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February 13, 2008****, ****, ****, ****,**********, ************, and tits.SHIT, PISS, FUCK, CUNT, COCKSUCKER, MOTHERFUCKER, AND TITS“Those are the heavy seven,” said George Carlin. “Those are the ones that will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war.” FART, TURD and TWATwere later mentioned as unmentionables. In 1969, George Carlin was fired from the Frontier Hotel in Vegas for saying “ass” on stage. In 1972, his mother was appalled, at his first appearance at Carnegie Hall, “that people applaud filthy, blasphemous, anti-American material.” His famous list of words you can’t say on broadcast TV appeared on his 1972 album “Class Clown,” along with “How Much Is That Dog Crap in the Window.” He was arrested that year for doing the “Filthy Words” stand-up routine at Summerfest in Milwaukee. In October 1973, the routine was broadcast on the radio by Pacifica’s WBAI New York, and heard by a child and his father, who filed a complaint with the FCC. Pacifica characterized George Carlin as “a significant social satirist” who “like Twain and Sahl before him, examines the language of ordinary people. . . . Carlin is not mouthing obscenities, he is merely using words to satirize as harmless and essentially silly our attitudes towards those words.” The FCC upheld the complaint, and issued a Declaratory Order to the station to behave or else. Pacifica filed an appeal with the D.C. Circuit US Court of Appeals, and the Order was reversed. The Appeals Court decision was in turn reversed (5-4) by the Supreme Court in Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica, 1978, which determined the FCC to be the arbiter of levels of “decency” for broadcast media. And that’s how the “bleep” was born. FUCKED WHICHEVER WAY YOU TURNis how Czar of Noir Eddie Muller describes the “cruel core” of Noir tales. I might also use it to describe trying to please all of the people all of the time (which is no concern of mine). To wit, a reader was unhappy with my choice of words in No Happy Endings, specifically “fuck” and “fuck over.” “One George Carlin is one too many,” he wrote. “I can see if we’re going to go mainstream with you we’ll have to get the fuck out of your vocabulary.” FUCK MAINSTREAM!What is the advantage of self-publishing on the web? YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE—you are one of my biggest fans and supporters. Of course I respect your opinion, and your preferences as a reader, but it’s not my project nor yours to make me ready for prime-time. I know you are speaking out of concern for my marketability so I don’t have to keep selling off my assets to stay in the game, but the time of quibbling with editors is not yet upon me, and I relish that freedom and control. Fuck marketability! Though I have on occasion made edits based on friends’ comments on works-in-progress, I’m not going to adjust my writing every time someone has something to say. I can’t be concerned with what any given known or unknown reader I might offend. I don’t write to elicit some particular response, positive or negative, from some particular kind of reader. Readers’ reactions are a byproduct of the writing process, not the impetus for them. Basically, there is no “we” in my writing, only I, the writer. DRESS TO STUN, NOT TO KILL,I was instructed about Chicken John’s Applause Bus Film Farm excursion to Petaluma for dinner at the Water Street Bistro. The appetizer was, appropriately enough, Les Blank’s film “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.” I can’t believe those seven filthy words still stun, much less kill. Obviously one seeks out appropriate publishers for whatever material one hopes to sell. I’m not going to write a story full of fucks and send it to Highlights for Children. But nor am I going to clean up my act to draw a wider audience, especially the mainstream kind. Fuck that! YOU, MY READER,are the judge and jury. You get to pass judgment on whether you want to spend your time on earth reading my offerings. I am solely responsible for my content. I choose the best words I can summon for the occasion. You are solely responsible for reading them. THEM’S FIGHTIN’ WORDS“I know you write much more memorably when you work around it [fuck],” said my reader. “It’s just become kind of a shorthand for you. (I think.)…a way to write quicker. Don’t hurt me!” “Fuck” is not something I have to work my way around. It’s something the abashed reader has to work around if he or she wants to read my writing. Whether an exclamation, an intensifier, a colloquialism, or an indicator of the nasty crud-encrusted realities of life as a human being on the planet earth, which by the way, has been fucked over by the human beings on it, fuck is a legitimate word available both for its form and its content. Who has escaped the cruel core of the Noir wheel of fortune? Who hasn’t wanted to fuck it all and live life their way? SUPREME COURT JUSTICE BRENNAN,in his dissenting opinion, observed:
Justice Brennan speculated that certain rationales “could justify the banning from radio of a myriad of literary works, novels, poems, and plays by the likes of Shakespeare, Joyce, Hemingway, Ben Johnson, Henry Fielding, Robert Burns, and Chaucer; they could support the suppression of a good deal of political speech, such as the Nixon tapes; and they could even provide the basis for imposing sanctions for the broadcast of certain portions of the Bible.” THE SHIT’S STILL HITTING THE FANThe very station, WBAI, that broadcast the Carlin piece, decided not to broadcast Ginsberg’s “Howl” on the 50th anniversary of the SF Municipal Court decision that it was not obscene. Why? Fear of FCC fines that could shut the station down. Instead, they presented an online-only program “Howl Against Censorship,” posted on Pacifica’s website. The Internet is not subject to FCC regulations. Which means, nor am I. I’ll use any form I please that I find appropriately expresses my content. CASE IN POINT, FUCKSPOILERS! “Jeopardy” tells the story of a perfectly happy, decent American family—Doug and Helen Stilwin (Barbara Stanwyck and Barry Sullivan) and their annoying son Bobby, who are driving to Mexico to revisit some fishing spot the husband knew as a kid with his father. Wouldn’t you know it, Bobby goes off to explore a dilapidated pier and gets his foot stuck between planks. That darn Bobby! Doug goes after him and when they are almost safe, the pier collapses and Doug’s leg gets trapped under a massive timber. They break their car jack trying to lift it off him. They have no other tools they can use to save him, so Helen must drive several hours back to a gas station/general store they had stopped at, to get some rope. Doug figures they’ve got just enough time before the tide comes in. AS NOIR WOULD HAVE IT,at the store she encounters a desperate fugitive, Lawson (Ralph Meeker—too handsome for this role), who commandeers her car and kidnaps her. This guy is on the lam and it’s not for shoplifting. In fact unbeknownst to her he has killed the gas station’s proprietor and who knows what all else. The federales are on his tail and he could care less about the equally desperate danger her husband is in. With Lawson’s head resting on her shoulder and her husband’s gun, which Lawson found in the glove compartment, jabbing her midsection, they are able to pass a roadblock because they look like a typical American couple. Long story short, Lawson is not succumbing to Helen’s pleas and (Noir choice coming up) she asks him how long it’s been since he has even seen a woman, and informs him that she will do anything, leaning against the car with a suggestive draw on her cigarette, to save her husband’s life. But here’s the kicker—she tells him if he takes her back to the beach, he can have her husband’s ID papers, clothes and the car—and her. If he helps her save Doug, she will leave with him. Their traveling together as a couple with papers will enable him to escape across the border. The vermin takes advantage of her desperate situation and rapes her with her consent because there is no acceptable alternative. FUCKED WHICHEVER WAY SHE TURNSThis brutal, despicable criminal, a murderer, does drive her back to the beach. They arrive in the nick of time and Stanwyck yells to her husband, “I have help!” without adding, “I had to fuck him to get it, but here it is.” Lawson does indeed save Doug’s life, and puts a lot of effort and ingenuity into it, with all the “matter of life or death” urgency Helen could have asked for. Lawson hides as the federales drive up and warn the family there’s a fugitive on the loose. Doug, Helen and Bobby wave and assure them they’ll be careful. Helen starts to make good on her promise to leave with him, but the tires of the car have been ground down from pulling the log off Doug’s leg. The shred of decency in Lawson, reawakened by his rescue effort, admires Helen’s honor and loyalty to her husband, and they part with a handshake. Helen wonders how she’ll feel if she learns of his capture. At the end of this tale of desperate vs. desperate, everyone has gotten what they needed, but at what a price! 2,443 IMPOLITE EXPRESSIONSSo to describe this situation, which euphemism for fuck would you choose? Carlin’s got a whole alphabet of them (except for “u” and “x”) on his website; pick as you please. Would you sleep with a fugitive? Would you make love with a fugitive? Would you go to bed with a fugitive? Would you make whoopee with a fugitive? This guy does not do any of those things. He fucks women, and he fucks them over. The crudest abuse of sex deserves the crudest description of it. NEXT ON THE DOCKET, FUCK OVERSPOILERS! “Road House” stars Richard Widmark as Jefty, a madman-in-waiting road house owner who falls for a tough-talkin’ dame, Lily (Ida Lupino), he hired to sing and play piano. He’s a womanizer and he leaves it to his best friend and manager Pete (Cornell Wilde) to pay them off and put them on a train. But this gal is “different” from the rest. He is smitten with her and makes it known. He has, however, no claim on her, and while he has gone hunting for a few days, Pete and Lily fall in love. Love happens, in life and especially in Noir. But while Jefty is gone, he decides that Lily is going to marry him, and shows up with a ready-made license. Of course he’s deluding himself, and Pete does not relish having to set him straight. Jefty is mortified and bans Pete from his life. Pete and Lily prepare to leave town together and Pete leaves a note, “I took $600 [from the safe] that was coming to me.” JEFTY THEN FALSELY ACCUSES PETE,the only other person who has the combination to the Road House’s safe, of stealing the week’s receipts, over two grand. Police intercept Pete and Lily at the train station as they leave to start their new life, and Pete gets tried and convicted of grand larceny. He faces years in prison, except that Jefty smooth-talks the judge into believing that he does not want to punish his old friend and war buddy for an error in judgment and asks that the judge remand Pete into his custody, where he can work his debt away. FUCKED WHICHEVER WAY THEY TURNBasically, Jefty assumes control of Pete and Lily. He is their parole officer. He “suggests” they all (the three of them and Susie, the bookkeeper played by Celeste Holm, who will be his undoing, go out to his cabin retreat, where he puts on a drunken shooting display. He’s quite a marksman; he’s not likely to miss whatever he aims at. Things get heated up, a struggle ensues, and Jefty is knocked unconscious. Pete and Lily decide to make a break for the Canadian border, while Susie discovers crucial evidence exonerating Pete in Jefty’s jacket and as he begins to wake up, flaunts it in his face and runs after Pete and Lily to warn them Jefty’s on his way. The edge-of-your-seat chase scene follows. (Poor Susie had had to cede Pete to Lily, though she also had no claim on him but hope.) As you can guess, matters conclude in a showdown where Jefty forces Lily into a life-and-death Noir decision. “Told you she was different,” are Jefty’s last words. Though the lovebirds are freed to love, it is hardly a happy ending. If I were rushing to a job interview there was no way I’d arrive on time for, I might say to myself, shit, I’m screwed. But if my best friend framed me for a crime of larceny I didn’t commit as “payback” for “stealing” from him a woman that never belonged to him, and held me prisoner for my punishment, I would say, I am totally fucked. I have been fucked over. PERKY NIPPLES, CUUNTS, COOCKS, BOOBS, BUTTS AND BLOW JOPSHorse blow jops, that is. Those are some of the search terms people have used that drew my column as a match. My webmaster, after almost three years, finally set me up to view my blog stats, which include searches people have conducted that resulted in links to The Ax Files. Repeating the searches myself I found I have indeed used the words, “cuunts,” “perky nipples,” “boobs and butts” “coocks,” “cocks,” and “horse blow jop” in various pieces, along with the baker’s dozen of unsavory words for penis I opened The Ax Files with. Nevertheless, h no longer introduces me as his “sex columnist,” as he did after those first two attention-getting offerings, which, by the way, if you refer your friends to my site, there is no need to apologize for. I wrote them and I stand behind them. Other search terms that have been used include: Big nipples of girls I write as I please, and have been writing thus since the 60’s. No one can tell me how to write or what to write. They can tell me what they like best and least about what I write. Someday, someone will tell me, as a commercial enterprise, what they will and won’t publish. But as Joe Montegna says in “House of Cards,” I’ll “deal with that thing then.”
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FUCK! copyright Alexandra Jones 2008 |
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