The first order of business for the Club was to decide just what kind of Club it was to be. As it was, the only discernible shared interest of the three founding and only members (Katty, Juju, and Flufster) was that they all wanted to be apart of something that others would refer to as a club. It began with Katty and Juju:
Katty: Gosh, Juju, I know we just met here, now, at this bus stop, but I feel like I can tell you one of my deepest fantasies. I want to be in a club.
Juju: Well, Katty, I feel like I’ve known you since, jeez, just about forever. Since the day my nipples came in – granted, this was late for most: 30, but considering I’m now 74, that is quite a long time – and to honest with you, for a long time my only wish was for my nipples to come in and when they finally did, on my 30th birthday, I was left with a grand and surprising abundance of emptiness inside of my belly. My chest was full and plush with a multitude of just about the brightest, greenest nipples you’d ever seen, but deep down in my soul’s stomach, there was an absence. The absence of hope. “What next is there for me to look forward too? I have my nipples and they aren’t going anywhere. What now? What’s on deck? More nipples?” That would have been a greedy wish considering biology’s birthday gift that year, albeit a belated one.
Katty: Right.
Juju: Then one day, I saw a playing card on the street, like it was a piece of trash. And, sure, maybe it was. But to me it was like a wink from the universe. This card was the King of Clubs and at first I thought what I needed to wish for was a black man in my life who may not be a king, but hopefully may own a crown of some kind, or at the very least, some Crown Royal – and to be honest with you in the here and now of it, yes, I do indeed hope for this and, no, that’ll never change, honey – but as I looked beyond that which was obvious, I saw the true sign in the card hiding that clover’s sexy shape: I should hope that one day I am in a club of some kind.
Katty: Well, okay. Maybe we should start a club.
Before Juju could open her pine-scented mouth, the bus arrived with a lurch and the doors were slammed open to reveal a cat the size of a human at the wheel. He was wearing a uniform
Christopher Hitchens – or, if you prefer, in reverse: Hitchens, Christopher – had a cancer living him, cancer of the esophagus, which he both provoked and tried to decimate with the ancient remedy of whiskey – known for its healing power amongst atheists and anti-theists (aparently, this doesn’t hold the same crystaline-aura-cleansing powers for the agnostics, who seek out the haughty and plush sensations of an I.P.A. rather than the ammunition-wielding gut-head-nuts-punches of hard alcohol), for whom (go back to before the initial parentheses if you are confused) he was a great icon and leader, waving an invisible flag of the Hitchens God: a non-god (also invisible). Usually, atheists weep from their penises and vaginas – these be the hedonistic and/or existential tears of whiteness and stickiness – but on the day that Christopher Hitchens’ cancer got the best of him, by recruiting pneumonia, these “God is Dead” shouters wept the conventional way.
“But, don’t cry, godless Hitchens Atheist,” hushed the omniscient nothingness to the masses. “He died with a sword in hand.”
Christopher Hitchens’ health had been on the decline for some time, and while he was never going to stop hating religion and drinking Scotch whiskey all night long - as he was so instructed by his favorite Steely Dan song – he knew that the worst was on its way and was, in fact, inside him, so this was Hitchens on cancer: “Build up that wall between yourself and the cancer!” He began to try to separate. This began simply by misspelling his name, slowly but surely, by starting with the last vowel, thus: “Christopher Hitchins” – a simple, but bold first step in removing himself from himself, though ultimately not enough. Between being drunk and dying and reserving an allotment of time specifically for flipping off a likeness of Christ on the cross that he himself had drawn, he had little time for the separation. Until one day, in the bathroom, Christopher Hitchens’ cancer finished the job of division and removed itself from the esophagus, unsheathing an ornate sword in the bloody process. Poised for the violent embrace of war, Hitchens’ cancer held the rapier in its tumorous hands, pointing at our antitheist’s nose, as if to say “en garde” (knowing full well that if it were to as-if-say anything else, presuming to debate Hitchens, it would lose such a battle, but a battle of blades, this little shit-bird cancer could possibly win).
Being an advocate of all things related to the death of man, all things that bring man closer to the proof of no afterlife, Chris Hitchens naturally had his own sword in his gloomy abode. In fact, he had at least three swords and up to nine daggers in each room of the house and, daily, Hitchens would double check and do a “head count” on his deadly tools of deathly destruction. Being that this unlikely event was happening on the terlet (toilet), he naturally went for the small sword he kept staved away in the terlet (toilet) tank (tank), flipping the porcelain lid off in a flash, shattering into white embers of non-fire on the bathroom floor, scattering a sharpness of sweepings amongst the carcinoma’s poisonous “feet”.
At this point, it was on: Hitchens vs Hitchens! A dual to end almost all duals. Sparks flew as they commenced to bang their sharp, metal phalluses together. One fighter on the terlet (toilet), the other a pulsing mutation “holding” a sword 50 times larger than the warrior itself. It would have made quite a fun postcard had a photographer been passing by Hitchens’ bathroom (as they often had). But we know how this battle ends, do we not? With the tip of a sword embedded in Christopher Hitchens’ pneumonia riddled lungs. In this final sad moment, with his final pathetic breath, the words:
“What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof,” Christopher Hitchens quotes himself here. A curious and cryptic message to an earless tumor, but cryptic of what?
Alas, the battle is over. Fought, but not won – the latter more important than the former.
What now after Hitchens’ death: it is true that while alive he was best known for his patented Hitchens’ debate your face off skills, those illustrious Hitchens’ YouTube appearances (oh, he went viral; oh, it’s a fact), and of course his Hitchens’ author works, which are called “books” or “page-toothed wisdom mouths” (these Christopher Hitchens books include, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” and “God Is Not Great” [in which he tried to dispell the popular rumor that God was indeed “great”]), but Christopher Hitchens’ true legacy will remain to be his uncanny resemblance to the great actor Roger Allam, who played the character of Royalton in the best film ever made, Speed Racer.
The project file went corrupt! Motivation to retrace steps and re-complete not likely to be found for a good long while. So, while not quite finished, enjoy the rough/final version of YOUR CAT IS DEAD: A CREEPER’S GUIDE.
Inspired by two lost cat posters from SE Portland. The posters are real and the stories almost are.
Words written by Sean Whiteman.
Words performed by Christof Whiteman.
Starring Hemingway the cat. We’d like to thank the owners of Hemingway, whoever they may be.
CLICK TO FIND OUT THE FATES OF FRANK AND MARCOS.
Pretty much every second of every minute of every hour of every half-day of every full-day of our long, drawn-out lives, some nobody comes up and asks us, “Why aren’t you dudes ever REAL, man? You’re always putting up some kind of a front, putting on some kind of act, or putting the fronts of acts up and on other things that act like fronts. Why? Why not deal with the inconvenient truths of hard facts?”
Well, the Whiteman Brothers will now begin devoting entire minutes of their years to nonfiction. Christof took the first turn wearing the “Press” cap and managed to cover a real hot story without leaving a couch. Read it here.
So after enjoying a particularly rewarding episode of “Frasier”, I deleted it; naturally, I was ready to watch another. But here’s where Fate’s predeterminedly slam of fortoldish instinctualiZedness impacted my human-core with pre-provocognitive-esque preparednessliness of something I had known prior: at this punch of a remote’s button, the screen returns not to the data bank of recordings, but rather to the last channel viewed, which happened to be the Fox News Channel.
Thus the interfaced blinked to a man in a suit saying, “…so why don’t we go to a clip of that, people that go to things.” Then lower-resolution video of some bland, staged event (an event with a stage, mind you) being watched by a crowd.
The last tele-prompted (?) bit of speech re-uttered itself in the confines of my brain’s mind: …so why don’t we go to a clip of that, people that go to things.
There’s some equivocation here and I find it fascinating. Firstly and most-unimportantly, the possibility that the transcribed excerpt you’ve just now read twice should contain a colon where there’s a comma is not a possibility. The intonations confidently suggested the direct address. He was speaking to those who identify as “people who go to things.” But the paramount question now reveals itself to be, “WHICH peoples who go to things?”
There are two possible answers that I can render:
1) The man in the suit who is paid money to talk to lenses was addressing those of us at home who also go to things – things like events or whatever – because he knew we’d get a real kick out of footage of a stage and its crowd.
2) The man in the suit who is paid money to talk at lenses was addressing the technicians – the “men and/or women in the booth,” as they say – and he was reminding them of their jobs without using their names or their professional titles.
The last scenario delights me in an odd way. It’s similar to sensations conjured upon seeing someone who has ice cream smeared about the mouth, or even the sensations conjured upon being someone who has ice cream smeared about the mouth.
Where to go? What to do?
Others may have taken the easy road by watching another episode of “Frasier” (a paragon encrusted on the crown of Yester-Thursday’s Must-Seen), but I had the strength to write it down and explore these new emotions and soon-to-be-age-old quandaries by assigning words to them and then italicizing some of them.
The Epiphanic Moral:
I may not be the muscle you want in a fist fight, but my brain-space is buff with courage, bro.
Writer: Santiago Vernetti
I look forward to the day we can all share a hearty nervous laugh in the memory of the long dead and buried postmodern cinema. Most of today’s artists have seemingly resigned from any attempts at cinematic progression, preferring instead to embrace the all too common delusion that postmodernism is simply a passing wave. They’ve convinced themselves that it will soon crest, washing away all the cinematic sequels, remakes and adaptations its waters have carried over the past few decades. While most lay catatonically in this collective stupor, the 2007 summer marks a record high in cinematic unoriginality. Die Hard 4, Harry Potter 5, 28 Weeks Later, Evan Almighty, Fantastic Four 2, Hostel 2, Oceans 13, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Resident Evil 3, Shrek 3, Rush Hour 3, Spiderman 3, The Simpson’s Movie, Hairspray, Halloween, Transformers the Movie, Nancy Drew, Underdog, Revenge of the Nerds… it seems this wave is more akin to a rising flood. A flood that provides very little evidence to suggest any plans of receding any time soon. Where the majority drown, Sean Whiteman diligently treads for dry land. With camera locked and loaded, and a few dead bears to his name, Whiteman has arguably produced the only thing super about this summer: Head Crumbs.
Stylistically, the “Texas saga” finds its roots in the modernist tradition. Riddled with self reflexivity, social/artistic commentary, and experimentation, Head Crumbs is Whiteman’s most progressive (dare I say radical?) work to date. Head crumbs is not only a refreshing concept amongst a sea of uninteresting cinema, but is executed in an outstandingly complimentary aesthetic. Not only can Sean Whiteman wrestle a grizzle single handed, he seems to know a thing or two about his craft. True, the piece is not without its technical flaws or shortcomings, but it is in the conceptual framework of the piece that these imperfections are actually welcomed, even embraced, regardless of artistic intention.
Wittily divided into three parts, Head Crumbs falsely advertises the typical three act plot structure. As with most of his structural critiques, Whiteman articulates his concerns with the subversion of narrative conventions, challenging audiences’ expectations and ultimately their involvement in the viewing process. Whiteman introduces part one just as “the tide shifts” and completes part three with not only an unresolved conflict, but with complex ambiguous metaphors. Though, his greatest subversion, and the most important element of Head Crumbs, is how Whiteman explores and deals with the idea of narrator.
The tradition of narrator within a greater fiction is literary, and for centuries it has carried with it the characteristics of a third person omniscient. This conventionally “effaced narrator” (to borrow the term from Henry James) provides an author with a direct voice, and one that holds unquestionably supernatural characteristics once the audience immerses themselves in the illusion of the fictional. The narrator takes on the godlike qualities of omniscience and omnipresence over the domain of the characters. The cinema however, presents an troubling obstacle in this respect to the effaced narrator. Though the cinema has its predisposition to the illusion of metaphysical dualism, it does so with respect to the camera and its transcendental relationship to the viewer. Were the voice of the narrator to be heard in a particular film’s soundtrack, the narrator would be revealed to us as character with a distinct voice. From this aural information we could suppose a number of things like age, gender, education, bringing the narrator further from godlike ambiguity and closer to definition representational of out natural reality. In this case, only the camera would remain a supernatural entity, superior to the narrator who now resides within the domain of the other characters. The possibility of a truly effaced narrator in the cinema is limited to the use of text (such as in the famous “One Year Later” device), but what Whiteman is concerned with is not the possibility of the effaced narrator in cinema, but of the greater issues of the authoritative nature of the conventionally effaced narrator. Not only does Whiteman give us a narrator with a voice and an image, he gives us the his own voice, his own image. Thus we are introduced to Sean Whiteman the narrator. This presents us with an interesting self referential paradox. The representation of Sean Whiteman claims to be Sean Whiteman, but isn’t the persona of this narrator Sean Whiteman merely a fictional construction of Sean Whiteman by Sean Whiteman? Yes. Of course. But by blurring the lines between authorship and narration, he is calling into question his own authority. Which, aside from being an interesting exercise in logic, is the most punk rock thing you can do.
Structurally and conceptually, Head Crumbs is a true work of avant-garde cinema! A progressive and political action in contemporary art criticism! When applying a psychoanalytic methodology, its narrative can even be viewed as a feminist battle cry in its depiction of male character Super Summer as the exhibitionist, and the female character Flip Flop (“more of a behind the curtains sort of gal”) as taking on the traditionally patriarchal role of the voyeur. Needless to say, this and many other events that unfold in the narrative are worth exploring and can be discussed on a multitude of levels. Yet, in remaining faithful to Whiteman’s commentary on the narrator, we can all agree he’s saying a lot about human relationships… but in the end, the most important thing he’s saying is, “Who gives a rats ass about the opinion of a man hating, modernist, god destroyer?” So let’s all take what we will from Head Crumbs and give our applause to Sean Whiteman, a filmmaker who, unlike so many of his contemporaries, has arguably the most important artistic quality there is – authenticity.