1001 Nights Cast

Someone else’s sunset is my morning coffee, black, soy milk gone curdly because I left it out yesterday in the heat, therefore wasted a quart. And it is still hot, hills tinder dry, extreme fire danger, exit roads blocked by dumpsters for the gazillionaires’ additions to their palaces.

So, the New York Times. The uninvited guests and a man who used to have a big house near the Euphrates. The story is about a shitload of evil rammed up the ass of a country that can’t do fuck about it. This is called the problem of the uninvited guests and stuck on the front page. The word guests is surrounded by scare quotes. Note the detail nestled in the middle of the other sentences stacked like plates in the cupboard before it was looted: the man displaced from his house lays his wrinkled 74 year old hand, his bronzed hand, upon the knee of a 31 year old American soldier. The erotics of the unspoken. Supplication. Someone else watches. Did the journalist make up this detail? Does it matter? Naked hand upon desert camouflage. Bronzed skin, powerless skin, lying upon the cloth that covers the muscle of one of the uninvited guests who is, moreover and of course, even before one gets to the inevitable photograph, sitting down because otherwise there would anatomically be no thigh upon which to lay a hand, at least in a New York Times cover story. But in the photograph, when you get to the photograph, the soldier is unappealing, white, meaning pink, and sits upon a small sofa with his body somewhat jammed against that of the man he has displaced and whom he thanks for letting him occupy his house. The sofa, a bit too small for two grown men, is not Room and Board, but faintly colonial, meaning American Colonial, meaning once illicit Anglophilia sublimated into Ethan Allan or just possibly overstock Mitchell Gold—simple lines, wood frame, upholstered in plaid, the plaid a nice assemblage of desert tones, browns, beiges, muted orange, hints of green, bold strokes of rust. The guy began building his house in 1991, his eleven room house that you can see in another photograph had columns in front of a large portico that would have given quite a bit of helpful shade, along with the orchard of fruit trees, now a chewed up driveway or parking lot for tanks. He was almost finished when the United States army arrived.

‘Nobody spent money like I did’, he tells the journalist, showing him into a room described as having a cantilevered ceiling, recessed lighting and a chandelier, which would be the room just off the foyer, which is as far as Hamad Moussa Khalaf al-Duleimi can go these days when he shows up, which he does every afternoon, in the cool of the day. He brings his video camera to make a tape of the house for which he is being paid $2,000 a year—YEAR—and in connection with which he has filed a claim for the $40,000 in furniture that used to stand upon the tile floors of the house. The claim is still under review.

In the event that one of the obvious adjectives should come to mind, Kafka, who was a highly respected senior employee at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Bohemia, got promotions and actually instituted reforms.

Last night, Monday night, in yet another eruption of real estate pornography, the same night I learned about Kafka, QE2 went to dinner at the White House, also porticoed, also columned, more than eleven rooms, driveway intact. Bush welcomed her by noting that she helped us celebrate the Bicentennial in seventeen…OOPS…famously wandering foot skids into famously wide open mouth, there he goes again, how could he, insulting a woman by implying that she’s at least 200 years old. President and queen, says the New York Times, turned to each other for ‘a long, silent gaze.’ Hold on medium shot, close-up of Dubya in white tie, close-up to Helen Mirren, who had, curiously, only a few days before, elected to stay in South Dakota for something or other rather than go to dinner at Buckingham Palace. Knees unnecessary, hands redundant. ‘She gave me,’ said Bush, ‘a look that only a mother could give a child.’ The remark is presented as a demonstration of wit, not as an even worse slip, nor as the fantasy of a slap withheld, or bestowed, his own mother watching, insert ‘close-up to Barbara’ in script after Mirren close-up.

I learned about Kafka last night, Monday night, from a man who spent too much time talking about himself while introducing Danielle Huillet’s and Jean-Marie Straub’s film Class Relations, the title Kafka would have given Amerika had he lived to exert any control over his literary output.

And in France, just before Sunday’s election, in another creamy moment of real estate, Nicolas Sarkozy, whose wife recently dumped him for another man, restored his masculinity by putting on a plaid shirt and blue jeans to ride a horse in the Camargue, home of French cowboys, salt drying flats, and nude beaches. Rented: one white stallion with big dick visible, herd of black bulls in foreground of photograph, tractor keeping journalists safe from black bulls, stable guy just out of frame, Sarko, preparing to suck up to Bush, plopped on top the whole confabulation, scared shitless that the animal will actually move. Slow zoom in: Sarko’s hand clutches the saddle horn. Also on Monday, he is declared the winner. Paris is burning, Helen Mirren unlikely to be invited to dinner again, about dawn for Hamad Moussa Khalaf al-Duleimi, who will have the sun in his eyes when he looks at his old house, the safety helmets that Kafka invented now too expensive for French workers, 102 degrees in Los Angeles.