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'.