1 of XX — Tenement Press

Rehearsal / 33. Jon Auman, 1 /of XX

^{Left—Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman,

The General, 79m (1926).

Right—Grigori Aleksandrov & Sergei M. Eisenstein,

The General Line, 121m (1929).}

The first in an associative thread
of works, works-in-progress, asides
& ideas from Auman.

The General *

A house falls on a man. Money sticks to his hands and the soles of his shoes, but he'll get none of it in the end. Then comes college, steamboats and then trains: The General.

Alone, the title is an abstraction conjuring up infinitely repeating patterns of images. There are the Patton replicas in knee-high leather boots, the stars and stripes, a close up of a stolid mouth chewing on one of John Ford's militant cigars. Inevitably it leads to the muddy combat jeeps, beach landings and schoolboy heroics that populate innocent movie wars.

Or, there is 'the general' in lower case (and lower class). What the thesaurus throws back as: COMMON PEOPLE, masses, populace, commonality, or, informally: the great unwashed. An unspecified body of bodies and expendable ideas.

Then, of course, there is The General Line, title of another near contemporary masterpiece of montage (Keaton made his film in 1929, while Eisenstein finished his in ‘26). Machines and faces must have been on the mind of the world. Charlie Chaplin, who won his first Academy Award in 1929 for The Circus, got the plaudits (and later the exile) for his proto-socialist tramp, who potato-danced his way into hearts and homes. Keaton isn’t so easily digested.

Where Chaplin made a habit of playing the only angel in a bum world, Keaton cast himself as just another Joe in the room—a bit player on a stage governed by materialist coincidences. Banks are ruined, parties are trashed. Minor disaster after minor disaster unfolds with the fractured, kinetic rhythms later disallowed by the introduction of sound.

And that face... the dead-eyed, hopeless stare of the citizen who can take anything but never understands. Does he ever ask questions? No, he keeps running, jumps, dives and dodges when he has to. Money, greed and corruption—the dream and the anti-dream run on parallel tracks. They propel each other forward while the everyman leaps between them, denied the time and space even to marvel at his own spectacular condition. No resolution. No grace or serendipity. Only the momentary delay—an empty frame between reels—until the next crisis.

_{May 2015, New York City}

_{* First published in Hotel #1 (2016).}

^{Jon Auman is a writer renting in Brooklyn.}

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