Leo and Artie

LEO

You can't be afraid of anyone or anything. Why should you be? Where does it get you? Nowhere. You gotta tear through life like a cannonball. You can't let nobody stop you. Momentum. Force. These are the qualities that you need in the world today. You gotta gather some mass. It's the biggest planets that got the most gravity. Life should orbit around you. You should be the sun, the center of your goddamn life, this flaming fucking ball of fire that'll torch up anything that fucks with you. You gotta feel things, you gotta express those feelings, even if it means somebody else doesn’t like it. I’d rather be an asshole than meek. You can't be some little shard of meteor just twirling around.

Now, Wally is ten times better than any of the crap out there. I mean it, Wally’s terrific. He really is. I just hate to see him waste it. Life has always got to be ripening. It's got to expand and grow and unfold in new directions, and if it doesn't than you might as well blow your fucking brains out right now cause you're dead. Just climb into your grave and go to sleep. Good night.

Fear is worthless. It is a worthless fucking emotion. You see a girl, a group of girls, six feet tall in their spiky heels and their hair all poking up like fucking pineapples, go talk to them. The only thing you can do is go talk to them. If you don't, you're dead. You see a guy bigger than you, being an asshole, tell him he's an asshole. Sure, he might sock you in the mouth, but you told the truth, and that's the best goddamn thing you can do in life. Nobody ever tells the truth anymore. Our whole lives, all we do is massage our discomfort, smooth things out into convenience. Well I'm tired of it. I want rough edges, goddamnit! Show me something baby! Show me something real. There's a whole palette of emotions out there. I want them all! I wanna know what it's like to starve, I wanna feel despair, elation. You gotta throw some Hail Mary’s. Maybe not every play, but sometimes. If you avoid these emotions, these wide thrown emotions, if you clamp some lid on your low-simmering melancholy, this ennui that everybody seems to be feeling these days, well that's it now, isn't it? Not for me, goddamnit. I'm loud. I say what I mean. I feel things.

All this alienation, everybody's alienated. There's some kind of society happening that everybody seems to be alienated from. Where? Where is this society that no one seems to be a part of? That’s pushing us all over the edge of the cliff. I got news for you, Mack. You’re standing in it. You are it. We all are. Fuck it. Who cares? The worst thing is to be alienated from your own feelings, to stuff a sock into the mouth of that voice screaming inside you to go fuck that girl in the neon dress.

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ARTIE

It’s really quite odd how different dog piss smells than human piss. Just this morning I was sitting out on the deck with a cup of coffee and my little notebook and Rudy, one of our dogs, came up and splashed some piss on the deck about ten feet from me. Bosco, our other dog, not one to be outdone, came over shortly thereafter and squirted his stuff all over the same spot. Well, I’ll tell you, the stench got to be so rancid that I had to get up and go inside. I could not bear it. And yet, just the night before, since they’re redoing the bathroom and our water’s been turned off, I was pissing on the fence out back. I’d had a bowl of Golden Puffs earlier and I don’t know if you’ve ever had Golden Puffs, but one of their most charming qualities is that they make your pee smell exactly like them! So here I was pissing in the grass in the moonlight and up wafted this wonderful smell of Golden Puffs and I quite enjoyed it! I lingered for a few moments, drinking it in, and Rudy came over with a quizzical look and he stuck his snout down there and investigated it and I went inside with a big smile on my face.

For many people, this would not be a significant part of their day, let alone their lives, but for me, any time I piss in my backyard, or sleep in a tent or someone flips me off in traffic, it’s newsworthy. It can shake me up for quite a little while. I mean, here I am telling you about dog piss! I don’t know.

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LEO

Wally used to do this thing, he told me, where any time he would enter a new room, first thing he would immediately figure out what his escape route would be if he somehow became trapped. (Laughs) Which wall he would scurry up, which window he’d climb out of. I mean, that’s just about the ultimate in paranoia. In a way, that’s a pretty good metaphor for what the syndrome of being Wally is all about. This is a cat who never enters into anything, a relationship, an institution, a gas station for chrissakes, until he feels it’s absolutely secure. He’s always circling outside things, sizing them up, figuring the odds, and he always takes the lowest risk or nothing at all. Subsequently I think he’s lost out on a lotta opportunities, a lotta living.

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ARTIE

I don’t know if I like all this self-improvement that’s going on around me. Granted, I’m a deeply vain fellow. I can’t go out in public if I feel I haven’t had the chance to preen myself properly, if I’m insufficiently coiffed, but I can’t help but think all these vegetarians and people who go jogging and only use organic products aren’t doing it because they want to help anyone, or save the world, they’re doing it purely out of vanity. What this says to me is that these people think they’re so important that they owe it to the world to preserve their physical and mental facilities as long as possible. There’s a thinly veiled disgust in these people’s criticism of the fast-food diet’s many of us are on. They’re not against double cheeseburgers because they’ll kill you, they’re against double cheeseburgers because they’ll make you fat and ugly. I’m not quite sure what to make of these people, these brand consultants and triathalon runners, these goal-oriented people devouring life like it’s a Powerbar, working 60 hours a week, running ten miles a day. Where are they running? It seems to me they’re not running to anything. It seems to me they’re running from something. Have you ever looked at their faces? They’re miserable! They heave and burn and sweat, their arms limp like little Hamster claws, an excruciating look in their eyes, like they’re doing everything they can to ignore the pain. They look like they’ve been running from Godzilla for 3 days straight, liked he's coming to crush any love anyone may have to give them.

Don’t get me wrong, people have to do things. I mean, we can’t all be Buddha sitting under a tree. Life sweeps you forward. We have to eat, we have to maintain life. We have to live. And it’s very hard to find a moral way to do this, especially one that society will allow you to have. I mean, it would take a lot of courage today to go around like Walt Whitman or Jack Kerouac “afoot and light-hearted” just wandering around or hitch-hiking and expanding your consciousness. The world doesn’t seem to want you to do this. It wants you to pack your consciousness, your opinions or thoughts or whatever, into a little tin lunch box. If I were to take my rucksack and go stand by the side of the road with my thumb out the police would immediately throw me in jail! That is, if some homicidal maniac didn’t chop my head off first. But, supposing I got past the police and the axe-murderers out there, I mean, is there anything really left to see? Is it all just one long corridor of strip malls lining Route 66? Is it one neon smear of Appleby’s and Wal-Mart all across the land? Maybe the whole blasted world is just as it is here, all Golden-Arches and pavement and telephone wires.

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LEO

Despair’s got a kind of sweetness, like wine. It's a thing rotting, it's a poison, but it's delicious, in its way, it's intoxicating. I savor it goddamnit. I savor it. Granted it ain't my preferred mode of life, but I'll take it. As human beings, the best things we can be are vessels for emotion. Sure, we always strive for happiness, but we shouldn't settle for comfort goddamnit. This bland, banal, numbing comfort. Life is not merely a waiting room for death, with muzak playing for everyone to ignore and quaint little paintings for no one to look at and flowers stitched out of fucking synthetic plastic that will never die and won't make you sneeze. Fuck that! I want knife edges. I want broken glass. I want to go out tonight and have an orgasm that explodes like a supernova, that echoes and sends shockwaves through the whole goddamn galaxy. I want poetry. I don't want fucking romance novels.

REASONS FOR LIVING: DECEMBER 10 2009

THE CIRCUS - CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Never seems to come up much in discussion of Chaplin, a really funny movie, with perhaps the most astonishing image I've ever seen in a Chaplin movie, the finale where the Circus train speeds away, leaving the Tramp behind in the center of the traces of the Circus Ring. A bittersweet punctuation on the end of the silent era, the end of vaudeville, the end of the golden age of comedy.

ELVIS PRESLEY - THAT'S SOMEONE YOU NEVER FORGET


Written by Red West based on something Elvis said, may be The King's most haunting record. A hymn to his dead mother.

GREAT JONES STREET - DON DELILLO
Pee-pee-maw-maw

THE RANDYS
The best band in Columbus, Ohio, but you aren't gonna find another band like this anywhere. Romantic without being schmaltzy, harmonies like clouds of perfume, a crowd full of girls in pretty dresses dancing, actually dancing.

THE DICTIONARY
Frank O'Hara supposedly read a page every day. I thought that sounded like a good idea, so I started. Try it. It's a weird experience.

MERLE HAGGARD
The guy invented the identity that essentially every male country singer utilizes today: rich baritone, twangy guitar, bump-chicka bump-chicka beat, songs about America, hard work, and drinking. Great because you can't really call him one thing or the other. His beliefs are complicated and his music is deceptively simple.

Lost in a Dream: Thoughts on Wes Anderson

The first DVD I ever bought was of a movie called Bottle Rocket. Though it cost $27, a lot for a DVD with no special features, and I had never seen it before, I liked Owen Wilson from his small cameo in The Cable Guy, and somehow I knew Bottle Rocket was going to be an important movie in my life. From the first time I watched it, Bottle Rocket has been my favorite movie. It expresses with such comedy and poetry what it’s like to be a young man in a group of young men without women who are trying to create something bigger than themselves. I’ve followed Wes Anderson’s career ever since with the interest one may have followed The Beatles or The Rolling Stones careers in the 60s, anticipating the release of each new work, scrutinizing it to the smallest detail. I have been delighted and surpirsed to see his work get more ambitious, more idiosyncratic, his grip over the mise-en-scene has gotten more sure. As his control, his visability in the media, his popularity has grown, so has the criticism against him mounted. People seem to think he’s lost his way, he’s too full of himself. Granted, I wish Anderson would make another film like Bottle Rocket, less reliant on style and allusion and more grounded in the humanity of the characters, I would argue that his films have grown richer, more ambitious with each new release. I don’t know that he’s of the magnitude of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, but he is, in a way, one of the premiere artists of this moment. Though he is not affecting change in the way the artists of the 60s did, that may be because he is, as this generation seems to be, not interested in those sorts of things.

What Anderson seems to be interested in is creating an alternate fictional reality. He is, like Quentin Tarantino, a collage artist: assembling ideas, dialogue, fashions, songs, names, images into a new world on film. His films are drenched in the vintage, picked from the thrift bins and the boutiques. In America today, where mass-produced, ready-made corporate inauthenticity is the mainstream, it is no wonder that a section of the younger generation has pilfered their parent’s closets and record collections. Anderson has what Natalie Portman called “the best possible taste.” He picks the most refined elements of pop culture (British Invasion music, New Yorker literary tropes, foreign film motifs) and parades them in a grand pageant across the screen. On DVD commentary tracks and in interviews he freely credits the sources of his work: A line from a Louis Malle film, the look of a San Francisco tycoon, a camera move from Hitchcock. Even proper names are borrowed from a vaguely understood upper crust: Hotel Chevalier, Voltaire No. 5, the Lindbergh Palace Hotel. I don’t think Wes’ penchant for theft makes him an illegitimate artist, but perhaps a representative artist of this era. Like Picasso said, “The good artists copy, the great artists steal.” What does an artist do but steal? The work has to come from somewhere. It’s just that, until recently, most art was “stolen” from life: The painter refashioned a sunset as his eye saw fit, a writer grafted the personality of a friend onto a character, the actor stole a gesture or a walk from a person on the street. Artists today are still stealing from life, it’s just that so much of our lives are spent absorbing art. Anderson’s sensibility, his ability to orchestrate a scene, is so powerful that these stolen things become new again. One of our only frames of reference, one of the only things that unites cultures across the world in this age is popular culture. The lines of communication which people used to use to relate to each other, such as small town gossip, have been stretched until they snapped by modern technology. One of the only ways to relate in a global community is through a global popular culture. As a result of this, we are required to assemble our identities from the music we listen to, the clothes we wear, the movies we like. We use them to signal others that, since we like the same things, perhaps we think the same way, perhaps we should be friends. Wes Anderson gathers up the ribbons of culture that appeal to a certain type of mind and tie them around pretty little packages containing character and emotion. The problem is that Anderson’s films have become less about what's inside and more about wrapping paper.

What some people view as superficial: clothes, taste, style, Wes Anderson sees as external manifestations of the inner integrity of a person. The problem is that his films celebrate these things while willfully ignoring the unattractive “larger” questions of life. His characters are probably interested in things like politics, philosophy, war, poverty, etc., but Anderson seems averse to exploring these issues in his films. In The Darjeeling Limited, the Whitman brothers go on a “spiritual journey” to India and nary a word is mentioned about whether they believe in God or the specific differences between Hinduism and whatever it is that they practice. Perhaps these things were meant to be a hypocritical part of the characterization, or to be implicit, alluded to in the environments and actions of the story but not in words. It seems curious that Anderson, a philosophy major in college, isn’t interested in exploring these questions in his work. On the Criterion DVD for The Life Aquatic an interviewer asks him if he believes in the devil. His answer: “I’m not really interested in that.”



Although some of the appeal for me of Anderson’s work lies in the frippery, the real nutrients, the stuff without which the films wouldn’t be great, is the emotional current powering the whole machine. As Martin Scorsese said, Anderson “knows how to convey the simple joys and interactions between people so well and with such richness.” This is why Bottle Rocket remains my favorite Anderson film. It is no coincidence that the film is the most stripped of the patented Anderson style. The Darjeeling Limited is a kind of update of Bottle Rocket: both were made in a sort of loose, adventurous way, both are about three guys (friends, brothers) on a freewheeling journey hoping to discover themselves, and both are insightful and inventive in their own ways, but, to me, The Darjeeling Limited, while being the more fully realized film, lacks the magic, the spark of Bottle Rocket. Don't get me wrong, I like The Darjeeling Limited very much, but the superficial elements, the clothes the characters wear, the locations they are able to travel to, the lifestyles they can afford, are a zillion miles from my reality, and so the film does not come as close to my heart. Although Anderson likens his movies to fables, of unspecified time and place, his earlier films were more grounded in reality, and this had much to do with their success. He hasn’t quite figured out how to give the story the same gravity in the flamboyant worlds he has, with his growing stature as a director, been given resources to create. He seems in love with his own style, averse to abandoning, or even modifying it. With each film he plunges deeper into his inventions, his newest film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox taking place in a world completely fabricated to the smallest detail (I have yet to see the movie, but it has gotten the best reviews of Anderson’s career thus far). Perhaps he could learn something from his heroes, say, David Bowie or Bob Dylan, who discovered that one way for an artist to stay relevant is to constantly be shedding his image, reinventing himself. In the film world, unlike the music world, this is not exactly a celebrated ideal. The ultimate accolade a film director can receive is to be recognized as an “auteur”, the complete master of his mise-en-scene. This is where Anderson takes his hardest criticism. He has, more than any other director of his generation, developed an instantly recognizable and unique aesthetic, and people seem to hate him for it. The very things that identify a Wes Anderson film are the most heavily criticized. If a director is lucky enough to develop something as hard won as his own vision, perhaps it’s best for him not to abandon it. After all, no one criticized Orson Welles for using dramatic angles and overlapping sound design for his whole career, or Jim Jarmusch for continuing to use long takes and few close-ups. I would argue that, as Anderson’s creative control has increased, as his fictional worlds have become more totally under his control, his films have started to lose their emotional impact, more closely resembling the surreal hyperbole of Max Fischer’s plays than the delicate poignancy of the film Rushmore itself. For example, when Zissou fights the pirates in The Life Aquatic, Anderson clings to the trademarks of his style even when the material demands a different technique. His wide-angle lenses, his preference for framing things at 90 degrees, the use of “Search and Destroy” to prop the whole thing up, cause the sequence to look more like a bunch of kids playing at making an action movie than anything with real suspense or danger. Then again, maybe that’s what he's going for. Anderson seems to keep anything grim at arms length. The scene in the hospital room in The Royal Tenenbaums after Richie suicide attempt is fairly dry, with little display of emotion. The characters in Anderson’s movies never explode. The melodrama is kept tightly lidded, as if it would be unfashionable, uncouth to erupt in feeling. Steve Zissou, probably Anderson’s most ambitious and not quite successful character, is too close to a caracature to really bleed through to us emotionally. We become fatigued by the fashion, are pushed so far from the characters by their eccentricity that their pain no longer seems real. It’s much easier for an audience to sympathize with a Dignan, a Max Fischer, mad dreamers whose fantasies clash so violently against the gloom of reality. Max is banished from Rushmore to a public high school. Dignan goes to jail. Dignan's yellow jumpsuit, Max's red beret certainly say a lot about who they are, but they are not smothered by them. Max’s uniform is touching, it reflects his yearning to be a part of the Rushmore elite. It is somewhat pathetic in it’s shabby impersonation of wealth, and we cannot fault him for this. In his more recent films the characters, perhaps like the man himself, no longer have any reality to bounce against, they are swept up in the absurd grandeur of the tapestry they inhabit. Anderson, unlike his early heroes, has achieved his dreams. He has an apartment in Paris, one in Manhattan, critical acclaim as a film director. Dignan and Max Fischer are trapped in a world which will not bend to their fantasies, no matter how they struggle. His later protagonists have been born into the aristocracy, they are no longer outsiders trying to get in, and their unhappiness seems more like torpor than fury. Dignan and Max Fischer are poor boys with nothing but their spunk, their moxie, to drive them to the top. When their dreams are slammed down, the audience feels this. It is much harder to sympathize with some rich has-been lost in metropolitan ennui. When Zissou’s life crumbles around him, it’s too surreal to break our hearts.

Anderson seems to have anticipated, and in part facilitated, an entire generation’s collapse into adolescence. As Richie and Margot and Chas Tenenbaum remain petrified, like some living exhibit to their own glory, their most honest, childhood selves, so do many of the current 20-somethings in America. Childhood was a pretty wonderful time for us. It was probably the only time in our lives we were allowed to be honest, impulsive, without fear of society lashing us into conformity or obedience. We were celebrated as children, our creativity was encouraged, our dreams were fostered. It is a time before our parents were divorced, when we liked TV shows or videogames because we liked them, not because it was hip to like them. We enshrine this part of our lives. This is the Catcher in the Rye mythology, the struggle to retain innocence against the demands, the hypocrisy of modern adulthood, and Anderson’s work is a kind of refinement, an update of this myth. The Tenenbaums, Max Fischer, Dignan all resonate with us because we see ourselves in them, or at least fantasies of ourselves. We would like to believe that we are beautiful disasters, neglected, maudlin, gifted; that we were on the path to greatness but somehow our glory vanished along the way. We have become lost in tangly beards and irony and shield ourselves from emotional battery behind headbands and sunglasses and blase expressions. Our generation inherited the world left behind after the 1960s, when all the ancient struts propping up notions of identity, truth, beauty, politics, spirituality were torn up and strewn about for us to reassemble. There are a lot of questions that we don’t know how to answer, and, in a way, we have chosen not worry about them. We don’t know if we care one way or the other if there’s a God. We aren’t much concerned with politics. We certainly don’t want to work in cubicles. We see ourselves as creative. We aspire to be geniuses, rock stars, auteurs. We strive for our dreams, but as they pass us by, we champion our failures, which is what Wes Anderson’s characters do. We believe, we were told, as they were, that we had all the potential in the world, but life didn’t lift us where we thought we’d go. Rather than make films that are discourses or arguments about politics or philosophy or spirituality, Anderson’s films deal more directly with the problems of a child whose development was arrested when he was seven years old and his parents divorced. The recurring conflict in his films is between that of a young dreamer or idealist and a brash, insensitive father-figure. Anderson is most specifically interested in the question: What does it mean to be a man? Royal Tenenbaum is a send up of certain type of old-fashioned, perhaps antiquated, notion of manhood: an ascot wearer, highball drinker, litigator, womanizer, who smokes his cigarettes in a long ebony holder and emotionally roughhouses with children all on tiptoes reaching for his love; Steve Zissou brandishes his physique in a bathrobe and a speedo, belly bending out, sipping a Compari or dispatching an entire band of Filipino pirates with a small handgun, his entire crew vying for his approval. The most appropriate metaphorical image in Anderson's work for this generation seems to be that of Eleanor Zissou lying, dreamy eyed, possibly stoned, in the observational bubble of the Belafonte as Ned Plimpton’s body sinks into the water before her, buried at sea. She certainly is aware of the funeral taking place on deck, and she’s not being insensitive by not attending, it's just that the pain would just be too much for her. It’s not that we young people are oblivious to the pain and suffering going on around us in the world, it’s not that we’re apathetic, it's that we've been left with this huge pile of questions to sort out, and rather than deal with them we wallow in ennui. We grieve in our own way.

Two Country Songs

Playing a lot of weddings in more rural areas, I've been listening to some country music lately, and I kind of like it. There is a kind of stubborn insistence on clenching tightly to certain cliches (Jesus, Beer, Pick-up trucks), but I admire the literary quality of the lyrics. They seem to fit a lot more story into their songs than other forms do.

I was driving through Southern Ohio, where a lot of my family comes from, and I was really affected by the beauty of the place. It seems like that region is having a rough go of it right now, and though I don't agree with much of their politics, sometimes I'm jealous of their way of life. The first song is kind of about that.

MY HEART IS IN THE COUNTRY

My family moved up here from a town down south
Cause all the work dried up when the paper mill shut down
I want to move back to the country and find me a girl
Rip the boards off a farmhouse away from the world

Buy me a little plot of land
Plant some corn and watch grow
Dig my fingers in the soil
Feel my heart burn in my chest like coal

CHORUS
I want to move to the country where the girls are pretty
Their little jean shorts are teenie weenie bitty
My mailing address may be here in the city
But my heart is in the country

Have a stable full of horses and a house full of dogs
Wake up in the morning, get lost in the fog
Go swimmin’ in the earth, fishin’ in the creek
Show my boys how to shoot like my dad done with me

Well the smog climbing from the smokestacks
Look like Heaven flying up to the sky
And TV Tower on the hillside
Beside the cross, they shine so bright

CHORUS
I wanna move to the country where the speed limit is 50
But on them county roads at night you can be a little shifty
My F-150 may be parked in the city
But my heart is in the country

Down on Main Street it ain’t safe at night
The shop windows are broken, can’t afford the streetlights
Out roaming in the fields, you can sense the ghosts
In your headlights you can see the deers shredded in the road

The frozen wind is blowin’
Through the skeletons of abandoned cars
But the lights are so bright in the city
At night you can’t see the stars

CHORUS
You can tell them city folks that I don’t need their pity
High class ain’t got nothin’ on that down home nitty gritty
I may be pumpin’ gas up here in the city
But my heart is in the country

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I've always had a kind of fantasy about being a truck driver, and many of the great musicians either were truck drivers, or sang about being truck drivers. This song is kind of about what that life may be like.

ENDLESS HORIZON

I’m burning down the miles, just torching them up
When I get behind the wheel of that big old truck
I’m a man on a mission, best get outta my way
I’m a concrete cowboy riding for my pay
And the days go by
like the painted lines
And all night I’m looking
for a lit-up sign
That says three miles left
to the roadside rest
I can lay down my load
Til the sun peaks the crest
Of that endless horizon
That’s just a-risin’ everyday

In the morning I’m plowing through the midwest corn
When the evening comes around I’ll be pulling my horn
For them pretty little women that they got down south
But the very next day I’m in the Rocky Mountain Clouds
And the days go by
like the painted lines
And all night I’m looking
for a lit-up sign
That says two miles left
to the roadside rest
I can lay down my load
Til the sun peaks the crest
Of that endless horizon
That keeps getting further away.

I got a beautiful wife and a baby back home
I heard his first words on a long distance phone-call
Sometimes I wonder what I’m missing on that road at night
As I’m staring at their picture in the soft-dome light.
And the days go by
like the painted lines
And all night I’m looking
for a lit-up sign
That says two miles left
until my hometown
And for a couple days
I won’t have to go down
That endless horizon
I’m gonna reach the edge someday

A Piece of Doggerel

What a joy it is to rise today!
To rise and meet the sun!
There’s no one I despise today!
I welcome everyone!

Exclamation points explode today
like fireworks in the sky!
Happiness comes easily!
I ask no questions why!

My poem tumbles freely now,
Not like a knot I must unlace.
The lazy battle’s shrugged away,
I withdraw from the race.

I take the lines as they come to me,
riddled with cliche.
I leave to write a real poem
to task another day

Suddenly I look to see
rain falling from the clouds.
Today’s not so nice after all.
No visitor’s allowed.

The Best Thing Around

People say that love’s the best thing around
so what does that leave you when you’ve finally found
that it’s often the finest who end up alone
and it’s the rotten bastards who can’t mute their phones?
Women know they go for the dangerous kind.
They say to themselves “Oh why can’t I find
a nice guy?” Why do I always fall for jerks?”
But they don’t want a man who’ll do all the work,
who’ll clean the house and make them dinner,
who’ll bring them flowers and be the breadwinner.
They want a guy who’s fucked all their friends,
Who’s rued by women, and envied by men.
Love is a game, and you gotta know how to cheat.
You can’t win the prize being honest and sweet.

REASONS FOR LIVING: Nov. 21st 2009.

Here's some media that I've been exploring/enjoying lately that I thought I might share with you.


Six Moral Tales: by Eric Rohmer
Criterion boxset

The title may be mistranslated/misleading, as these films aren't really parables of any kind, but instead are sure handed stories of people grappling with love and their own moralities. These films were first written as a series of stories (Collected in a book included in the box set) by Eric Rohmer, a somewhat neglected member of the French New Wave, and certainly exude a literary bone-structure. Either dialogue or voice over heavy, the films are a wonderful and unique marriage of visual poetry and oral sophistication which prove that neither dialogue nor narration is uncinematic.


Bob Dylan and the Band - The Basement Tapes

Saw Bob Dylan in concert a couple weeks ago, and although I am always listening to him, it inspired me to explore albums and songs I hadn't before. The man's body of work is staggering. I remember looking at my parent's copy of this album and thinking the song titles were incredibly bizarre, and probably covers of old Americana stuff. I am shocked to discover that the songs are all original. This album is an anomaly. A complete freak parade. Favorite tracks: "Odds and Ends", "Yazoo Street Scandal", "Apple Suckling Tree."

P.S.-Never liked The Band too much, but I can appreciate what they do. Robbie Robertson is one of my favorite guitar players, Levon Helm kicks ass ("Yazoo" is one of the best vocal performances I've ever heard), Danko and Manuel have beautiful voices and Garth Hudson is about the best rock organist ever. Still, something about their sound doesn't quite add up for me. I like them, but I'm not in love with them.

Here's a video example of Bob Dylan's unparalleled talent for being both a genius and completely weird at the same time.



Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Dir. Terry Gilliam
Maybe one of the best comedic performances ever: Benicio Del Toro as the Attorney. I think for a lot of the film you can see Depp's acting, his pretty good impersonation of Hunter S. Thompson, but Del Toro, perhaps having the advantage of playing a person who's not quite as visible a public figure, proves that the most bone-cutting comedy is played with serious gravity. This movie doesn't quite work in every way, but it is funny as hell.

Goldfish Hands - Bernard Diabolik
One of the great poet/shaman/seers/troubadours of our time, Bernard Diabolik drools this 16 minute epic devotional of unrequited love. Best lines:

Scar me with your flaming whip,
Lick me with your serpent tongue,
Bite me with your fangs,
I'm not gonna run.


Taylor Swift
May be the musical artist of her generation. A star with the talent, charisma and magnitude of Elvis, Michael Jackson, Dolly Parton, anybody. She's gonna last. Or maybe I'm just in love with her.

The North Market
Cheap, good food, all conveniently located under one roof. I'm writing this upstairs compliments of their free wi-fi.

The Writer's Almanac podcast
Hosted by Garrison Keillor, a poem a day is good for you.

Bullet Park by John Cheever
I've read a lot of Cheever, which is surprising because I don't particularly love his writing. I really want to, but he's just so wildly erratic. He's very easy to read. Sometimes he's a genius, sometimes there's nothing there, but it always flows. This may be the best Cheever I've read yet. An interesting take on the 1960s from a reluctant lover/ poet laureate of the suburbs.

Up and Down

Down is the natural movement.
Nothing is lifted. Things
disappear in ascent:
Water, souls. The phoenix
screeches into flames.
A balloon is strangled. Clouds
plummet down. Leaves fall. Birds fall.
Surrender and you will fall.

Things rise too.
Mountains scrunch
heavenward. Trees reach.
The tomatoes palpitating on the vine
climb towards the sun.
The heart ripens on the veins.

Life lives
and kills
and dies.

Two About Time

Regardless of what is bought,
time will be spent.
Pennies of seconds all rot
away to pay life’s rent.

Dollars of days funneling the debt
down with the sun into the grave.
Figures of months, mortgages of years
billing my body. I cast unwinnable bets.

Nothing can dam this flow to a halt;
Not Pictures or words collected in vaults.
Kisses and births blaze like hundreds on fire.
Our lives passed chopping wood for the funeral pyre.

-------------------------
BUFFALO NICKELS

I’ve got a hunch these days will appreciate
like buffalo nickels, grimed and freely spent
newly-minted, going at their face rate,
Cherished after they’re long out of print.
“If I woulda held on to those things,” I’ll say,
“I’d be a millionaire. Instead I let
them roll down the gutter, used them to pay
for stupid things: women and drinks and debt.
How could I have known those little coins would
turn out to be worth so much?” But I do know
the worth of these days. I know that I should
spend them carefully. The question is: How?
Surely it’s better to spend while you can
Then clutch in your coffin the coin in your hand.

John Hughes: A Man of Sophisticated Taste

I have loved John Hughes' films all of my life. When I was 7 years old I rigged up Rube Goldberg machines in the living room trying to be Macauley Culkin in Home Alone. When I was in high school I skipped school and karaoked "Twist and Shout" like Ferris Bueller (though I was probably more like Cameron Frye). My family watches Planes, Trains and Automobiles everything Thanksgiving. In recent years, as my tastes have developed, and as I continue to watch Hughes' films, I have come to notice that, although his subject matter was somewhat unextraordinary (the suburban upper middle class American experience), and he worked within the confines of commercial Hollywood, Hughes very much demonstrated the qualities of an "auteur," and his films are strewn with clues revealing the man's sophisticated artistic ambitions and tastes.

Hughes is an important link between Mike Nichols' pioneering use of Simon and Garfunkel in The Graduate to today's soundtrack cinema of Wes and P.T. Anderson. Hughes' soundtracks are eclectic, to say the least, as much mixtapes as accompanyment for a film, loaded with everything from Oingo Boingo and Kajagoogoo to Patsy Cline and obscure R&B gems from the 50s. He was never indulgent with his soundtracks though, always matching the character, the mood, with the song. In Uncle Buck John Candy, an old school Chicago guy complete with cigar and porkpie hat, barrels around in his broken down bomber of a Caddy to the rolling beats of Big Joe Turner and LaVern Baker. In Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Matthew Broderick models himself philosophically on the teachings of the Beatles, and could easily be described, using Timothy Leary's famous description of the Beatles, as a "laughing freeman" (I am sure Hughes casting of Broderick had something to do with his not faint resemblance to a young Paul McCartney). Bueller, however, like Hughes, is not simply a casual Beatles fan. "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me," Ferris quotes, a lyric, not from a Beatles song, but one of Lennon's controversial solo singles, "God". Bueller is also obsessed with the Wayne Newton song "Danke Schoen" and later, in one of the most joyful sequences in cinema, performs it on a double bill with "Twist and Shout". It was rare for a Hughes film not to feature a memorable musical sequence: Who could forget John Candy playing keys on the dash to Ray Charles' "Mess Around?" The "chica-chic-ahh" of Yello's "Oh Yeah"? Anthony Michael Hall talking shop with old bluesmen in Weird Science? Perhaps Hughes' only musical misstep was the atrocious score for Planes, Trains and Automobiles, which comes close to ruining an otherwise brilliant film.



Hughes, not surprisingly, had impeccable tastes regarding actors as well. He cast Richard Edson (pictured right) of Jarmusch's hip minimalist masterpiece "Stranger Than Paradise" and the original drummer of Sonic Youth, as a garage attendant in Bueller when Edson had acted in almost no other films. The bit parts in Hughes' films were almost always infused with life, with texture, by brilliant actors. Where would Ben Stein be if not for his famous "Bueller? Bueller?" scene? No one seems to mention the other teacher in Bueller, the pontificating English teacher, but he is played by Del Close, the man who taught Bill Murray, John Belushi, Harold Ramis and countless others how to be funny at Second City. Dylan Baker was given one of his first roles as Owen ("Her first baby come out sideways. She didn't scream or nuthin'.") in Planes, Trains. Michael McKean plays a bit part as a state trooper in the same film. Hughes cast Robert Downey Jr., Bill Paxton, Steve Carrell, and Laurie Metcalf, among others, in some of their earliest film roles. Even the actors who didn't go on to bigger parts are wonderful. In a Hughes film, Edie McClurg (the red-headed receptionist with the Wisconsin accent) is a star.

In Bueller, Ed Rooney consoles Sloan Peterson for the (fake) death of her grandmother with the last line of William Faulkner's The Wild Palms: "Between grief and nothing, I will take grief." Hughes was probably a Faulkner fan (Uncle Buck is the name of a character in Go Down, Moses), but this line is doubly significant because it was quoted by Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard's seminal New Wave classic Breathless. One can clearly the see the influence of Godard's Pierrot Le Fou vibrant color scheme on Bueller, particularly in the close-up shots of the Ferrari, as red as a firetruck, and the blue of the shot with Bueller and Sloan kissing in front of the stained glass window. Undoubtedly, Hughes was a fan of Truffaut, as the two men shared a tender affection towards adolescence and their depictions of the rigors of school are perhaps unmatched in cinema. Hughes was also interested in theatre (he spoke of turning The Breakfast Club into a stage play; when he cast Broderick and Alan Ruck in Bueller they were appearing together on Broadway in "Biloxi Blues") and art (the art gallery from Bueller).

Where Hughes was original, where the true genius of his work lies, was in his ability to create indelible comedic archetypes out of the stuff of your average Middle American life. It is very hard to write about something like high school, about family vacations, without seeming fickle or self-indulgent, but Hughes wrote about little else. He gave us nerds and jocks, Prom Kings and Queens, teachers, secretaries, principals, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, who were real people, not just stereotypes. My favorite Hughes film, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, has a comedic set-up that is so simple and elegant: an uptight ad-man (Steve Martin) trying to get home for Thanksgiving finds himself stuck on an odyssey with an annoying but loveable shower curtain ring salesman (John Candy). It is a film filled with many beautiful moments, but probably my favorite comes at the end, when Martin, on the El train finally nearing home, cycles through the memories of his misadventures with Candy and, finding something in Candy's story that doesn't add up, turns around to find him sitting alone in the train station, lonely, with no home to return to. We find out Marie, Candy's wife, has been dead for years and Martin, rather than turn his back on Candy as he has done throughout the film, offers a place for him at his family's Thanksgiving table. Together, the two men carry Candy's cumbersome trunk down Martin's suburban street towards Thanksgiving dinner, a poetic image that unites and expresses all that Hughes celebrated: family, home, friendship. Things that, upon seeing his friend and greatest collaborator John Candy worked to death by Hollywood, he willingly sacrificed his career as a filmmaker to preserve.

Worker's Compensation

Russ put his broom up and leaned on it, his face, back, chest all doused with sweat. "They don’t pay us enough for this shit," he said.

"The view is good, we’re getting a tan, a workout," Woody said. Woody was handsome, jaw hard as poured concrete, but spoke with the cretinous lisp of a mad scientist’s hunchbacked assistant.

For a week they had been on top of the Adams Tower, a dormitory that could be seen from miles around alongside its twin, Morris, both 15 stories tall. The wind blew hard up there, but the sun bouncing off the tar was so hot that it pretty much negated any refreshment it might have brought. In high school Russ had been pudgy and pale, but his three summers with Kyber Roofing had pounded and baked his flesh into sturdier shape. He hated the work, and told himself he was going to quit all the time, but after drunkenly charging through a red light at 3 am and subsequently flirting his way to an OMVI and a suspended license, he didn’t have much choice but to keep at it, as Woody, his roommate and bestfriend since they met at 6th grade wrestling camp, could drive him to work.

“Jesus Christ, what time is it?” Russ said.

“It’s almost five.”

The radio played country music in the background. Russ looked out at the city, the football stadium, the campus, the rivers, the freeway, downtown. He could see for miles. He had spent so much time on the roofs that he had almost forgotten the danger of falling. He remembered seeing those pictures from the 20s and 30s of guys in newsboy caps and overalls eating their lunches on thin steel beams, high above the faint grey mist of a city, as casually as if they were sitting on a park bench. He used to think those guys were crazy, and though he’d never worked on a skyscraper, mostly because they didn’t build skyscrapers in Columbus, if they paid him, he probably would’ve. You only fall if you’re a dumbass.

Russ didn’t do much of anything as the last fifteen minutes of his shift dripped away. At five o’clock he and Woody took the regular elevator down, at the chance they might see some co-eds, whereas the other guys took the service elevator. There were no girls on the elevator, and they got in Woody’s pick-up and flipped the air-conditioner to full and it chilled them like a wonderful arctic blast. They lived in one of those apartment complexes where people are filed away into little rooms furnished with beer pong tables and cinder block shelves. To them it was a kind of paradise though. They were living alone for the first time in their lives, making money, with little responsibility to anyone but themselves. The amenities were great; A lake, too muddy and shallow to swim in, belonging to the ducks, with a rather limp fountain gurgling in the center, but good for fishing; a pool with a waterfall and built-in concrete bar stools; a small gym, and what was advertised as a movie theatre but was actually just a a small room with a couch, a few folding chairs and a projection TV with an image of a basketball game burned into the screen. They got home, cracked a couple beers and headed to the pool, where one of their neighbors, a carpenter named Bobby, was sitting at the concrete bar. Bobby had a hunch in his back, and could no longer rotate his neck, but rather turned his whole body to focus on whoever was speaking. He nodded from his chest and seemed to have a different injured-on-the-job story every night.

“I fell down a set of stairs on this site over by Ravenwood, tripped over a bucket of nails, fell 13 concrete steps to the basement floor. Cement. Fucked my spine all up. They had to take 3 vertebrae out of my lumbar, fused a couple together in my neck. They gave me a shitload of oxycotin and vicodin though, so I feel fucking great.”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to drink while you were taking that stuff,” Russ said, commenting on Bobby’s margarita.

“Shit, I don’t know. Half the stuff Doctor’s say you gotta figure is bullshit.” Bobby said. Russ and Woody shared a laugh. “If you want any I’ll sell’em to you, 20 bucks a pop. Tell your friends. I got hundreds of the little beauties.”

“I’ll take some,” Woody said.

“Come on by the place. I’ll hook you up,” Bobby said.

“Hell yeah,” Woody said.

“Cost fifty grand for the surgery, course my medical shit’s all covered so I don’t have to worry about that. I can’t hardly bend anymore, except from the waist, but I get compensation out the ass. I just sit around high as a motherfucker watchin’ Speed channel all day, cashing checks. Beats the shit outta working for a living.”

Russ laughed and shook his head.

***

On the last day of work on the tower, after they’d packed everything into the truck and everyone else had left, Russ asked Woody to take a picture of him with his camera phone on the roof in front of the football stadium. He stood near the three foot wall that rimmed the roof.

“You gotta get closer to the edge,” Woody said, looking at the screen. “I can’t get you and the field from this far back.”

“I’m standing two feet from the edge, dickhead,” Russ said.

“More like two yards,” Woody squinted and maneuvered the camera around different heights and angles, trying to frame Russ. “You’re gonna have to sit on the edge or something.”

“Just hold the camera higher,” Russ said, “Point it down.”

“I’d have to be ten feet tall,” Woody said. He got an empty gray bucket, placed it upside down and stood on it. “Since you’re such a pussy and won’t go near the edge.”

“I don’t care about the edge. The edge doesn’t bother me, it’s just that you don’t know how to take a fucking picture,” Russ laughed.

“Bullshit, I took Photography all four years in high school,” Woody clicked a few pictures. “Who are you, Johnny fuckin’ Kodak?”

“Johnny Kodak? Who the fuck is Johnny Kodak?”

“Shut up. I couldn’t think of anybody famous who takes pictures.”

“I took some pretty famous pictures with your mom.”

Woody lost his balance and the bucket teetered a bit.

“Don’t fall there buddy,” Russ said.

“I’m not gonna fall,” Woody hopped down from the bucket and held the phone so they could both look through the pictures. The sun was too bright so Russ took the phone and shielded the screen with his hand.

“Dude, your fucking thumb is blocking out half the picture.”

Woody laughed and looked at the phone. “Sorry dude.”

Russ held the camera at arm’s length and took a picture of himself. “Now I’m gonna look all emo taking my own picture.”

“Cause you are emo. You’re a pussy who wouldn’t go near the edge.”

Russ faked like he was going to punch Woody and Woody flinched and laughed. “I’ll bet you 500 bucks right now I’ll hang down over the side,” Russ said off-handedly as he cycled through the pictures.

“Deal.”

“Bullshit,” Russ pulled a can of chewing tobacco from his pocket and stuffed a load into his mouth.

“500 bucks. Right now. Do it.”

“You got 500 bucks on you?”

“I’ll go to the ATM.”

Russ stroked his chin, considering the bet. He spit a thread of juice. “I don’t know. I want to see the money first.”

“Dude, it’s me. I live with you. What am I gonna do, not pay you?”

Russ wasn’t afraid. He trusted his own strength. He was smiling, tantalized by the idea.

“I’ll tell you what, you climb over the edge, hang there for 30 seconds, I’ll pay your share of the rent this month,” Woody said. “And the utilities. That’s more than 500 bucks.”

Russ examined the roof, figuring the logistical aspects: what he’d grasp onto, how he’d pull himself up, where he’d put his feet. “I feel like we should get a video camera or something.”

“I’ve got one on my phone.”

“What if Ronnie comes back up and finds my ass hanging over the roof.”

“Ronnie’s not gonna bring his fatass back up here. We already took everything down. He’s probably in the drive-through at McDonald’s by now. If he comes up, we’ll just say you tripped.”

Russ chewed his tobacco slowly. “Would you do it?”

“Fuck yeah I’d do it. Piece of cake. Easiest 500 bucks you’ll ever make.”

“You gonna pull me up if I start to slip?”

“Fuck no dude. You’re on your own,” Woody said. “Of course I got you. I won’t pay you the full 500, but I got you.”

“How much if you pull me up?”

Woody considered it. "None."

"None?"

"It's an all or nothing deal, bro."

Russ hocked his wad of chewing tobacco over the side. He watched it twist and fall, its path bending until it hit the ground in the gravel near a bank of air-conditioners with blades whirling. “30 seconds?”

“I’ll count.”

“All right,” Russ said. He clapped his hands together, breaking from the stillness of his consideration.

“All right?” Woody said, surprised at the answer.

“Let’s do it,” Russ said. “Shake on it.” They shook hands. Woody snapped his phone open and clicked the camera on. Russ stepped one foot over the wall, clasping it between his ankles. He knelt down, hugged the wall and gently let his legs down, one at a time. He was hanging from the edge.

“Count Motherfucker,” he said.

Woody began to count, “One-one thousand, two-one thousand...”

Russ’ face, normally a tomato-red, grew to the purple of an eggplant as the numbers got higher. He could feel the breeze against his legs. His steel-toed workboots dragged at his feet, but he didn’t have to strain to keep himself up. He felt the sweat on his forearms slide from the rim like butter on a hot pan, his grip slipping. He clamped his fingers harder against the gritty stucco wall.

“...Twenty-one thousand, twenty-one-one thousand...”

Russ scraped his boots against the side of the tower, pushing himself back up, as if he were getting out of a pool.

“Twenty-nine-one thousand, Thirty-one thousand.”

Russ threw a leg over the wall and rolled onto the tacky black roof.

“You motherfucker,” Woody said.

Russ laughed and huffed in great breaths of air, rolling back and forth in ecstacy. He stood up and pumped his fist, held his arms over his head victoriously.

“I can’t believe you did that. You’re crazy, dude.”

“You said you’d do it!”

“No fuckin’ way! You fall you’re a dead man.”

“Did you get the video?”

“Yeah dude,” Russ sidled around to look at the screen and they watched the video, “Holy-shit”ing” and “Dude”-ing and spinning around as if they’d just won the Super Bowl.

“You gotta put that on facebook,” Russ said. “You better pay up.”

“Of course I’m gonna pay.”

“Beer’s on me tonight.”

“Damn right beer’s on you.”

They walked towards the door to the stairs, the sun still flaming in the sky.

“Shit,” Russ said, “I’da done it for free if you’da asked me.”

These Songs

These songs have potholes
in their cheeks. These songs do not
wear capri pants. These songs
say what they can in
Japanese. These songs do not
bend like the horizon. These songs
are half-starved and delirious,
imagining cake, stomachs
bloating like the universe.
These songs are the amalgamated
pieces of every invisible
sound you’ve ever caught
with your ears, butterflies
in a net, legions fluttering
in formation.
They are not even songs.
They are the combination
to a safe holding
your own heart.

Perfume

He found a blond wisp of hair near his pillow, unmistakably her length and twine, slightly curled, like a line of cursive. He pulled it taut and smelled it, but the lonely strand no longer carried the fragrance. He had been thinking of her often recently, how she used to lay her head on his shoulder and he’d put his nose in her hair like a bouquet, but he couldn't quite remember what she smelled like. Shampoo, certainly, but what kind? Summer storm? Tangerine Dream? Lilac Wine?

On an August day he was riding his bike near her house and a warm wind was blowing and all at once the scent floated down like music. The flowers in the trees smelled exactly of her hair. He stopped pedaling and put his nose up and drew in deep, rapid breaths, one on top of another, trying to possess the smell. He rode in circles beneath the trees, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing, but it eluded him, and soon drifted away like a current of warm water in a cold lake. He pedaled off.

Skin

A skinhead handed Henry a beer. When you’re alone, other loners find you, and they are often alone because they’re fucking weird and the Lower East Side of New York City has the most professional weirdoes on the planet.

“Mickey Skin,” he said. He ran his hand over his scalp, then held his fist in Henry’s face, knuckles tattooed “SKIN.”

Henry nodded, feigning appreciation. “Henry,” he said. They shook.

“Hank,” Skin said, “This is a cool joint, but there’s too many fags.”

Henry usually smiled and nodded with most of the sentiments offered in a conversation, whether he agreed with them or not, simply out of convenience, but he did not smile or nod at this. He stalled, wanting neither to concur, nor to rile up the short, muscular skinhead. Henry figured his Doc Martin’s had probably kicked their share of shit.

“This music’s gay,” Skin said. The bar was called Mix-Tape and the jukebox was loaded with garage rock and new wave. Hip, but not excessively so for the Lower East Side.

“I like it,” Henry shrugged, quietly rebelling against Skin’s prejudice. He wanted to escape but figured since the guy had bought him a beer he owed him a few minutes of conversation. He didn’t really have anyone else to talk to either, and part of the reason for being in New York was to experience new things. Conversing with a skinhead was certainly new to Henry.

“I’m going to this party in BK,” Skin said, “Wanna come?”

“BK? Brooklyn? I’m supposed to meet some friends here in a bit,” Henry said. A lie. He had no friends in this place.

Skin rolled his eyes. He was wearing a yellow backpack with a cell phone slung between the straps. He whipped the phone open and held it away from his face like a tape recorder. “Yo, where you at?” There was no reply. “”Fuckin’ thing.”

“Why don’t you text them?” Henry said, pressing mime buttons with his thumb.

“I don’t know how to do that shit,” Skin holstered the phone.

The two men stood there, out of things to talk about. Henry sipped his beer to camouflage the silence. Two black girls passed and stood at the bar.

Skin nudged Henry and mumbled. “Why don’t you get on that?” Shyness and desire hid behind his mask of aggression.

Henry was surprised at his choice of women. “Me? I never know what to say.”

“Yeah, me neither man. That’s always my problem,” Skin said. The conversation sprung into momentum.

“You just gotta go talk to them. The more you stand around thinking about it, the more nervous you’re gonna get. You just gotta turn off your brain and go.”

“So do it.”

“I'm not the one who likes them," Henry said.

"That's why you should go. Set me up."

Henry sipped his beer. A guy with dark hair splayed on his scalp like a banana peel started talking to Skin.

Henry was suddenly struck with paranoia that Skin had put something in his drink; some kind of drug or poison. He pretended to sip it while he looked around the bar, then he slipped into the bathroom and dumped it down the sink. He looked at himself in the mirror while he peed, his face lazy with drink. He went back into the bar and saw Skin pretending to punch the banana-haired man in slow motion. Henry thought he should try to find an exit out the back so he wouldn’t have to walk past Skin on his way out. He sifted through the pages of the jukebox, stalling for time, and decided, finally, that the bouncer, a large black man, would probably take his side if Skin attacked him, so he headed out the front door. He checked over his shoulder a couple of times as he went down the street, but Mickey Skin wasn’t following him.

A Gypsy in New York

A Gypsy in New York from Matt Proctor on Vimeo.

A short film I finished today.

The Girlwatcher

This is a short video, followed by the story which it was based on.



I’m in love with this girl. She doesn’t really like me. I mean, she thinks I’m nice and everything, she’s cordial, and I would like to believe that someday, if I played my cards absolutely impeccably, she would let me quietly hump her in my own pathetic little way, but I know that she doesn’t lie in bed at night with the sheets all snaked and clinched between her knees and ache for me like I do for her. I do open mic every Wednesday at the coffee house where she works. There’s usually a bunch of people there but I’m sure that even though I’m wearing sunglasses cause I’m nervous she has to know I’m singing directly to her. I have conversations with her whenever I can invite the courage, conversations that swelter in my body all week like lava, conversations where my words erupt and spill over.

She started working at the coffee shop after my ex and I had broken up, so I don’t think she would have made the connection. My ex is a vindictive bitch. She’s bisexual, which was nice when we were together, got a little menage action every once in a while, but it’s not nice anymore. I only mention it because I’m out the other day and I see her walking down the street hand in hand with this new girl that I’m in love with, the coffee shop girl.

I didn’t really understand what was going on at first so I sort of started following them a little bit, on the other side of the street about 50, 100 yards back. I know that sounds creepy, but it was harmless. It’s not like I'm OJ, like I wanted to kill anybody or anything. It hurt my feelings to see them together. I can’t help that I’m in love. I’m a jealous guy, I’ll admit that, but what’s wrong with caring about somebody? People always make you feel bad for caring. It’s bullshit.

I tried to be sneaky at first, pressing my back to the brick walls and peeking around and springing to the next doorway or crevice between buildings, but I stopped giving a shit. I didn’t care if anyone noticed me in the middle of a busy downtown sidewalk looking through binoculars (I like to go birdwatching in the park every once in a while). I watched them swinging their linked hands back and forth. They would stop and press their faces up to the window of a boutique and then go in and I would go into the store across the street and watch through the front window and they would come out licking ice cream cones or carrying a little trinket they had bought. I didn’t pretend to be reading a magazine in the convenience store or to be looking at the leather masks and ball gags in the sex shop. More than one proprietor forced me out of his store. Homeless people came up on the street and asked me for change, asked me what I was looking at. I ignored them too. I couldn’t see anything but the two girls I had most recently been in love with.

We ended up at my ex’s apartment on the third floor of a bulding where I lived with her for ten months. We used to wake up in the morning and spread the curtains and make love right in the bay window overlooking the trees. We broke up two months before the lease was up. It was a bad break up. I fooled around with this bartender chick and the ex threw all my stuff out into the street just like in the movies.

I jumped in the dumpster in the alley across the way and watched as my ex and the coffee house chick walked up the steps to the porch with the swing in the back. I could smell the rust and beer and rotten food as I watched my ex-pin the new girl up against the wall with a kiss. What I began to feel I had never felt before, this rage like a hot stove. I felt like I could have swung a whale by its tail up through the goddamn panoramic third floor fuckin’ bay window. I felt like I could’ve drilled through a mountain like John Henry. I felt like I could’ve brought down the columns of the world and busted through the sky with my fist as it tumbled down on top of everything. The ex took the new girl by the hand and they went inside.

I started humming the mantra my Tai Chi teacher taught me. I climbed up into a tree to see into her window but it was Springtime and there were too many leaves. I swung down from a branch and dropped to the sidewalk. I circled the building but at no angle could I see into the apartment. I went up to the porch and waited for a few minutes to see if one of my old neighbors would come out, or maybe Yanni the Super, but no one came out. I'd had to climb up the fire escape a few times when I forgot my key, but it was a real bitch and I only did it after I'd tried everything else. As I sat there, I began to get the idea that maybe they wanted me to come after them. Women don't want timid guys. They want cavemen. They want guys to drag them by their hair into the cave and have their way with them. All I had to do was climb the fire escape and go right in the window, which I could see from the street was open (we had an air conditioner but the ex would never let me turn it on. Too expensive). The girls would be shocked at first and try to cover their nakedness, but then they’d see how right it was. We’d all fall in love, the new girl with me, me with the new girl, the ex and me, me and the ex, the ex and the new girl, the new girl and the ex. When something is meant to be, you can’t fight it and the three of us were meant to be; We were meant to be a triumvirate of passion, a trifecta of lust, the holy trinity of sex.

I jumped up and grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder. This was always the hardest part; catching the ladder probably eight or ten feet off the ground like a basketball rim and pulling all of your weight up with your arms, legs thrashing like a hanged man’s. Though I go to the dojo twice a week it was a pain in the ass pulling myself up that ladder. I braced my forearms against the bars below my hands for leverage and lifted my foot so high to get it on the ladder that I nearly ripped open my sack. I pushed my self up by my foot and after placing my other foot on the ladder it was easy to climb up onto the first platform of the escape. I rubbed my forearms, which throbbed as if they were about split like wishbones, and waited for minute to catch my breath before I quietly went up the mesh iron steps.

When I got to the third floor I paused against the wall next to the open window. I watched, through the thin curtain flowing in the window, my ex take off the coffee shop girl’s tank top. They were not five feet away from me and I could hear their breath, their lips sucking at each other and parting with a pluck and plunging back together again. I was enjoying the show and didn’t want to interrupt too soon, and I knelt down so my face would be level with theirs. I felt almost like I was a part of it. It was weird, my heart was being broken and pieced back together all at once. I really believed that I could love them both, that they would both love me. I wouldn’t be jealous of my ex. If she were some douche bag getting with the coffee shop girl I might want to shatter his face with a sledgehammer, but the new girl had somehow rekindled my love for my ex. She would heal over our pain like a splint over a broken bone, and we would fuse together stronger than we were before.

I put my leg through the window and set it down quietly on the hardwood floor beside the bed. I ducked beneath the window frame and snuck through. I lifted my other leg and, as I was putting it through I accidentally knocked out the wooden slate that was holding the window up and it dropped down on my shin.

The two girls jumped apart. My ex’s face tightened savagely.

“Charles?” she said, “What the fuck?”

I clambered to pry my leg out from the window. I realized that the new girl probably didn’t know what was going on and I might be able to save face with her. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, “I thought this was the fourth floor. Terribly sorry.”

I freed my leg and went out the window as my ex bitched me out. I climbed up the fire escape to the fourth floor and my ex poked her head out and yelled up at me.

“Jesus Christ, Charles. You’re a fucking creep,” she said. “Come down from there.”

I knocked on the window of the fourth floor apartment, hoping that they might let me in, but no one answered.

“I’m calling the cops,” the ex said and disappeared back into the apartment. I meekly climbed down the ladder back to the third floor and, seeing that my ex was on the phone and the coffee house girl was on the bed, I thought I might have time to explain things and peeked my head in the window.

“Window’s locked,” I said, indicating “my” apartment upstairs. “Hey, you work at the Midnight Cafe, don’t you?”

She nodded. My ex saw that I was talking to her and threw a blue high heeled shoe at me. I blocked it with my elbow and offered a quick apology to the new girl.

“Hey look, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude or anything. I live upstairs.” The ex slammed the phone down and came after me. I ducked out the window and the ex yelled things at me as I scurried down the fire escape and down the alley behind the house.

The best thing I ever heard about love my 8 year old brother told me. “Mary likes me,” he said. “How do you know that?” I asked. “She laughs at me and when I look at her she smiles,” he said. Now, I know that that’s one hundred percent true, but it never really works out that way for me.

Some Thoughts on Making Movies From an Amateur

"Julia"



I've made a number of short films and videos as a kind of apprenticeship. I've heard a from the likes of Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino that their first movies were bad, and how they wouldn't want anyone to see them now. I figured that if their first movies were bad, then mine probably would be too, so I might as well just make them and get them out of the way.

I wrote dozens, maybe even hundreds, of pages of scripts in high school classes. My friend Chip and I wrote a Vietnam War movie featuring Prometheus, the man who stole fire from the Gods. I saw "The 400 Blows" and wrote a semi-autobiographical New Wave coming of age drama. I didn't have a good video camera or a computer, so I never really made a movie until I was 19 years old (save the improvised, unfinished "The Magic Baseball" which I've yet to upload to youtube). After I saw the movie "Adaptation" I got the book "Story" by Robert McKee. Later I read David Mamet's "On Directing Film" and "The 3 Uses of the Knife" and took screenwriting classes, and I feel these books shaped my writing in a very kind of sitcom-y style, which I have only recently figured out how to escape.

McKee recommends planning your story out on note cards before attempting to write your screenplay. Each scene gets a note card and you write the beats on it. I would argue that it is nearly impossible to write this way (at least for me). It's like asking a river to flow in reverse. It causes you to think too rationally. It introduces the critical impulse before the creative has had a chance to express itself. Joseph Campbell speaks of how Pegasus, or poetry, was born out of Medusa's severed head. One must remove the critical agent, the "head", before one's creativity can take off. How can one write if one is sitting around thinking of little bits of information to put on note cards? It is only after one dives into a situation, a scene, after one's hand is moving freely, writing, that the intricacies, the details, the life comes into a scene. You travel into the layers of a thing. If you sit around thinking, and not writing, you remain on the surface. I would advise a screenwriter to visualize everything, to see the movie in your head and write what is seen and not worry about three act structure or story beats or any of that. It is a natural human tendency to structure things dramatically. The most satisfying course a basketball game can take is to have one's home team suffer early on and have to make a comeback which climaxes with a three-pointer made "at the buzzer." A story, if you work at it hard enough, will find it's structure as water finds it's level. Part of the problem with movies today is that we have internalized the form as audience members so completely, and that writers obey it so slavishly, that it has become predictable. After the premise, the conflict has been set up by the end of the first act (ten to fifteen pages, or minutes, in), the movie rarely spirals out of it's own constructed ethos into the unpredictable. The hero is guaranteed to have a third act break were he or she loses everything, only to surge against the antagonist at the end and either acheive their goal or be denied. The writer should be following the story where it wants to take him, he shouldn't be forcing the story to take the course of some prefabricated structure or form. A movie should unfurl like a flower, rooted in one place, but free to grow wherever the sun leads it.

Writing is a voyage into the unknown, and if one has the guts to throw oneself off the cliff without note cards stories have a way of solving themselves. The seemingly invented, inconsequential details of the thing lead to the resolution. The way things are written now, every detail must add up to the sum of the film, must lead in some way to the climax. Movies are slim, efficient emotional machines calculated to evoke a particular emotional reaction from the viewer. Hollywood achieves this with great success every few years. Think of how you felt at the end of "The Usual Suspects." The machine of that film was so finely calibrated that it triggered the surprise, the thrill in all of us. Many Hollywood movies are aiming at this kind of reaction. This is not the only way to make a movie, however. Jimmy Stewart told a story of how, late in his career, a man came up to him on a film set somewhere in the country, Colorado or someplace, and asked him, "You Stewart?" He said Yeah. The guy said, "You read a poem in a movie once. That was good." The man didn't remember the story, the context, only the scene, the moment, but that is enough. Movies should be curious. The dance contest in "Pulp Fiction" has little to do with the plot, but it is a joyous, memorable sequence. Movies should be concerned with creating these kind of moments and images. Movies needn't be roller coasters where every rail and board, where every line of dialogue and shot is building, building, building towards the climax. They should be works of art encompassing the totality of man's existence, great and small. They should be paintings, poems, songs, novels, plays, operas all rolled into one. They should have a little fat on their bones.

The tough thing about movies is expressing things only through pictures and dialogue. Too many people think writing dialogue is writing movies. It isn't. It's writing radio plays. It's writing sitcoms. People end up writing 12 characters that all speak in the same "witty", "urbane" voice. It's verbal ping pong. This is why so many sitcoms have cute eight year old girls who talk like middle aged comedy writers. Writers are crafting situations and peopling them with faceless vessels for their own jokes. It isn't even just sitcoms. Aaron Sorkin is an example of a well-respected writer who's characters are essentially mouthpieces for one voice. The characters parry and joust, swipe at each other as they walk down hallways. The walks give the illusion of movement, of action, but nothing is really happening. In order to escape this, a writer must not create from a place where two characters are speaking to each other in the darkness. He must instead imagine in vibrant life the totality of a situation, as if he were writing a novel and record that. Nabokov said something about how he never thinks in words, he thinks in images. He just uses words to communicate the images to others. This is what a screenwriter must do, communicate the image to the director, actors, the artisans on the set.

Advice from one who has read McKee, Mamet, taken screenwriting classes: Don't read these books. Don't read any books. The only way to learn how to make movies is to make movies. Solve the problems on a one to one basis. Do not try to follow any rules. Every film has a number of difficulties that will arise, and you must face each of these as they come. They are what making a film is about. If you don't like arguing with an actor over a line reading, if you don't like filming outside in freezing temperatures, if you don't like waiting around while they set up lights for 3 hours, don't make films. Go do something easy, something predictable, like work in an office.

Mamet says that there is no such thing as character, only action, lines on a page, but this is a very dangerous thing for a writer or filmmaker to hear. Of course, plays and movies, the dramatic arts, are about action, but if one writes or acts believing "There is no such thing as character," one will have a tough time creating anything specific or original. People, characters handle situations differently. An elephant walks differently from a mouse. Zorro would handle the kidnapping of his daughter differently than Uncle Buck might. The characters must be specific, unique. If Hamlet were nothing but a plot line, a neutral, blank entity's desire and obstacles, there would be nothing of interest in it. Hamlet is what makes Hamlet intersting. Just because a character has a "goal", an "objective" doesn't mean we're going to care if he or she achieves it. The objective is only interesting insofar as we can relate to it, as we can sympathize or respect the character who is after it. We wouldn't care one way or the other if John McClane saved those imaginary people in Nakatomi Tower if he were just some regular guy, but John McClane is funny and badass and that's why we want to see Hans Gruber eat it. John McClane is an interesting character and a good guy and this is why we want him to be able to make it home for Christmas. If John McClane had no individuality, if he weren't a smartass, if he weren't a character, we wouldn't give two shits if he lived or died. "The Big Lebowski" is a movie where, essentially, the plot is laughable, yet it is endlessly watchable due to the hilarious eccentricities of the characters.

One of the things that is frustrating about making films is that, the way things are done nowadays, you have to make a film three times. Once, when you imagine and write it, again when you shoot it, and finally when you edit it. A fully realized and carefully planned screenplay is like a grocery list. You set out for the store to gather specific ingredients which later you will put into the pot and stir and cook into a film. The mechanization of the process, the equipment that Hollywood has taught us is "required": trucks full of lights, set pieces, costumes etc. bring the creative process to a crawl, and allow little room for interference or the spirit of invention. Any kind of unpredictability on a set leads to problems. Orson Welles said a director is one who "presides over accidents." Francis Ford Coppola said a director is "Ringmaster of a circus that is inventing itself." And yet most films try to fortify themselves against the unpredictable, against accident, the unforseen. If it rains, if a certain prop or costume can't be obtained, the whole scene could be ruined. I would much rather make a film with vague notions, where the story arises during the process like an island from a mist. I would rather start out with a treatment, an outline, improvise the shooting, and craft the story in the editing, and this is what I'm doing with the film I'm making right now, a story about a Greek gypsy living in New York. It's also sort of what I did with my short "Julia" (seen above), which is on Youtube, a video I did for my Gothic literature class, and probably the best thing I've yet done.

Anyway, you can check out my shorts here. They're pretty mediocre overall, but there are some fairly beautiful images here and there. I am fine with this, because I've figured out how to work, and I will make better films in the future.

Over the Mountain

Lying in his armchair with a
joint in his mouth, my dad
decries and prophecies
and coughs at the television
sunk in the floor like a tomb
heavy with all the world’s ghosts.
He putts a ball into a machine
that shoots it back at him.

His uncle once told him “Someday
I’ll be going over the mountain and
I won’t be coming back.”

Mornings he and the dogs walk through the field
behind the church. He hits at the sticks he’s poked
into the earth to mark the holes
and the dogs chase after the balls and drop
them in the grass at his feet. Once
they brought him the femur of an autistic
girl who had been murdered along with
her unborn child a few doors down.

Her boyfriend buried her by the
creek in the woods out back.
His father shot himself when the
Police came to take his boy away.

Dad hurried the dogs home up the hill.
Someone else found the remains later
and we watched him on the news.

Mack Sennett

Mack had this huge office on stilts right in the center of his lot so he could watch over all the production on the stages like a goddamned prison warden watching over his yard. The stages were all open-air in those days, no ceilings, to let the natural sunlight in, so Mack could see everything. He was especially keen on keeping an eye on Mabel, make sure she wasn't carousing with that week's leading man. He liked to watch the Bathing Beauties of course too.

Mack had a big reputation. Everybody started with Mack: Fatty, Chaplin, Mabel, all the greats.

Murray, my manager at the time, gets the idea in his head that he ain't gonna let Mack Sennett, the King of Comedy, push him around. We're in the elevator up to Mack's office and Murray leans over to me and says, "Don't you worry about a thing. We ain't gonna let some porkbarrel get you for a nickel less than you're worth. The thing about these Hollywood guys is you gotta grab'em by the balls."

I knew Murray was gonna embarrass me. I could smell it. Instead I just told myself the same rubbish people always tell themselves when they're trying to make it easy for themselves. "Murray's been around for a long time. He bought me a train ticket all the way out to Hollywood. He's making ten percent. He wants me to succeed." I shoulda trusted my instinct. I shoulda stopped the goddamn elevator right then and there and booted his ass out. Always trust your instincts. That's why God put'em there.

So we get up there and the doors open and Sennett is sitting behind this desk with a bib tied around his neck eating the biggest steak I've ever seen in my life. Looks like he cut down a redwood tree, carved a desk out of it, slaughtered a bull and cooked the whole ass. He stands up to greet us and, aside from being big in the business, he was physically one of the largest men I've ever seen in my life. Every one of his pictures had some big, black-eyed bastard chasin' the little hero around, the Heavy they call him. Well, Mack was twice is big as any of those guys. He's got two feet on me, easy. He puts his arm around my shoulder, says "Hey kid lemme show you something." He walks me over and points to the Bathing Beauties down laying around the pool in the sun. He says "See them girls? I keep'em on set full-time. Pay'em twenty-five a week. Think they're gonna be stars. See the kid cranking that camera at'em? There ain't even film in that camera." Then he laughs like a buncha bowling pins clobberin' about and goes back to his steak.

That's when Murray went to work. Murray marches right up and starts banging his fist on Sennett's desk. Sennett looks up, a little confused, not mad or anything, just curious why this guy's banging his fist on his desk. Then Murray does something I'll never forget so long as I live. Most damn fool thing I ever saw. Murray takes Sennett's plate and throws it across the room against the wall like it's a goddamn banana creme pie. Then he looks Sennett right in the eye and goes "Fuck you, you fat fuck."

Mack had a look on his face like he just about shit. Murray was a good manager, or had been up to that point. He knew how to talk to the Circuit owners, theatrical agents. Mack wasn't one of those city guys. He was from the forest somewhere in Canada. He was a lumberjack. He was Paul Bunyan.

Murray points at me and says, "Sign this kid right now or kiss your studio goodbye cause he's gonna be the hottest star there ever was and Metro and United Artists already offered us three thou a piece."

I had no idea what to do. I was just a dumb kid. I stood there, nodding my head, flaring my nostrils, trying to look tough even though I knew goddamn well we didn't talk to Metro and UA wouldn't even let us on the lot.

Mack, real calmly, takes off his bib, puts it on his desk, stands up, looks over at me, sizes me up. I turned away. I couldn't watch. I looked down at the Bathing Beauties. They were so gosh darn pretty down there dangling their toes in the pool. The water looked so cool and blue.

"This the Irish kid?" Mack says. Murray says yeah.

"I'll give him seventy-five a week to play stock. We'll see where it goes from there." And he sits down like that's the final offer. No negotiations, nothing.

Well, I'll tell you, that sounded pretty good to me. I'd been making fifty a week doing eight shows, six cities, and that was before travel expenses. I was lookin' around at all the palm trees and the Bathing Beauties, thinking, yeah this is the place for me. I felt like I was in some Arabian Palace or something, like Sennett was the Sultan with his harem and all that. I shoulda spoke up. I shoulda said something.

Murray leans over Sennett, gets right up nose to nose with Sennett and laughs, once, as hard as he can right in his face.

HA.

He turns around and walks past me right out the door. Doesn't even say anything. Like an idiot, I follow him to the elevator but right before I get on I hear this great, booming voice call out.

"Boy," he says. I turn around.

"Yes, Mr. Sennett?" I says.

"I seen your act," he says, "It's one of the best."

"Thanks Mr. Sennett."

And that was it. I got on the elevator and the doors closed and I looked over at Murray, with his nose sticking up in the air like it was the goddamn cherry on top of the Sundae. He was saying something about how this was ultimately the best thing for my career, but I wasn't listening. I just had this feeling like maybe one of my dreams had passed right in front of me.

Mack Sennett was the King. He was prestige. Everybody started out wearing those bobby hats and badges, swingin' those billy clubs and bumblin' and chasin' each other around the screen.

I got a job making my own two-reelers at King Studios for $125 a week. Sure, I was starring in my own two-reelers, but who ever heard of King Studios?