Friday, March 19, 2004
new poem, first in a series to replace a series recently cancelled due to better ideas.
Some Hands
It is easy to type this:
"the keyboard has become like a lover to me."
It is easy, but it defeats my mouth.
Then the shift beckons that I've been waiting for
like for a subway train:
"the lover has become like a keyboard to me"
Or I'm the train, waiting to eat more passengers,
and ashamed of how dirty is my shell.
I want a wash. This is the pull I feel,
from the living to the mechanical.
Machines are more tragic, and therefore
more deserving of the words we reserve for the tragic:
shame, dirt, pain, mother, beer, shell.
The train is a working man who never goes home
to a shower and some arms. A keyboard is
a woman who lets herself be touched
while lying flat on a surface of our choice.
I can't find sadness like this anywhere human.
"I have become like a lover to my keyboard."
It will never know how perfect it is,
or how imperfect I can make it. Is there nothing
we don't poison with our hands?
Some Hands
It is easy to type this:
"the keyboard has become like a lover to me."
It is easy, but it defeats my mouth.
Then the shift beckons that I've been waiting for
like for a subway train:
"the lover has become like a keyboard to me"
Or I'm the train, waiting to eat more passengers,
and ashamed of how dirty is my shell.
I want a wash. This is the pull I feel,
from the living to the mechanical.
Machines are more tragic, and therefore
more deserving of the words we reserve for the tragic:
shame, dirt, pain, mother, beer, shell.
The train is a working man who never goes home
to a shower and some arms. A keyboard is
a woman who lets herself be touched
while lying flat on a surface of our choice.
I can't find sadness like this anywhere human.
"I have become like a lover to my keyboard."
It will never know how perfect it is,
or how imperfect I can make it. Is there nothing
we don't poison with our hands?
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
new poem, first in a series for which I have no real outline.
1st Ode to Sound and Childhood
It's shook. No, it has to be a siren.
No, a syphen A stack
of books, a cream soda
Too much too much throat
when I gawked at a painted wave and thought "whore"
the second poem I ever wrote
was called "At the Wharf" but he
was brown and barking on television.
A throat, a goat, a mote, a mother
"Oh, mother" is that prefix of mantras
mantra itself to the fragile
down in fragile rocks. Clap-Clap.
Down on the family rug with handfuls of armymen
hiking the shag with their shunted carbines.
What is a shunt, I ask myself? It's the nonsense
that sat in my childhood chairs, like a sac of shirts
with hair last touched by my mother
"oh mother" is that wild hushing with tears,
is that wilderness we shared indoors.
1st Ode to Sound and Childhood
It's shook. No, it has to be a siren.
No, a syphen A stack
of books, a cream soda
Too much too much throat
when I gawked at a painted wave and thought "whore"
the second poem I ever wrote
was called "At the Wharf" but he
was brown and barking on television.
A throat, a goat, a mote, a mother
"Oh, mother" is that prefix of mantras
mantra itself to the fragile
down in fragile rocks. Clap-Clap.
Down on the family rug with handfuls of armymen
hiking the shag with their shunted carbines.
What is a shunt, I ask myself? It's the nonsense
that sat in my childhood chairs, like a sac of shirts
with hair last touched by my mother
"oh mother" is that wild hushing with tears,
is that wilderness we shared indoors.
Sunday, March 14, 2004
Uzak @ Cinema Village
There is recent Turkish film titled Uzak (which means Distant) that is, appropriately, about two men who are trapped inside themselves. Establishing a simple but effective formal technique of juxtaposing the human subject from bleak surroundings, director Nuri Bilge Ceylan divorces his human subjects from their austere environments. Although not nearly as existential as Van Sant's Gerry, Ceylan's film finds its protagonists nonetheless left without purpose or connection.
Aside from the opening shot of ruralite Yusef hitching a ride away from the economic decay that ended his job and cast his family into poverty, the film is set in a distinctly soulless contemporary Istanbul. Naively hoping to find work or escape as a sailor, Yusef applies to his cousin, successful artist Mahmut, for a place to stay in the city. Their plot as housemates unfolds not unlike that of Felix and Oscar in The Odd Couple, had Felix been a discontent and weary photographer and Oscar an ignorant everyman affecting cool in all the wrong ways. And without the spaghetti on the wall and minus about two hundred lines or so. And without much music or any gags (aside from the meak relief of a sticky moustrap subplot that just barely, but deftly, eases the dull tension between Mahmut and his boarder). So, I guess not too much like The Odd Couple after all.
Yusef and Mahmut are diametrically opposed. The former prefers broad common comedy and is amused by a battery-powered soldier toy he bought for a relative back home, but lacks a mature understanding of where his is headed; the latter prefers attempting to be stimulated by Tarkovsky but ultimately caving into the pull of pornography, is not amused by his cousin's childish demeanor, and sees too painfully well the bleak island upon which the swells of fate have cast him (and this last sentiment is probably exactly that which Ceylan directed Muzaffer ?zdemir, who plays Mahmut, to lay over his face in many sad compositions of the aging photographer mourning by the harbor or alone in the Turkish equivalent of Starbucks).
Not long after Yusef arrives at his cousin's appartment, Mahmut begins to be irritated by his guest and the offensive smell of his feet. Their dissonance is captured with the utmost subtlety, their minimalistic dialogues seeming all to appropriate for two men who have nothing in common.
The payoff in the film's final act results from a shift in the audience's perception of each man's motivations. The focus comes to rest fully on Mahmut, and while I should not spoil the soft but moving closing mintues, I will note that a story that had appeared to be a drift is, in fact, given definitive shape. The effect is like studying one of those drawings that evokes the gestalt principle: from randomness, patterns eventually suggest meaning.
Ceylan suggests many dimensions of causality for the alienation of Yusef and Mahmut -- political/economic decline, cultural emptiness, it simply being the inescapable reality of existence -- while neither emphasising nor understating any of them, just like how life can be perceived through any number of emotional or intellectual lenses. I fear I'm beginning to expose the unsightly superstructure of a ridiculously pretentious "art" film, but Uzak is seamless beyond reproach, and does not boast anything it does not genuinely and tastefully accomplish.
And besides, tossing aside plot, Uzak is just as sound formally. In many sequences, it approaches what theorists giddily refer to as pure cinema: it accomplishes that which still visual art, music, or literature fails to accomplish alone. This indefineable power of moving images is perhaps what compels us to the movies and is what lack of which makes most movies failures. Uzak hovers there.
It's best seen alone.
[I composed all but the last full paragraph of this review on the blogger template, and added the ending in the email I sent to phiLL for him to post it on the phiLL(er), which the Yahoo email template FUCKING ERASED (or I did) and since there is no "undo" button among their cursed Edit options, it, the whole last paragraph, was GONE. Not only that, it was, I think, the best written part of the review (or at least the only decently written part of the whole thing). I tried to re-create it, but it is now the shittiest passage ever (the one beginning with "And besides..." Sorry and grrr.]
There is recent Turkish film titled Uzak (which means Distant) that is, appropriately, about two men who are trapped inside themselves. Establishing a simple but effective formal technique of juxtaposing the human subject from bleak surroundings, director Nuri Bilge Ceylan divorces his human subjects from their austere environments. Although not nearly as existential as Van Sant's Gerry, Ceylan's film finds its protagonists nonetheless left without purpose or connection.
Aside from the opening shot of ruralite Yusef hitching a ride away from the economic decay that ended his job and cast his family into poverty, the film is set in a distinctly soulless contemporary Istanbul. Naively hoping to find work or escape as a sailor, Yusef applies to his cousin, successful artist Mahmut, for a place to stay in the city. Their plot as housemates unfolds not unlike that of Felix and Oscar in The Odd Couple, had Felix been a discontent and weary photographer and Oscar an ignorant everyman affecting cool in all the wrong ways. And without the spaghetti on the wall and minus about two hundred lines or so. And without much music or any gags (aside from the meak relief of a sticky moustrap subplot that just barely, but deftly, eases the dull tension between Mahmut and his boarder). So, I guess not too much like The Odd Couple after all.
Yusef and Mahmut are diametrically opposed. The former prefers broad common comedy and is amused by a battery-powered soldier toy he bought for a relative back home, but lacks a mature understanding of where his is headed; the latter prefers attempting to be stimulated by Tarkovsky but ultimately caving into the pull of pornography, is not amused by his cousin's childish demeanor, and sees too painfully well the bleak island upon which the swells of fate have cast him (and this last sentiment is probably exactly that which Ceylan directed Muzaffer ?zdemir, who plays Mahmut, to lay over his face in many sad compositions of the aging photographer mourning by the harbor or alone in the Turkish equivalent of Starbucks).
Not long after Yusef arrives at his cousin's appartment, Mahmut begins to be irritated by his guest and the offensive smell of his feet. Their dissonance is captured with the utmost subtlety, their minimalistic dialogues seeming all to appropriate for two men who have nothing in common.
The payoff in the film's final act results from a shift in the audience's perception of each man's motivations. The focus comes to rest fully on Mahmut, and while I should not spoil the soft but moving closing mintues, I will note that a story that had appeared to be a drift is, in fact, given definitive shape. The effect is like studying one of those drawings that evokes the gestalt principle: from randomness, patterns eventually suggest meaning.
Ceylan suggests many dimensions of causality for the alienation of Yusef and Mahmut -- political/economic decline, cultural emptiness, it simply being the inescapable reality of existence -- while neither emphasising nor understating any of them, just like how life can be perceived through any number of emotional or intellectual lenses. I fear I'm beginning to expose the unsightly superstructure of a ridiculously pretentious "art" film, but Uzak is seamless beyond reproach, and does not boast anything it does not genuinely and tastefully accomplish.
And besides, tossing aside plot, Uzak is just as sound formally. In many sequences, it approaches what theorists giddily refer to as pure cinema: it accomplishes that which still visual art, music, or literature fails to accomplish alone. This indefineable power of moving images is perhaps what compels us to the movies and is what lack of which makes most movies failures. Uzak hovers there.
It's best seen alone.
[I composed all but the last full paragraph of this review on the blogger template, and added the ending in the email I sent to phiLL for him to post it on the phiLL(er), which the Yahoo email template FUCKING ERASED (or I did) and since there is no "undo" button among their cursed Edit options, it, the whole last paragraph, was GONE. Not only that, it was, I think, the best written part of the review (or at least the only decently written part of the whole thing). I tried to re-create it, but it is now the shittiest passage ever (the one beginning with "And besides..." Sorry and grrr.]
