Flying cars
In Cure, Yakusho Koji takes his wife to a hospital. They ride the bus together. Clouds roll past the windows, and there's no ground to hold the bus to. The two of them sit together in the back:
In Creepy (right), the same thing, as Yasuko drives her loving new family around in a van. These sequences remind me of Hitchcock and generally call to mind rear projection which I am thinking about right now.
A much more extreme rupture between the still vehicle interior and the dynamics of the outside. The clouds in these two films untether the van and the bus from the road, where they should be. A sense of travel without a sense of the space being traversed by the characters. Creepy complicates this with the inclusion of the shot where the camera/car/passengers speed under streetlights and some type of barred tunnel ceiling, nominally re-placing the vehicle on the road. At the same time these shapes are a small geometric fragment of what composes a road and do more to evoke movement than elaborate on the space.
The similarities in blocking between a rear-projected vehicle interior and a shot of filmgoers in a theatre, or of people watching TV on a couch. With buses or with cars the rows of seats. People sitting and looking, sometimes not at the screen. Of course the way the actual viewer is situated mirrors this also. We can say maybe that these shots visually reproduce the viewer. And the specific spatial interplay of rear projection represents for the viewer the... dreamy affect of being surrounded by movement while at a point of stillness? The fact that in both Cure and Creepy the outside is a sky or void-space. Just moving clouds which, while fulfilling the job of conveying transit in relation to the stationary vehicle, pushes the artificiality and also functions to emphasize the interior of the vehicle as the Real space. Then oh the interior of the theater as the real space, stolen from or given up by the viewer all the time
The young girl in Creepy sticks her head out the window. Nishino says "Get your head back in the car. That's dangerous."
At the party I got it mixed up and said it was the practice of apocrypha. It's mentioned on the same page but that was my mistake. On the way home from the party Camille and I talked about going shopping for some sunglasses because I don't have any. We had the same conversation at Athena's party last year.
Windy, not that windy. Steganography is not the practice of apocrypha. It's the practice of hiding information in messages or other containers. What is it that got so mixed up. Bought a few clothes. 磯女 can be mistaken, from behind, for a rock formation. In other words part of the landscape. She is localized pain and that is why 磯女 works for Everybody Misses Nina. The hair, the not really alive decoration of the body, as the medium for blood transfusion also. More of an absorption than a consumption. Hair strands veins externalized nerves / tactile organs. Something to think about. Hair's shielding, semi-protective function. You don't wanna eat, but you gotta. Historical convergence is real in that similar conditions produce similar results
It was a short sentence. Will my sentence be a short one. I wish, I wish, I wish.
Your house in my house
Madame Web
A gun is on the wall. After an argument, the gun goes off. Or it's on the wall, and later, the girl first visiting her friend's place finds out that she keeps it as a memento of her deceased hunter father. This is a bonding moment for the two, who eventually become a couple. What is this?
Madame Web. Dakota Johnson shows three teenagers how to take turns giving chest compressions. They don't talk about CPR before this. They talk about breakfast. She has hidden them in a motel from a deranged, superpowered businessman who believes these teenagers are destined to murder him one day. She has them practice trading off, keeping the collective rhythm of the compressions. This is an important scene. This is important because it is initially utterly nonsensical as a narrative element. We can imagine, maybe, that Dakota Johnson is thinking "this might be useful later," but there's no connective tissue. There's no easily imaginable reason why someone would show three girls CPR when a superhuman killer is after them. Absent a stronger motivation than "this might be useful later," the scene is reduced to signifying that it will be useful later. It will be essential, and it will be enacted ritualistically by the girls in the same order that they trade off doing chest compressions on this motel pillow. Dakota Johnson is later knocked unconscious on a rooftop, and the girls kneel around her. This scene in the motel is important because, because, it establishes a mythology of structural purpose.
Dakota Johnson watches a flashback where she realizes her mother died trying to find a cure for a degenerative illness that Johnson was going to be born with. She says something like "You did it. You did it. You saved me" in the flattest voice imaginable. Delivered this way, the verbalization of an emotional process manifests more as a structural element than one with a clear affect. The villain is even more distinctly freed of complexity. Across an almost entirely dubbed, emotionally inscrutable performance, he mostly simply repeats "I have to kill those children because they will kill me someday." These are performances that to some extent work to erase the emotional sentience of their characters. Without the cover of psychological development, the film engages in an almost religious devotion to structural devices as ends in themselves.
This is what I mean by a mythology of structural purpose. A determinism that states that things will happen because they need to in order to justify what will happen next. Writings by Aristotle and onwards direct the playwright or screenwriter or puppeteer or novelist to blanket the narrative gears as much as possible. To instead prioritize these devices without irony is notable.
In the context of a movie about clairvoyance it's especially striking. Johnson's visions of the future are formally indistinguishable from what we are shown as present diegesis, except for the fact that they are repeated immediately after. Her boss dies in a fatal car accident. Then she sees her boss getting into a car and he is crushed by an eighteen-wheeler. We know she saw the future only because it happens twice and she tries to warn him, but fails. Later, the girls run away from her and end up at a diner. Dakota Johnson pursues them there and arrives at the same time as the killer, who stabs her. She bleeds out on the floor until the next shot. She is unharmed, sitting in her car half a mile from the diner. Johnson drives back to the diner and runs the killer over, then drives off with the girls. Mushy temporality. This is a character who has the power to change the future because she can see it, placed in a narrative system that shows us things only because it wants us to know they are unavoidable. Agency is endlessly established as a thematic. At the same time it is endlessly subverted by the bare determinism of the film's structure. It becomes unclear if there's a contradiction here.
There is a perceived need for character motivation. It is not enough that something happens. The characters must make it happen because they intend for it to result in some outcome, and tension is built as we wait for this outcome. Madame Web refuses this to the viewer. Of course in a story things happen because in some structural sense they must in order to justify some later occurrence. Generally speaking this is a rule. But the lack of any real attempt to bury these devices under constructed psychologies affords special privilege to the narrative machinery as a generator of meaning. What meaning. If something happens, it will recur, and it happens because it will recur.
During her promotional tour, Dakota Johnson tells talk show hosts she doesn't know who this movie is for. In a real way she has a point. All the superheroes people like are taken. More people are sick of capeshit. The big stars have all been in a superhero movie already or adamantly refuse to. Real comic fans see this as a profane cash grab. In some way they are right, but the fact that people are not going to see this movie. No one is buying tickets to this movie except to confirm how bad it is or to revel in capital's grave miscalculation. The most bankable star is Sydney Sweeney and now she won't get her own movie because the implied Madame Web franchise is cancelled after the response to this film. The people who think it's camp do not really know what camp is. I don't know who this movie is for.
This is a gun on the wall that appears only in order to tell you it will later fire because it was there before. No one even has to touch it. This is a world that exists to prove it does. One time I thought I was going to move to Chicago because I became close with several people from Chicago over the span of a few months and received a letter from the university there.
I'm practicing.
Practice
0034 Coquette's first day
Had our first live set on Friday. Fireworks!! those were over Panchita's #2, over the grate over the underground room you could see into. Look, to me the lights are facing in this direction. My face and our face. We made all these songs for you. Raining hard and wearing my raincoat. I'm so thankful to Jupiter and Zachary, and everyone who came and everyone I met. And then we had our first day as the real sun held still around the sky.
Not always a lot to say but I try to learn, you know? I do
0033 Crocodile time
So everyone is sleeping over here and we play video games on Nick's ps5. We go play basketball at the park. Two fingers taped together. What else is there. I learn this trick from reading Hour of the Star, the easiest way to make something universal is to say
All of us see something in a girl with a hurt finger
We watched a number of horror movies together. I thought it was interesting in Terrified how the ghost hunters didn't care to vanquish the interdimensional vampires or whatever they were, it was enough to know they were behind the wall. Exciting even in the face of being turned inside out.
Birthday tomorrow. 23. When I write what else is there, maybe I should write what's better than this.
0032 Your week
Because this one like all of them is all for you. I thought. Keys. At the date, the rain, and shock all over trying to get into seasons. Nice the same atmospheric river at the same time of year, building tradition. Last night we Ryan and I watched Bug and before that talked about friends. Ryan is my friend. The date is displayed in the bottom right corner. Watched Bug and we loved it. Watched Bug and thought this is a real disaster. Early in the movie, there's a scene where Ashley Judd is startled by a guy trying to get around her in the liquor aisle, then goes into a fugue staring at onions and a shopping cart. Huge pile of red onions next to a huge pile of white onions. The shopping cart with an angular gleam.
A later piece of plot justifies it but before that you are thinking wow I can't believe someone finally said it. Bug shows you the same onions and the same shopping cart and says this means Ashley Judd's child was kidnapped ten years ago but really it's telling a truth way more secret than that. It's telling the truth like the rain, not like the date.
0031 Dialogue picked up off square
"Delany gets it right that our worst consequence is laziness. And I wear him like a patch for that. A patch over what, over nothing."
"Laziness"
"Worst, I don't know, certainly--
"Alligators in the sun"
"Yes, and"
--certainly a characteristic so inextricable as to be well characteristic of life in the ruins of capital."
"Yes, and"
"Deadstock Levi's, sherpa-lined"
The controller vibrated.
"Yes, and"Plough in, counting
0030 Blood relatives
0029 Here you can play Silent Hill
0028
"Oh, right I nodded off into the clutch of blackberry bushes.
I had been. I was there being told the story in the taxi's generous folds but it was totally a case of a barstool mis-
understanding decadence. The light in the taxi was a game of Family
Feud that a football dynasty was losing. The light in the taxi was
the other cars' headlights. Totally what, oh my god
it was totally boring. Telling you it later.
I could see all this not quite out yet. On the eve of
my arrival I was afforded, toothsomely. There remained time to consider varied plights.
For example a tactical incursion into a surgery ward, or more generally a hospital. That was just
an example. For example starting off with something totally teething.
if I died right now, cringe. Cringe bc we're rearranging
the letters again. A body is given a name, loses it, then
it gets another one. Sometimes the same, sometimes fibrous
substance, sometimes febrile, or fire hydrant. Fire truck
according to the canon. Red feeler.
At this point my useless right hand touches the
right door handle in the dark. It's not very effective...
The door stands tall and covers the attacked side
of its extended protectorate. A word. Totally.
A classroom vibe. The dental abomination that is a
ninety degree angle. Right, because imagine. Right
teeth ready to fall out and the wind took my hair at
the last possible moment. Took and lifted. What
am I supposed to worship the wind. What the
teeth? What else, automatic rifles. Totally.
The first liturgical object whistled between the
second an action I had no part in. I had and no
part in it. So cringe.
Before tipping out totally remembering
I didn't even bother to describe who was driving me or
if someone was driving
Fell in the bush thinking whether the gasoline affected the blackberries taste
0027 Bearing stone
Your ****** is going to suffer
For this, something, a voice you rebuild
Tells you.
Climbing out onto a
Plain soaked dry with dust and siren equipment. Out of a suit that looks like this.
Like this:
A flower that is going to suffer. Like this
Still, using your rubber feet as stamps
Climbing out onto it your figure unrendered because it isn't compelling
But imagine you're walking cartoonishly,
Holding a smaller, hateful-er landscape
0026
Brain and body on japan time. No problem. Went to work, played a bunch of porpentine games in my room. I played those things for like four hours. Remind me of being fifteen scrolling itch.io downloading until I feel sick like eating too much. I don't remember any of those games I just remember doing it. Think about in third grade when I tried to write a short story about playing a video game but I couldn't capture the experience of playing it. I wrote it out six or seven times and then I had to write something else maybe about an animal. It was some 2d metal slug clone on miniclip. And then this family came from France to my house, a son who was my age or a little older with blond or brownish hair, and I showed him the game. Me standing over him at my dad's computer desk.
He didn't understand that holding down the mouse made you fire the machine gun continuously, he couldn't figure it out intuitively which upset me and I couldn't communicate to him how to do it. Me standing over him at my dad's computer desk saying Click click in this french accent more like clique and miming keeping my finger pressed on the trigger. Then time for some snack or play on the trampoline.
Anyway the porpentine games are fun. I played to one of the three Armada endings and almost the second one but I think I forgot to destroy one of the ai's in the swamp factory after i got 100% corrupted and now am stuck in the armada area with seemingly no way back out. So game over and that's fine. I'm not a completionist even though sometimes the idea is appealing or you feel like you should be. Liked the music.
It would only play extremely intermittently once I returned corrupted and I thought this was an interesting choice but it's just as likely it was a bug. Came back in at random. Being forced to retread the same areas. You could think of the first scene in Godard's King Lear.
"Almanac of girlswampwar territory & the _girls who swim as fertilizer through the warm soil cloaking the roots of the glorious tree of eugenics (giving birth to a black hole in a walmart parking lot at 1am)" I also played. Not close to finishing it but it's hard to tell. I liked the words. Porpentine who seems to really suck online gets her work placed in art museums and is mostly known for text adventure interactive fiction things in Twine but I like games so I will be playing her games instead. I did actually try to play one of her twine things about some kind of space surgery monster robot killing you. It was boring and her writing stripped of its setting in a game world comes across as a little abhorrent. Back to the girl swamp game. The minecraft style hunger and sleep mechanics in girlswampwar are compelling because unlike in many survival simulations it is completely unsatisfying to maintain them. You step on a glowing tile and get a new sickness. The moon has an orchid eye. I died over and over for seemingly no reason walking around in the forest and felt a terrible ache each time.
0025 Alpine Dam opening voice-over
0024 Starting a pot of coffee
Terrible lymphatic pain. About good. If you brought something into existence you would want it to be good. If you had to recognize something you would hope it were either good or moldable into a good form, into goodness. Otherwise, otherwise. Terrible lymphatic pain. Hearing a noise outside that rips you from yourself. Obviously. Obviously otherwise you would just have watched a movie or had been. Inside if you learned about the ingovernability of laughter or that the sprites are all bound to one key the same key, nothing wrong with that and nothing to be changed neither, if you learned there's nothing wrong with that, if you could learn that tubercular emotion and feel a less destructive quiet.
A living room with a couch that folds out into a bed, a view of water distributing its pressure across the window, another house further out recognizable by its shadow. Science fiction over speculative. Someone started a pot of coffee, now someone needs to finish pouring it in. You're telling me all this and I'm telling you all this, and then we reveal to each other that we are termites wearing the bodies of rats that starved in our apartments.
0023 Premium basket
I am so very proud of Josh.
0022 There are
0021 In the living room
Doris throws a vampire themed birthday party. I cut myself shaving and make vampire bites with it. In her presumably non-functional fireplace are wine bottle candles at least ten burning. I'm happy looking at it. My friends and I take up residence on the couch which we leave a few times but ultimately end up back at, sometimes with guests. Mostly it's my friends and I hanging out at a party. I feel in some way a purity.
We watch a John Smith retrospective over two evenings, and Josh shows me his preliminary mix for Alpine Dam. We watch Empty Metal. In snatches I also watch Nosferatu on mute--at Doris' party, at the kitchen table, on our couch. Individually and as a group of experiences these make me reconsider how sound can relate to the image in a movie, how it doesn't only have to do with amplification. It's really stupid but I forgot because I had't watched Godard in too long. John Smith talks in an interview about making his films in such a way that it seems like anyone could make one like them. It's nice of him to say. I sit in the armchair now considering my spine.
In Empty Metal, Mother says that defining your project limits your freedom. She says something like that.
Karine's monologue, upon becoming a vampire (a lot borrowed from Nosferatu)
In the Anaximanderian analogy the heart is equivalent to
the sun. And the truth bore witness to the miracle. At that
very moment the Great Death came to an end, and the shadow
of the deathbird was gone. As if obliterated by the
triumphant rays of the sun. And I live by the light
of something else. Other things that have their own
referents. I learn to need because wanting is not
enough. All together, a piece of paper. Ink,
holding my hand. You loved me when I was born but
you love me more now I embrace you back. Replace
my card. Replace my card. Replace my card. Replace my
card. Replace my card. Replace my card.
When I find that the girl in Nosferatu is named Nina it's a weird surprise.
Nosferatu script (translated into English)
0020 Non-ionizing Radiation
Josh's virtuosic new iphone film is a joy to watch! It can only be viewed through a blog so keep that in mind
0019
The street five blocks from my place. I walked into you or walked up near to where you were, mistakenly. That's someone I know from high school. Like an instax camera I saw the real-produced image as soon as it was taken, one of walking in late, wearing a ridiculous T-shirt.
Into the classroom, stopping in front of you, asking if you recognized me. This was when I knew you. Vague-ly. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me.
Up to you with a dead or sleeping birch tree several feet to your left and cars scattered like a numismatist's lost collection. Essentially we were some of the contents of the wallet. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me. Do you recognize me.
It was weird because I don't live in a well-populated city and I'm far from where I was born. Your jacket was that of a tourist's, and your face had a threatening softness. I didn't know why you would be here. I was talking about different things every time.
0018 Coquette's first song
Coquette has made a song . Splintered homely music for girls who don't know how to read. They were talking in the cellar and someone knocked over a hundred year old bottle of hard seltzer, and the cobwebs were soaked. They laughed something gay they laughed something. The pools were black that wasn't a bad thing
0017 I sprained my ankle
At the same time you feel your self hardening you feel a dissolution. A draft of my book is finished. I generally avoid talking to people when I can in July. It's a bad habit especially because so many things seem to happen in July.
We watched Werckmeister Harmonies at the Roxie Theater. Josh and I. 3:20 showing. We both thought it was at 3 and so arrived then but this gave us time to buy a bag of peanuts at the corner store. The size of the movie is sometimes terrifying. Like the whale. The wash of light, the procession of faces in the square like a sculpture garden. The procession of entire bodies. It's never been clear to me whether the circus people actually do anything evil or if the townspeople simply work themselves into a fervor when the object of their discontent (whatever it is) is brought intolerably close. The helicopter. I didn't remember the helicopter from the first time I watched it and I'm glad to see it again for the first time in the theater.
After the movie, a group of people outside argue with the box office because he tells them there are only two tickets left for the next movie, and there are seven of them. They say we want seven tickets.
The cold enters our house through these places:
The cracked kitchen window
The laundry room, where the window is propped open to slow the growth of the mold
The fireplace behind the couch
The fireplace carries a draft, also sounds of thunder. Ryan wants to sample thunder in a song but probably a different rendition of it. Josh has been out of the house a lot, working. Everyone is talking about wives incessantly. Everyone is my roommates. Do you want me to wear knee high socks? I can if you really want me to, but you have to buy them for me. Zachary says I have really good hearing. I think it's true. It's for this reason I'm composing a score for Josh's film
0016 Unacknow shape
0015 I wrote another sonnet
It's on Zachary's blog
0014 No Hard Feelings
The Presidio Theatre. Green walls, fifteen dollar admission. I try to haggle but I'm shut down. This is where me and Josh see No Hard Feelings at 3:50 in the afternoon.
It's my favorite new movie of the year. A tow truck in a beach town, color grading in a palette from thirteen years ago, the mundane cruelty of the hook the bank steals your car with. Everyone, seemingly, all the remaining locals are abandoned lovers. Jennifer Lawrence acts out a role that's almost entirely empty, a series of emotions in archetypal scenarios rather than a person. This applies really to all the actors but Lawrence is the movie star. You see a character in broad strokes you never imagine the actors conjuring whole people. I think this is wonderful.
She walks through a concrete courtyard, she climbs a staircase on rollerskates. I hear the trailer misrepresented this movie completely. This is what it boils down to: at the behest of his absurdly wealthy parents, Jennifer Lawrence sexually assaults a socially inept teenage boy in exchange for a Buick Royal. From what I can tell that's what it boils down to. It seems impossible, malicious kind of, to read it as an endorsement. There's a neutering of images of decay that's exciting, the Buick Royal smashed by a tree. Jennifer Lawrence driving the Buick, covered in elastic cords, tape for windows, an Uber sticker suctioned on the broken windshield, bullying college kids into it. The back of a van filled with fishing gear, or torture implements, a fatality from the new Mortal Kombat, an organ ripped out through a screen. A car drives into the ocean with a woman on the hood, her back on fire. Afterwards, the driver and the passenger embrace. Her hoodie, yellow, is burned. Some people don't like the color yellow. I do.
0013 Divino Sonnets, Party forever
Alpine Dam is wrapped ! During dinner I forget to mention that it is the wrap dinner, but the air is still celebratory. My seafood soup has a blue crab in it, whole. I break the shell with a butter knife. Pieces of it crack onto the table. I pick them up fastidiously, fill the mini arepa bowl with the empty legs. I think to myself that people are so distinct. 911 by Sech plays in the restaurant.
The first time I hear that song I'm in an uber with Alice to the airport. Walking through the terminal I listen to it over and over. I shoot pieces of a sci-fi movie called And The Sun Refused To Set, which I will abandon two months from that point, maybe three. I consider grouping my experiences by place rather than chronologically, because now I think of it it's hard to remember which time in the airport that was. But I must have been with Alice. My bag was heavy, and everything shined.
In The Bedroom. The son of a doctor and a music professor puts his dreams of architecture on hold for love, and is killed by his girlfriend's abusive ex-husband. The parents grieve. Vengeance is exacted. It's interesting to compare with Tar, a ghost story, because in this film death is a total severance from the world. The living, the killer and the girlfriend, the friends' growing children, become haunting presences more than the dead son does. Sissy Spacek looks wonderful.
We throw a party at the house, I dress up as Zachary's blog. Zachary says reading Genet is turning him gay. Miles and I argue about who is more antagonistic. Josh dresses up as my blog. Chloe comes as their own. Most people fail to follow the theme. Still. It's a lot of fun. Athena gives me my new favorite jeans and I wear them to the baseball game.
A sentence from my book. "He feels a sad affinity." We will see if it comes out true. I write a third sonnet:
You've never heard of wicca phase springs eternal?
Heartless I rite of spring around the trees.
I, we, eye the car and sit perfectly
Jawed, perfectly still, cranes. Later you knew
Where we were supposed to go, the way to
Make sense of the GPS, but right then
A red wire, a white one. Like a bomb.
You gave the run-down store some dialogue:
We look out of place, don't we, didn't run
At the right time, did we. A parent bone
Salivating in the wind. Shifted tone
An overbearing scape, five or six birds,
A clue implying it's common to cope
After losses on the track. Forget me,
Forget how forget me forget my sleeve.
0012 Escape Room
0011 Pliable Fragrance
My divino sonnet can be found on my wonderful friend Jupiter's site on the blog page
0010 The Red And The Black
On archive.org, I see a filmed adaptation of two scenes from The Red and The Black, the first where the hero Julien Sorel is beaten by his father, the second, an aborted duel. In both scenes, the pages of the text itself are the only thing pictured, they fill the frame. It reminds me of Derek Jarman's Blue, which I watched a youtube rip of, a polluted experience, maybe, as the blue pixelated, artifacted in parts of the screen. No longer completely static. In the same way the only movement in The Red And The Black is the rare change of light across the pages. The camera cuts when page-turning is implied. Voiceover like a combine harvester. They must have done multiple takes, I think as I watch it, the narrator doesn't ever stumble. I wonder why the two scenes were chosen. The experience of reading, having a book read to you simultaneously, not reading as much as being shown the text, changes the words more than I think it would. I read the original a few months ago. Wished the scenes in the gaol were adapted, also.
37 minutes, 1981
Jean Gruber, narration Emile Tailleur
0009 By popular demand...IMG_3776
This like much of my other work is a short film about television
0008 My week
I watch Wax again with Josh and Zachary. I'd meant to show it to Josh for a while, half the reason I wanted to be friends in the first place had to do with something he said about ghostly presences in photographs and that reminding me of the film. Down the hall, Ryan coughs. I'm surprised the whole time by blair's engagement with the frame, not even really a window but a world itself, which can be bent, turned inside out, warped, folded, broken into tiny pieces, doubled. Bodies, planets, as linguistic elements. It's a hard movie for me to describe. In Sweet Days of Discipline Fleur Jaeggy compares memory to a wall of graves, disobedient corpses that talk as much or as little as you don't want them to. Pulse describes a finite, overpopulated purgatory, nobody knows what to do with ghosts. Everyone seems afraid, ambivalent at least, about the prospect of coexistence, the implicit promise that the links they create won't last seems like an essential factor in psychic business models. But Blair's excitement about sharing space, time, with the dead is infectious. Also the past several days, Zachary has been more closely identifying with the Mr. Bean character than I expected him to when we moved in together.
Earlier, on my way to the BART station two girls carry a dog onto the bus like a handbag. It's small and white, half-blind. One of its eyes is an opaque gray. It's a mundane sight, but there's nothing else I think to look at. The dog's good eye stares at me. The two of them are coming from college, something. On the way home. I can't hear their conversation, I'm listening to 3Oh3. When I get off I avoid looking back because in my imagination the dog doesn't register my movement at all and I don't want to prove myself wrong.
I'm nervous later, when I get off the train, then not at all. When you watch a memory and it plays out the way you know you imagined it might in your head it's hard to think of it as a real experience. Others from this week are more true. The sun starts rising before we finally start the True Blood finale. The disorienting cuts every two seconds, the cheap sets, a new microexpression before every single line in close-up, give me a strong feeling of watching TV. This basically is what beauty means.
James Hive Maker imagines it as a place of dense vegetation.
Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees
https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858668239/
0007 Change My Mind excerpt
Tiny piece of my book
0006 Volumes
words from Geno Smith postgame press conference, week 18, 2022 NFL season
Media accessibility as a hostage situation, sports spectatorship as a hostage situation
0005 The Haunting of Queen Ansleis
Two nights ago my good friend suggests i write about the haunting of Frances Quinlan and their band Hop Along's post-Freshman Year output. I've only heard Freshman Year, which according to Josh is extremely different from their newer work. Freshman Year depicts the communal act of Playing music, sharing it. Voices of friends sometimes obviously added at the beginning, middle, end of songs, the haphazard entrances of percussion instruments. Josh calls it anti-hauntological as in the recording the place remains exactly as it was, on Freshman Year all the people in that room are in that room, continuing telling about the farmer telling the boys that it's getting late, that it's best they come back in. Until such time as time ends.
Queen Ansleis' name disappears from the band's face after this album, the sound changes dramatically. The place their music recreates now requires extrapolation if there is a place to be found at all. Which is fine but it's different, right. Freshman Year invokes a place, sings and plays it back into existence, Get Disowned reproduces emotional landscapes and sonic memories. Asides by family or friends are replaced by plundered radio recordings. Listening to Laments of A Mattress, now augmented, electrified, everything in time. The song is just called Laments on Get Disowned. Freshman Year engages with stories of war, cruelty, clearly placed in the past but does so with immediacy, on Freshman Year the mattress maker makes his living by the minute. Even when the words are the same on Laments you struggle to imagine the mattress maker still in his shop, the minutes he made his living during are not the ones when you're listening to the song. Harmonies that occupied more space on Freshman Year are separated by layers of reverb, rendered ghostly, somewhere else harder to hear. The only presence fully recognizable is Quinlan's and they remember everyone who was there but can't conjure them fully. She's wearing a white dress.
0004 paper on El Coraje Del Pueblo
written in April 2022
0003 Everybody Misses Nina
0002 Together Forever
Zachary called this movie I made "sweetly brutal" and i hope you enjoy this enough to think of something similarly lovely!
0001 Short Piece About The Fridge
I find a fragment of a calf in the fridge, the plastic mostly papered over with nutritional notices so it is hard to see what color exactly the meat is.
I leave the door open while i massage the packaging. My legs do not shiver from the wave of cold the way they would if i were awake doing this. The blood shoots through the tiny warped plastic channels from areas of high pressure to low. It, i know because i can see it during these quick spurts behind the monochromatic percentages and into the corners of the vacuum sealed oblong, is dark red.
did you know that this blood you find on, in, store-bought meat is not really blood, but some sort of muscular fluid? All of the real stuff is drained out in the slaughterhouse.
0000 Karen Black Doesn't Pass
welcome! this is my blog and over time it will fill. i plan to write about karen black not passing but if i forget, i am right and if you think about it you will also realize i am right. here you will find movies writing and songs by me and my best friends and possibly people i dont know at all. Dont worry about it!