Andrew Durbin - Mature Themes

to the Place de la Concorde, which is like a Venice Beach of stone

without the beach, so imagine it’s spring break

in Paris where Cher and Dionne dance to Kylie Minogue’s

“Can’t Get You Out of My Head”

spring breakers everywhere dancing to an uptempo

126-beats-per-minute mega hit. This is

what Baudelaire means when he talks about the world

breaking out in a clamor of spirits or, in other words, sudden awareness

of the Big Other. I can’t get you out of my head

within the city walls music pushes forward to interrupt

this party, reneges any evidence of a despair in a frat boy’s fraternité

Baudelaire says the wind enters his soul

and like any porous category this rupturing is the conclusion

that ends the poem but allows him to keep writing

why Cher goes on without a Jeep and what is referred to in the poem

as Anguish or in Clueless as Paul Rudd

both drop down to plant a black flag

(you can imagine Paul Rudd listening to Black Flag

while lounging with the Modern Library Nietzsche by the pool)

into the poet’s brow or to translate: the subject

acknowledges that in exteriorized forces

the personality is determined by a variety of interventions that enter

the head like big symbolic flags in the conquered soil which

seldom knows its defeat

um, but forgive me for puking, Cher, forgive me

for not whole-sale swallowing this bullshit

which is how Baudelaire begins

“To the Reader” the only contemporary analog of which I can think of

is “Niggas in Paris,” boys’ club of the privileged few

gilded among the merveilleuses and the lights

that have lit the city since 1881 against which millions

of Americans have backdropped among fireworks

avarice, all that, in the poor who in systematized

financialization of the body politic finally resemble

the nothingness that leaps up in Nietzsche to waltz toward

the end of the world at the home of Michael Bay

where we belong is ultimately the holy land, LA

Jeep-bound in the Hills

buried in the sunlight that illuminates

every face with the brightness that accompanies any intimacy

with death, even brain death

but what I truly want to do is be with you, Cher,

and learn to tell the difference between us

the intelligence of Baudelaire is anger with strategy

shovel off the world with boredom

to avoid work and its attendant wage slavery

heinous at the time of the composition of Les Fleurs du Mal

shortly after the Paris Commune

which ended with its destruction

to create “youth culture,” MTV

and its educational programming via MTVu

I’m aware that this has nothing to do with speaking to you,

dear reader, but isn’t this what Baudelaire is talking about

when he runs up against the wall of the world

which encircles an obelisk of the world

standing in the middle of Paris it’s like the word incroyable

a mouthful of revolutionary policy

like “ours” in Egypt

from which Paris imported the Obelisk of Luxor to the Place de la Concorde

a gift from the self-appointed Egyptian Viceroy Muhammad Ali Pasha

was constructed to exalt Ramses II

whose teeth rotted out of his head a pharaoh

whose reign lasted longer than any single French Republic ever has

nowhere to be found in “Au Lecteur” but its singular message as important

then as today: WATCH THE THRONE

never lost on the incroyables and merveilleuses

meaningless outside of some limited revolutionary context

which has subsequently absolved us of any need to be literate in its politics

who emerged at the end

of the reign of terror to infuse Paris

with the rare air of empire parties

fanning themselves with peacock feathers

gripping staffs wrapped in gold lamé

awash in a river

of luxury like a Bank of America exec in 2009

the pistons of the new world are pumping much faster, reader,

out of culture-bound mysteries

that rest here in the sun

while you, stand there still as always

antiflâneur or — flâneuse in memory of Cher

not singer-songwriter but the blonde

whose dusty complexion

mocks the world she faces to save

everything everywhere submerged in the moral philosophy

of “Niggas in Paris”

where the individual balls hard

in the exclusive right to be fair

self-determined in Paris getting fucked up

or getting married, as Kanye says, in the mall

no longer an important reference to the focal point of commerce at the end

of the nineteenth century but to every undergraduate

whose thesis quotes The Arcades Project extensively

in the morality of “Niggas in Paris”

like “To the Reader” it ultimately becomes itself

a teacup ethics to be thrown against the flower

wallpaper of the sitting room

reader, disengage

from the utopia of “my zone”

in a plume of desire

destroyed but alive, like you like me like blood

There is an infinite highway that builds toward Cher’s Jeep. Everything is the pop gradient of Tumblr, even the desert in which the highway begins from our point of view. From our point of view the highway begins everywhere. Sunglasses and Advil, everything is mad real. For others, it begins with the faces of the dead, Ronald Reagan, Jacques Derrida, Gertrude Stein, mixed with the dust from which the road starts. Horizons mean nothing. Horizons mean the albatross has been captured and is dying, slung across the deck of the ship toward the teary-eyed sailors burdened by its bad luck. The procedure that envelops us culminates in a disavowal of the system we benefit from more substantially than we know. There is no other choice, art markets shift, make room for more art, then disappear. What is the light that springboards off the surface of a pool in the Hills? The white Jeep, pure symbol of wartime ingenuity married to lives of leisure, sits in the driveway and commands us to bow down. I was in awe as a child. I was in awe as an adult, too. Perfect suspension and a lightweight exterior both affordable and transmutable, the luminous soul of the entire project dwells there. A word that means so little and yet suggests the undoing of its own simplicity: Jeep. Two e ’s like in spleen, which Cher meant when she cursed her driving instructor for not giving her a pass. As if. Take away a car and you still have a passenger. I take walks everywhere I go, even in the supersprawl. Los Angeles, the antithetical capital to preservation, accelerates the speed at which we consume in order to perfect a place in the future as the site of the future. LA translates today into tomorrow by noon. But tonight, we can relax in the waterfalls of the Hilton as they flood with bubbles and champagne.

Clouds can archive. My fantasy is a landscape. Sometimes I daydream about merging my body with my computer so that I can more fully enter the landscapes of Google Earth, lush surface world without pollution or traffic, planet seen from the vantage point of space and roving surveillance vehicles, a motionless field, magnifying the normal imperfections and irregularities of the earth so that the planet is rendered transparent, misshapen and yet intoxicating in its languishing distinction from the real. Where are the palm trees swaying toward tonight? Standing at the beach nothing fails to come to mind, but out of blue prevalence thinking comes in waves. Am I my own vision? I am stretched beyond it, but beyond that, other oceans we hadn’t known, lost continents restored in code. Where should we enter? The point where the digital camera clicks to record dusty boys playing by the side of the road? Weather in Google is fixed.