Quote Bag: More David Goodis

Some more quotes from my man David Goodis:

He reached for the glass and was bringing toward his mouth when he saw her entering the cocktail lounge. She moved toward him like a thin blade of blue-white steel coming to cut him in half. Here she comes, he thought, gazing dismally at the advancing figure of his wife, and he closed his eyes, wishing he could keep them closed for a long, long time. He was saying to himself, Point One: You can’t stand the sight of her. Point Two: You can’t stand the idea of losing her. Point Three: What in God’s name is the matter with you?

The wall was a dark gray and her body was cream-yellow against the darkness. She was awfully skinny but it was a flexible construction, it was soft and somehow electric-wild, the voltage charging across to him where he reclined on the bed looking at her, getting hit with the blaze that never failed to blast him whenever she stood there with nothing on.

If it wasn’t opium it was hemp, and they had a way of treating it to make it extra-powerful, lifting the smoker very high above the earth, allowing him to soar up there with all the great ones, all the famous singers and dancers, all the champions and leaders. This special hemp they sold along Morgan’s Alley was a very pleasant habit when it was available. When it was not available, the loss of altitude was sudden, a sort of plunging , and so finally they had to take it all the way and jump off a pier. It was the only thing to do when the hemp was not available to a user.

Because even in this short time she had taken the lead, she was out there in front, her pace steady and yet relaxed, her confidence a thing of menace, her relaxed superiority almost like a panther’s playing with a zebra.

The platinum hair came nearer. He stood there waiting, watching the parted lips, watching her tongue moisten them. He felt the mild caress of her breath against his face, and suddenly he found her in his arms, and her lips crushed against his mouth. His hands followed the smooth curve of her back, and he breathed deeply of her hair, drugged with the nearness of her. He didn’t see the clock that said Now and the bed that said Here. He was aware only of her closed eyes, the swell of her breasts against his chest, the warmness of her. He was swept outward and away from the boundaries of reality and yet somehow he knew this wasn’t a dream, it was something he had waited for and hungered for and it was happening…

Clayton lowered his head and felt the pain lacing through him. On the level of sanity he called himself a moon-maddened idiot, craving something that was worthless. And yet he was torn with yearning, and the core of that wound was a horrible sense of futility and loss.

– David Goodis

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David Lynch and David Goodis

I had the privilege of seeing David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE last night. Although it resists interpretation and I wish the guy would hold on to narrative just a little bit more (if only because he does it so well), you have to give Lynch so much credit for continuing a dying tradition of experimental, visionary film making. INLAND EMPIRE explores and blurs the boundaries between reality, dream and fantasy, and also, in this age of reality television, creates for both character and audience a very pertinent postmodern confusion between playing a part and living an authentic life. It certainly is the only movie around at the moment that approximates art. I also have to mention the performance by Laura Dern which is absolutely fantastic and more than Oscar worthy. Although as a cinema of gesture, reverie, violence, hysteria and lyricism it resembles the work of such past geniuses as Bunuel and Godard, what it brought to my mind was Interstellar Overdrive by Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd – a relatively normal chord progression in the beginning followed by a long total freak out in the middle and then a slight return to convention at the end, all of which causes you to see the medium (and in fact REALITY ITSELF) in a different light.

I been working on a soon to appear short, little thang on David Goodis and the intermittent noir revival and there was a line in INLAND EMPIRE that seemed very resonant. At the beginning the crazy, witch woman says something like "the road to the palace doesn’t lead through the marketplace but through the alleyway behind the marketplace," pertinent considering Lynch’s noncommercial instincts and Goodis’s preferred setting and subject. Here’s a few choice Goodis passages that rang my chimes and help remind that it’s only too easy to get lost in that alleyway:

And he said to himself: All you want is a look-see, that’s all, you just wanna get a glimpse of her. Just a glimpse. Just a chance to look at her again after all these years. He thought: What a chance, buddy, what a chance to let it hit you between the eyes and cut through you and eat your heart out. If you had only one grain of brains you’d get the hell away from here.

– from Street of No Return by David Goodis

 

"I don’t like to be called sir," The American said. "It gets on my nerves to be called sir."

The West Indian’s face remained expressionless. "What would you prefer to have me call you?"

The American pondered for a moment. "Jerk," he said.

"I don’t understand that word," the West Indian said quietly.

"You would if you knew me."

– from The Wounded and the Slain by David Goodis

 

Going toward her, it was more as though she were coming toward him, and the effect of her was something tremendous. He couldn’t understand that, because along with it there was something uncanny, made all the more uncanny by the fact that she looked to be anything but uncanny or hard to figure out. He asked himself to stop trying to understand it.

– from Nightfall by David Goodis

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Crime Beat: The Pineapple Chunk Chucking Moriarty of Main Street

Crime Beat: The Pineapple Chunk Chucking Moriarty of Main Street

I think we’ll all rest easier when this depraved criminal genius is finally apprehended!

Litterbug driver flees bike police

A driver seen littering an empty can of pineapple chunks fled from two Ann Arbor bicycle patrol officers Sunday evening, city police said.

The bicycle officers were in the 200 block of South Main Street at 7:30 p.m. when they saw a driver throw a can from the window of the car. When the driver stopped at a red light, an officer told him to pull over, and after replying, "O.K.," the driver accelerated.

An officer in a patrol car followed the driver as he fled on Pontiac Trail, but he did not give chase and the driver escaped. The vehicle was described as a green boxy convertible from the 1970s or 1980s, with a black fabric top, missing rear window and loud exhaust.

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“You WIll Be Wiser When You’re Older” by Matthew Delooze

Whenever I do my monthly order from my book distributor I try to make a point of ordering one book from their "Lightning Source" section. These are basically print on demand books, self published or from very small publishers, stuff that’s under the radar of most bookstores and the book world at large – you’ll never see them for sale at chain bookstores, or reviewed in newspapers or even available from a library. They’re underground ephemera, here one day and gone the next, often leaving very little evidence of their existence. Some of the authors, of course, ape the bestsellers, hoping to somehow bust into the ranks of the professionals, and there’s a lot of autobiographies, self- help books and Christian whatevers, but there are always a few that are printed because the writer really, really felt they had something to say and refused to consider editor or even reader. They’re the loonies who used to pass out crudely printed pamphlets or even stand around with hand lettered cardboard signs, but now, thanks to modern technology they are able, with the aid of a few thousand bucks or a similarly attuned publisher, to produce something that pretty much resembles a real, live book. Here’s the author/publisher supplied description of one I reluctantly passed on:

An "Einstein" Thought Experiment: Rationality & Morality Waves in Nature

by William W. Morgan

Most people are aware there are many "waves" in nature. Light waves, gravity waves, etc. What no one seems to have recognized is that when there is a thinking specie taking action there will also be rationality and morality waves. Further, that if these waves are of a negative nature they will cause chaos in society. That this is in fact what causes the chaos in our society. This book describes how it happens. Why it happens. And gives some ideas about what we can do to first slow and then eliminate these "negative morality waves" that are having an effect on the viability of our specie.

The one I did pick, however, didn’t disappoint:

"You Will be Wiser When You’re Older"

by Matthew Delooze

1965, Burnley, north-west England. Matthew Delooze was 6 years old. He was out playing, climbing over a wall when a bird caught his attention. Suddenly he found himself on a spacecraft talking to a beautiful woman. She told him that he had agreed to help save the world and when he objected that he was only a little boy, she told him, "You will be wiser when you’re older" She showed him horrific vivid images of earth’s future on a large screen, floods and destruction, dead bodies of children and old people. People burning in fires and then people being shot and blown up, starving children and animals being butchered. He was then returned to earth. This was just the beginning. This is Matthew’s story in his own words.

I am very interested in Alien Abduction accounts, and not just for laughs as it seems to be a fairly widespread phenomena. Delooze’s account is pretty typical in many respects, it’s efficacy strengthened by his apparently authentic straightforward English working bloke persona. There are familiar abductee elements in the experiences he describes — the beautiful, friendly female figure, the nasty reptilians, the body cavity probing, the extraction of precious bodily fluids, the feelings of immobility and helplessness, and the projection of a vision of future ecological disaster. Interestingly these warnings have been a constant in reported alien/human interactions for decades, long before their details became so familiar as what we now know as global warming.

As the renowned author of the terminally unpublished Snakes in Caves which has quite a bit about the esoteric/paranoiac significance of reptiles, I was also interested to read of Delooze’s theories about the perpetrators and significance of the abductions:

The general belief of most UFO or abduction researchers is that we are being abducted to breed with bug-eyed Greys or Reptilian beings (some are even lucky enough to breed with blond haired beauties). The same belief has been around for decades. In my opinion, the Serpent Kingdom do not want to breed with us – they want to control us and feed off us. The hybrid programme theory may be just a red herring created by the Serpent Cult. The Serpent Cult are "agents" on earth for the Serpent Kingdom.

Many abductees have noted the aliens’ lack of emotions and their seeming envy of our ability to feel them so deeply. Delooze rejects the popular "breeding experiment" hypothesis – he thinks that rather than our jizz the aliens want to simply control us like sheep and feed off our feelings. In his view abductees are not chosen for their experimental or genetic value but rather in order to correct the rebellious instincts which might cause them to threaten the Serpent’s sheepdogs’ (church, state, bosses) control of the herd. How the aliens were able to detect this contrarian streak in Delooze at age six, the time of his original abduction, is not explored, and in general he eschews the usual occult patina of erudition for simple statements of what he’s experienced and what he believes.

Naturally, I wanted to pick up his more theoretical work The Stars are Falling: Reasons to Believe We are Enslaved by the Serpent , and less than a week after I’d gotten "You Will be Wiser When You’re Older", I searched my distributors online database for it, but came up with nothing, not even under the heading of Matthew Delooze. The book I’d just been shipped was not there by title either, and in fact it was only when I searched by ISBN that I located the entry, now tagged simply Not Available From Ingram, when in fact it had been shipped to me by them only a few days before. Paranoia alert! The Serpent Cult strikes? But then I went to the publisher’s website http://experiencers.net to see the message: We no longer carry Matthew Delooze’s books and articles. If you are interested, please visit his blog. Although said blog http://matthew-delooze.blogspot.com is quite entertaining and has thus been entered in the coveted RADIOFREEUBU Suggested Destinations in Cyberspace guide to the right of this page, it failed to enlighten as to the reasons for the books quick withdrawal and the sudden rupture between author and publisher. It did reveal a certain paranoid (but maybe they ARE out to get him) and pugnacious streak, however, and perhaps that explains things. You can still get the book, however, at Amazon (four left at this writing, although I’m not sure that, as they claim, more are on the way) and his English publisher seems to be keeping the faith.

Like many of my encounters with the "paranormal," I’m not sure what it all means, but it’s fun while it lasts!

Yr Pal,

UBU

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Crime Beat: Anticlimax Department

Crime Beat: Anticlimax Department

 

McKeesport Children Missing

McKEESPORT, Pa. —

POSTED: 10:15 am EDT May 7, 2007

Police are searching for two children missing from their McKeesport home on Evans Avenue.

Allegheny County officials told Channel 11 a 9-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy were found missing when their mother went to check on them Monday morning.

No other information about the children’s description has been released.

Missing McKeesport Children Found

McKEESPORT, Pa. —
11:05 AM UPDATE: Police tell Channel 11 News the children were found safe. Officials said they were outside riding their bikes.

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In Memoriam

This is the dream I had the night before Pierce’s funeral:

We’re at my old house in Pittsburgh (which, having been demolished, is literally a ghost house) having a memorial dinner when, suddenly, Pierce is there, sitting at the head of the dining room table. No one else can see him except me and one little nephew who keeps reaching out trying to touch him.

I’m so glad to see you, I say.

I feel a lot better today than I did yesterday

, he says, but you know, once you go in you can never come back out again.

Then he gets up and walks into the living room, and as I watch he gets older and older – fifty, sixty, seventy – becoming the man he would have become, all in the space of a minute, and then sits down in one of the overstuffed chairs, a very old man with a cane and white hair.

In Memory of Pierce Edward Cunningham 7/30/59 – 5/4/07

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Katie: Part Two

I lumbered past the outstretched legs and indifferent glances, unsure of where I was going or what I was looking for. Showing her usual indifference to the schedules the rest of us lived by, my favorite party mate Heather was still on Sanibel Island. I was even denied the bittersweet pleasure of the sight of my eternal crush Virginia, who, as evidenced by the absence of her boyfriend Tad’s GTO from its customary spot next to his twin brother’s Trans Am, had already left. Tad and brother Bill always arrived together at parties for maximum effect, but left separately, depending on whether they thought they had a better chance of getting lucky on site or back home.

I guess I basically wanted someone to acknowledge my existence, my relevance, but all the faces I passed were either too tranquillized or too preoccupied to engage a fossil like me. The dark, narrow smokiness became even more oppressive, and, not being a pill person, I couldn’t just take my medicine and descend into the morass with the rest of them. My objective became escape, but, in the face of the endless dark winding clotted with low lying crowds, even that proved difficult until I was finally able to wrench open a set of glass doors and stumble out onto the patio.

With the full moon and fresh air, things seemed incomparably clearer outside than in, and I rather theatrically recovered myself, stomping around and taking deep breaths, stopping suddenly when I realized there was someone sitting cross-legged on the cement picnic table across from me. The embarrassment I felt when I recognized Katie quickly evaporated when I realized that she, like everyone else that night, hadn’t been paying the slightest bit of attention to me.

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Isis, oh Isis

I’ve been busy (goofing off) and am going out of town so you’ll have to chew on this qote for a few days:
 
The power of Isis is concerned with matter which becomes and receives everything: light and dark, day and night, fire and water, life and death, beginning and end.
 
— Plutarch
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The Steelers Draft

Well, I don’t have a lot to say today — which is good, I guess, because nobody seems interested in hearing it any way! I was just going to point out that even though the Steelers have been one of the more successful franchises in the NFL "experts" of both the Pittsburgh barstool and New York writer kind are always sure that management don’t know what they’re doing. I read criticism of their first two draft choices (including Michigan’s LaMarr Woodley who I KNOW is a great player) because they’re better fits in a 3-4 than the Tampa Two 4-3. Since their new coach Mike Tomlin has said he’s going to stick with the 3-4 I don’t know why everyone in "the know" simply assumes he’s fibbing. Then people were steamed up they took a Tight End when that’s not a big part of their offense and they already have a great, underused Tight End, Heath Miller. So what? This guy, Matt Spaeth seems like a fantastic player, and if he was the best available why not take him? The other thing people are hot about is the Steelers trading up to draft a punter, which seems unSteelerlike. But if you can gain a few yards, or a lot by pinning the other team on their own goal line, something the Steelers haven’t been able to do lately, it’s worth it, special teams, as everyone says, being a crucial part of the game. And then there’s this piece of film which seems to suggest that Daniel Sepulveda is going to be a Steeler kind of guy:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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That Swinging Bird, Agatha

You don’t really think of Agatha Christie as a sixties kind of bird, and yet she was certainly alive and writing in London when it was really swinging. Needless to say, like a lot of people, she didn’t get it, even when she thought she did, as these artfully arranged excerpts from 1966’s The Third Girl demonstrate:

His visitor was a girl of perhaps twenty-odd. Long straggles of hair of indeterminate color strayed over her shoulders. Her eyes, which were large, bore a vacant expressions and were of a greenish blue. She wore what were presumably the chosen clothes of her generation – black high leather boots, white open-work stockings of doubtful cleanliness, a skimpy skirt, and a long and sloppy pull-over of heavy wool. Anyone of Poirot’s age and generation would have had only one desire – to drop the girl into a bath as soon as possible.

Silly girl. Goes about in dreadful clothes and has picked up with a dreadful young man. Ah, well, they’re all alike nowadays. Long-haired young fellows, beatniks, Beatles, all sorts of names they’ve got. I can’t keep up with them. Practically talk a foreign language.

They probably look like mods or rockers or beatniks or whatever they call these chaps nowadays with the long hair and the dirty nails. I’ve seen more than one of them prowling about. One doesn’t like to say, who the devil are you? You never know which sex they are, which is embarrassing. The place crawls with them.

"Would you like a cup of tea," he added, "or would you prefer a purple heart or a tranquilizer? That’s the kind of thing people of your age go for. Done a bit yourself in that line, haven’t you?"

She shook her head. "Not – not really."

"I don’t believe you. Well," he went on, "what are your tastes? Something out of my drug cupboard or a good solid old-fashioned English cup of tea? Right. Sit down there. Make yourself comfortable. Do you smoke?"

"Well, I–"

"Only reefers – something of that kind?"

The girl’s full of drugs. I’d say she’s been taking purple hearts, and dream bombs, and probably LSD. She’s been hopped up for some time.

It was the drugs that did it. Drugs that made her do things she would never have done of her own volition, and left her with no knowledge of having done them.

A rather interesting medley of drugs – LSD giving vivid dream sequences – nightmares or pleasurable. Hemp distorting the time factor, so that she might believe an experience has lasted an hour instead of a few minutes. And a good many other curious substances that I have no intention of letting any of you know about. Somebody who was clever with drugs played merry hell with that girl.

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