Friday, June 30, 2006

UNTITLED POEM

there is much that he might have said
& much that he may have done
but it's a little too late to tell.

though the sun was setting later & later
it will still be dark & there is
surely nothing that anyone can do about that
now.

ruminations, yes, but he gets up,
puts on his scarf and hat. puts on those black gloves &
goes to a funeral.

the sun may set, the moon will die
the stars will fade away.
the onset of winter, the dying-time
December, leaves all disappear
the elms are bleeding black & it is getting
very very cold indeed.

the priest leaves. he doubts that she would have wanted
one at all, but conventions must be respected,
or so he thinks.

an english summer rain weeps gently,
alone. reconstruct desire, or forgiveness---
silent on the hill by the tree at the end of the world
i love you is just a euphimism & its beauty
will always last for awhile.

three flowers, white-and-purple
stained red once upon an early March.
then, just then, there was only a hint of gray
a promise of ash & dust,
only a hint & nothing more.
SOME FRAGMENTS


this is white hands in the darkness flashing, empty signals
a tongueless mouth at midnight,
mumbling words in a language that you do not know.

~

pupils dilated & together on the couch
skin meeting skin platonic like hot silk
touching, meeting still & silent god perhaps
i love you, soft tones nodding off, someday
we make it, i promise, and everything
will be wonderful, and they held each
other & kissed & pushed each others'
darkness into the corner, believing in each
others' light, each others' dream.

~

i will remember three things
only three things on the last day on earth:
being on a sailboat in summer & tacking hard left;
a smoke-filled bar with you, a good man, as good men go;
two in the morning in someone else's apartment,
high with nowhere else to go but downtown.
it's the last day on earth when we
walked away from another in the
pouring rain & i realized that losing
a friend hurts more than gaining a lover.

~

mind flowers bloom, lifeless petals
vibrant in the silent kingdom, unreal
the world around you changing faster than
the changeless

~

might one remember
something that couldn't be redeemed
on the far side of the world.
"let's go get the shit kicked out of us,"
she said, and everyone agreed.

what could be more wonderful than this?

~

I will kiss your neck slowly
and in a whsiper call you a whore
when we fuck
if you can still remember the little things,
meaning those which I cannot.

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

FIVE VIEWPOINTS ON THE TOPIC OF DEATH

1.

I want to be shot into space. That would be cool. They should take my body and put it inside of one of those clear plastic tubes like in that movie and fire me into the sun. Maybe something cool would happen, and I'd come out onto the other side, resurrected, with superpowers or something. That would be pretty neat. But even if I was dead for good, I'd still want to be fired into space. I used to have these really cool dreams about being dead in a glass coffin floating around in outer space, and so much time had would pass that I'd float hundreds of light years out of our solar system and into a totally new area of space. In the dreams, my body would be perfectly preserved and my dead eyes would be open, like they were actually seeing the alien stars. Nova remnants, gas clouds, dust would surround me and eventually pass on. Out here, it would be emptier than any place on Earth, more beautiful and lonely than anything human eyes have seen. No matter where you are on Earth, there’s always a spark of life nearby, no matter how small, microbes in the ice, worms under the seafloor. Where I’d be floating, though, there would be nothing even remotely alive for millions of miles. That would be really beautiful, I think.


2.

If you're dead, you're nothing. I thought everyone knew that. I’ve seen enough bodies to know. A corpse isn't a person; it's a thing, a sack of meat without anything special about it. You look in a corpse's eyes and tell me if you see anything inside. When I look down on the operating table after one of my patients dies, I don't see the person who came into the operating room an hour ago. I don't see the guy I discussed the procedure with the day before. I see a dead hunk of skin and bone, and I don't feel anything. I've never understood feeling bad for dead people. They don't feel bad. They don't care if you fucked up or did something wrong or even you didn’t. Why should I feel bad about something that doesn't exist? Why should I get anxious over the fact that I'm going to die? I know I'm going to die, but it's not like I'll care when I do, so why should I bother with worrying about it? Eventually, I'll be one of those sacks of meat and whatever it is that makes me me will be long gone, and I won't be any different than a million other corpses. They say that the brain lives a little bit longer than the body, that a person is trapped inside of their skull for a few brief moments after the body expires, but I don't believe it. All you have to do is look into the eyes and you’ll see that there isn't anything there, and not only that, but you don't understand how you ever could have seen anything there in the first place. Maybe it's all the same thing. Eventually, it'll be me on the operating table, except when I die, I don’t think my eyes will change at all.


3.

When I die, I'm gonna go to heaven, so I don't really care what you do with my body. You can burn it, bury it, eat it, even dump it in the ocean if you want. I won't care. I almost can't wait. It's gonna be so great, the moment I die. I'm gonna be ushered into a big ole dining hall with God Hisself, Jesus on the right and the Holy Spirit on the left and this big golden thing in the center and they're going to be different and the same all at the same time. Can you imagine? And Jesus is going to get up, he's going to be all white and fiery, his eyes will be like kindness or swords and his hair will be like a coal fire without the smoke. I'm not gonna actually see this, see, but I'm going to be knowing it. I'm not gonna have any eyes, see, cause I’ll be dead, but knowing something is deeper than seeing it or hearing it. We don't know anything here down on the ground, we just think we do, but we really don't, and that's why everything is so mucked up. And that's the thing. I don't know I'm gonna go to heaven, but I sure as shootin believe it, and that's what matters to me. I've got faith. I guess when I die, I’ll really know for sure, one way or the other, but I'm not worried about it. I trust that God is gonna take care of me, he's gonna take care of me right fine, and when I get up there, to heaven, see, I'm not going to care what you done to my body, I'm just gonna look down and I'm gonna know you and it's in that knowing that I'm going to be more like God, and it's in that knowing that I'm going to be a better person, because I don't think you can know someone, you know, really know them, and do anything except love them. And that's what God is, see? He is love. And that's why I believe I'm going to heaven and that's why I wanna go.


4.

There isn't going to be enough left of me to bury. I know that one of these days it's going to be me checking the back of the truck, it's going to be me flying backwards when the fucking thing explodes. If it isn't a truck, it'll be something else, but it's going to be me. I can feel it, whatever it is, stalking me. I know that my name is on the tip of its tongue. It looks at me out of windows when I walk by on patrol, it breathes on my neck in the hot desert wind. I see it peaking from the eyes of my buddies in the company. Maybe I'll be relaxing in the barracks and one of the sand niggers is going to sneak up the other side of the wall, me sitting in my bunk with my hands over my eyes, listening to the Shins and thinking about home, and he'll light off his bomb, blowing me and himself to hell. Or maybe it'll be one of those women in black with the hoods and dynamite stuck up between her legs, carrying a basket with fruit on top and C4 underneath. It could be a kid. You never know. But I know I’m next. If they find enough pieces to send back to my gal, I'll be happy, but I know in my heart that I'm never going to see her again.


5.

Someone told me the other day that burial is just an old-fashioned ritual. They told me that we are running out of space to bury our dead; that we are starting to bury people vertically in graveyards, back to back, coffin to coffin. I don't believe that. We've got plenty of space; we've got the whole world. When you die and they burn you up, there isn't anything left but a bunch of ash; when they scatter that ash, there isn't even a hint left that you ever existed. When I die, I don't want to disappear into the wind. I want people to remember me; I want people to be able to visit me, to be able to ground themselves on something real, a real stone, a real cross, a real tiny patch of God's green earth. It might be old-fashioned, but rituals always have reasons behind them. People used to bury corpses and say they were supposed to because their holy book told them so, but that wasn't true. The people who started off burying corpses were farmers and peasants and countrymen. They were tied to the earth while they were alive, and when they died, their relatives gave them back to the earth. Even though it was a funeral, even though the person was dead, the ritual itself was life-affirming. No one would ever bury a friend or relative in their cornfield, but the dirt that corn grew from was the same dirt they buried each other in. It isn't something old-fashioned, it's something beautiful and profound, and I can't exactly say why, but the fact that nobody gets buried anymore just divorces us from something we can't escape and distances us further from something we should be trying to move closer to, both as people and as a society. That's why they aren't going to burn me up, they're not going to scatter my ashes and burn anyway what’s left behind. I have a history that I do not want consumed by fire. I want to be buried in a field at dawn, just a pine box and a simple marker. And as I start to slowly decay, the worms will feed, the grass will grow tall, the sun will rise and set, and I shall deeper know the earth and through that earth myself.

Monday, June 26, 2006

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SALÓ
An Essay

On November 2, 1975, the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini was found dead—murdered, police said, by a young male prostitute. However lurid its details (the Roman tabloids ran huge front-page photos of the disfigured corpse), his death struck many as metaphorically apt, and not only because of Pasolini’s known taste for rough trade. He had long had a crush on the idea of flamboyant death.
Painter, poet, novelist, essayist, filmmaker, semiotician, gay icon, renegade Marxist, public controversialist, champion of both outlaw sexuality and of a mythic view of life he termed “epic-religious,” Pasolini was not only Italy’s most important post-war intellectual but also a quintessential twentieth-century type—self-indulgent and self-despising, never sure whether to blame himself or the world for his inescapable alienation. Never keeping to one style for long, his cinematic career carried him from his gritty early ’60s films about pimps and thieves in the borgate (the impoverished shanty-town wasteland that circled Rome) to his popular ’70s “Trilogy of Life” (The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights) which seemed the work of a bawdy, life-affirming man.
The happy perception suggested by the trilogy was changed forever by his final film, Salò (1975), a one-of-a-kind project that takes no little defending, and may indeed be indefensible. It’s the cruelest, most obscene, and most intellectually toxic work ever made by a major director. Once seen, it is forever remembered.
Pasolini began the film during a period of enormous artistic crisis. Filled with “disappointment in man and God” (as one friend of his described it), he began to think that all his earlier work was bogus and compromised, merely another length of the feed-tube through which consumerist repression is shoved down our throats. His response was to make what he called an “indigestible” film based on the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, with a smidgen of Dante’s Inferno thrown in. Set in Italy during the waning days of World War II, Salò tells the story of four debauched Fascists who retreat to a chateau and begin using innocents to satisfy their basest desires. Beginning with mere violation in the “Circle of Obsessions” (sodomy is favored), they move on to the “Circle of Shit” (people forced to eat their own feces) before reaching the “Circle of Blood,” in which skulls are smashed, eyeballs sliced, and victims ritualistically slaughtered.
Salò is one of the handful of genuinely disturbing movies ever made; it leaves you shaken, not simply because of what it is depicting but also because of how. Pasolini presents the most vicious debasement in a highly formalized style that’s as coolly dispassionate as a geometric proof. There’s no room in this death-eating film for human decency or affirmation: a heterosexual couple is murdered merely for being heterosexual, yet homosexuality is also portrayed as a form of tyranny. A cinematic ground zero, Salò confirms the cruel meaninglessness of everything human. Life is reduced to impersonal fornication, eating and defecating, the inescapable power of hawks over sparrows—with no hope of transcendence or redemption. Sparrows can only hope to become hawks.
In what is probably the most savage twist, Pasolini implies that watching this movie makes one complicit in its horrific world—our own voyeurism is inescapably guilty. At the end, we witness the ritual murder of innocents through reverse binoculars, a distancing process that frees us from the sound of their screams and lets us “enjoy” the moment with proper detachment. There’s never been a stronger attack on the deathly voyeurism lurking in the experience of art — Pasolini’s and our own.
With such a bleak work for his artistic testament, it’s small wonder that many people saw Pasolini’s own murder as Salò’s real-life climax. Nor was it surprising that such a film would divide critics and audiences. It was assailed by (among countless others) worldly men such as novelist Italo Calvino, who saw in it evidence of the filmmaker’s personal corruption, and Richard Roud, the late director of the New York Film Festival, who wrote, “It is a terminal film in every sense of the word.”
Yet if Salò is not a simple or likable movie, it does have a terrible kind of grandeur. And this grandeur is inseparable from its assault on all our most cherished moral beliefs. In an interview with French television before its premiere, Pasolini explained the aesthetic principle behind the film: “I believe to give scandal is a duty, to be scandalized a pleasure, and to refuse to be scandalized is moralism.” At a time when movies are routinely called 'shocking' and 'controversial', Salò not only lives up to these words but makes them feel childishly inadequate.

- John Powers

(John Powers is film critic at Vogue, critic-at-large for NPR’s Fresh Air, and editor-at-large of LA Weekly, where he writes a regular media/culture column. He is author of the book Sore Winners, an analysis of American culture during the Bush years.)

Sunday, June 25, 2006

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666 GOD DAM DIE AND GO StrAIGHT TO DO DAM HELL
666 FLOODS AND FIRES TITAL WAVES AND SEX DEASES SHall KILL THE
666 REAT OF THEM OFF AND SEND THEM StrAIGHT TO GOD DAM HELL
666 all THE DEAD BODIES THAT DIED WITH THE CROSS GOD DAM THE
666 FIRST POPE DIED UPSIDE DOWN WITH 999
666 all THOSE DEAD PICTURE JOHN WAYN IS DEAD GOD DAM
666 SO IS SKY KING SO IS WALT DISNEY SO IS WHAT THE FUCK
666 MORIS IS DEAD SO IS LASSIE DEAD A DOG AND A CAT DIED
666 AND STILL MAKING MONEY AFTER THEY ARE DEAD
666 GOD DAM ELVIS PRESLEY IS DEAD AIDS DRUGS KILED HIM
666 RICK NELSON IS DEAD AIDS DRUGS KILLED HIM
666 BUDDY HOLLY IS DEAD AIDS KILLED HIM
666 GOD DAM WHERE DID all THE DEAD GO THEY WENT TO HELL
666 BUT THEY ARE all ON TV MOVIES PICTURES AND THEIR NAMES
666 WELL GOD DAM THEY ARE AT THE GRAVEYARDS WITH all THEIR DEAD
666 FRIENDS ROCK DIED AIDS SURE IS KILLING OFF THE PEPLE
666 all THE SOULDERS DIED OF AIDS WELL GOD DAM SATAN RULES
666 all THE GOD DAM DEAD BODIES THAT HAVE DIED AND WENT TO HELL
666 THEY CAN'T OWN NOTHING SELL NOTHING BUY NOTHING
666 SATAN RULES all THAT HAVE DIED AND PERISHED OFF THE face OF
666 THE EARTH NEVER TO BE SEEN AGAIN head FROM AGAIN
666 OR SPEAK TO FOR THE DEAD ARE DEAD THEY HAVE GOD DAM NOTHING
666 TO SAY THEY DIED AND WENT TO HELL
666 all THE DEAD THAT DIED ALREADY MORE DEATHS ARE NOT BEING
666 REPORTED ON THE OBITUARIES IT SAYS IT all
666 GOD DAM AIDS OF THE PRICK AIDS OF THE PUSSY AIDS OF THE
666 MOUTH AIDS SATAN AND DRUGS SURE IS TAKING THE BITE OUT
666 OF THE POPULATIONS GOD DAM SATAN KNOWS HOW TO WIN
666 AND THE FUNERALS AREA LL FREE NOTHING IS FREE FUNERALS ARE FREE
666 AND THEIR DEAD BODIES LIKE DEAD FISH ARE PICKED UP AND
666 DUMPED INTO THE OCEANS WITH THEIR GUNS MONEY ALSO
666 THE DEAD ARE DEAD AND SATAN IS RULING all THE SOULS
666 THAT ARE NOW BURNING IN HELL FOR all THEIR GOD DAM SINS
666 OH SATAN CAN TO YOY SEE HOW MANY DIED FOR THEE
666 OH SATAN CAN YOU SEE HOW MANY GAVE THEIR LIFE TO THEE
666 OH SATAN CAN YOU SEE HOW MANY DIED FOR THE CROSS AND THE
666 GOD DAM AMERICA FLAG DIED FOR THE GOD DAM ChrIST CHILD
666 OH STAN CAN YOU SEE HOW MANY DIED FOR ONE GOD DAM CENT
666 SATAN CAN YOU SEE WE AREA LL WATCHING TV LISTENING TO DEAD PEOPLE
666 ON RADIO AND WATCHIN THE OBITUATIES OF all THE DEAD THAT DIED...

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- 77x7
Man Bites Dog cover.


MAN BITES DOG
An Essay

Why am I watching this?
The question comes up whenever an otherwise reasonable person watches a sordid character do horrible things. You want to look away, but you can't, or won't. Maybe you do look away for a time, but then you look back.
That, in a nutshell, is the experience of watching Man Bites Dog, a faux cinema verité about a film crew documenting a mass murderer's rampage. The magnetic star of the show, Ben, is a rueful psycho. He's also an amateur philosopher (all the better to justify his crimes) and fancies himself a sophisticate, he plays chamber music with his girlfriend, he composes poetry, he complains about the aesthetic ugliness of public housing. There's a bit of Dostoevsky's loquacious axe murderer Raskolnikov in this strange, bright young man. Abstract, intellectual curiosity is his fuel; it's what he has instead of a conscience.
Ben's mix of charming awkwardness, intellectual pretension, and fathomless sadism suggests not a real-life serial killer but a fantastic fictional equivalent, a blood-spattered cousin of the James Bond baddie, whose wickedness has a playful edge of showmanship. Ben is the personification of spectacle. We're a captive audience, seduced by his charisma, just like the documentarians who act as our eyes and ears. (One is reminded of the notion that comedy equals tragedy plus distance; Man Bites Dog's verité conceit calls attention to the actual physical distance between the filmmakers and Ben's victims. We get closer without being closer, a defining characteristic of cinema generally, and nonfiction film in particular.)
The film crew tails along, recording every significant and insignificant moment in Ben's life. Presumably their goal is to gain insight into evil, but what they're really doing is blurring the line between spectator and participant. That line dissolves entirely when the crew runs out of money and accepts Ben as a patron. He's transformed from a depraved nonfiction film subject into a kind of director-producer-writer-star. Rather than merely inviting the filmmakers to witness the narrative of his life, Ben finds a way to make them participate in its construction.
Whether you chose to view Ben as simply another murderous movie character or as a perverse metaphor for documentary subjects in general, his manipulations definitely question central premises of documentary filmmaking: that a camera can record truth; that the presence of a lens and a crew full of observers won't distort reality, and that a journalist's obligation to be objective trumps the natural human impulse to intervene in a bad situation. When Ben and the crew examine footage of his attack on a policeman at a Steenbeck editing table, it seems a direct reference to Gimme Shelter's depiction of Mick Jagger watching (as editor Charlotte Zwerin, on-camera, operates a Steenbeck) the film of the Hell's Angels stabbing Meredith Hunter. This allusion serves as a pointed reminder of Pauline Kael's famous criticism of Gimme Shelter: its makers failed to acknowledge that the Altamont concert was created specifically for the film. Are Ben's filmmaker pals merely recording the atrocities of a flesh-and-blood demon, or does their presence urge him toward increasingly gruesome acts? (The escalation of the killer's violence suggests that when a camera comes between storytellers and their story, the boundary between documentary and exploitation can't help but spring leaks.) The filmmakers become ensnared in a double-bind: If they allow events to unfold naturally without getting in the way, they are complicit in murder; if they do interfere, they are breaking the rules of verité.
Like all good satire, Man Bites Dog literalizes and magnifies what might otherwise seem like an abstract rhetorical problem. The ludicrous exaggeration insures our response: of course the crew should interfere with Ben's crimes. But if a filmmaker has an obligation to intervene when one person is trying to kill another, is there an obligation to keep a subject from stealing, from drug dealing, from prostituting? Where is the line drawn?
Man Bites Dog anticipates so-called reality TV, which places real people in situations contrived to resemble bad movie plots, only instead of the unquestioning voyeurism encouraged by those programs, this film's objective is to bully the viewer into guilty self-reflection. It's a strategy that draws on a tradition of cinematic explorations of spectatorship and violence, from Peeping Tom and A Clockwork Orange to Network and Taxi Driver. But Man Bites Dog alone is effective as a (pre-emptive) critique of the reality television movement. It doesn't simply condemn the desire to watch; it first provides its own audience with enough distance to enjoy a seductive spectacle. If we begin by laughing at Ben's sharp wit, we're soon laughing in a desperate bid to reinstate an emotional arm's length. The humor brings us closer and our defensive laughter helps us pull away.
Unlike American media satires, which tend to leave viewers bruised from constant nudging of the ribs, see Oliver Stone's psychedelic, crushingly obvious media satire Natural Born Killers, which literally superimposes the film's issues over the skin of the characters, Man Bites Dog never loses its verité edge or its workaday feel. This maintenance of realism is a remarkable stylistic feat. (Adding to the illusion of authenticity is that the three filmmakers, Remy Belvaux, Andre Bonzel and Benoit Poelvoorde, also played the central roles using their own first names). The normality, even banality, of its imagery, and its fairly strict adherence to documentary techniques, ensures that audiences will believe its inherently ridiculous storyline, and perhaps leave feeling vaguely ashamed at what a good time they had.
When Man Bites Dog was first released, many critics complained that one of the film's central points, that those who watch violence without resisting it are, in a sense, complicit, was too simplistic, too glib, too obvious. It's true that we already know violence is bad, and that if we watch a lot of it, we build up a level of tolerance that can only be transcended with an original and fresh act of savagery. But Man Bites Dog, with its hyperreal, almost cartoonish litany of outrages, expands on that point in a significant, almost subliminal way: slowly, subtly tricking the viewer into sticking around, then implicating the viewer and the filmmakers as the story unfolds. By the time Man Bites Dog ends, you may wish you'd stopped watching.
But you didn't.

- Cinema of Entrapment by Matt Zoller Seitz

Saturday, June 24, 2006

Irreversible.


IRREVERSIBLE, written and directed by Gaspar Noe
A REVIEW by Roger Ebert
March 14, 2003

Irreversible is a movie so violent and cruel that most people will find it unwatchable.

The camera looks on unflinchingly as a woman is raped and beaten for several long, unrelenting minutes, and as a man has his face pounded in with a fire extinguisher, in an attack that continues until after he is apparently dead. That the movie has a serious purpose is to its credit but makes it no more bearable. Some of the critics at the screening walked out, but I stayed, sometimes closing my eyes, and now I will try to tell you why I think the writer and director, Gaspar Noe, made the film in this way.

First, above all, and crucially, the story is told backward. Two other films have famously used that chronology: Harold Pinter's Betrayal, the story of a love affair that ends (begins) in treachery, and Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000), which begins with the solution to a murder and tracks backward to its origin. Of Betrayal, I wrote that a sad love story would be even more tragic if you could see into the future, so that even this joyous moment, this kiss, was in the shadow of eventual despair.

Now consider Irreversible. If it were told in chronological order, we would meet a couple very much in love: Alex (Monica Bellucci) and Marcus (Vincent Cassel). In a movie that is frank and free about nudity and sex, we see them relaxed and playful in bed, having sex and sharing time. Bellucci and Cassel were married in real life at the time the film was made and are at ease with each other.

Then we would see them at a party, Alex wearing a dress that makes little mystery of her perfect breasts. We would see a man hitting on her. We would hear it asked how a man could let his lover go out in public dressed like that: Does he like to watch as men grow interested? We would meet Marcus' best friend, Pierre (Albert Dupontel), who himself was once a lover of Alex.

Then we would follow Alex as she walks alone into a subway tunnel, on a quick errand that turns tragic when she is accosted by Le Tenia (Jo Prestia), a pimp who brutally and mercilessly rapes and beats her for what seems like an eternity, in a stationary-camera shot that goes on and on and never cuts away.

And then we would follow Marcus and Pierre in a search for La Tenia, which leads to a S&M club named the Rectum, where a man mistaken for La Tenia is discovered and beaten brutally, again in a shot that continues mercilessly, this time with a hand-held camera that seems to participate in the beating.

As I said, for most people, unwatchable. Now consider what happens if you reverse the chronology, so that the film begins with shots of the body being removed from the night club and tracks back through time to the warm and playful romance of the bedroom scenes. There are several ways in which this technique produces a fundamentally different film: 1. The film doesn't build up to violence and sex as its payoff, as pornography would. It begins with its two violent scenes, showing us the very worst immediately and then tracking back into lives that are about to be forever altered.

2. It creates a different kind of interest in those earlier scenes, which are foreshadowed for us but not for the characters. When Alex and Marcus caress and talk, we realize what a slender thread all happiness depends on. To know the future would not be a blessing but a curse. Life would be unlivable without the innocence of our ignorance. 3. Revenge precedes violation. The rapist is savagely punished before he commits his crime. At the same time, and this is significant, Marcus is the violent monster of the opening scenes, and the crime has not yet been seen; it is double ironic later that Marcus assaulted the wrong man.

4. The party scenes, and the revealing dress, are seen in hindsight as a risk that should not have been taken. Instead of making Alex look sexy and attractive, they make her look vulnerable and in danger. While it is true that a woman should be able to dress as she pleases, it is not always wise.

5. We know by the time we see Alex at the party, and earlier in bed, that she is not simply a sex object or a romantic partner, but a fierce woman who fights the rapist for every second of the rape. Who uses every tactic at her command to stop him. Who loses but does not surrender. It makes her sweetness and warmth much richer when we realize what darker weathers she harbors. This woman is not simply a sensuous being, as women so often simply are in the movies, but a fighter with a fierce survival instinct.

The fact is, the reverse chronology makes Irreversible a film that structurally argues against rape and violence, while ordinary chronology would lead us down a seductive narrative path toward a shocking, exploitative payoff. By placing the ugliness at the beginning, Gaspar Noe forces us to think seriously about the sexual violence involved. The movie does not end with rape as its climax and send us out of the theater as if something had been communicated. It starts with it, and asks us to sit there for another hour and process our thoughts. It is therefore moral - at a structural level.

As I said twice and will repeat again, most people will not want to see the film at all. It is so violent, it shows such cruelty, that it is a test most people will not want to endure. But it is unflinchingly honest about the crime of rape. It does not exploit. It does not pander. It has been said that no matter what it pretends, pornography argues for what it shows. Irreversible is not pornography.
EXCERPTS FROM The Story of the Vivian Girls by Henry Darger

The massacre continued for still another day. Children were dispatched in the most horrible manner. Their intestines were cut out, the Glandelinians even pelting their victims with them. Children were commanded to eat the hearts of the dead children, and those who refused were tortured beyond describing. The children were fairly bathed in blood.

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Scores upon scores of poor children were cut to pieces, after being strangled to death, and even their organs were hung on trees. Children were forced to swallow the sliced fragments of dead children's hearts. Nearly three quarters of the number of children who were massacred died first by strangulation, their eyes and protruding tongues were extracted, their bodies opened and their entrails pulled out, and their bodies hacked and torn and left lying in that condition on the streets and pavements.

title or description

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The massacre continued for still another day. Children were dispatched in the most horrible manner. Their intestines were cut out, the Glandelinians even pelting their victims with them. Children were commanded to eat the hearts of the dead children, and those who refused were tortured beyond describing. The children were fairly bathed in blood.

- Henry Darger, textual and visual excerpts from The Story of the Vivian Girls
UNTITLED

If she calls me chief one more time, I am going to hack off her head, I decide. If she calls me by one more supposedly endearing nickname. I will kill her. 'Lima bean.' 'Pootie.' I will ask her to follow me into the breakroom, I will make up a story about a private matter that must be discussed or a juicy bit of office gossip that I need to tell her. Her curiosity will guide her in my footsteps; I will quietly approach her and she will follow me into the turquoise room. When she walks into the kitchen, I will strike her pretty skull with something heavy, the coffeemaker or my earthenware mug. The item will surely shatter, its pieces will scatter on the floor. Her blood will mark the tiles.
When she has fallen, after I have hammered her into unconsciousness, I will take one of the dull kitchen knives from a drawer and with steady hands and graying sight, I will carve out her voicebox, sawing through rubbery skin and durable cartilage until I have what I seek resting in the palm of my hand, dripping. It will look like something alien, a misshapen waxy thing, red and wet. Later, someone will come in and discover me crouched over her corpse like some sinister ape, hooting, pushing the pieces of her around the tiles, painting myself with blood.

Friday, June 23, 2006

UNTITLED

People existed like clouds to Eleanor, in that each was both unique and fleeting. Something special separates even the driest individual from his peers, even if that idiosyncrasy is only as small as the way he might eat cereal or fold his socks. Very few people were aware of Eleanor's intense scrutiny of those around her, or of the esteem she held a distinct minority in due to miniscule details that no one else bothered to notice.
She was a clerk at a local library, where her coworkers considered her unfriendly and patrons regarded her as imperious. At work, her mind was lethargic, and she could not understand what her superiors expected of her. Her mind and moods was her own, and she received a paycheck for her service, not her silence or lack thereof. More than once, a patron had complained to a supervisor, having felt like a schoolchild dismissed when their business had been completed. Every evening at five o'clock, Eleanor left work, got into her black motorcar, and drove to a small restaurant that welcomed both reticence and writers. Paradoxically, if the waiter at the restaurant smiled at her, it filled her with a warmth that a day's worth of considerate patrons could not.
One waiter in particular she preferred. His name was Todd, visibly displayed on the nametag pinned to his shirt, and the fact that it was evident for anyone to take note of was somethingthat filled Eleanor with a mild and irrational jealousy. He had brown hair, a goatee, and a ready smile. Eleanor was one of the few regular customers, and she was sure that he recognized her, even though he never gave a visible sign of it.
LESSER URY

Lesser Ury.


Lesser Ury was a German Impressionist painter, notable for his darker vision of the Impressionistic movement. I find a slightly disturbing beauty in his work.

Here are some examples.

Die Näherin

Birken

Allee in Berlin

Dame eine Pferdedroschke rufend

Nächtliche Impression

Jeremias
JAMES MERRILL (1926 - 1995)

title or description


James Merrill (1926 - 1995) is "increasingly regarded as one of the most important 20th century poets in the English language" (1). In addition to the following excerpts, as well as hundreds of other poems of varying lengths, Merrill co-wrote "The Changing Light at Sandover", which is sometimes referred to as a "postmodern apocalyptic epic" of a poem.

The following excerpts are from Merrill's 1976 poem "Lost in Translation", which meditated on the governess who taught him French and German as a child. The poem is exploring much deeper themes.

(excerpt 1)
Diese Tage, die leer dir scheinen
und wertlos für das All,
haben Wurzeln zwischen den Steinen
und trinken dort überall.

(These days which, like yourself,
Seem empty and effaced
Have avid roots that delve
To work deep within the waste.)

(excerpt 2)
A card table in the library stands ready
To receive the puzzle which keeps never coming.
Daylight shines in or lamplight down
Upon the tense oasis of green felt.
Full of unfulfillment, life goes on,
Mirage arisen from time's trickling sands
Or fallen piecemeal into place:
German lesson, picnic, see-saw, walk
With the collie who "did everything but talk" —
Sour windfalls of the orchard back of us.
A summer without parents is the puzzle,
Or should be. But the boy, day after day,
Writes in his Line-a-Day No puzzle.

(excerpt 3)
But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translation
And every bit of us is lost in it...
And in that loss a self-effacing tree,
Color of context, imperceptibly
Rustling with its angel, turns the waste
To shade and fiber, milk and memory.

- James Merrill, 1976
full text of the poem

Friday, June 16, 2006

GRACIAS PARA LOS OJOS

Fuck him, thought Miguel. Fuck that stupid wetback spic nigger faggot bastard. Fuck him. He'd nearly fucked up the whole thing by making eye contact with the mother. He'd smiled at her: 'How're you?' Dogfucker. They weren't supposed to have any contact with the family at all. Otherwise, one of its members might be able to identify them. They were supposed to be invisible, and that fucking idiot John C. had spoken to the boy's mother.
'Don't worry,' John C. had said. 'You worry too much.' He laughed. Miguel opened his switchblade. John C. stopped laughing. 'Hold on,' he started to say, 'wait a second,' but Miguel stepped up close real fast and slashed him across the face. He screamed; Miguel broke his nose and knocked him down. When he was on the ground, Miguel kicked him until his screaming changed into thick wheezing. Miguel kneeled down and cut his throat. Black blood darkened the floor. He spit on the corpse. Dogfucker. The anger drained out of him.
Miguel lit a cigarette and took a breather before opening his backpack, pulling out a small gray toolbox. He took out a pair of pliers and kneeled on the cement next to former partner's corpse. With the pliers, he ripped out John C.'s teeth, carefully putting each one inside of a plastic sandwich bag. When he finished with that, he took his lighter out of his pocket and burnt each of the corpse's fingers until the flesh peeled from the bone. Almost done, he thought. He stood up and cricked his neck before going to the car and getting a crowbar. After putting out his cigarette, Miguel beat the corpse's head until its face was completely unrecognizable.
He dragged the corpse across the cement by its feet until they reached the large gray trashcan in the corner of the warehouse. With some effort, he dumped the corpse inside. He dropped in the bloody crowbar after and replaced the trashcan's plastic lid.
Miguel walked back to his car and got inside. He took off his work gloves and put them on the passenger seat. A lot of the blood had gotten on him, but he wasn't worried about that. His clothes were dark, the day was nearly over. He doubted that the boy's parents had even contacted the police yet. It'd been about an hour since they'd snatched the boy out of the arcade. Families typically looked for their children for about two hours before calling the cops. They usually worried that the child had wandered off.
The boy hadn't regained consciousness yet. If he had, Miguel was sure that he would have heard the boy thrashing about in the car's trunk. He sighed and lit another cigarette. John C. had hit him really hard. Perhaps too hard. Miguel thought that he'd killed the boy initially, but his slight breathing betrayed life. This job worried Miguel a little more than jobs usually. Killing his partner wasn't something he'd anticipated, even though he might have enjoyed it a little. John C. was a sick fucker, and he always complicated things. Miguel never liked him, not since their first grab.
After he'd finished his cigarette, Miguel drove across town to a rundown motel on the outskirts. He got out of his car and walked down the open air hall until his found an empty room and picked the lock. He went back to his car and got his backpack, and, after to looking around to verify that no one was watching or nearby, he opened the trunk. The boy was still unconscious. He was breathing shallowly through his nose.
When Miguel and John C. first grabbed him, they'd crammed an oil rag in his mouth and Miguel had wrapped a couple of long strips of duct tape around his head to keep him quiet if he woke up. His hands were also taped together. Miguel picked up the boy and carried him into the motel room, dumping him on the floor once inside. He closed and locked the door, spying a nearby chair and propping it up against the door handle.
He used his switchblade to cut the tape on the boy's hands, and he dragged the boy into the bathroom, groaning when he picked up the boy and pushed his unconscious form into the bathtub. Miguel sighed deeply and stretched, trying to work out some of the kinks in his back. He left the bathroom for a moment and lit a cigarette. He turned around and went back inside. The boy hadn't moved.
Miguel pulled a hairnet and two yellow plastic dishwashing gloves out of his backpack and put them on. He also took out a flat metal pan with a ribbed edge, putting it on the edge of the tub. In it, he placed a scalpel, several pairs of forceps, a set of soft tongs, a sharpened chisel, a small hammer and a very small pair of surgical scissors.
Leaning over him, Miguel placed one of his hands firmly on the boy's chin and the other hand on the back of his skull. Miguel jerked his hands abruptly, breaking the boy's neck with a weak crack. The boy made a little noise. His body went limp. Getting the duct tape, Miguel taped down the boy's wrists to the sides of the dry plastic tub. It might not hold for very long, but Miguel wanted the boy's body to sit relatively still while he worked.
He moved to the back end of the tub, facing the same direction as the boy, and pulled his head back. The boy's eyes remained closed, but he could have been staring at the ceiling. Miguel tossed his burnt cigarette into the foot of the tub.
Carefully, he felt the firm orb of the boy’s eye with the gloved tip of his finger, gently tracing the curve of the supraorbital process. He took the smallest scalpel and a white plastic prop from the pan. He pushed the boy’s left eyelid open.
Miguel made a deep incision, the scalpel scraping hard against the foramen. Blood welled up, drooling thickly down the boy’s pale cheekbone, striated with milky corneal fluids. Miguel sliced down in a curving stroke, using the zygomatic bone as a guide in this red mess. The scalpel cut through ocular muscles cleanly.
When he is finished cutting around the left eye, he pulled it out with the soft tongs, reaching behind the eyeball with a slender pair of iris scissors to snip the optic nerve. He placed the eyeball into a small clear vial filled with a sterile solution. Miguel repeated the process on the right eye.
Placing his instruments in the sink, Miguel turned on the faucet and let it run. The water blushed and gurgled. He held up the two vials and looked at their contents for a moment. The boy’s eyes were blue. Startlingly blue. He hadn’t noticed before. Then he took both vials and put them in the storage container he had brought.
After lighting another cigarette, Miguel carefully washed and replaced his tools. He put the two steel thermoses into his backpack. Looking back into the bathroom one more time, he felt a brief pang of sympathy for the boy's parents. Black tears were drying on the dead boy's face. Miguel had two children of his own. Finding them like this would be unimaginable. A single fly buzzed around the empty eye sockets. More would come when he left. If a couple of days passed before it was discovered, the corpse would become infested with cockroaches.
His work was nearly done. The eyes had been cleanly removed; the body could be left behind to be discovered in the morning.
This is where John C. would have turned over the boy’s corpse and sodomized it. Miguel was glad that he didn’t have to sit through that again. John C. had been magic with the scalpel. Watching him work was deeply moving. The things he did after the cutting was done turned Miguel’s stomach.
Miguel shrugged and turned off the light. He closed the bathroom door and left the motel room. Inside his car, he peeled off the yellow gloves and removed his hairnet. A line of sour sweat navigated the grizzle on his cheek.
The sun was setting. He had a delivery to make.

~~~


It was about eight thirty when Miguel arrived home. He got out of his car, stubbed out his cigarette, and unlocked the front door. He could smell stale tortillas and lemonade. The dog barked at his arrival. Soy casero, mi dulces, he called.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

UNTITLED (K.)

When K. gets up in the morning, he cracks some eggs. Each one hisses when it strikes the pan. When the eggs start turning white, he scoops them out with a spatula and eats them. It is eight thirty.
He goes into his bedroom and dresses for work. After tying his shoes, he goes outside. He gets into his car.
The traffic is average. K. takes the overpass, exiting the freeway. Rather than going to work, he decides that he will visit Ethan. Ethan's house is only a few moments away. When he arrives at Ethan's house, he parks his car. He gets out and goes to the door, but the door is locked. When he knocks, no one answers.
K. knows that Ethan does not have a job. He knows that Ethan is probably sitting on the kitchen floor, strung out and nodding off. K. is certain that the dope Ethan doubtless has been shooting this morning was dope that K. had bought for him. K. goes around to the back door, but it is also locked. Ethan never left anything open.
Taking off his shoe, K. breaks the tall rectangular window next to the back door. He reaches through and unlocks it. He opens the door and goes inside. It only takes a couple of minutes to find Ethan sitting on the toilet, shorts around his ankles, his forehead resting on his crossed forearms. He hums tunelessly and does not seem to notice when K. opens the door. There is a syringe in the ceramic toothbrush holder mounted over the sink. K. picks it up, then puts it back down.
'Wake up,' he says, knowing that Ethan won't even hear him. It'll be awhile before he'll even be aware that K. is in the house.
K. leaves the bathroom. He doesn't bother to shut the door.

Saturday, June 10, 2006

CRASH (1995): MY REVIEW

James Spader purportedly refuses to watch any of the films he has made an appearance in, and despite the fact that I think he is a fantastic actor, I can understand why he wouldn't want to watch Crash, the 1996 Cronenberg film based on the novel by J.G. Ballard.

Dying Unger. Oh noes!


According to Spader, "I have my own artistic sensibilities and Crash complements them. It is a provocative, challenging, disturbing film made for adults. It's not a skeleton in the closet for me." Well, I hate to say it, but frankly, should be an it embarrassment, both for Cronenberg and Spader. The film seemed like little more than an excuse for Cronenberg to film Spader having simulated anal sex with Alice Poon, Deborah Kara Unger, Holly Hunter, and Elias Koteas.

Spader and Unger


Despite this travesty of a movie, I continue to have a high opinion of both James Spader's acting ability and David Cronenberg's talent as a director. Unfortunately, Crash my wankery alarm shriek terrible things at an ear-splitting volume.

Unger


One star out of four. I would have given it zero, but James Spader's voice always counts for at least one star.

Spader