Tony O'Neill
Harper Collins Publishers (2010)
“I
am the dead center of a changing reality for which no langage has been
invented”
Henry
Miller – Black Spring
The modern city, its loneliness, the
misfortune it generates and the gloomy characters wandering in its sad streets.
Contraries are juxtaposing… where opulence mixes up with its dizzy opposition.
Through the tentacles of its deployment – like dead cells in a rotting body –
crawls a haunting melancholy. Ethereal hopes turn into the more infectious
degeneration. In the modern city, everyone is kind of insane, perverse and
endlessly alone.
Tony O’Neill’s city suffers from an
incurable illness. Like the time we live in, like our world, like a dope addict
organism. Sin crawls in Los Angeles’s
veins, a city haunted by the nightmares of its unconsciousness… Firstly, there
is the urban envelop, weaving a web of uneasiness around the people who pace up
and down its ramification. Then there are Jeffrey and Randal, Pat or Trina,
Spider, Damian or dr Mike… all kind of individuals with opposite trajectories
but their fate will clash into each other because of the obscene satisfaction
going through their bodies… Anguished and wounded by solitude, Tony O’Neill’s
characters echo the society they were born in. They wander together but
separately.
This bloody addiction and the fear
it generates! It doesn’t matter how addiction reveals itself and how it will be
satisfied, but everyone will be confronted to it in this convulsive book. A
dark, intense and furious book. Like the urban labyrinth the story takes place,
this piece has many ramification and echoes. As he analyses the
self-recognition all those characters are dreaming about and how their hopes
fade away, Tony O’Neill draws an acid portrait of the occidental agony.
Disillusion and boredom will bind Jeffrey
and Randal during a rehab. Jeffrey is a gay drug addict who found himself stuck
in Los Angeles
and forced to satisfy the psychotic delirium of a retired, corrupted cop so he
can buy his dope. Randal is the speedfreak offspring of a rich Hollywood godfather. Together they will chase a common
dream that could give them a new start in life. When the corrupted cop died,
Jeffrey found a unique and precious gang-bang video that shows among others,
Sharon Tate and Steeve McQueen. This celebrity orgy could interest another kind
of freaks: old rich Hollywood people bored to
death.
As they are stuck in this rehab
clinic, getting overfed by Dr Mike’s redemption bullshit. Dr Mike is an iconic
figure. He’s the presenter of the show Detoxing
America
and the author of the recovery’s Big
Book. A recipe to go from one idol to another! Dr Mike is the most wicked
character of this suffering city… Very often in O’Neill’s writing, irony and
humour give a break in the story’s fury… and when he chooses the fiction mode,
we feel close to insanity.
Between fiction and reality, between
an acerbic critic against society or the paranoiac delirium of destabilized
people, we never know which part catches up the other. The only stable marks
the reader can have are Los Angeles
and its polluted air, this monster of steel and asphalt swallowing everything
and everyone. As the urban landscape became denser during the XIX’s century,
the modern city engendered all the possibilities of phobia. Metropolis, anti-utopia movement and
science-fiction defined the gloomy representations that cities imposed on
contemporary human beings… where sadness spreads itself, where we are alone,
lost in the unrestrained movement… individual voices getting lost within the
global sonic magma… All those people who find themselves marginalised: poor and
immigrants, wandering drug addicts, prostitutes and homeless… The ones who are
left behind, the ones who die in loneliness…
In the memory of the people he
hanged around with during his blurred years of indecision and through the sad
eyes of all kind of outcasts, Tony O’Neill brings with SICK CITY
a very contemporary reflexion about the urban imprisonment. Strange places or
characters we discovered already in his past books like Lupita or Alvarado Street,
the central knot of the story, where things will brutally end, the area where
nobody goes except beggars, murderers and dope heads.
SICK CITY makes the reader ill! The little
quote just above condenses in a way all the paradoxes and the themes explored
in this frantic book. Dope and money, sex
and violence, frivolous hopes or broken dreams… the psychic degeneration
imposed by our period. The better life that Randal and Jeffrey are imagining
would be possible with money. Money would be possible with an extreme video
they want to sell… Randal knows well Hollywood
and its corruption. The way money governs it all and how perversion entertains
producers or actors who are looking for new distraction.
We live the dusk of our time… a
world where everyone is unsatisfied, addicted, dreary, corrupted or perverse.
Like if the thin partition between madness and normality disappeared. It is our
world and Tony O’Neill invites us to look at it…
We thought the last reincarnation of
Sade occurred in the city of Interzone and since
then our good old marquis got locked in again, but in William Burroughs’s inner
world. When the Naked Lunch author
died, we thought nobody would be brave enough to dive again into the darkest
areas of being. But Sade is alive and he must be walking through L.A… like in
this book where Bukowski is searching Céline while death is coming around the
corner… reading SICK CITY is a little like asking to yourself what human form
the Justine’s author would occupy in
our world… Maybe he’s Damian, a mad painter who tries to represent the body’s
dereliction? It might be DeWald, a weird producer who owns Napoleon’s dick in a
bowl? Why not Pat, a real fucking maniac? We’re forced to think Sade is Dr
Mike…
Tony O’Neill’s writing mixes very
old things and very contemporary ones, like a montage of influences with
different stenches. From Jean Genet to Bataille, from Artaud to Sade, we think
about the obscure literature’s constellation. The human body, its doubtful
particularity and the unpleasant need that it aspires to… The fascination for
people who live in the street, for the struggling ones, the ones who steal, the
ones who sell dope and who solve their problems without thinking about police
or justice. SICK CITY is an indistinct journey between Atrocity Exhibition, The thief’s journal, LA Confidential and Moravagine. But there is something
different in O’Neill’s writing, something new maybe… a thin thread making a
very old past coagulate with a future we endure already… Tony O’Neill’s vision
of Hollywood
echoes to John Fante or Bukowski’s representations but as if he was working on
the next Garpar Noe’s movie.
In a great article named William Burroughs and the novel, Susan
Sontag talks about the fact a lot of writers in the middle of XX’s century
tried to use in their work the particular
tempo of movies and camera’s movement (Susan Sontag – Against interpretation and other essays). Tony O’Neill’s writing is
very cinematographic. The way it alternates between fixed point of views and
jerking angles. The way scope and anti-scope (?) is used, when for example he
goes from a close-up to a face destroyed by drug to the global movement the
body finds itself… Sometimes reading SICK CITY feels like watching a movie like
Amores Perros inside a Berlin
electronic underground club… it feels like being wasted… it feels like it’s 6 in the morning after
throwing up in the toilets…
Maybe we were waiting for a writer
like him since a long time without envisioning the possibility. This mix of
fury and sensitivity, of social analysis and philosophical reflexions… Tony
O’Neill’s characters are deeply human with their anguish and their dreams, with
their addiction and their nastiness… like the book from Cendrars Emmène-moi au bout du monde, SICK CITY
transports its reader in the hostile thoughts of fucked up individualities… A
world where personal aspirations and blurred aspect of being mix with the
global fate of a psychotic humanity. A world where cops are corrupted, where
cinema and theatre are worst than mafia. A world where the outcasts aren’t the
ones society point with its dirty finger.
La
Chaux-de-Fonds, 09
et 10 septembre 2011
