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How fine I’d have it if it were just a matter of biography (something like the early experiences of Freud’s Wolf-Man). A street ditty in a movie. Perfect pap for my piglets. The stuff writes itself, in contemporary style, which, in its love of atmosphere—oozing quotations of style—betrays its attraction to the past:

POSTER

(in psychedelically dynamized Jugendstil graphics: the linear flow narrowing to a cascade, the spectrum sprouting teeth, a buzz saw of nerves—rose-madder, sulfur-yellow, leek-green, violet . . . with interspersed boutique heraldry: two male hands, hacked off at the gentlemanly cuffs, with forefingers stretching like pistol barrels, point from either side at the name)

ARISTIDES
Chief Mechanic for the Western Union Tunnel of Love

(collage: model of an early locomotive from pioneer days, its cathedral-bell smokestack sending up as a cloud of steam a distilling flask with alchemical stuff in it—toads, snakes, embryos, homunculi; in the engineer’s cab, his booted foot on a female body with a bald head, General Custer with a drawn sword, his left hand waving a fresh scalp)

invites you

on a

TRIP TO HADES

into the

SPIRITUAL INNARDS

of the

CONSUMER SOCIETY TROGLODYTES

(newspaper advertisement praises a method for treating clubfeet and ears that stick out; likewise nose-shapers, body-hair removers, wart, blackhead, and goiter remedies)

Idea:

!A MIDDLE-AGED MAN COMES TO REALIZE

THAT HE IS REPRESSING GUILT!

God grant that I could come up with such a thing: I could sell it instantly to my piglets.

the peppy little producers, co-producers, copro-producers who teem and crowd wherever the milk of financial assistance, government grants, and development prizes pours from the overlapping folds of showbiz and the culture industry:

the bright, alert magician’s apprentices, soon outstripping the great film sorcerers—and the hatchlings of the movie business, living it up on expense accounts; rosily fattening on petits fours, foie gras, crab claws, slices of Nova Scotia, caviar dollops at the press conference buffets (with champagne, of course!), their tiny eyes sated and wearied by young starlet flesh—

yet physically in top shape—supremely fit, swept along by the process of beauty-construction in the studio and location wardrobes—groomed and spruced up, their little fingernails pared, filed, and polished between the motherly breasts of staff manicurists, their cheek skin smoothed and salved by epidermically solicitous makeup men, their intervertebral disks loosened and their bodies shaken aright by studio chiropractors, kneaded and massaged to firm up their tissue by junior-star gym teachers, their blood circulation refreshed in stars’ genuine Finnish saunas in the bungalows of leading men, their flesh treated to ultraviolet rays even in the winter months and then tanned to a crisp by the spring sun over the beach promenades of Mediterranean festival settings—

men of the world, of course: well traveled, as they go about preparing big unrealizable projects, and thus surefooted on the parquet floors of Hilton hotel banquet rooms—

hence mentally too at the highest attainable peak: shrewd, crafty, brazen, hard-boiled—and infernally clever at wielding the magic wand that every moviemaker carries in his old kit bag and that opens wide all doors, hearts, female legs—yes, even bank accounts: