Tag: Film

Sunday November 12, 2017

Yesterday began with the rescue of Lou Reed’s Street Hassle and Steven Halpern’s Spectrum Suite, both of which turned up on vinyl mid-morning amid Mantovanian dreck in the bins at Goodwill. Afterwards, I drove to campus, my Horatian Ode derailed by mere rhetoric, the literary at odds with the fast-paced commercial. History as the text’s intertext, Trump’s America oozing into every moment of one’s embodiment in the present. Poet and fiction-writer friends read from their work. Pink light, concentrated into single beam. As day approached evening, the sky erupted into radioactive pink against an ever-deepening blue. Not too much more, too much more. Murky, kudzu-clothed shadow-trees hung over me, filling me with welcome reverence. In the moments before dark I forever and ever locked eyes in what I interpreted as a show of mutual respect with a cat in my neighborhood. The magic around me prepares to repeat itself for another season. I find meaning in this, the world’s parts become rhyme, no matter the slant. The day shapes what I write, and what I write shapes the day. What of the film version of Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur?

A loving assemblage of voices and impressions. What can be heard, though, when we go inward? No gurgling creek. Beatniks launch out on a weed-and-alcohol-fueled weekend romp. Kerouac’s alcoholism was the snake he invented to keep him from his own creation. To stave off death, he frames experience as the passage of a soul through its seasons. The postwar subject suffers its alienation from others via words. Whereas today’s suffers soul-death as perpetual contingent labor. Reality steals away from us our powers, our capacities, our faculties. One’s wit is applied to standardized drool, in a stalemate of crossed purposes: meum and tuum. Barely sensate, the one risks becoming by the other crushed underfoot. One must defend oneself, rise up, demand more.

Friday August 18, 2017

The return of Westworld may prompt the return also of my obsession with the religion or belief system known as Gnosticism. How odd, to re-watch the title sequence of a TV series repeatedly, as if one were practicing its memorization. Repetition isn’t a world we can easily escape. Art is the simulation’s equivalent of the shot-reverse-shot. A cry when confronted with the psychedelic sublime. What do I fancy myself with these scribblings? Is this the kind of writing that results if one were to follow the advice of voice-oriented “expressionists” like Peter Elbow? Doesn’t this confuse making with the one doing it, linguistic reality laid out like the map of a game-world? Life is but one possible play among many. When television bores me, I bear down upon the taste of a sour gummy lips. Volcanic explosions among the taste buds toward the center of my tongue. Which tasks shall we suppose will be required of us next? Let us tire of reading about the deeds of our betters. How are artists able to achieve what they do despite no coherent theorization of themselves? Why ever do we find pleasure in self-consciousness? Best to become absorbed in New Argentine cinema, thus staving off the thought of thought’s decline. Alejo Moguillansky‘s Castro uses kinetically edited transition sequences to tell its story as protagonists run through the streets. The urban environment becomes the labyrinth through which desire flows. Better to live one’s life than to waste it on a living earned. I’m not sure those of us on the Left know anymore how we’ll win, but this fight is on, it’s happening — so we’ll do what we can. No need to reproduce a scene for today’s events. I sometimes become glassy-eyed and uncommunicative. Too much going on upstairs to bother with the speech acts of others. Words topple and collapse around me. Part of me feels unjustly treated and run ragged by my community; but the only way I know to right this (and thus “write” this) is to use weed to make myself more generous, more sociable. Proceed with the reinvention of the process of communist socialization. Reality delivers to those who dispose themselves accordingly. One’s face becomes like that of a rabbit while asleep.