i wrote a post on the velveteen rabbit and velve-teens over at montevidayo (caption from source): Riva London stars as the velveteen rabbit in Ballet Theatre San Luis Obispo’s holiday production.PHOTO BY BARRY GOYETTE (Source: http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=2784 )
I haven’t posted anything in months. No reason. But I thought I’d put something up today to show that I’m not dead. I’ve managed to squeeze myself into a screenwriting class 2 weeks late, and have been working on “Loglines” for the first assignment. Not surprisingly, my loglines seem to be the kind that will never get sold. But how awesome would it be if I could turn these into actual movies?
LOGLINES
1. MARS VIOLET
2. MINOS
Introverted schoolgirl who can see into the underworld befriends a jaded but brilliant teenager in trouble with drug lords and gets dragged into the fray.
3. MASTER APHRODITE
A modern per-version of the venomous love triangle of Aphrodite, Eros, and Psyche leading to the suicide of two children, set in a summer camp.
4. MEAT FAIRY
A lonely fast-food worker grows pathologically attached to the food products he makes, believing them to be sentient; meanwhile, a meat packer dies in a meat packing factory.
In other news, I have an interview at Radioactive Moat (Ugly Fish is now a free download!), and my book, Butcher’s Tree, is now available for preorder. It ships right after AWP. Speaking of which, I will be doing a book signing on Saturday at the Black Ocean zone. I will, however, be reading at 2 readings, Thursday and Friday nights. Thursday night will be a strange affair inside bathroom stalls with Lara Glenum, Lucas de Lima, Johannes Gorranson, Kate Durbin, and other strange people at a location TBD (because I don’t know where, and I’m hoping it’s off site so I can actually do it) and Friday (I think!) will be a Black Ocean reading with my awesome Black Oceanographers. Details to come. Why is this year’s AWP sold out? Has there suddenly been a population explosion of avid poets and writers? Tough times call for feeble literary types?
I’ve also been reading this http://www.scribd.com/doc/42995065/PONGE-Nature-Things book by a french poet, Ponge, who loves snails and talking about pebbles. The one line that sticks out to me regards the secretion of humans, and this secretion is not like/unlike the creation of shells by mollusks, but rather than calcium, we secrete language.
Finally, I never thought I would like a show like Downton Abbey. But I am getting old, and historical dramapics are becoming more and more interesting to my wrinkling mind.
Also, looking forward to the birth of my book. Look at this amazing cover design! Thanks to Janaka Stucky and Josh Wallis and all the hot people at Black Ocean for this:
Cover Image
The Thing is this alien parasite that attacks you, turns your body inside out, and then reconstructs your body and lives inside it. The reconstruction is exactly like you.
Influence is The Thing that waits for you in the dark. When you are alone. Then it becomes you.
Yes, it is astral/alien. The Thing is ultimately anything alive, because you cannot tell when you’ve been influenced/infected/inspired. You can trust no one.
The Thing is ultimately dead. It can only live through others, through manipulation and possession.
It commits spectacular unsightlinesses.
Does that scene remind you of the boar in Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke?
What happens to birth? The Thing does not reveal the possibilities of reproduction, only replication. Also, there are no women in the movie.
Princess Mononoke is about the struggle to coexist. The Thing is literal coexistence. When the other becomes you. The fear of that.
There is a strained analysis that parallels the thing in transition with marginalized womanhood. Guts orifices and uteruses and stuff.
I don’t mind it because womanhood is made up. That is the thing.
I am of the tribe perpetually worried about being pregnant.
Because of money.
When I think about the world, which reaches out to me from the internet, everyone seems like a Thing.
$$$
But I believe that we can break out of Thingness.
I can’t say how. I haven’t.
Paul Cunningham of Radioactive Moat has been in labor for many days (he made this gooey thing!), and my first chapbook should be arriving any minute now, with a full head of hair.
Taxidermia, one of my favorite movies! By Palfi. Probably not that fun to read on a blog, but since I haven’t posted in a month, and it seems relevant to the theme of mortal steaks, I’ll just vomit it up a little here. Oh, and this article is good and helped me think about the movie. You should all see it!
This is where I talk about the meat pack:
A disembodied female voice begins and ends the extremely male-focused epic of three generations of Hungarian men. Taxidermia implies that the “art” of history, so focused on masculine, rational perspective and desire, obliterates the feminine and its respective attributes. But as Stallybrass and White attest, what is overtly excluded or marginalized by the dominant class is also symbolically central to its identity. The female body is not the overt object of focus; it has been not just negated but also exploded, diffused and suffused throughout the entire film, but perhaps the pervasiveness of the grotesque in Taxidermia makes these othered, feminine images so blindingly conspicuous that once again, their source becomes invisible. The repressed female, the lower sex, the sex associated with the porcine, the bodily and instability of all manner is present only as symbol, yet it is physically channeled through the male body. Taxidermia’s taboo-laden terrain reconfigures the gendered terms of the social “economy of signs” and gives us a vision of history as regurgitated slop that resists rational determination. The feminine Life Cycle and masculine Revolution become one undifferentiated series of convulsing, distended stomachs, while the object of history turns into the grotesque mounting of a dismembered human corpse, an allusive hybrid of Michelangelo’s David and Antioch’s Venus de Milo.
Seems that I enjoy everything that Johannes Goransson writes. His latest post on Black Swan made me think about “being an artist”. Here is my personal reading of the film as an allegory for Art… Johannes writes, (and this is nice because I also felt that the film wasn’t trying to convey the boring you-have-to-be-hetero/sexual-to-have-real-artistic-passion):
“The way to this success is not by sex, but through a couple of other means: Fantasizing about *homosexual sex* (with Lily) and, much more importantly, fantasizing about killing Lily (Art is Crime, as Joyelle likes to say). Art is fantasizing. She doesn’t actually have sex, but she imagines (homosexual) sex. She performs, but she performs so well she herself can’t tell the real from the fantasy. Art is quite convincing!”
Indeed it is the fantasy, the empathy, the allowing of herself to become other and the war between worlds/personas that break her out of her frigid skin. She succeeds in her performance because she succeeds in collapsing membranes between the mundane real and the fantastic… but it is the violence and the wounds and the morbidity of these fantasies that speak to what Art is. It is a hunger that is so great that it implodes the body. What Nina possessed in her transformation into the Artist is her hunger, her huge hunger (which makes her anorexia/bulimia interesting) for the release/climax that cannot come. The fact that it is realized in fantasy only fuels the hunger, and its gravity grows so great that the real and the unreal become undifferentiated. The references to Hunger Artist are key, as Art is denial of the real. The Artist must lust for something unattainable, must continually hunger.
In a previous post, where I offer a very plain vanilla reading of the film’s moral, I said that selfishness was what allowed Nina to become an Artist. But the film is not simple. The bleeding between frames, as J pointed out, does not allow for linear, easy readings to sit by themselves. I would like to complicate this Selfishness by opening the word to its consequences/connotations including violent introversion. The spectrum of Nina’s hunger/desire increases exponentially when sex (Thomas) and rebellion (Lily) enter as magnetic forces. Her pink childhood life at home serves as the opposition and forces Nina, who must please everyone, to implode her desire, since, paradoxically, she is allowed no outlet, no privacy to relieve herself. Things begin to burst bloody at the seams (I do like the interpretation of the ending as menarche). It does not matter if Lily is real or not. If Lily is an imagined projection, then Nina succeeds at Art by entering the fantasy and becoming the Black Swan. She cannot become Lily… Lily is the unattainable that she must hunger for, and who ultimately threatens her because of the ambiguous nature of what exactly she is… that Nina might disappear into her hunger and digest herself… her identity is put at risk. Art happens when she “lets go” and allows herself to bleed into otherness, to allow herself to be murderous, evil, jealous, lustful. She is Lily, The Black Swan, Nina, and Beth all at once. Self becomes multiple. Mirrors are shattered and mirrors penetrate. The artist does not need heterosexual experiences or even real experiences at all to enter Art. She needs to let go of wholeness and embrace the Black “hole-ness” of hunger.
Speaking of holes, the image of the feathers trying to burst of her skin in the mirror reminded me of a passage from ”A Thousand Plateaus” about the hysterics of psychosis according to Freud:
“Yet it would never occur to a neurotic to grasp the skin erotically as a multiplicity of pores, little spots, little scars of black holes, or to grasp the sock erotically as a multiplicity of stitches. The psychotic can… “
Nina’s psychosis is erotic and obliterating.
I related to Nina a lot. So much, in fact, that I purposely distanced myself from the movie while I was watching it. It would have been too much otherwise.
I’d been wanting to see Black Swan for a while. And I’ve been reading Montevidayo a lot and loving it, and then I saw that M. Milks wrote something about The Wrestler and Black Swan and I wanted to be able to read it… so I went to the movie on Xmas eve with my brother. Then I came home and read the article.
Great movie. The effects that made Nina’s psychological trauma a “reality” were my favorite part. Like Milks, I felt like there was something about the film that left me unsatisfied. Milks isn’t convinced that the self-destructive Nina was motivated by her own character or the “real horrors” of her world… I’m not on the same page. I see both the White and Black swan as representations of oppressive identities. Nina is tragic because she has no character… she is smothered/controlled by her mother, lives in suspended childhood, and has no life outside of the ballet company, within which she has no social connection. She wants to be perfect in all the clichéd senses of the term, and along with this comes the expected “disorders” in diet and self-harm. She wants to be Perfect and please everyone, but when her tiny world of music boxes and pink solitude is ruptured, it is her lack of a self that makes it impossible for her to please anyone. Perfect is an ambiguous term and is not definite. For Thomas, it is passion, or reigned eroticism/chaos. Nina doesn’t understand passion and Perfection to her, means pleasing others (fear of disappointing others)… this becomes a problem when there is a diversity of expectations of what she should be. She is uninterested in pleasing herself, which makes the moment when Thomas tells her to go home and “touch herself” interesting because she must be directed towards a self that doesn’t exist. Yet. This point is where the film becomes interesting.
Art that moves comes from within, and she has no within. Nina’s dancing is flawless, but impersonal. It is only when real feeling enters that she gives the “perfect” performance. Her heart is actually broken. She actually feels jealousy. She actually feels her own pain. She actually feels lust. Feels resentment, hatred that is her own. She is, at the critical point, violent and ruthless towards others… and finally the white swan. (Thomas tells her that the only way standing in the way is herself.) The mistake is that she believes him. When she self-destructs in the end, the moment was flat because it seems to end up being the old fight between black and white, this and that, self and other… though in Nina’s case, she is mostly a channel through with the desires of various others war. The point at which she finally gets a tenuous sense of self, of selfishness, is also the point at which she must die. Kill the selfless self. This makes sense, is necessary, because Nina’s entire existence is dependent on the wills/desires of (m)others. Not even at the top of the ramp at the conclusion of Swan Lake does she have any idea why she doing what she doing or what she wants, except that she had felt Perfect for once in her life. Perfect, in this sense, as selfish. Unrepressed. Acknowledging her own will / lust / drive. Her doll shell cracked, she is able to do something other than idolize others. She can finally empathize, as shown in the scene at the hospital with Beth, the other suicidal dancer destroyed also by Thomas. The tragedy of Black Swan is that Nina does not reach that outlet that Lily provides (Lily, the self-pleasing, successful, lustful)… she does not get to live/dance as an individual, (let alone dance for the sake of dance, which can only happen after the self is relinquished, and this can only happen after there is a self to begin with,) because she has already been eaten by her life, the company, the mother. Too bad!
So please yourself.
In my epic adventures as pro-procrastinator, I have seen quite a few (or started) films of late. Ones of note include Eraserhead and Ghost… the latter of which I had to stop watching because it made me cringe inside out… but I finally figured out who Patrick Swayze was, which made an apples to apples game in which he was the perfect answer to “clammy” make beautiful sense… and I was also able to figure out how I feel about David Lynch. It’s love.
Two quotes that cemented this love:
“I’m obsessed with textures. We’re surrounded by so much vinyl that I find myself constantly in pursuit of other textures. One time I removed all the hair from a mouse with Nair-Hair just to see what it looked like. And it looked beautiful”
“I’m really interested in textures … For instance, I once had this dead cat. A vet gave it to me. I took it home. It was a real experience. I got all set up for it in the basement. And I dissected it. I examined all its parts, the membranes, the air, the skin, and there are so many textures which may be pretty gross on one side but when you isolate them and consider them more abstractly, they are totally beautiful. There’s something in nature, especially when nature starts decomposing, that brings out these textures. For a long time I loved looking at that.”
Texture is probably what I care about most aesthetically. If words have textures, if language has texture, then I am more interested in texture than form/content, though of course all of them are related and inextricable from each other. Sometimes I want to lick my books and my fingers get excited when I read. I guess what I mean when I say texture is ambiguous… but like, when Fanny Howe says, out of nowhere, “…the sea at last lies over this place / and registers expressly…”, the sea she is talking about isn’t actually the sea. I don’t know shit about semiotics, but there is some major sliding between signs going on here, or some intense oscillation between signifier and the abstraction it creates. It’s not non-sense, but it’s definitely not normal-sense. The word sea without its normal context is naked. Whatever is sieved from my sea connotations is left and fleetly grappled with by my passing over it with my touchy eyes. A sea that lies. It can only be registered as a sub-text or thought-texture. And then Fanny Howe says, “…I know evolution is done developing / Its laws of mathematics must be correct / In my created head I don’t exist…” and “the mist / is fixed…” and this camouflaging of the self or dissolving or whatever one calls it I imagine to be like a blending or blinding into texture.
http://sp.dictionary.com/dictstatic/d/g/speaker.swf
[teks-cher] 
Show IPAnoun, verb, -tured, -tur·ing.
Eraserhead unravels like a poem to me. There is so much layering of imagery and clotting of symbols and mating/weaving of textures. The tapestry is a mood.
Here is a nice bit of writing about it:
http://www.thecityofabsurdity.com/papers/jdl.html
I was very taken by the brain-stem thing, or plant/intestine hybrid thing that is littered throughout the movie.
Here is an non-grotesque piece of fabric art by Seiko Kato that reminded me of the little worm stems:
I’ve been thinking about butterflies, poop, and poetry, and I feel like a crazy person because I think everything is connected. The word “fold” has been very important to me lately. I’m excited to read “The Fold” at some point though my pile of books is looking rather Everest…
In The Fold, Gilles Deleuze argues that Leibniz’s writings constitute the grounding elements of a Baroque philosophy and of theories for analyzing contemporary arts and science. A model for expression in contemporary aesthetics, the concept of the monad is viewed in terms of folds of space, movement, and time. Similarly, the world is interpreted as a body of infinite folds and surfaces that twist and weave through compressed time and space. According to Deleuze, Leibniz also anticipates contemporary views of event and history as multifaceted combinations of signs in motion and of the “modern” subject as nomadic, always in the process of becoming. -University of Minnesota (yay!) press
On another digressive note, a friend and I were talking about the non-membrane between thinking and sensing. I like being like a kid that makes up words by crashing them together. Sense + Think = Sink. Or like, in the awesome Look Around You series…
I like the idea of sinking into texture.
Some random in-bed doodling that connects this to the previous post about sucking.
Finally, some nice texture from my very own window:
This post from Montevidayo about Let the Right One In made me think about seams. The post made nice links between anachronism/seams-in-time and the seams in Eli’s vampire-child body.
I really loved this movie when I saw it. It has a great color palette.
I find Eli’s body interesting because of its displaced sexuality… she can never go through puberty. Joyelle says “Eli’s removal from reproductive futurism is signified by the removal of her genitalia, which leaves a visible seam in her body, just as anachronism is a visible seam at which would-be separate time periods come into contact.” As a female who never menstruates, and instead must consume the blood of others to survive, she is the opposite of “reproductive futurism”. I am fascinated by the way her body invites/causes seams to break in other bodies. A seam that breeds other seams. Oxymoronic reproductive infertility / productive failure. Eli is death/drive, the period without periods, seam that is bled into rather than out.
Reminds me of this:
the Healing of St. Thomas by Anish Kapoor (I’m obsessed with AK)…
ANISH KAPOOR: Exactly, and to bring colour into space. I think, if I might be so bold as to dare to put myself in that lineage, I’m interested in the idea that form in a sense turns itself inside out, that the inside and the outside are equivalent to each other, that we don’t just enclose. The form is continually in a warp, and continually turning itself inside out. Now I have a feeling that’s a very contemporary idea about form.
JOHN TUSA: I’m interested you mentioned phallic because I get the impression sometimes that when people look at your works, the one thing that they feel they can’t quite mention in their English way is that of course they are womb-like. Womb-like is the easy bit. Vaginal and things like that.
ANISH KAPOOR: Anti-phallic, the opposite of Brancusi. Inward. Downwards.
JOHN TUSA: Downwards!
ANISH KAPOOR: If one took a platonic model, one might say the back of the cave, away from light towards darkness.
JOHN TUSA: But you actually penetrate to the back of the cave, and penetrate is the word.
ANISH KAPOOR: Rather than the front of the cave, which is light and forward and out towards the open world.
I would call Let the Right One In an “anti-phallic” film. It is anti-linear, implosive, anti-seminal. It draws, rather than penetrates. The seam is an opening and a closing. I’m not done thinking about this, but I’m going to go to bed now and leave this post with the following lines from Gertrude Stein which can be found in the beginning of Reines’ “The Cow”:
Sucking is dangerous. The danger of sucking.
I am interested in all that suck.
Even those with a limited capacity for reflection can sense the urgency of emptiness. ”How can I start over?” “Can I start over?” They ask themselves, they ask no one in particular. But what would they do?
“Screw your authority”.
I was struck by the mute interactions between family members here. Seemingly nothing binds them together. Necessity keeps them coming back to the home. The father’s life is pathetic, a thin gauze wrapped around a huge mass of humiliation. In the end, the kid piano player is the only one who can convey some kind of dignity and feeling, and humanity returns, and they are no longer dead people. They turn beautiful.
The members of the family do not seek to convey anything complex, only to hold together the precarious nucleus of their co-existence. They struggle with the inability to uphold primitive ideals, to fill their roles. They unthinkingly stumble through suffering and meaninglessness, unable to create their own meaning. Sometimes I am ashamed of myself because I look down on others, thinking that there are “coarse” souls and “polished” souls. I separate myself from the characters in the movie, from the uneducated.
I begin to doubt real depth. What’s so great and transcendent about intense self-awareness? How am I more alive? Is beauty more beautiful to me because I’ve written theory papers? Does my life have more “meaning”?
