I cruised down to the Speed on Friday and caught a screening of “Funeral Parade of Roses.” It was real sweet, almost as sweet as the block of Cupcakke videos I watched on YouTube directly afterwards. Cupcakke, she’s not holding back — she’s existing on a level of beautiful self-expression I’d like to reach one day but never will because I’m too afraid. See, I only fuck with people who live completely out loud and with total disregard, and I don’t like no one else.
They say there’s a Confederate statue in The Highlands. I’ve never seen it, but that sounds about right to me. Terminally-fucked rich people tend to erect wack monuments of themselves, or their awful friends, in the name of murder and privilege. It’s what they do. Like, I once saw a picture of a statue depicting a centurion trampling the small body of a child underneath his sword and sandal, at the behest of some Caesar. Not sure which race of people the babe belonged to, but I can guarantee the whole hierarchy of the Byzantine Empire both paid for and approved of it.
History, I keeps it in my rearview. That shit is a web-heavy with dead bodies and grotesque conquerors. It is what it is, and I’m in no way a heritage guy. I know my ancestors came from all over, were dirt floor poor and sometimes came to a violent end. Not one of them moved up, so there are not a lot of inspirational tales floating around the Powell household about great-grandpa Clarence overcoming great odds to become anything other than a predestined tragedy.
“Funeral Parade of Roses” had a lot of tragedy running through it too, a queer Japanese take on Oedipus Rex moving to the tune of Godard, a black-and-white splash of trippy, tricked-out cinema, that type of flick wine-sniffin’ snobs pay lip service to without having the soul to properly connect to the material. The audacity of chumps! Which is a good way to describe every monument ever carved, forged and raised. I ain’t about that bronze-and-marble man-life, not at all. Like look here dingus, stop trying to make gods out of dudes, dudes fuckin’ double suck at life no matter what their accomplishments and achievements may have been. Slide me a couple of wet million, and I’ll show you some fuckin’ achievements, I’d be getting shit done like Nebuchadnezzar naked!
And herein lies the rub at the center of the whole horrible issue as I see it, dicks!
Every little Lord Bullington ever cradled in a golden yoke of fortune has spent many hours stretched out before a massive parlor window, as the sun kissed its way through the panes, and he daydreamed of a sure future in which a massive monument would be constructed in his likeness — he, straddling and charging a mighty steed into battle, bedecked in armor and all the latest in high-tech life annihilating weaponry. A mutilated rock, chiseled down to proclaim to the world he had a dick like a cruise missile. You let the right type of rich lunatic get away with it, and they’ll use a lazer cannon to etch a wildly-exaggerated portrait of their own wiener on the face of the moon. I mean these assholes have been defacing the sides of majestic mountains for so long I’m actually shocked no one hasn’t humiliated the moon yet, but hey — any day now.
A statue of a man is still a statue of a man, and no man ever born has ever traveled from his start to his finish without getting blood on his hands — a little or a lot doesn’t matter, because the stains you keep. You own those stains until that looming moment you hit the floor to breathe your last, and if you worked the game hard enough to actually land yourself a paragraph or two in the history books, then those stains stay fresh and permanently slashed across your legacy forever.
Them’s the breaks.
And I couldn’t care less if every bird shit-covered statue of every single bygone general, dusty-ass dictator or big-brained thinker came crashing down. You wanna get your sculpture on? Sculpture me up all the heroic dogs and pussycats who have graced our lives for the better and leave dead dudes to rot, unseen in their tombs.
