Melendy Avenue Review 2021-01-14
Hello, all! I hope this new year is going well for you. It’s going basically fine for me! I’ve got a straight down the middle, three fun reviews and a cat pic issue for you today. I’ve also been writing fiction! If you want to read some of it when it’s ready, you gotta pay up! Go in your Substack thing and become a Citizen for five bucks a month or fifty a year! It’ll be rad.
CONTENTS
Reviews
Ellroy, Widespread Panic
Forman, Locking Up Our Own
Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Mithra Cuddles
REVIEWS
James Ellroy, “Widespread Panic” (2021) - James Ellroy returns to his bread and butter in this story of blackmail and obsession in fifties LA. You can argue he’s never left his bread and butter, but his most recent series, which he interrupted with this book, is a little off the beaten path. “Perfidia” and “This Storm” take place during WWII, involve more geopolitical intrigue, an effort at a sort of Balzacian encapsulation of the whole time and place of wartime Southern California, and also get into the strange and unlikely master plots that animated arguably his single greatest novel, “Blood’s A Rover” (don’t go off and read BAR if you want to start reading Ellroy, read the beginning of its series, “American Tabloid,” first)… but can’t quite nail it like that book could.
I’m still along for the ride wherever Ellroy, to my mind the great living American crime writer, wants to go… but it was nice to reunite with the more mundane LA scumminess that’s his old go-to. Our narrator this time is Freddy Otash, a (version of) a real life Hollywood private dick, supposedly one of the bases for Jack Nicholson’s character in “Chinatown.” As in real life, Otash in “Widespread Panic” is an ex-LAPD cop who works for “Confidential” magazine in the 1950s. “Confidential” turned the scandal rag into an art form and an ideological statement, and is among the main influences on Ellroy’s famous telegraphic/bebop-inflected writing style. Otash has the run of fifties Hollywood, gathering gossip on the stars for “Confidential,” arranging blackmail and shakedowns using the information he finds, threatening or just mauling anyone who threatens the business, etc.
If you’re looking for tightly-plotted detective work ala Ray Chandler or whoever, you won’t find it here. The plots here are mostly forgettable. Otash gets tangled up with figures ranging from JFK to James Dean. Importantly to Ellroy’s whole thing, he also gets tangled up with a variety of women- a floozie actress who leaves him for one of the bad guys, a giant college basketball player who flirts with him but refuses to have sex with him, an ex-communist with a deadly grudge, and one of Ellroy’s classic good hardass Midwestern women who have to make it in this awful town types.
The women are important thusly: in Ellroyland, like I discussed in my Jacobin piece on him long ago, romantic love for women constitutes the highest good a man can reach for, and what distinguishes good men from bad. Otash feels himself superior to the main villains in this novel, the minor actor Steve Cochran and Nick Ray, the guy who directed “Rebel Without A Cause,” despite the fact that, from most readers’ perspective, they’re a lot alike. They’re depicted as violent men who are obsessed with control and with voyeurism. They obsess over women and pursue them both openly and on the sly- they are stalkers. Otash is friends with James Dean for much of the book, but loses him to Nick Ray’s evil cadre surrounding the “Rebel Without A Cause” production. Ellroy puts a lot of weight on a scene where Otash finds the “Rebel” crew — Dean, Ray, Sal Mineo, etc. — do a frat-style “raid” on a sorority house. It’s a little more violent than what Animal House would get up to, but mostly involves yelling at women and stealing their underwear. Bad behavior, no doubt, Otash is right to be disgusted… but he does the same shit! He routinely breaks in places and does weird voyeuristic shit! All Ellroy protagonists do, and Ellroy used to himself! He’s a weird dude!
How, then, does Ellroy cop a judgmental attitude towards his villains? It comes down to a few differences that would register to most of the people reading this as aesthetic more than anything, but which for Ellroy make up the heart of his romantic-noir ethics. It’s in the way you go about things, and what backstops what you do. If you love the right kind of woman — a hard, difficult, protagonistic woman who is just off on her own weird trajectory — then you are among the blessed. Steve Cochran and Nick Ray just run around fucking whatever, which Ellroy protagonists also do, but you know, they either stop when they meet The One (or A One, anyway) or view all future assignations through the lens of one of the Divine Women.
I found myself wondering what the relationship between Ellroy’s protagonist-thugs, the divine (whether expressed as a woman or more conventionally), and rebellion as I read this curious book. Like “Confidential,” Ellroy does not love or necessarily even respect duly appointed authority, but he tends to despise those who rebel against it. Ellroy protagonists, Otash included, routinely rip off their (invariably crooked and thuggish) bosses in police departments or wherever else… but they don’t make a principle out of it. Rebellion as a principle is verboten in Ellroy. Much of the early part of “Widespread Panic” concerns Hollywood communists. They’ve already been raked over the coals by HUAC, and can’t really do much, but Otash and Ellroy still give them some juice. The runaround he gets into with them, politics aside, is a little… it’s fine, but not as good as the other parts.
Considerably more compelling in this vein of rebellion is Otash’s disgust for the (somewhat anachronistically early- the main action of the book ends in 1956) emerging counterculture. He doesn’t hate gay men, like his erstwhile pal James Dean, or drug abusers (Otash pops benzies like they’re going out of style). But he does hate people who go around acting like they can upset the applecart, morally or culturally speaking. Part of that might be good business- a blackmailer has much less to do in a morally permissive society. But beyond that, it seems to me that maybe Ellroy thinks copping an attitude of rebellion — whether it’s riding motorcycles too fast and making “blue movies” or following the Moscow line — means abandoning the straight and narrow, not defined by staying away from booze, drugs, sex, violence, and betrayal — that’s boring — but defined by certain patterns of devotion, like those Ellroy’s protagonists have for the divine women.
Satan was the first rebel, after all, and whatever else you want to say about the politics of Ellroy’s takes, there’s few better at getting across the airheaded but vicariously vicious posturing of rich, decadent types who think they’re above morality or respect, let alone devotion. This comes out in Ellroy’s treatment of the case of Caryl Chessman, a convicted (and confessed) rapist who became a Hollywood cause celebre. I’m also opposed to the death penalty, but Ellroy made opposition to gassing (they used gas in California back then, creepily enough) the guy seem like pure envy- they love Chessman, these Hollywood liberals, Nick Ray included, because they want to be bad like him, because they lack the sort of moral rectitude that differentiates an Ellroy protagonist… even when said protagonist is also a murderer and a creep. That Otash tells this all from Purgatory, where telling his stories brings him closer to salvation… well, it’s a weird and thought-provoking book, and I’d say upper-mid-tier Ellroy, which at this point means top-tier of contemporary fiction. ****’
James Forman, Jr., “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” (2017) - There’s a lot of annoying cliches that have either arisen or taken on new life since the Black Lives Matter movement began, but maybe the “why don’t they protest black on black crime?” one is the most irritating. Among other things, it reveals the utter isolation of the speaker from any kind of black community. I’m not saying my social situation isn’t very white, and to the extent it’s not white, it’s not very black. But go to any march or rally pertaining to anything black — or if that’s not your speed, read a book by a black author, or hell, listen to even more or less any music by black musicians — and you will get an earful about black criminals harming and exploiting their communities. Every BLM action I’ve been to has had speakers denouncing gun violence in their communities, with loud affirmations from black people in the crowd. Inter-communal violence is a clear source of angst in black culture and has been for a long, long time, and you need to be profoundly, willfully ignorant not to see that (or so offended by the ways in which many black people are unwilling to take shit off of white people chiming in on the issue these days that you just shut down).
In fact, law professor James Forman, Jr. (son of a civil rights legend) argues that we can’t really understand our current mass incarceration crisis without understanding black anti-crime politics. He focuses on Washington, D.C., the premier “chocolate city” of that time, starting in the early seventies, when black mayors started getting elected in largely-black cities and walls keeping black people out of civil service jobs started coming down. DC also had a serious crime problem, concentrated in poor black parts of the city, and it only accelerated in the period when the official rulership of the city passed into largely-black hands.
People were pissed. Black people were extremely pissed. Suburban whites weren’t, aren’t, mad about crime, not really (whites who actually lived or live in areas with high crime rates often enough are). A lot of them are scared, and a lot of them feel shame about that, and want to experience either the vicarious thrill of someone “cracking down,” or else do it themselves, or feel shame that they or their politician/cop surrogates aren’t doing enough… but black people who live in areas with a lot of crime were and are pissed off about it, understandably so. You didn’t need to be a socially conservative black person to feel that way, either- many movement veterans, as the high water mark of both civil rights and black power receded into the past and they found themselves with crumbling cities on their hands, were profoundly depressed, angry, and ashamed at the contrast between their high hopes and the grim realities of cities in the seventies.
Organizers and politicians in DC and other cities called for many of the things progressives and leftists still call for in response to high crime: more jobs, better education, stuff to keep young people (especially young men) busy, medical solutions to addiction. They also called for more policing to deal with existent thieves, drug dealers, gangsters, and others making urban neighborhoods unlivable. As Forman puts it, most of them had an “all of the above” approach. They often wanted policing to be undertaken by police forces that took on more black recruits. This took a while, given the prevailing racism in police departments, but by the eighties they were getting their wish.
A combination of bad circumstantial political calls, pervasive lack of funds for social programs, and fundamental misapprehensions about the role both of police and of class divisions within black society brought about this tragic situation, where black people who sincerely thought (and think) of themselves as pro-black, contributed — continue to contribute — to a situation that sees more black people in some stage of incarceration than were enslaved in 1850. It didn’t happen overnight, it was more of a consistent series of botched reactions to awful situations- you see that a lot when people lack resources and political room to maneuver. So the newly-formed DC city council refused to decriminalize marijuana in the early seventies- a white “hippie” brought it up, heroin was ravaging the black community, it just didn’t seem right. DC passed draconian gun restrictions, but couldn’t get any kind of alternative to the illicit economy in front of its citizens, so people still had guns and used them. DC empowered it’s police to act like warriors in an occupied land when the crack epidemic spread out of control, and black cops — many of them drawn from a black middle class both long accustomed to looking down on the black poor and not much more knowledgeable about poor black communities than their white fellow officers — unleashed a stream of violence on black DC that goes on to this day.
Plenty of black voices opposed these things, in DC and out, but there was no consensus on these issues (and I doubt there is one today, though maybe things are a bit better when even a lot of conservatives admit the carceral state is out of control). It’s unlikely that any but Clarence Thomas-style authoritarians would have approved of the tough-on-crime course of action had they could have seen the end result. Many black leaders called for a “Marshall Plan for Black America.” What they got from the white elite that still holds the purse strings was a much harsher military-style occupation than the US Army gave Germany and barely any of the economic reconstruction.
Safety is still a substantial concern in a lot of neighborhoods, disproportionately black and brown neighborhoods. The police aren’t helping, and for many populations, especially young people and particularly young men, are a frequent danger to their safety and a constant drag on their dignity and sense of belonging to anything other than a throw-away community. Forman criticizes the police, and he includes scenes from his own interactions with cops and the legal system from his time as a public defender and as a founder of a school for kids within the juvenile justice system in the book. I won’t soon forget his descriptions of cops routinely rousting his students for nothing more than standing outside the school during their lunch period, screaming at them, slamming them down on the ground or on car hoods, finding nothing at all. Forman and his fellow teachers painstakingly arrange a “community forum” with the police. Officers come, almost all of them black, and robotically repeat the same talking points about “high crime areas” etc., and how the students should all wear big lanyards so the cops know they’re ok. Needless to say, Forman and his students aren’t impressed with the idea that they need to carry a “pass” to avoid police harassment.
But Forman also sees the police as a necessary part of a better future for black communities. He is not an abolitionist, it seems. Well… I am, but I get it, from two angles. The first is that we need a robust alternative safety system of our own in place before just ditching the cops and calling it a day. It isn’t fair. Think about everything that capitalism — that policing! — fucks up every day, to crickets and shrugs from most people, and then think about the hue and cry every time a reform effort screws up or simply has a slow or rocky start. But fair gets you on the bus. We can’t afford to fuck up. The second and more depressing angle… where are the police going? Forman probably thinks of them the way more advanced political thinkers in the early modern period thought of the aristocrats. The armed, organized people aren’t going anywhere, not on their own, they’re not. You can pull their leash a bit by messing with their money, but what else can you do in this system? Well, we probably have to figure out something better than that. But Forman isn’t there to paint pretty pictures, just to show us the deep and gnarled roots of our current situation. ****’
Bronze Age Pervert, “Bronze Age Mindset” (2018) - I decided to take a look at this one because people on the contemporary far right talk about it a lot, including people close to Donald Trump, people with security clearances. “Gaze upon the terrible and stupid shit supposedly serious people are taking seriously.” Well, I had my little gaze, but I also do antifascism and watch street-level and internet fascists on my own. It might be important that the likes of Michael Anton (author of the “Flight 93 Election” essay) take “Bronze Age Pervert” seriously. But I have the inkling it’s less likely that BAP will directly advise on policy or something, and a lot more likely — in fact, is already a fait accompli — that BAP expresses a way of thinking that has already filtered outwards into the broad contemporary right.
For those of you unfamiliar, “Bronze Age Pervert” is a social media personality. He hollers about the corruption of our current age, harkens back to a period when men were men (there were a few such periods but as you’d guess, the Bronze Age is his favorite), and caterwauls about the relationship between physical strength/classical beauty and virtue. In 2018 he put out some of his stuff in ebook format. As far as where he fits in contemporary reactionary circles goes, his influence mostly runs in the “manosphere” and in “neoreactionary” circuits. Some even speculate that BAP is actually Curtis Yarvin, aka “Mencius Moldbug,” a neoreactionary writer I reviewed a while back. Whether he is or isn’t Yarvin, BAP fits in- while a screaming reactionary, he’s also pedantic and, like many in the manosphere, urges a peculiar vision of self-improvement over real-world political action. Scream online, whisper in the ear of the powerful (if you can get them- this isn’t 2017 anymore), and “cultivate yourself,” the main MO of this type.
A brief detour: what seems like a long time ago, when this book was likely being conceived and before she took her “heel turn,” Angela Nagle cut a reasonably high profile in the land of left-wing altright-explainers. We all should have seen how thin that pretense was (plenty of people did- but we all should have) between her needless cheap shots at tumblr teens, the distinct absence of the deep research into altright forums she claimed she did from her written work, and from the sort of pseudo-clever, Twitter-sound-bite quality of even her best points. One of those points was this: in no way did the altright, as we called it then, resemble patriarchy of yore. It was juvenile, vulgar, polymorphously perverse. Nagle would assure us that growing up in rural Ireland (another tell- for someone who hated identity politics, Nagle was not above making use of her Irishness for authenticity points) she knew from patriarchy, and it wasn’t that. As usual, even her relatively good points were more about scoring points against enemies on her left, in this case Internet feminists throwing charges of “patriarchy” around. Moreover, the point lands and then mires in the context of twenty-tens Internet debate like a two ton anchor in swampy bottom muck.
I say all that to say this: it should be a given that Internet misogynists (racists and other reactionaries too), even when they harken back to one or another period of the past as a golden age of gendered order, should not be expected to actually live up to even their own picture of said golden age, let alone what the time was “actually” like. It can be good for “owns.” The failure of people to live up to the standards they set themselves seldom fails to provide targets for criticism and abuse, and if the standards are ludicrous to begin with and they scream and abuse others for not accepting them, all the better. But there’s limits to that, too, and arguably that’s where books like “Bronze Age Mindset” come in.
The word “mindset” is a vague one. Most users of the word would be better served trying a variety of nouns ranging from “attitude” to “ideology.” BAP and those like him are a (likely accidental) exception. Vagueness serves them, and if you think the mind is a sort of simple input-output device you can “set” or program, then the word is perfectly cromulent. Set your mind on its course and let it fly! Don’t think too much about how you had to think — at least a little! — to get yourself on this set course. That should be your last thought! “You’ve been thinking thoughts your whole life!” As Super Hans put it in that one Peep Show episode where he and Jez join a cult. “Look where that got you!”
That’s roughly the sort of thing BAP would say, though he might use fewer conjunctions, to get across the idea he is a hulking caveman, or else throw in some dumb Internet-speak. That’s not to say he recommends something so simple as just not thinking. Oh no! He’s a Nietzschean, you see. He’s the real thinker! He sees past the skeins of lies put out by vampires who seek to prevent the true spiritual elite — who are also the intellectual elite, and the physical elite, the strongest and the prettiest — from living out their destiny. You can guess what ethnic group most of those vampires come from, though BAP has a lot more to say against the Chinese and Shia Muslims (not sure how that bee got in his bonnet but who cares) more than he does about Jews.
Biology is everything; history is mostly falsified and in fact men and monsters and weird gods coexisted, maybe (he strikes many more poses than he stakes claims, but says readers should look into hollow earth ideas). The real conflict is between those who’d “domesticate” people by getting them to live in cities, and then those who want to live wild and free with the strong taking what they want, as nature supposedly intends. The nonsense of it all is apparent and not really that necessary to rehearse here- science is true when he wants it to be but a tower of “bugmen” (domesticated people) lies when it says something he doesn’t like, history is mostly lies except the back third of the book is mostly tediously-retold stories of heroic men from history, most of whom came from at least partially agricultural/urban societies, blah blah.
Stupid to expect much sensible here. To the extent he has anything to say, it’s about the farce that is most of contemporary masculinity. He uses “gay” as a casual insult, but advances an interesting, sympathetic theory as to why boys turn out queer: they get a look at the parody of masculinity prevailing around them, abd don’t like it. Without any “real” masculinity to model themselves after, they become effeminate and hence gay and/or trans, etc. I reject a lot of the premises involved, but I do tend to think a lot of people, by no means men and boys only, have discovered themselves somewhere on the spectrum of queer because of just how awful and rotten conventional sex and gender roles are. But he doesn’t sustain any real train of even half-interesting thoughts — one wonders if he included that bit about gay boys to appeal to rich reactionary gays like Peter Theil — and like I said, spends a lot of the book telling “epic fuckwaffles”-toned versions of old stories about pirates and conquistadors and shit. He gets that contemporary Internet-based life is awful, but he doesn’t write like it.
Like I said, I think this book is less important for its potential to reach important shitheads — they’ll do awful and stupid things whether or not they read BAP or anyone else — and not really directly his impact on more everyday fash, either, at least not directly. I guess what I’d say is that BAP is an example of an emerging attitude towards truth on the part of some reactionary sections of our society.
In recent years, being wrong has not proven to be a problem for our elites. Everything from the Iraq War to the 2008 crash to the Clinton presidential campaign shows that they just don’t suffer meaningful consequences for fucking up, and often recieve greater rewards when they do. I’ve come to think that in lieu of any better explanations for the world around them, certain sectors of society have more or less decided that being factually right or wrong about things is for suckers, and even having a standing attitude towards the rightness or wrongness of most given ideas beyond personal convenience is just unnecessary. If they just carry on that way with enough conviction, then they, too, can be like our elites, consistently rewarded. They too can fail upward. That most of these same people claim to hate postmodernism, while adopting distinctly postmodern attitudes towards truth claims and towards the relationship between appearances and reality… well, that’s just the sort of factual reality they don’t have to care about.
I see this pretty frequently in street practice. Political types generally try to minimize their losses (it takes discipline to follow Amilcar Cabral’s motto, “mask no defeats”) but contemporary fascists really take it to a whole other level. What does it matter if they get infiltrated, routed, humiliated again and again as long as they can cut video for their few hundred followers on right-wing-only social media that makes them look (their peculiar version of) cool? Real world failure seldom embarrasses them. If you can really get them at their ethos, that embarrasses them, sometimes- a big manosphere figure got shamed, “cancelled” if you will, because someone dug up an essay on how he enjoyed his girlfriend having sex with other men, thereby making him a “cuck” (his outsized emotional reaction, directed at a player in the scene bigger than himself, didn’t help). But even that’s inconsistent. Reality as you and I understand it, with some relationship between cause and effect and everything that implies, is for bugmen. Supermen make their own reality, with kickass elves and magic and shit in it.
“They’re immune!” you might find yourself crying out. Well, they may be immune to facts and logic, but we already knew that, didn’t we? Immune to mockery most of the time too- well, we’ve seen that, too. Really, as unsettling as seeing people who really think the Earth is flat, or that there’s microchips in vaccines, or that physical strength is the same as personal virtue is, it’s probably a good thing. It’s good that we see what we’re dealing with. Think about eras when embarrassment actually did work, when people didn’t pipe up with their worst ideas because they were afraid of being mocked- the sixties and the nineties come to mind, that is, rising tides. Once they stop handing out shiny apples for being good rational types, it’s no surprise that people — many of them only a few generations removed from hex signs and tent revivals (or darker things yet) — decide they won’t play along.
Beyond showing the seriousness of our situation, there’s another… maybe not happy, but positive message here. People of this type lose to people who can see reality and drag the others into it. Sometimes, it’s even relatively easy- the original altright became a punchline because one dude decked Richard Spencer on TV, and because we dragged the rest of them off their forums and into real, public space, and made clear we wouldn’t put up with their shit. It’s unlikely that this form of reactionary post-truth, and others like it (QAnon probably most troubling of all) will be out to bed that easily. But if we can adhere to reality harder than they can adhere to fantasy, I think we can do what needs to be done. *’
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Mithra Cuddles
Blurry I know, but hey, I had to hold my phone weird to capture this cuddle angle.