everything that wasn’t me. The world was the enemy and I was a sociopath in survival mode. It was intoxicating. I felt like a cyborg, scanning the environment with laser cold eye, processing the distance between myself and others, as I maneuvered my shopping cart through a supermarket aisle. Avoid proximity to humans. Get supplies. Reach home. Lock yourself in.
A few weeks earlier I rented an apartment in a brand new building. The neighborhood was dodgy and few people risked movimg there, so for the first months of the pandemic I remained the only tenant in the property. Winner of the lottery, king of the hill. I praised my luck, my privilege, my clever choices as I locked the front door behind me, leaving the Zombieworld outside. The purifying smell of fresh cement gave the lobby an aura of antiseptic power. The inside of the elevator was still wrapped in protective fabric. No one will press those elevator buttons. No one will breathe their deadly droplets in my face. I alone have access to the rooftop. I will never be anything but a selfish little pig, I thought to myself, as I went up in the elevator to my very private 6th floor. If I was on Titanic, I’d be the guy who sneaks into a life boat designated for children. I lovingly placed the supplies from the supermarket into my shiny new refrigerator. Then I rolled down the shutters over the glass wall separating the room from the balcony. The aluminum sheet went down slowly, erasing the external reality from view. It felt wonderful. I was ready to dissolve into the digital illusion of nostalgic TV. Let’s turn on the neon lights, and put the air conditioning on 30C – the world can burn to hell.
Then there was a map. An interactive map of contagion from the ministry of health, which they updated daily for our thrill and amusement. The little red push-pins, pointing to the locations of confirmed cases, looked like pus-filled boils on the body of the city. In some areas the pins were so many, they sat on top of each other, disgustingly, forming entire curbunkles of horror, impurity, bad luck and otherness. I looked at the plague-stricken neighborhoods and no part of me felt compassion. “This red dot isn’t me, that red dot isn’t me” – that’s all I could think about. They surely must deserve it, those backward-minded synagogue goers of Bnei Brak, those brainless wedding attendees in Kiryat Ono. I’m so much better than them, and therefore I will survive. Not only it is logical, but it is just! Look at me, a responsible citizen, staying home with Netflix, updating my news feed 40 times a day, ordering food deliveries, wearing 3 layers of masks, crossing to the other side of the street when I see a human being, sanitizing my credit cards with baby wipes. What a redeeming moment that was for all the misanthropes: suddenly, your idiosyncrasies became virtues, suddenly you could save the world by hating it.
As the city got quieter, panic started creeping through the armor of my manic self importance. Every sneeze ignited an avalanche of anxiety. Every little headache opened a view into the abyss. There were times when I drove myself into suffocation imagining how I would suffocate. Tubes sticking out of my nostrils. My sickly face pressed against a sweat soaked pillow. My helpless miserable body sprawled on a hospital bed. To shake off that vision, I had to activate a type of thinking that was opposite to my earlier delusion of grandeur. I’d tell myself that I am nothing but a bunch of atoms loosely held together by a mechanism we don’t really understand (and if we did, we’d probably be disappointed), a petty blob of snot and paranoia. It is grotesque to place this much importance in the survival of it.
Eventually, both anger and depression gave place to infantile hankering. I didn’t last long as a responsible citizen. The righteous zeal wore off as soon as I got bored of isolation. I found myself craving human germs in a near fetishist manner. By that time, we all developed our moral theorems by which we justified our irresponsible behaviors. My formula looked like this: there is a hierarchy of desires and you need to indulge only the best ones. Some desires are worth the risk, and others you can do without. Reduce the number of unnecessary dangerous activities to those you really really want. Of course, what I really really wanted turned out to be everything I wanted even just a little.
When the vaccines came into circulation, the world broke into halves, and each half waited for the other one to die, so they could say “I told you so”. To the liberal bohemians of Tel Aviv the vaccination possesses a certain drug-appeal, even if on the surface they made it all about science. My friends would often say: “I sniff unknown substances in filthy nightclub toilets. Who am I to fear an officially approved pharmaceutical?” I received my shot on the 18th of February. This was my birthday, so it felt like a gift. It was a bit like one of those Western things some people managed to obtain in the hungry Russian 90s: a VHS tape recorder, a Panasonic telephone, something foreign, cool and techy. On my way home I ventured into a party supply store and bought a sequin rainbow dress. I wore it to bed, where I stayed for the rest of the day, playing Depeche Mode and savoring my post-jab fever. It was psychedelic. Later, when I sat at a restaurant with friends, indoors for the first time in months, we jokingly called ourselves The Vaccinati. A bunch of unjabbed individuals was only allowed to dine outside, and we utterly enjoyed that little civilized apartheid. Again on a life boat, again on a rocket, shooting to Elysium away from dying Earth!
And then everything kind of faded. The apocalypse blended with the landscape. The magical immunity waned, and so did the fear of disease. Life did not go back to normal, but the abnormality was no longer excitong. There no more maps of contagion, curves and graphs, no more hand washing tutorials, no more sharing of clever internet memes, no more posing in designer masks, no more listening to lengthy YouTube lectures about the gain-of-function research. No one stocked up on toilet paper any more, and no one made cute isolation artworks. It was all just dread and bore.
And that, of course, was when I finally came down with the virus.
1991 was the year my parents bought our first color tv. It replaced the old one, which was black and white and lived in the kitchen. Now I was allowed to take the old one into my room. The little black and white tv, with glitchy picture and an almost spherical screen became my undisputed property. From that moment on I could enjoy my television intimately, when and how I pleased, in the privacy of my own room, uninterrupted. The easy access to television with the delights it promissed, seemed almost too good to be true, and surely undeserved. The unmistakable sense of wrongness accompanied the pleasure, but I did not care at all. There it was, the glassy eye, the window to the otherness, right in front of me, and no obstacle to come between us.
I was 13 in 1991 and insatiable in my search for 2 things: erotic material and everything foreign, Western, or simply “american” – a twin desire characteristic for Russian kids who’s coming of age coincided with the fall of Soviet Union. Thus foreigness and sexiness became inseparably intertwined. Everything “american” was sexy, and everything sexy was American. America was sexy and sex itself was an american cincept. Not the kind of sex that happens between wives and husbands in the communal apartments, or the kind that leads to hynecological chairs, or the clinical horror of childbirth. The concept of “American Sex” had less to do with procreation, and even with physical pleasurex, and more to do with the very notion of desire. SEX, that three letter latin word (and one could only envision it as such), was like a shiny neon sign, pulsating seductively against the thrilling darkness of the unknown. Aesthetically, there was something distinktly pop art about that “american sex”. And all those sexy american things, and visions, and sounds, and movies – all of it became inseparably intertwined with the very notion of desire.
One must also remember the childish sense of dependence a television viewer experienced in pre-Youtube era, when content on demand was not invented yet. The broadcasting deities defined your viewing experience for you. You did not chose what to watch. You opened the weekly newspaper and it told you what you were going to watch. It was like the proverbial box of chocolates. The soviet tv menu by late 80s had grown painfully austere. Everything was just dreadful. Propaganda that no longer believed itself. Lengthy documentaries about a forest mouse. A greyscale cartoon about a hedgehog wondering about in the fog. Nothing ever happened. Nothing ever will. It was all just fog. Now all of this stuff could make for a nice arthouse screening, at the gathering of nostalgic bohemians. But back then I was craving something colorful. Like SEX. And suddenly, the sexy western movies started penetrating the program. What a wonderful moment that was – to discover the name of the scandalous erotic drama from the forbidden West, sitting casually in the tv program, printed in a Soviet newspaper. There it was, 9 1/2 Weeks, right there, in the last line of the daily grid, the last séance on an ordinary Wednesday. We did not own a VHS tape recorder until 1992. So there was no rewinding, no pausing, no second chances. I knew I had to record the whole movie directly into my brain, using only my eyes and ears. There is no doubt – that late night séance laid out a foundation for a lifetime of solitary voyeurism and other deviations which rendered normalcy impossible. It is probably through this film, that the concept of desire was linked forever in my mind with the notion of unavailability, and my perception of romance with its inevitable finality. But there is nothing I can do about it now.
Closings without closure are a common occurrence. Everyone knows how they feel: a dead romance, waiting to be put out of its misery. Closures without a closing are a different type of thing. Much better, if you ask me. When something has been pronounced null and void, yet keeps on going, a peculiar appendix of reality pops into existence, where the laws of continuity appear to be temporarily suspended. While this loop hole remains accessible, one can experience a pleasant equilibrium between the future and the past, in which the present can be enjoyed without the expectation for it to last, or a fear of it ending.
Something like this happened to a tiny bar on Allenbi, an insular place of refuge for a small group of people, by which I was adopted after becoming anchored in Tel Aviv. Arguably, the bar itself became the anchor. There wasn’t much of a bar to speak of, really: a room with a half-balcony, nested in a shabby building across from the Great Synagogue. Some cushioned couches, a screen above the bar, a punk-themed toilet with elastic dimensions, dim lights, peeling wallpaper, a poster “Visit Palestine”. The djs were the regulars themselves. Yet a very special illusion of a private, kaleidoscopic infinity enclosed the visitors as they sat on the couches or moved around with drinks in their hands, regrouping in various combinations. But only the ones who were there every weekend: this infinity remained invisible to the external observer. Hence why the external observers rarely stayed there for more than one drink. The festive Allenbi crowd flowed around the tiny bar, without penetrating it. They would walk in, look around, see nothing, and leave.
The first time I ventured into the tiny bar was on a crisp winter night early in my Tel Aviv days. I lived hopelessly far from anything worthy and knew no one in the scene. It was a Friday night, the streets of my sluggish suburb succumbed to boredom, families digesting their Shabbat meals at home. I felt a sudden flush of antagonism towards the sleepy tranquility of the apartment blocks, a rush of adrenaline that pushed me out of the house before I could prepare or plan. Nights like this are rare. They are the best nights. The buses already stopped running, but I was eager to walk all the way downtown, if I had to. Miraculously, the sherut turned up immediately as I left the house, a capsule of blue neon light that carried me to the city and there I was, walking down Levinski street, past the dangerous smelly caverns, towards the technicolor lights of Rothschild. I hesitated for a moment on Allenbi / Rothschild intersection and decided to continue down Allenbi. I think it was something from Bauhaus playing in the tiny bar, as I walked past it. I looked up at the half-balcony, which was crammed with people buzzing festively with drinks in their hands. They all seemed to known each other forever. No one looked overwhelmingly dazzling, but everyone had style. There were corduroy jackets that have surely been to good parties. Someone was proving a point to his friend, very passionately, as he adjusted the glasses that kept sliding down his nose. I slipped through the dusty glass door and the kaleidoscopic infinity swallowed me up for the next several years.
But stretchy infinities aren’t suited for the central streets of cities under capitalism. Sooner or later they are annexed, squashed, deflated, the air sucked out of them and sliced into rigid units of future real estate. When the demolition of the tiny bar obtained a date, the closing party was scheduled. It happened on the New Year’s eve, and the melancholy-flavored bacchanalia continued well into the sunlight of the following day. Good byes were said, emotions shared, and when the tired barflies left the building, waving their adieu’s to the graffiti-covered walls, they thought it was the end. Then the next weekend the party happened again. And again. The guillotine of gentrification was hanging over the tiny bar with the execution day postponed. The first post-mortem party felt a little necrophiliac, but the tribe had nowhere else to go, so they kept re-convening at the usual location, but now without sentimental feelings. When the actual final party occurred, no one was aware, or cared, that it was for real this time, so we left as if the next weekend was going to be as usual.
On a sunny day, the apocalyptic expectation has a digital flavor to it. The vision renders itself in fluorescent inversions, the kind you see on the insides of your eyelids, when you stare at the sun with your eyes closed. It is a flashy, brisk but subtle transition, almost imperceptible to the senses; a soft “wow” that disintegrates us into a confetti firework of colorful emoji. It is even enjoyable . It is survivable, too – except, or course, there is no way of telling if the survivor will equal the survived, or even remember it.
On a rainy day everything is grey and analogue. The apocalypse and its survival both appear soggy, iffy and dissatisfying, like paper cocktail straws that dissolve in your mouth. An over-sized version of those cocktail straws once appeared in a vision I had while imagining the world in which a state of emergency has become a mundane everyday routine. Soft structures, like tall stems of grass (the size of streetlights) stick out of water, wet asphalt, mud or anything else that passes for surface. When a sudden gasp of wind lifts you up in the air, or a flash flood rushes down the street, you grab onto a nearest straw and cling to it, or dangle for a while, like a human flag signifying nothing.
But most days are neither this nor that. Most days are filled with doubt and uncertainty. Feeble sunshine, interrupted by disjointed clouds, seems to be too self-conscious to deliver a message. The rain starts talking, but stops itself abruptly in the middle of a phrase. The vision of the apocalypse is muffled by the neurotic hissing of voices disagreeing with each other in your head over the minutia of the picture they are describing. On a day like this, you wander around dazed and confused, almost wanting for the world to end, just so some certainty is established. But the world keeps on going.
“I was at the book shop the other day and I just started laughing. I started thinking about the olden days, the monasteries and the Bibles, and who said what and what they meant, and all the wars and what have you – all gone. No one gives a fuck. People will read, but that old world is gone. Papers – gone. News – gone. Tune into NBC at night to be told what to think – no, over. It’s all about the morsels, man. Feed me the fucking tasty morsels, keep me interested – that is where we are headed. Tasty morsels from groovy hubs.” This is Roman Roy, a character from HBO’s “Succession”, a tragicomedy chronicling turbulent tensions inside an American media dynasty which strives to “maintain continuity” in the shifting landscape of everything. “TV?? Yeah, I remember those. I have one of those in my gym”. Disruption threatens to alter not just the rules of the game, but the field itself. The once solid notions are melting like polar ice. The good old politics of ruthless domination are frowned upon. Instinct is being replaced by algorithm and it isn’t clear any more what is the fun of accumulating power, if you are not allowed to display it by pissing on the floor of your enemy’s office.
But I want to talk about Roman. Roman Roy is a son of Logan Roy, and Logan Roy is a patriarchal billionaire at the top of “Waystar Royco’, an international conglomerate owning news, cruises, and other things money is made of. When Logan Roy hints at possible retirement, his adult children rival for the role of the successor, but we quickly learn that none of them is fit for purpose. Kendal is a soft Gen-xer who needs copious amounts of cocaine to put himself in a competitive state of mind, otherwise unnatural for him. Shiv has a lethal fear of finality contained in any choice, no matter how good the options. Roman simply can not focus on anything. Succession itself, in the sense of continuity, a sequence of similar things that come one after another, appears to be problematic, if possible at all, in the fractured reality of flickering distractions. Consequently, success becomes something no one has the attention span to pursue. Definitely not Roman, who represents a grotesque quintessence of everything that is wrong with all of us. He is deeply perverted, too, so I like him.
When Roman talks about the world of post-literate media consumption, he knows he is one of the consumers himself. Roman is more than just self-aware. He is constantly focused on himself from a multitude of external perspectives. A defiant hedonist, a self-conscious narcissist, trapped in a circuit of instant feedback, Roman is virtually stretched out bare on the surface of the black mirror. We are all a bit like Roman. I noticed lately that my brain started generating absurd, often grammatically incorrect news headlines in my sleep. I wake up distinctly remembering them for about 3 seconds, before they evaporate, like real news: “Three escape claws of feather blanket”. Things like that. Roman’s dysfunction may be what Leonard Cohen meant by “the blizzard of the world” that “crossed the threshold” and “overturned the order of the soul”.
Roman is incapable of any purposeful action, but his addiction to immediate gratification is just the framework for other problems. Its the kinds of gratifications he enjoys that are too synthetic, too complex, to sublime to withstand. He isn’t unintelligent – his reflections on the world are often witty and imaginative, but his attention is scattered across an incomprehensible amount of small instances. His perception of the zeitgeist is at the same time accurate and useless. Not being able to see the forest for the trees is the opposite of Roman’s problem: the forest as a whole is always at his fingertips, as he scrolls through the news-feed on his phone. His consciousness perceives the collective murmur of the myriads of leaves of this digitized forest, but the reality of the individual trees is something he has no access to. The analog reality is something that leaves him frustrated, as if he can not approach it in any meaningful fashion.
There is a scene where he watches in real time a failed satellite launch he was responsible for organizing. He is at his sister’s wedding in a family castle in England, while the launch is about to start in Japan. Anxious with anticipation and fearing failure, Roman escapes to the bathroom to stream the video on his phone, in private. As the rocket explodes on the launch pad, his face grows stiff, mirroring the incongruity between the physical reality of what has happened and his absolute removal from it. Is this a real explosion or just pixels changing color on the screen?
Another noteworthy sequence is where he masturbates in the office on his first day as COO, when his father is temporarily disabled by a stroke. Roman is an innovative thinker. He is full of ideas, he wants to disrupt. But as he watches the incoming emails pile up on the screen, dull anxiety reflects in his eyes. He looks away in uncertainty, walks to the window and starts masturbating. Salvador Dali, in his autobiography, recalls a phase of his youth when he would walk home from art classes, bursting with grandiose creative ideas, eager to start implementing then as soon as possible. But by the time he’d get home, his agitation would translate into anxiety which would translate into sexual arousal, and he wouldn’t be able to do anything before releasing the pressure. This state of perpetual childish over-excitement about too many things at the same time, paired with inability to focus, zoom in and narrow down, may never pass for Roman Roy- or all of us, who try to keep up with the world where everyone is expected to disrupt, kick-start, innovate and re-invent.
“Why don’t you go to bed, Roman, and masturbate all your ideas out” – says Gerri, the company’s general counsel, a stone-cold business professional in her 60s, who is Roman’s only true sexual interest. “Maybe I will”, he replies, as he lays down on the bed, phone in one hand, unzipping his pants with the other, “and maybe I’ll leave you on the pillow, so you can hear my brilliance cascading.” “You disgusting little pig!”, Gerri exclaims, but stays on the phone. “Yeah, yeah… what else am I?”. As she searches for different variations of the same insult, Roman brings himself to the climax, turned on not only by his own failure, but the external perspective on it.
Roman’s condition is similar to that of a character from another show, “Episodes” – an eccentric entertainment industry executive, who is at once bursting with disruptive ideas and incapable of making decisions. In a scene almost identical to Roman’s phone sex, he masturbates to verbal abuse from his ex-boss, who yells at his through the door of the office, where the troubled executive locked himself, unable to attend a scheduled meeting. A side effect of his anti-depressants is such that he gets sexually aroused by things unrelated to sex, like a live TV report about a woman trapped in a coal mine. This scene in “Episodes” is played for laughs, but it tackles into a real problem that we are all aware of, as we curl up with news in the privacy of our bedrooms. When fractured bits of information are tailored to us by algorithms that know us intimately on levels we are not aware of, the line between idle curiosity, procrastination and sexual arousal becomes blurred, and everything in the world becomes masturbation material.
“You have a problem, Roman. A revolting problem in your head. This is why you will never be anything but a disgrace. A rotten little nothing. What if your family could see you now? Jesus Christ, you are a classic fuck-up, Roman. What are we gonna do about you?”
Professor Legasov is sitting in his kitchen, lit by electric light the shade of cancerous yellow. He reminisces about the events of 1986 and dictates his memoirs into a tape recorder. Professor is cool, a man of dignity and style. He won’t let you see him going through a gory molecular deconstruction, but we know he is sick. He runs his hand through his hair and a handful of hair remains in his palm. He looks at it for a moment and places it in the kitchen sink, right on top of a dirty plate that is already sitting there. Not in a dust bin, not in the toilet to flush. He puts it on a plate. The visual is abhorrent and irrational, a scandalous confusion of the order of things that crawls deep under your skin. The official angle of “Chernobyl”, as stated by the show’s creator Craig Mazin, is that the lies and bureaucracy of the soviet system made the catastrophe possible. This is reasonable. But can it also be, that at the very core of disaster, somewhere on the sub-atomic level of decision-making, there was an inverted compulsion of sorts, a creeping temptation to do something abysmally but intricately disgraceful, a thing that feels perversely rewarding, especially when you do it to yourself? Graphite tips, as we learn, can, under very rare, almost infinitely unlikely (yet not entirely impossible!) circumstances, turn the emergency button of a nuclear reactor into a detonator. They weren’t supposed to be made of graphite, but they were, we are told. The scientists explain that the decision to fashion a nuclear reactor after a Russian roulette, was simply economical: it’s cheaper. Still, it is really bizarre. Could it be, that prior to all the the lies, the bureaucratic negligence, the quick and dirty solutions and cover-ups, there was a flickering dot on the back of designer’s mind, a subliminal desire to give chaos a chance? Just a little bit. Just the tip. The tip is all you need with chaos anyway – the rest is up to Murphy’s law.
In elementary school (which was around 1986) I often stood on a bus stop, for what seemed like an eternity, contemplating the meaning of a large billboard, placed on the roof of a building across the street. In human sized neon letters it said “Don’t let children play with matches!”. The city in 1986 was still decorated with propagandist billboards of this sort, before the logos of Zara and Audi took their places. Usually they were vague and universal (like “For the happiness of all mankind”), but this one was specific, and therefore thought-provoking. The visions of hypothetical fiery hell blazed through my mind as I stood in the frosty darkness of a winter evening: house engulfed in flames, everyone screaming and running in panic, sirens, smoke, roof collapsing etc. It impressed me so much that I made a drawing, where a terrified little stick figure was pictured surrounded by red and yellow hectic zigzags, with the slogan from the billboard scribbled above them. My parents were joyous – it is rare for a child to create prohibitive instructions for themselves. They placed the drawing on the wall above the stove (ironically, I presume). The proximity of the picture to the source of chaos created a constant tension between temptation and restraint, and I felt like I was practicing abstinence. But I was also a coward, and I did not see the prospect of burning worth the thrill. I was a happy child, I had a lot to lose. The collective child-state had a different background, and bigger matches to play with.
Forget climate change, Russian bots, Chinese gulags, left, right, capitalism, socialism – all I care about in spring 2019 is weather or not Michael Jackson molested those kids. We must know the truth, we want it so bad it hurts, so we scratch and scratch the truth-searching spot and it only becomes more itchy. There’s a problem with truth these days. Reality used to be like a mountain on the horizon – whether honest or fake, at least it appeared to have a certain shape, a silhouette, a color palette. Here’s a bushy slope, here’s a snowy peak, here’s a cloud sitting on top. We were standing on a safe distance from reality, smoking cigarettes, and it was bearable. Now we have come dangerously close – forget smoking, the volatility is through the roof – we are so close that the whole thing disperses into an array of pixels, and in each pixel there’s a microphone, a camera and a broadcasting infleuncer. Here’s the truth, look at it, how could you not see what was under you nose? It is so tangible, you can almost touch the “brillo pad” texture of Michael Jackson’s hair, as he puts your hands on his head, and yet you can’t, it’s not there, and everything escapes. You reach out, but you miss it, you swing right between the atoms, and it all drives you absolutely nuts. There are those, of course, who don’t join the fun. One podcast propels the idea of rejecting all entertainment as the only path to sanity. The media, it claims, feeds you with a cycle of creation and destruction of the idols. It is all part of the media’s great plan to distract you from whatever it is that you are doing. What can I say. The cycle is indisputable, the media’s authorship over it not so much, but either way, the advice sucks ass. It only works if you believe that this thing the media circus is distracting you from is more real than the circus. I happen to doubt it, and even if it were true, I don’t like the alternative. I much rather be swallowed up by Michael Jackson’s insanity, in one big slurp, like Stephen Hawkins spaghetti-man. And by Michael Jackson I mean the world. And by the world I mean me.
Let me say it here, so we can move on – I enjoyed watching Leaving Neverland. The style of the documentary is dreamy with all the drone aerials circling over various properties. Abandoned Ferris Wheels, ominous French hotels, shady housing units in Los Angeles. In the logic of all dreams the story takes you on a roller-coaster ride in slow motion, so you can well anticipate the moment when you’ll be flying upside down, possibly to the curb, with carriages turning into pumpkins, love letters to subpoenas, and nothing left to look forward to but a drawn-out sober awakening. You learn your lesson while secretly wishing to go back to the dream. What can I say? I am a shameless voyeur who’s brain has been hacked by the algorithm of the news feed. It doesn’t know wrong from right, all it knows is that Michael Jackson means more Michael Jackson. Or maybe it knows but can not get past the fly traps. When lovely men are telling me about Michael Jackson, their seemingly real human friend of a near godly status, who toured them around the world in 1989 and had them go to the far side of the bed so they can be on display for his viewing pleasure, the fact that they were only boys registers in my mind, but only in a very abstract way. Because at that level of crazy everything is abstract. And whichever way you twist it not entirely unpleasant. I empathize with the characters, but I still want to ask them how did Michael Jackson’s skin smell. What was his breathing exercise routine. Were his toes damaged from all the crazy stands on toes. And finally, what about the markings? You know what markings. The ones that are kept in sealed envelope somewhere in teh vaults of FBI. I mean, I now know so much about Michael Jackson that those remaining gaps won’t let me sleep at night. But maybe what the markings really outline is the fluidity of truth. If vitiligo is a real thing, we must assume that the shape of them shifted with the rest of the morphing interface of our patient, which means that everyone who’d seen them has their own exclusive rendition and all of them are true. Or not, because the heart is deceitful, above all things.
The story offers more than that. It invites us to marvel at the glaring insanity of the era on the edge between the 80s and 90s. We tend to think of historical events having some sort of “overarching narrative” but what if there is none. What if the collapse of Soviet Union was an accidental side effect of one of Michael Jackson’s magic tricks? He did not mean it when he sang “Give In To Me” (a rare rock ballad from 1991 performed with Slash), but we surrendered anyway. There’s something of an Apocalypto-style solstice moment about that landmark in time. A peak of mass hallucination, the zenith of pop-culture, when everyone’s eyes rolled back in ecstasy from staring too long into the sun. Could it be that the whole Michael Jackson phenomena is the embodiment of the moment when the dazzling abyss reciprocated the gaze of the worshiping crowd? Children are not sexually available to adults. Pop stars of galactic scale are not available to simple folks. Here the two impossibilities collided, cancelling each other off.
Truth is – I haven’t even been a fan up until now. Michael Jackson was too present everywhere to pay any closer attention to. (a lame excuse for laziness). I conformed to a deceivingly non-conformist notion that pop is shallow. Still, I want to have my own little nostalgia moment. In 1991 I was spending a summer in a pioneer camp (soviet version of boy-scouts). By that time the communist ideology was already dangling lifelessly from rusty flagpoles, so dusty you could barely see it’s color. There was no singing of inspirational songs around a bonfire. In fact, there were no organized activities for the youth at all. The adults who were supposed to look after us were hardly present, but they had western music playing through the speakers all day, and it worked as a magnet that kept the children from wandering too far into the woods. If you were in the lake the sound would reach you with a bit of reverb. The dj’s favorite track from Michael Jackson was Give In To Me, a rock ballad with soaring guitar riffs by Slash. A late soviet kid, I was musically undernourished and liked my pop music heavy, crass and melancholic. An eternity of teenage longing is packed into that anticipatory moment between the verse and the chorus, the levitating pause before Slash thrusts his head and strikes the chord. Thunder, lightning, firework explosions, boom! “Love is a feeling. Quench my desire”. Yeah, love is a feeling. Earth is a planet. It is in banalities that the profundity of creation reveals itself. Perhaps the verge of 90s was the time when all mothers, including Mother Russia, went collectively negligent. Maybe the collapse of Soviet Union was just a side effect of Michael Jackson’s magic tricks. He didn’t mean it this way when he sang “Give in to me”, but we surrendered anyway. I didn’t stay faithful though – soon other sonic delights overshadowed him in my teenage universe. It wasn’t until 2019 that I properly discovered Michael Jackson.
An element of sinister in Michael Jackson’s image suddenly became a piece of puzzle that was always missing, and once it fell into place the picture became alive and three dimensional. It was instant magic. I became obsessed. Investigating songs for clues of criminal obsession is an irresistible temptation, but it is distracting, because you just get trapped in the rhythm. As you catch your breath while choosing the next track to dance to you realize you are no further in your investigation and you don’t rule out anything, including the multiplicity of realities. Strange things started occurring. One week into my Michael Jackson obsession I found my work desk disassembled and removed along with all the other boring computer stuff, and replaced with nothing but a big mirror. There’s nothing human nature loves more than looking in a mirror, preferably in a room of mirrors, so it can dissolve in the infinity of reflections. But a person standing next to us is not enough reflective, he is too familiar to be recognized, he is practically see-through. Only the one on the stage, in the distance, the singular one sparkling in stage lights and smoke, the inexplicable, the unattainable one – that’s the one in which we like to see ourselves. So I looked and looked, and I danced and danced. I mean, the brilliance of Billie Jean music and performance is sublime, surreal, mesmerizing (there is no way to find any original adjectives here). But the lyrics are closeted and claustrophobic. There’s almost no space for metaphor there. “…but baby unlock the door because I forgot the key” or “So I walked out, parked the car like sideways so I can find what i can fix”. Sometimes the lyrics do resemble an extraterrestrial spirit’s exercise at human language, like the opening scene of “Under The Skin”. Maybe he was indeed an extraterrestrial spirit, raised in a body of Louisiana boy. Trained to be a stage puppet, he become so good at mimicking human condition that he popped out of it and broke it eventually.
I watched every available concert of the BAD and Dangerous tour, every live performance of “Will you be there” to compare the types of trembling in his voice as he pronounces “in my joy and my sorrow” in the closing prayer. Every documentary, including Bashir’s “Living with Michael Jackson”, where both the subject and the object appear equally possessed. The tabloid template “Hard Copy” with Diane Diamond and other sensational documentaries where the subject of pedophilia is being discussed. Those are best watched together with the unreleased short film for his song “Ghosts”. Psychoanalysts can feast on that material. I love how in “the making of Ghosts” Michael Jackson drops his sweet voice and switches to a regular male voice when wearing the prosthetic head of Tom Sneddon, his prosecutor in the 1995 trial, then tells how he would like to go to Disneyland and sit on a bench in this disguise. You just gotta love the Gothic phantasmagoria of this. I was absolutely gluttonous, and devoured every piece of junk I could lay my hands on. In 1991, or even in 2005 documentaries would promise to make the biggest revelation just after the commercial break, stay with us, in 2019 the biggest revelations are made matter-of-factly but no one is kept on edge of their seats. Everyone either “knew it all along” or ‘doesn’t buy the bullshit”. Back then the perspective was quasy-objective, cut from one expert to another, with suggestive reenactments (which themselves look a bit like child abuse), now it is minimalist in it’s uncompromising subjectivity. There’s a just a camera staring in the face of one individual human and reality unfolds from their singular view. Nothing else. I watched every available private tape, every interview, as well as a cringe-worthy recordings of some police interrogations. I watched the documentary about the making of This Is It – a last tour, a smashing come back, that was supposed to be “bigger larger and greater then anything anyone had ever seen” and which, of course, never happened because Michael died. I even put my hands on excerpts from Victor Gutierrez’s book “Michael Jackson Was My Lover” – a so called secret diary of Jordie Chandler, a pornographic fantasy, masquerading as journalistic work, but just enough to be appreciated also by those perverts who can’t admit to themselves who they are, and consume the material by tricking themselves into thinking they are on a quest for truth. As pornography, the book is badly written and unimaginative, but the author has some chutzpah – from all the available sources you are offered to purchase it as collectible item for $400. In your dreams, Victor.
An urge to stand with things is so intense these days it would kick a dead man out of his grave. But standing requires a lot of effort. You need to put your shoes on and get dressed. I prefer to curl up on the couch with notions. Like, getting cozy with an idea of being a Michael Jackson’s lawyer in a third imaginary trial, where the defense drops the denial strategy and focuses on the subjectivity of experience as an ultimate measure of all things. In a Heinleinian universe, where nothing, including childhood, is put on a pedestal (pedestal are the foundation of all unhealthy fetishes) we can imagine an Utopian garden where Michael Jackson is a rare flower, among others, each carefully labeled with an exhaustive identity tag, his being something like a “mono-sexual benign hebephile”.
But before anyone employs themselves as a ghost’s advocate we have another issue to address. You just can’t avoid it if you want to maintain the semblance of objectivity. Did I believe the story because the version of reality in which Michael Jackson is a pedophile is less disturbing than the one where a group of people concoct a fictitious plot, or because believing provided for a better viewing experience? It’s hard to say really. And that’s where the fun begins with reality branching out in several directions. The “truth or false” junction, one of the major dichotomies that break the world apart, is met here with the “good or bad” binary pair. You have to be on one side of the divide, otherwise you fall right into it. Even Oprah Winfrey in her interview with the boys mentioned that we need to grow out of good old binaries, and stand on both sides of the divide with our both full-grown, super-adult, Gulliver legs. One there, and one here. “The things that Michael Jackson did or did not do… transcend Michael Jackson”, she said. She actually said that in exact those words. They surely do, and in more ways then she meant. Michael Jackson may have seduced children, but Tom Sneddon is still a cold man. Victor Guttierez’s may be a complete bluff, yet the events he described may have happened. Wade Robson may be seeking money and relevance more than anything, but it doesn’t mean that Michael Jackson did not jerk him off.
My first instinct was to avoid all the “Debunked” “Exposed” and “What is really behind the…” materials that addressed the accusations, but I figured it would be unfair. As I went deeper into that rabbit hole I was able to observe the different types of logic in the response to Leaving Neverland. The believers came in several shapes. The majority was the “You gotta blame it on the parents!” concerned citizens who surely would be much better parents themselves in the circumstances. Then there were cold-hearted warriors fighting the tyranny of bad, wherever they can find it. Director Dan Reed is of that category. Then we have the psychoanalysts sharpening the precision of definitions of the grooming techniques and power abuse strategies. Their arguments seemed both reasonable and counter-intuitive: takes a lot of audacity to assume you know how reality looks like from inside a human being, who’s only relationship with the Other was that of being followed around by those others in swarms, like swarms of insects who smash against your windshield, screaming your name, as your chauffeur hastily rolls down the windows. Finally, there were satyrs, feasting away on a delicious scandal, taking full advantage of comedy, the only public space where radical ides are allowed for a test-run. Sure enough, those were the ones I related to the most. What unites all of them is a preference of judgement based on intuition rather then logic. In other words, a fundamentally human approach to reality. The non believers, on the other hand, showed signs of what I call the artificial intelligence syndrome. I have a theory that it’s this type of machine thinking that helped elect Donald Trump. Those people aren’t stupid or irrational, they are too rational. But the better they become in connecting dots in such a way that their envisioned constellation become visible, the more they lose a sense of smell. They look at people and see functions, facts. They see reality as a plot in a classical Hollywood film, where everyone follows a clear path of action dictated by understandable human motivations: money, love, revenge etc. The characters don’t just drop their path for no reason mid-scene in Hollywood films, but in real life happens all the time. When the human intellect is told that a child was molested, it goes on to look closely at the alleged perpetrator, looking for clues in intonations, facial expressions, movements of hands, in other word. When the artificial intellect is fed with the same information, it goes to dig the construction authority archives to find out if the room where the alleged act happened had already been built at the time. Whatever the truth is, I prefer the 1st approach because at least it is poetic. One might assume that the two approaches could enrich each other if they cooperated, but they don’t. There is no intersection between the camps.
But I feel like I wasted my non-existent reader’s time without making any point. What’s the moral? “Thu shall not make yourselves idols and if you made one, don’t leave your kids alone with them”? I don’t know, I feel like the temptation to go proverbial may be more jaded than the simple joy of voyeurism. If there a few terribly didactic thing I might say, one is that timing is a key to almost everything – dance, music, truth. There simply is no way to establish the truth about Michael Jackson now, the moment is gone, dead, six feet under. If we care at all, we just have to live with this irreconcilable knot of uncertainty. The defendants of Michael Jackson all point out that accusing someone who has no way to defend themselves is cruel. My suggestion is that what is even more cruel is to deny a person a right to apologize. There are also interesting thoughts on forgiveness. James Safechuck (one of the stars of Leaving Nenerland) says that “forgiveness is not a line you cross, but a road you take”. The phrase is catchy, but I don’t know how I feel about it. In my experience it is neither a line, nor a road. It’s more like a stone on which you may or may not accidentally step, and the only way to increase your chances is to keep dancing.
Given the depth of my immersion I was hoping that Michael Jackson would come to me in a dream, but he remained closeted and didn’t show up. The closest thing I got was Eddie Murphy, who visited when my obsession was already starting to wear off; or rather I visited him, and we got to sing “Wazupwitu”.
Every year when the Oscar season begins I play the game of predictions, with a full understanding of the futility of such endeavor. There is, of course, no logical reason to limit the range of one’s interest to the Oscar-nominated films, and it is certainly a waste of time to question why this wonderful film hasn’t been nominated, while the other, less deserving one, has been, but as far as “to watch” lists go, the Oscar’s is as good as any. My predictions tend to be shit, so I am going to leave them out of this, and just share some thoughts on the movies I thought were worth seeing.
I really liked “Can you ever forgive me?” – for all the obvious reasons, but also because I like films that give me a sense of personal hope – in this case a hope that even the prospect of aging alone and penniless in a big city, may be not as terrifying as it seems. I mean, it is terrifying but bearable. You can deal with it. You can find ways to do it with style. Get a pet, don’t be a total bitch, and stick to your best friend. For some reason, things like carrying your misery with dignity appear to be more possible in cities like New York. Which is perhaps an illusion created by cinema: in a lot of films set in New York there will always be a soothing jazz tune playing on the background of the most sad or dramatic moments, as if reminding us that everything will be ok in the end, or that everything is, in fact, ok already, and you just don’t see it, being too preoccupied with your immediate and insignificant problems. A kind of tune that gives a viewer a sense of forgiveness. Anyway, it is a lovely film.
“The Wife”, on the other hand, is neither relatable nor good. But there is a peculiar parallel between “Can you Ever Forgive Me” and “The Wife”: both films are focused on the subject of literary forgery, and their main character is an aging woman who somewhat fails in her writing career. Ironically, the real story of a real writer Lee Israel, portrayed in “Can You Ever Forgive Me”, is a proof that women writers can, in fact, be published, acclaimed and taken seriously, contrary to what serves as a justification for the cowardly life choices of a fictional character of “The Wife”, who doesn’t, by the way, ask if the readers can ever forgive her and her husband for their trickery. Whether ghost-writing is ethical, is an interesting question in itself, but it is not explored in the film, which views the ghost-writer wife as a victim who deserves her revenge.
Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” deserves to win best cinematography just for the scene where the insane Reverend pours a stomach pain relief syrup into a glass of whiskey – a visually astonishing metaphor for so many things at once, including modern-day christian spirituality itself, which is not so much a religion any more, but rather a form of conceptual art. The film is also a gateway to a whole universe of other works which it references, quotes, or is inspired by in some shape: Scorcese’s “Taxi Driver” and “Light Sleeper”, Ingmar Bergman’s “Winter Light”, Robert Bresson’s “Diary of A Country Priest”, and others, most of which I still have to see. I now intend to read Paul Schrader’s book “Transcendental style in film”.
“The
Favorite”is
brilliant, I watched it twice in a row and I already want to watch it
again. Queen of England or not, we are all constrained by the
unavoidable necessity to rule our personal realities, we only differ
in the style of our tyranny. Some ride it like a horse, some weave it
like a spider-web, but most just suffer through it, limp through the
days, forcing ourselves to attend to our daily duties, with only
consolation being found in accidental, rare, fleeting moments of
pleasure. As for the pleasures, the movie confirms my concept (well,
not “mine”, of course, but the one I share) that human sensuality
in its purest, most unleashed, delightful and delicious form can only
exist in environments of total brutality and vicious cruelty. On the
other hand, a society that fosters safety and respect for fellow
human beings produces insipid, sanitized, measured, and ultimately
boring type of love. You can not combine the best of both worlds in
one experience. Or can you?
“Roma”
is interesting already for the fact that Slavoj Zizek wrote an
article about it, and unlike most of the stuff that he writes, it is
accessible to a general reader such as myself. The point he makes is
that the film is praised for all the wrong reasons, and that the
seeming goodness of Cleo – a young woman who works as a maid in a
middle-upper class family – hides a deeper reading. He claims that
Cleo’s selfless devotion to the family she works for, is not a
virtue, but rather a symptom of certain ideological apathy, a blind
submission to the system of exploitation. Whether the director had
intended it this way or not, I do not know. Perhaps, the intention
was to allow for both interpretations, and it works either way. But
“Roma” is not a kind of film that makes you sympathize deeply
with the character, it doesn’t invite you to be emotionally involved
in what is happening on the screen. The director’s perspective is
withdrawn and cold, and so is the viewer’s.
The opposite is true of “Green Book” which is a heart-warming and immaculate production. Yes, you can say that it appears naive in 2019, especially in the face of the facts that surfaced relating to the story. Still, if the film doesn’t squeeze a tear out of you, it means you are a drone. As critic Robert Ebbert writes: “Green Book is the kind of old-fashioned filmmaking big studios don’t offer any more. It’s glossy and zippy, gliding along the surface of deeply emotional, complex issues while dipping down into them just enough to give us a taste of some actual substance”. “Just enough” is a key point, or at least I think I know what Ebbert is talking about here. In 2019, If you are watching a psychological drama, you will be looking into the pores in the skin of people; if it’s an action film, your internal organs will vibrate, in other words – if it is erotica, it will be porn. And while I am not against the tendency in contemporary filmmaking to go to the extremes in all directions – after all, you start at a zero point with any new endeavor, and the only vector you have to explore, is that aimed at the extreme – I sometimes miss the “surface-gliding” style of motion picture. I miss the picture in which the genre is not the main character. And I want to be able to sympathize with a character as much, as everyone sympathized with Jesse Pinkman of Breaking Bad, when it felt like there would be street riots if the creators decided to kill that character.
“Vice” is a film I looked forward to seeing, but I had to force myself to finish it. The after-the-credits scene, which turns the movie into a self-referential artwork of sorts, was funny, if you ask me. But the rest I found inedible. It may be that I am so tired of political reality in general, and especially represented through the faces of political figures, that even the most creative, ironic, angry, genre-bending attempts at processing this reality leave me indifferent. Either that or I couldn’t get through Christian Bale’s mumbling under all the plastic makeup. And somehow it seemed that the sculpted face of Dick Chaney was recycled from that of Winston Churchill, worn by Gary Oldman last year in “The Darkest Hour”. I don’t know… I just have a problem with plastic make up. Where do they keep all those faces after the movie is done? Do they sit next to each other in a shelve somewhere in the inner chambers of Holywood? It’s macabre. A lot of reviewers agree that “Vice”is a film that failed to decide what it wanted to be – a drama or a comedy. And if it wanted to be both at the same time, it failed at that as well. I think that it should have went all the way grotesque: instead of fancy face prosthetics, the actors should have used Halloween rubber masks from a dollar store, like those that the characters of “Private life” wear in one of the movie’s most touching and witty scenes.
“Private
Life”, by the way, is in my
personal top 3 favorites this year, but I am biased – I just love
Paul Giamatti. What can I do? I fell in love with him in Sideways
and stayed faithful ever since. Indiewire’s film critic David Erlich
writes in his column that Private Life
is a “film that beautifully exploits Giamatti’s unique genius of
blurring the line between schadenfreude and self-recognition”, and
I agree with him. Exactly like last years Call
Me By Your Name, Private
Life is a film where actors literally
act through the credits. It is a perfect, perfect creation.
“Black
Panther” is a film I started watching, but fell asleep.
Which does not mean that it is bad. I suspect that if I was 12 I
would have enjoyed it – that is, if I was 12 now, and not in 1990,
when I was actually 12. Thing is, in 1990 we only had a small black
and white TV, and no access to the technicolor Disney delights. The
most popular children’s cartoon of the entire soviet era was a
dadaist greyscale production called “Hedgehog in the Fog”.
Everyone who grew up in Soviet Union knows Hedgehog in the Fog. Hell,
even now, 30 years later, you join a group of Russians for dinner –
anywhere in the world – and at least once per evening the hedgehog
will pop up in conversation. The plot of the cartoon is just what the
title suggests – a hedgehog wanders through a thick gray fog.
Nothing happens. Nothing is resolved. Nothing ever will. I claim that
this summarizes our identity as a nation. We are all hedgehogs who
failed to come out of the fog. My point is that fantasy, I believe,
can not be an an acquired taste. It is something you can appreciate
as an adult only if you grew up with it. And I grew up with Hedgehog
in The Fog.
“Blackkklansman” has received a lot of criticism, the main point of it being that the caricature evilness of white supremacist characters does not help us understand the nuanced reality of contemporary racism. I suppose it is true. To this end, I can tell a little anecdote. I watched it yesterday while at home waiting for an electrician to come and fix something in the flat. The electrician turned out to be the Russian guy who lived in the apartment before me. I put the movie on pause when he arrived, and as he attended to the electricity issue, we had a little chat. I asked where do they live now, and he told me that after leaving this house (I live in Shapira – an area of Tel Aviv with a large population of African refugees), they moved to Florentin. “It’s nicer there”, said the guy – “not so many Negros”. That is all.
There are also the two music-oriented productions of the year – “Bohemian Rhapsody”and “A Star Is Born”. I don’t have much to say about either of them. The Queen biopic is what it intends to be, no more, no less – a well made tribute to a musical phenomena. Although perhaps my limited knowledge on the subject did not allow me to notice little things in the film which hardcore Queen fans might have noticed. As for A Start is Born – Lady Gaga is a cutie, and so is Bradley Cooper, and that is enough for me to like it. The movie is also interesting when viewed in a row of it’s predecessors – the 1976, 1954 and 1937 versions. Stories that keep being reproduced in films several times in a century, become a vehicle to tell the history of cinema.
There is also a bunch of TV-shows that everyone tells me I should see, but I have a problem with TV-shows. I can handle spending 2 hours watching a not-so good feature film, but to spend 30-40 hours I have to be absolutely in love with what I’m watching. And if I am, I have no discipline to dose the viewing to weekly, or even daily portions, I will watch the whole thing in a binge no matter how long it takes or what important things will be pushed aside. So either way it is problematic. Plus, there is an eerie effect only existing in TV shows: when at some point the production changes the writers, you can’t get rid of a feeling that the characters have been replaced with impostors, who are trying too hard to resemble themselves. Anyway, the only thing I can say on the subject of TV shows this year is that I quite enjoyed the weird little Youtube video Kevin Spacey recorded, addressing the audience as Frank Underwood after Frank Underwood dropped out of the “House Of Cards”. Considering the level of absurd the show have reached in its stubborn intention to proceed without the lead actor, this gesture seems logical. I don’t think I know another instance when an actor, who continued to play his role outside of the set, after being fired from a project. In this case Frank Underwood literally resurrects himself from teh grave in defiance of the script. A character creating an alternative story-line outside of the show – that could become a new genre in itself. I think Kevin Spacey should continue with this concept. But I don’t think he will.
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