In the Sixteenth Season, Dog the Bounty Hunter captures a fugitive Lloyd Blankfein (ex — Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Goldman Sachs). As part of Blankfein’s community service, he’s ordered to play the role of the poet Sebastian Venable in a Cirque du Soleil production of the Tennessee Williams play Suddenly, Last Summer. (It would be more accurate to say that Blankfein is, winkingly, playing himself playing Sebastian Venable.) In the Williams play, Venable is cannibalized by the street urchins / male prostitutes he’s been paying for sex. (In the play, we only hear the story as narrated by Sebastian’s insane cousin, Catharine Holly. In the movie version, we actually see fragments in flashback, as Catharine (played by Elizabeth Taylor), under the influence of Sodium Pentothal, relates the grisly story to the lobotomy specialist, Dr. John Cukrowicz (played by Montgomery Clift), of how, while vacationing in the Galápagos Islands, her cousin was beaten by street urchins / male prostitutes, who then tore him apart and ate his flesh.) At the end of the Cirque du Soleil production, Blankfein is actually cannibalized by street urchins / male prostitutes. No one in the audience even lifts a finger to try and help Blankfein. Even though it’s horrifically grisly—Blankfein is hacked and torn apart by flesh-eating, subproletarian ragazzi di vita (hustlers) — his agonized cries for help go unheeded. Everyone in the audience thinks it’s just part of the Cirque du Soleil show. But it actually happens. In real life. These are not actors (i.e., rich fucking celebrities) pretending to be flesh-eating, subproletarian ragazzi di vita. These are real flesh-eating, subproletarian ragazzi di vita.
XOXO’s fingerprints are all over these mutations and deformities (i.e., the mind-fucking God’s “trashing” of the epic) — the power ballads; the operatic self-enucleation of the REAL HUSBAND’s eyeballs; the talk-radio drivel about cheap foreign labor and tort reform; the suborning of experts with the expedient of an abbreviated, user-friendly title; the suggestion that an epic that’s been declaimed by chanting, drug-addled bards for tens of thousands of years is actually some sort of compliant, domesticated pet that can be beckoned merely with the tantalizing display of a bacon-flavored treat; etc. The frat-boy prank of changing the word “Flemish” to “Phlegmish” is classic XOXO, as are the screeching gossip-magazine headlines that plunge Ike into the cauldron of his own contradictory abhorrence of celebrity and yearning for immortal renown, his introversion and diffidence and how shamelessly he revels in the masturbatory gaze of moaning Goddesses. And although the ritual dismemberment and cannibalization of Wall Street titan Lloyd Blankfein by feral male hustlers (or ragazzi di vita) “reeking of Thierry Mugler” bears the unmistakable imprint of La Felina, the abrupt and arbitrary switch from German to Italian as T.S.F.N.’s pet foreign language (e.g., ragazzi di vita) seems right out of XOXO’s bag of tricks.
An expert once observed that XOXO “totally gets off on injecting military-grade ass-cheese into the synapses of the epic.” But is the “XOXO effect” always harmful? It undoubtedly maximizes the mutability of the epic, which is a good thing, right? And although the Sixteenth Season is rough going and many people find sitting through a public recitation of it almost unbearably harrowing, it is also one of the most beloved Seasons. Grafting the culturally prestigious melody of “O Sink Hernieder, Nacht Der Liebe” from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde into “The Ballad of the Severed Bard-Head,” especially to cue the REAL HUSBAND’s self-enucleation by melon baller, couldn’t really be called “bad,” right?
But last September, the highly regarded but reclusive Caltech biochemistry professor Pot Pi, or someone writing under his name, issued a controversial statement declaring that XOXO was, in fact, a form of delusional parasitosis, akin to Morgellons disease. (Not much is known publicly about Pot Pi. There are no official photos of him. And the authenticity of existing images is debated. Apart from the fact that he is missing one eye, accounts of his physical appearance are wildly contradictory. Some people who have met him describe him as having the voluptuous curves of a Beyoncé or a Serena Williams, while others describe him as more closely resembling Representative Henry Waxman. And while he has been characterized by some as shy and untalkative with foreigners, others contend that if you get a few Mike’s Hard Lemonades into him, he becomes a screeching cockjockey.) Pot Pi’s hypothesis that XOXO is a form of delusional parasitosis is one with which Ike Karton violently disagrees. Ike unequivocally rejects any suggestion that the Gods are symbolic or allegorical. And just as he would dismiss any pantheistic or structuralist or semiotic interpretation of the Gods, he categorically repudiates a psychopathological one. Ike communes with the Gods themselves, he is their beloved, he is their sexual fantasy, he is their chosen one, even though they occasionally array themselves against him when they’ve taken umbrage at something, e.g., Shanice’s pique at having been left off the “Ten Gods I’d Fuck (T.G.I.F.)” list. But the bottom line is: the Gods are real and they intervene in human affairs. Period. And this is why Ike sent one of his elegant little Joseph Cornell / Unabomber boxes to Pot Pi at Caltech — a box containing a butcher cleaver stuck to Pot Pi’s photograph and splashed with blood and cold vomit, and a note that read, “You must not forget that traitors (i.e., thorns in the eyes of the Gods) have ALWAYS been slaughtered by cleavers.” It’s Almost Impossible to Get One’s Mind Around XOXO
What shape does one’s mind need to assume in order to get around (i.e., “apprehend”—with both its meanings of “capture” and “understand”) XOXO?
It’s impossible to know where XOXO ends and you begin.
XOXO calls into question the provenance and chain of custody of every single thought in your head.
XOXO is the inside and the outside.
Sometimes it actually appears as if T.S.F.N. is holding its own against XOXO. Maybe, with an invulnerability conferred by its morbid ingestion of everything extrinsic to it, T.S.F.N. simply cannot be killed, like Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers. So powerful is the human tropism toward boldface signifiers that whenever the severed bard-heads manage, even momentarily, to wrest control of the epic from XOXO and return to the basic story of Ike and Ruthie and Vance, the audience (which has glazed over, staring torpidly at their feet during the interminable and frequently incoherent exegetical Seasons) perks up, looking alive and avidly interested. But these moments are far and few between, and given the overwhelming perception that XOXO has carte blanche access to the bards’ brains and to your brain (via public recitation, book, Kindle, Nook, iPad, iTunes, etc.), it’s reasonable to ask: Why hasn’t XOXO just killed T.S.F.N. by now? And the answer is, according to the experts, because XOXO is content to simply toy with the epic, to just keep fucking with it forever.