chained link kiss

Buddhadasa Bhikkhu

2010-03-14T11:21:00.000-07:00

Letter to Zanmi Lasante__Haiti

2010-01-30T10:36:00.000-08:00

Dear Partners in Health,

I admire and respect your efforts in Haiti during the recent earthquake tragedy as well as your health care projects prior to the cataclysm. However, the message you sent to me under your letterhead featuring Dr. Paul Farmer's address to the U.S. senate was disappointing. Though I'm not a citizen of Haiti nor an expert on Haitian politics, the country's present government seems corrupt and in need of an overhaul, as any reading of Haitian history over the last 10 years will elucidate. Dr. Farmer doesn't mention this in his U.N. address. The deprivations of Haiti don't all stem from freak acts of nature, but are largely caused by systemic inequalities in the power structure of what should be a paradise in the Caribbean. Dr. Farmers suggestions seem vaguely to kowtow to the United Nations and the United States (as well as other industrialized nations) in hopes of opening new financial and policy networks similar to the policies which were in place prior to the earthquake. An unfortunate direction, I would think, considering that the paradigm used won't protect the people of Haiti from the international business and governmental interests bent on exploiting Haiti for its own profit and ends. Dr. Farmer acknowledges Bill Clinton as a prospective partner in his plans for Haiti. I would remind you that Clinton did more damage to the people of the undeveloped nations in our hemisphere than any single individual alive. His international policies enacted while President of the U.S. (NAFTA among them) has stifled the lives of millions upon millions of people in Mexico, Central America and elsewhere. Dr. Farmer and Partners in Health (Zanmi Lasante) are swimming with sharks, which spells grave troubles ahead for the average Haitian citizen.

Economics is not my specialty, but the class inequalities of consumer capitalism which the United Nation and the United States uphold are far more dangerous than even your recent earthquake. Someone should ask the people of Haiti which avenues of future economic and cultural design they're most desirous of following rather than bureaucrats and celebrities speaking in their interest. The modern world has many examples of foreign business and governmental interests (even many NGOs) failing the people while providing great profit to those who acquire contracts and drive policy. I would have Dr. Farmer first ask the United States aid contingent of military personnel in Haiti to remove their arms, dismantle the "Green Zone" surrounding the airport of Port au Prince, and investigate the corruption of Haiti's current government. I would wisely fear the business interests of the world sharpening their metaphorical knife and fork as they enter Haiti with soldiers and antibiotics.

I again applaud the service which Partners in Health has provided to the people of Haiti, but I voice grave fears of foreign interests preying on a weak and greedy government, plunging the average Haitian into a future of even worse economic servility and loss of human rights.

Please pardon my "soapbox" sermonizing, but the stakes are high and the sharks are most certainly circling. Dr. Farmer seems to be unaware of, or in league with, those same interests which most alarm me.

In Solidarity,
Dennis Dorney

Poison Idea1983Elvis is on the back

2010-01-10T11:01:00.000-08:00

A Kiss On The HeadMarina TsvetayevaPoem

2010-01-01T13:56:00.000-08:00

.

A Kiss On The Head

A kiss on the head---wipes away misery.
I kiss your head.

A kiss on the eyes---takes away sleeplessness.
I kiss your eyes.

A kiss on the lips---quenches the deepest thirst.
I kiss your lips.

A kiss on the head---wipes away memory.
I kiss your head.

.
(A Kiss On The Head is from Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva, translated by Elaine Feinstein, E.P. Dutton, 1986. The image above is a Shunga woodcut print from 1820 by Hokusai titled Dream of the Fisherman's Wife).

.

Morituri__Bernhard Wicki

2009-12-31T16:19:00.000-08:00

So, I’m in bed this morning, a few days after watching an old VHS of Morituri, and can’t seem to get it out of my head. It’s a film from the mid-Sixties directed by a Bernhard Wicki, a German actor/director who’s probably best known for Die Brucke (1959). The evening I watched it in my apartment I wasn’t particularly impressed, except perhaps by the black and white cinematography of Conrad Hall, and the solid performances. So why this morning does it play over and over inside the broken down movie theater behind my eyes? And why, in this era of immediate forgetfulness can I still see the handsome profile of Marlon Brando in a white linen suit playing the coerced Nazi saboteur, smug in his personal isolation? I doubt that his performance in Morituri is to be found in anyone’s top ten Brando vehicles—so why this cinematic hangover on my part, where scenes sneak back into my consciousness unexpectedly, like an alcoholic’s memories of his most recent bender? This is not to say that the film was a bad one, but it didn’t seem like anything terribly original or poignant either. Nothing I would still be ruminating over days later.

Perhaps part of my acknowledged fascination was in the story, which at first glimpse seemed a rather ordinary World War II genre film mixed with equal parts Hitchcock-like thriller--that is, a rather formulaic espionage model. My opinion has changed though, but more on that later. In keeping with Hollywood’s menu for war movie success, Morituri does boast a very good cast including: Marlon Brando, Yul Brynner, Janet Margolin, Trevor Howard, Hans Christian Blech, Martin Benrath, and even the quintessential nerdy coward, Wally Cox. All are talented, all dedicated to their roles. One may quibble that Brando’s fey German accent seemed to come and go throughout the movie, or that Janet Margolin (the film’s only woman) falters at convincingly symbolizing the horrors of the holocaust, and indeed the history of all Jews—a chore too vast for any single character or actor. Though, even if her part was far too multi-faceted for a mere 15 minutes of screen time, she was the very soul of the movie, and the camera loved her face. It once again makes one realize what a loss American movies sustained when directors and casting directors began to overlook her abilities by the mid-1970’s, relegating her to episodic television until her early death. Then there’s Yul Brynner, an actor who I have previously pigeonholed as something of an industry hack. He’s one of those vaguely exotic actors who can fake ethnic roles, and he enjoyed a good career by playing the Cossack warrior, or Siamese King, or brooding Russian, or Egyptian Pharoah; his physical appearance and vocal bravado sometimes seemed more important than any insight into characters or their range of quiet emotion. But I was wrong. Recently watching him in The Sound and the Fury (Martin Ritt, 1959), I was captivated by his conflicted character’s interior confusion and secrecy, while outwardly delivering authoritarian bombast. Though paired with the formidable Joanne Woodward as a lead, Brynner paced himself into a cathartic unfolding by movie’s end. So too in Morituri, working with the heralded Brando, Yul Brynner interprets Captain Mueller (in a very strong performance) as yet another psychically antagonized personality, this time he's a captain of a freighter carrying an important cargo bound from Tokyo to Europe and, once there, the Nazi war effort. In addition to the aforementioned, the Darmstadt-born actor Hans Christian Blech was charismatically engaging as an anti-Nazi engine room worker named Donkeyman. This working class hero focused upon ending the reign of Third Reich power, represented in the form of Brando’s SS undercover officer, Robert Crain. Blech as Donkeyman is a very interesting actor, with facial scars actually carried back from WWII battles on the Russian front. Though he performed in a many roles in his homeland, he was rarely seen by American audiences. The entire cast proved well-chosen by Wicki, each one capable and seeming to feed off the performances of one another.

Perhaps here I should present a short distillation of the story: as mentioned Yul Brynner is Mueller, German captain of a freighter commissioned in Tokyo with bringing a load of raw rubber to aid the German war effort. He doesn’t seem to mind the cargo, but braces at the German navy hand-picking his crew with political prisoners they hope to arrest once the ship lands in German occupied territory. Meanwhile we find Brando's Robert Crain as a German deserter living the good life in India, hoping to live through the war undetected. His personal neutrality and anti-war stance is flipped by Trevor Howard, a British Intelligence Officer who threatens to arrest Brando and turn him over to the Gestapo if he doesn’t agree to sail upon the aforementioned freighter as a spy posing as a SS officer. Using his demolition skills, the plan is to dismantle the scuttling charges on-board ship, helping effect the waylaying of the precious cargo by American naval ships on the High Seas. The German freighter’s officer staff is composed of pro-Nazis whereas the crew is comprised mainly of political dissidents. About three reels into the film an American ship is sunk by a German U-Boat, and when their surviving passengers and crew are transferred as prisoners onto Yul Brynner’s ship for transport to Germany, the captain’s political disinterest is put to the test. One of the prisoners is a female German Jew named Ester, played adroitly by Janet Margolin. Ester had been previously imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo in Germany; and so now finds herself, once again, captured by her German nemesis and along with the other American prisoners is heading back aboard the ship to certain gestapo interrogation and a concentration camp. Her disdain is boundless and her sense of doom is palpable to all, rendering her fearless and capable of anything. Her plight convinces both Brando’s spy and Brenner’s ship captain to reassess their disenfranchised view of the war’s issues and combine forces to thwart the Nazis (typical Hollywood jingoism). Give or take a few subplots, that’s the main thread of Morituri’s story. Nothing we haven’t seen before, or will see again, but snappy and filled with digressive detours into moral questionings without rote answers, or any answers. In addition, the jaundiced view of mankind seen in political settings looks equally dismal for Axis or Allies; an uncommon focus, but probably a truer one from which to observe the grand experiment of war.

However, none of this gives any indication why the film remains interesting to me, or why it’s shallow political ideology should impress me. If the cast and cinematography are the most laudatory ingredients of Morituri, it would appear that the screenplay itself gives it its anemic palor. Certainly a lackluster story/screenplay can ruin a production, or at least hamstring the other factors into that status we may refer to as “a noble failure.” But I’m not so sure the screenplay is bad at all, just the contrary. It was written by Daniel Taradash as an adaptation from a novel by Werner Jorg Luddecke. Taradash’s professional track record as a screenwriter is very accomplished indeed. Some of his other efforts include Golden Boy (Mamoulian 1939), Knock On Any Door (Nicholas Ray, 1949), the weird and wonderful Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952), From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953) for which he won an Oscar, Picnic (Joshua Logan, 1955), Castle Keep (Sydney Pollack, 1969), and many others. Of course a history of adapting novels into good movies doesn’t mean that he couldn't have bombed on Morituri, but it did make me look again before casting any aspersions onto Taradash for this film’s seeming weaknesses. No, upon rethinking it, the screenplay’s episodes, its pacing, its dialogue, its unity were all a solid bulwark upon which a good movie can be carried. And in addition, beneath the outward appearance of a fairly typical jingoistic war movie, lurks the film’s contrary philosophy—not an anti-war movie as once might expect from participants like Bernhard Wicki and Marlon Brando, but instead a thinking person’s war movie. And that is not common.

How to illustrate what I mean by a “thinking person’s war movie?” For lack of a better method, I’d like to introduce some of those scenes which keep coming back to me as I lie in bed. Here’s one: an introductory scene where Yul Brynner's captain Mueller exits a cab in a busy Tokyo street in 1942 and enters the German consulate. Nothing earth-shattering I suppose, a downtown street scene with a locale title naming the city and date. Brynner is obviously upset and hurried as he rushes from his cab into a nondescript, though modern, building to confront the German government. Oddly, out of all the Hollywood war movies I can think of, none showed a wartime Tokyo street scene, and certainly none showed Tokyo in 1942 with Westerners walking the streets, unhampered by irate citizens or military. Of course the Germans retained diplomatic ties with Japan during the war, and so it stands to reason that Japan may have had a few Germans in residence. But merely the image of a non-Asian in Tokyo seems to fly in the face of all that I, as an American, had seen in films or learned at school. Hollywood as an arm of American foreign policy nearly always showed Americans at war in a good light, and our enemies as diabolical monsters. Even in 1965, 20 years after the armistice, that fundamental view was still adhered to. We were also led to believe that Japanese citizens were racists, hating all Euro-centric peoples, especially white Americans—a useful guise to mask our own Asian racism. And so, merely to view an opening street shot of European civilians acting perfectly normal, and being treated quite decently in downtown Tokyo in the middle of WWII came as a shock. Of course Brynner's Captain Mueller works in and out of ports all over the world. Shipping is certainly an international occupation, even in wartime. Many countries refuse to take sides in a conflict, their independence being good for peace also good for commerce. And so it isn’t too large a leap to see that this world of international commerce (business), retains its primary focus on profit even in wartime, whether in combatant countries or neutrals. The one constant is business and its profitability. Of course this can be shipping, but also investments, financial trading, stockpiling natural resources and selling to the highest bidder regardless of political affiliation. Curious for me to begin watching a war movie, and I’m already thinking along these lines.

Not long afterward, we see another street scene, but this time the locale title informs us that we’re in India, 1942. Trevor Howard is paying a call on an effete playboy, Brando, in his Indian home surrounded by modern German art (Nazis considered it decadent), and tasteful, ancient Hindu sculptures. We find him dressed in fine western clothes and listening to Mozart on his record player. We learn that Brando's character is named Robert Crain, and had deserted the German army after being trained as a demolition expert. Though movies certainly have shown deserters many times, Brando is neither ruled by cowardice, nor anti-Nazi feelings, he’s merely interested in protecting his privilege at all costs. Before the war, he was never a jack-booted brown-shirt fighting communists in the streets, or rounding up Jews into trucks. Instead, we find in Brando an educated, art-loving, handsome, self-contained citizen of modernity and rational thought. His ideology knows no politics, nor great populations of like-minded volk. He’s an individual who has no allegiance to National Socialism nor Democratic Republicanism. He hates no one, but neither does he feel linked to anyone. Oddly, the Japanese writer Jun’ichiro Tanizaki wrote about similar people prior to WWII, most closely perhaps in Some Prefer Nettles, 1929. However Tanizaki’s central characters weren’t artistic Germans, but Japanese moderns who at that time included many western influences into their lives and ethos. Brando’s character is in exile from stupidity, from chaos, from injustice—he’s in flight from all those traits humans seem condemned to repeat. In most ways, he’s enviable in his thinking and his isolation, but there are larger issues at play in the world, and in this movie. Soon, he’s caught by the powers he seeks to avoid, in this case British Army Intelligence, then black-mailed into working for them against the German military, to which he once belonged.

Brando's Robert Crain is an eccentric, not unlike Camus’ Stranger, with the obvious and large difference that Brando can enjoy himself and doesn’t feel hounded by a sourceless anxiety. Brando’s character has set himself up to be a witness and a judge rather than a participant in war or communal life itself. But he’s dragged from that fortunate perch down into the mire of society, the masses who must dance to a fiddle played by those who control economic and political power. In today’s world, there are those who seem to follow Robert Crain's example. I think of Christopher Hitchens and those neo-cons who divorce themselves from the population at large, but seek to use abilities at their disposal to protect their solitary privilege, to amass distinction for themselves and friends, increase influence and wealth, and encourage the protection of a higher order. I think of those who would find wit more important than shelter for the homeless, personal art collections more important than simple protections for those millions of investors who find their retirement accounts ravaged by Wall Street oligarchs. I think of personal aggrandizement as redemptive theory. Now did Morituri bring me these ideas, or were they merely whirling around my brain and punctuated by the characters in Bernhard Wicki’s movie? Probably both.

As the film proceeds, there is a sequence when Janet Margolin’s character Ester relates the tortures and degradations she was forced to undergo at the hands of Gestapo agents. They were depraved, violent and in the case of her brother, lethal. In this film, Janet Margolin is a walking shade, a cipher roaming the world looking for her familial dead so that she can lie down with them forever. She had been damaged beyond repair, yet had the bad manners to still be alive as proof of a wicked world, a complex and dangerous species. We're in the maw of Greek tragedy here. Morituri doesn’t merely blame the Nazi’s, since we watch Americans (on board as prisoners) sexually raping her in exchange for their participation in a scheme to assault the ship’s officers. Her face shows no effect whatsoever, no pain, no remorse, no feeling at all. Those are luxuries which are no longer possible in a world where “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” Janet Margolin wasn’t only a Jew representing all Jews; nor one Jew merely representing one integer in the Holocaust’s millions. Janet Margolin was representing all victims, past and future, Jews and non-Jews. And her pathetic story was the only cause sufficiently serious to change the beliefs of both Robert Crain's egalitarian self-love, and Captain Mueller's fusion with responsibility—be it for family (love for his son) or Fatherland. Americans depicted in this film weren’t heroic, Germans certainly weren’t either, nor Japanese, nor British. Each organized faction merely contributed to a larger immanence of brutality, no matter the flag. Refusal to enter conflict, or personal passivism wasn’t an option either, since power’s darkest debasements must be opposed in the face of its combined savagery. Or else . . . what? Perhaps something coded in our genetic make-up provides that answer, certainly something older than written history. Are we monsters and angels? Either or none?

At the denouement, humans in the unlikely costumes of Robert Crain and Captain Mueller finally remembered their humanity and acted accordingly, though not in time to save Ester's fragile life. Both become willing to accept even the possibility of the gestapo's draconian punishments for the treason of respecting their neighbor, perhaps loving their neighbor. The ending shots don’t exhibit the two main protagonists together in some composition of union or brotherhood. Instead they inhabit two separate parts of the floundering ship. Miracles of communion between erstwhile enemies isn’t the film’s easy answer. The questions posed are personal, solitary questions we are encouraged to ask themselves without aid of community or cant. Not bad for a 1965 war/spy movie . . . with Wally Cox.

.

MondayPrimo LeviPoem

2009-12-29T14:05:00.000-08:00

.

Monday

Is anything sadder than a train
That leaves when it’s supposed to,
That has only one voice,
Only one route?
There’s nothing sadder.

Except perhaps a cart horse,
Shut between two shafts
And unable even to look sideways.
Its whole life is walking.

And a man? Isn’t a man sad?
If he lives in solitude a long time,
If he believes time has run its course,
A man is a sad thing too.

.
(Monday is from Primo Levi's Collected Poems, translated by Brian Swann and Ruth Tenzer Feldman, Faber and Faber, UK, 1988. The photograph is pilfered from Flickr. It's a photo taken by Murfomurf late at night from a moving car, through a dirty window).

.

Woodpecker__A Film by Alex Karpovsky

2009-12-27T22:09:00.000-08:00

http://www.woodpeckerfilm.com/

(You'll have to drag and drop the link. My link connection function is broken. Sorry)

.

Where Un-Making Reigns__Adrienne Rich

2009-12-24T15:09:00.000-08:00

.

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

A passion to make, and make again
where such un-making reigns. --Adrienne Rich

Recently, a friend sent me a letter in which she included the above excerpt from an Adrienne Rich poem. A beautiful sentiment on the face of it, but something struck me as problematic, or too pat in the well-wrought lines. Like a bumper sticker or a slogan, the reader is too quickly and too easily let off the hook. Rich is working in the broadest of strokes, embarking on nothing less than reconstituting the world. Big job. She mentions that others in history have taken on similar tasks, people common as herself. She makes it sound a little like doing a load of laundry, but a rather big and important load. The problem is, through all this reconstituting of the world, nothing has been resolved, nor changed. I for one am tired of empty phrases, even eloquent ones.

Zen master Dogen in the Mountains and River Sutra wrote that "the blue mountains are constantly walking... He who doubts their walking does not understand his own walking." Just why this quote placed itself in my mind as the successor to Adrienne Rich's profound lines (of which she has many), I don't know. Maybe I just like the idea that the blue mountains are constantly walking and will be doing so long after we're gone--individually and as a species. Sometimes I worry that a very negative arrogance accompanies all of us who believe it is our duty or within our ability to reconstitute the world; those of us who share this passion to make, and make again where such un-making reigns. Yes, it's important to make, to create, to will something alive, especially in a landscape of entropy, but only if it has value. Otherwise we merely manufacture more un-needed stuff, egocentric detritus--be it idealogical, artistic or consumerist. For my nickel, the world has had too much making, with not nearly enough gravitas behind such making. We may find that within our constructs we create our own tyranny of ideology, offering actions which are not fundamentally different than those we might oppose. In the rush to produce some testament of existence, we sorrowfully plant one more thoughtless flag. Sorry that this sounds so pompous on my part, but until one "understands his [sic] own walking," there's little constructive worth that's afforded to our actions, since we're trying to make decisions from a very limited or erroneous set of impersonal options. My interpretation sounds lifted from Socrates’ dictum, know thyself, and I suppose it is.

In the quotation above, Adrienne Rich seems a reluctant member whose desire to join is born solely out of frustration at what has been lost, or hope for some better solution, and isn't that call to action truly the same rationale we always use when entering the fray, any fray? I'm perhaps most impressed that Adrienne Rich is willing to cast her lot with a group whose aims are admirable (though certainly grandiose), but whose position is necessarily perverse in it's opposition to popular thinking, or opposition to the era's accepted ethos. Literature is filled with these stories, the righteous of small means fighting the seemingly impervious tyrant (even the metaphorical tyrant of inaction), and eventually, after much suffering, snatching victory. But, history is different than literature. David slew Goliath, but immediately dove into a miasma of monarchical extremes and abuses, so that his reconstituted world became almost identical to the world before his revolt, except the players had shifted. More recently we saw it in the Bolshevik Revolution's mission change from one of investing power in the people, to bestowing power to a small political core and eventually a single despot. During the interim since we human beings stopped being hunters and gatherers, not very long ago--10,000 years is a conservative number--it's been one power base overturning the next, be it military, economic, or philosophical. The common fact seems to be that human beings have no idea what it means to be human beings, leaving each of us open to manipulation and governance by any mad ideologue, or house painter, or oligarch with the focused will to power. We don't merely need to make, be it art or revolution; but to discover. We have more than enough already, and though Rich's poem may rue impoverishment by things lost, we have enormous resources left in both aesthetic and pragmatic worlds. No, instead of reloading more new themes to replace those jettisoned into history, I say we learn to integrate that which surrounds us, even now, raw concepts and paradigms that will work, will provide, will grow truthfully. Though it may require a more fearless way of looking at the world, my hunch lately is that it isn't the world which needs reconstituting, but our assessment of ourselves and our duty to this world and its possibilities. It is we who must change, we who must become accountable for ourselves and our relationship with other humans, as well as our intercourse with the natural order as a whole.

My fear, when hearing quotes concerning fighting the good fight, be it politically progressive or conversely conservative, is that we're falling into one of history's oft-mentioned traps. As soon as acknowledgment is won, or the message is promulgated, be it by poem, court decision or a Genghis Khan-styled pogram, the victorious are left with that most addictive drug we call influence. History shows us many instances of leaders wielding power, but rarely shows us leaders sharing power among all constituents in a form that these same constituents will be able to flourish within. I suppose it's so rare they could be called utopias: often merely literary devices, or small social experiments of dubious distinction. We seem ignorant, even with our much vaunted intellectual accumulations, of just what role human beings should play on our planet, or the universe. My personal belief is that we're monsters one and all, no matter the placard we carry or the army we command. Look at us, 7,000,000,000 monsters each desiring an unlimited sufficiency of those products we hold valuable above all others, be it simply a bowl of soup or a mansion in a gated community, our appetites seem to know only more. We're all idea junkies, dominated by genetically disposed addictions to our own brain functions. We humans pride ourselves on the size of our brains, the quotidian assessments of our brains, the shiny things cognition offers. The myth of Narcissus is merely the need to reflect upon ourselves endlessly, a Rube Goldberg machine of mental mirrors chugging endlessly and reflecting only more mirrors. We only view others as a reflection of ourselves; if they don't act the way we believe they should act (our way) they're pronounced inherently misguided and must be changed, since to leave them unchanged presents a threat to our own convictions about ourselves. By manipulating this simple premise, humans can be motivated to physically bully, enslave, imprison, torture, kill, enact genocides, always feeling logically correct (often legally correct) and morally responsible. We're certainly making, but I for one wish we weren't.

I'm getting far afield here, but my basic thrust is this: we're using the wrong tools to effect change. Humans will not change using traditional definitions of intelligence as the sole arbiter of actions, either in preconception or antecedent judgments. The tool is flawed, our short history proves as much. Of course it sounds heretical and preposterous, but then again those are mental constructs themselves. The Vedas of ancient India divide life into three temporal possibilities: Dreaming sleep; Dreamless sleep; and Waking. Our brains are active in each, but to different degrees. Intuition, artistic inspiration, and thoughts unfettered by logic (or its weird moral assignments) are each equally as old as human history. They were once more revered, and in some cultures continue as an influence, though certainly modified by a modernism of thought. Gandhi meditated as well as marched. Gandhi also refused the mantle of power once the political struggle against the British had ended. He invented a new script of political action based on non-violence and reliant upon a healthy cynicism toward traditional power. He was actually able to effect personal and social change, real change (at least for a time). Gandhi was not perfect, but then again he was no monster. He integrated physical work (i.e. weaving), non-logical brain processing (meditation), logical brain processing (reading, writing, conversation), exercise (walking or yoga) and a desire to understand himself, what it means to be a human being on planet earth. Not merely content to populate his ideas within the world so as to reflect an undisciplined image of himself, Gandhi chose a vigorous regimen of personal inquiry and balance. The world being what it is, it seems fitting that he was murdered. But, what we seem to forget was that he was murdered by someone exactly like ourselves, a monster.

To return to Adrienne Rich's quote, which is extraordinary in its insight and its dedication, I can only wish I were as selfless and filled with conviction. However, I also believe that her mission is pointless unless it can evince actual change, not illusory change. The battle isn’t fought with beauty, nor in protesters filling the streets, nor in gender caucus groups, nor in well-meaning articles published in periodicals or internet blogs, not even in revolutionaries armed and prepared to fight violence with violence. Instead, the actual battleground is within each individual. The battle is fought where there are no leaders, no antagonists to rail against, no comrades, no enemies. The battle is an interior revolution wherein we can disarm logic and useless intellectual arguments in favor of some greater and more humane discipline, and I certainly don’t mean any religious interpretation. Until we’ve changed ourselves, it’s mere idiocy to believe that we will alter any larger scheme or popular endeavor, except in name only. I’m afraid that the sentiment Adrienne Rich offers, heartfelt as it appears will never benefit the course of justice, equality, and peace, just as it has historically failed to do for the last 10,000 years. Until we wage insurrection against the monsters inhabiting ourselves, there’s no hope for metamorphosis of any social order, or civilization. Sure, we can lop off a few heads from our most egregiously diabolical leaders, or transform a few laws, or build a few monuments upon which to carve aphorisms in granite, but we’ll basically be in the same place. The human race will be destroying one another, maiming the planet’s ecosystems, using our protean resources to place power and privilege in the hands of a few at the dire consequence of the 7 Billion and growing. I encourage anyone who would be moved by Ms Rich’s quotation to refuse payment on that percentage of federal income tax which is currently used to conduct policies you believe are counter to humane practices: military budgets; federal protection of private financial interests; the prison industry; economic aid packages to foreign countries who conduct inhuman practices. Imagine if each of us actually acted with responsibility, facing legal punishment, financial backlash, estrangement by friends and colleagues, instead of merely talking like know-it-alls at the water cooler. Perhaps Adrienne Rich had such commitments in mind when she wrote of a passion to make, and make again where such an un-making reigns, I can't say. The slippery interpretations of metaphor and vague poetics are intentionally difficult to nail down, just look at how some interpret what they call holy scripture. Sadly, we Americans cower in our own leisure and point the finger at politicians for our problems. Most of us are never even uncomfortable, much less about to go hungry. We confuse anxiety with reality. No, I’m afraid readers of Adrienne Rich are not going to reconstitute the world in any valuable sense. We’ll all still vote either Democrat or Republican and feel that we’ve made a difference, pat ourselves on the back, flip on the television set and watch our favorite global media conglomerate’s comedy program.

About now, I'm sure you might like to yank away my soap box. But hey, I’m one of you too, a fellow coward. Let’s not pretend we’re anything else, nor crow about our ability to change things, to make things. We in the United States are a selfish lot, rather stupid, and embarrassing to the world at large--but above all we're dangerous. Perhaps we should practice restraint on our reconstituting of the world, perhaps we should learn to breathe deeply, reflect, and grow quiet; but even more importantly we should allow everyone else the same opportunity to breathe, even in Iraq, even Afghanistan, even, even, even. I'm reminded of lines from Eliot's Ash Wednesday: Teach us to care and not to care, teach us to sit still. And though I'm tempted to suggest that we begin a journey of discovery into ourselves, it would smack of hubris. I have no ideas which can help you, and I doubt that you have any which will aid me. In that we're equal, and we can call that a beginning.

(The above image is a mixed media painting by Greg Gossel. The excerpted poem at the start of my installment above is from Natural Resources, a poem included in Adreinne Rich's book The Dream of a Common Language--Norton, 1978).

.

4 Days Until Christmas

2009-12-21T13:11:00.000-08:00

A Tommy Hilfiger Duvet Cover ?

2009-12-16T16:34:00.001-08:00

.

.

Christmas in a Recession Year__Poem

2009-12-15T12:19:00.000-08:00

.

Christmas in a Recession Year

Oh shit, oh damn,
here’s the thing—I’m broke;
envious of everyone who isn’t.
Imagine only Dickens on your iPod.

But I suppose one might
forego the mandatory tinsel tributes,
those presents frothing with ribbons—
after all, our last few years
weren’t scripted by Ernst Lubitsch
now were they?

Sometimes the best I can muster
while looking for a parking spot
beneath Macy’s or Best Buy
is to not hate my fellows
or visualize them caught pitiably
under a 40 point headline.

Maybe it’s a year for minimums:
fewer munitions transports perhaps,
smaller numbers of caskets
in villages or suburbs.
Can’t we confess to one another
that we’re not in a position
to wrap more cold Moslem children
with bows and holly
and place them beside the fir boughs?
At least this year?

.
(Image above is Untitled; Red, Orange, Brown and Black Butterfly #581 (colored pencil on paper) by Mark Grotjahn, 2005. It belongs to the MOMA collection. He lives and works in Los Angeles).

.

Let The Right One In__Whitenesses

2009-12-12T13:06:00.000-08:00

.

Kare Hedebrant
.

The color white with its associated hues and permutations seems to be a primary physical indicator in the Swedish vampire film, Let the Right One In—and a ravishing white it is. The opening sequence introduces us to Oskar, the film’s major protagonist, while he plays some solitary psychic game in his bedroom: a singular monologue reminiscent of the boys’ chants in Lord of the Flies; in fact, the Swedish story has more than a passing association with William Golding’s influential novel of the 1950’s. On first encounter, we view Oskar in reflection from his window which opens onto the dark night, making it a perfect ghost-like image of contrasting high-lights. We are spying on him as he acts out some unusual personal theater during which he unsheathes a scabbarded knife almost reverentially as if prefacing some sacrificial rite. “Squeal, let me hear you squeal,” he orders some imaginary victim of his passionless exercise. His shirt is off, and though the winter night outside the pane of glass is freezing, the room’s well-heated effect seems more in keeping with precious hothouse orchids than a typical schoolboy’s messy bedroom. His naked chest in reflection is certainly pale and bloodless, but something more than that, something sexual and yet clinical at the same time. I’m reminded somehow of those elegant large photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe’s calla lilies, captured almost perversely in their attention to detail. The whiteness not only delineates the form, it becomes the entire language to express the flower’s objective: that being its offering of associations and multiplicity of meanings, it’s artistic breath.

Oscar’s world is a dualistic one, and though the movie’s color cinematography is altogether painterly in what we might view as traditional Swedish imagery, yet the camera documents an integral polarity featuring nature’s rugged allure and beauty at odds with it’s personal isolation, its famous history of suicides amid Socialism’s seeming success. And if one of Sweden’s iconic images might be snow, so too Oscar’s milky Nordic skin and his flaxen, pageboy hair appear chaste and serene, yet belie a horrible ability for violence and retribution to those who would threaten him. But I’m not quite getting to the point I want to make, which is the impression that Oskar’s physical presence made on the screen: he was the white lab rat tipped topsy-turvy into becoming the victim and the experimenter, a solitary bully who prods the defenseless with gleaming instruments, at least when alone in the dreamscape of his bedroom. At school, Oscar is the object of cruel intimidation by class toughs, and though certainly intelligent and gifted, his isolation has begun to transmogrify into obsessions such as keeping a journal of press clippings featuring violent crimes, and his reliance on the aforementioned knife. Kare Hedebrant, in the role of Oskar, utilizes a quiet, reflective acting ability, amazing in its aptness. Here’s a character whose physical characteristics blend with the winter landscape as well as the interior landscape. A vague opaque quality informs him, whereby we don’t watch large gestures or statements, but instead the boy’s character is delivered in a series of quirks, facial twists, weird though slight ruminations that manifest in the muscles around his mouth and cheeks. He’s one who’s trained himself to escape notice by limiting his physical presence, appearing almost camouflaged like a wild rabbit on a snowy plain in a field of hunters. Oddly the isolation he uses as protection from a dangerous environment hinders his ability to learn how people actually work, instead he builds a psychological view of humans as sadists, serial killers, and even vampires—with the real world giving ample corroborating evidence at every turn.

His salvation arrives in the form of a 12 year old girl named Eli who moves into an adjoining apartment with her father. It’s their friendship turned love which offers Oskar a reprieve from rejection at school; an abatement from loneliness for his estranged father; a lessening of fear and humiliation as a daily reality. All this occurs within the close confines of a small suburban town whose buildings feature maximum utility though at the cost of style, and if these aren’t the faceless architectural apartment buildings of Soviet Block countries during the 1980’s, still there is little room for personal expression or freedom. This background proves appropriate for the eventual revolt that Oskar wages (within his quiet means) with the aid of Eli and her special skills. Of course Eli is a vampire, however she’s a source of compassion and strength to Oskar, star-crossed at best, but in love nonetheless. I’m not very interested in divulging any more of the story, I suggest that everyone rent or buy the dvd and watch it. Sadly, one unfortunate ramification of good foreign movies which fall into the horror genre is that American or British interests immediately make plans for a remake in English. Not a sequel, but a remake with Hollywood's stamp of casting and marketing. Such is the case with Let The Right One In. Similar to the Japanese and Korean horror movies which were re-produced with American stars in the leads during the last decade, it seems we can expect an English version. It’s difficult to imagine a new version being anywhere as compelling as the original Swedish movie. Surely, the performances of Kare Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson as the 12 year old leads will be impossible to best. Yet another unfortunate example of consumerism’s muscular reach for the cash.

Of course, one of the wonderful by-products of featuring the color white—in Oskar’s body and the snowy expanses of Northern European winter—is it’s lovely contrast to blood, and there’s quit a bit of the messy red stuff. What with the violence of a serial killer on the loose, the feeding habits of Eli, the spotty damage caused among the schoolyard’s bullies, and the sacrificial knife’s eventual uses, there’s plenty of splatter. Odd then that this isn’t really a suspense-laden series of genre tropes whose ambition rests on coaxing audiences to squirm in their seats awaiting the next scream. The splatter isn’t really of much importance, it’s merely the dripping nutrition that keeps Eli alive, or that keeps the vengeful rowdies at bay. The color schemes seem more a function of the subtexts-- reading into each major character as symbolic of social or psychological investigations, an opening into a well of ideas not usually associated with horror films.

Let The Right One In was helmed by journeyman director Tomas Alfredsson from a novel and screenplay written by John Ajvide Lindqvist. The work is thoughtful and the decisions throughout seem less interested in shock or cinematic thrills, but always focus upon the character development in Oscar and an unusual unveiling of warmth from Eli, our erstwhile monster. See it. If my impression was any indicator, it will give you that afterglow that a good novel leaves behind, wherein ideas keep presenting themselves as the result of the completed work--a catalyst, a stimulant, a good movie.

.

Insert Poem Here

2009-12-04T22:25:00.000-08:00

.

.

Everyman's Library: 100 Essential Titles

2009-11-29T17:18:00.000-08:00

.

.

Everyman’s Library was founded on February 15, 1906 with the publication by Joseph Dent (1849-1926) of fifty titles. Dent, a master London bookbinder turned publisher, was a classic Victorian autodidact. The tenth child of a Darlington housepainter, he had left school at thirteen, and arrived in London with half-a-crown in his pocket.

Dent promised to publish new and beautiful editions of the world’s classics at one shilling a volume, ‘to appeal to every kind of reader: the worker, the student, the cultured man, the child, the man and the woman’, so that ‘for a few shillings the reader may have a whole bookshelf of the immortals; for five pounds (which will procure him with a hundred volumes) a man may be intellectually rich for life.’ It is now published by Alfred A. Knopf in the United States and Random House UK abroad. It brings this reader great memories to see these titles and to remember reading some of them in their older editions. My copy of Heinrich Heine's Prose and Poems has long ago lost it's green dust jacket and shows tears along the binding from one of my dogs gnawing her way into the tasty, congealed glue inside. Worn and battered, It's one of my favorite treasures. Below is a list of reprints they currently market as The 100 Essential Titles. One might carp that the list is decidedly British, or that it omits many great titles, but their publication list is peppered with some of the world's greatest works as well.

The Aeneid by Virgil
The Analects by Confucius
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Arabian Nights by Husain Haddawy
The Audubon Reader by John James Audubon
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window by Raymond Chandler
Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh
The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Carried Away by Alice Munro
The Castle by Franz Kafka
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Collected Stories by Raymond Chandler
Collected Stories by Roald Dahl
Collected Stories by Franz Kafka
Collected Stories by W. Somerset Maugham
The Complete Henry Bech by John Updike
The Complete Short Novels by Anton Chekhov
The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Dubliners by James Joyce
Essays by George Orwell
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani
The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Histories by Herodotus
A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipul
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Human Factor by Graham Greene
The Iliad by Homer
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann
The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback by Raymond Chandler
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
Mr. Sampath–The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma by R. K. Narayan
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
My Ántonia by Willa Cather
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
The Odyssey by Homer
Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays by Albert Camus
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M. Cain
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver’s Seat, The Only Problem by Muriel Spark
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike
The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
The Republic by Plato
Rights of Man and Common Sense by Thomas Paine
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher by R. K. Narayan
Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
The Woman Warrior and China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Ulysses by James Joyce
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion
Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo

** Another interesting reprint series I discovered recently is published by the New York Review of Books (NYRB). I believe that they're all 20th century authors, but a tasty grouping of novels, stories and essays it is. Lots of authors I've never read. http://www.nybooks.com/nyrb/ (Drat and fuck, my link thingy doesn't work, you'll have to drag and drop it).

.

"Derelict Appendages"__Movie Critics

2009-11-28T22:37:00.000-08:00

James Agee

.

Though I would greatly enjoy having a first-rate vocabulary, I’m afraid my hope will have to join a long list of deferred personal desires, each entry standing around inside my imagination like teenagers without appointments at the Department of Motor Vehicles office. It's a list which includes: wanting to be Johnny Depp handsome; disposable income; a girlfriend who could be mistaken for Virginia Woolf; tactile proof of God’s existence; a 1958 bathtub Porsche with a dependable engine; a PhD in film appreciation; the cost of a new dental bridge; the Cubs winning a World Series; a Socialist government in my country; the re-opening of the Fox Venice movie theater on Lincoln Boulevard; a road trip across Africa; a small life insurance policy for my kids after I’m gone; free Sushi every Wednesday, and the list goes on. Why bring this up? Well, upon reading some old issues of Film Comment, I was struck by the vocabulary used by their film critics and reviewers—an amazing cornucopia of language that would drop many a philologist’s jaw. Immediately, I grew envious and bemoaned my own paltry language skills, especially admiring the grey matter data bases which could house and retrieve such a huge and varied collection of meaningful syllables. I began writing down each interesting word in a notebook, some whose definitions I knew, some which sent me to the dictionary. Pretty soon, I was including multiple words from each sentence. Why don’t I use these words? Am I lazy? Genetically impaired? A spelling bee underachiever? How I wish when I wrote down the phrase “lots of” I had actually used “proliferating magnitudes of associations therein.” Did I sleep through college or what?

Eventually the word list became too large, I’d never remember the entries. I then realized I also wouldn’t remember the gist of the article either. Like the swirling confection of rococo sculptural details in a Viennese church, all that marble froth was really just a cloud to hold up an angel. Why all the fuss? So, I began the Film Comment article once again, trying to paraphrase and dumb down the prose into digestible bites of meaning. Surprisingly, the ideas behind the formidable ammunition cache of words weren't very complex whatsoever. The critic was admiring a movie she found of interest, or perhaps the critic was admiring a movie she wished she'd seen, rather than the actual film itself. Maybe it was a movie the critic would have made, given the ingredients of the movie which had actually been released, had she been the director. Reality is a funny business, and apparently film critics are a curious and unusual bunch. I’m reminded of an interview with Manny Farber titled The Throbbing Acuity of Negative Space: an interview with America’s most original film critic, in which the interviewer, Kent Jones, reflected while formulating a question for Mr. Farber: “I read Agee [James Agee] quite carefully when I was young, and there was always something about his criticism that bothered me, no matter how gorgeous the prose. Simply put, he was forever writing about the film he wanted to see as opposed to the one he did see, and that unfortunate tradition in which the critic’s prose competes with the film in question begins with him.” Oddly, I might be more interested in where that tendency ends rather than with whom it began. I can visualize, however, a circumstance in which a well-written piece on a bad movie is worth more for the critical ideas which it percolates (by the impetus of writing) than any ideas which can be found in the movie in question. So, wordsmiths, rock on; but remember that at the end of the day, you’ll have to confront Guy Debord and his Situationist brethren demanding to know if you’ve merely continued the precepts of Spectacle, or effectively pointed new directions in which readers may counter the accepted and entrenched fetishism of images which confound rather than inform. That is, once film writers accept the responsibility to be more than cheerleaders for world film sales, prose takes on a fresh importance whose subject is no longer limited to the single movie at hand, but its relationship to a heady concoction of cinematic culture, one channeled and shaped by international business interests using the film-going public to sell commodities surely, but to order and control the public’s role in the non-virtual, non-imagistic enterprises of daily living. I can hear you now, and I sympathize, “fuck, I just want to watch George Clooney in an action flick, try to forget my day at the slaughterhouse; maybe grab a Corona later and see if that waitress with the Mondrian tattoo will be there.” And you will, my friend, you will.

Guess it's time to dig out Manny Farber, he was an amazingly crusty and original troublemaker.

Manny Farber

.

John Ford, Kent Jones and HighPlainsHondo

2009-11-28T00:25:00.000-08:00

.

John Ford

.

Here’s the deal, I like movies. Here’s another deal, I like to write. Write what? Just about anything, however poetry is the playmate with which I have my greatest longevity, notice I didn’t say “success.” But fun doesn’t stop at stanzaic forms, I also like writing fiction sometimes if it doesn’t demand too much rational thought; and from time to time I even enjoy trying my hand at non-fiction--hence this blog. Though in truth, the blog is more an outgrowth of loneliness and some amorphous wish for approval. From who? You I guess. Welcome to the psychological judgment forum of one Dennis M. Dorney. My, but the the world's indignities never stop.

Now I’ve completed my first paragraph and still haven’t decided what I’m even writing about, but I think it has to do with John Wayne, John Ford, Vera Miles and a Western movie I don’t value very highly (see entry from November 23, 2009). But it also has to do with Kent Jones, a film critic whose work I usually find in Film Comment. For years I’ve read Film Comment, a glossy film magazine one may find at most newsstands, usually with the picture of a recognizable star on the cover from their newest offering. It’s part fan magazine, part film criticism; once a rather staid textual organ published bi-monthly by the Film Society at Lincoln Center. Surfeit with scholarly articles on world cinema, it saw it’s readership begin to slide, and so Lincoln Center brought in a new, younger, hipper editorial board with fewer fusty associations. Whereas the magazine's covers at one time might be expected to feature a dour black and white still from Carl Dreyer’s Vredens dag, after the marketing department’s make-over we were given Jim Carrey from the Farrelly brothers’ 2000 comedy Me, Myself and Irene. As memory serves there was a letter from the new editor, Gavin Smith, promising to include a more eclectic emphasis, and a more insightful examination into contemporary culture and film, I think he may have even used the word “fun.” I was shocked. I liked my movie criticism dense with polysyllabics I didn’t know the meaning of, concerning films I’d never seen. It helped shore up the many insecurities I maintained in the realm of my would-be intellectualism by being able to summarize these articles and opinions, perhaps even embracing them as my own. Only later would I come to accept my obvious exclusion from the high-brow club; luckily it was about that time that a flood of advanced film degrees were offered at American Universities in critical theory; a time when PhD candidates in film departments began publishing books and articles on subjects which might easily include the Foucaultian insights of Jerry Lewis in Cinderfella. Post-Modernism had become the new catchall, even in the heartland. The dumbing down of America segued rather painlessly with my own acceptance of diminished critical abilities. People were heard at art gallery openings discussing the new Superman movie while balancing an appetizer and cheap wine in a plastic cup—whereas not long before the topic would have been considered déclassé, and been jettisoned in favor of the most recent Ingmar Bergman slog-fest, or the always dependable Jean-Luc Godard.

It was during that time, roughly the end of the millennium, that I began to read Kent Jones’ articles in Film Comment. Remember that I had a grudge against the new editorial staff who had replaced the ousted editor (my memory is faulty, but I want to say the prior editor was Richard T. Jameson). Anyway, I discovered that reading Kent Jones’ pieces was always thrilling, even when the movies he wrote about might seem uninteresting. Usually, the movies were shown to be much more complex and valuable than I had first believed. In no time he and fellow film critic/editor Gavin Smith among others had completely won me over. My knee jerk reaction to the changing of the guard was pleasantly amended. There’s something about reading a good movie critic that I find of utmost pleasure, it usually involves their balance of insight, wit, goofy obsession for all things celluloid and the grounded base which the best of them embrace—displaying knowledge and pliable facility with language, yet always remembering that snobbishness is a deal-killer. Talk down to the audience and you lose that audience, or at least you lose me.

So here we are, a hand full of paragraphs under the bridge and I still haven’t found any core to my ramblings, good thing I’m not being graded. But let’s push onto John Wayne and his part in all this, shall we? In 1962 the justifiably reverenced American director John Ford directed The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Though I’ve watched many Ford films, not exclusively Westerns, but many non-Western dramas as well, I’d never seen his 1962 release. It starred John Wayne, James Stewart and Vera Miles. Certainly, I’d read about it, seen it on people’s lists of favorite movies, noted it referenced as part of the cinematic canon, even heard it quoted: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” As the years passed, not having seen the movie was becoming a larger and larger embarrassment and a secret. Oh, I’d had many opportunities to view it. The movie has played on double bills in revival houses and film exhibitions for thirty years, and it's certainly a perennial on television’s retro programming channels. Truth is, I had begun to view the film on more than one occasion, but I found it unwatchable and stopped long before its denouement. But last week with a fresh resolve, I finally viewed The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in its entirety. It was bad, or using an exaltation I prefer even more, Holy Shithouse Mouse it was bad!

Unhappily, it placed me in a quandary. As I’ve admitted elsewhere, I’m becoming truly unsettled by disliking movies that others revere. Being a misanthrope isn’t really that pleasant a role, it also tends to reduce the number of people who want to talk with you, let alone argue the merits of a particular tenet, or movie. I’m 61 years old, I know having companionship is more important than being right, or defending some digressive opinion. Don’t I? So, why did I log onto the imdb site, enter the Western movie fans' comments section and write to all those Duke worshipers that I thought The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was a bad movie and John Ford was completely responsible for its many faults? It’s like going to a Republican Party Convention and pissing on a Presidential photograph of Ronald Reagan. There’s nothing to win except antipathy and loathing. By the next day emails were flooding in from guys named Buck45, RowdySidekick, and HighPlainsHondo. No, they didn’t want my friendship, but felt compelled to point out my errors in cognitive assessment; my ignorance of what constitutes great acting; my inability to grasp superior art in any of its dramatic forms—usually febrile blurts of text with exclamation points and capital letters throughout. Jeez, chill out cowboys.

But that wasn’t so bad, everyone likes to call people names on the internet. Problem is, maybe they were right--not necessarily about whether the movie was good or bad (it was a stinker), but on reflection and in rereading my comments I've realized that my assessment isn't written very well. It isn’t Kent Jones building an invincible superstructure of prose to protect his in-depth observations, but rather a guy sticking out his tongue at a crowd of strangers, at least metaphorically. I was neither encouraging anyone to see my position neutrally, nor was I admitting that the prevailing opinions of Western lovers might include salient points. No, I was throwing verbal pot shots from the safety of my shooting blind, and patting myself on the back for courageously pointing out the errors of their long-held misconceptions. I forgot that opinions just aren’t that important, one way or the other. Sounds almost religious in it’s sonorous simplicity, but nobody cares much what anyone thinks except themselves, so why raise a ruckus? Or to quote Thumper’s mother, "If you can’t say . . ."

So, how to exhibit my cinematic disapproval of what I consider a shabby film, and yet not ruffle the feathers of those who don’t agree? Well, Kent Jones would find a forensic solution I’m sure, one biting with wit and conversely hammered from genuine concern into universal acceptance, but as I’ve already admitted, the only thing Kent Jones and I share in writing is spell check. Eventually, the solution came to me. I retrieved the video tape of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance from my library (yes, as a matter of fact, I still watch VHS tapes if I haven’t replaced them), then . . . well, perhaps it’s more fitting if I just show you a picture:

.

.
(Above black and white photo of John Ford was taken by Richard Avedon in 1972 a year before Ford's death. Color photo below shot by Nick Minkler, 2009)

.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance__Bad John Ford

2009-11-23T19:55:00.000-08:00

.
Though John Ford's 1962 Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is peppered with many admirable elements, mostly in James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck’s screenplay; still, the movie as a whole is a mediocre sagebrush melodrama. The acting is so over-the-top that Andy Devine's cartoonish sheriff looks toned-down in comparison to the hysterical tenor of almost every serious scene. Any director who asks his cast to perform in the manner of Edmond O'Brien (who seems to be channeling a vaudevillian rum pot in baggy pants), or Lee Marvin, whose title character begs comparison to his role in Cat Ballou for farcical interpretation (“I’m a mean guy, see me snarl”), well that director is responsible for one confused and jumbled assignment. Yes, even the great John Ford made some sub-par movies, and I can’t count the movie in question as anywhere near the top of his game.

Why, I ask myself, is this movie shot almost entirely on a soundstage or backlot? With the expensive cast and Ford’s own production company taking its slice of the pie, I’d wager that most of the budget went into above-the-line costs, leaving very little for production value of any meaningful sort—locations were out. Shooting westerns in black and white in the early 60's was usually the result of budgetary considerations, not as some would have us believe, part of the director's vision. The budget of $3.2 Million was a good amount of money at that time, it wasn't as if the studio was skimping. Movies from the same year, such as To Kill a Mockingbird had a much smaller pocketbook to work with, but certainly delivered the look and feel which the movie demanded. Why was John Ford's movie hobbled by the poverty row look, certainly not to further the realism or to enhance historic detail? We could blame the producer for putting unrealistic constraints on the director, but Ford was the producer and director. Sad that the production didn't care enough about creating a cinematic world, but was satisfied with the most rudimentary sets, background paintings, and back lot streets left over from the last television show, or so it seemed. The production designer certainly wasn't overworked by demands for originality. I’m not saying that a Western needs Monument Valley backgrounds, or Vistavision formats in Technicolor to be successful. Certainly many wonderful movies were composed in sparse Western towns, or in glorious black and white, but High Noon, or Gunfight at the O.K. Corral this ain’t. John Ford himself directed very good “town” Westerns, My Darling Clementine being a case in point. However he certainly moved that one off the backlot. But leaving the budgetary constraints alone for the moment, Ford had a choice to treat this script in a serious, caring manner wherein the story might truly reflect the nexus of Wild West vs democratic expansionism; but instead he gave us a cramped, hyperbolic, manic treatise on grammar-school-level political science. And since I bring up childishness, the film’s most crucial personal drama is not concerned with killing, or personal responsibility, or the power of citizens to steer their country’s destiny, but instead he hangs the movie on an implausible love triangle. Tom Doniphon's (John Wayne) motivations are always and only in relation to what he judges to be the best interests of Hallie (Vera Miles), his planned wife-to-be. Then to confuse the romance issue even more, we’re given no clue that James Stewart's character, Ransom Stoddard, cares one amorous whit about Hallie until after the film’s active resolution late in the fourth reel—the killing of Liberty Valance. In Ford’s muddle, he seems to award Hallie to Stewart's Stoddard as a prize for acting heroically. We never satisfactorily discover why she chose one man over the other. It seemed like some amorphous destiny rather than the result of free will. But perhaps motivation is mute when assessing a film which treats characters solely as symbols to represent socio-political conviction rather than narrative storytelling. Later, all those deplorable scenes of governmental procedure in which Ransom Stoddard is elected as the would-be State’s representative are tacked on as a flag-waving coda; nothing here furthers the main construction of the story except as a dependable (if arbitrary) place to reveal the true actions of the famous shootout. We're left as always with the theme of civilization and modernity (sodbuster citizens) versus lawlessness and freedom (range ridin’ cowboys): a rather useful formula which permeates many westerns. It's certainly not original, and is often found in the most ordinary of genre pictures. The film's only acting job which can claim to be equally as embarrassing as Edmond O’Brien’s performance is exhibited within this same parliamentary sequence in John Carradine’s role, however to give the devil his due, at least there’s a reason for the merciless blow-hard factor, since he’s parodying political discourse.

With all the film criticism which has passed under the bridge since 1962, much has been made of this movie's use of spartan sets, few horses, no gambling houses. Some have referred to it as a psychological western, but where is this psychology? Each character hides behind a stereotype, with no individuality with which to espouse psychology. In fact the motivations among this cast are oftentimes obfuscated, or downright unexplainable. No, I don't agree that John Ford was interested in engineering a new species of western, I think he got tired or lazy. Take a look at the camera lighting, mostly interiors. The scenes have no key light, no directional source. It's the overall soft-lighting of early 1960's television. It's easy and fast to shoot this way, a series of camera set-ups is quicker to complete, but it's unwarranted and a cheat. I'd argue that some of this film's motivations aren't psychological as much as economical. 1962 was toward the end of John Ford's career, he'd been doing episodic television for the first time in his otherwise illustrious career. The year prior to filming The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, he made another so-so movie titled Two Rode Together, which by the director's own admission "I did for the money . . . it was crap." It also starred James Stewart with Richard Widmark and Shirley Jones rounding out the headliners.

"Pappy" had been directing films since 1917, he'd won 6 academy awards (two were for WWII documentaries), and been nominated for two others, but those accolades had dried-up long before 1962. It's easy to admit he's one of the very best talents to ever make a Hollywood film. No less a judge than Orson Welles, when asked to name the three best American directors answered, "John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford." But great directors don't always make great films, especially when their careers span over 50 years at the helm. I merely believe that the great John Ford made at least one western that wasn't very good, this one. Critics and Western audiences (primarily older, white conservative males) have hung their interpretations on the skeleton of a standard movie, a fairly typical Hollywood movie of the day. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was certainly not a spectacular event like the dazzling musicals which were being produced at that time, nor did John Ford use younger more popular stars which Otto Preminger and Elia Kazan were beginning to use from the acting studios of New York. Newer directors, writers, and method actors were breathing a more earthy sexuality into film. There was a surge of moral questioning taking place. At this time Ford was in his late 60's and his male stars weren't much younger. Both John Wayne and James Steward were in their mid-50's playing young men vying for the hand of a much younger Vera Miles. The director's loyalty to cast and crew wasn't helping his film's stories and the audience stayed away. In 1962, critics and movie reviewers were not referring to John Ford's newest western as a breakthrough or psychological film. They were calling it uneven. And indeed, many scenes and entire sequences in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance seem like sketches, rather than fleshed out cinematic storytelling.

With the cowardly sheriff; the slavish hired-hand; the sensitive and idealistic lawyer; the tough, well-respected, horse rancher smitten by love; the pretty waitress with a heart of gold; the dipsomaniac newspaperman; we should have Toto leading them all down a yellow brick road to Oz, or, in this case the Territorial capital to beg for redemption. And in answer to anyone's belief that James Stewart is a fine actor, I disagree. He was a serviceable leading man/action actor—simply put, a movie star. His range was minimal, his voice mannered, with constant use of his high range to simulate excitement. I’m afraid his insight into psychological impact read more often than not as phony. Give him a prop, show him where to hit his marks, he’s fine. I’d rank him somewhere above Charlton Heston, and below Henry Fonda, as I said, a serviceable star. I thought John Wayne won any acting honors which might be given in this ham-fisted drama. At least his character showed depth and a certain range of emotion. Except for the steak-on-the-floor sequence, James Stewart intoned throughout.

No, the film’s a mess. Certainly, there are many good ideas, but nothing seems to have the power to hurdle the directorial malaise, the impoverished production, the lackluster acting, the stodgy camera work, the ridiculous make-up and the infantile political preaching. As I said, it’s bad John Ford. He’s done better, much, much better. Sergeant Rutledge is a better movie from this approximate point in the director's career, but you won’t see it being foisted as one of the best Westerns ever made, as so many seem to advance The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I remember Graham Greene defining some of his lesser books as “entertainments” rather than describe them in the larger, more robust identity of a novel. I’d say the movie at hand is just that, “an entertainment.” To call it a great film merely reduces the definition to gibberish; that some don’t agree with me when I call Ford’s movie over-rated is to be expected, though my opinion is hardly the heresy some may believe.

.

Color of the Blues__Elvis Costello

2009-11-15T13:31:00.000-08:00

.

(Isn't that bluish mess of pixilated and broken-up imagery beautiful? It even pulses as if it inhabits it's own mechanical life, although it's electronic. Well done. Of course, the original version by George Jones is one of the all time sad songs, and must have spun on the record player, over and over, as many a teenager in Knoxville or Beaumont cried themselves to sleep in 1963. Suicidally depressed alcoholics can really bring it).
.

A Movie with Binx__poem

2009-11-13T18:44:00.000-08:00

A Movie with Binx

First the ink dripper
dumps some hooey
on the skirt in the choo-choo
puffin’ to Chi
where the fat cat
twinkles past the cold box
by flappin’ wings
to mammysville.
Lights go out for deep pockets’ caddie
when the air jockeys
start jukin’ in the clouds
so Shakespeare grabs a roscoe
to papa the twist
while a combo scoots
into Dixie’s dreambox
for some flat-foot hi-jinx
and a Romeo double-cross
until Pops starts singin’
and goes Slappy Maxie
on some cream-puff’s pan
for an 8 count, then gets
bit by a shiv in the bucket,
punching his ticket longways.

Meanwhile, angels pass so closely
we hear gristle in their wings creak.

.

Politics of Nails

2009-11-13T13:55:00.000-08:00

Politics of Nails

Dr. Hornby has invited all the nails
in all the boards of all the walls
at Twentieth Century Fox Studios
to wiggle out of their current positions
and join him in protest against
the general effects of what Marcuse termed spike singularity.
I for one will be present
if I can get a ride since I don’t drive;
and find something to wear, since
I don’t know how best to choose event costumes;
and find a companion to stride alongside,
since soliloquies are so shamefully embarrassing
that I’d prefer to grouse, if I must, in the choir.

Dr. Hornby, or “Hammer” Hornby
as he was known at Stanford, relies
on instinctual polarity toward that which
Erich Fromm labeled magnanimous impingement:
a plush flocking of the heart’s murkier interiors.
Nails, as can be attested by those in their circle,
are loyal devotees to service, but rather invisible
in the halls of discourse, at least until now
when Los Angeles and all she invigorates
cry out for support and patronage from patsies,
be they ten-penny, or flat-headed.

Dr. Hornby’s call to action is expected this weekend,
count on me to welcome and urge,
if I can find someone to stencil me a new placard,
mine being useless as a result of previous
concussions onto the forged pegs of activism;
and perhaps find others who will stolidly carry banners
exposing plight, stirring arousal;
maybe open their homes to those nails
who will be traveling in from bordering states
and junctions, each construction site collapsing
in their wake, each page of history falling
down to the general hubbub below
where those of us encapsulated in involvement
tear off a corner, fold it rigidly and pick our teeth,
while freedom rings, waits, rings again.

.

Love/Hate with Irvin Kershner__In a quandry

2009-11-07T17:42:00.000-08:00

I’m stumped. Last night I attended a double bill at the Cinefamily’s Silent Movie Theater which was being shown as an installment of their “Overlooked Auteurs” series; the night's offerings were being exhibited as examples of Irvin Kershner’s directorial talents. The first movie was titled Loving, a tight, explosive and perverse study of societal amorality among the middle-class during the late 1960’s. It starred George Segal and Eva Marie Saint among others and I found it scintillating; certainly the programmers at Cinefamily had unearthed a gem which had gone undetected by me and probably many others. During the intermission I spoke with a friend while replaying some scenes in my mind and becoming almost manic in praising the direction, cinematography (Gordon Willis), sequence construction, acting, screenplay. This is the essential pay-off for a film buff, to stumble upon a really good film you’ve never heard of and walk away ecstatic in its after-burn. If the evening had ended there, I’d be happy. No wiser perhaps, but definitely happier than I later became after watching the second listing of the night’s double bill. That movie was a Barbara Striesand vehicle titled Up the Sandbox, a political farce and one of the most painful screenings of my life. In my personal list of bad movies it ranks alongside Boxing Helena in its worthlessness. Certainly I would have walked out of the theater after 20 minutes if I wasn’t with a date who appeared to be interested in its quirky humor, which the Cinefamily flyer had touted as “Bunuelian.” Truly, I couldn’t keep from wiggling, sighing and even groaning in my perturbation, at one point I even had my fingers in my ears to protect myself from its consistently embarrassing dialogue and textual rim-shots.

Luckily, after the lights had gone up, we adjourned down the street to Canter’s for a deli treat and a long conversation, blessedly about other subjects than the movies we’d just seen. We tip-toed around the Irvin Kershner topic, knowing it was a rusty landmine of potential disagreement. Today, I checked a few quick sources (imdb, reviews from 1972), only to find that both movies ranked almost exactly the same in the imdb rating system (approx 6.4, or a modest success). I found many glowing blurbs from fans of Up the Sandbox, not idiotic effusions for Babs’ superstar status, but a combined and heartfelt thumbs-up—and if the reviews weren’t quite so singular in their praise, they weren’t universally terrible either. The same seemed to hold for the earlier film, Loving. It had both its supporters and its opponents on the fan base, and generally walked away with good critical reviews. Pauline Kael in the New Yorker, gave it a rave review in which she rather sagaciously claimed that “it looks at the failures of middle-class life without despising the people, it understands that they already despise themselves.”

So, there’s my dilemma: two films, both from the same director and similar crews, both films having fallen from sight, both commercial flops, both with their individual fans and detractors. For all intents and purposes (in the world at large), both films seem to be similar and of fairly equal value, and yet I personally believe one is enormously superior, while the other one remains a huge waste of time, a professional vanity project of ridiculous proportions, taking rather serious subject matter and profaning it in it’s slip-shod, infantile treatment of source material all in order to . . . what, create laughs? It wasn’t even funny, but merely embarrassing.

Being a movie fan is certainly a subjective business. Whereas I may accord Frank Perry high praise as a director, another movie buff might consider him a hack. But, if there are no concrete criteria for comparison or ultimate judgments, who’s to say that Forrest Gump is a good movie, or the sophomoric, artistically reprehensible piece of fluff which I may think it is? At the end of the day, all judgment is merely opinion with no more credence than one’s favorite flavor of milk shake at McDonald’s. Like politics under our present system, each vote is swayed by marketing departments, spin doctors, phony or misleading statistics making appeals to the mass fears and desires of it’s citizenry or audience. So to, Hollywood has always fed on the projected taste of its uncritical audience: foisting celebrity appeal as skilled acting, or offering rehashed screenplays as original ideas which speak to the moment. I suppose I’m humiliated to realize that it’s all merely entertainment, a distraction to keep us from actually thinking or participating with a general aim in sight--as much an opium for the masses as any crackpot sermon at a pulpit, and as virulent.

Which all brings me to this: what do professors, students, technical staff, critics, authors, publishers, archivists, and all the other professional members of the critical film world actually study? Is it all mere puffery and opinion? Is the dissection of the editing sequence in Psycho’s shower scene of any more value than studying a dream episode in Irvin Kershner’s Up the Sandbox? If technical virtuosity is equally at the beck-and-call of business executives to amass revenue, or artistic aspirations from truly concerned and idea driven film-makers, then “how it looks,” or production value is inherently meaningless. If formulaic pacing and iconic presentation of proven stimuli can create tears or laughs ala Spielberg’s E.T. or shrieks ala Tarantino’s latest offering, then aren’t we merely talking about emotional pornography? If box office receipts are used as an indicator of a film’s worth, or professional film critics’ opinions are held to be trusted indicators, how is a viewer to assess their own value judgment? An interesting page in each issue of Film Comment shows a graph of popular film reviewers from prestigious newspapers and magazines. Perhaps 10 film critics are asked each month to rate a list of new films which have been released with stars ranging from zero (a bomb) to 5 (a masterwork). The reputation of these critics is very high indeed, their backgrounds are indisputably professional, many write books which are used in university courses and have become canonical. And yet . . . none of these critics agree, even moderately about each month’s movies. It’s great fun to see Armond White or Manohla Dargis condemn a film as a bomb when the same film garners 4 and 5 stars by Andrew Sarris. What, we may rightfully ask, do these professionals use as criteria in their assessment of films. Why do each reach conclusions on the same movie which are so wildly different in their eventual rating? One may equally view art criticism in the same way, or philosophy, or poetry, or fiction, or music, and the list seems to include everything. So, where lies superiority? Or mediocrity? Or downright sham? I don't think I'm wrong to consider judgment important in each of our lives, going well beyond film. Why is Socialism condemned and republicanism revered? Why do we decide to give a homeless person a few dollars, or pass by? For people as insecure as myself, these aren’t mute points. Just what and where does one look for standards?

We may say that only natural sciences can be judged with any degree of veracity because they can be tested and proven as to efficacy and determinate usefulness. But is that even true? The FDA tested the arthritis medicine Vioxx as did other countries and found it safe. Deaths from the drug were later estimated at 28,000 on the low end to 200,000 on the high end. Guess scientific regimens aren’t as exact as we had thought. So, here I am at my computer steaming because I think a Barbara Streisand movie from 1972 is a bad film and take umbrage at anyone who disagrees. So what? Well, you can still buy Vioxx (or the same formula) on-line from Canada, and this is after documented proof of it’s terminal effects. So what? The U.S. voters donated over a $1,000,000,000.00 dollars to elect Obama as President on a ticket of “change,” of which there’s been none in sight. So what? We believe that the United States is the apex of industrialized nations, yet our infant mortality rate is only 29th in the world. So what? International film festivals and awards programs list hundreds of notable films from recognized world-class directors each year which are never released in the United States. So what? If Roshomon is no better or worse a film than the new Jim Carey movie, what difference does it matter if we selectively keep foreign films from our screens? And just who is to say that the Jim Carey movie isn’t the best movie ever made? It wouldn’t take much effort to find such opinions on imdb, or at the water cooler at work. But who cares?

See, I’m tired of being a snob—the guy who doesn’t watch the latest American uber-hero movie . I want to finally agree with someone, at least once in a while. I don’t want to try convincing my friends that Guru Dutt’s 1957 Pyassa is a truly inspired work of art, when I know that they’d dislike the subtitles, guffaw at the low production value, blow raspberries at the songs. I suppose I could get a better caliber of friends, but I have to beg just to keep the few I have. Snobs aren’t much fun. I’d like to say I can enjoy, or at least disregard Babs playing a Jewish super-mom of limited means in a sequence shot in Africa where a hundred or so black women are topless with spears and beads doing some silly Colonial era dance to convince we in the audience that they’re truly “natives,”—though I didn’t see any with fake bones through their noses, I wouldn’t rule it out—I swear I could feel Angela Davis off screen aiming a rifle at our actress/producer; or a picket line of Nation of Islam members wondering why white people hate them so much. No, I’m afraid Irvin Kershner and Barbara Streisand should be brought up on charges of terrible taste, racism, sexism, jingoism, the worst face of pseudo-feminism ever brought to the screen and be judged harshly. But worse still, it was so damnably boring. I didn’t care a whit about one character in the entire cast, nor apparently did the screenwriter or director. Maybe I don’t understand the big picture. Perhaps it was just a joke that didn’t fly . . . for 97 of the longest minutes I’ve ever lived.

.

Ojos en LLamas__Madalena Jitrik, 2008

2009-11-02T19:27:00.000-08:00

.

"Ojos en llamas," 2008
Length: 7:04
Hand-treated 8mm film
By Magdalena Jitrik
Music by Sterling Roswell

Magdalena Jitrik is an Argentinian artist who works with over and under exposed 8mm film, treating it by hand with bleach, paint and marker pens. Her work has echoes of 1960s psychedelia: the multi-media environments of USCO, the non-narrative "Expanded Cinema" of Stan Brakhage and Jordan Belson, the in-motion paintings of Tony Martin and Bill Ham, but these blobs and colors have a completely different meaning in the 21st Century. Choosing to work with film emulsion during the dog days of digitalia is an oddly oblique but original move and we are happy to be featuring Magdalena's "Ojos en llamas" here on Spaced Out, the on-line commune. - AG (commentary lifted from blog titled Spaced Out).

.

.

The Minneapolis PoemJames WrightDia de Los Muertos

2009-11-02T11:21:00.000-08:00

The Minneapolis Poem

to John Logan

1
I wonder how many old men last winter
Hungry and frightened by namelessness prowled
The Mississippi shore
Lashed blind by the wind, dreaming
Of suicide in the river.
The police remove their cadavers by daybreak
And turn them in somewhere.
Where?
How does the city keep lists of its fathers
Who have no names?
By Nicollet Island I gaze down at the dark water
So beautifully slow.
And I wish my brothers good luck
And a warm grave.

2
The Chippewa young men
Stab one another shrieking
Jesus Christ.
Split-lipped homosexuals limp in terror of assault.
High school backfields search under benches
Near the Post Office. Their faces are the rich
Raw bacon without eyes.
The Walker Art Center crowd stare
At the Guthrie Theater.

3
Tall Negro girls from Chicago
Listen to light songs.
They know when the supposed patron
Is a plainclothesman.
A cop’s palm
Is a roach dangling down the scorched fangs
Of a light bulb.
The soul of a cop’s eyes
Is an eternity of Sunday daybreak in the suburbs
Of Juárez, Mexico.

4
The legless beggars are gone, carried away
By white birds.
The Artificial Limbs Exchange is gutted
And sown with lime.
The whalebone crutches and hand-me-down trusses
Huddle together dreaming in a desolation
Of dry groins.
I think of poor men astonished to waken
Exposed in broad daylight by the blade
Of a strange plough.

5
All over the walls of comb cells
Automobiles perfumed and blindered
Consent with a mutter of high good humor
To take their two naps a day.
Without sound windows glide back
Into dusk.
The sockets of a thousand blind bee graves tier upon tier
Tower not quite toppling.
There are men in this city who labor dawn after dawn
To sell me my death.

6
But I could not bear
To allow my poor brother my body to die
In Minneapolis.
The old man Walt Whitman our countryman
Is now in America our country
Dead.
But he was not buried in Minneapolis
At least.
And no more may I be Please God.

7
I want to be lifted up
By some great white bird unknown to the police,
And soar for a thousand miles and be carefully hidden
Modest and golden as one last corn grain,
Stored with the secrets of the wheat and the mysterious lives
Of the unnamed poor.

(The above poem is a reminder for this Day of the Dead. James Wright's This Branch Will Not Break, and Shall We Gather at the River , in which the above poem first appeared, remain two of my favorite books from the 1960's. You can find the poems in the author's Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose, (Wesleyan University Press, 1990) .

.

Girl Talk"Still Here"Bunnygreenhouse

2009-10-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

The Poetry of Ellery QueenThe ResurrectionistsLuc Sante

2009-10-26T18:59:00.000-07:00

Above, a poem drawn from the depths of The American Gun Mystery (1933) by Ellery Queen (joint pseudonym of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee). The extraction was the work of an anonymous member or members of the Resurrectionists, a shadowy group devoted to finding the poetry hidden in the works of the most prosaic authors. The members never made their identities public, although rumors flew during their heyday, from the late 1950s to the mid-'70s. This anonymity, which seems to have begun as a whimsical cloak-and-dagger affectation, was before long cemented by threats of lawsuits from touchy authors. In one of their manifestos the Resurrectionists noted that they had derived their initial inspiration from Blaise Cendrars's Kodak (1924), every word of which was taken from the novels of Gustave Le Rouge, and which was threatened with a lawsuit--although the plaintiff was Eastman Kodak, and the complaint was over the title (which Cendrars changed to Documentaire, and the suit was dropped).

The Resurrectionists, who enjoyed waxing militant, calling for the abolition of "simple load-bearing literature, which trucks ideas from the factory and dumps them at your door" and the exposure of "functionaries who pretend to be writers," were actually menaced by a few of their famous victims. In 1965, Green Berets author Robin Moore was apparently set to take them to court in Florida on grounds of plagiarism and libel, although at the eleventh hour the court balked at a case directed at an undetermined number of John Does. Even earlier, Ayn Rand was said to have hired detectives to flush out the poets' identities in advance of a harassment campaign; evidently she failed. It may be hard at this late date to understand how wealthy best-selling authors could become so exercised by a marginal avant-garde prank, but the Resurrectionists seem to have had a way of exposing raw nerves, "psychoanalyzing" the books they selected and uncovering unconscious residue the authors would rather had not been noticed. Their takedown of Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain (1969) was so devastating he allegedly confessed to friends that he was done with writing altogether.

The Ellery Queen poem illustrated was one of their first published pieces (in The Creedmoor Review, 1956) and shows them at their most lyrical and even affectionate. In the following decade, in the climate of rebellion of the time, their work grew more pointed and aggressive. Their victims included many of the biggest names of the day: Allen Drury, Fulton Sheen, Taylor Caldwell, Leon Uris, James Michener, Bob Hope, Arthur Hailey, Erich Segal, Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum. That most of them have sunk into obscurity today was predicted by the Resurrectionists again and again. "By 1980 it will be as if [James Gould] Cozzens had never been born!" they crowed in a 1957 press release. In their valedictory manifesto, issued in 1976, they foresaw the eventual end of bad writing. "Best-sellers are the preliminary step for those who are forgetting how to read," they wrote. "Soon those followers will drop the pretense and give themselves over to television and thumb-wrestling. Of course, they may take the publishing industry down with them. But that is a risk we must face. After all, almost anybody can afford a mimeograph machine."

I lifted the above short article from Luc Sante's blog, Pinakothek. Luc Sante is a writer and critic currently living in New York City. A few of his more recent books are: Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005 (2007), and Folk Photography (2009). To find out more about the author, cut and paste the following link. Unfortunately, the direct link option isn't working on my blog at present, sorry. http://ekotodi.blogspot.com/

.

Street Art

2009-10-10T12:13:00.000-07:00

.

LIU-BOLIN, Invisible man (China)

MEDO, (Brazil)

TOM TOM at work, (Paris)

JERM IX + NINJA IX (Vancouver)

ZOO PROJECT, (Paris)

OX, Billboard (France)

HERAKUT, (Berlin)

EVOL, (Artotale, Germany)

SKULLPHONE, (Los Angeles, CA)

BLU, (Anacona, Italy)

PARAMODEL, (Yashukiko Hayashi & Yusuke Nakano, Osaka)

.

RackGaki (Grafitti)__ Kanagawa, Japan

2009-10-09T13:47:00.000-07:00

The Strong Urge to Steal__Shanna Compton

2009-10-09T10:59:00.000-07:00

The Strong Urge to Steal

Reapplied to a new theme today.
He said I was sort of lackless

That I was a metaphorical entrance
that spun rather than rose

So neither of us ever knew
if we were coming in or going out.

Yeah, it went well, considering.

Considering my motheaten
availability we had a good time
talking about all the reasons
he & I shouldn’t worry too much
about the attacks dropping on our future.

You can’t even see that little stain. (!!)
It’s just an insignificant rumbling.

At the same moment
we decided no really great talent can stay
hidden underground for long,
that it made sense for biological hackers
to experiment with DIY bleeding
before, but now it was kind of passé.

Tomorrow we’re taking a train to a beach
somewhere along where the country
broke on itself and healed over bumpy.
I hope it comes in cream.

Shanna Compton is the author of For Girls (Bloof Books, 2007) and Down Spooky (Winnow, 2005), in addition she is the editor of Gamers (Soft Skull, 2004). Her poems have appeared recently in Dusie, Abraham Lincoln, Ping-Pong, Tool, and elsewhere. Visit her online at shannacompton.com.

.

Distance from Loved Ones__James Tate

2009-10-08T20:32:00.000-07:00

Distance from Loved Ones

After her husband died, Zita decided to get the face-lift she had
always wanted. Half-way through the operation her blood pressure
started to drop, and they had to stop. When Zita tried to fasten
her seat-belt for her sad drive home, she threw out her shoulder.
Back at the hospital the doctor examined her and found cancer run
rampant throughout her shoulder and arm and elsewhere. Radiation
followed. And, now, Zita just sits there in her beauty parlor, bald,
crying and crying.

My mother tells me all this on the phone, and I say: Mother,
who is Zita?

And my mother says, I am Zita. All my life I have been Zita,
bald and crying. And you, my son, who should have known me
best, thought I was nothing but your mother.

But, Mother, I say, I am dying . . .

(This is the title poem from James Tate's book Distance from Loved Ones, published in 1990 by Wesleyan University Press). He has taught for many years at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and is a Pulitzer Prize recipient among other honors. His most recent collection of poems is The Ghost Soldiers from Ecco books, 2008). I came across the poem today in a thrift store in Silverlake. A fortunate transaction.

.

Gottfried Helnwein__Modern Sleep

2009-10-04T22:16:00.001-07:00

.

(The images above are from a photography collection by Gottfried Helnwein titled Modern Sleep 2004-2005).

.

Real Bells

2009-10-03T12:25:00.000-07:00

Real Bells

Okay, things are tough. Just this morning
you pulled a rotting molar from your mouth,
your credit cards are long shut off
and some honest citizen called up
and had your van towed god knows where.

Even the AA meetings are getting stingy.
You could swear you’ve heard
that alimony story they tell a gazillion times,
only it was funny before, or something was.
Crappy luck that Michael’s in jail.

Wish you could ditch that jacket, huh? July
isn’t the weather for it, but at night it helps.
You can always use it for a pillow.
Once you too gave handouts to bums:
sorry fuckers, bonkers or heading there.

We’ve all got stories: the wife gone bad,
kids mangled in head-on collisions
with no insurance, not even casket money.
And that’s prior to peeing on ourselves.
But those can be shoved in a corner,

at least for awhile. What’s bad is the library
banning you because you smell. Folks complained.
Plus nobody on the street plays decent chess.
Worse still, churches don’t even ring real bells,
just recordings, like you won’t know the difference.

.

Otto's Discount Rack

2009-09-24T15:43:00.000-07:00

Otto's Discount Rack

The Golden Age of Pistol Targets

How Rosh Hashanah Humbled Ash Wednesday (with Maps)

Putting Teeth into Brooding

A Few Quodlibets about Lichen and Moss

The Spiritual Life of Moles

10 Most Expensive Elbows

“I Escaped Using a Cattle Prod Made of Soap”

Pornography in the Magellanic Clouds

Writing Software for Prophets

A Crime Report from Death’s Sister Cities

Carving Brain Cortices into Ink Stamps

When Peckishness Comes Knocking

Circumcision: The Owner’s Manual

The Great Khan Confirms his Tattletales

A Compendium for Flautists with Peeves

Bad Habits in Ice Sculpture

Caprice Hoodwinks the Lama

When Galleons Pull Down the Shade

Removing Penmanship’s Odors for Life

Red Meat’s Taxation Tables

(Image above is inside The San Francisco Book Co. Paris, France)

.

A February Release

2009-09-23T19:42:00.000-07:00

A February Release

Land Ho, you’re in the swim of things.
So much for clinical depression.

If I were you I’d pick-up
where I left off, I’d circumnavigate.

While you’ve been away
the moon married a gazelle,

both were chased down, lip-serviced,
and given embarrassingly good jobs.

The moon had always been
a sorceress’ sorceress:

kick-ass plough girl,
one who always had your back.

Not so the gazelle,
dandy be he, confound it!

No sooner had they wed
than he got the upper hand,

stopped her white rambles. Difficult
enough in times of plenty, but tonight!

I suppose you’ve had it up to here.
What with the leechings

and your new face. Luckily,
excess has so much to offer,

like this and that
giving it both barrels

on the horn-carved cusp
of Mardi Gras’ first parade.

(Image at top is from the Proteus Krewe Ball, Mardi Gras, 1970).

.

Irish Tunes

2009-09-23T16:34:00.000-07:00

The Pogues with Kirsty MacColl

Cantorion Colin Jones Trio

The Lass of Aughrim__The Dead

Padraig Pearse

.

Mensa Kids

2009-09-18T13:18:00.000-07:00

Mensa Kids

My children are so smart
their tests have to cheat to get the questions right.

It took some getting used to at first,
like when they browbeat gravity with theorems
and axioms until they could fly.
Regularly they shamed our chessboard
with only a handful of pawns.

When riding across town for burgers and shakes
they’d re-spell all the signs in Elamite,
sing along with the radio in Old Malay.
Of course no-one got their jokes—
they taught the parrot profanities
only shamans would blush at in Burkina Faso.

It wasn’t always pleasant. They figured out
my infidelities with parish wives almost before sin
had a moment to collect its thoughts.
Even the dog couldn’t lie.

Nuns found them demonic, making school impossible,
plus, how smart should they get? Bedroom walls
were covered in mathematical graffiti,
they played Bach with embellished sub-woofers
until plaster planets began to fall from the ceiling.

Owing that California is mild, they stopped wearing clothes,
which imposed the Girl Scouts' ban.
My wife took to drinking Vodka from pint bottles;
our girls taught her remedial games of chance
and soon owned our deed, even the Volvo.

Specialists diagnosed St. Anthony’s Fire,
and prescribed tranquilizers, which they ate like Raisinets;
becoming rather surly, fashioning weapons
from the kitchen drawers, building grenades from mold.
I’m currently seeking asylum.

Police are doubtful, being predicates
to faulty logic themselves. My daughters feast
on television. They’ve taken to sporting hairstyles
Elsa Lanchester popularized at Universal.
Using real voltage they plug themselves to the wall.

In the cellar, my wife is habitually bound and starved,
meanwhile I bunk with transients beneath overpasses.
They drive by in the car sometimes, waving like starlets
propped up on fat dictionaries, no doubt
to hide the facts—and therein rests my hope.

.

8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain__Jim Carroll

2009-09-14T13:03:00.000-07:00

8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain

1/
Genius is not a generous thing
In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover
And it resents fame
With bitter vengeance

Pills and powdres only placate it awhile
Then it puts you in a place where the planet's poles reverse
Where the currents of electricity shift

Your Body becomes a magnet and pulls to it despair and rotten teeth,
Cheese whiz and guns

Whose triggers are shaped tenderly into a false lust
In timeless illusion

2/
The guitar claws kept tightening, I guess on your heart stem.
The loops of feedback and distortion, threaded right thru
Lucifer's wisdom teeth, and never stopped their reverbrating
In your mind

And from the stage
All the faces out front seemed so hungry
With an unbearably wholesome misunderstanding

From where they sat, you seemed so far up there
High and live and diving

And instead you were swamp crawling
Down, deeper
Until you tasted the Earth's own blood
And chatted with the Buzzing-eyed insects that heroin breeds

3/
You should have talked more with the monkey
He's always willing to negotiate
I'm still paying him off...
The greater the money and fame
The slower the Pendulum of fortune swings

Your will could have sped it up...
But you left that in a plane
Because it wouldn't pass customs and immigration

4/
Here's synchronicity for you:

Your music's tape was inside my walkman
When my best friend from summer camp
Called with the news about you

I listened them...
It was all there!
Your music kept cutting deeper and deeper valleys of sound
Less and less light
Until you hit solid rock

The drill bit broke
and the valley became
A thin crevice, impassible in time,
As time itself stopped.

And the walls became cages of brilliant notes
Pressing in...
Pressure
That's how diamonds are made
And that's WHERE it sometimes all collapses
Down in on you

5/
Then I translated your muttered lyrics
And the phrases were curious:
Like "incognito libido"
And "Chalk Skin Bending"

The words kept getting smaller and smaller
Until
Separated from their music
Each letter spilled out into a cartridge
Which fit only in the barrel of a gun

6/
And you shoved the barrel in as far as possible
Because that's where the pain came from
That's where the demons were digging

The world outside was blank
Its every cause was just a continuation
Of another unsolved effect

7/
But Kurt...
Didn't the thought that you would never write another song
Another feverish line or riff
Make you think twice?
That's what I don't understand
Because it's kept me alive, above any wounds

8/
If only you hadn't swallowed yourself into a coma in Roma...
You could have gone to Florence
And looked into the eyes of Bellinni or Rafael's Portraits

Perhaps inside them
You could have found a threshold back to beauty's arms
Where it all began...

No matter that you felt betrayed by her

That is always the cost
As Frank said,
Of a young artist's remorseless passion

Which starts out as a kiss
And follows like a curse

Jim Carroll died this week in New York City. He'll be remembered and re-read as a sympathetic witness and poet of his city's underground culture. He began writing and became involved with poetry at St. Marks' Project during the late 1960's; his autobiographical book The Basketball Diaries was published in 1978 to general acclaim. In 1980 he recorded his first music album, Catholic Boy which garnered considerable support from the late punk audience and spawned more albums and tours. His celebrity stature as a poet and punk songwriter/musician was unique. Few people in this country are identified both inside and outside the academic community as first and foremost being a poet. Like his mentors, Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg, his work incorporates details of urban modernism that spark with a brilliancy of rare insight. He ended his Basketball Diaries with the line, "I just want to be pure."

The photo I've found was taken by David Shankbone in 2007. On first view Jim Carroll looks ravaged by the excesses of sex, drugs and rock, a warning somehow. But spending more time with the photo I changed my viewpoint and have grown to like it a lot. We can look into his eyes and see what? An opacity perhaps, a sense organ, a tool for looking unfiltered at the world (begging the question whether drugs filter or unfilter) and collecting those findings into a base from where his intelligence and language skills can create. The photo seems to turn celebrity status upside down: the handsome Irish good looks of his youth have been distilled by his decades of writing and performing into the approximation of a wizened god's close-up, one who's seen terrible deeds and grand attractions. Though a tall man, his elfin ears and skinny frame belie his 60 years, and exhibit some weird palimpsest of youth peeking through the decimation of bad teeth and muscle disintegration. No-one gets out alive, least of all a poet who's stock in trade is experience. I will assume he still dyed his hair the red of his clan, since gray would be the natural color of his age--a show of affectation, a yearning for atypical acceptance, and a human surrender to fame. That the shot was taken in front of a marble Doric column is also coincidentally of interest, dragging the early associations of classical poetry and myth into a more modern questioning or appraisal. I think it's a very good portrait of Jim Carroll both real and imagined. The poem above, in which he speaks to Kurt Cobain after his death is filled with understanding. Both knew heroin addiction; limelight; the desire to create and its attendant euphoria; an acute sensitivity to pain; and the weighty temptation to escape for good. It seems a poem of brotherhood somehow, and yet discovers a difference: one's desire to never relinquish the thrill of writing a good line, a lyric, or the hope of similar accomplishments. Jim Carroll continued on, Kurt Cobain ended--those decisions are personal, demanded of us all. The photo above lets us discern some of the cost of that continuing.

(Photo above is of Jim Carroll taken in 2007 by David Shankbone).

Jussi Bjorling's Ambulances

2009-09-13T23:38:00.000-07:00

Jussi Bjorling's Ambulances

Thwart is a word prickled by interbreeding,
same with Ozymandias,
ratchet and swizzle. What’s it called,
or what’s the diagnostic
when words like these slather themselves
in fake blood on the cellar walls
of euphony’s falling down mansion?
Trundle, Eurotrash and anything ending in i-l-e
excite me equally, even sexually,
like Belgian chocolate or
bondage movies. Which is not to say I am one
whose syntax or meaning is parsed intently,
rather it’s like watching the skies
during an air show and from a great distance
comes a blimp. No longer are our newest military jets
of interest, or the Flying Fortresses dipping a wing
to signify something nearly Masonic in hidden lore,
instead, focus is locked on the dirigible.
Words can be like that. Their definition
is hardly the point, like pressurized gas.
Form is closer to the cob of it all, or smell—
yes, but how to explain the earthy stench
of catalyst or badinage?

Let’s tack cross-wind a moment shall we?
Jussi Bjorling was a galvanic Swedish tenor,
also something of a cad, but regardless
his lyrical tone surpassed all but Caruso.
When ending the final cadenza on high B
in Rigoletto’s La donna e mobile, ticketholders
fainted dead away, ambulances
became integral to his legend.
Reciting Aunt Jemima’s recipe for tollhouse cookies
could equally have floored his rubber-legged patrons:
it wasn’t the score, nor brio,
nor Verdi’s excavation into schmaltz—
instead, the piercing odor of form proved too gigantic
for the untested, even 3 floors heavenward.

Cellophane, merle, positron—Christ,
I’d beg these syllabics to abuse me and throw me
in a ditch. Using pollywog as a verb
rouses my curious essence into drool.
Bring out the mares from limbic stalls,
I’ll ride the palomino into full emersion.
Pamper me oh my snarl, sprinkle
talc and balm into the crafters’ tall cotton.
Behemoth me, you big spender you!

(Image above is a digital photo by Tudor Kline, 2007).
.

The Last of England_Derek Jarman

2009-09-13T03:03:00.000-07:00

Song is sung by Diamanda Galas

.

Derek Jarman footage with Smiths' I Won't Share You

2009-09-13T02:30:00.000-07:00

Thumbnail Movies

2009-09-08T22:46:00.000-07:00

Glue-sniffing kids curb

cat population after tornado hits the heartland.

Yokohama businessman faces enmity

and moral surcease oozes from hilltop home.

Raising hucksterism to new levels, a roustabout

splashes in nightclub society with mentalist Zeena.

Pregnant cashier and husband

argue Shepard-like in Hokkaido trailer park.

To judge tussle over big hat, we follow

hep kitten and jazzbo skins-beater.

Oedipal bully threatens fiery kablooie

atop petroleum’s big house.

While Muscovites flex and quaff,

suspicious man stalks with tripod.

Both orphan and frazzled writer

fatten up on penitents’ transcriptions of joy.

Inside Mexican desert, vets’ fishing plans

are waylaid by one-eyed insomniac bent on flight.

Sapphic coquettes in velvet capes

stand haunted house on its ear.

Grandee leaves all to playboy

and somnambulist nun’s homeless clan.

As trees sough above a river bank

mother and daughter submit to rapists.

Alongside cuckolded Nazi father-figure,

bicyclist manages Berlin winter.

Escaping Hamburg thugs, tiny accordion player

and whore take-up dairy farming in Wisconsin.

Truck-stop cook and hitch-hiker

show their exhaust to demonized big rig.

Single mother of four gets erotic

and forgets from whence they liked her jokes.

Before Federal sentence can get brutal,

swabbies cook-up winter frankfurters.

Dying son with eye patch returns home

to break knuckles with Neanderthal father.

Teenager inhabits closet with Spaghetti-O’s

as social worker diverts into Freudsville.

After promotion, Snappy dressing Aryan

levels Warsaw and peepless call girls.

Reporter with nothing to lose but incestuous

affair, enters bug house for big story.

Obsessed with heart-breaker’s love nest,

Charles visits Park City A-Frame packing ennui.

Raccoon-eyed loser fronts John Doe,

leaves folkie sister in the moral dust.

Blacklisted Lothario flees tinsel town

for twisted femme in Newcastle bed-sitter.

Answers to Thumbnail Movies (Tues. September 8, 2009)

Gummo—Harmony Korine (1997)

High and Low—Akira Kurosawa (1963)

Nightmare Alley—Edmund Goulding (1947)

Yellow Handkerchief—Yoji Yamada (1977)

Phantom Lady—Robert Siodmak (1944)

White Heat—Raoul Walsh (1949)

Man with a Movie Camera—D. Vertov (1929)

Central Station—Walter Salles (1998)

The Hitch-Hiker—Ida Lupino (1953)

Vampyres—Jose Ramon Larraz (1974)

Viridiana—Luis Bunuel (1961)

A Day in the Country—Jean Renoir (1936)

Germany, Year Zero—Roberto Rossellini (1948)

Strozek—Werner Herzog (1977)

Road Games—Richard Franklin (1981)

Nobody Knows—Kore-eda Hirokazu (2004)

The Last Detail—Hal Ashby (1973)

Dream with the Fishes—Finn Taylor (1997)

The Taste of Water—Orlow Seunke (1982)

The Night of the Generals—Anatole Litvak (1967)

Shock Corridor—Sam Fuller (1963)

Chilly Scenes of Winter—Joan Micklin Silver (1979)

Georgia— Ulu Grosbard (1995)

Finger of Guilt—Joseph Losey (1956)

In the Know

2009-09-07T22:20:00.000-07:00

“I'll bet poetry readings are just about the most boring thing there is.”

“Well, I don’t know about that. I’d say they’re boring alright, but Hungarian movies give them a run for their money. College graduations shouldn’t be left out either.”

The boy and his father were driving back from Ojai. It was hot. Ojai is always hot except for two weeks in winter when a cold snap arrives and threatens the citrus growers. It brings on a panic of prevention. Smudge pots, huge fans run by generators; the crews work around the clock, same as fire season. But it was March.

“Did you like your sister’s poem?”

The boy considered a moment, “Not really. I didn’t understand why she put French in it. This isn’t France. And her voice was so phony.”

The road down from Ojai is only two lanes until the freeway. Most everything was green, most everything but the broom plants which were taxi-colored, and the wild mustard. The boy held an inhaler in his lap. His asthma was chronic and had begun giving him trouble beneath the oak trees. The reading was on the grounds.

“Dad, how come Daniel didn’t have to read? I’ll bet his poem would have been cooler than Hannah’s, or that girl who was so scared. Least he surfs and could have written about the waves or sunsets. Something cooler than French.”

“Oh I don’t know, I liked her poem. It’s tough to write a poem. At least she put Georgia in it and some real things. Things she knows about. Some poems don’t have anything real in them.”

Georgia was Hannah’s horse. Hannah chose her school in Ojai because it was near the stables where Georgia was boarded. After school, she’d work around the stables and help her trainer to offset the cost of lessons. There was a bus. Teenage girls and horses inhabit a private country.

“What about the music?” His dad quizzed him. “I think her flute is cool, and the boy with the Sitar was pretty fun. Did you like that?”

Traffic was light for a Saturday. He felt foolish talking down to his son, using stunted language as if kids were puppies that only understood the most rudimentary words. He’d always talked to him this way, but knew it was ill-advised.

“Afterward he let me play it. The sitar. It has 22 strings. Must take forever to learn how to play.”

“That was pretty co . . . generous of him. To let you play it. Do you ever think about learning an instrument? You’re older now and your Mom and I will look into lessons if you’d like.”

“I like drums.”

“What kind of drums . . . bongos, conga drums, rock and roll?”

“Like the guy in Nirvana that Hannah has on her wall. His drums. They’re called kits.”

Along this stretch, the road followed a creek which was nearly always empty, but the recent rains had filled it bank to bank. It was muddy and fast. It made the narrow canyon look more normal somehow. That’s how the father thought about California, that it was freakish, barren. His idea of a proper landscape he’d gleaned in his own youth from television commercials during football games. Maple trees framing two-story homes somewhere in the Northeast, maybe Connecticut. Life insurance, or Campbell’s soup. Everyone in flannel raking leaves, or digging up bulbs in their Wellingtons. California, at least Southern California was desert, no matter the lawns or swimming pools, it wasn’t right somehow. The run-off stream seemed right.

The boy had a t-shirt with Bart Simpson on it. It had a quote under his round face that said something daring or borderline perverse. That’s where comedy lives, even with kids.

“How about the piano? You have mom’s piano at the house. She could even help with your lessons. She can read music and plays pretty good.” He was testing the waters. He knew his son’s mom would like him to learn piano. She felt slighted when Hannah chose flute. Rejected somehow.

“She’s taught me some chords and I can play a couple songs already, but I like drums.”

The boy never looked at his father, just as the dad rarely took his eye off the road or glanced toward his son. They both looked and spoke forward as if addressing the road up ahead.

“She wants me to learn a Clara Schumann piece, but it’s hard. My fingers can’t reach like hers can. And no, I didn’t like the song Hannah played on the flute . . . She says her music teacher’s a lesbian. So’s her writing teacher, Karen.”

“You have an opinion about lesbians one way or the other?”

“No, not really. Karen is cool. I don’t know her music teacher. She only has classes once in awhile and I’ve hardly ever seen her. I like her art teacher best, Roz. Last week she let me sculpt some bowls the way Indians used to. She’s gonna fire them once she gets more stuff from the class.”

“Mom’s birthday’s coming. Maybe they’ll be ready by then.”

“I don’t think so. Mom wants a book. She told me.”

“What kind of book?”

The father had been separated from the boy’s mom for close to two years. He’d always been interested in what books she read. Sometimes he’d read them as well. His own copies. It helped him feel in the know.

“I forget. A German woman I think. Something about the holocaust. I think she died.”

He shook his inhaler and took two quick puffs, sucking in the Albuterol cloud. He replaced the nozzle cap.

“You ever think about that, dying?”

“Me? Hmm, well I suppose I do from time to time. The big mystery and all that. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just wondered if other people think about that stuff.”

“I would venture that everyone thinks about that stuff once in awhile. Was the reading so terrible that you’re thinking about ending it all? A rope, or the big jump from Golden Gate Bridge?”

The previous summer, the boy and father had taken a road trip to San Francisco. The boy had been focused on Alcatraz for months prior, and had exhausted his local library branch on the subject. They’d stayed at a Best Western near the Presidio, with a pool. Out on the island they’d both dressed in prison garb and had a Polaroid taken behind bars. They saw where Clint Eastwood made a movie. Where Al Capone grew old. One day they drove across the bridge to Marin and took a hike in the redwoods. Upon returning over the bridge, the father pointed out a parking lot where suicides often left their cars. He’d read that police check it conscientiously for what could be considered evidence. The father felt a quick rhythm under his tires from the girders. His mouth tasted bad.

“I think mom could teach school about the holocaust. She has so many books.”

“True enough. She’s fascinated alright . . . Does mom talk about dying?”

“No. Just the people who were gassed and stuff. The Jews mostly.”

The two lane road was dissolving into a long on-ramp to highway 33. They picked-up speed. The sun was hiding behind a steep hill to the North as they headed toward Ventura and the fog-banked Ocean.

“You know I love you don’t you Bud?”

“Yeah, I know.” He waited a while to size up the moment. “Dad, if you want, I’ll trade you my Storm for Magneto.”

“You mean the trading cards? Thought you liked Storm?”

“Yeah I do but I got doubles this week at Comics’ Corner. Plus, you should have Storm.”

The father knew Magneto was common, you couldn’t give them away. He’d given Storm to his son weeks prior, in a lop-sided trade. The kind dads and kids always do. He wondered if his son really had doubles. Then spoke to the road up ahead.

“Yeah, that’s cool. I’m crazy about Storm.”

To their left the late sun hit the hillside high above Mission Avenue. The father rolled down his window. Half way up the bald face of sandstone and scrub, a lone building, a hospital, reflected a coral glare.

“I go to meetings there sometimes. There’s no-one around. I swear it’s deserted up there. The halls, the rooms. Weird.”

The boy’s eyes were fluttering. They were tired eyes. He’d done all he could do.

(The above image is from a Marvel trading card of Magneto, one of the X-Men superheroes, 1992 or so).

.

Religion and Beer

2009-09-04T13:43:00.000-07:00

Religion and Beer

Name me one prophet you’d invite over
for a beer, even one? Except for Eve,
and of course Adam, the Bible is filled
with sourpusses or worse: tyrants,
paranoiacs, the deranged or terminally stuffy.
If the New Testament were minutes
from a fraternity meeting, Christ wouldn’t
actually paddle the pledges personally,
but he’d sure as hell be ordering
his minions “not to spoil ‘em.”

No, I’m afraid everyone after Abraham
is a mafioso in sheep’s clothing.
Now, one could make a case for the Marys,
a good case, but it’s a little like having
a friend who’s a Scientologist--no way
you can trust them not to tattle to Jesus
or blab to the biggest weirdo in the room.
Joseph you say? Let’s face it, he was
so dumb he wouldn’t know which end
of the beer holds foam.

To placate my Jewish friends, David
in his youth deserves some consideration.
Too bad he turned into Generalisimo
with a hard-on for everyone’s wife.
Let’s skip Mohammed and his crew,
they ran around Saudi Arabia like
an NRA convention on dune buggies;
and though they certainly get points
for poetry and inventing astrolabes,
they kept their girlfriend’s clits
in a special pouch like Vietnam Vets
kept gook ears. Maybe it was the heat.

Buddha was a rich kid, and about the biggest
wet blanket south of Bhutan.
He’d have devotees taste his beer for him,
he’d channel the fucking beer.
Confucius and Mencius didn’t wear
the trappings of sticks-in-the-mud
like the aforementioned, but who can
feel comfortable around eggheads?
Give brainiacs a couple of drinks and
there’s no stopping the precepts—
but ask them the Philly’s line-up,
or to name the cast in Touch of Evil,
I swear their eyes cross, they harrumph!

But I do have one in mind, an old
fugitive named Han Shan with a stone hut
in the South China mountains. Some
called him a Taoist, some said Zen.
He wrote poems on trees and cliffs,
then begged left-overs around Guoqing.
Hermits are great to be around, they know
the best taco stands, the coziest terraces
along the laziest rivers. Of course,
I’m not certain the Council
of World Religions would approve,
but his stories were legendary.
I can see splitting a six pack of Pabst,
just him and me and the moon
laughing so hard it just about feels holy.

(The image above is Tete de Paysan Catalan, painted by Joan Miro in 1925, currently owned by the National Museum of Scotland).
.

Japan In Peacetime

2009-08-31T15:42:00.000-07:00

Japan in Peacetime
--for J.K.

I
A samurai warrior loves
a little girl with little ears
and invincible black hair.
He’s usually in danger of himself,
but she pays his debts
by twirling her ears at fairs
or at the city gates.
Young dandies offer her ryo.
Ruffians threaten to cut-off
her income. The samurai
spends his days drinking plum wine.
It’s all he can do, that
and dice people neatly.
While he awaits her, ghosts
with pale masks and sheets
make him miserable.
He can’t kill them.
They swill his wine. He’d weep
but it’s not the bushido way.

II

After work, she arrives tired,
shoos the ghosts out the door,
loosens her obi and grabs a beer.
When dinner is finished
they play a board game,
he massages her ears.
Eventually they entwine and sleep.
From a corner, through a tear
in the paper wall, a mouse enters.
He’s come for tidbits
of rice and to practice
with the samurai’s swords.
His hands are delicate, pink.
He baths them in milk.
When he grabs the ornate handle
and lunges, all is at his mercy:
even the samurai’s sleepy heart,
even the girl’s invincible hair.
Cherry blossoms are afraid to fall
in the vicinity of the mouse.
They hold it in
until he’s finished,
then fall and fall.
It’s a scream.

(Image above is a C-print titled "It's only love give it away" by Wolfgang Tillmans).

.

Louise Bourgeois__Spirals

2009-08-30T14:43:00.000-07:00

(Images come from the Museum of Modern Art webpage.)

A Map of the Lands of Human Sexuality__Franklin Veaux

2009-08-29T15:31:00.000-07:00

click on image to enlarge

I found this map on a blog named FranklinVeaux's Journal. Somehow reminds me of a composite of Mark Lombardi's graphic drawings and the Middle Earth maps on the flyleaf of J.R.R. Tolkien's books as printed on a J.T.'s Stockroom shopping bag.

.

MOVIE LIST_NO PARTICULAR ORDER_NO REASONS

2009-08-28T16:14:00.000-07:00

(Yes, the photo at top is the Vista Theater in Silverlake/Los Feliz, taken opening night 1923 when it was named Lou Bard's Theater).

.

The Harvest__a story by Amy Hempel

2009-08-27T12:34:00.000-07:00

Amy Hempel is a short story writer and journalist. Along with Raymond Carver and Mary Robison, she is regarded as one of the leading figures in American minimalist fiction, an influential style which began in the 1980's and is often associated with editor Gordon Lish. Her Collected Short Stories was published by Scribner in 2006.

The Harvest

The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.

The man was not hurt when the other car hit ours. The man I had known for one week held me in the street in a way that meant I couldn't see my legs. I remember knowing that I shouldn't look, and knowing that I would look if it wasn't that I couldn't.

My blood was on the front of this man's clothes.

He said, "You'll be okay, but this sweater is ruined."

I screamed from the fear of pain. But I did not feel any pain. In the hospital, after injections, I knew there was pain in the room — I just didn't know whose pain it was.

What happened to one of my legs required four hundred stitches, which, when I told it, became five hundred stitches, because nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

The five days they didn't know if they could save my leg or not I stretched to ten.

The lawyer was the one who used the word. But I won't get around to that until a couple of paragraphs.

We were having the looks discussion — how important are they. Crucial is what I had said.

I think looks are crucial.

But this guy was a lawyer. He sat in an aqua vinyl chair drawn up to my bed. What he meant by looks was how much my loss of them was worth in a court of law.

I could tell that the lawyer liked to say court of law. He told me he had taken the bar three times before he had passed. He said that his friends had given him handsomely embossed business cards, but where these lovely cards were supposed to say Attorney-at-Law, his cards said Attorney-at-Last.

He had already covered loss of earnings, that I could not now become an airline stewardess. That I had never considered becoming one was immaterial, he said, legally.

"There's another thing," he said. "We have to talk here about marriageability."

The tendency was to say marriage-a-what? although I knew what he meant the first time I heard it.

I was eighteen years old. I said, "First, don't we talk about dateability?"

The man of a week was already gone, the accident driving him back to his wife.

"Do you think looks are important?" I asked the man before he left.

"Not at first," he said.

In my neighborhood there is a fellow who was a chemistry teacher until an explosion took his face and left what was left behind. The rest of him is neatly dressed in dark suits and shined shoes. He carries a briefcase to the college campus. What a comfort — his family, people said — until his wife took the kids and moved out.

In the solarium, a woman showed me a snapshot. She said, "This is what my son used to look like."

I spent my evenings in Dialysis. They didn't mind when a lounger was free. They had wide-screen color TV, better than they had in Rehab. Wednesday nights we watched a show where women in expensive clothes appeared on lavish sets and promised to ruin one another.

On one side of me was a man who spoke only in phone numbers. You would ask them how he felt, he would say, "924-3130." Or he would say, "757-1366." We guessed what these numbers might be, but nobody spent the dime.

There was sometimes, on the other side of me, a twelve-year-old boy. His lashes were thick and dark from blood-pressure medication. He was next on the transplant list, as soon as — the word they used was harvest — as soon as a kidney was harvested.

The boy's mother prayed for drunk drivers.

I prayed for men who were not discriminating.

Aren't we all, I thought, somebody's harvest?

The hour would end, and a floor nurse would wheel me back to my room. She would say, "Why watch that trash? Why not just ask me how my day went?"

I spent fifteen minutes before going to bed squeezing rubber grips. One of the medications was making my fingers stiffen. The doctor said he'd give it to me till I couldn't button my blouse — a figure of speech to someone in a cotton gown.

The lawyer said, "Charitable works."

He opened his shirt and showed me where an acupuncture person had dabbed at his chest with cola syrup, sunk four needles, and told him that the real cure was charitable works.

I said, "Cure for what?"

The lawyer said, "Immaterial."

As soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn't know it. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life.

The accident happened at sunset, so that is when I felt this way the most. The man I had met the week before was driving me to dinner when it happened. The place was at the beach, a beach on a bay that you can look across and see the city lights, a place where you can see everything without having to listen to any of it.

A long time later I went to that beach myself. I drove the car. It was the first good beach day; I wore shorts.

At the edge of the sand I unwound the elastic bandage and waded into the surf. A boy in a wet suit looked at my leg. He asked me if a shark had done it; there were sightings of great whites along that part of the coast.

I said that, yes, a shark had done it.

"And you're going back in?" the boy asked.

I said, "And I'm going back in."

I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story. I'm going to start now to tell you what I have left out of "The Harvest," and maybe begin to wonder why I had to leave it out.

There was no other car. There was only the one car, the one that hit me when I was on the back of the man's motorcycle. But think of the awkward syllables when you have to say motorcycle.

The driver of the car was a newspaper reporter. He worked for a local paper. He was young, a recent graduate, and he was on his way to a labor meeting to cover a threatened strike. When I say I was then a journalism student, it is something you might not have accepted in "The Harvest."

In the years that followed, I watched for the reporter's byline. He broke the People's Temple story that resulted in Jim Jones’s flight to Guyana. Then he covered Jonestown. In the city room of the San Francisco Chronicle, as the death toll climbed to nine hundred, the numbers were posted like donations on pledge night. Somewhere in the hundreds, a sign was fixed to the wall that said JUAN CORONA, EAT YOUR HEART OUT.

In emergency room, what happened to one of my legs required not four hundred stitches but just over three hundred stitches. I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true — nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

My lawyer was no attorney-at-last. He was a partner in one of the city's oldest law firms. He would never have opened his shirt to reveal the site of acupuncture, which is something that he never would have had.

"Marriageability" was the original title of " The Harvest."

The damage to my leg was considered cosmetic although I am still, 15 years later, unable to kneel. In an out-of-court settlement the night before the trial, I was awarded nearly $100,000. The reporter's car insurance went up $12.43 per month.

It had been suggested that I rub my leg with ice, to bring up the scars, before I hiked my skirt three years later for the court. But there was no ice in the judge’s chambers, so I did not get a chance to pass or fail that moral test.

The man of a week, whose motorcycle it was, was not a married man. But when you thought he had a wife, wasn't I liable to do anything? And didn't I have it coming?

After the accident, the man got married. The girl he married was a fashion model. ("Do you think looks are important? I asked the man before he left. "Not at first," he said.)

In addition to being a beauty, the girl was worth millions of dollars. Would you have accepted this in "The Harvest" — that the model was also an heiress?

It is true we were headed for dinner when it happened. But the place where you can see everything without having to listen to any of it was not a beach on a bay; it was the top of Mount Tamalpais. We had the dinner with us as we headed up the twisting mountain road. This is the version that has room for perfect irony, so you won't mind when I say that for the next several months, from my hospital bed, I had a dead-on spectacular view of that very mountain.

I would have written this next part into the story if anybody would have believed it. But who would have? I was there and I didn't believe it.

On the day of my third operation, there was an attempted breakout at the Maximum Security Adjustment Center, adjacent to Death Row, at San Quentin prison. "Soledad Brother" George Jackson, a twenty-nine-year-old black man, pulled out a smuggled-in .38-caliber pistol, yelled, "This is it!" and opened fire. Jackson was killed; so were three guards and two "tiertenders," inmates who bring other prisoners their meals.

Three other guards were stabbed in the neck. The prison is a five-minute drive from Marin General, so that is where the injured guards were taken. The people who brought them were three kinds of police, including California Highway Patrol and Marin County sheriff's deputies, heavily armed.

Police were stationed on the roof of the hospital with rifles; they were posted in the hallways, waving patients and visitors back into their rooms.

When I was wheeled out of Recovery later that day, bandaged waist to ankle, three officers and an armed sheriff frisked me.

On the news that night, there was footage of the riot. They showed my surgeon talking to reporters, indicating, with a finger to his throat, how he had saved one of the guards by sewing up a slice from ear to ear.

I watched this on television, and because it was my doctor, and because hospital patients are self-absorbed, and because I was drugged, I thought the surgeon was talking about me. I thought that he was saying, "Well, she's dead. I'm announcing it to her in bed."

The psychiatrist I saw at the surgeon's referral said that the feeling was a common one. She said that victims of trauma who have not yet assimilated the trauma often believe they are dead and do not know it.

The great white sharks in the waters near my home attack one to seven people a year. Their primary victim is the abalone diver. With abalone stakes at thirty-five dollars a pound and going up, the Department of Fish and Game expects the shark attacks to show no slackening.

.

Stille Nacht_The Quay Brothers

2009-08-26T00:25:00.000-07:00

.

.

Arresting You . . . Quotations

2009-08-24T14:06:00.000-07:00

"There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him -- disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others." --Anton Chekhov

"Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." --Antonio Gransci

"I am old, I am fat, I am ugly - but I am still Tetrazinni" --Luisa Tetrazzini

"To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now." --Samuel Beckett

"... we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong." --George Eliot

"Unhappy the land that has no heroes!"
"No, unhappy the land that needs heroes.” --Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo

"Harmful literature is more useful than useful literature . . ." --Evgeny Zamyatin

"I was timid when I was young. Now that I'm eighty-five, I'm seriously terrified." --Jorge Luis Borges

"The more information one has to evaluate, the less one knows." --Marshall McLuhan

"It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg." --Anatole France

“We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.” --Simone Weil

"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music." --Vladimir Nabokov

.

The Myths of Outer Space in Ohio

2009-08-15T15:56:00.000-07:00

The Myths of Outer Space in Ohio

Sunlight wore a new dress
given as a present by her uncle: Uncle Nighttime.
It was some shade of lavender. No-one really knew why,
but on her it worked. Her uncle was a fop,
always trimming the end of his cigar,
lying in his single bed whistling Gilbert and Sullivan,
noticeably vague about his affairs.

In town, Nighttime had often been mistaken
for Anthony Perkins, something about the skinny frame
that never threw a shadow. Though
the family forbid him, his crush on Sunlight
was sizeable. He carved her name with an exacto blade
into the skin of his leg. Someone
had to invent Physics just to understand his motive.

Of course this was long ago, 1940’s or so.
Sunlight’s dress had a wide collar and the belt cinched
tight on her trim waist. Her hips curved
around Venus and drove all the lesser planets crazy.
Though Nighttime had poor vision,
he could see her luminance through the lavender dress.
It pulsated like a hot Artie Shaw tune.
When sunset rolled around
and he obtained a better view, he had to fan
himself with darkness so as not to faint straight away.

Sunlight didn’t know Nighttime even existed.
Hell, she was young, impetuous, liked to ride
around in the backseat of speedy cars, lean
her head out the window and scream, “faster, faster.”
Uncle Nighttime stayed in his room writing poems
and dedicating each of them to her;
he grew pale, took up drinking absinthe
from a special glass made of ancient quasars.

In Southern Ohio on a hot and sweaty night
the local police arrested Nighttime
on a morals charge. The family was aghast.
What with besmirchment and all,
concern ran high for Sunlight’s reputation.
Suddenly she remembered her Uncle,
his taste for damask and Belgian lace,
I suppose she was outgrowing the crude townies.

Her plan was simple. She met her Uncle
in the jail’s visitation room and slipped him a gat,
then began a slow striptease, removing one glove,
then another. By the time
she was down to her bra and panties
she had permanently blinded the guards.

Soon both had escaped into the alley.
Uncle Nighttime turned over the ignition
in a late-model Oldsmobile and headed out
toward Atlantic City.
Meanwhile Sunlight wriggled
into a waiting Studebaker ragtop.
Waving and beaming unrestrainedly, she drove west.
That’s all I know about it—
maybe they never looked back.
It’s a big country.

Above image: The moon completely covers the sun during a solar eclipse on August 11, 1999. Copyright © 2007 by Heinz-Peter Bader.

.

Two poems by David Shumate

2009-08-11T21:51:00.000-07:00

David Shumate lives in Zionsville, Indiana. His first book of prose poems, High Water Mark was published in 2004 by University of Pittsburgh Press. It subsequently won the Agnes Lynch Starrett prize. In 2008 a second book of his poems was also published by University of Pittsburgh Press titled The Floating Bridge. He teaches at Marian College.

The Rain

I suppose after the heavens and the earth I too would have
created Adam and Eve. Or some pair of innocents like them.
The first food would have been grapes, and of those they
could have partaken freely. I would have bestowed on them a
sense of humor and encouraged practical jokes. I would have
let them learn about procreation on their own and practice it
without shame. When they had a dozen children or so, when
their hair had turned to gray, I would have shown them the
way out to the sea. They could have traveled there often and
written about it to their children's children. Some of their
letters might have survived and these would be holy texts. Who
knows? With a few small changes, things might be different
today. But the rain . . . The rain . . . Now that was truly
inspired. I would never have thought of that. Not in a million
years.

The Bible Belt

It's a vast and fertile land. Soybeans and corn grow in this soil.
Wheat and tobacco. A little sorghum. It's not dramatic terrain
with ocean waves crashing against the cliffs. It's mostly gently
rolling plains. Long stretches of prairie. You know you've entered
it when the signs along the highway begin telling you what God
wants you to do. Those who live here regard it as their duty to
make these things known. Otherwise the rest of the country
would be left in the dark. The bibles in this region are larger than
elsewhere. Most weigh over a hundred pounds. It takes two strong
men to lift them into a pickup truck to haul off to church. All the
women dress up on Sundays. And all the white men shake hands.

.

Old Crimes

2009-08-03T15:19:00.000-07:00

If I could age like Dan Duryea, I wouldn’t mind the onslaught of decrepitude and the bulky distension to my trousers that wearing diapers will certainly expose. That guy was a rock. His chiseled features and suave pomaded hair were the epitome of 1940’s gangster élan. That’s when gangsters wore suits and ties topped by a wide-brimmed hat, not the ¾ length baggie pants, NBA team jersey, thigh high white socks and immaculate white basketball shoes that they sport today. Curious to even think that gangsters of that bygone era could look as frightening as the grim reaper without one single tattoo exposed, not even a dagger through a ruby-red heart. One with “Helen” emblazoned across the top. The times do scuttle along in one mandatory direction I suppose.

Crime is normally a young person’s occupation. Perhaps that rings true owing to the small amount of criminals left alive when pension time comes a-knocking. Not that they all die in some dramatic criminal plot before realizing their golden years. Many expire quietly in drive-by shooting, prison shivs, drug overdoses, witness protection program snafus, or complications of H.I.V. Not the stuff of television news specials. Usually the most you can hope for is that some high school girls in the neighborhood will hold a weekend car wash in your honor to raise money for a headstone. Friends of the family will light tall candles and place plastic roses in front of your mother’s apartment building. A far cry from Don Corleone’s parade of black Packards leading out of the cemetery archway and around the neighboring streets on a drizzly late afternoon.

Maybe that’s why I was never fascinated with crime until I turned 60. Since I’d only been to prison as a visitor for a few hours upon a single occasion, the steel re-enforced cement walls and case-hardened steel bars didn’t provide the deterrent that was intended to rid me of my illegal folly. If one looks at the social opportunities for advancement in Los Angeles during our age, realizing that Karl Marx’s reputation has been somewhat tarnished, if not rusted, one might still find truth in describing the city as one divided by class. 3 major classes to be more exact: first the wealthy and powerful; then those who wish to become wealthy and powerful; and finally everyone else. I’m a class jumper, that is, I once belonged to the second rubric encompassing those of us who had hoped to become wealthy and powerful, however through a sequence of relentless circumstances I’ve dropped into the third basin which collects “everyone else.” It wasn’t a seismic shift of dense change, merely a wearing away of ambition and a corresponding increase of insidious boredom.

When one looks across the city it becomes obvious that the greatest mucilage keeping us from flying into chaos is not brotherly love, civic pride, or fear of police retribution, but rather it’s The Lotto. The California lottery is to its citizens what heaven is to the Christian faithful. It is the answer to every question. It is paramount among capitalist myths, proclaiming that we’re all suckers, but one day through luck, perseverance and a trickling away of our pocket money, we’ll strike it rich and be able to buy our own house trailer. It is our only reason for putting our pants on in the morning, or turning our television off at night. It defines us completely. Best of all, it discounts hard work. In fact it disregards work entirely. As long as you give the local liquor store clerk your 2 dollars or 5 dollars, you are entitled to dream of a brighter tomorrow. The horrors that fill your waking life will immediately discharge into nothingness and become replaced with any fantasy you can conjure. It is the great buffer against financial reality. A gambler’s hallelujah. It is Uncle Sam’s version of clemency and reward.

I began my criminal life, as I said, after I turned 60. The milestone occurred during a bad patch when I had lost half of my savings in the investment fraud scandals of George Bush’s last year in office. My girlfriend of longstanding also decided to use one of many understandable reasons to leave me at that same time. Both incidents were deep incisions into my already frail psyche, but it wasn’t until I lost my dog that doomsday began to toll its clear chime. She was a wolf-hybrid and I’d owned her since puppyhood. Funny, but friends came and went, lovers likewise, even family members relocated to New Jersey or the local cemetery--but my dog was a constant. I took her to work with me, traveled with her. She knew my quirks and phobias better than my girlfriend, better than my best friend. If I ever get a tattoo if will be her name in a circle of dog bones. How she loved bones. At that time, life seemed a passionless redundancy of breathing, eating and shitting. A full moon was too bright, a sunset too dull, and the hours in between whirred like a refrigerator motor with bad bearings.

So it was with an uncalculated decision one afternoon that I told my friend, Dallas Ely, I’d accompany him to a casino in Gardena. I’d been there once before with Dallas, a poker player. He was a luckless gambling addict and taught me that what losers need more than even winning, is someone to accompany them when they lose--I understood the rationale. I had an uncashed unemployment check. He drove.

Billboards for casinos always include colorful nightlife with wholesome people having fun. I’d say everything on that billboard, even the ladder, is a lie. Not that it bothers me much. After all, if there are no lies, there is no advertising--and I have a soft spot for ads. With the hope of one day purchasing what they offer, many an otherwise stuffed shirt has embezzled his entire company. Watching my fellow citizens act counter to their upbringing and moral code in order to buy a German automobile, or season’s tickets to the opera, or a trip to Jamaica, gives me faith that we’re all still malleable and will hasten to change at a moment’s notice. A scenario I prefer to one dictated by karma or fate. Plus the prettiest girls are always in ads. They might be selling a dialysis machine, but they’ll be wearing thong bikinis, spiked collars and stiletto heels. Capitalism is fun spelled wrong.

Dallas picked me up after 4:30. It probably took him half an hour to drive over. He lived in Santa Monica, and though he didn’t have a view of the ocean, at least the air was wet and smelled salty. For that I envied him; him and the hundreds of thousands like him that huddled on the lip of the Pacific in overcrowded apartments, paying stiff rents and voting the Democratic ticket. He couldn’t come earlier because he watched re-runs of The Simpsons every day at 3:00. He claimed the little girl sounded like his ex-wife and it gave him an erection. I didn’t want to know any particulars. Everyone has their reasons, even animation-voice-actress lovers.

We took the freeways through the witless census of bad drivers that usually parade the downtown lanes. Although typically slow, there were no accidents, and we finally gained speed after maneuvering the eddies of independent transport between Chinatown and the Coliseum, sluicing down the Harbor Freeway heading south. His car rode smooth and the air-conditioning worked. My car didn’t do those things—didn’t even try.

We pulled into a huge parking lot and paid the six dollar fee. The area wasn’t known to be very safe, so it was smart to park in the patrolled lot. Losing all the money to your name in a 20 hour nightmare of bad cards and maxed-out credit, only to leave and discover that your car has been stolen is not a notion one courts knowingly. We grabbed a couple of bacon-wrapped hot dogs from a vendor on the sidewalk. They always smelled better than they tasted, and tasted better than they felt in your stomach, but they were cheap. We hadn’t come to eat good food, but to win other people’s money.

Inside was cool and the lighting was pleasant. They hired designers from Las Vegas to build the casino. You never saw a clock, never saw a window, never felt a change in temperature. Nothing to indicate that time was passing, or that there was another world outside the confines of the main floor: a world of husbands, kids at school, bill collectors, jobs, bank balances. Instead there were card tables with green felt tops and multi-colored denominations of chips to stand-in for real money. Nothing was real, everything was possible. The only way one could lose was to leave out that front door.

I had no affection for poker, too many rules, so I separated from Dallas and found a Blackjack table that looked quiet if not prosperous. Blackjack is my kind of game, the skill quotient is nil. Anyone who can count to 21 and has enough chips to feed the house's lopsided odds can play. If it takes a tubercular dandy of the Old West like Doc Holiday to personify the game of poker, well then Blackjack might be the Manny Pacquiao of card games. Pacquiao is a Filipino boxing champion in 5 weight classes and a virtual deity in his home country. I saw him once at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in a title bout against Erik Morales, and though he lost the fight in a 2 to 1 decision, Pacquiao was a precision puncher with a never-say-die heart. A few weeks afterward, a judge at the prizefight admitted to scoring a round improperly, costing the fight, which is all the more reason to equate Pacquiao with Blackjack. No matter how well you play your hand, you lose.

It took me about an hour to waste $300 dollars which put a sick fist of bile in my stomach, and rather than continue my downward spiral I took a break and walked around. On the second floor I found a snack bar and sipped a club soda with a bag of chips. At an adjacent yellow Formica table, a woman was jotting down numbers in a small notebook. She was middle-aged and Asian, cute Asian. Her head was bent either totalling her loses or working out a new mathematical scheme to break the bank on the Pai Gow games. "You winning or about to be winning?" I asked. My pick-up lines were rather cobwebbed due to lack of use. She ignored my interest, but I had nothing much to lose, so I leaned closer, "I said you look too sexy to be spending your waking hours banging out dollar bills in this joint. Let's go get a bottle and a room." Never in my life had I shown such rude authority. I must have been channeling Dan Duryea in Scarlet Street. Since I'd been alcohol free for over 10 years, the question of getting drunk with a stranger I'd met at a poker hall was completely out-of-character, completely. But the sick feeling in my stomach was gone, replaced by some intoxicating adrenalin I seemed to have created by my bold-faced bullshit.

I was prepared for a pithy rejoiner about losers with tiny dicks drinking water with a straw, but she smiled and replied with a little giggle, "No thank you. I'm here with a friend and I don't drink." She didn't rule out the implied sexual Olympics I'd imagined when offering the room. "We don't have to drink, I'm here with a friend myself and just wanted to kill some time until his luck runs dry. These seats are uncomfortable and the lighting makes me feel like I'm posing for a passport photo." She giggled again which I was now counting. "What are you writing down in that book? Lucrative figures I hope." She closed the notebook and placed both hands on top. "Nothing really. I just try to figure odds at Blackjack. Not merely numerical probabilities, but I include atmosphere, colors, time between hands, genders of people at each table." No wonder she was agreeable, she was nuts . . . Figures! But I continued, undeterred by the mental health issues at hand, "So do your calculations work? I'm not one for systems myself. I just give them my money and call it therapy." She giggled a third time and I was in love.

I rose from my table and asked if I could join her, carrying my clear plastic glass and Doritos. She didn't seem to mind, but took her book and placed it in the purse slung over her chair. "Can I get you something? A drink, a sandwich?" Christ, I thought. First I asked her to get drunk and fuck me senseless in some dive hotel room and now I'm acting like a schoolboy offering to share his lunch. If I can just keep her giggling I thought. "Well, sure." She answered kind of chipper, "I wouldn't mind a BLT and a diet Coke. But I've got money--and how about you? Can I offer you a sandwich or something?" As she was talking, she looked me in the eyes, but I noticed she was removing a wedding ring from her left hand. Oh thank you, Jesus. "Tell you what," I said, "Why don't you order us some food to go and I'll get a room upstairs. We can eat and talk more comfortably, maybe put on some music. Relax. I think the AMC channel is showing a Joel McCrae and Claudette Colbert movie at 8:00." Somewhere in the recesses of my consciousness I realized that not every sexy woman would get aroused by Joel McCrae and Claudette Colbert, but I was batting a thousand and giddy with confidence. A long moment began to stretch out on the carpet at my feet. It rolled onto it's back, curled it's tail, looked up at me and blinked. The noise of exuberant winners somewhere below broke the feline monotony of time's quiet loitering. "Okay." She replied, "I just have to tell my friend what I'm doing so he won't worry." She grabbed her purse as she rose and leaned close to my ear, "Palm Beach Story . . . Preston Sturges . . . Paramount, 1942 . . . You want pickles with your sandwich?"

2

Her name was Yukio and her breasts were small; not at all like the bovine sized glands I'd been spending my evenings masturbating to on dvd's titled Rosalita's Hot Lips, Nuns in Bondage #44 and Tolstoy's Tsarist Tarts: A Saga of Cruelty. I quit counting her giggles, her mewlings, her gurgles, gasps, grunts, burbles and breathy snorts. They were mixed with my own. And though I'm not here to confess to premature ejaculations, we did catch the second half of the movie. Flailing that sex stick around has never been my strong suit anyway. It always seemed so physically perfunctory, as if we guys are plugged into a 12 volt generator and are trying to hammer through bunker walls. I prefer to rest my reputation on my eight inch tongue and its rude calisthenics. That and my sweet talk.

Yukio knew some of the film's dialogue and recited lines along with Claudette Colbert. As fortune would have it, I knew a few Preston Sturges sheets of dialog myself, having once been a projectionist at the Rivoli Theater in San Luis Obispo--a now defunct revival house which showed vintage and art house fare for one week runs. It was a good time. The money wasn't much, but it beat repossessing cars which was what I was employed to perform in my prior incumbency.

I licked the tender flesh at the joints of her fingers while we watched Rudy Vallee get beaten in love's fickle parlor game. I could feel the indentation left by her wedding ring. "You said your friend was a guy. Nothing romantic I suppose?" I inquired, trying to sound off-handed. "Oh, well. . . no, not really." She answered without taking her eyes of the hotel flat screen. We were up against the headboard on pillows that could use a plumping. "He works here at the casino. Security." "He's not going to break down the door and shoot me like a dog in a fit of jealousy is he?" She offered another of her patented giggles. "No, he's used to it. Besides he doesn't know which room we're in." Her explanation didn't quiet my growing list of misgivings. "I mean he's not your husband or anything is he?" I said, my voice dropping a tone. "You're not being rude dear, you're just being yourself," She soundlessly lip-synced to Miss Colbert's delivery.

I had to admit, Preston Sturges made some great films. I took her longest finger and tried to touch the back of my throat with it, but gagged. My eyes even began to tear. I love those scenes in porn movies when a woman's eyes tear and her cheap slut mascara begins to run down her face. They almost look like early 1930's Universal monster movie ghouls. "But if he did find which room number we we're in, would he do anything?" I questioned again. Yukio looked at me and smiled, "Don't worry, he's not that kind of husband."

One of my least dependable abilities is thinking under stress. I've never been good at it, and as the years pass by it has become worse. "Really, what kind of husband is he?" I asked, scanning the room to make sure I knew where I'd left my pants and shoes. "We're partners mostly. We met years ago in a business deal and fell in love. We managed to get married, but can never find a good reason to get divorced."

I reached across my side of the bed to get my bottle of luke warm water and took a sip. "It's not my business I know, but do you both still live together? Sleep together?" She was watching Palm Beach Story again. "Please . . . don't . . . worry. He loves me too much to ever hurt any of my friends, and that includes you." She rolled over onto me and bit my nipple hard. The localized stab of pain wiped my brain clean and we started fooling around again. I forgot all my questions until after I'd pulled out of her leaving small dollops of cum on her back. Yukio wasn't tall exactly, but she had long thin legs connected to her narrow hips. She was probably in her mid 40's and still trim. I on the other hand had a pronounced gut that jutted out over my belt line like a profile of Orson Welles' chin in Touch of Evil. Glad she wasn't shallow.

At some point during our last dip into passion's swampy pit, the movie ended. I vaguely remembered finding the remote and silencing the post-screening commentary. We were both sweaty, so I turned the air-conditioner knob to a higher setting and pushed the fan slider to maximum. We still had half a bucket of watery ice left, so I filled our glasses with it. I gave her one and sat down beside her. She hadn't shaved her pubic hair as so many women had, and her black hair met along a crease above her vagina like a toupee, albeit a fine, dark, sexy toupee. For some unfathomable reason I wondered what she looked like when she was a kid, say kindergarten age. I bet I'd have had a crush on her. I could imagine mooning over her from a rear desk, or acting openly foolish if I though she was watching and it would make her smile.

There was a loud knock on the door. If I were Dan Duryea I'd have reached for my .38 then pulled on my pants, tucked in my wife-beater t-shirt and barked, "Waddya want?" Instead I pulled the blanket up to my chin and froze. Yukio slid out of bed and without benefit of her underclothes, pulled her dress on over her head. "Yes," She called to the door, "What is it?"
She walked to the door and put her hand on the secondary lock. The rear zipper of her dress was still open down to the crack of her ass. Her skin was was still flushed from our squishy exertions.

"Yukio . . . you okay? Open the door." It was a male voice and I wished I was losing money at a cold Blackjack table. She pulled back the door with the lock still in place so that the two inch clearance allowed her to see the guy outside in the hall. "Oh hi. We just finished watching a Preston Sturges show. Come in." She closed the door to unhook the lock, then reopened it wide. I was naked under the covers and began shaking in an un-gangster-like way. "Lester, this is Dennis. We met downstairs and decided to kill some time together."

He wasn't a big guy, but he wasn't small either. He wore black slacks and a Hawaiian shirt. Probably worked out at the casino gym three times a week. I'd put him somewhere in his early 40's, somewhere around Yukio's age. I pulled out my hand and gave a weak wave, "Pleased to meet you, Lester." If Preston Sturges was around I'd have asked him for some fucking direction, but he wasn't so I tried to follow Yukio's lead. He looked around the room, obviously spotting Yukio's underpants and bra on the floor with her sandals. I hate the unexpected--these pregnant pauses that ensue: the silence that sucks everything into its vortex just before a wave crashes its crippling power all over everything in sight.

He disregarded Yukio, who bent to pick up her underclothes. With a few strides he was at the foot of the bed and sat down. He could see my clothes scattered over the little table and chairs. A cross between a leer and a smile grew across his face and he looked me over. "Well," he began, "How was it?" Oh fuck! I wanted to call King's X, or Time Out, but he continued, "Don't you love it when Gerry says, 'You have no idea what a long-legged woman can do without doing anything? That's one of my favorite Claudette Colbert lines of all time."

"Yeah, how about Rudy Vallee when he's talking to Mary Astor?" Piped in Yukio.
"Oh that was so cool when John D. Heckensacker III says: 'You don't marry someone you just met the day before; at least I don't."
Only to be followed by Yukio imitating Mary Astor in her roll as Princess Centimillia: 'But that's the only way, dear. If you get to know too much about them you'd never marry them."

Both Lester and Yukio broke out in laughter and embraced. They kissed a slow affectionate dance of the lips and when they pulled away, he kept his arm around her waist and they both faced me again. "Must have been on the AMC channel huh?" Lester asked. I didn't know how to respond, I may even have been drooling I was so confused. Then he continued, "Tomorrow, they're showing Murnau's Island of Lost Souls. It doesn't screen that often, but I have to work." Lester didn't get the appropriate answer from me that he hoped to elicit, so he looked over at Yukio and squeezed her waist. They looked like an aging prom couple. She still had my cum on her back and it was probably being wiped onto his forearm as we all chatted like the good chums we'd become. Gotta love America.

Just as I had decided to squirm out of bed and put my pants on, Yukio read my mind and gathered them for me. It saved a naked waltz in front of her husband, my movie buddy Lester. His statute of limitations for flying into a rage and killing me with a handy blunt instrument was just about exhausted, so I got out of bed with my back to them both and slipped each leg into my pants. I grabbed my underpants and stuffed them into my pocket, then after buttoning up my semi-clean shirt, turned to continue our confab.

"Dennis made me cum twice." Yukio offered up for general comment. They must do things much more differently in the far East than I ever imagined, maybe Buddha's doing. Or maybe it's just Gardena. "Well, my friend must be wondering where I am. He's probably broke by now and in a hurry to drive home. It's been great meeting you both." I looked at Yukio and held out my palm for a handshake, which she took and held for a moment before returning it barely used. I didn't think Lester and I were really intent on shaking hands, so I just gave him another half wave as I ambled toward the door.

"Sure you have to leave so soon?" Lester asked in a regulated tone of voice. "I was hoping we could talk some business."

"Well, not right now. Besides I'm terrible at business. Worse than Blackjack even." I was looking at the door and cast this last sentence over my shoulder like a feeble lacrosse pass.

Yukio slid next to me and stroked my arm, "Please, Declan. It will only take a few minutes." I fabricated an insincere measure of a smile, but she must have perceived that I'd say anything to get outside that door in one piece, and that I wasn't about to agree to camping out for another few minutes or another nanosecond. So she lifted herself up on her toes and whispered in my ear a promise so lewd and exiting that I released my grip on the door handle and re-entered the room with no noticeable hesitation. Such is my firm hold on commitment. We each took a seat at the table and Lester remained leaning on a chest of drawers while he spoke his piece. It began, "First I'll have to shoot the guard."

3

“Do you know how to distinguish a good hotel from a dive?” Lester asked. I waited a beat while my memory swam back decades and retrieved a rule I'd learned while taking SAT tests in my student years: that any answer is preferable and statistically stronger than no answer, so I ventured one. “Let’s see, If the woman at the front counter behind the cross-hatched metal cage doesn’t show any fresh needle marks on her arms it’s the Plaza?” Lester showed disappointment in my flippancy.

“Well, yes, that might be a pertinent clue, but I’ll tell you the insider’s method of judgment. There’s money to be made on both ends of the spectrum, cheap or classy. It’s like Blackjack. There’s many ways to win, not merely pulling a King and an Ace off the deal. No, if you want to ascertain which way a hotel swings just tell the front desk you’d like to view the room before checking in. They’ll give you a pass key and verbal directions to the room. A good hotel will have security at the elevator and they’ll ask to see your key, a dive won’t. Then as you proceed, judge the carpet and the interior paint job. If it compliments well and the paint is trimmed with a second or third highlight, then once again it’s a nice place. Look down to the end of each corridor and notice if the facing wall is a mirror, again unless it’s Paris, the good hotels will have installed a quality mirror. Look for cameras in the corners. If you see surveillance cameras it’s a dump. A nice place will hide them behind glass or in light fixtures. Then when you walk into a room notice the bedspread. A light-colored, non-floral bedspread is a good sign. The Motel Six style chaotic print patterns are the tip-off of a joint. Know why the large hotel corporations buy these hideous eye-sores?” He asked while pointing to the bed where Yukio and I had broken commandments and vows. He seemed to be awaiting another guess from me.

“I don’t know, hide cum stains.” It just came out, before the sound waves left my mouth I felt contrite.

“Good guess, but no. Glycol ether solvents can remove semen stains. No, these gaudy floral patterns are designed to hide spare change that's fallen from your pockets. In hundreds of thousands of rooms spare change is left behind every day to the tune of over 30 million dollars a year. It never appears on a spread sheet. It’s untaxable, untraceable. High end hotels for obvious reasons don’t include these windfalls in their business management.

“So what? Some Johns in fleabag hotels leave spare change behind, the maids pick it up to buy themselves postage stamps. Who cares?”

“True enough Declan, it doesn’t seem like much, but to return to our Blackjack analogy, remember that drawing a 5 or 7 card Charlie wins more than two-card 21. Big denominations, or small denominations are all just figures. At the end of the day, it’s only the total that’s of interest.”

“Tell him about Global Props” Yukio said to Lester. She reached out and draped her hand on my arm. Funny, but her touch reminded me of my Grandmother when I was a youth. She had the most delicate and delicious touch. Her back rubs were probably my first introduction to sex. She’d actually get me hard just rubbing my back. Crazy. My grandmother. Crazy.

“Global Properties is a national hostelry, third largest in the United States, first in California. They own and manage hotels, motels, commercial real estate, casinos, and a cruise ship line. They’re the parent company of many medium priced chains up and down the coast: the Executive Suites is theirs, Harmony Hotels, J.W. Stubbs’s Business Hotels, Paradise Motels, the Golden Moon Cruise Line, and lots of independents you’ve never seen advertised. What makes them interesting to us is that they make a practice of keeping that chump change maids use to buy postage stamps. Every day . . . Every bed. Last year they made just under a million dollars. They own this casino.”

“So somewhere downstairs there’s a big bag of pennies. I still don’t get your business interest.”

“Declan, we can offer you $20,000 dollars cash for a weekend’s work. If we’re lucky, you get renumerated handsomely. If we’re unlucky you go to prison for a long time, or you’re shot and killed in a parking garage by the Los Angeles Police. It always comes down to luck and money. You won’t be asked to fire a gun, it’s actually more an acting assignment. It’s serious, but we’ve found it can be greatly entertaining. That’s the pitch. That’s the deal.”

“Why me? Why not some other recalcitrant loser taking a breather in the snack bar? I hate work, legal or illegal. I’m going to have to turn you down.” Then I looked at my wrist where a watch would have been had I a watch to wear, “Now, I have to meet my friend. I appreciate the offer. No hard feelings, but the answer’s no.”

Neither one of them seemed disappointed. Yukio was still caressing my arm, then she reached across my chest and dropped a folded piece of her notepaper in my shirt pocket. I picked up her hand and kissed it goodbye, rose and walked to the door.

“You have three days to decide. If we don’t hear from you by late Friday we’ll assume you’ve definitively refused.” Lester said, smiling as if we’d just finished a croquet game together instead of me having wonton and uncontrolled sexual eruptions with his wife. "I suggest you keep our conversation to yourself, though I understand that it's difficult not repeating such a strange offer. Just remember that you'll be placing the friends you tell about us in danger. We are part of a larger conglomeration of business associates, I can safely relate that none of the others are as friendly as us. Not even close.

“Okay, but I’m not really the criminal type. I was a bed-wetter and weep at Bette Davis movies.”

Yukio giggled.

I closed the door behind me and looked down the corridor, forgetting how I’d arrived or which direction led to the elevator. Turning right I hastened on. Dallas might have left already in a depressed fit of resignation, in which case the cab would cost me 40 dollars I didn’t have to waste. I felt excited and was breathing quicker than normal. More than anything I wanted to tell someone about my last few hours, someone who wouldn’t just laugh. Someone who understood how fortunate we humans are to live in a world of sexy Asian women who giggle and know the best lines in one of Preston Sturges’ greatest screenplays. Though that wasn’t all I could ruminate over. Funny people they grow in Gardena.

Dallas wasn’t at the same table, but he was still playing. This time it was a Texas Hold’em table. Oddly he had stacks of green and black chips which meant he was winning. I’d forgotten that sometimes that happened, if only to give yourself a pleasant memory before you lose it all to some stoical dealer in a long-sleeve white blouse, black bow tie and a name tag that never looks that permanent.

I didn’t want to jinx Dallas’ luck or pull him away from a winning run, so I told him I was tired and would take a cab home. I’d talk to him the next day to hear if he’d managed to walk out with any of the money stacked in front of him. Of course I knew the answer; if he didn’t lose he wouldn’t go home at all.

The night was dark and cool. Summer was in full swing, but temperatures had dropped after sunset when the ever-present jasmine began to broadcast its redolent carillon. You could still feel some of the day’s heat trapped in the sidewalk. It made Los Angeles bearable. Darkness hid the grimy cracked façade of it all; the neon and streetlights shouted out to you like old acquaintances you hadn’t seen in so long you forgot they owed you money.

I didn’t want to wait around for the front desk to call a cab, so I walked down to Vermont and hailed my own. Felt good to leave the sound of money behind me. Sometimes, I start humming that tune all the way to self-pity’s rendition of Kurt Weill’s thoat-slitting underworld. Not my favorite music on a Tuesday night when I still had $380 dollars in my pants and the taste of Yukio’s pussy on my lips.

4

Once home, I whipped two eggs around the skillet, then pulled out some cold sausages I’d fried the day before, grated some queso and concocted a thick quesadilla. With an icy glass of club soda and squeezed lemon I sat down to eat and ponder again the day’s events. I could see by its blinking red light that my phone’s answering machine had a message. The device was old, but it still worked okay. Although a novice might think that the pitted voices sounded like jumbled Navajo code, I'd trained myself at translating the garbled messages trapped within the stretched magnetic tape. In a world of cutting edge marvels in digital technology, I limped along with an analog consciousness. Old, broken or stolen, that’s me.

My cooking was satisfactory provided I used enough hot sauce, which I did. My refrigerator door held dozens of those murky plastic demitasse cups filled with assorted hot sauce mixtures from taco stands and take-out restaurants. I always cracked the cover and smelled them to be sure, but my experience dictated that good hot sauce never goes bad. It’s too mean.

With a mouth full of delicious slop, I pressed the Play button and listened. There were two messages, the first one was a wrong number, a Latino sounding woman asking for Linda. I probably receive more wrong numbers and recorded advertisements than actual messages intended for me personally, but it helps me to feel apart of this cockeyed world. If I'm lonely and bitter it helps to know that someone I've never met has my phone number written down on a pad of paper, or incised into a cell phone database. It matters little that it's all a mistake, the fact is we're connected.

The second message was from Yukio. Just at hearing her voice, my blood started acting coltish. She wanted to see me again without Lester. She left her cell number and hoped I'd return her call by Tomorrow. After she'd hung up, I listened to the soulless voice of the answering machine inquire if I wanted to delete the two messages. I saved Yukio's voice, jettisoned the wrong number.

Carrying my plate across the small apartment, I opened the cd deck to see what music selection still remained from that morning: a soundtrack from a Wong Kar-wai film, Our Glorious Years Have Passed Like Flowers. I returned the cd tray and hit the largest button, whose word had been rubbed off over the years. At the initial strings I remembered liking the tune and so turned the volume higher. It was a good movie as well, restrained and moody as hell. The cd began with Yumeji's Theme, a sprightly intro that sounded more like vintage Nino Rota than anything traditionally Chinese. I took another bite of my quesidilla and actually gave a little try at a circus pirouette. Though Yukio was Japanese, somehow my memory of Wong Kar-wai's film reminded me of her. Asians were all lumped together as the "Yellow Peril" when I was a kid: slant-eyed Kamikaze pilots with Tong braids and their geisha girlfriends with big hair and buck teeth, pouring tea and smoking opium. I knew we kicked their butts in the Pacific during the war and forced them to build our railroads in the previous century owing to their inferiority. I grew up believing everyone not white was inferior to the suburban collective of Sherman Oaks residents and habitues I belonged to. Differentiating between Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Tibetan, Japanese, Okinawan, Vietnamese, Laotian, Thai, Burmese, Ceylonese, Indonesian would be frivolous at best. Better to lump them into an indivisible rubric called "Chinks" and forget them.

After finishing my food, I washed the dishes I'd dirtied in hot foamy water and set them to dry on the sink. Though not a particularly clean renter, I was nonetheless tidy. A thin layer of dust covered most of the spaces not directly in the path of foot traffic, however all was stacked neatly and piled at every corner and upon every surface. Books, records, CDs, magazines, memento-stuffed cigar boxes, vhs tapes and DVDs rose up from the ground like those 5 foot ant hills one sees in photos of the Malawi bush. When visitors commented on the place, it was embarrassing. They were unusually kind, but transparent in their judgments and eventually I stopped inviting people. My dog, though large, had learned to maneuver around the piles like a trained ballet dancer learned to bypass any sorcerer wearing black tights. Though gone, there was still evidence of my dog's life in the apartment--deep scratches on the door; dust bunnies under furniture constructed largely of her shed undercoat; stains along the kitchen wall where her food and water bowls had been kept; or the deep indentation on my couch cushions where she curled at my feet during late night viewings of assorted movies, or while I read novels both perverse and profound. Her name was Hannah, she was killed by a drunk driver while sleeping in the rear bed of my pickup truck. My temporal lodge of forgiveness had been eroding ever since.

Often, I stretched out on my black leather couch and reminisced about Hannah through the cracked and debris-strewn bunker I call my memory. Women loved my dog. Usually better than me. She was a wonder of dignity and grace in a world where such attributes are rare or go unheralded. When women ascertained these qualities in her, they wanted to take her on errands with them, or walk her in the neighborhood park. Originating in a bloodline of large breeds from cold northern climes, she offered my women friends protection from unseen threats, and yet her handsome markings and furry athletic frame also gave them a feeling of style and a general swagger while in her company. All remarked upon her loyal disposition and equilibrium in matters of tongue licks, warm nuzzles and her indefatigable desire for tummy scratching. Owing to her lineage being half-wolf, she could also be accounted as one possessing a sudden ferocity in times of perceived danger. I carried many bite scars from breaking up the snarl and slash of bloody dogfights. Though never did she bare her teeth at women or children. In that, she exhibited a primordial system of implied ethics much preferable to the average bloke and lass of now-a-days' planet earth. And though I was often tempted to accept personal accolades for her temperament by my meager training, it was unwarranted. I never taught her anything that make her exemplary. Maybe Lester was right in his assessment of all eventualities being a by-product of luck, hence the medieval wheel of fortune, or the I Ching. Perhaps like Ra, the Egyptian sun god, Hannah was just born on an auspicious day. Good a reason as any.

It wasn't difficult for me to play second fiddle to a dog. I was grateful for her company, and secretly felt undeserving of such an even-tempered companion.

I'm not saying I believe absolutely in luck, or that there aren't ways to improve your chances. A gun will do that. Graft, corruption, financial malfeasance, crooked cops, or when a politician swears on a Bible--all sure winners. The only corrective which trumps all these is bad luck--that I do believe in. When that drunk hit my truck and killed Hannah, bad luck came calling. In fact it broke into my life, ordered a pizza and changed the channel on my TV; and like a good lapsed Presbyterian, I blamed myself.

If I even considered joining Yukio and Lester in their vague criminal plans, it would be tantamount to calling the authorities in advance and reserving a cell in Chino prison. My soul had even begun to smell like a long dead rodent stuck behind the plasterboard walls of my best intentions. I had the look grifters running a shell game hoped to find in a sucker. I couldn't shake it, and was becoming convinced it had come to stay. And yet like any gambler, I knew my luck could always change, or as Publius Vergilius Maro opines in The Aeneid: "audaces fortuna iuvat"--Fortune favors the bold.

Leaning my head back against the padded arm rest of the couch, I remembered that Yukio had put a note in my pocket. I removed it expecting a further clue to their money scheme, or perhaps her phone number, but instead on the blue lined paper was a hand-drawn happy face: circular, bold and silly as a school girl's lack of cogent description. I re-folded it and stuck it back in my pocket, then smiled. It came like a thundercloud across a horizon of parched July desert dropping big fat gobs of rain. A fucking happy face.

Jim Jarmusch On Theft

2009-07-30T18:18:00.000-07:00

Individual Results May Vary

2009-07-29T12:32:00.001-07:00

I was early for a change. It's not that I make appointments with Dr. Hsiao all that often, maybe once or twice a year, but when I'm late, the health clinic personnel become parental and dominant--all professional warmth dissipates, then turns icy and I'm forced to wait hours. Luckily, I remembered their primary regard for promptness and, like I said, arrived 10 minutes early.

The waiting room was big, airy with a flat screen television on which interviews with baseball personalities were being conducted while the network twiddled its thumbs waiting for a rain delay to cease in St. Louis. Dodgers vs Cardinals was the subtitle banner. I'm not someone who likes televisions in public places: Thai restaurants, supermarket check-out lines, produce departments of the grocery store, even little monitors on gasoline pumps blaring the evening news. Obviously, it's an infringement on my desire for quiet and serenity, but the core of my disdain is its mind-numbing homogeneity. Just once I'd like to see an announcer with a large facial scar and bad teeth loosen his badly-tied Windsor knot and stutter his way through the teleprompter's highlights. And instead of programming Titanic, or Harry Potter as the movie to watch while I gobble my Tom Kha Gai and Yellow Curry, perhaps someone at the television studio would broadcast Venus In Furs, or a filmed colposcopy. Anything but the dross we refer to as family entertainment.

I should mention I had booked the doctor's appointment for suicide. My own. No, I wasn't going to pull out a gun and blow my brains all over the pharmaceutical advertising and IKEA furniture. I merely wanted a prescription of sleeping pills to effect a nap into eternity.

While I waited, and leafed through a Newsweek, I tried to rehearse a convincing story to tell the doctor. Many years ago I was very good at such stories. With the aid of many a gullible, or greedy doctor I once kept my dosages of barbiturates in hefty supply. That was decades ago however, when my rainbow cache of downers might include: nembutals, seconals, amytals, tuinals, or luminals. Interesting that Pentobarbital, the pharmacological name for nembutals, has spun off to become the prime ingredient used for animal euthanasia, some of whose trade names include Euthasol, Euthatal, Euthanal, Euthanyl (in Canada), Beuthanasia-D, and Fatal Plus. Pretty cool huh? I don't suppose there could be any misrepresentation of my plans if I walked in and asked the doctor for a three month supply of Fatal Plus.

In movies, they always seem to glide over the actual procurement of sleeping pills. They're always just there in appropriate supply. Open a bathroom sink mirror and they appear next to Viagra, 0.5 ml syringes of Restylane and hormonal anti-wrinkle cremes. In reality, it takes a bit of dramatic enhancement to get sleeping pills from a doctor. A bit like getting absolution from a priest. They make you work for it.

I had taken a seat in a finger of the waiting room which blocked any view of the television. A mother and daughter were also tucked away there, whispering and playing on the girl's blackberry phone. They somehow seemed too happy; I imagined them sharing their last good afternoon together. In a few weeks tests would be interpreted to show an advanced stage of breast cancer in the mother. A pall would descend over their world never to be excised, never.

Although I knew it was merely my quixotic imagination at work, probably from stress at my approaching audition with Doctor Hsiao, it did seem true somehow. An old episode of Twilight Zone had opened here in the clinic, giving me the dubious power of temporal projection. I didn't want it to happen. Christ, who'd want cancer to be visited upon utter strangers, especially the happy duo I peered at over my copy of Newsweek? Fate wasn't in my hands, I was just able to look into the screenplay twenty pages ahead of the mother and daughter. Or as Rod Serling might intone: "There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man."

When my name was called from the rear door, a heavy set and rather attractive nurse waited for me to follow her. We stopped so that I could weigh myself on a white enamel scale. Then she led me into a generic examining room where she asked a few dull questions, took my blood pressure
and placed a thermometer under my tongue. It was quick and business-like, she could have been plucking feathers from a headless rooster. "The doctor will be with you shortly" she told me and exited the door, closing it behind her. I looked at some of the graphic aids on the counters and walls. Mostly weird medical artwork paid for by pharmaceutical companies with their logo emblazoned across the top. One shiny poster was for Atherosclerosis. It had 5 subsequent cross sections of the blood stream showing a progressive build-up of fatty tissue and cholesterol. It looked exactly like one I'd seen in an article on home plumbing, but instead of tree roots growing inside and blocking the clay pipes which lead to the street sewer, this artwork described heart attacks, brain hemorrhages, and paralytic strokes. Someone should curate an art exhibit of frightening posters in doctor's examination rooms with the faint voices of a choir barely audible from invisible speakers singing something funereal and appropriate. It had the effect of telling me the doctor was boss. He lived around this creepy stuff and called it healing.

Hanging from the wall was a dispenser of conical black plastic funnels, the ones doctors place on the end of light-emitting tools they use for checking your ears. I stole one and put it in my pocket. A small victory for the patients against great and expensive odds.

Dr. Hsiao opened the door as if a cartoon caption said "Swoosh." Big smile, thick-rimmed glasses, bloodless white lab coat. We shook hands politely, but I thought it was more like pugilists touching boxing gloves to begin round one. He had my file opened and quickly got to the point. "The nurse said you're having trouble sleeping?" He began. "That's right doctor" I lied. "Don't get to sleep until after the birds start singing each morning." I was looking him in the eye and tried to look convincing. "I've been out of work for awhile and I stay up all night on the computer or reading, just can't sleep."

He looked at my file in his hands to refresh himself with my past. He obviously didn't remember a thing about the 7 years of doctor-patient relationship we'd enjoyed up until this time. I didn't blame him. It was a clinic after all. He was merely the first line of bureaucratic defense summoned by the insurance companies to keep costs and complaints at a minimum. For any serious problem or ailment he merely recommended a specialist who then sent the patient to a battery of technicians to run tests, and who then sought interpretation from additional specialists until you were in the hospital with a shaved chest and a male nurse joking that your quadruple bypass operation was nothing to worry over. The end result is often bankruptcy and death.

"Are you still taking the Depakote and Wellbutrin?" He asked matter-of-factly. " That's one of the things I wanted to tell you, Doctor." I said, acting more interested in this conversation than I really was. "I quit taking them a few months back. At first it was difficult, but now it seems fine. After 15 years of constant medication, I want to see what I feel like without using them." I could tell from his silence that he didn't agree. The issue wasn't terribly important to me one way or the other. In truth, I had quit taking the medication a few years ago and was selling the medication refills he prescribed to me and which were paid for by my union health plan. Between unemployment and a rank economy, every little piece of untaxable income was a bromide to mind and body. There was a woman I once worked with who had been prescribed the same concoction of pills to combat Bi-Polar Syndrome, however she had no health insurance. Instead, she paid me cash every three months when my supply arrived. I only asked about half the pharmacy price. Both of us considered the transaction fair.

"That's why you're not sleeping." The doctor pronounced with alacrity and certainty. "A symptom of Bi-Polar disease is sleep disorders and insomnia. If you begin your medication again, your sleep patterns will return to normal." I knew that the conversation was beginning to slip away from me. "There's a new generation of anti-psychotic medication I recommend that's probably more effective than the Depakote and Wellbutrin. You'll also sleep deeply." Jesus, I thought, now I'm psychotic. This doctor has no idea what I am. Even the Bi-Polar diagnosis was not his. He merely continued an on-going prescription once given me by a Psychiatrist in Ventura before the good doctor was incarcerated from a County Medical Malpractice sting. That had been many years ago and I'd never been to a shrink since. We had both liked each other, he wore funny clothes with horses embroidered on his sweaters and shirts and thought my stories amusing. I complimented him on the paintings which covered his office walls, mostly idyllic landscapes of childish accomplishment. Doctor Durning. It was reported that he bilked over a million dollars from a county program: mostly by creating fictitious patients in a walk-in clinic downtown. It was for the homeless. After an initial aversion, I grew to like him. He kept my disability benefits flowing for years before his unfortunate exposure to the criminal courts. It was his diagnosis that Dr. Hsiao was referring to when he mentioned the new pharmacological treatments which would improve my emotional health and my circadian sleep rhythms.

I couldn't exactly tell him that he was merely following the lead of a psychiatrist with a pony fixation who's medical license was revoked and who had served 2 years in Tehachapi State Prison for getting rich on the backs of homeless street people. It would complicate matters. I also couldn't tell him that my circadian sleep rhythms were actually maintaining a stable schedule, all things considered. And where he gathered that I was in need of new anti-psychotic
chemicals instead of simple sleeping pills--well, I was flummoxed. This was going to be more difficult than I had supposed. I wish I'd worked harder on a good story.

"Couldn't I just get some sleeping pills? Use them to get myself back into a normal rhythm?" I inquired, sounding a tad more like an imbecile than I usually took credit for. "Sleeping pills aren't the answer." He countered. "You have to use them every night and pretty soon you become addicted. It's very difficult to stop once addicted. If I give you Ambien, you'll feel groggy every morning and might even begin walking in your sleep. People find themselves sleeping on the front lawn without any recollection of how or when they moved from their bed." I could tell that Doctor Hsiao had never taken a sleeping pill in his life. Nor had he taken a prescription for Bi-Polar Disorder or psychosis. He also had no idea that my file was filled with incorrect information in the main. Oh I was borderline crackers alright, but not along the lines he believed to be curative.

"I don't really want to go back on psych meds doctor. It took me too long to finally stop them. Why not prescribe some sleeping pills--any ones you feel comfortable offering me. I'll take them for a month or so and when I return for a follow-up visit, we can decide to change the plan or continue?" I don't get more rational than that. It was a good mixture of adult confidence in my own decisions and respect for the doctor's esteemed wealth of knowledge. If the police ask questions after my death, he can with good conscience offer the valiant rebuttals he tried to convince me to accept. He'd sleep well. I'd sleep longer.

"No Mr. Kelly." He continued. "I don't think you understand how easily you can become addicted to sleeping pills, and how difficult it is to quit them. Soon you'll rely on them every day. Sleepwalking at night, groggy at work, irritable." Christ, I thought. People give sleeping pills to their fucking Pomeranian dogs and this professional pill-pusher won't even give me a month's script? Does something I embody scream drug-addict? Do I have some tell-tale signs of suicidal depression written across my forehead in a secret language unknown to me?

"I'll go write this prescription for Risperidone and be right back Mr. Kelly." In a flash he was gone. What had happened? I was a grown man with a sincere request concerning a drug to help my short term health. Over 42 million sleeping pill prescriptions were sold last year. Ambien and Lunesta accounted for $3 Billion dollars worth. And here I am being refused by a doctor of higher moral caliber than his entire AMA brotherhood? I smell a stoolie. God, is this your doing? Are you telling me I just haven't earned it yet, as if suicide were some great reward unavailable to the unworthy?

I had walked in the doors feeling suicidally depressed, then followed a continual progression of wellness care until I arrived at a further moment which retained not only the exact same ennui, but had added a new desperation and a fresh sting from the swollen slap of refusal. Killing oneself shouldn't be quite this difficult, I mused. Merely stock-piling the necessary aids to eternal rest was becoming hard to arrange. Does this mean it has to be one of the less agreeable methods I'd hoped to avoid: the bullet, the bridge, the high-balling Amtrak locomotive? Don't you hate being treated like a kid? If I were a politician or a monsignor I'm convinced I'd be leaving with pocketfuls of deathly digestibles.

The good doctor returned through the door and handed me a typed and signed prescription for something I didn't want. Does it occur to these professionals just why people with low self-esteem like myself would want to end their life? We're tired of being treated like entities less important than a middle-class poodle. If you can sell 42 million scripts a year, why don't I rank in equal measure? Fuck, I'll even pay cash. How can I hold my head up at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting? It's all so seedy and humiliating, this living.

Instead of filling the script, I tossed it in the back seat and drove to a temple in Hollywood. There I attended a 6:00 meditation service hoping to calm myself and rethink the firm desire for an overdose. It would have to wait, at least a few days. While listening to the car radio I'd discovered the surf was pushing 15 feet and a rare B-movie noir, The Burglar, was playing at the Bing Theater. I suppose death must take it's place in line like everything else, at least until the right moment comes along in its own sweet, bedraggled way.

(Painting at top: "Sleep" by Gustave Courbet)

.

Chess Records vs Cadillac Records

2009-07-24T12:51:00.000-07:00

I recently watched a new biopic entitled Cadillac Records (2009). Sad but true. It's a musical recreation of early recording artists at Chess Records circa 1950-1960's, the Chicago Blues' holiest temple. Marquee roles include Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Etta James, Howlin' Wolf and Chuck Berry. Pulling strings from behind the glass is owner/macher, Leonard Chess. Unfortunately, Hollywood can even fuck up the blues. In it's profligate grab for cash, the executives seem to have found a formula which entails hiring music and film stars to pose and emote for an hour and a half in order to sell a soundtrack. Do they teach this stuff at USC graduate film school? Or does the new breed bypass appreciation of the medium altogether? Is it all dollars and cents?

For every good bit of casting, such as Jeffrey Wright in the role of Muddy Waters, there are countless others who flail around, mug, grimace, bleed, and of course sing. Adrian Brody will not remember this role as a benchmark in his career. At what point did the director, Darnell Martin, throw up her hands and quit caring? Contracting Beyonce to fill the role of Etta James is like casting a Persian kitten with dyed tips to play a bloody-mouthed mother lion growling her need across the hot nighttime skies. Whoever made this movie should be ashamed. Hell, I'm ashamed and I only watched it.

I understand it's easy to criticize or complain, and difficult to make a good movie. However, I also realize that it's difficult to make a bad movie as well. So, why bother to make a movie at all if you have no intention of holding it next to Orson Welles, or Vincente Minnelli, or even Julie Taymor? Cadillac Records had a larger budget than anything Sam Fuller ever had, noticeably larger than E.G. Ulmer, Joseph Lewis, Gordon Parks, Ida Lupino, Jacques Tourneur, Monte Hellman, Oscar Micheaux, or any director of the French or Japanese "new wave." Go back to making music videos, or episodic television. Give the producers back their money and say, "Sorry, your project stinks. It's a piece of fluff, candy gloss without an ounce of redemptive intention." It even brushes pretty close to racism for its black cast. I say that not solely because of its reliance on stereotyped 1950's black men, so dumb as to be unaware of any business acumen even after 20 years of writing, singing, recording, partnerships and touring. All they really need is a flask filled with gin and a new Cadillac. Natch. The black women are equally as cartoonish: mothers or whores. We could just as easily be flinching while watching Butterfly McQueen in Cabin in the Sky (1943). However, the music with Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong and Ethel Waters was far, far superior to this over-produced, antiseptic Hollywood interpretation of the infamous Chicago sound. Jeffrey Wright was the only actor who earned his pay. The only one who gave a nuanced performance, even with a stiff script and negligible dialogue. This movie is so bad it will probably make money. The producers know their market: youthful audiences aroused by celebrity casts (Mos Def, Beyonce), and older fans enticed by the Blues legends of their youth. We need look no farther than the recent box office success of similar films including Taylor Hackford's Ray, James Mangold's I Walk the Line, and Bill Condon's Dreamgirls. Each one focusing on the recording industry with its supply of soundtrack hits, stars and prodigious awards. This movie dips into that same well.

Cadillac Records borrows heavily from those films, but lacks any focus. It's a compendium of characters, songs, sub-plots in search of a main thread. They'd probably have achieved their ends more successfully by making Muddy, thereby concentrating on one major luminary instead of an entire stable of acts. Or Etta, since R and B is a more commercially viable commodity in 2009 than the three-chord limitations of Chicago Blues. In fact Cadillac Records tried to fit about 5 biopics into one, which was an unfortunate conception.

Though the movie is about music, the actual mix is too lush. So much so that it sounds as if a single acoustic guitar with an elemental pick-up being played on a busy street in Chicago becomes a Beethoven concerto for slide. Simplicity of style was jettisoned which is understandable in today's market, but proved a major concession when refusing to deal seriously with urban blight, racism, and poverty-- the wellspring of the electric Blues. Cadillac Records reflected the Chicago Blues scene of the 1950's the way The Wizard of Oz portrayed Kansas farm life--with over-produced theatricality. We assume soundtrack spin-offs will become lucrative as well as the global dvd market. So, everybody wins. Everyone's happy--except those malcontents who keep harping on the far-from-compelling story, unbelievable characters, and wretched dialogue; the ones who think camera and audio crews should assist the story and not merely showcase this month's newest technology. Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Jimmy Rodgers, Hubert Sumlin, Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry, Etta James, Sonnyboy Williamson, Buddy Guy, Little Milton, Memphis Slim, Bo Didley, J.B. Lenoir, Gene Ammons, Koko Taylor, Fontella Bass, Sugar Pie DeSanto, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Jimmy McCracklin, Sonny Stitt, Pigmeat Markham, Ramsey Lewis, Gene Chandler, Big Bill Broonzy and Washboard Sam: quite a list. They made their living at Chess Records and the blues clubs that booked them. They understood the difference between mediocrity and excellence. They each gave the entirety of themselves. It wasn't perfection they inhabited, not 8 octave range. There's a certain proud ferocity in early 1950's Blues that is integral to its appreciation. The musicians were aiming for the heart of the matter, not mere proficiency. Not one of them hoped to make a mediocre record because "that's what the marketing people can sell." If they couldn't put their stamp of individual greatness on the song, or the lick, or the solo, they weren't headliners. Why would movie makers feel any different?

The music, characters and story in this entertainment are facile and flaccid. A tribute lounge band in Las Vegas gives more integrity to the Chicago legends than this movie does. There's something so soulless and imitative about it, as if it were written, filmed, edited and finished by a cell of marketing executives. Doesn't seem like selling popcorn is that exciting , does it?

.

30 Biopics Without Pop Stars In The Lead

2009-07-23T00:51:00.000-07:00

1. Napoleon (Bonaparte), Abel Gance, 1927--FR
2. Bonnie and Clyde (Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker), Arthur Penn, 1967
3. My Left Foot (Christy Brown), James Sheridan, 1989
4. Elephant Man (Joseph Merrick), David Lynch, 1980
5. Yankee Doodle Dandy (George M. Cohan), Michael Curtiz, 1942
6. Lawrence of Arabia (T.E. Lawrence), David Lean, 1962
7. Coal Miner’s Daughter (Loretta Lynn), Michael Apted, 1980
8. The Gospel According to St. Mathew (Christ), Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964--IT
9. Birdman of Alcatraz (Robert Stroud), John Frankenheimer, 1962
10. Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn), Alexander Korda, 1936
11. Dead Man Walking (Sister Helen Prejean), Tim Robbins, 1995
12. Camille Claudel (same), Bruno Nuytten, 1988--FR
13. Samurai I, II, III (Miyamoto Musashi), Hiroshi Inagaki, 1954--JAP
14. Basquiat (Jean-Michel Basquiat), Julian Schnabel, 1996
15. Vincent (Vincent de Paul), Maurice Cloche, 1947--FR
16. Capote (Truman Capote), Bennett Miller, 2005
17. Andrei Rublev (Andrey Rublyov), Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966--USSR
18. Sid and Nancy (Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen), Alex Cox, 1986
19. La Vie en Rose (Edith Piaf), Olivier Dahan, 2007--FR
20. Childhood of Maxim Gorki (Maxim Gorki), Mark Donskoy, 1938--USSR
21. Rosa Luxemburg (same), Margarethe Von Trotta, 1986--GER
22. Man for All Seasons (Thomas More), Fred Zinnemann, 1966
23. Queen Margot (Marguerite de Valois), Patrice Chereau,1994--FR
24. Lumumba, (Patrice Lumumba), Raoul Peck, 2000--FR
25. Ivan the Terrible I & II (Ivan Groznyy), Sergei Eisenstein, 1944, 1958--USSR
26. Queen Christina (Queen Christina of Sweden), Rouben Mamoulian, 1933
27. Edvard Munch (same), Peter Watkins, 1974
28. Amadeus (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), Milos Forman, 1984
29. The Color of Pomegranates (Sayat Nova), Sergei Parajanov, 1968—USSR
30. Rise of Louis XIV (Louis XIV), Roberto Rossellini, 1966—FR

The list above is a group of biopics filmed without need of Pop Stars embarrassing themselves in the leading roles, a modern American trend. Perhaps a current film maker ready to embark on another biopic should watch some of those titles again as a refresher before making the next deal. Let's see, how about packaging The Benazir Bhutto Pakistani Express? We get Freida Pinto, last seen in Slumdog Millionaire, to play the lately assassinated Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto. But assassinations are depressing, so we can turn it into a musical. Lots of Pakistani Salsa in Urdu with subtitles that everyone can sing along to. Instead of following the bouncing ball we can use the little icon of a bomb which bounces across the screen landing on each new subtitled word. Oh, you say we can't get Freida Pinto because she's in London doing the new Woody Allen untitled movie? Don't worry, how about Beyonce in a burqa? Bad for the close-up? Okay, we get the costumer to run up some thin hijab coverings and backlight her. Nothing as sexy as a silhouette. I can smell money my friends. Wonder if Bin Laden would do a cameo? Nothing too difficult, just a short dance number in a cave using an AK47 like Fred Astaire might use a cane. How about Bono as the foreign journalist/CIA contact? Someone talk to Cedric The Entertainer, see if he's good at languages? He can be her piano playing bodyguard, we'll beef up his part, a duet or two. Cast lots of kids from the Pakistani or Indian version of Pakistani Idol. Maybe we make it bi-religious: animated sequences in which 3-D characters of Ganesha and Krishna dance alongside Maulana Abdul Aziz, cleric of the Red Mosque. I see dance numbers my friends. Throw in some traditional religious music, something slow, maybe we get Norah Jones in a sari? How about M.I.A. as one of the hip daughters? Hindu and Moslem tracks, two billion potential customers right there. Maybe we can tie it all together as a peace mission, tap the United Nations for placement money. Tax breaks perhaps. The soundtrack will sell like hot chapatis. What's that smell? That is popcorn my friends, sprinkled with rupees.

And maybe she doesn't need to die in a fiery bomb blast at all. History can be very fickle. It's our movie after all. I think anything is preferable to all that carnage and black smoke. How can the audience hear the tunes if there's wailing and screaming on screen. No, I see it differently. Lets call it "enlightened history." Benazir Bhutto escapes the bomb and mounts a stage to sing to the throngs one final song. A love song. Picture Evita in Islamabad, that's where I think we should be steering this thing. As the end credits roll we wait one beat and then hit them with a reprise of all our best songs. Then pray dear ones that it takes off. Because I can see us two years from now, sitting right here talking . . . sequel.

In case you were afraid the trend in biopics will curtail soon, you can rest assured. Wikipedia lists these actors as playing historical roles in movies due for release this year: Audrey Tautou as Coco Chanel, Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin, Meryl Streep as Julia Child, Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela, Brendan Gleeson as Winston Churchill, Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, Javier Bardem as Pablo Escobar, Al Pacino as Salvador Dali, Christopher Plummer as Leo Tolstoy, Dita von Teese as Mata Hari, Paul Giamatti as Philip K. Dick, Elijah Wood as Iggy Pop, Sally Hawkins as Bernadette Devlin, Mike Myers as Keith Moon, Don Cheadle as Toussaint Louverture, Keshia Chante as Aaliyah, Shabana Azmi as Benazir Bhutto and Wesley Snipes as James Brown.

You're right, I didn't know who Pablo Escobar was either, the one Javier Bardem will be immortalizing on film (do they still call it film or should we be saying pixels?). Pablo Escobar was a Columbian drug lord listed in Forbes Magazine in 1989 as the 7th richest man in the world. He was killed in a "hail of bullets" delivered by an undercover assassination team called Seach Bloc trained and coordinated by the U.S. Special Forces and allied with Los Pepes, a vigilante group manned by members of the rival Cali cartel, run by Carlos "Cocaine" Castano. What . . . the United States government armed and trained cocaine cartel forces in Columbia? Another black eye for our already Lon Chaney-like foreign policy face? Gotta see the movie to find out!

Sounds interesting, but remember Johnny Depp's turn as a drug kingpin in Blow? Not many people do. It was a miserable movie which not even star power (Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Ray Liotta, Rachel Griffiths) could save. I think the director, Ted Demme died of a cocaine-induced heart attack not long afterward while playing a pick-up game of basketball. The bar at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel is named after him, "Teddy's." That's immortality. I'm beginning to feel like a slimey gossip columnist--say Burt Lancaster's J.J. Hunsecker in The Sweet Smell of Success. Hmmm. Hey, I could use a job.
.

Don't Fuck with Bette

2009-07-17T14:48:00.000-07:00

Bette Davis and Leslie Howard in Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage (1934).

It's obvious this guy lives with his parents and he recorded this video in his boyhood bedroom. The cute little look he gives the camera upon the song's finale is the stuff of entertainment genius. I'd say the world needs a new "King of Pop" and here he is.

.

Welcome to Sam's World (Merrill's Marauders)

2009-07-15T11:45:00.000-07:00

There's something compatible about watching a movie from 1962 on a well-used VHS tape. Not one which shows damage from its years of service, but something which wears its years like a construction worker wears his suntan, a proud by-product of work well done. I like them the same way I like trout fishing gear, hardback books wrapped in original dust jackets, red-headed women, wolf-hybrid dogs, station wagons and knives made of German steel that will last a lifetime provided I give them a sharpening from time to time.

Makes me sound like something of a survivalist who follows the Unabomber code, but I draw the line at guns and the somnambulist delusions of those infested with political reasons for owning them. Funny, most of the people I know who own guns never take those proud penis extensions out of the closet. Their reasons for buying firearms is embedded in the need for defending themselves against some phantasmagoric foe bent on violence against them, or their family, or their property. Ordinarily, they never take them out of the closet. Oh, perhaps on an initial practice run, they take the handgun or rifle to a shooting range just after they've made the purchase. They buy a box of cartridges and squeeze off some rounds, generally in the company of a gun-owning veteran from the office, or a son.

Upon returning home with his prize toy, the proud owner sits down with his family and explains the severity of the Glock 9 millimeter's ambition to speed a heavy piece of metal at incredible force through the air searching to locate a bad guy's internal organs, there to bury itself inside until the police arrive and clean-up the affair. The family ascertains the importance of the gun because these mandatory family meetings are convened over very few, yet very important, matters: the death of Grandma Riggs without leaving an inheritance; Katya's pregnancy and removal from high school until the baby is born to be adopted by a "loving couple;" Chester's conversion to Islam; Mom's decision to leave Dad because in 18 years he's never given her an orgasm, though Hildegaard Steele, the children's driving instructor has given Mom multiple orgasms throughout the months since Katya began driving.

Dad explains to his bloodline that for safety sake, he'll keep the semi-automatic pistol in his bedroom closet, meanwhile removing the magazine and safeguarding it in his padlocked footlocker located in the garage; which also holds the family marijuana, mushrooms, extra boxes of 9 millimeter ammo, loan papers, rolling papers, and ownership affidavits for the modern art holdings sprinkled on the walls and corners of the house. In this way Dad hoped to eliminate any impulsive or accidental use of Mr. Glock's percussive namesake. It gives one pause to imagine a scene in which a genuine burglar, or a Danny Trejo-visaged murderer with bandeleros crisscrossing his chest and a sawed-off shotgun in hand, actually breaks and otherwise enters the home. Would Dad try to call "time out" like on the Sherman Oaks schoolyards of his youth meanwhile gathering pieces of his handgun from room to room and with shaky hands attempt to load the magazine with live rounds, then insert it within the grip handle, unlatch the safety and yell "Okay, I'm ready" finally firing resolutely at anything that draws breath, just at the moment our robber sits down in a genuine Bauhaus chair to watch Chester's head explode like a shattered Shoji Hamada fluted pitcher?

Luckily most burglars know that armed robbery carries a stiffer price than murder itself in the United States, where we have a tighter relationship with money and fiscal assets than any other personal object of desire. Thieves understand it's easier to break into a house unarmed when no-one is at home, steal the guy's expensive weapons and sell them on the street. They sell like hotcakes. And it often takes months or years for the owner to even know they've vanished. Wasn't it Mark Twain who wrote a famous short story in which we follow the string of accomplishments earned by the possessor of a British million Pound note? And though the fictional possessor was as impoverished as a pensioner whose investments were overseen by Bernard Madoff, the story enables us to follow the drama inherent in each transfer of illusory wealth and value. The denomination was so unbelievably large that it retained no functional worth, but was tendered all around London simply for its symbolic value. Be nice to see the story of an unloaded Glock 9 millimeter passing from hand to sweaty hand, and the half-life it possesses, the value it imitates. If I weren't so lazy, I might write that story. Tell you what, I'll give the idea to you free--you write it.

Which doesn't get us any closer to my fondness for VHS tapes and the Samuel Fuller movie, Merrill's Marauders. It was a Warner Brothers' movie released in 1962 whose cast was peopled by Warners' television stars of the era. All shot on location in the Philippines. It roughly followed the historical facts of the conflict in Burma during World War II, wherein the U.S. Army fielded a composite fighting force of 2,900 veterans: men who'd already fought for at least 2 years in the Pacific theater, mostly Guadalcanal combatants. They had volunteered for this mission to counter the Japanese push from Northern Burma into China with the implausible mission of joining the German forces once they'd pushed through Russia--lots of bad maps in the movie and graphic arrows comically pushing across the screen in supposed reenactment of huge troop movements.

War movies owe a large amount to homoerotic attractions. In this respect they resemble Samurai movies. It's no surprise that Nagisa Oshima's last film, Taboo, concerned gay lovers in a Samurai school for the Shogun's most advanced sword twirlers. Most war films deal with man love in layers of exceptional context: absence of women; psychological exhaustion; lapses of moral judgement owing to the huge piles of body parts and quagmires of fetid blood that surround them; fear of their own mutilation and death: all these leave a dramatic opening into the primal desires of men, or so an early 1960's American screenplay might intimate. Which is not to say Merrill's Marauder's is a sissy film, hell no. Sam Fuller (he of the chomping cigar and Bronx accent) is a tough guy through and through. His war films are informed by his own experiences in North Africa and Italy which he committed to celluloid history in The Big Red One (1980). Like so many bad war films before, the enemy is portrayed as vile, ignorant fodder for the superior Allied forces. The "Japs" drop like flies, body counts show a ratio of at least 10 to 1--them versus us--in this macho bullet ballet.

If Sam Fuller's movie is judged solely on the reasons for which it was supported at the box office (B movie, tough-guy blood and guts), it would be unremarkable--just another piece of bold font journalism at 24 frames a second. A recruiting tool for the lads about to enter Vietnam. But fortunately, that's not the totality. One is certainly tempted to refer to this Burma campaign movie as largely jingoistic, which it is. Also, I could say it's simplistic and hackneyed in its dialogue, camera movement and editing, but there's more. From out of a genre movie which satisfies all the elements of slick formula, it's rather miraculous that Mr. Fuller was able to grab the stink of real human emotions and portray death as folly. Fuller is a pulp Shakespeare in idea and drama, if not in language. General Merrill, as played by iron-jawed, weepy-eyed Jeff Chandler is a confused tyrant who pays lip service to responsibility for his men's safety, but whose decisions are personal evocations of grandiosity inherent in hierarchical power, in addition to psychotic reiterations of military Bushido. All reason is lost. Even the basic instincts for self-preservation are lost. The only rationale for living at all is one of Zen distillation: "when you have no strength to fight, when you have no ability to think, or even to feed yourself, you place one foot in front of the other." It's simple. No-one has to think any longer. We're beyond morality, beyond humanity, even beyond complaint or emotion at all. We follow orders unequivocally and ignorance is our only desire. Whether our leader is a madman or a saint makes no difference. We're beyond caring. Fuller isn't merely talking about a group of men in Burma, but about our social paradigm. We kill millions of civilians in ovens and prison camps, drop atomic bombs on civilian targets, firebomb cities with no military value, blanket bomb cities from 30,000 feet killing anything that happens to live there, pull gold from the teeth of newly gassed naked grandparents. We mutilate crowds of neighbors with machetes or set them on fire with cans of gasoline. We fire missiles from unmanned drone aircraft into crowded village weddings. We do it gladly. Just don't make us think. We absolve ourselves of all responsibility. We will solely follow orders. In the absence of direct superiors, we follow any authority available, any law no matter how challenged.

I found an eerily similar appraisal in Seijun Suzuki's Story of a Prostitute during a recent viewing. Oddly, as in the case of Samuel Fuller, Mr. Suzuki was a military war veteran. His movie encompassed a scathing look into Japanese atrocities in Manchuria during the late 1930's, examining similar "dog-face" indoctrinations into nationalism and beyond into perversions of moral law by following orders. It isn't the army, the flag, the religion, the political formulations. Fuller and Suzuki's century saw over 100 million humans killed by other humans with scant reason. The problem is inside us. All of us.

Everyone is familiar with Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil" in reference to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and its inquiry into moral responsibility. Fuller (like Arendt), goes beyond a singular man, or a singular nation's crimes. It's not merely a few score of high-ranking military or political personages who require blame and punishment, these criminals merely tapped into the innermost psyche of their people. Therein lies the tragedy. Given a push we are all kapos. We are all complicit and eventually are only too happy to enforce orders. The pain of being human authorizes our relinquishing of indiscriminate care and love. We trade the complexities of love for the simplicity of obedience and its blessed absolution from responsibility.

During one harrowing episode of Merrill's Marauders, a soldier who is the mule wrangler for his unit comes to the aid of his exhausted pack-mule by shouldering the heavy supplies himself up a steep mountain pass, finally succumbing to the effort and dying. It's the stuff of Jesus, or Robert Bresson, or Gandhi: sacrifice as love. It's a glowing account in the film's instruction on personal sacrifice in military hardship. He introduces a favorite dramatis persona of war movies, the propitiatory hero. But Fuller shows us that war is beyond esprit de corps, or honor, even foxhole savior love. War thrives and is perpetually generated through sacrifice; be it the Allied grunt soldiers, the officers, the enemy, the civilian's, the animals, the family members at home receiving letters of regret, or the generations who read history as anything more than surreal, chaotic struggles for power at any and all cost. Giving orders is tyranny by those appointed from the elite. Following orders is mind-numbing sacrifice unto death. Welcome to Sam's World.

.

I Wonder About All These Words Bumping Around

2009-07-13T14:04:00.000-07:00

I

“ We are so close to the ditch that we are on the bounce and the width of the jump start not sufficient and therefore able to easily jump short if the lack of a sufficiently solid basis to convey a bounce allowed. "--Martin Heidegger, 1946 (translated by the Google German to English program). I drank with the crazy portion a sickly translation sometimes offers ownly used newness.

http://www.schloss-berlin-live.de/
press for view of Berlin live

II

When I meet a monk, I never fail to greet him;

When I see a Buddha I do not bow down.

If one bows to a Buddha, the Buddha does not know;

If one greets a monk, one is greeting what is actually there.

--Quatrain by Yuan Mei, from the biography Yuan Mei, 18th Century Chinese Poet by Arthur Waley

III

"Reduce Bloom by cross multiplication of reverses of fortune, from which these supports protected him, and by elimination of all positive values to a negligible negative irrational unreal quantity

Successively, in descending helotic order: Poverty: that of the outdoor hawker of imitation jewellery, the dun for the recovery of bad and doubtful debts, the poor rate and deputy cess collector. Mendicancy: that of the fraudulent bankrupt with negligible assets paying 1s. 4d. in the pound, sandwichman, distributor of throwaways, nocturnal vagrant, insinuating sycophant, maimed sailor, blind stripling, superannuated bailiff's man, marfest, lickplate, spoilsport, pickthank, eccentric public laughingstock seated on bench of public park under discarded perforated umbrella. Destitution: the inmate of Old Man's House (Royal Hospital) Kilmainham, the inmate of Simpson's Hospital for reduced but respectable men permanently disabled by gout or want of sight. Nadir of misery: the aged impotent disfranchised ratesupported moribund lunatic pauper."--Ulysses, James Joyce

"God who, in his simple substance, is all everywhere equally, nevertheless, in efficacy, is in rational creatures in another way than in irrational, and in good rational creatures in another way than in the bad. He is in irrational creatures in such a way as not to be comprehended by them; by all rational ones, however, he can be comprehended through knowledge; but only by the good is he to be comprehended also through love."--St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), excerpted from The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley. (The curious translator from the French is unknown to me)

"Since every practical law represents a possible action as good, and on this account, for a subject who is practically determinable by reason, necessary, all imperatives are formulae determining an action which is necessary according to the principle of a will good in some respects. If now the action is good only as a means to something else, then the imperative is hypothetical; if it is conceived as good in itself and consequently as being necessarily the principle of a will which of itself conforms to reason, then it is categorical."

--Metaphysics of Ethics, Immanuel Kant (translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, B.D., Litt.D., Hon. D.D. (Glasg.), fellow of Trinity College, Dublin)

"My brother in the wisdom of his conceit

is not willing to admit that my ingenuity

is mathematically, inevitably, equivalent to his own;

since we are not separate entities by one.

And therefore our two accomplishments are one.

He believes I cannot solve the acrostic of his fortress;

but yet it is self-evident that I must,

because we both have drawn the plan.

He believes the perimeter of my argument has

wrinkled like the wattle of a beaten cock,

not realizing this must be his also. . . "

--Notes from a Bottle found on the Beach at Carmel, Evan S. Connell

VII

"According to the Archpoet Homer, Cerberus was simply a dog. Dante calls him a worm. Hesiod mentions Cerberus twice in the Theogony, but is unable to decide if he has one head or fifty. Pindar doubles this number, while Horace endows Cerberus with a mane of snakes. The tragedians are more restrained, content with three heads. Sculptors and painters represent Cerberus with three heads at most. Here an observation comes to mind--language is inclined to hyperbole and exaggeration if not lying, while a statement in marble or paint imposes a matter-of-fact simplicity.
Because of the dim illumination at the place of action, the outcome of the struggle between Heracles and Cerberus--guardian of the kingdom of the dead--was unclear. It was the twelfth, the last and the most difficult, labor of the hero. Hence the sacred semi-obscurity that befits other worlds."
--"The Infernal Dog," from The King of the Ants by Zbigniew Herbert (translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter)

VIII

"Behind the liberal identification of totalitarianism with authoritarianism, and the concomitant inclination to see "totalitarian" trends in every authoritarian limitation of freedom, lies an older confusion of authority with tyranny, and of legitimate power with violence. The difference between tyranny and authoritarian government has always been that the tyrant rules in accordance with his own will and interest, whereas even the most draconic authoritarian government is bound by laws. Its acts are tested by a code which was made either not by man at all, as in the case of the law of nature or God's Commandments or the Platonic ideas, or at least not by those actually in power. The source of authority in authoritarian government is always a force external and superior to its own power; political realm, from which the authorities derive their "authority," that is, their legitimacy, and against which their power can be checked."

--Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt

"It is one of man's passions to disentangle apparent chaos. He has to harmonize the universe to his own mental structure, and he does so by choosing from nature what fits into the working of his mind. One of the resultants of this activity is called Science. Concordances are but re-echoed questions and answers. All human activity, whether technical or artistic, tends to create structures which conform with those of our constants, and free perceptible affinities from the magma of the real and possible. The geometrising [sic] spirit is one of the consequences of the tendency to least resistance. It is innate."

--Foundations of Modern Art, Ozenfant (translation by John Rodker)

"Overpowered by consular guards and turned over to the police the assassin admitted to being a member of the dreaded "Fly Tox Movement" an extremist sect who hold hashish in horror getting their kicks largely from vitamin deficiency a preparation like that you can get on his line sweet and clear 'Can you hear me Homer?' Of course you can. I'm telling you what you have to do Homer. We will protect you Homer. Flying saucers will be waiting after you have done our bidding.'

Now it sometimes happens you lose a screwball can't get on his line well then you put everybody with cop in him out on the streets to trace down the lost screwball before he talks too sensible about what we are doing here in this department which is unthinkable because we got here first heavy and cold as a cop's blackjack on a winter night we was looking for a lost screwball last contacted in an orgone accumulator screen went dead case like that usually turns out to be interdepartmental sabotage or illegal recruitment the whole department is rotten with it maybe the Ethnology Department used him in a ritual murder we are men of the world these things happen . . . "

Q: "Do you think we will arrive, or have already arrived at the point of creating artificial beings without recourse to normal reproductive processes? Does that seem desirable to you?"

A: "I think it's quite within the range of modern technology, and it seems very desirable to me, indeed, because it would bring about elimination of the family. . . Now, if you could produce artificial beings, you could produce them at a reasonable age, and you wouldn't have all this infancy. Yes, it seems to me very desirable."

--The Job, interviews of William S. Burroughs by Daniel Odier (1973)

"The notion of force is far from simple, and yet it is the first that has to be elucidated in order to formulate the problems of society. Force and oppression--that makes two; but what needs to be understood above all is that it is not the manner in which use is made of some particular force, but its very nature, which determines whether it is oppressive or not. Marx clearly perceived this in connection with the State; he understood that this machine for grinding men down, cannot stop grinding as long as it goes on functioning, no matter in whose hands it may be. But this insight has a far more general application. Oppression proceeds exclusively from objective conditions. The first of these is the existence of privileges; and it is not men's laws or decrees which determine privileges, nor yet titles to property; it is the very nature of things. Certain circumstances, which correspond to stages, no doubt inevitable, in human development, give rise to forces which come between the ordinary man and his own conditions of existence, between the effort and the fruit of the effort, and which are, inherently, the monopoly of a few, owing to the fact that they cannot be shared among all; thenceforward these privileges behold in their hands the fate of the very people on whom they depend, and equality is destroyed. This is what happens to begin with when the religious rites by which man thinks to win nature over to his side, having become too numerous and complicated to be known by all, finally become the secret and consequently the monopoly of a few priests; the priest then disposes, albeit only through a fiction, of all of nature's powers, and it is in their name that he exercises authority. Nothing essential is changed when this monopoly is no longer made up of rites but of scientific processes, and when those in possession of it are called scientists and technicians instead of priests."

--"Analysis of Oppression", Simone Weil (translated by Arthur Wills and John Petrie), from The Simone Weil Reader

XII

fou / mad

It frequently occurs to the amorous subject that he is, or is going, mad.

1. "I am mad to be in love, I am not mad to be able to say so, I double my image: insane in my own eyes (I know my delirium), simply unreasonable in the eyes of someone else, to whom I quite sanely describe my madness: conscious of this madness, sustaining a discourse upon it.

Werther meets a madman in the mountains: in midwinter, he wants to pick flowers for Charlotte, whom he has loved. This man, during the time he was in a padded cell, was happy: he no longer knew anything about himself. Werther half recognizes himself in the madman seeking flowers: mad with passion, like himself, but deprived of any access to the (supposed) happiness of unconsciousness: he suffers from having failed his own madness.

3. For a hundred years, (literary) madness has been thought to consist in Rimbaud's 'Je est un autre': madness is an experience of depersonalization. For me as an amorous subject, it is quite the contrary: it is becoming a subject, being unable to keep myself from doing so, which drives me mad. I am not someone else: that is what I realize with horror.

(A Zen story: An old monk busies himself in the hottest weather drying mushrooms. 'Why don't you let others do that?' 'Another man is not myself, and I am not another. Another cannot experience my action. I must create my experience of drying mushrooms.')

I am indefectibly myself, and it is in this that I am mad: I am bad because I consist."

--A Lover's Discourse, Fragments, by Roland Barthes (translated by Richard Howard)

XIII

"This way of looking at the old was itself something new. Past realities are transformed by present reflection. Te translation of tradition into conscious principles gives rise to a new philosophy which identifies itself with the old. The philosopher does not advance his ideas as his own. The Jewish Prophets proclaimed God's revelation, Confucius the voice of antiquity. He who submits to the old is saved from the presumption of basing great demands on his own infinitesimal self. He improves his chances of being believed and followed by those who still live in the substance of their origins. Independent thought, springing from the nothingness of mere reason, is futile: 'I have gone without food and sleep in order to think; to no avail: it is better to learn.' But learning and thinking go hand in hand. One demands the other. 'To learn without thinking is vain.' "

--"Confucius' Basic Idea: The Renewal of Antiquity," Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Karl Jaspers (translated by Ralph Manheim)

XIV

"In this Chapter Ani identifies himself with Tem-Khepera, who composed the words of power that Thoth pronounced, which resulted in the creation of the heavens and the earth. In the character of this god Ani could pronounce words, the effect of which would be to give him everything that he desired. Now the Egyptians thought that words were concrete things, and that it was possible to steal from a man his words of power, or the spells wherewith he had been provided; and whereas we should say that we had forgotten a formula, the Egyptian would say that it had been stolen from him. The object of this Chapter was to give a man in Khert-Neter the ability to make his words of power, supposing they had gone away, or been carried away from him, to return to him, no matter how far away they had been carried. When the Chapter was recited by Ani, his spells would return to him more swiftly than greyhounds can run, and quicker than the light. Its recital, too, would obtain for him the help of 'him that brought the ferry-boat of Ra, of the god Herfhaf who ferried the souls of the righteous over to the Island of Fire, wherein Osiris reigned. The word of power which Ani wanted to possess was that the utterance of which would enable him to recreate himself."

--The Book of The Dead, a hieroglyphic transcription of the papyrus of Ani by E.A. Wallis Budge

"A Cambridge don, John Mitchell, wrote a paper in 1783 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in which he pointed out that a star that was sufficiently massive and compact would have such a strong gravitational field that light could not escape: any light emitted from the surface of the star would be dragged back by the star's gravitational attraction before it could get very far. Mitchell suggested that there might be a large number of stars like this. Although we could not be able to see them because the light from them would not reach us, we would still feel their gravitational attraction. Such objects are what we now call black holes, because that is what they are: black voids in space."

--A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking

XVI

When God made the first clay model of a human being He painted in the eyes ... the lips ... and the sex.

And then He painted in each person's name lest the person should ever forget it.

If God approves of His creation, He breathed the painted clay model into life by signing His own name.

XVII

HM: "Rewriting is so extraordinary, it's where writing, not always, but very often, takes place. That's when the writer becomes the first reader. Becomes a creator. If the reader is the only creator, the writer gets to share and in fact participates in that act of creation in the stage of rewriting. That's when the writer can play creator too. The old idea is hard to get rid of, that the writers have something to say and the readers are there to get it. I don't think things work that way at all.
LT: In that sense, the author has always been dead.
HM: That's right. There have never been any authors. There have only been readers. The authors are first readers.
LT: Your most recent novel, Cigarettes, seems formally very different from, let's say, your first novel, The Conversions, although it seemed to me that Cigarettes reworks some of The Conversions' themes.
HM: The earlier works were misread by a great many readers because they always thought I must be doing something else than what was actually there. And so they kept looking past what was right in front of them . . . The narrator makes only two or three remarks in the course of The Conversions--about his wife divorcing him, for instance--but they're enough to suggest all the things that he's not saying that he should be saying. You can't help being aware, even if you don't know why, that the narrator has been reduced to a point of total fearfulness.
LT: His pursuit of the inheritance, which sets him chasing fragments of an esoteric puzzle that, in fact, doesn't exist, has all sorts of meanings. He's on a quest, a journey. Is he worthy, is he smart enough? A lot of anxiety there."
--"Harry Mathews by Lynne Tillman," from BOMB magazine interviews 1992

.

Beck and Jane Birkin

2009-07-11T21:29:00.000-07:00

chained link kiss

Buddhadasa Bhikkhu

Letter to Zanmi Lasante__Haiti

Poison Idea__1983__Elvis is on the back

A Kiss On The Head__Marina Tsvetayeva__Poem

Morituri__Bernhard Wicki

Monday__Primo Levi__Poem

Woodpecker__A Film by Alex Karpovsky

Where Un-Making Reigns__Adrienne Rich

4 Days Until Christmas

A Tommy Hilfiger Duvet Cover ?

Christmas in a Recession Year__Poem

Let The Right One In__Whitenesses

Insert Poem Here

Everyman's Library: 100 Essential Titles

"Derelict Appendages"__Movie Critics

John Ford, Kent Jones and HighPlainsHondo

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance__Bad John Ford

Color of the Blues__Elvis Costello

A Movie with Binx__poem

Politics of Nails

Love/Hate with Irvin Kershner__In a quandry

Ojos en LLamas__Madalena Jitrik, 2008

The Minneapolis Poem__James Wright__Dia de Los Muertos

Girl Talk__"Still Here"__Bunnygreenhouse

The Poetry of Ellery Queen__The Resurrectionists__Luc Sante

Street Art

RackGaki (Grafitti)__ Kanagawa, Japan

The Strong Urge to Steal__Shanna Compton

Distance from Loved Ones__James Tate

Gottfried Helnwein__Modern Sleep

Real Bells

Otto's Discount Rack

A February Release

Irish Tunes

Mensa Kids

8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain__Jim Carroll

Jussi Bjorling's Ambulances

The Last of England_Derek Jarman

Derek Jarman footage with Smiths' I Won't Share You

Thumbnail Movies

In the Know

Religion and Beer

Japan In Peacetime

Louise Bourgeois__Spirals

A Map of the Lands of Human Sexuality__Franklin Veaux

MOVIE LIST_NO PARTICULAR ORDER_NO REASONS

The Harvest__a story by Amy Hempel

Stille Nacht_The Quay Brothers

Arresting You . . . Quotations

The Myths of Outer Space in Ohio

Two poems by David Shumate

Old Crimes

Jim Jarmusch On Theft

Individual Results May Vary

Chess Records vs Cadillac Records

30 Biopics Without Pop Stars In The Lead

Don't Fuck with Bette

Welcome to Sam's World (Merrill's Marauders)

I Wonder About All These Words Bumping Around

Beck and Jane Birkin

Poison Idea1983Elvis is on the back

A Kiss On The HeadMarina TsvetayevaPoem

MondayPrimo LeviPoem

The Minneapolis PoemJames WrightDia de Los Muertos

Girl Talk"Still Here"Bunnygreenhouse

The Poetry of Ellery QueenThe ResurrectionistsLuc Sante