Excerpt from a poem by Fernando Pessoa

The soul contains, it seems,
A dark where there hardens and
Blows a madness that comes
From trying to understand

From 'Rage in the Dark, the Wind'

Quote: John Ashbery

"The worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about."

West Marin

Quote: CG Jung

"Free will is doing gladly and freely what one has to do."

Quote: DT Suzuki

" ... reality is grasped only when the intellect quits its claim on it."

Gazos Creek

Quote: Lawrence Weschler

"Grace: you work and you work and you work at something that then happens of its own accord."

from Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

Quote: Kierkegaard

"The more you limit yourself, the more fertile you become in invention"

Quote: Lao-tse

"Words that are strictly true seem to be paradoxical"

Quote: Adam Gopnik on the paintings of Wayne Thiebaud

"Thiebaud challenges us to be true to the real sources of our happiness, to the way that in a haphazard commercial culture small areas of order appear ... and become in our memories as sacred as stained glass, and at times as sad ... how confidently he knows that getting the happiness down right will convey the sadness too." (italics mine)

'My Love': a poem by e.e.cummings

my love
thy hair is one kingdom
   the king whereof is darkness
thy forehead is a flight of flowers

thy head is a quick forest
   filled with sleeping birds
thy breasts are swarms of white bees
   upon the bough of thy body
thy body to me is April
in whose armpits is the approach of spring

thy thighs are white horses yoked to a chariot
   of kings
they are the striking of a good minstrel
between them is always a pleasant song

my love
thy head is a casket
   of the cool jewel of thy mind
the hair of thy head is one warrior
   innocent of defeat
thy hair upon thy shoulders is an army
   with victory and with trumpets

thy legs are the trees of dreaming
whose fruit is the very eatage of forgetfulness

thy lips are satraps in scarlet
   in whose kiss is the combining of kings
thy wrists
are holy
   which are the keepers of the keys of thy blood
thy feet upon thy ankles are flowers in vases
   of silver

in thy beauty is the dilemma of flutes

   thy eyes are the betrayal
of bells comprehended through incense

Part 1 of Out in the Open: a poem by Tomas Transtromer

The labyrinth of late autumn.
A discarded bottle lies at the entrance to the wood.
Walk in.  The forest in this season is a silent palace of abandoned rooms.
Only a few, precise sounds: as if someone were lifting twigs with tweezers;
as if, inside each tree trunk, a hinge was creaking quietly.
Frost has breathed on the mushrooms and they've shrivelled up;
they are like the personal effects of the disappeared.
It is almost dusk.  You need to leave now
and find your landmarks again: the rusted implements out in the field
and the house on the other side of the lake, red-brown
and square and solid as a stock-cube.

Kitchen Song; a poem by Laura Kasischke

The white bowls in the orderly
cupboards filled with nothing.

The sound
of applause in running water.
All those who've drowned in oceans, all
who've drowned in pools, in ponds, the small
family together in the car hit head on.  The pantry

full of lilies, the lobsters scratching to get out of the pot, and
   God

being pulled across the heavens
in a burning car.

The recipes
like confessions.
The confessions like songs.
The sun.  The bomb.  The white

bowls in the orderly
cupboards filled with blood.  I wanted

something simple, and domestic.  A kitchen song.

They were just driving along.  Dad
turned the radio off, and Mom
turned it back on.

SFIFF 55: Wuthering Heights

Andrea Arnold does Wuthering Heights!  It's a dream come true!  She totally gets the book, and then, thank god, she doesn't betray it with a lot of BBC-drama type styling and other thespian nonsense.  What we get is raw, unmediated human nature briefly diverted by civilization but returned through tragedy to its elements.  Civilization is the tragedy.  She celebrates the natural sublime, the bleak, rain-lashed landscape, the savage, 'inappropriate' emotions, the mud, blood, and fur; birth and death and cruelty; fire, rock, and rain.  It is thrilling and beautiful, hands down the best film in the festival.

SFIFF 55: Snows of Kilimanjaro

This is a heartwarming story about good people whose ethical mindsets have calcified in middle age and don't serve them so well when crisis hits.  Set in the port city of Marseilles among shipyard workers and their families, I was expecting something grittier by far, but this gentle drama about salt-of-the-earth types got progressively sweeter until a sort of cynical instinct in me began to reject it.  The film was inspired by Victor Hugo's How Good Are the Poor, which is a sentimental disaster of a poem and not to be read under any circumstances.  I'm not immune to feeling good about good people, and I enjoyed the film's many subtle moments, but it's impact was weakened by its excesses.

SFIFF 55: The Loneliest Planet

I wanted to like this US/German production because, 1. it was so beautifully shot, with gorgeous landscapes, 2. it was a chamber drama with only three characters, which usually makes for dramatic intensity, and, 3. it had Gael Garcia Bernal in it.  But the film was ruined for me by the horrible character of Nica, whose irritating and banal personality pushed its way into every scene, as well as the general insufficiency of the script, which was so lackluster I nearly fell asleep.  The concept was good, and it could have been a great film, but it wasn't.

SFIFF 55: Twixt

Francis Ford Coppola's latest film is a luxurious gothic romp, with vampires, mad preachers, dead children, damned souls, doomed virgins, Edgar Allen Poe, and a lot of mist on the lake, which thing is a problem for the blocked, haunted, alcoholic writer at its heart (you just have to see it) but wonderfully comedic for us.  Beautifully shot, with isolated spots of impossibly rich color in cool, moonlit ghost-scapes, bright small-town vignettes that reminded me of David Lynch, and odd 3-D scenes.  It's an extravagant spectacle, but Poe's refrain about the death of beauty is still tenderly explored, and there are layers of mystery and enigma as well.  It's not entirely beside the point to remember that Coppola, like the character at the center of this story, lost his own child in 1986.

SFIFF 55: The Source

The perfection of this film is due in large part to the great trove of raw footage at its heart.  It's fascinating to watch in such detail the magnetic effect this self-styled 70's guru had on his 100-odd beautiful 'Aquarian children', and thank God it found its way into the hands of filmmakers skilled enough to render its power intact.  The result is a fascinating anthropological document of people on the edge of society developing primitive instincts to worship and wield power that lie at our collective core whether we care to admit it or not.  Glamorous, hypnotic, and profound ...

SFIFF 55: The Last Gladiators

I don't know what this says about me, but I loved watching the tough guys in this excellent doc about sanctioned violence in the NHL beat the crap out of each other.  It was a complete adrenaline rush!  There will be people who laugh at rather than with these bruisers, but I so appreciated the quietly unapologetic, sometimes gleeful logic of the film's central character, Montreal Canadiens star Chris Nilan.  He's a sort of heroic archetype, and his profound maladjustment to ordinary life didn't change that for me.  It's a great film, funny, thrilling, and compassionate.

SFIFF55: The Double Steps

A brilliant and completely original feature from Spanish director Isaki Lacuesta uses the life of French painter Francois Augieras, who painted his own 'sistine chapel' in a bunker in the Mali desert and then concealed it under sand, as a jumping off point to explore themes of identity, legend and visual representation.  It is poetic, non-linear, charming, funny, and beautiful, and its characterization of modern Africa is completely sympathetic.  It's easy to see why it took grand prize at last year's San Sebastian Festival.

SFIFF55: Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

A good documentary about an exceptional performance artist, this portrait focuses on her 2010 MoMA show in which she met the gaze of 750,000 gallery visitors one by one over a period of 3 months.  It was incredibly moving to watch individuals respond to her peculiarly open and vulnerable face with their own expressions of gratitude, curiosity, and pain.  Clips and interviews reveal her to be an extraordinary and charismatic personality whose creative feats of endurance challenge art world norms, audience passivity, and the limits of her own spiritual commitment to radical living and loving.

Quote: Joe Brainard

"I feel very much like God writing the bible.  I mean, I feel like I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written ..."

from a letter to Anne Waldman about his poem I Remember

Quote: Jackson Pollock

"I am nature"

Quote: Meister Eckhart

" ... we are made perfect by what happens to us rather than by what we do "

Golden Gate Park

Quote: Kafka

"Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made"

Black Wine - a poem by Philip Levine

Have you ever drunk the black wine - vino negro -
of Alicante?  The English dubbed it Red Biddy
and consumed oceans of it for a pence a flagon.
Knowing nothing - then or now - about wine,
I would buy a litre for 8 pesetas - 12 cents -
and fry my brains.  Being a happy drunk,
I lived a second time as a common laborer
toiling all night over the classic strophes
I burned in the morning, literally burned,
in an oil barrel outside the Palacio Guell,
one of the earliest and ugliest of Gaudi's
monuments to modernismo.  Five mornings
a week the foreman, Antonio, an Andalusian,
with a voice of stone raked over corrugated tin,
questioned the wisdom of playing with fire.
He'd read Edgar Allen Poe in the translations
of Valle-Inclan and believed the poets
of the new world were madmen.  He claimed an affair
with Gabriella Mistral was the low point
of his adolescence.  As the weeks passed
into spring and the plane trees in the courtyard
of the ancient hospital burst into new green,
I decided one morning to test sobriety,
to waken at dawn to sparrow chirp and dark clouds
blowing seaward from the Bultaco factory,
to inhale the particulates and write nothing,
to face the world as it was.  Everything
was actual, my utterances drab, my lies
formulary and unimaginative.
For the first time in my life I believed
everything I said.  Think of it: simple words
in English or Spanish or Yiddish, words
that speak the truth and no more, hour after
hour, day after day without end, a life
in the kingdom of candor, without fire or wine.

(2011)

Latin America Club

Quote: Fernando Pessoa

"In order to understand, I destroyed myself"

Quote: Levinas

" ... the first fact of existence is neither being in itself nor being for itself but being for the other, in other words, human existence is a creature.  By offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays."

The attic

Excerpt from a poem by William Blake

"When thought is closed in caves
Then love shall show its root in deepest Hell ..."

from Jerusalem

'Dear Salvation Army' - a poem by Dawn McGuire

You can have the goat
I got for reading my poems
In Willits
He has balded my yard

Now he's grazing my books
The bible from when I was baptized
is his favorite so far
He is a brindle-colored goat

and under  other circumstances
a fine reward for a reading
The poet before me
got fish

Please arrange pick up very soon
I am okay with losing Leviticus
Would like to save Mark
and Ruth

available at IF SF Publishing http://ifsfpublishing.squarespace.com/storage/DawnMcGuire_Interview.pdf

Papaya

Route 1

Quote: William Faulkner

"The past isn't dead, it isn't even past"

Bracken fern

The red room in Newburyport