Early 1970s

 

F for Fake

September 1973

it goes that artists deal in lies and experts deal in truth. but if a lie told enough times can become the truth, and even a good enough lie can fool the experts, then what does that say about the truths they uphold? who do we vest with the authority to differentiate truth from falsehood? if experts are making it up just as much as everybody else, who can we really trust? maybe artists are actually the best liars bcuz they can create the most beautiful and perfect lies in the world. so beautiful that they overtake our old "truths" with their sheer beauty and become the new truth in its place. maybe the dynamic is in reverse. maybe artists are the real truth-tellers, and its the experts who are the liars. maybe artists in all their perfect lying are actually getting closer than anyone to some form of higher truth that no one could even begin to comprehend... lol nah. artists ain't that virtuous. to be an artist necessitates being a kind of charlatan, to sell yourself on the big lie at the foundation of all art: that the act of making it means anything at all. in truth our desperate attempts to realize this immense beauty and majesty we feel in ourselves and the world around us will always fail. the best we're capable of is these transient, half-formed attempts at reaching out to a creative truth far beyond our expression. and along with us, they inevitably fade away in the flow of time, back into that harsh and impenetrable unknown we spend our lives pursuing for the sake of that truth and must someday cross the barrier never knowing if we'll really get to see it or not. into a world where both truth and falsehood are ultimately irrelevant. maybe what's really beautiful isn't what we leave behind but that we ever had a place in this process at all. a nonstop historical procession of artists, liars, scumbags and freaks casting off every fake notion of truth and goodness and authenticity and embracing failure and falsehood, annihilating themselves in pure artifice to bear witness to the hidden realities within and envision for themselves a world with its own beautiful form of truth. just as flawed and contradictory as any other, and just as real too. our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? go on singing.

 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

October 1st, 1974

picking through the bones, hair, teeth and gristle caught in the wheels of the american meat grinder. the rotted-out innards of a post-60s dream-turned-nightmare strewn across a brutally indifferent landscape whose very formations run parallel to the scorched membranes of cracked, blistering flesh under an unforgiving sun. mechanized state apparatuses of murder displacing all the honest, hard-working butchers that made this country what it is today and forcing them into the margins; the empty spaces of middle america, the run-down farmhouses and off-road cemeteries lurking just behind the friendly veneer of bright green pastures and apple-red barns. festering alone in a haze of violence both aimless and incomprehensible, all they can do is wait patiently for the moment someone just happens to fall through the cracks straight into their jaws and they can finally unleash every horrible, indescribable thing they've been forced to keep inside themselves in a single explosive cacophany of bloodshed. an all-consuming vortex of ecstatic depravity which none can escape the gravitational pull of its horrible catharsis, not even the stars themselves.