Monday, April 12, 2004
Air
A singer resents the notes beyond his throat
as much as the book never read or the child
he could not teach to love responsibility, or to love
responsibly. "Harlot, harlot," cried the night streets
to her eyeshadow. There is a story in the sheet music,
but it was not his to write and he cannot find its pitches.
Some other heartbreak, some desperation as solitary as the heart
in all our dark chests.
I think there is something like performance in how we carry
ourselves like a sac; isn't dancing precarious,
like swinging the canned groceries
while skipping over the sidewalk. But then, I rarely sing.
And rarely sung, my lungs they are just ballast against the lake water.
Holding you against me, I thought of our breathing as us,
but now it seems to be that art we'll never need to teach our daughter.
I had a vision of traveling down her bronchioles,
deep into what hides there, one-a-side,
two swollen secrets like shipwrecks or testicles.
I couldn't tell you what I found there because it scared me,
so I kept it in an old pocket against my ribs; it sits.
Some nights, I become anxious that it will accidentally sing out to you
while we're sleeping
like some obsecene horn that betrays the last fingerfuls of what I don't share with you.
A singer resents the notes beyond his throat
as much as the book never read or the child
he could not teach to love responsibility, or to love
responsibly. "Harlot, harlot," cried the night streets
to her eyeshadow. There is a story in the sheet music,
but it was not his to write and he cannot find its pitches.
Some other heartbreak, some desperation as solitary as the heart
in all our dark chests.
I think there is something like performance in how we carry
ourselves like a sac; isn't dancing precarious,
like swinging the canned groceries
while skipping over the sidewalk. But then, I rarely sing.
And rarely sung, my lungs they are just ballast against the lake water.
Holding you against me, I thought of our breathing as us,
but now it seems to be that art we'll never need to teach our daughter.
I had a vision of traveling down her bronchioles,
deep into what hides there, one-a-side,
two swollen secrets like shipwrecks or testicles.
I couldn't tell you what I found there because it scared me,
so I kept it in an old pocket against my ribs; it sits.
Some nights, I become anxious that it will accidentally sing out to you
while we're sleeping
like some obsecene horn that betrays the last fingerfuls of what I don't share with you.
manna in Soho
Let me write about my boy scouting experience this weekend. My sister and her roommate from St. Bonnaventure were visiting for their Easter vacation, so I took them shopping around Manhattan Saturday. It was around 5:30, and we had just crossed Houston behind a group of women (27ish?), and I noticed with that special inner thrill an HSBC. Suddenly, like walking into the smell of my appartment and needing to pee, I needed to extract cash. The women, dressed sleekly for Saturday in tight black and leather (but tastefully), also approached the door. One scanned her card and we pushed in behind.
There were three ATMs, and only one was available. One from the group started the process, seeming to know all the right rituals. The other two customers were belabored. My sister waited behind one of them patiently. At the control panel, the woman cruised by them, and I felt a kinship to her for having known what to do and to have done it with excellence. She and her trio began to leave the ATM-room, and I siddled up to the open machine with alacrity. What I read on the screen surprised me.
Do you wish to make another transaction? Yes No
Uh...And in the wink of that "uh" a thousand moral file-folders were referenced in my mind ? ...Bernstein Bear books, movies, Shakespeare, the first time I was punished for lying (even though it wasn't my fault!), cheating once on the 4th grade Knights of the Math Table drills, church school, my mother my mother my mother, being lame in Jr. High... ?, moving my hand to punch the "No" button. Her card spat out, but as it did, and just before I turned around to catch its momentarily-irresponible master, a second wave crested and crashed in lurid plasma-tv color: buying rounds at Avalon that night (we were too tired to go out that night anyway), a free round of college loan payments, speculation on how much I could request the machine to spill out ? $300, $500 ? and how many times I could keep requesting other transactions, gifts for Amanda, the luck the fucking luck involved right in the lap of my hands.
"Miss....Miss..." She turned and partially concealed her embarrassment. I said something, something my dad would have said, and even in his weary, tried tone: "I coulda had a fun night with all your money." Why? Why did I say that?
I noticed a relaxed guard perched against the window on the ledge, not really looking at anything.
There was, of course, a rush of having done the right act. The good. But not really. Truthfully, I was regretting not having taken advantage of this luck that all but threw money at me. All the foolish mindgames suddenly seem like a religion I'm now proud to belong to: all the doors I've held open + the not calling in sick for work since I started working here + all the hours of sacrifice + the payback from shitty deals back = take your reward, moron! But I don't want to cash all that in, because I'm happy and I did those things because they were right to do, I think. ? ? ? No, why didn't I just press six buttons!?!?!?!?!
Yes
Withdrawl
3+0+0+ENTER
Minutes later, I accepted the likelihood of the girl rushing back in the middle of my theft, she quietly notifying the guard, my stomach twisting as I try and break for the door... OR worse, the camera zooming in on me, my oily fingers printing the whole area. Jail. Fuck.
So, I didn't do a good act, I did the right act. The act that kept me from jail. Actually getting the money and not getting in trouble was a precariously thin wedge on the Price is Right money-wheel (I know Wheel of Fortune would be a more apt analogy, but I hate the damn show). Tests just find you.
Let me write about my boy scouting experience this weekend. My sister and her roommate from St. Bonnaventure were visiting for their Easter vacation, so I took them shopping around Manhattan Saturday. It was around 5:30, and we had just crossed Houston behind a group of women (27ish?), and I noticed with that special inner thrill an HSBC. Suddenly, like walking into the smell of my appartment and needing to pee, I needed to extract cash. The women, dressed sleekly for Saturday in tight black and leather (but tastefully), also approached the door. One scanned her card and we pushed in behind.
There were three ATMs, and only one was available. One from the group started the process, seeming to know all the right rituals. The other two customers were belabored. My sister waited behind one of them patiently. At the control panel, the woman cruised by them, and I felt a kinship to her for having known what to do and to have done it with excellence. She and her trio began to leave the ATM-room, and I siddled up to the open machine with alacrity. What I read on the screen surprised me.
Do you wish to make another transaction? Yes No
Uh...And in the wink of that "uh" a thousand moral file-folders were referenced in my mind ? ...Bernstein Bear books, movies, Shakespeare, the first time I was punished for lying (even though it wasn't my fault!), cheating once on the 4th grade Knights of the Math Table drills, church school, my mother my mother my mother, being lame in Jr. High... ?, moving my hand to punch the "No" button. Her card spat out, but as it did, and just before I turned around to catch its momentarily-irresponible master, a second wave crested and crashed in lurid plasma-tv color: buying rounds at Avalon that night (we were too tired to go out that night anyway), a free round of college loan payments, speculation on how much I could request the machine to spill out ? $300, $500 ? and how many times I could keep requesting other transactions, gifts for Amanda, the luck the fucking luck involved right in the lap of my hands.
"Miss....Miss..." She turned and partially concealed her embarrassment. I said something, something my dad would have said, and even in his weary, tried tone: "I coulda had a fun night with all your money." Why? Why did I say that?
I noticed a relaxed guard perched against the window on the ledge, not really looking at anything.
There was, of course, a rush of having done the right act. The good. But not really. Truthfully, I was regretting not having taken advantage of this luck that all but threw money at me. All the foolish mindgames suddenly seem like a religion I'm now proud to belong to: all the doors I've held open + the not calling in sick for work since I started working here + all the hours of sacrifice + the payback from shitty deals back = take your reward, moron! But I don't want to cash all that in, because I'm happy and I did those things because they were right to do, I think. ? ? ? No, why didn't I just press six buttons!?!?!?!?!
Yes
Withdrawl
3+0+0+ENTER
Minutes later, I accepted the likelihood of the girl rushing back in the middle of my theft, she quietly notifying the guard, my stomach twisting as I try and break for the door... OR worse, the camera zooming in on me, my oily fingers printing the whole area. Jail. Fuck.
So, I didn't do a good act, I did the right act. The act that kept me from jail. Actually getting the money and not getting in trouble was a precariously thin wedge on the Price is Right money-wheel (I know Wheel of Fortune would be a more apt analogy, but I hate the damn show). Tests just find you.
Had Philip K. Dick re-written "A Christmas Carol"...: A review
In 1999 and with little effort, I coerced a fellow film nerd to see Being John Malkovich with me. It had shat rainbows all over my brain the week before, and he needed to experience the same. Glee crept over him, and an hour in he giddily asked me "what happens if he goes into his own portal?!" Fans of the work of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze know the answer to these type of questions. The pair's second collaboration, Adaptation, was equally as artistically rewarding and just as inventive as its predecessor, but it also moved toward more human ground. Malkovich was an excercise in detached metaphysics, and its sterile tone matched that lack of sentiment; Adaptation was much more dependent on a real personality (two, actually).
Kaufman's latest script is his most human, and his finest, to date. It's not a Jim Carrey vehicle, although it starts Jim Carrey, and it has gotten plenty of hype: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (The audience learns from Kirsten Dunst's character that the title is a quotation from a poem by Alexander Pope.) The film, which may be a masterpiece (although I don't know how one determines such a thing with any precision), carries similar Kaufman/Jonze themes and approaches to new brilliance: perception, ego, metaphysics, love, convolution — only, Jonze did not direct it. Fellow music video master Michel Gondry, another former Kaufman collaborator, guided the project.
To compare Jonze and Gondry in terms of ability is pointless; they are each a pop-visual pioneer rooted in the cross-roaded possibilities of technology and expression. For this particular film, however, the clever-on-clever combination of Kaufman AND Jonze probably would have been too loathsome in its own deliciousness. Jonze's idiosyncratic flair would also have detracted from the impact of Kaufman's achingly rendered characters. If nothing else, seeing the film will help you tease out what exactly is fundamentally Kaufmanian about all his previous work; the whey of what is missing can be credited to Jonze.
On to Gondry. He establishes mood well. The film's prologue is captured in lonely winter light, featuring Carrey's, as Joel Barish, expressive face in depths of humdrummery. And although the mind-journey that comprises most of the film takes Joel (and the audience) across the expanses of inter-human relations, New England, and time, the film maintains a gauzy visual motif, evoking memory, confusion, emotion, and kinds of loss. Even at its most esoteric moment, when Joel projects his consciousness back to when he was a toddler (and this is as close to a Malkovich-in-his-own-head moment the film gets) it is a grippingly real moment. Gondry evokes sentimentality without making the movie sentimental. Knock Carrey endlessly, but he can, at least on film, project the elemental emotions convincingly. I guess we just all have to choose to forget the whole Fire Marshall Bill thing.
Kate Winslet is immediately memorable as Clementine, a quirky single riddled with impulses and heart. A real heartbreaker. And HEY, if before this film, you thought the possibility of Carrey and Winslet convincing you they were in the sort of love you use against loneliness, take this as the most provocative praise I make: they are.
Kaufman's metaphors are not wholly abstruse. Clementine is a name meaning "forgiveness," Montauk serves as a visual representation of a limit (of memory or of forgetting) as well as a beginning (meeting of land and sea), the name of the back-alley medical office that offers the service of erasing people from their patient's memory is Lacuna, Valentines Day. The film is brilliant in how it arranges these elements, in its syntax. It pauses a complete relationship and traces the usually confusing threads of regret, doubt, and dissonance that creep into any romance. In other words, it is atypical. And yet it's about fundamental human failings. Only Kaufman can arrive at such crushing but accurate observations by taking such a bizarre and convoluted route. That the film ends with a pair of technically-speaking "strangers" listening to tape recordings of themselves harshly isolating the flaws of each other is a perfect example of the filmmakers' allegiance to paradox. It's like discontent at first sight.
There is humor, but muted. David Cross, typecast in an unscrupulous bastard cameo, has one of the best lines, and one that defines comedic tone. In a moment of domestic strife, his wife comforting the lovesick Joel, he is building a birdhouse with abandon. His wife chastises him for making noise. "I'm building a birdhouse." Only Cross could make that the slightest bit wry, because otherwise it's pretty devastating.
Like Swingers or Joni Mitchell's album Blue, Eternal Sunshine is about loss, albeit in the singular Kaufman/Gondry way. Instead of a lover ruminating on the shards of their former relationship, a former lover has his memory erased but realizes George Bailey-style during the procedure that it was the wrong choice and struggles to secure a safe corner of his brain to hide his remaining memories of his beloved. The film reminded me of a Denis Johnson poem, a sonnet that concludes
of all of us between the two of these:
harmony and divergence,
their sad story of harmony and divergence,
the story that begins
I did not know who she was
and ends I did not know who she was
In 1999 and with little effort, I coerced a fellow film nerd to see Being John Malkovich with me. It had shat rainbows all over my brain the week before, and he needed to experience the same. Glee crept over him, and an hour in he giddily asked me "what happens if he goes into his own portal?!" Fans of the work of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze know the answer to these type of questions. The pair's second collaboration, Adaptation, was equally as artistically rewarding and just as inventive as its predecessor, but it also moved toward more human ground. Malkovich was an excercise in detached metaphysics, and its sterile tone matched that lack of sentiment; Adaptation was much more dependent on a real personality (two, actually).
Kaufman's latest script is his most human, and his finest, to date. It's not a Jim Carrey vehicle, although it starts Jim Carrey, and it has gotten plenty of hype: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (The audience learns from Kirsten Dunst's character that the title is a quotation from a poem by Alexander Pope.) The film, which may be a masterpiece (although I don't know how one determines such a thing with any precision), carries similar Kaufman/Jonze themes and approaches to new brilliance: perception, ego, metaphysics, love, convolution — only, Jonze did not direct it. Fellow music video master Michel Gondry, another former Kaufman collaborator, guided the project.
To compare Jonze and Gondry in terms of ability is pointless; they are each a pop-visual pioneer rooted in the cross-roaded possibilities of technology and expression. For this particular film, however, the clever-on-clever combination of Kaufman AND Jonze probably would have been too loathsome in its own deliciousness. Jonze's idiosyncratic flair would also have detracted from the impact of Kaufman's achingly rendered characters. If nothing else, seeing the film will help you tease out what exactly is fundamentally Kaufmanian about all his previous work; the whey of what is missing can be credited to Jonze.
On to Gondry. He establishes mood well. The film's prologue is captured in lonely winter light, featuring Carrey's, as Joel Barish, expressive face in depths of humdrummery. And although the mind-journey that comprises most of the film takes Joel (and the audience) across the expanses of inter-human relations, New England, and time, the film maintains a gauzy visual motif, evoking memory, confusion, emotion, and kinds of loss. Even at its most esoteric moment, when Joel projects his consciousness back to when he was a toddler (and this is as close to a Malkovich-in-his-own-head moment the film gets) it is a grippingly real moment. Gondry evokes sentimentality without making the movie sentimental. Knock Carrey endlessly, but he can, at least on film, project the elemental emotions convincingly. I guess we just all have to choose to forget the whole Fire Marshall Bill thing.
Kate Winslet is immediately memorable as Clementine, a quirky single riddled with impulses and heart. A real heartbreaker. And HEY, if before this film, you thought the possibility of Carrey and Winslet convincing you they were in the sort of love you use against loneliness, take this as the most provocative praise I make: they are.
Kaufman's metaphors are not wholly abstruse. Clementine is a name meaning "forgiveness," Montauk serves as a visual representation of a limit (of memory or of forgetting) as well as a beginning (meeting of land and sea), the name of the back-alley medical office that offers the service of erasing people from their patient's memory is Lacuna, Valentines Day. The film is brilliant in how it arranges these elements, in its syntax. It pauses a complete relationship and traces the usually confusing threads of regret, doubt, and dissonance that creep into any romance. In other words, it is atypical. And yet it's about fundamental human failings. Only Kaufman can arrive at such crushing but accurate observations by taking such a bizarre and convoluted route. That the film ends with a pair of technically-speaking "strangers" listening to tape recordings of themselves harshly isolating the flaws of each other is a perfect example of the filmmakers' allegiance to paradox. It's like discontent at first sight.
There is humor, but muted. David Cross, typecast in an unscrupulous bastard cameo, has one of the best lines, and one that defines comedic tone. In a moment of domestic strife, his wife comforting the lovesick Joel, he is building a birdhouse with abandon. His wife chastises him for making noise. "I'm building a birdhouse." Only Cross could make that the slightest bit wry, because otherwise it's pretty devastating.
Like Swingers or Joni Mitchell's album Blue, Eternal Sunshine is about loss, albeit in the singular Kaufman/Gondry way. Instead of a lover ruminating on the shards of their former relationship, a former lover has his memory erased but realizes George Bailey-style during the procedure that it was the wrong choice and struggles to secure a safe corner of his brain to hide his remaining memories of his beloved. The film reminded me of a Denis Johnson poem, a sonnet that concludes
of all of us between the two of these:
harmony and divergence,
their sad story of harmony and divergence,
the story that begins
I did not know who she was
and ends I did not know who she was
