2023: year in review

 wow. What a year. every time it didn't seem like it could get more disappointing and bleak, there was more disorienting trauma piled high on our plates. It feels ignorant to the suffering of people through history to say that these are unprecedented times. Pain, subjugation, war. These are not new things. They aren't even recent things. But  the sense that much of human culture is eating itself alive does not escape me. The sense that we are expected by the rich, by the powerful nd their lap dogs to just accept mass death and total control as simply the way things are feels more perverse than it has before. 

Knowing that there is a kind of long arc to the moment we are in now that traces itself back several centuries, it can just feel like too goddamn much. I have certainly retreated to a kind of mutated 'ignorance is bliss'. Rather than one of pure neutrality I find myself thinking "I know it's bad but reading about it won't help anyone anywhere!" Which is embarrassing and kind of anti-curious. I just don't know where to keep my eyes. Which atrocity deserves my attention this week. Should I focus on my home country and its surprisingly quick and robust slide into a new kind of insanity fascism? No truth! Just guns and no healthcare! Or do I expand my If there's some positive spin to my lackluster participation it is that I refuse to be an informational disaster tourist. 

Speaking of hopelessness and loneliness, its been a very hard year in those arenas. That was also another hallmark of this year, isolation, the winnowing away of social bonds. I suppose the nature loneliness is at odds with comprehending that one is amongst great ranks of others who feel very similar. I feel by in large friendless. I don't have many people to talk to. I have hardly anyone to hang out with. No one I can ask to hang out with really. I've felt dead and stagnant. Not moving in any direction. Trapped in these morbid chambers of material and emotional disease. I think about pivoting one way and I come up to a sheer wall. I either don't have the money or I don't have the relationships so I've had to just bare it. Take the isolation. Take the sense of  crushing isolation, the traumatic baggage of my youth, the sense of powerlessness. Of agony. In this year, like many years, I thought of killing myself. In my lonesome desperation I turned to death. It probably won't be the last time that happens. It's been a hard year. But every time I needed to, I took another step into another day and I am better for it. 

The largest inspiration for writing this was trying to frame some positivity around the year. I'd like to mark this as the positivity line. We're going positive from here on out. I was laying bed. Lamenting things. And then it hit me. I did some cool shit this year! Stuff happened! As much as it doesn't feel like my life has evolved. Like I'm going nowhere fast. I did things. And I'd like to list them out. I'd like to celebrate them and revel in the shards of achievement that I've accumulated. 

- I became a paid and published writer in 2023/22. It might have been at the tail end of 22 but through the early months of 23 I was writing freelance for the Keene Sentinels ELF magazine, a fluff piece factory that paid me 50 bucks an article. I'm not sure how many articles I wrote. It wasn't many and they weren't the 'serious' shit I wanted to get up to, but I leveraged all the opportunity I think I could. And I made a few hundred untaxed dollars along the way. 

- I put out a record on a record label! Sure I've been putting records out on my own for a long ass time but this was the first time someone liked my stuff and put there stamp on it. To support my art in some small way. I didn't get a shit ton of gigs or tour full time or sell a buncha records or anything. But it came out. And I have labelmates whose music I love and respect. That feels like a real victory. 

- I played a show in Keene for the first time. It always kind of stung that I never played a show in Keene. And I got payed! and a bunch of my friends came. It was awesome. I had gotten fired from a job like the day before so that hundred bucks saved my fucking ass. 

- I wrote the first draft of a screenplay. I got an idea for a movie, took a month to write it, wrote it, and sent some copies to some friends. Here's hoping draft two is kick ass and I can get an agent and sell that motherfucker for some stone cold cash. 

- I wrote a bunch of poems I like a lot. I want to make a little zine of poems so I put a bit of work into writing poems that I liked and while they are all deeply scary and sad and violent they are my poems. I wrote them and I love them. I feel as though I have a developing poetic voice. 

- I got poems published for the first time! I took a shot and emailed a blog called High Horse Press and they wanted to see some work of mine and they liked 'em and well I got published for the first time. What means the most is the words of encouragement they gave me. What they wrote about me on their Instagram was spectacular and so special. That was the real victory. 

-I wracked up a lot of rejections from literary journals. And that, my dear readers, means I'm trying. 

I don't think I really moved the needle this year, more often than not it feels like the voices in my head telling me I'm a loser, that I have no life, nothing to point toward as my own, is by an large right. But I did some shit. I tried. It's still so scary and harsh here in America, it feels like we are a long way off from care for one another. There are so many layers of demented thinking infecting life now. the normalization of death, the scarcity of empathy. There are men, hunkering into dangerous and isolating logic all over, I see the videos on YouTube. Crazed and lonely they record podcasts and YouTube shorts talking about how many fully loaded magazines you'd want for a firefight. That's how you think when you are alone and have only so little to protect. you think 'well I'll just kill whatever problem comes up'. And I know seeing these videos of these men preparing for firefights they will eventually seek out is scary, and I also know thinking of them as 'the enemy' only makes the version of things they're pulling for more likely. 

We are too days into the new year. I have some idea of how I want to move forward. I'm not sure how I can build more robust and trusting relationships. I know I need to. We can only make a world more worthy of our humanity if we do it together. Failing that, I know there are people out there fighting for human dignity. Every day they do the unsexy work, the most important work. There is possibility in the bleakest of times, especially when things feel like they are breaking. That's when you get to make something new. 

Love, 

bye

For the worth of life.

 Boring walls. No boss. Not a bad deal. Undisturbed and with unfettered access to stores of food. A decent job anyone might want to keep. 17 dollars an hour. Not bad if you can get it. 

I think my life is worth a lot more than 17 bucks an hour, an asymmetrical trade that can't be bought back. 

There is a lot of heady language being wiped around about the connections between the worker in america or the worker anywhere that the worker toils for wages and the people of Palestine in Gaza facing decimation. The machinations of global war, the turning of age old mechanisms, might seem as though they have nothing to do with working for a living. And they don't if that's how you want to go about it. Fundamentally though I think the link boils down to what is a life worth, and who gets to set the price. 

I know, like I know that my life cannot be bought for 17 but I must sell it incrementally to secure food and housing, that the people of Palestine must also sense that their lives are worth far beyond the constraints and torment they have lived under for decades.

In all honesty I am woefully ignorant about the particulars of this history. I have a glancing familiarity with its poetry through Mahmoud Darwish. Though what does one need to know about torture? What are the particulars that I need to be aware of in-order to unequivocally denounce geocide and confinement and incarceration and destruction? Here, I suppose, is where anarchism becomes a philosophy of elegant simplicity. I'm not squabbling about a states right to defense, or even sovereignty. I am not squabbling about the need for currency, or the economic utility of wages. I understand, in an infinitely fractional sense, the horror of being contained. That when your life, or the cessation of your life, becomes of economic interest to larger entities,  your ability to make a choice is always being filtered through someone else power over you, and in the infinitely abstract space of survival. Will they give me such and such day off? Will I not go in if they don't give me the time? Will I have the cash saved to weather the unemployment? I don't need to know much because I just know that when you are bound up in the fist of some terrible, deadly, oppression, eventually all there is is to lash out. You quit playing by rules of respectability regardless of whether is will work out in your favor. Because to keep idly accepting the limiting, claustrophobic conditions of your existence would be to leave your humanity at the door. 

It is simply not about Judaism as a faith. It is perhaps about land and indigenous occupancy right. I wouldn't know really. It's about what a life is worth, and the value it loses when the economic prosperity of certain people run opposed to the continued existence, not even the flourishment of some others. My clans are not dying, nor are my children being strafed by US supplied ordinance. I just know that one freedom beets another. The value of one life illuminates another. That a war to exterminate hospitals and houses simply can't be defending anything worth keeping, and that a people divested of their homes have always presented inconvenient narratives for ruling class, for the settler colonial state. Through their lens Palestinians become animals. An Arab scourge to be demolished, lives and histories pounded into rubble. As the inherent worth of humans everywhere has always presented an inconvenient narrative to the factory foreman, to the capitalists.

The goal is Palestinian liberation. Less would be to fail. Less would be to continue, each and everyone of us, to rigidly abide a system which is killing us. I am unsure what a measured, and by measured I mean feasible, form of resistance might look like but what I do know is that Palestine must be free. Israel must cease its genocide.

The goal is an end to the wage economy. 

From the river to the sea.  

This is in part dedicated to my friend Zahra. Whose Instagram stories keep this constantly on my mind. Her poetic and effective curation of cats in bombed out rubble, and kids posing in the skeletons of their homes could do nothing less then make this a struggle for the worth of human life. As she is an exemplar of what is best in people. Their kindness, their creativity, their sadness, their humor, and their heart. 

Working For the Weekend

 I spent eight hours today staring at a wall. It's not as much of an exaggeration as you might think. From 9am to 5pm I sent four emails and rang a couple people up and got some people their custom shirts from the back. In the remaining seven and a half hours I sat in my wheelie chair and wrote in a little note pad and clicked around on my mouse and keyboard to look busy. Why wasn't anyone giving me anything to do? No one bumping me some quotes to fill out. Customers coming in and asking questions I couldn't answer. I intensely watched people having conversations in an attempt to learn something. Or at least look like I was learning something. the husband of a friend of mine from Highschool/ elementary school came into my place of work to hand out a flyer for a party the casino he- I guess- works at. I thought about saying hi. Of asking after Charlie and saying that I enjoyed getting their Christmas card from a couple years back. But in that space I am not that. There, I stare at a wall for eight hours. I do nothing and my ass goes numb in a chair so I wander around putting the tags down the necks of shirts. There are worse ways to make 16 dollars in an hour. For sure. Though, my ass could get fired for doing nothing. So I sit in a semi wound twitch all day. Trying my best to not look like I'm enjoying doing nothing. Sweeping a more or less clean floor. Touching shirts in a kind of pantomime of productivity. I do not say hi in these conditions. In this situation I do not feel as though I have a self. I do not have a heart. All that is inside of me is a solid void. I sit and I have no future. Answering the dreaded "so what's new with you?" is a toll I will not pay for connection. People I knew once pass through my job often. Sam Elliot, the artsy gay boy who I loaned Scott Pilgrim to in Highschool. Mr. Schmidt, my third grade gym teacher. I don't say hi. There is nothing new with me, I want to say, I'm just working some bum ass job that I hate in order to not starve, and as much as I was trying to wrap my head around the idea of it, it's still terrible and terrifying in a way I was not prepared for. At all. I could talk about the gig I have coming up. Or the things I am trying to write or the jams I've been in, or the debut as a (bad) actor. But none of that is "happening' really. Those things are reprieves in the torrent of small violence that the world throws around every day. Those are not happening to me. I do them because I must. The mini comic I wrote has no barring on how the events of my day will play out. Nor on me sitting in that room. Nervous and still. Tense for eight hours. Listening to the static hiss of retail space ceiling tile speakers. The same dozen songs or so for the day. Coming at me from slightly different directions. At least it isn't loud. if the speaker system was actually clear it would be game over. 

This is the third job I've quit in just as many months. In that way I have no past. I have no cohesive line from the year before to now to four years ago to now. In my country I am sparred the worst of peoples judgments because I am white. Cuz' my momma raised me to be a kind of facsimilia of middle class. Or my  families penchant for bookishness and a life of the mind cast us in that direction. Whenever my coworkers and my boss talk about the homeless people who stop in for free shirts and who pass out on the benches near our store front, all I can think about is just how close I- and any other worker- are to being in that situation. I feel a kind of kinship with the social death of it. I have no life in so far as in America work is your life. Everyday I keep pressing on toward my own very real death I feel my relations dying as well. The older people I love, who seem invested in me- or some facsimile of me- are cut out the more and more my relationship to employment becomes adversarial. It's hard to explain just how much of a combat making it through the eight hour work day is to someone whose been doing it as long as you've been alive. As I quit job after job it just becomes a quilt of failure which separates me from these folks. You can only ask someone for a reference and just fucking walk off so many times. To a certain logic I have my imminent death coming. I can't get my shit together, I can't eat. 

It struck me today that all the people who love me -barring, probably, my mother- love me on the condition that I am not homeless. That I am not nearing death. Love is a very easy idea to maintain when it does not require the heavier lifting of actual sustained care. I have seen my own love for people dissipate when the love they require exceeds the love I am willing or able to give. And where I to fall out of the social order, to be- as is becoming clearer and clearer with every passing day- unfit for the life of an eight hour work day all the people who I file in my heart as beloved would most likely cease to be. either in that their capacity to help on such a scale is just dwarfed by their own need to keep themselves afloat, or by an inability to adapt what are more or less low input relationships to a higher resonance of interpersonal need. I do not long for survival because survival would cost me everything. I would rather die and leave behind a smattering of mourners than go on and drag myself away from all the people I love because my need has become too great. This is what I think of as the minutes crawl by at work. 

To not have a past is to also not have a future. For the eight tense hours I don't have a 'next move'. I have lived on impulse long enough that to do so anymore is to my detriment. I keep thinking about how many weeks there are to go until I can quit. 50. Maybe 40. I want to leave my home in the hopes of finding a life that doesn't feel like a holding pattern. I want it to all feel worth it at some point. I could quit this job, I think to myself, just leave. I've only been here for a few weeks so I don't need to give notice. I bet the ball bearing place is hiring. And then what:? work there and hate it? Quit that place too? Leave in 50 weeks when I take off for a new mid sized American city. The future rhymes with the past. I knew I would pay for my actions and here I am.  

I have a dream where I'm killed. I'm arming explosives and then I am running down a street from someone with a lot more power than me. I have thrown a grenade or killed someone and now I will be chased down and vengeance will be enacted. I had another dream perhaps where I was Sue Storm, the powerful matriarch of the fantastic four. The first family of marvel. My girlfriend jokes that I need a big roost to rule. I love her so much it hurts to know I am all by myself, nothing but a worry. I clean the dishes but she could do that. And I will die. There is no other destiny for me. No roost to rule. it's true. I would love an airy kitchen to lean on counters in. to chase grandkids and console the children the woes of their lives. to hold the great grand babies. A great mother at the head of a long lineage. Passing on the best of myself to stronger generations, and keeping the worst as a coming home gift for the absentee god who left us all to rot here on earth. We have lived not at his behest but in spite of his animosity. We are powerful in that way. I try and dig in to the idea that continuing is the only way to get there. to get anywhere. But continuity requires choice and I have precocious few. precious few. precious few. 

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I got fired from that job, probably not long after writing that. It was a mercy, really. That plunged me into depression and financial anxiety. I just couldn't hack selling t-shirts. 

  

Some Lightening Some Not

 The first time I read James Baldwin’s A fire Next Time I read it all in one day while on break from my shit-pay-super-busy restaurant cook job. It was an extra day off because me and the sous chef had held it down while a bunch of people were out sick or something. I don’t remember. I remember that I said to myself “girl, it’s okay if you lay in bed all fucking day, you are going to just chill, read this book and listen to all of these CDs you got in the mail.” And that is exactly what I did. I listened to Isis and Oxbow while reading Baldwin, looking out over the street and the ridge line behind my apartment. Looking at how the light plays with the clouds. It was a sparkful day. In the middle I took a nap to a Merzbow album. I drifted off to the the grinding noise of machine feedback and awoke as it all coalesced and ceased into silence. 

This is all just to say that there is art which creates beautiful, distinct memories around it. Certain things jump into our personal, and collective, zeitgeist. The album before last by The Michael Character, Oh, Shoot!, took over my morning routine for a while. It gave me hope and a sense of urgency and ardency in the face of the dehumanizing forces of the profit motivated, hierarchal, economy which defines most every aspect of our existence. 

For all the people who have read The Fire Next Time a lot less have read  No Name In The Street, Baldwin’s follow up to Fire. I did not read that book in a day. It took me about a month of working my way twenty, ten , or five pages at a time. It was a more brittle book, as Baldwin was wading his way through the deaths of Malcom X and Martin Luther King Junior, and to a certain extent, the death of the civil rights movement. Coming to terms, as it were, with a failure to achieve what Malcom X identified as the dominion of human dignity, not civil rights.

As I heard that The Micheal Character were ramping up to release this album, and I was brought into the fold and given the promo link, I started thinking about the relationship between Fire and No Name as a framework for thinking about Oh Shoot! and the new album. Would Totally Totally be a less shining, more contemplative, response to the things which have occurred since the tumultuous, almost surreal experiences, of early lockdown when Oh Shoot! was released? The historic moment that was the early days of covid in America seemed to almost lift a veil on possibility. And Oh Shoot! Felt like a reminder, as Bruce once sang, “that it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive”. 

Totally Totally reminds me of No Name In The Street less because its reflecting on losses and collective tolls, and it does that some, but because of its lack of luster. Like No Name, Totally is dense. The first song “Erik Prince” is an extended reference to the privatized military politics of the global war on terror. One thing I know is that a lot of the references were flying by me like exit signs on a highway. As soon as the album started I had to google who Erik Prince is. I don’t know what making ‘Iran the new Afghanistan’ means. 

Sonically the album is lush and warm. More so that Oh Shoot!. There are woodwinds, strings, slide guitars, and pianos all over the record. On my first listen I thought there was a lack of bangers, of songs you’d want to play at high volume and dance around your room to (see ‘The Social Wage’). My repeat listens, though, are giving way to a real fondness for these songs. I don’t know if any of them feel like they stand out in the same way as on Oh Shoot!. Though I do think there is a ‘if you observe it, it will change simply by the act of observing it’ thing going on. I find that when I go into a record knowing I have to write about it, the things I say about it change as I listen more and more, making exact statements about a record hard to pin down. 

Still present on this record is the thru-line of looking at the comforts we accrue in the world, because we all want, and deserve, comfort, and how this comfort separates us from the people who are lower than us on the rungs of society. I am poor but I ain’t homeless. I was raised broke but my moms got money now. I have a degree. I read the good books and I talk right and dress right. What, really, is my relationship to oppression, stress, and trauma. Getting the answer to these questions feels essential to moving on with my damn life. But I know I’ll never have them. 

This record, in what can only remind me of listening to early career Eminem in my brother's bedroom while playing Xbox as kids, has a lot of skits. Well three. But for a ten track record that is a lot. And one of them, “Eliot Hugh” has a funny voice! A track I always skip. Because I am a humorless bitch. The accompanying piano is marvelous. 

In some ways it feels like this album is bursting with too many ideas. Lyrically, and musically. There are noisy moments of synth which are fun and exciting and perhaps add nothing. The references. Oh god so many References. The lyrics come on sometimes like a graduate paper or a leftist zine of ‘talking points’. Album closer “Song For a Project” does the best at bridging the political to the human with a singing melody and a refrain of “you better get more creative real soon”. Fantastic stuff. 

The Michael Character, after 15 albums, have a sound, defined by subtle and wild dynamic and tonal shifts. They excel at taking a kind of american songbook pastiche and wringing it out until it's something a lot more raw and a lot more punk. On this record a sudden burst of synthesizer madness creates these moments of shift, on “32” they are deployed to mirror the mental anguish the singer is contending with as they describe their excursion deeper and deeper into the fold of normative middle class hegemony. “Erik Prince” undulates between a kind of mad dash bloom of trilling strummed guitars, twinkling pianos, and beer bottle whining slide guitars and a folk rock strumming stomp. The band, after all this time, is tight. They are perhaps underrated as a great band, being that the lyrics and ideas tend to take center stage. But the music is no joke either. 31 turns up the tempo and gets the tempo up. “Where's all the land back when you need it.” The screaming at the end of that song is scary. Very scary. 

“Did I work for all the things I got?/ My high birth and my union job?” Totally Totally revels in its sing song density. The more I listen the more I see that there is luster. And perhaps if I reread No Name I would see that the complexity of the diamond carbon structure of it is not at the sacrifice of gleam. 

“I didn’t know anything about Communism, but I knew a lot about slums.” Baldwin writes about his march in a May Day parade, chanting, “East side, West side, all around the town, we want the landlords to tear the slums down.” My love of Baldwin stems, in part, in his ability to find the humanity behind a cloak of cultural diction. Here he spells out that though as a young boy he knew little of theory, he knew a lot about slums. This is an energy The Michael Character has been drilling into record after record. How to build collectively with people, in spite of their desire to man a barricade. The lyrics about the social wage, about Palestine, about moving to the suburbs are in essence an incantation of question and protection. Searching for some way to bring it all together so that everyone gets what they need. 

The Michael Character has proven that they release heartfelt and essential records. By the fifth listen through the record started to make sense, to fit together wholly. It's good that a listen through takes a bit less time than to read a book. My critiques still stand though they feel less relevant, after the picture starts to make sense. And now I have spent my Baldwin comparison-for-a-review bullet. 

Home and its destruction

A fascist jag named Ellis told me trans women were just pretending to be women. And zap, there goes my favorite comic bookstore. I turned from him, said fuck off and walked out, screaming fuck into the road. That comic store was, I thought, a port in a storm. A place for some beautiful retail therapy and comradery. A place where I could always be safe on at least a certain level. I had spent the last two years or so spending my way through to some type of certificate education in comics, buying whatever in the hell caught my eye at the overstuffed shelves of Comic Boom, consuming and regarding as a part of whatever on going pipe dream I have to write comic books. I'd walk in there more days of the week than not. 

I went home. after being confronted by this toxic, ridiculous, totalitarian way of looking at the world, after softly saying 'that is so terribly cruel.' and being told I was looking to be a victim. I went home and slumped in my chair in my sobbed. mourned violently the loss of my second home, and my naivety. Transphobia is not hard to find in the world. Go sniffing and you will get a whiff. whether you want to mince about gendered language and cisnormativity, or hunt for the destruction of gender essentialism or 'gay panic' defenses. And here I was, confronted with it all. The cool imperialist shitbirdisms that only some shlebby dude can dole out as though he was god himself (just before this interaction this dude and (I think his brother?) we declaring with marble clad certainty that Andy Warhol had made art worse, which hey fuck Andy Warhol, but what kind of person thinks art is the kind of thing which can be made worse). The tears and wracking sobs gave way to violence. I won't lie, the violence hit my brain pretty quick, pretty much as soon as I slammed the door and screamed fuck into the road. I thought about getting physical, not walking away and out. I ran in my mind a thousand different ways how it might have all gone down, how I could have controlled or handled the situation. Who I could have cracked over the head with a thick hardcover Möbius reissue. And the current of thought only got more violent from there. For days and days after. It kept me from sleeping a couple of nights. I hate conflict and I especially despise the arrogance of men and I hate even more a bastard know-it-all. A projected understanding of knowledge which is absolute and unwavering. no hemming. no hawing. no tick to to even present that one might need to consider the grand and complex tapestry of all the things we call the world. He asked me, if trans women weren't just men pretending to be women, than what are they. I whispered 'they're women'. He said that's 'just not how it works.' I left and told the room to fuck off. 

This horrible exchange just served to remind me that the marginalized, a word i use to describe myself hesitantly, are never long for our safety. the places that hold us can be burned off in an instant. When I got home I texted my friend Dylan, and I called my mom, and I called my brother after I had called my mom. They all advised me, kindly and rightly, that I shouldn't let this experience ruin a source of joy in my life. Everyone knowing just how much time and how much of my heart I put into Comic Boom. Which is why it stung so fucking bad. I had put the chips on making that place a kind of home. A territory I could claim. ain't that the irony of life-and indeed a truism, which i do so find icky- it is the importance of things which makes their breaking apart so devastating. I so want to head the advice of my friends and family, but something in that moment felt like flash paper. just snap and gone. I think that is why i screamed fuck into the wet pavement of west street. Like I didn't even feel that regret of loss like... i had fucked up and been banned or the store closed or some tragic separation. But like a choice had been made, a path had been shifted. and all there was to do now was Mourne the loss of one more safe place to be in. A trans girl out in the lurch once more because of the ignorance, and the wide birth that ignorance takes up. 

Its all very metaphysical. i'm trying to be less melodramatic in that way. which is a kind of hard thing to say after writing everything I have written, but it's true. and im trying to thread  the needle of knowing that there is a difference between the world as i ingest it in a metaphysical sense-the meaning i assign to the segmented notions of its various parts- and life as it is just lived here, through the eyes and the hands. by this i mean i can talk about the flash paper moment, the mourning of a home destroyed. or i can just walk into the shop and risk looking that fucker in the eye again. and take up the space i want to take up while being who i am. though this struggle is essentially of life, between what things mean to you and what they actually are to you. In any case, i know i'm going to save a lot of money on comics thinking it all through. 

peace love and protect trans women. 

Idealism and Materialism

 I met someone today that described themselves as a materialist. Which has hitched me, for whatever reason. Maybe because the conversation had a stilted quality to it. Like two people waiting for a surprise that the other was not going to, was not willing to deliver. In any case it got me thinking of the nature of idealism as opposed to materialism (this person said, 'I am a materialist, I do not believe in the utopian'. To which I think ‘then what the hell is any of this for’. But also maybe that’s why their standing on the corner distributing goods to people who need them and I am sitting around thinking about materialism versus idealism). I am an idealist, by way of a fairly basic understanding. It has crossed the bar into self myth at a certain point. When I reach into my memory for a reason, for an origin I plunge my hand into a murky stream and pull up the phrase: “That which is right is good and that which is good is right.” I have no idea where I heard this. I just know it is true and it is what I believe and I call it idealism. 

A quick google search reveals that materialism is a philosophy propagated by Marx which deals wholly with the material, as opposed to the ideal; the spiritual realms. This is a philosophy of form manifest in the bodily consciousness. The ideal is that which is spiritual or non-embodied, or so says the google search. My main gateway through idealism is Hegel and his dialectic on the nature of recognition: “the lord-bondsman dialectic.” A piece certainly possessed of the ideal. A dialectic which brings us the material. Marx, having drawn on Hegel, could never have conceived of the proletariat, illuminated the hierarchy of class fundamental to his materialism, without the idealism of Hegel. Without Hegel's idealist notion of work. That the lord separates the bondsman from their labor, as Marx would say the factory worker was from theirs by the factory foreman, and thus separated from themselves, as Marx would say of the factory worker, obliterated by the piecemeal nature of their singular task. The ideal provides, as it often does, the heart of the material. 

And so I think about the relationship between the material and the ideal. They are written about as being oppositional, but we see they are indeed lineal. Corroborative. The ideal, dare I say the utopian, paves its ground for the material concern. What does the material mean to me if I cannot have my spirit. What's that line: ``I don't want to join your revolution if I can’t dance”. What is dancing but ideal.  

The Last American Cowboy

What is a critique of masculinity? Is it trying to get men in touch with their feelings? Is it simply a rebuke of violent solutionism? An exploration of power as a simple machine for leveraging positive outcomes, and the  historic/cultural distribution of the means of that power to men? Perhaps on one level. Or is a critique of masculinity a look at the way social constructions of manhood, maleness, and masculinity create a severely limited menu of options from which to process emotions, traumas, and joys? Perhaps it is both. What I do know is that a ‘Critique of Masculinity’ has become something of a filmic buzzword over the last, let's say half decade. If the article “Men are in Trouble and Hollywood Wants to Help” , written by Manohla Dargis for the New York Times in 2019, I am not alone in my estimation that trying to get men in touch their feelings has become a very prevalent artistic framework. 

Questions such as these, mean a great deal to me. I am a butch transgender dyke. I have not undergone hormone therapy or any surgeries and I got deeper into masculinity as I came into my own womanhood. To me the pop cultural lens around masculinity is gendered to a level that might never be separated out. It makes me dysphoric. In the article Dargis talks about what critic Raymond Duggan called ‘male weepies’, the kind of bloody and emotional action films that have been the mainstay of dad and uncle dvd collections for years. Something like Saving Private Ryan. I have always loved that hard edged masculine tenderness which exists in a war flick, a position that plants me, critically speaking, in maleness. We hav known that butchness is nonbinary, so not much new there. I thought Tom Hanks' casting in Saving was transcendent when I first saw it in honors American studies. I couldn’t quite explain why until now, because of the way Hanks has alway represented what can be seen as the best facets of American hetero normative masculinity, in additon to the great things Hanks brings to a role as an actor. He is comforting and sensitive while still being a firm figure. I think groups of women make me feel ousted more often than not. So something like a male weepie lets me see emotions, lets me feel a way into a story without feeling like a wolf in a hen house, as I live under two layers of predatory conditioning. First as a tranny and second as a dyke. Both identities paint me as a predator. 

The idea of the male weepie places this current wave of masculine critique firmly in heteronormativity. Which isn’t necessarily bad. Cishet dudes are, as much as some queers like to joke, people too. And have a right to process and berieve the way, to quote myself here, they are victim to patriarchal self-cannibalization. A phenomena I noted in instances when men I knew growing up would indicate moments of feminist double standard around things like hair length and piercings. What they were really pointing out were moments when they themselves had butted up against the limits of patriarchal framework, calcified as a cultural subject in the form of masculine norms. That is to say, however, I am interested in a conversation around masculinity that recognises the limit of a gender essentialist framework.   

Cowboy is, in essence, about two men chasing down the destinies of their fathers. Loren frames this, sometimes convoluted, story around the American mythic image of the cowboy. Loren does well handling the genre. To get more specific with the plot. The movie follows the misadventures and meanderings of Jerry ‘Jericho’ MckJunken, played by Hunter Slattery, as he follows the instructions of his deceased father and follows his dreams. Those dreams take him to Claremont, South Dakota (New Hampshire) in search of cattle to rustle and seeds to sow. After a comedic understanding with a dude that is honestly doing a pretty decent midwestern accent, leads our main (anti?) hero to turn to the life of an outlaw. From here we are introduced to the second cowboy force of our epic. The man in black. Com-eddy, Played by Edward Ferland. In search of a pistol to carry out his outlaw schemes, he happens upon Com-eddy telling jokes in a town square, getting pelted by tomatoes for their terribleness. Bonding over their shared cowboyness Com-eddy just gives him a handgun. Then he attempts to rob a train at the Claremont South Dakota (NH) Amtrak station. After having failed to rob a train, he retires to a sandpit, lights a fire, and has a tomato thrown at him. Out of the shadows steps Com-Eddy. Who shoots Jericho, the squib in this scene is dope. Thus ending our first chapter. 

Oh yeah. Cowboy is told out of chronological sequence as; prologue/ chapter 1/ chapter 2/ chapter 3. The slashes represent the scenes where Jericho is talking to the detective, the first chapter is Jericho describing his call to action. The dream he has where a cowboy talks to him. I’ve seen the movie twice now and I honestly can’t remember what the hat says. The story catches up with itself in chapter 3. 

Com- eddy, through some shadowy connection, comes to find that Jericho's dad is not dead, and he was the man who orphaned him (referring to the car crash in the prologue). By affixing his critique to the penultimate American symbol of masculinity, the cowboy, and its advertising avatar the Martlboro Man, Loren can be braud in his technique. The clearest running thread I saw was how, in giving himself over to his cowboy ideation, Jericho literally did not know what the fuck was going on. When he gets to the Restaurant in his first scene, he can’t tell that its a restaurant, too fooled by what he wants it to be, i.e. a ranch. He doesn’t know that they don’t transport treasury bonds by rail anymore. He has been actively placed in the past. A scene in the very real sweet fire BBQ reveals that Jericho never really had an I.D.

Loren makes what I find to be a mistake common amongst cis people when critiquing masculinity. They throw the baby out with the bath water. Masculinity is seen as a realm of danger. Much in the way stupid atheists see the church or religion as itself the inherent ill, rather than all the systemic, tangible, forces around these non tangible essences. Like what the fuck even is masculinity. I’m a trans woman and a butch dyke and I don’t really know! So how can we create such negative implications to something that is hardly even knowable. Masculinity is harmful in and of its rejection of femininity, of its womanness. And it's here that Loren might have failed to interrogate his subject matter to the degree he should have. 

While the structure is clever, the script is less elegant. What feel like large incidentals, or constraints of working conditions make it harder to tease out deeper meaning. Some of the dialogue can be stilted, or a little less eloquent. I am a sucker for the cowboy gunfight monologue. Its honestly one of my favorite things in fiction. Com-Edy strikes such an alluring facade as the man in black. His ‘man on the other end of a gun’ speech at the Climax could have been so incredible. But, ‘sell em cigarettes to make their dicks bigger’ felt lackluster. They had a fire, it looked great! 

The two cowboys eventually have their gun fight. Jericho inching out a victory. Both men having to contend with the cycle of violence that the generation before them had wrought onto their lives. Though not by exploring those feelings or even ‘doing as the cowboys did’ (what Jericho was referring to that is unclear as I thought having gunfights is what cowboys do and Jericho never seemed particularly interested in historic awareness). They feel out this familial trauma through the gunfight. And when Jericho walks away he completes the ultimate cycle in the annals of toxic masculinity: the oedipal, he kills his dad. Annihilating himself in essence. Completing a small tragedy. In the end he couldn’t escape the cycle. Watching the film is like watching him walk unknowing into the destruction of himself. Though we aren’t left with the sense that Jericho has learned anything which drove him to kill his own father, the very reason he set out on the chain of events we have just watched, a fact Jericho himself notes just before he kills his dad. 

There is a playful Nihilism to Loren’s work, so I don’t think the world of Cowboy is one where people learn lessons in the end. Its one where delusional men are ineffective to stop the dangerous events they set in motion. Pointing back to the article I mentioned at the top, Loren manages to leave women wholly out of his critique of masculinity, save for the mother in the prologue, who is abandoned by the killed father, to pursue his dream of becoming the Marlboro man. But she is dead before our story even really kicks off, a dead mother as motivation. No woman really has a character to play. And when talking about masculinity, or specifically the gendered understanding of that dynamic, as a thing men do to women, or patriarchal reaction to the degradation of womanness, then why leave women out? Why give no woman anything really to do? I suppose because the pain men cause each other, the pain fathers cause sons, is just as integral to the communal healing of men. 

  I would also add no character in the film seems like they have much to do. The characters don’t seem much like characters save for maybe Jericho and Com-eddy. Outside of those two every other person is a cardboard cutout on a stick designed to populate the world and to move it along the path toward the climax. fleeting machinery pieces. The expositional nodes on Loren’s map. I’m not going to hold that against the film, as a slaving regard for realism in a story isn’t a particularly interesting way to look at art. When you realize that realism isn’t the be all, end all of artistic storytelling, you become open to a whole other world of possibilities. Perhaps what we’re being shown is that the masculine script makes people more into cardboard cut out versions of themselves rather than their actual self.   

The Last American Cowboy is a project borne from the deep love of its creator, and that certainly shows. As a first feature it shows tremendous promise and I hope Loren is given the opportunity to expand his reach. Given more resources to execute his vision, and given more time to mull over just where next that vision can take him.