April 13 - Malfeasance of Lesser Saints

The Council of I, under the blessing and degradation of the dogs, in the year of our Word half-past nothing and faretheewell, through a special deviation granted by a Metro worker at Place de Clichy, aside from qualified exceptions, of and by and with, above all criticism but yours, therefore hitherto, because of the taboo and so invigorating marriage of necessity and freedom, notwithstanding, Frank, assigned a task force to determine the process for sainthood.  This was patently unsuccessful.  Consequently, a preexistent process was stolen from the Roly Chaotic Lurch, which in turn was pillaged from the Poly Semen Umpire, a theft from the Nascent Beer Beast, who plundered from Brahma while he copulated with himself.  Brahma, naturally, stole it from the future.  Having thus raided ourselves and hoodwinked time, let us disclose the goods.

Venerability

1. A name may be submitted to the Council of I for consideration of Venerability.
1. Names may be submitted by qualified members of the human species, dead or alive, subject to the remaining guidelines.
2. Non-sentient entities and sentient entities unable to speak a human language are excluded from consideration.
3. Submissions may only be made on February 29 in years whose digits add to 13.
4. Submissions should include full biographical details, complete oeuvre or portfolio, in the 12 most commonly spoken languages and any official language of the United Nations, should it not be included among the 12 most common and should the United Nations or rough equivalent exist, at the time of submission if a literary submission, along with a SASE.
5. Care should be taken to include relevant awards, degrees, certificates, even if considered trivial to certain sectors, social connections, titles, knightings, dameships, sightings, and cultural pedigrees; these will be used for statistical purposes only and disclosed solely in aggregate form to accredited parties.
6. A suffering biography should be included, tracing the candidate’s despair and afflictions, his/her methods and copings, his/her failures.
7. For each candidate, submitters must number 81, with the exception of candidates matching the criterion in h. below, with each submitter’s present and historical contact information (including all phone numbers, cellular phones, faxes, e-mail and postal addresses), sex, gender, and blood type clearly included.
8. Submitters may nominate themselves.
9. Any submission which includes an image of the proposed saint in any form shall be immediately and eternally disqualified.
10. Evidence of a miracle while the candidate was living should accompany the submission.  The following media are accepted:  CD, DVD, Blu-ray, 36mm.
2. If the Council of I agrees with the submission, the nominee shall immediately be promoted from human to Venerable and a song commissioned for the occasion.
1. Should the Council of I disagree with the submission, the submitter(s) shall be slain the following day at daybreak according to whatever method is most common in his/her/their culture.
2. The name of the human so made Venerable shall be inscribed in the Tablets of Destiny on the doors of Hell’s 6C elevator.
3. The name of the human so made Venerable shall be added to this Malfeasance in the Section of Venerability.
3. The Council of I may at any time, without cause or explanation, promote a human to Venerable or demote a Venerable to human apart from the above process.
4. A category of Barely Venerable shall be available for those about whom the Council of I is unable to decide anything.  A human made Barely Venerable shall be eternally disqualified from promotion or demotion away from Bare Venerability.

Blessedness

1.      For those humans made Venerable, by whatever process, submissions may be made to the Council of I for consideration of Blessedness.

a.      No human shall be made Blessed without first being made Venerable.

b.      The time elapsed between Venerability and Blessedness should not be less than the time it would have taken for the Venerable to denounce and destroy all originals and copies of his/her art.

c.       Submissions for Blessedness may not be made by anyone or thing with a post-secondary degree, whether honorary or earned.

d.      Submissions for Blessedness must be written in the composite blood of three extinct animal species.

e.      Submissions should include:  a conduct report of the candidate in the Venerable realm; a 21-second video clip of the candidate bathing in one of the following rivers:  Euphrates, Hudson, Styx; a 2,500 word essay on the relation between the candidate’s sexuality and religion, with sources appropriately cited in APA; 50 grams of the candidate’s flesh.

f.        Only Venerables may nominate Venerables to be Blessed; no Venerable may nominate him/herself.  A simply majority of all current Venerables is necessary to make a Blessed nomination.

2.      If the Council of I agrees with the submission, the nominee shall immediately be promoted from Venerable to Blessed and a plaque ordered for the occasion.

a.      Should the Council of I disagree with the submission, any relatives, friends or acquaintances of the submitter(s) who have a post-secondary degree shall be hung from meat hooks in front of Buffalo’s city hall.

b.      Any Venerable who has three successive failed submissions shall be automatically demoted to human.

c.       The name of the Venerable so made Blessed shall be inscribed on the Blessed plaque, which will be eternally hung above the urinals in the northernmost men’s washroom on the third floor of Buffalo city hall.

d.      The name of the Venerable so made Blessed shall be added to this Malfeasance in the Section of Blessedness.

3.      The Council of I may at any time, without cause or explanation, promote a Venerable to Blessed or demote a Blessed to Venerable apart from the above process.

a.      Even the Council of I¾may it breathe forever¾may not demote or promote directly between Blessedness and humanity.

b.      The exception to a. above is if all those in the Blessed category unanimously agree, without coercion, bribery or subterfuge, that one of their members should be cast from their midst, that member shall immediately, without debate or consideration, be made a little lower than human and his/her name struck from all records and his/her art and all references to it destroyed.

4.      No category of Barely Blessed shall exist.  One is Blessed or one is not and that is that.

Sainthood

1.      For those Venerables made Blessed, submissions may be made to the Council of I for consideration of sainthood.

a.      No human shall be sainted without first being made Blessed.

b.      Less than 5% of the Blessed shall be sainted within twelve centuries of their death.

c.       The Blessed shall be requested to appear before the Council of I to defend their candidacy; any Blessed who appears shall have their candidacy immediately and eternally revoked.

d.      A Senior Blessed (such defined as those who have had three or more unsuccessful candidacies for sainthood) must initiate a nomination for sainthood.  This shall be followed by validation by not less than 10% of the present Blessed population, not less than 25% of the present Venerable population and not more than 33.3% of the human population.

e.      A Blessed may be nominated for sainthood a maximum of three times, with an interval of not less than five centuries between each nomination.

f.        Requests for exceptions to e. above may be made in writing to:

The Council of I

21 Penny Lane

Rochester NY USA 14625-2217

                              (Note:  While the records and discussions related to promotions, demotions, nominations and submissions are not available, interested parties may write to the above address to request copies of exceptions requests.)

g.      Proof of two living and two posthumous miracles should be attached to the application for sainthood.

2.      If the Council of I agrees with the submission, the nominee shall immediately be promoted from Blessed to saint and a hole dug for the occasion.

a.      Should the Council of I disagree with the submission, Reprimand Form C-1342 shall be printed, addressed to all submitters, and stored in the Council’s personnel files for a period of not less than 17 years.

b.      The name of the Blessed so sainted shall be uttered briefly and inaudibly at the precise moment of sainthood.

c.       The name of the Blessed so sainted shall have a Proper written for him/her.  The entire cost of the Proper, including incidental expenditures, shall be fully borne by the Council of I.  The Proper shall be written by a qualified individual (the Council follows the 1513 Bavarian Code in this regard) before 51 further Propers have been written.

3.      The Council of I may at any time, without cause or explanation, promote a human, Venerable or Blessed to sainthood or demote a saint to Blessed, Venerable or human apart from the above process.

4.      The number of saints shall be eternally held at 81, the number of Blessed at no greater than 81 times 81 and of the number of Venerables there shall be no end.

a.      Desainted saints shall retain their Propers, but they shall be renamed Paupers, removed from the Proper and added to the Pauper.

b.      Desainted saints shall be known neither as Blesseds, Venerables, humans, saints, or desainted saints, but as desaints.  Let all who misname, whether through omission, commission, malice or curiosity, in written, oral or visual discourse, be circumscribed and their foresins nailed to Buggalo’s mare and the mare be ridden in the manner of old.

5.      No category of Bare Saint shall exist.  If one is not a saint, one is less than a saint and one is improper.

The Blessed

Blessed Filipepi Tondo; Blessed Oscar of controlled nature; Blessed Auguste of surmoulage and marcottage; Blessed Ruiz of muliebrous cubes; Blessed José y Lucientes of uiocide; Blessed Christopher of circumspice; Blessed Lloyd, Fröbelist; Blessed Roland, director and martyr; Blessed Il Prete Rosso, Pio Ospedale della Pietà; Blessed Edward, such sweet thunder; Blessed Dewey of the altonic reinventions; Blessed Gustav of bad hall; Blessed Daniel, Dumas’ Ding Dong Daddy; Blessed Leopold #9; Blessed Fyodorovitch, savage dissodant; Blessed Vassilievitch of the large hands; Blessed Orfeo of the Blessed Virgin; Blessed Miller, son of Clarence; Blessed Aristophanes, Reptilian and Fowl; Blessed Matsuo, weather-beaten skeleton; Blessed Charlotte of the three weird sisters, Blessed Blais, proto-nihilist; Blessed Benedictus, panpsychist; Blessed Niccolò, Satanist; Blessed Wallace, Vice-president; Blessed François, Carnivalist and Scatologist; Blessed Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand of the subtle influences; Blessed Elizabeth, agoraphobist; Blessed David, proto-ecologist; Blessed George, citizen; Blessed Rajmund of the dark souls; Blessed Mallord of fantastic puzzles; Blessed Muzaffar al-Din, Mumtaz Mahal; Blessed P-A, painter; Blessed Henri-Émile-Benoît, Fauvist; Blessed Gustav of Der Kuß; Blessed Felip Jacint Domènech, Marquis of Pubol; Blessed Paul, father of us all; Blessed Max, frottheim grattist; Blessed Edvard, skrik and morbidist; Blessed Dedo, addict, sculptor; Blessed Franz, dodecaphonic motivist; Blessed Johannes, yet another German schmaltz; Blessed Achilles, impressionist and misnomer; Blessed Dmitri Dmitri of the Babi Yar; Blessed Jacob, Yankee; Blessed Jakob Ludwig Bartholdy, with a name like that you don’t need no title; Blessed Fryderyk, excessivist; Blessed Robert, whimsical syphilitic; Blessed Peter, another one; Blessed Franz, liveried.

The Venerable

Venerable Jean, thief and homosexual; Venerable Schlomogustav, mythmongers; Venerable Alexander the rapist; Venerable Vladimirovich, pedophile and cribbist; Venerable Ambroise-Toussaint-Jules of terrifying ideas; Venerable Krzysztof of moral anxiety; Veneficial Arthur of the poofy hair; Venerable Gerald Sir; Venerable Newbold, architect; Ventral Lanier, alcoholic; Venatical Jonathan of the single hair; Ventricle García, Andalusian dog; Venal Nałęcz, trilingual nigger; Venerable Mordechai, anarchist; Venule Marie, tediast; The Unvendable Cuthbert who declines; Venerable Pith of one’s negation; Venerable Jake of things; Ventriloquial Stéphane of it’s pure sound; Vinfinitesimal Cartesius, calculating cud; Venereal Marlais, dog; Ventral Key, poor son of a bitch and romantic egoist; Venerable Andreevna of the helplessly cold breasts; Venerable Émile, atavist; Venerable Gerritszoon, foiblist; Vendable Marie of the misplaced talents; Venerable Edgar of the three red roses; Veniable Ernst, Eubranchus; Venatoiral Airy Tottle, tedia episteme telos smelos; Venrisible Poquelin, castigat ridendo mores; Venerable Yi Li Me, sing kong; Vurnable Fanny, secretary for porcelain; Venereal Valerian, that man; Venial Nat of the scarlet bugger; Venerable Tom, writer; Vencynical Gustave, bourgeois; Venerable Johan, destroyer; Vengeable Ellis of the matryona; Venabsurdible Beauchard, pied noir; Venbabble Barclay Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham; Unvendable OM of unmerited order; Venrisible Lydia’s for the youth; Venus’s Girdle Wills, Sebastian Melmoth; Verbosibble Bernard, antivivisectionist and fascist.

The Barely Venerable

The Barely Venerable Maro, the Barely Venerable Immanuel.

***

These saints under construction, these demi-saints of dishonorable mention, lustralling purgatives, still clambering on that hideous ladder though wormed.  Oh random time! Oh fickle fad!  Human scum leching after distant laughing dogs.  Here they are, the wretched pantheon, barking on air and stone, pissing on longgone churches.  Give them praise or mayonnaise or something.

March 15 – Malfeasance of Bach

Due to certain unusual formattings, Bach's Malfeasance does not appear as the author intended.  This unintended effect, however, seems to infer certain other intentions.  The Council of I doesn't particularly give a turd whether the original or modified form is comprehensible to anyone.

***

Friends.  Scholars.  Charlatans.  I shall share with you, this Grand Day of Caesar’s Death, the taxonomy and evolution of art.  While the faces of art are as infinitely varied as screensavers and leaves, its categories are strictly finite in number; specifically, seven:  dance, music, painting, architecture, literature, food, film.  And this is also their peculiar order in time.

Picture with me, if you will, on the screen of your

imagination­—if it hasn't yet been savagely attacked and

destroyed by the Great Beast, Television—Maria gnawing on

her uncle's thighbone.  She stands up, gorged on blood and marrow,

just as the sun drips over the horizon and spews its crimson spittle

for her pleasure.  She removes her porcupine pelt and with primitive

intensity and spontaneity flails her body for the gods.  Thus dance

 was first among the arts and we know from confused experience

that dancers are most severely misplaced in time.

Then came music.  Maria sang.

Grunts, whistles, howls, croaks.  She sang, and

while tigers may have plugged their ears, music, in a manner

of singing, was born.

 

Some time later, she dipped a freshly bitten prick in

blood and drew a fresco of her victim on the luscious curves of her

        cave wall.  He may not have liked it, squirming in the

        spiders in the corner, but she showed it to her friends,

and they approved.

A thousand years, a thousand leers:

Maria, out to impress an itinerant magician, razed

her cave and in its place build a coiled tower of bones and eyes

that lured that fine man in.  When he finally escaped, smitten, bitten,

with one less arm, he shared her design with the rat-gorged hovels

of the earth, and towers sprang in magnificent

     rebellion.

					0 BCE & CE 1000 CE 2000 CE

At the intersection of brutality and civilization,

what is commonly called Christmas, words were frozen into

stories, and literature was brought into the world with forceps.                                       

Wasn't this fun, chiseling alphabets?  Look—

anyone can do it!

During The Delicacy itself, Mario sprinkled cocoa

on a Frenchwoman, and nibbled with his friends

to create the culinary arts.

And in this pleasant present day, the great director,

Mario Maria Marionette, combined all previous six forms into one,

changed three dimensions into two, packed a thousand people in a

popcorn bag ... voilà ... film.

To be thorough in our investigation—and not simply historical—we must make two further points:  points which should please the scholars among you, whom I know are satisfied only with the most precise and rigorous logic (which is why we respect you so much), and perhaps also you charlatans, who are satisfied by games and masks.  (My friends—they are satisfied with anything.)

The first point is a risky one, but must be made.  Each art has a primary and secondary practitioner; the whole shebang looks like this:

Art	Primary Practitioner	Secondary Practitioner
Dance	Choreographer	Dancer
Music	Composer	Musician
Painting	Painter	Dealer
Architecture	Architect	Builder
Literature	Writer	Publisher
Food	Chef	Waiter
Film	Director	Actor

Now in some cases—such as literature, architecture, food, painting—we would never say the secondary practitioner is as great as the primary, but in the remaining three—dance, music, film—we can always say that the greatest secondary practitioners are superior to the mediocre primary practitioners.  Thus, Bogart exceeds Just Jaeckin, Gould Schubert, and Anna Pavlova Yasmina Ramzy.  But we cannot say that any secondary practitioner—no matter how great—equals or exceeds the greatest primary:  Gould does not equal Bach, Whelan Balanchine.  This is simply because the primary practitioner is closer to creation's center, transforming the unknown to the known—and the secondary practitioner is inevitably left the task of interpretation—like the shuffling scholar, who spends his gray decades writing about artists or politicians, but always somehow distant from the action.

Now secondary practitioners, unlike scholars, are in the action—in some cases are the action—so they leave you scholars in the outhouse; though you may write a thousand refereed articles opposing me and win the Bribitzer, you'll still be out in the petunias.

We could, naturally, as is the rage these democratic times, extend art outward and include in our loving arms:  quilters, performance artists, software developers, cabinet makers, news reporters, managers.  They too are artists.  But why stop there?  Prostitutes create guilt, cops tickets, priests and morticians lies, secretaries power, rock stars lust, the wealthy envy ... we're all artists!  Mothers create.  So do roaches, spores.  Even meteors, planets, rocks, stars do, in their own special way ... the whole universe is an artist … — … yippee!

But for the term to have any meaning (if everything's an artist, everything's also a chair, a weed, an analysand, a tune, a tomb), it must suffer the burden of limitations; my shebang and table stand; scholars, go home.

Point two.

If sainthood's all about purity, which of the seven forms is the most pure?  Can we say that one of them definitively offers the potential for a more polished mirror of the world?

Dance and music, after all, being the oldest and simplest—no tools are required other than the body—lay a certain claim; their immediacy and transience—ignoring recent technological developments—are characteristics we could associate with purity.  Food too, here a moment, consumed the next, the foie gras entier but a memory on the tongue, being so necessary for survival, yet this survival raised to the power of art and beauty!—surely, surely, food is the purest.  Yet when we examine architecture and note that this most utilitarian enterprise doesn't only serve utility, but sends the greedy masses into awe—not just for a moment or a year, but for millennia!—who could say no to architecture's prerogative?  Painting's claim to purity is that the two share four letters—this surely is significant.  Film was the first form to eliminate a dimension while increasing complexity, which must count for something and begs the question—what one-dimensional form awaits us?  Literature uses the very medium that defines humans—words—working with these tools of imperfection to transcend the world.  If literature is the most pure, its purity arises from its precise enmeshment in human frailty; its purity is so pure because it is so impure.

What say you charlatans?  Whose side are you on?  Are you flesh’s squirming advocates?  Sound’s?  Do you defend the splash of color?  The hard display of edifice?  Word’s wormy wanton?  The kitchen’s kitsch?  Or pomo’s prick and power—light’s projection?

All of you ... all six billion charlatans and four hundred million scholars (friends, stay out of this) ... cast your vote for the Crown of Purity.

***

We're here in Purity Central, the votes are in, and the results are ...

5,999,999,999 to 1

 ... no, wait, ... the 1's been murdered ...

to 0 ...

for

...

music

Some quotes from our excited participants—

The very voice of God (God)

The universal language (Sapan Shah)

Makes me feel good (Jaylan Xacutti)

The perfect propaganda tool (Klara Pölzl)

If music be the blood of strife, flay on (Billy Whipstick)

***

There you have it, there it is, music's got it.

On this Malfeasance of Bach, this consecrated Ides, when saints are betrayed by their friends and plundered, turn your speakers to 100 decibels, turn your iPods to deaf, crank your heart to Can ... or if eternity's not your thing, Piranha Carey or M&Ms ... hunker down in purity's beady bath:  six billion charlatans can't be wrong.