New Form of Photography

That special new genre of political photo, of Trump as a fuzzy orange Rothko  blur in the foreground, and in the background some lickspittle –– Bolton –– the General whose name I’ve already forgotten –– Tillerson –– Jared –– each looking pained, plaintive.

"Trump and David Lynch: The Hidden Hand."

Apart from the fact that OVERCOMBER DONMB appears to have emerged from the Black Lodge just around the time of the testing of the atomic bomb in the Nevada deserts ( –– coincidence? –– nope –– ) –– he's a slight variant of the "Gotta light" lumberjack, only he smears himself in orange paint instead of pitch –– here are two other highly suspicious connexions between David Lynch and Donald Trump, exposed exclusively by this office.

1. Predilection for the used-up word "Disruption" –– every time I hear the word "Disruption" now I think of Ivanka.

    Ivanka / Disruption
    Ivanka / Disruption
    Ivanka / Disruption
    Ivuption / Disranka
    Ivuption / Disranka
    Ivuption / Disranka
    Irruption / Disvanka
    Irruption / Disvanka
    Irruption / Disvanka
    I must not use the word "disruption" in my academic writings
    I must not use the word "disruption" in my academic writings
    I must not use the word "disruption" in my academic writings
    I must use the word "Disvanka" in my academic writings
    I must use the word "Disvanka" in my academic writings
    I must use the word "Disvanka" in my academic writings

Back in 2017 I was living in LA, loafing, bumming, freelancing up and down the PCH as a boogie-board instructor and when I wasn't doing that also editing audiobooks for errors.  One audiobook that crossed my desk was Ivanka's book on female empowerment, whatever the fluck it was called. I have neither the inclination nor the energy to google it. Was it even ever published? I know it was held back indefinitely. Was it killed outright? You look it up. Okay. That book. As I was checking it for errors –– a paradoxical quest inasmuch as the book entire was one comic celebration of the concept of "error" –– all I heard was Ivanka vaunting DISRUPTION.

This is a word academics grew to like when they had used the word "subversion" once too often in one paragraph. "Gah. Lemme see, what's a fucking synonym for fucking subversion –– oh cool, disruption." Academics: always talking about subversion and also transgression. It's as if they see every action done in the past as somehow "subverting the norm". What norm? The norm of history as they kind of vaguely imagine it. "Without thinking much about it I imagine things were quite strait-laced and puritanical back in the past so this would have been subversive."

After Ivanka used the word disruption I could never stand to hear it, let alone speak it, without shivering in disgust. Let us outlaw this word –– call it "the D-word". It is to be an anti-shibboleth –– a word the usage of which instantly exposes its user as a toolkit professor of the first order.

Cue David Lynch, oblivious to all this (i.e., the stuff of reality, of the actual planet), and he was all giddy about the word too and he starts bandying the word around incessantly too. He even organized a "Disruption Festival" –– I checked to see if Ivanka was a "keynote speaker" but apparently she wasn't. But if you were to seek out champions for the cause of total fucking obliviousness then I think that Ivanka and David Lynch would both be splendid ambassadors for it. Lynch told the Guardian that Trump could "go down in history as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much." (My italics.) What "thing" has he disrupted exactly, David? "Oh you know –– people's lives."

This, Lynch's pro-Trump utterance was taken up by Breitbart and then by Trump himself, both of whom apparently really wanted to court that considerable section of the population that loves racism, nihilism, and also avidly watches Twin Peaks. Trump crooned softly from the dais at a KKK rally in South Carolina that Lynch's career was probably "over" for supporting him so openly. This penetrated even David Lynch's thick cranial veneer of self-obsession and mock-innocence, and Lynch was placed in the uncomfortable position of having to sheepishly clarify one of his gnomic utterances. Characteristically he mouthed some Woodstock-era flannel and in essence bade Trump go forth henceforth and, uh, do good and to please always follow "the Golden Rule". Didn't he know? Trump hates the Golden Rule even more than G.G. Allin did.

2. Emin Agalarov –– The secret "easter egg" hidden in Lynch's blundering floundering "charitable actions" concerns one Emin Agalarov, a name with which eagle-eyed CNN-spotters will be familiar.
Paging Jeffrey Toobin.

Emin Agalarov is the simpering moon-faced weeble shmoe who –– presumably by the judicious use of Russian troll farms and little else –– enjoys the virtuous status of a "pop star" or what passes for such a thing in Russia. (Can you imagine Russian pop music? It must be like French hip hop.) He is also connected through to the craw with Trump, Manafort, &c &c &c His name was invoked in the Trump Tower debacle –– it was Emin's weird creepy English manager who put DUMBN JUNIOR in touch with the Russians who claimed to have "dirt" (the official term) on the woman now known in Trump fanboy circles simply as "Crooked". That is well-known and established.

Less well-known is that David Lynch's "foundation", as well as hosting lacklustre events featuring a seemingly-random array of TM enthusiasts (I attended one where Donovan was the main event), puts out records, puts out shitty CDs like the one featuring Emin Agalarov, alongside such luminaries pulled from a hat as Alanis Morissette, Andy Summers of the Police, Ben Folds, Ben Lee, anybody named Ben in fact, Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, Donovan, Nancy Sinatra, Peter Gabriel, and "Pink Jaffee with Jakob Dylan and Daryl Hannah". Is David Lynch a magnet for these hard-up chancers? You can imagine Jakob Dylan and Daryl Hannah weaving their way, hand-in-hand, across a Hollywood Hills party, to speak to Lynch. And Lynch, with his chronically defective bullshit detector throbbing, thinking that they have hit-making status and this could be a great record and Trump could be a great president.

One thing that categorically opposes Trump and Lynch is their hair. David Lynch, for all his shortcomings, is a great filmmaker if only he would stick to that (–– his forays in the musical world, the world of religious and cosmic speculation, and obviously his blind questing on the earthly plane where politics is to be discussed, are as ill-advised as his humiliating explosions into the world of painting and drawing, where he exhibits the aptitude and mindset of a twelve-year-old boy ––) and he undeniably has a formidable, even prodigious, head of hair. Donald Trump, meanwhile, is bald, and has glued hair from other parts of his head to the top of his head, in tribute to the late Mr. David Ferrie, scout leader to Lee Harvey Oswald.

"Trump's Election and That Rise in Suicides."

This isn't really a joke. Does anybody monitor the suicide rate globally? And if so, has anybody noticed a remarkable rise in the number of suicides since You Know Who entered "office"? It seems to me that I am hearing about suicides, both in the press and in everyday existence, every other day.

RELATED:––

I was in Sainsbury's a few days ago and thinking about how many overweight people there were. I thought: "It's Trump. Gotta be. People are stress-eating."

RELATED:––

Similarly, in my current job, I am cataloguing academic books from the presses. A casual observation, given with kind intent: a whole lotta nonsense coming from these "sterling" presses. I thought, "It's Trump. It's gotta be. People cannot think straight they're so nutso by now. Academics are in a panic like headless chickens in the barnyard running in circles."

Althpugh actually, and then again, I think you could possibly blame it mostly on Jacques fucking Derrida and Trump gets off scot-free.

In fact I think you could blame Trump on Derrida.

If you really want my opinion, and apparently you don't, well here it is: no Trump without Derrida.

"Frankly."

When Trump says "frankly" –– which is to say every time he begins a sentence –– he sometimes speaks "frankly" and other times he speaks a terrible untruth.
   
Like when he'd read the autocue and suddenly wake up from his psychic haze, his eternal demonic drowse that he has infected us all with, to remark, usually with some surprise, "That's really actually true, I actually agree with that."

Trump's so used to saying things he doesn't actually believe that he has to comment when he says something he actually thinks is true.

What I mean is he expects to lie when he speaks.

"One or Two Things I Know About Trump."

1. What with the Government shutdown and the latest Russia revelations, nobody speaks much anymore about Stormy Daniels, but I have intended to make this observation since before Christmas and I must be allowed:

CNN got into the habit of calling Stormy Daniels a "porn star" while they called Karen McDougall a "Playmate". They are always very precise about the fine differentiation.  Unfair.

There that's it.

2. Trump was talking about the vaporous mystery atop his fat, bumpy head. (Always a bad idea to draw attention to it.) He defended it, saying that it was his "own hair." Sophistry!

I thought about this and eventually decided he said it  –– on the recommendation of his lawyers and after a subsequent, intimate and lengthy bull session with Alan Dershowitz at Mar-a-Lago –– so that he could not technically be caught perjuring himself. It is in fact his own hair –– but it is hair that actually sprung from the back of his head, that abundant and considerable source, his mullet hair, which was cut off and then grafted to the top of his head. So do you see, when he says it is his own hair, he is not actually lying. It just happens that it was moved from one place to another and reapplied.

Like the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Mass.

Or London Bridge.

3. A couple of times now, at the height of a spirited rant in the car for the unfortunate audience of my wife, I have looked down mid-rant and seen with unfeigned disgust that I am actually making the trademark circles between my thumbs and forefingers, popularized by none other than the leader of the Western World. I looked on in candid horror –– recoiled in shame now –– tried to throw my hands away from me like alien and remote objectoids.

I then calmed down and returned to my indefatigable habit of fucking analysing everything that comes along. I said to my wife, "Imagine, if I'm doing that, making Trump shapes with my fingers, how many others of Trump's worst habits have been subconsciously absorbed and assimilated by all the world. We watch this guy every day, in the morning and again at night, and take it all in hypnotically. His vocabulary, his psychology, what he has in lieu of a moral philosophy. Word begets Trump, and Trump is virus."

4. They always say that the only person Trump doesn't criticise is Putin. It's a banality, a saw. Then inevitably it is asked, "What's he got on Trump?" What they don't say, but should, is that there is another person Trump doesn't ever criticise –– and it's incredible –– it is Kushner. Now what's he got on Trump? What awful things has Ivanka told him I wonder?

5. Roger Stone was on Chris Cuomo last night, fresh from a night in the Tombs. Chris couldn't stop marveling that he had this guest. "He's nuts to be here, dunno why his lawyers okayed it, in fact I dunno why his lawyers haven't got him sedated in a cabin off Lake Tahoe, handcuffed to a metal bedframe, but WTF it's all gravy. Let's go."

There was now an image of Roger Stone in a box in the top left of the screen. For a moment it seemed like it was a still photograph, but then it blinked. Creepy. Like the old portrait in the haunted house in every episode of Scooby Doo ever. The eyes moved. It blinked repeatedly, rapidly. Then it moved its head slightly to one side. It was in fact a live feed of Roger Stone in the green room, radiating intense anxiety, blinking quite incessantly. Maybe he was signaling his Nazi handlers like Trump with the hand gestures and the blowjob mouth shapes. Maybe he was just nervous because he had made a real fucking rookie error of judgment as the sun was setting on this late twilit stage of the last act of his political career.

His eyebrows seemed to be a smudge of colour celebrating their fierce independence from the peroxide-and-nictoine hair on the thin wedge of his head. I saw that documentary about him last week and have painstakingly charted the peculiar career of his hairline. He now has a sort of Stan Lee plastic surgery festival that suggests he has vibrant bangs from the very front of his pate that he is forced to slick back with nuclear strength Brylcreem every morning. The dream of the bald man. "Too much hair at the front. It gets in my eyes." As a result of this skin-grafting melee he presently looks like one of the fabled "Aztec Children" that P.T. Barnum used to exhibit –– those sad victims of microcephaly. His eyebrows meanwhile seemed to be a tribute to David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald's former scoutmaster and also his own personal Angela Lansbury (from Manchurian Candidate, not Murder She Wrote). David Ferrie was completely hairless and enjoyed gluing scrapes of fake fur to his face roughly in the places where clumps of hair usually occur on the human cranium and physiognomy.

6. The "in" thing to do now is to disdain the talking-in-tongues Trump sometimes does at the White House lectern. He doesn't quite fall on the ground and writhe on his back with a rattlesnake in each fist (yet), but he does everything else. He says anything and everything that occurs to him in the transcendental moment. They are calling it his "word salad." This seems to me inaccurate.  Unkind to salads. It is hardly a salad, lacking the complexity and heterogeneity of a salad, unless you mean by salad a sliver of iceberg lettuce and a dried up slice of carrot. It is more a club sandwich –– or in fact a "hamberder".

"John McCain."

It seems as though the outpouring of eulogies for John McCain is secretly driven by –– what else ––animus towards Trump. They're saying what a great American McCain was as though every word is an awful insult to Trump. Every kind word is a nail in Trump's coffin –– or at least in his leg.

People love the double-whammy of appearing to be respectful and grieving when also getting to shaft the Pres.

By the way I still can't believe that Donald Trump is the President of the United States.

People want to say, "Trump killed McCain! There, I said what everyone else is thinking, I said it aloud! It was Trump that killed him!"

I felt it too when Aretha Franklin died. It was all the CNN pundits could do not to say, "Fuckin' Trump!"

In other news they say that Doug Cowie has officially applied to have the address of his flat in Archway changed to "The London Think Tank and Archive for John McCain Studies." It is unknown whether the Royal Mail will comply with this nonsensical but obviously heartfelt request.

"Eight Is the Magic Number."

On CNN last night two news items broke simultaneously:–– Paul Manafort was convicted on eight counts, and Cohen surrendered and took eight lashes for sins against the Republic. My wife gripped her fists and cheered. It was like when Obama won the election. I was more jaded about it.

"This is a turning point in history," remarked one of CNN's knowing ones. This would carry greater weight perhaps if they didn't apply it to sundry occurrences on a daily basis, if not an hourly one. Either they are given to hyperbole or we are living in a heightened age.

Could be both.

(I was in a hospital in LA a couple of years back, being prepped for ear surgery. I was having tissue from my earlobes grafted over holes in my eardrums –– those self-same holes previously bored permanently into my eardrums using lasers by ingenious doctors in New York years earlier.)

(There was something of an East Coast–West Coast divergence of opinion. I don't say it was an inter-coastal war but my LA doctor pronounced the practice of his Eastern brethren barbaric. He referred to the time it had happened as though it were the dim Dark Ages when he chuckled and said, "They loved lasers then. They thought everything could be solved with lasers." I was actually passed around quite roughly like a common wanton, a sort of Barnum incroyable for the edification and amusement of medical students visiting the ENT wing in those days. I remember one lady doctor, a specialist on the ear who ironically was a very poor listener, asking a young naif if she would like to look closely into the zone of scarified trauma within my "shell likes". The girl backed away –– she shrank back –– shaking her head in horror just at the thought of it.)

(And as I went through all the preliminary processes one of the lady nurses told me that eight was a lucky number in Chinese numerology.  'Yes, I'm really lucky," I said, waiting to have as I said tissue from my earlobes grafted over holes in my eardrums.)

That was six thousand miles away and two years ago –– wonder why I even mentioned it actually –– it's not like I'm getting paid by the word –– and now here I was, drool cup in hand, hearing through –– aye –– admittedly imperfect ears, the verdict against Trump's hench flunkies. CNN's anchors kept interrupting their pundits because new footage was rolling in. Wolf even cut off the great Toobin in his Connecticut retreat.

They had a shot of the front of the courthouse where Cohen had just sung like a canary. A cluster of microphones was all, and everyday New Yorkers going past on their way home. Perhaps to a bar, perhaps to Grand Central for the commute to Long Island. Westchester. Connecticut. Points west. Yonkers. All out for Bronxville. Suddenly Wolf became excited because Michael Cohen emerged from the courthouse and swiftly darted off to the left. His right, our left. He dashed into the crowd and disappeared. I had a premonition –– the scene recalled to me Lee Harvey Oswald being led out in front of Jack Ruby –– RFK's ill-fated trip through the hotel kitchens –– it had that air of the ungluablich that precedes political assassinations.

"Somebody's going to shoot him," I told my wife. "Trump's going to shoot him –– on Fifth Avenue! It's finally going to happen!"

Good joke but it was at a downtown federal courthouse and Fifth Avenue only starts above Washington Square, about twenty blocks north.

Still I wonder if that's how Trump will signal his resignation –– by shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue. It's like –– yes –– the gun in the Chekhov play.

I used to think that that was quite a learned reference –– read it in a Phillip Roth novel I think –– but it actually cropped up in an issue of Squirrel Girl recently.