Wrnlrd - Pentagon

Ever been to D.C. when the cherry blossoms are in bloom? I haven't. And I thought that they'd be a dazzle of bursting pink when I arrived. They weren't. I've seen pictures. They're beautiful. Limbs and boughs heavy; flowers like red corn popped. The Potomac's tidal basin does nothing but hold the reflection, bright as blood. I can almost forget about the crackpots, the beggars, the politicos in pressed charcoal gray suits. Streets that unfold in alphabet, or align as the intersections of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Vermont avenues to K Street NW in a star of five points. Echoes of Constantine, St. John, Mephistopheles… What of L'Enfant's "radial city?" Or Wren's roads as wheel's spokes? The histories not-so-secret of polis pontificate thought into stasis and kept still, incubate; only breathing as "irrational idea." So much for setting the table; even when Wrnlrd's shown his hand, it's still an accumulation of lingo-geometric riddles. The nation's capitol may well be its home, but the whole of the Western World is its workplace. Washington as Baphomet. Mars to his right hand. Osiris in apparition. Lady Libertas and Isis. Capitol Hill a perch, the owl at rest. Metaphysics. Sorcery. Black Magick. Etc. Sure, it sounds fucked. Catch your breath. There's a trillion paperbacks cribbed together re: "the conspiracy." Twice, no, thrice as many websites. Some of these folks will scare you silly. I know a few of 'em. One a former Al-Jazeera reporter. When I ask him about "The Pentagon," I get a two-hour exegesis on Ba'al, Luciferian geometry, a screaming discourse about "The Pentagon" as the "ultimate occultic manifestation." I tell him I'm driving to D.C. to interview Wrnlrd, ask him to go along. He jumps at the wingman opp; days later we're walking the forum.

Pentagon ain't your typical USBM. It owes as much to Jim O'Rourke's Terminal Pharmacy as it does American Roots Music. Not a drop of Darkthrone here. Pickin' and paper-thin-walls converse combine with skipping CD industro-core. Trees free of leaves guitar, thin and spindly sounds that grow from the air down to the ground in a root of static and tone. Melodies bing and bong and loosely loop. Percussion is the same totally fucked brand of warbeatz Joe Preston programmed for the best Earth record ever. Shit's intermittent, like to the point of not making much sense at all, and then banjo breaks down some sorta tonal figure that's been smeared over the last five minutes into skeletal jangle, dancing bones. Drums clicking like ivory dice. Sonic idioms are switched, substituted, mixed & matched: transformed. Black Metal as Back Porch Bluez and vice versa. In the process, histories near and far are given plastic sheens, stretched around the width of this world. Jefferson and Adams plucking the diamonds from the dunghills… Doctors, scientists, land-owners, abolitionists, speculators, loyalists, merchants, sycophants, prospectors, hypocrites, louses and rouges… Square & Compass; Liberty, Equality, Fraternity… Grant and Sherman chomping cheroots. Kennedy laving Castro’s surname onto Marilyn’s labia; Lincoln wringing hands, brooding. Hear all that whispering? I'm convinced "he's" tapped all the phones in his apartment complex, painted the backgrounds of each piece with there innocuous blather. There's crying and laughing and people doing ordinary people things. Should I pick up something on the way home for dinner? Did my package come today? I'm guessing really. I can't hear any of it. I strain to hear it. Hisham strained to hear it. The "talking" was his favorite part. It's not mine. Shit makes me uneasy. Queasy. I am going to ask Wrnlrd about it when I see him.

Hisham's relentless. He won’t stop lecturing re: Rosicrucians, Templars, Free Fucking Masons. I push the one-sided affair out of the sun and into the oaken shadows of the Old Ebbitt, where he can watch me sink into drink and continue his lunacy over fizzing seltzer. But the whole bit digresses into nihil when Hisham asks me for a buck and promptly sliderules out a hexagram over the reverse of The Great Seal. He circles the letters at the five points with his blue ink Bic. I order another Turkey and water. There's a fucking walrus head mounted on the wall. I can't stop looking at it. The bartender hands me the drink. The walrus? He asks. Roosevelt bagged it. I start laughing; Hisham's still doodling on my dollar. Annuit = A; End of Coeptis = S; End of Seclorum = M; Ordo = O; Novus = N. He writes out, "ASMON." I don't have a clue. The drink's fucking lethal and I'm trying to concentrate as Tommy Dorsey’s "There Are Such Things," comes sultry, pouring outta the juke like liquefied Liz Hurley. It's an anagram, he screams. May-son? Make sense to you? The Free Masons. Listen, sometimes people just need the facts, he continues. Numbers, names, places. You don't have to delineate what can't be delineated. I mean, there are some things you can't write. Like, I can't explain what it was like for a group of Mujahedeen to show me how to break down a Kalashnikov. I can't explain what it was like to walk 10 feet from the man that planned 9/11. To watch him talking on his satellite phone. To watch him navigating a hill's incline with a walking stick, his straw-colored pakol tilted to the left, the Kalashnikov's barrel hitting his hip as he walked. I watched as he walked, disappearing into the fog. I was blindfolded. Thrown into the back of a Toyota truck. Driven away. Met at a roadside gathering of tribal elders by another Al-Jazeera reporter. I can't tell you how many times I've been asked about that meeting. People consider him a god. They told me there isn't a cross big enough to hold him. How did I report it? It's easy. Just facts. None of this "cherry picking" of details. When some actions outweigh other actions. I wrote fact, statistic. Do you know what it was like to see Massoud squat down by a river and take water? Do you know what its like to be in the bowels of a mountain, hearing the mortar shells chipping away at thousands of years of geology? Do you know what it's like to sit at a café as burqa’d women float by like pastel ghosts?

Hisham kept talking. I wasn't paying attention. But I was thinking about all those Kalashnikovs; the bright brown wood of the stock; the comma of a magazine—gleaming black steel; the complicated manner in which the barrel navigated through the fore-grip; the dorsal of a sight; the barrel scarred by smoke—it's resinous exterior showing utility… tapped. You know what it's like to take this all in? Hisham asks. He keeps on. I look at him, his polo shirt, frayed A&F shorts, Raybans, Rolex, his pack of Newports he's extending. You know I don't smoke… That's how the disaster gets written, he says. I was already sick of him and his “American Clothes.” I couldn't imagine taking him to the interview. Having him there. Sitting through the whole fucking thing. What was this? The American Plan? Outfit the savage with articles of satisfaction, like Crusoe placating the natives with useless kitsch? I look at my shirt sleeves: tea stains, inkblots. Hisham, I say, I really need more than this. I need to understand what it's like to sit there with some guy who owns nothing but a fucking Dell laptop, and you're both able to sit there in the nothingness of Afghanistan and watch an MPEG of the Trade Towers falling. I need to know what that's like. You understand?

Of course I do, he says. But nothing I say will make you understand. All these people… they don't know. They don't understand that for the Afghan to take up change is to take up the AK. Why do you think there's so much vegetal language in war? Kamikaze pilots were called “night blossoms.” The death toll at Tannenberg became known as “The Day of Harvesting.” Why do you think? No matter how much your country tries to “clear it out,” to “prune,” to “clean it up,” it's still going to be there; it's still going to “grow.” Do you know who June Jordan is? Great fucking poet, man. You know what he said about Gulf War One? Jordan compared the feeling of Gulf War One to drug use. He said it's a hit the same way crack is, and it doesn't last long. How fucking great is that? Bob Wills’ “San Antonio Rose” is playing. Hisham sighs. He drains his seltzer and lights a Newport. How about this, he says. A fire breaks out backstage of a theatre. A guy dressed as a clown comes out on the stage to inform the patrons. Naturally, they think it's a joke. The more he urges them to leave the theatre, the more they laugh. Kierkegaard used this example to demonstrate that the end of the world will occur amidst applause and laughter from a populace that believes it to be a joke.

I'm not listening. I show Hisham I'm not by calling Wrnlrd. I realize I don't know his "real" name. He's in my phone as WRNLRD. It rings and rings. No voice mail, no nothing. I catch the bartender’s eye; point to my empty glass. The guy next to me, a dead fucking ringer for George Stephanopoulos. French cuffs. Cufflinks. Hundred dollar haircut. Smells like a French whorehouse. Fucker goes into some diatribe about inter-planetary civilization, Cydoniac geometry, the Founding Fathers. Hisham's enraptured. The guys do everything but exchange fluids. We swap stools. I manage to order another drink. How are the oysters? He suggests the crab cakes. Bartender's buying this round. Whatcha know: D.C. is my kind of town.

[Stewart Voegtlin]

type: reviews    keywords: black metal, lhp017, d.c., cherry blossoms, jfk, crab cakes, conspiracy, sexual metaphors,   

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