Quote: Marshall McLuhan

"The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers"

Quote: Robinson Jeffers

"Only tormented people want the truth."

Sir Francis Drake Blvd.

slug mating

Found this on Ron Silliman's blog, among other nuggets;

Quote: Owen Barfield

"Consciousness is not a tiny bit of the world stuck on the rest of it.  It is the inside of the whole world."

All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.

Do Americans censor shows of traumatized children's art?  They do - when the traumatized children are from Gaza.  Oakland's Museum of Children's Art has cancelled its scheduled exhibit this month due to pressure from local groups.  Here are some of the images our community has been saved the trouble of seeing.

Signature

Quote: Picasso

"We all know that art is not the truth, art is a lie that makes us realize the truth"

Quote: Robert Duncan

"There is not a phase of our experience that is meaningless, not a phrase of our communication that is meaningless.  We do not make things meaningful, but in our making we work toward an awareness of meaning; poetry reveals itself to us as we obey the orders that appear in our work."

My home town

The Mission

Frameline 35: 'Absent'

This unusual thriller from Argentinian director Marco Berger is a complete departure from his debut Plan B.  Both films are psychologically astute, intelligent and erotic, but Absent swerves into much darker territory with its study of youthful obsession, sexual taboo, and paranoia.  In a clever twist on the seduction-of-a-minor theme, so prevalent in anti-gay rhetoric, 30-something swim-coach Sebastiano (played by Carlos Echevarria) is tricked early on into first driving his 16 year-old student Martin (Javier de Pietro) to a doctor's office one evening and then extending his hospitality to a couch for the night when Martin's supposed arrangements go awry.  The relentless way this innocent-looking boy draws the well-intentioned but increasingly nervous older man into his web of attempted seduction is developed in tense, spiralling detail, with claustrophobic sound design and camerawork, but at some point the discomfort it generates splits into divergent streams in the viewer's mind; one stays with the action, while the other begins to question the film's intentions - its bowing to genre conventions and persistent invocation of Hitchcock become a shade too heavy-handed, perhaps ironic (?), close to parody without ever exactly crossing the line, and for some time we are unsure just where Berger is going with it all.  

Given the revelations in the second half of the film these self-conscious effects make wondrous sense, and I marveled all over again at the intellectual facility of this young director for whom elements of film grammar/history double as psychological clues and even plot devices.  The slightly ramped-up genre tropes refer not to the action after all, but to the windmills in its unfortunate protaganist's unconscious mind, and when events swerve into more dreamlike territory the sense that we are witnessing the exteriorization of a sealed, completely occult experience intensifies, with layered cuts, sequencing distortions, and obscure visual keys (darkness, shots through water, through glass, broken windows, eye movements, eyes ... ) which extend the ominous effects of Carolina Canevaro's weird soundscape and Pedro Irusta's incredible, spooky, thrilling score.
 
Berger has commented somewhere that he makes 'gay films for straight people', and it's true that straight audiences will identify completely with the characters in both Plan B and Absent.  They hover on the cusp, they are straight people who find they are gay, or gay people who think they are straight; they are embroiled in scenarios as complex, challenging, or ambiguous as any we have seen or can imagine - and when sexual orientation comes in as somehow integral to all that, we respond to their situation as if it were our own.  It's an oblique approach to the theme which works well, completely sidestepping the 'otherness' that usually inflects gay films and situating characters inside our shared predicament.  I hope he finds the crossover audience he deserves, for his sake, but mostly, for ours.  We all need films as good as this.  Berger is a master already and he's barely out of film school - its phenomenal.

Midsummer

Frameline 35: Three reviews

Four More Years:  This film is a class act from beginning to end, hilarious, delightful, and very clever.  Its script alone should win every award going.  It is sharp, fast-moving, on-target, and very, very funny.  Why can't we have more of this kind of screenwriting over here?  We used to have Woody Allen, but he is churning out the same tired old stuff these days and this film from Swedish director Tova Magnusson-Norling is completely fresh.  The acting is great as well, the characters intensely lovable, and the concept - the leader of the centre-right party in Sweden falls for the second-in-command of the victorious socialists - is superb.  I can't even begin to imagine how funny it must be for Swedish speakers familiar with the scene.  But we get the gist of the tax-cut/tax-hike rhetoric, even if it is laced with references to things like the North Bothnia Rail Link.  Actually the North Bothnia Rail Link part is important.  I should like somebody to text me about the North Bothnia Rail Link in that way.  And have I mentioned the Serbo-Croatian, Social-Liberal aspects of bisexuality yet?  See this film. 


Wish Me Away:  I wasn't ready for how complex and passionate this documentary about country music phenomenon Chely Wright's coming-out was going to be.  If you like soul-searching stuff, and I do, this film is one of the stand-out events of the festival.  Quite apart from the in-depth revelation of how intelligent, thoughtful, courageous, divided, and conscious one human being can be, it really opens up the issue of just what it means to be gay in homophobic country with a crowbar.  It is hell.  People have to subvert and destroy themselves - especially people who dream big, apparently.  Chely Wright is a kind of superstar, and was an icon in the country music scene, a virtual archetype of beauty and goodness to a community saturated in hate for gays and other differently-oriented types.  Her journey as documented here is intensely moving; I cried my eyes out.  Her on-camera deliberations are a complicated, eloquent testament to just how thorny and profound a human predicament like this can be.  Coupled with fascinating footage of meetings with her spiritual advisor and publicity agents, editors, tour-managers, make-up artists, friends and family, it is a rich and beautifully-crafted film that will make you realize, if you don't already, what is at stake emotionally and spiritually for LGBT people everywhere.


Last, Fast Ride - The Life, Love and Death of a Punk Goddess:  This is one of those films that sometimes crop up at Frameline, where the subject is only incidentally gay or lesbian, but the issue at stake is something else.  I like that about this festival.  It illustrates how GBLT issues bleed into other issues, like feminism, or 'values'-politics, or media representation, or any area where the political and personal collide.  In this case the late, great, and beautiful punk-rock star Marian Anderson's sexual orientation is not exactly the point; nor are her sexual antics on stage, or even her outrageous acts of provocation generally, though these get closer.  It is that she was a victim of childhood sexual abuse by her father, an alcoholic, violent cop.  Everything that comes after, and there is a lot, can be seen in the light of this traumatic original sin.  Her life becomes an object lesson in how profoundly destructive such early trauma can be.  No doubt she means many things besides to many people, and I don't mean to deny any of that.  On the contrary, her achievements, her fearlessness, her energy, and raw talent (her voice alone is incredible), not to mention her sweetness and intelligence, as illustrated here in several interviews, contribute to what is at least my understanding of the magnitude of this crime against her, because it becomes abundantly clear as the film goes on that the effects of her sexual abuse were so far-reaching that no amount of personal talent, courage or virtue could save her from its destructive legacy.  It is a tragic film, a study in identity and struggle and loss, but I was filled with admiration for how fiercely this woman fought to define herself against unbeatable odds, and filled also with a renewed sense of disgust and hate for the men who perpetrate such crimes against children.  Fans of local punk scene will love it as well.  There are tons of stunning performance clips, and interviews with Tim Armstrong of Rancid, Dexter Holland of The Offspring, Becky Wreck of Lunachicks, Texas Terri, Daniel deLeon, Greg Langston, Fate Fatal, Ginger Coyote, and more.              

Quote: Walter Benjamin

'There is no document of civilization that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism.'


from 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' in Illuminations

Castro Street

Quote: Emerson

"The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent"

Quote: Rosa Luxemburg

'The first revolutionary act is to call things by their true names'

'Balanced Individual' by Michael McConnell

more from this local artist at www.poopingrabbit.com

SFIFF54: 'Another Earth'

Another Earth: I loved this film.  It's basically a character drama exploring themes of loss, guilt, and atonement, but the presence of a second, identical earth on the horizon, with all its quantum implications, gives the film a brooding, crepuscular feel, an ambiguous atmosphere that hovers between menace and possibility.  Its a brilliant debut, intimate and powerful, and possessed of the sort of integrity that can characterize indie productions when they are conceived and developed from the ground up by ensembles as intelligent as this.

SFIFF54: 'Nostalgia for the Light'

Nostalgia for the Light:  This brilliant film from Chilean director Patricio Guzman succeeds on so many levels it is hard to summarize.  It creates its own level, it's a miracle that exceeds the sum of its parts.  Elegant commentary and dazzling images (of deserts, bones, moons, stars) attain a sort of harmonic convergence in which history, astronomy, and ethics align.  In revealing the ecstatic relationships between human and celestial bodies, light, time, space and memory, Guzman manages as well to bring reason and compassion to bear upon his country's darkest and most secret crimes.  It's a documentary - but it's also an astonishing work of art.

SFIFF54: 'Aurora'

Aurora: An unforgivably bleak and tedious attempt to render the texture of one man's despicable mind, this 3-hour exercise in testing the limits of audience endurance fails to justify itself psychologically, philosophically, artistically, or in any other ways relevant to sentient life.  Director (and star!) Cristi Puiu must be satanically depressed, or worse.  Avoid at all costs.

SFIFF54: 'The Mill and the Cross'

The Mill and the Cross:  Lech Majewski's intriguing study of Bruegel's painting (the Way to Calvary) zooms in on vignettes within the canvas and then develops mini-episodes from there, sliding backwards and forwards in time and in and out of the picture as a whole, until all are unified under the by now greatly expanded 'sign' of the painting.  With a dramatized Bruegel (Rutger Hauer) explaining his political, social, and aesthetic motives, the painting is transformed into a miraculous freeze-frame of a convulsion in history and society.  You have to see it to know how artfully this effect is achieved.

SFIFF54: 'Silent Souls'

Silent Souls: Cinema might be the best medium yet for conveying the symbolic nature of cultural forms, and Siberian director Aleksei Fedorchenko's lovely adaptation of Aist Sergeyev's 'The Buntings' is a case in point.  The Merjan (Russian/Finnish) burial at the center of this lyrical film doubles as ritual for the vanishing culture itself, but it is not a complex or sophisticated film - its virtues lie in its simplicity, its physicality, its poetry, its tenderness, and its quiet beauty.  Some of its scenes and images - the drowned typewriter, the ribbon ceremony, the incredible choral scene, the naive poems - are pure illuminations, limpid and inspired.

SFIFF54: 'The Deep End'

The 10 shorts in this compilation are all, in one way or another, meditations on the rural or urban environment, and with the exception of Hell Roaring Creek (more about this film in a minute) they all say as much about the means of observation as about the object observed.  A variety of complex effects amplify the subjective tone of the work so that the act of seeing/feeling what is seen/cognizing/interpreting is consistently foregrounded and, as we know generally, there are as many ways of seeing the world as there people to see it.  Some pieces, like Louise Bourque's overtly expressionist 10-minute a little prayer (H.E.L.P) were very powerful - its distressed images of a bound, gagged, and inverted Houdini, accompanied by layers of frightening aural effects, were actively nightmarish; others, like T. Marie's 6-minute Slave Ship, a silent, painterly manipulation of Turner's 1840 masterpiece (dedicated to recently-departed poet Leslie Scalapino) were haunting and beautiful.  The visual fantasia of Katherin McInnis' 2-minute last resort, a collage of layered close-up stills shot inside an abandoned and decaying hotel pool was utterly exquisite, saturating the eye in image after image of proliferating colors and forms; and Vincent Grenier's 9-minute Burning Bush was a positively hallucinogenic digital trip organized around one or two static takes of euonymus leaves on a garden wall. 

But most remarkable to my mind was Lucien Castaign-Taylor's transparently shot, unmanipulated pastoral Hell Roaring Creek, which records in two or three long takes the passage of a flock of sheep across a creek at dawn.  The simplicity of this film is absolute; it is perfect.  Its pristine, untouched images have the distilled quality of something essential, and together with its lush sounds (of water on rocks and the calling of lambs) it adds up to an experience both ravishing and complete.  The longest piece at 20 minutes, it comes last on the program and balances the other more process-oriented and expressionist segments perfectly - an inspired bit of curating, I think, from Kathy Geritz and Vanessa O'Neill.  Their sensitive work on this project is a credit to them as well as to the artists they have chosen to present.

SFIFF54: 'World on a Wire'

World on a Wire:  As if over 3 hours of futuristic 70's German TV is not remarkable enough, throw Fassbinder in the mix and you are granted a sort of unorthodox version of bliss.  For all his New Wave affiliations (cf. Alphaville) this legendary enfant terrible is really in a class of his own.  World on a Wire is packed with his signature tropes and themes, from the slightly hallucinogenic outre aesthetic and carnivalesque characters to the withering critique of capitalism, power and convention.  Bizarre, complex, delightful - and important, in film-historical terms.

SFIFF54: 'Miss Representation'

Miss Representation: As director Jennifer Siebel Newsom was quick to point out, her documentary is a 'call to action' for those of us who want to be liberated from the gender constrictions that suffocate our lives.  Crammed with archive clips, images and interviews, it is a fast, convincing, powerful and sometimes shocking (for those not over-familiar with routine TV talk show content) look at the degrading treatment of the female in contemporary media, its all-pervasive influence and its connection to capitalism and power.

SFIFF54: 'End of Animal'

End of Animal:  This thoroughly weird and original first feature from Korean director Jo Sung Hee takes a pregnant girl, her cabdriver and a third, uncanny stranger deep into a kind of sudden purgatory or lateral zone and leaves them there.  Because the film maintains its allegiance to life's ordinary surfaces, its dead cellphones and stalled cars, torn maps and broken heels, we identify easily and so are all the more disturbed by what unravels on the human plane.  Its weirdness speaks, that is, to some unspecified fear we all share, something immediate and unconscious.  But the film is not without its humor or irony either.  A truly surprising, unsettling, and odd experience.  Don't miss it.

SFIFF54: 'The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975'

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975:  This stunning documentary is about as close to perfect as a film can get.  Assembled from a cache of original footage found in Swedish TV archives, it presents the Black Power movement as it should be seen, transparently, without establishment 'enhancements.'  Gracious, perfectly-pitched to the intellectual caliber of its material, it explores events, issues, and personalities in considerable depth.  And what personalities!  See it for the interview with Angela Davis alone. Or the early speeches of Stokely Carmichael.  Because characters like theirs are given so much unmediated airtime, their charisma touches what is already an exquisitely beautiful, brilliantly organized and powerful film with something approaching genius.

SFIFF54: 'The Redemption of General Butt Naked'

The Redemption of General Butt Naked: A jaw-dropping study in megalomania. This savage Liberian warlord whose victims number in the tens of thousands is fooling no-one with his contrite Christian pastor act. Or is he? Many heart-breaking scenes of survivors succumbing to his rhetorical powers, such as they are. This is where the film gets a bit sickening.  Arendt's banality of evil comes to mind.

SFIFF54: 'Page One'

Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times: The collapse of advertising revenue, exploding competition, the 'End Times' debacle, Judith Miller, David Carr, Wikileaks, Twitter ... it's all in this bright, relevant, fast-moving, and at times very funny documentary about the recent travails of the NYTimes. The film's pro-Times ("good journalism/the public trust") sentiments are clear, and there isn't enough coverage of the alternative view, but it's still an unprecedented inside look at one of our most beloved institutions as it confronts the specter of its own extinction.

SFIFF54: 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams'

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: This enchanting study of the 32,000 year-old cave paintings at Chauvet Pont d'Arc is the apotheosis of Herzog's perennial landscape-as-mindscape theme, exploring the interiority of the earth itself, with much attendant hypothesizing.  Beautiful (in 3D!) and powerful in a cumulative sort of way, with superbly evocative music.  The usual sprinkling of flute-playing, bone-sniffing oddballs who usually enable Herzog's strategy of ironic defense can't deflect us any more from recognizing his personal fixation on the mystical and sublime.

-5 (Negative Five): a poem by Chelsey Minnis

-5 for debating
-5 for misuse of the tractor
-5 for altering the chore list
-5 for pinecone throwing
-5 for misplacing shoes and other personal property...
-5 for delaying, kicking dirt, separating, tossing thermos off lookout rest-point, non-listening...
-5 for cracking twigs
-5 for excessive yawning
-5 for loud whistling, touching people's hats without permission, putting Jared's comb into the fire, misuse of the grill tongs, burning, failing to comply with cleanliness of common area, spilling trash...
-5 for improper conduct while fishing...
-5 for euphoria, obstruction of doorways, fire hazard...
-5 for "misplacing" trail map
-5 for scattering birds, meaningless interjections during staff meeting, lingering and/or petting the guide dogs...
-5 for delayed objections
-5 for exaggerated enthusiasm about trail walk
-5 for tracking mud, solitariness, obsession with fishing lures, reluctance, inability to initiate social interaction, furtiveness, secrecy, paleness...
-5 for loud humming during rest hour, loud buzzing or humming sound, destructive theorizing, misuse of and/or staring out of windows...
-5 for refusal to read information packets, emotional recklessness, bad sportsmanship, lateness...
-5 for improper storage of personal food, repudiation, defacement, refusal to return group mascot, lack of effort at horseshoes, hoarding the first aid kit, contradictions, negligence, spitting...
-5 for misuse of the fly swatter...


from 'Bad Bad' 2007

Box of pastels

Quote: Carlo Emilio Gadda

" ... to know is to insert something into what is real, and thus to distort reality"

Excerpt from a prose poem by Ron Silliman

Revolving door.

Revolving door. A sequence of objects which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line.

Revolving door. Fountains of the financial district. Houseboats beached at the point of low tide, only to float again when the sunset is reflected in the water. A sequence of objects which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, camels pulling wagons of bear cages, tamed ostriches in toy hats, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line.

Revolving door. First flies of summer. Fountains of the financial district spout. She was a unit in a bum space, she was a damaged child. Dark brown houseboats beached at the point of low tide - men atop their cabin roofs, idle, play a Dobro, a jaw's harp, a 12-string guitar - only to float again when the sunset is reflected in the water. I want the grey-blue grain of western summer. A cardboard box of wool sweaters on top of the book-case to indicate Home. A sequence of objects, silhouettes, which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, dromedaries pulling wagons bearing tiger cages, tamed ostriches in toy hats, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line.


from 'Ketjak'

Quote: Marianne Moore

'The cure for loneliness is solitude.'

Limantour

Quote: Jean Genet

My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.

Oyster shell dust, Point Reyes

Jonathon Coe 'Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of BS Johnson'

The atmosphere of reverence that has attached to this horribly unsatisfactory biography (the Boston Globe calls it one of the finest literary biographies ever written) is just incomprehensible to me. Have reviewers actually read the book cover to cover? It's as if they are more excited by the idea of one iconoclast (if that's what Coe is) taking on another than they are by the book itself.  Subtitled The Story Of BS Johnson (probably ironically, given Johnson's famous rejection of stories as 'lies') this is most categorically not a story; nor is it, incidentally, an analysis of Johnson's novels. Perhaps his failure to work the material into a narrative or even a cogent analysis is Coe's deft tribute to Johnson, a nod to his hero's (or antihero's - he can't decide) attitude of refusal and nonconformity, but the result is painfully glib. His exasperated authorial interjections varnish what is otherwise a rather dreary ledger of accounts, a catalogue of every business transaction and project Johnson ever undertook in film, TV, theatre, poetry, and the novel. It is mostly illustrated with letters, and of those a preponderance of business-oriented exchanges between Johnson and his hapless agents and publishers. We do encounter extracts of plays and TV dramas; there are a couple of poems, and some letters to friends, but most egregiously there is practically nothing from or about the novels, which works are the absolute bedrock of Johnson's achievement. Instead we get a slight, in every sense of that word, synopsis of each novel at the beginning of the book, 16 pages in total, before we move on to what is evidently for Coe the more pressing task of registering BSJ's every career transaction over a period of about 15 years or so until he died in 1973. What is clear is Coe's developing distaste for his subject, coyly evidenced by his repeated sampling of Johnson's absurdly inflated self-appraisals, and of his sometimes hysterically defensive posturing vis-a-vis the English literary establishment and its obtuse intellectual positions. Judging from this sour, malnourished and poorly imagined effort, things have not improved much since Johnson's day.  The organization alone is horrible, more like a school project than a book, with ruled-off cubbyholes for excerpts, and isolated sections which briefly 'contain' different approaches to the material; one for novels as mentioned, one at the end for an attempt at analysis (again, just 33 pages), and a lone chapter of quotations from Johnson's friends and colleagues, which might have gone some way towards humanizing the man had Coe taken the trouble to assimilate them. The whole thing is a nightmare, a catalogue of meaningless facts, absolutely lacking in creativity or even a willingness to organize the evidence into something resembling a true biography. So many questions go unanswered, unasked, questions about the work as well as the life. Why was he so tortured? How successful was his method? Did he sacrifice content to form and if so, why? How did his interrogation of form relate to his experience? How did his art reveal (or conceal) his personal preoccupations? How successfully did he continue the tradition of Joyce and Beckett, his avowed literary idols? What were his relationships like, his childhood, his marriage? Unbelievably, the most important of his early love affairs, a relationship Johnson himself considered as devastating as anything that had ever happened to him, is flatly dismissed by Coe as a piece of immature grandstanding unworthy of his consideration.

.

I can only conclude that the curious work and the complex, baffling personality of this writer are simply beyond Coe's powers of comprehension, as they might be to many of us, but we are not burying him all over again in a mountain of meaningless, lifeless, superficial, unexamined and disconnected facts masquerading as an honest work of biography. The revelation at the end, which resembles nothing so much as a cheap mystery novel gimmick, does not redeem it either. Will Self, a more dazzling and innovative writer by far, has remarked of Coe that he takes an artist's pleasure in the cultivation of a certain kind of tedium vitae. I couldn't have put it better myself. Let's hope Johnson's case will not rest here.

Quote: Milan Kundera

" ... the novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel."

'Exposed' at the MoMA

The SF MoMA will continue Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera since 1870 through April 17, so there's still plenty of time to see it, but be prepared - it is shocking and perverse, though not unbeautiful. I didn't make a note of photographers' names, but there were many images I'll never forget. This iconic image of Thich Quang Duc protesting treatment of buddhist priests by South Vietnamese authorities in 1963 functioned as a kind of fulcrum, positioned as it was in a glass case in the center of the room, but the images fanned out around it were just as extreme. A spinal column sticking out of a truncated torso in a pair of shorts. A would-be suicide on high scaffolds. The blackened but otherwise perfect face of a man burned by Nazis before he could squeeze out from under floorboards into open air. A police dog lunging like a bullet at a black man in the South. A lynching. An armored British Army hut like some space pod bristling with black spears on a little street in County Armagh. Surveillance shots of British suffragettes. Disintegrated remains in Rwanda. Burning oil fields in Iraq - 'the mother of all battles'. The whole thing was stunning, awful. I thought somebody should be filming us. The voyeur motif so clearly implied us, the consumers of art and images flocking like bats to open wounds. We pooled up around particularly shocking images in corners, we bumped into one another, looked at one another uneasily, tried to communicate our dismay and hide our fascination. Not so surprising, I suppose. But there was awe and reverence in the room as well.

Quote: Sharon Doubiago

'Grammar makes you lie, I've always known that. That's partly why I'm a poet ...'

from My Father's Love, Vol. 2, 2011

Yemen - by Gwen

'Bag of Mice' - a poem by Nick Flynn

I dreamt your suicide note
was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag
& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag
opened into darkness,
smoldering
from the top down. The mice,
huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag
across a shorn field. I stood over it
and as the burning reached each carbon letter
of what you'd written
your voice released into the night
like a song, & the mice
grew wilder.

from 'Some Ether: Poems'

Excerpt from a novel by William Golding

' ... perhaps the truth of life and living lies in the strange things women do and say when they are hysterical.'

from 'The Double Tongue', 1995

The Mission

Quote: Slavoj Zizek

'The unconscious is outside'

Zizek quoted in Victoria Nelson, 'The Secret Life of Puppets', 2001.

Excerpt from a poem by Robert Duncan

The great speckled bird who broods over the
Nest of souls, and her egg,
The dream in which all things are living,
I return to, leaving myself.

from 'Tribal Memories: Passages 1' in Bending the Bow

Quote: Jorge Luis Borges

'The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors.'

from 'Kafka and his Precursors' in Labyrinths.

The Wild Side

Quote: John Updike

"Being ourselves is the one religious experience we all have."

from his introduction to Bruno Schulz, 'Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass'

Jon Fosse 'Aliss at the Fire'

Experimental literature is alive and well - in Norway. Jon Fosse's Det er Ales has just been translated into English by Damion Searls, who stated in an interview with Scott Esposito last week that it is Fosse's best novel - visionary was a word he used more than once. He's not kidding. Fosse's minimalist language and very long sentences (the first period came on page 43) are unusual enough, but his subtle shifts in perspective, which are really seamless transitions from one character's inner voice to another's within the same perspective, as though there is only one, a single stream of consciousness occluded by clouds of unknowing, together with his extreme compression of time and starkly mythic topography of fjord and fire together create something weirdly compelling, a sort of modern gnostic document. Potent symbols evocative of pagan ritual burn, glitter and fade across a landscape which is both inner and outer, a hermetic mystery; words like wood, boat, wool, coffin, hair, body, fish, window, boy, flip over in waves of incantatory prose like the flotsam and jetsam their author claims elsewhere to be the essence of his poetry, images which float into sight in the process of writing and create their own meaning. We begin to draw lines between objects in an obscurely imagistic way, as though there is a picture beneath the pictures we are given and we only have to focus or perhaps un-focus our inner eye to see it. It's an encounter with something very rare, even occult, but it takes place in 2002 - or an expanded version of it. Time is layered, braided, or blended completely; in one scene, Signe hangs her coat over the coat of the (ghost?) Aliss who hangs it on the same hook a hundred or so years earlier. It really is a kind of ghost story, a meditation on memory and loss, and the distorting effects of grieving, a grief which can be never-ending and calls into question just who is grieving in the first place. Grief simply is. Perhaps it happens to something rather than someone; perhaps people stitch it into the fabric of time or place.

The only living character, properly speaking, is the middle-aged Signe who has lost her husband Asle and still waits for him in their home by the water, though she knows he is not coming back. Into the contorted space of her memory and longing float the shades of Asle and his ancestors, including that of his great great grandmother Aliss, who burns sheep heads in the fire, who saves her boy from drowning by speaking the name of God, who is powerless to save her grandson Asle from the same fate, or indeed her great great grandson Asle from his. Events are subject to the same ritualistic treatment as words, deaths mirror one another as if ordained, or at least, connected in the same inevitable, unbreakable way that moments are connected, or generations.

It's impossible to isolate one scene or sentence without the feeling of having taken it sacrilegiously out of context, perhaps even killing it. Which is another way of saying, I can't find a quote that conveys what I want to say - no fragment can do justice to the whole. There really aren't any fragments anyway. It's a single, sustained literary gesture, one long sweep of the eye.

Fosse's books and plays are much celebrated in Europe. It's time we knew him better over here, and this beautiful book is the perfect place to start. A swift read at 106 pages, its strange effect lingers like the green spot at the back of the eye after a sunset.

Quote: Gerard de Nerval

'Madness is the desire to be recognized by an ideal other who functions as a transcendental being.'

Forgotten at The Vogue

Excerpt from a novel by William Golding

Following is a passage from Golding's fourth novel, Free Fall, in which the transfigured artist and prisoner-of-war Sammy Mountjoy perceives the world anew after a spell in solitary confinement and a spiritual crisis;

Huge tears were dropping from my face into dust; and this dust was a universe of brilliant and fantastic crystals, that miracles instantly supported in their being. I looked up beyond the huts and the wire, I raised my dead eyes, desiring nothing, accepting all things and giving all created things away. The paper wrappings of use and language dropped from me. Those crowded shapes extending up into the air and down into the rich earth, those deeds of far space and deep earth were aflame at the surface and daunting by right of their own natures though a day before I should have disguised them as trees. Beyond them the mountains were not only clear all through like purple glass, but living. They sang ...

Happy Day!

What a great day for Egyptians, for the Arab world, and for people everywhere who believe in freedom! Goodbye Mubarak! The people were stronger than you, despite your brutal police, your torture cells, your corruption, your billions in American aid!
Rejoice!!!

Excerpt from an article by Slavoj Zizek in The Guardian 2/1/11

The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned ...

see the rest of this Guardian article here

Thai Bui show at Menlo College

I love this artist. A small selection of his work is currently showing at Menlo College in Atherton, and will run through about March 21. For a Spark documentary segment about this artist, click on Thai Bui Sculpture in Links, to your right.

Excerpt from a poem by Eugenio Montejo

'Honor the ass, honor his box of butterflies
where he stores the blows of God and men
and never complains.'

from 'Honor the Ass' in Alphabet of the World, Kirk Nesset transl. 2010

Jack Davis show at Magnet, 18th St.

SFIndiefest 2011: 'Gabi on the Roof in July'

This film took me completely by surprise. It's straight out of left-field, totally, rigorously unlike ordinary films, ie. the micro-managed top-down productions we usually see. John Cassavetes comes to mind, updated to 2010 and populated with a lot of people we recognize if we have lived in New York or San Francisco, young, talented, arty people who are devoting their energies to self-expression without having first developed much self-awareness or responsibility. Twenty year-old 'feminist' artist and Oberlin College student Gabi visits with her older, slightly more established artist brother Sam for a summer in New York and ignites, through a series of provocative gestures, a state of ever-more inflamed and contradictory relations between relatives, friends, lovers, ex-lovers, roommates, freeloaders, and others. But the action is not strictly scripted, so everything just develops normally, with the right amount of levity, hesitation, bravado, and release, meandering through uncharted terrain in loosely connected chapters that reflect the episodic character of ordinary life. As director (and co-writer, actor) Lawrence Michael Levine explains in his statement for the film, he has collaborated with (co-producer, editor, actor) Sophia Takal and others to make something closer in feel to a jazz-combo performance, in which the ensemble creates and interprets together, seeking the unexpected, the extraordinary, the miracles only a well-prepared combo can play. Characters are based on real people - probably Levine and friends, only moved over a couple of inches from the film to the visual art world - and the script is developed through ongoing improvisations that deliver a product so authentic it makes even traditional verite techniques like hand-held camera etc. seem contrived.

Youthful, experimental ventures like this can be associated with dodgy production values, but there's no evidence of that here - Gabi is transparently produced, lucid and elegant; the sound in particular is perfect - we hear the whole galaxy of exhalations that go into the experience of a real conversation. The acting is stellar as well. This is no bunch of amateurs coming together in unschooled defiance of professional norms. They are clever, provocative, imaginative artists with rich backgrounds in fringe, off-Broadway and indie-film work (with a lot of Columbia graduates in the mix) and their fresh approach is clearly grounded in the familiarity with conventions that effective subversion requires. Gems like this are few and far between (though Levine lists ten of them made in 2010 alone, see his blog), so don't miss this one's single showing at the Roxie, February 5th as part of SFIndiefest.

18th Street

Quote: Henry Thoreau

Why have we ever slandered the outward? The perception of surfaces will always have the effect of miracle to a sane sense.

Excerpt from a novel by Tobias Wolff

The life that produces writing can't be written about. It is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind's business and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way; and when a few survivors break through to our attention they are received as blandly as waiters bringing more coffee.

from Old School

Little green spot

Quote: Hegel

'The spiritual eye stands immediately at the center of nature'

John Carey's new biography of William Golding

Following are the first four paragraphs of William Golding: The Man Who Wrote 'Lord of the Flies', reproduced here because they are so fascinating. How could you not want to read a book about a great writer that begins like this?

His earliest memory was of a colour, 'red mostly, but everywhere, and a sense of wind blowing, buffeting, and there was much light'. Together with this was an awareness, an 'unadulterated sense of self', which 'saw as you might with the lens of your eyes removed'. Whether this was actually a memory of his own birth, he is not sure. If so, it was remarkably trouble-free compared to his mother's experience of the same event. As soon as she had given birth to William Gerald Golding on 19 September 1911 she said to his father, 'That'll be all.'

In his next memory he is eighteen months old, maybe less. He is in a cot with a railing round. It has been pulled next to his parents' brass-framed double bed because he is sick with some childish ailment, and feels a little feverish. It is evening. Thick curtains hang over the window, attached by large rings to a bamboo pole. A gas jet on the wall gives a dim light. He is alone in the room. suddenly something appears on the right-hand end of the curtain pole. It is like a small cockerel, and its colour is an indistinct and indescribable white. It struts along the pole, its head moving backwards and forwards. It knows he is in the cot, and it radiates 'utter friendliness' towards him. He feels happy and unafraid. just near the mid-point of the pole it vanishes and the friendliness goes with it.

He hopes for it to return, but it does not. when his parents come to bed he tries to tell them about it, using the few words he knows. 'Thing' he says, or rather 'Fing', and 'Come back?' his father laughs, and assures him kindly that the thing won't come back, he's been dreaming. But he knows it was not a dream. Seeing it was not like dreaming, nor like waking. Its friendliness was 'like a whole atmosphere of natural love'. It seemed to come from 'the centre of all rightness'.

Struggling to tell his parents about it brings him for the first time up against 'the brute impossibility of communicating'. when he grew up he came to wonder quite what he had seen: 'Was it an exercise of clairvoyance before growing up into a rationalist world stifled it?' But he remembered it as one of the most powerful experiences of his life, a glimpse of 'the spiritual, the miraculous' that he hoarded in his memory as a refuge from 'the bloody cold daylight I've spent my life in, except when drunk'.