Library Guy

With the enormity of holding keys, the anxiety of secret Sunday morning when no one ever comes the first hours

or late Monday when the sleep sets in on the studious and they clear out

that par-lit time the stacks have mass, get weight, hang heavy off a low-watt bulb

dead man- and spunky woman-names show on the spine, or in deep footnotes

stamping the place like a caught lover

me just being the sentry, acting the watch, my bowel holding a cosmos of ghosts, the knot of human mind I don't know my own

my walkabout a rendezvous with a fear that if I lie down I never rise, that there's only my walking then nothing

that the odd ideas smelling of thread and binding glue, they're the only real,

that, and the frontispiece of a dragon folded with a pencil note:  my home

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Style-Blind

A teacher once said that satire can't just wallow in its subject; it needs to follow it with a keen, but quietly judgmental eye.  

Over the past 30 years, America's puritanical heritage has resurfaced in its politics, and much of that can be attributed to fear that what we see in P.T. Anderson's Boogie Nights was 'real', that it represents what was a 'mainstream deviance that corrupted our children'.  Even people who 'experimented' may wrongly believe that this movie shows 'what it was like'.

Actually, Anderson gets wonderfully comic performances out of these actors, some of whom have become fixtures, either as major names or solid supports.  They all play deluded people of average talent and intelligence, maybe a bit less, who focus on their American Dream which -- given the Southern California milieu -- means using the lens of a porno industry camera.

You don't watch Boogie Nights for sex or for music, though both suffuse the movie . . . uh . . . top to bottom.  You watch it to find the true nature of your pity.  How much human outreach do you have?  How would you -- if this were real -- how would you counsel any of these people?  You gladden when the ones who don't sink from their actions don't sink.

Most of the movie is simply fun, despite the awareness that  those dumb-headed actions happening recklessly at the edge of one behavioral cliff or another presage downfall.  For some of the characters, disaster comes.  For others, life plods on in very common ways.  

It's not real, but as you watch, you see how it could have been real.

Watching and seeing are retrospective skills.  That's what art is for.

Living is for mistakes.

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Kiss, Kiss

Within love

discontinuities, however

you count the bickering and maybe

one or two of the fallings-out

followed by climbings-back-in

they do say it's there anyway

the pair-bonding, for life, like

two swans.

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Feel The Power

Australia's Aboriginal Elder, Cedric.

How 'primitive' must a culture be, still to hold onto a human interplay with -- not the physical world?

Hopi Chief Dan Evemhema.  His spiritual compass has centered in North America, but tapped into mystery, too.

For 'contemporary', 'scientific', 'secular', 'modern', 'technological' mankind, though,

when did the last 'respected elder' live and die?

Sometime when common households held several generations.  

1940?

Let's check Wikipedia on this.

(photo:  Ted Szukalski)

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Street Saint, Saint Street

Attestation as to the ear-

witnessing of the heart's want.

Was as if i'd pulled a bunny out or flipped

a coin had landed on its edge as a naturist 

knowing a bird from a bat were a flutter in the belfry

weird and wild no plainer nor truer

was the angel talked from voices

vocal in my bowed-down head.

Sworn this day, as my maternal aunt

had a brother-in-law whose son was me.

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Victory In Europe, 1945

This Vera Lynn RAF appearance.

Stanley Kubrick uses her song as the exit from his 1964 Dr. Strangelove, as an 'automated deterrent' of nuclear bombs mistakenly (subconsciously!) gets triggered -- the Doomsday Machine causing 'blossoms', one after the other, Springtime.

Kubrick's irony goes, as usual, that distance into the human heart . . . which only The Shadow seems to know.

This entry to the brave people, dead and living, who weathered those times and fought that 'good war'.

And good will to the many who oppose fascism in all its forms.

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Laying Out The Cards

The town quarter where we have slept sleep, some men at golf under umbrellas, the women upturning diamonds and hearts,

unto the babies a donation of constant things,

what is magic after all except the continuance that has no answers for itself

that it's begun is all, that there was a start, that a stranger, a man choosing between two forks of a road goes headlong off onto the highway of his own making

and what of paths, anyway, they just go and we're not sure they stop since that end produces a fresh choice.

If you wander to the left and I move my hand to the left I am taking the same journey and if I cry at the season when sadness calls for it and you pinch tears from your own eyes you are feeling the same sadness

and when the woman needing distraction plays the deck, and after the lay observes what the cards have turned, the resultant,

she sees a woman playing the deck and observing, and still hears the infant, still feels what's been there the while, the squeeze at her breast, that surprise, that unconditional.

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Lying Low, Flying High

To be roused by a handful of beads

and on the carpets were strewn petals

ears filled with the fiddler and the bongo

touches, blue songs arrested from the night

at the marrakesh of a friend's apartment

gold spangles and red pills and pillows

all this evanescent scene foretold by Roz

from her beatnik couch, hand on her clavicle

a relic, this memory, an ancient find, so very old

clacking of beads, night resting upon itself.

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That Time Of The Deity

Being it's the month of 45 and rainy

one gazes at the deck and wonders

if I saw a god's face, I might turn it to stone,

or draw mustache or scribble some jokes

or become like rain myself or forget my name

Being it's a week of the 45, rainy,

too cool for the deck, one stalls in the thought

about just what makes things a god and

whether I could make one an ornament from stone

or paste it to pictures of cities far off as a cute joke.

Being the remainder is 45, rainy, 

such final days are to brood

over whether to bury or burn, dig down a god

alongside me -- or mount us both on the mantle,

twin boys, and obsessed for fame, for esteem, to be loved.

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The Parts And What They Make Up

After almost 30 years, the magic of this still holds. 

Peter Weir is one of the few directors who has managed to allow-in, for his audiences, a sense that the world isn't flat, that our apprehension of it as a scientific object or manipulable set of economic relationships -- that understanding -- isn't the prime or only way of taking-in the world.

His The Mosquito Coast, his Picnic At Hanging Rock, his The Last Wave, surround eccentricity, weirdness, or mythic spirituality.  The Year Of Living Dangerously, which might be a love story alone, or an earnest socio-political pitch set in Sukarno's Indonesia, gains immensely from the character Billie Kwan, Linda Hunt's smashing 'trouser' role.

Billie is the puppeteer, the clever arranger of his part of Jakarta, maneuvering foreign journalists and embassy people, as he may try, to effectuate success for a -- depicted here -- sympathetic Sukarno walking a thin line between Communist insurrection and military repression.

The film is not just a liberal plea, worthy though that is.  Sacrifice shows itself, several people risking real personal jeopardy and giving themselves over to doing the right thing while surrounded by corruption and cynicism.  

The clip above, while (still!) hotly romantic, represents a moment not simply of sexual assignation, but of moral choice -- Jill (Sigourney Weaver) is betraying and committing at the same time.  In accepting what she gives, Guy (Mel Gibson) is now placed at a moment of choice himself. 

They're not conscious of it, but they have been taught Billie's idealism and they do not fail him.

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A Little Big Song Of The Earth

What comes, comes.  An upstart park alongside a sidewalk witnesses up-shoots of the spring, an urbanscape where a cluster, itself, of daffodils in yellow constitutes awe.

In the shuffle to find a purpose, as the sun spills onto a clear pond, slapping us awake to confront or present or simply be,

that bright yoke flashes in the moment, the madly artificial gone.

No business of ours anyway how business goes when the body is going in its turn in tune with its life's own hum.

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Art Means Work. Yes, Work.

This should open your eyes and interest you.  

What to those of us who are 'just plain folks', who believe in 'democratic arts', who may recognize that being called a 'philistine' is a slur, but simply show our social equality in return (Back at ya!) -- what to us appears as an elitist enterprise, ballet, really produces more sweat in a day than a lifetime of backyard barbecues and lawn-mowings.

This clip doesn't show it all:  the blisters and infected corns, the slipped discs, the exhaustion, the struggle just to be able to get a chance to suffer that way!  The schooling, the disciplined adolescence, the foregone 'outside' life, the forced 'early retirement' at 30 or -- if you're truly strong -- 40.  

The sheer physicality of it.

The mental grit needed for it.

Nils Tavernier's film of a decade ago, Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet, honors the institution it views.

It should also raise the question:  How much guts do I have -- how much have I given?

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Person, That Whole Person

And it's vernal, she's washed winter from her sallow skin, the skin of the near dead, and gotten done with the African violets

and uttering such words certainly meant to be meant as come from the mouth though cadged from a bard . . . thee best, O most best, believe it . . .

noted that I've liked love, the punctuations of it, the wink and wave at you, shadows bristling with a holy ghost

that such religiosity has its habits, its myth of desolation and rise, of utter promise based so truly on the rhythm of that waltz on the hooves.

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Ms. Wasikowska. Ms. Bronte. Ms. Eyre

Hard work week at the end of which I found this reward.

Texture.

Yes, Romantic sentiment between socially vulnerable young woman and a Byronic older man.

Yes, 'Gothic' secrets, 1830s English country conservatism, heath, rain, snow.

Yes, a mute servant class, a knowing but powerless housekeeper.

Yes, many sins, some revealed, some merely suggested.

Candle fire.  Hearth fire.  Room fire.  Estate fire.

But we're not merely interested in the discharge of formulas, are we?

The film is a real one.

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The Sleep Of The Just

Speaking of that, how expansive we've become, how complexities drive our technology and our very imaginative edges get put on notice and we solve intricate problems elegantly,

an edge of understanding comes from the Neolithic when one reads about the village not that long ago smelling of goats, when they faced a problem -- say, adultery in their midst --

not wanting to let things slide but do justice instead the right thing and the perp's I'm sorry not enough and his offer to work half the season on the common plot of barley

failed as a remedy so a deputation of strong men took him by his arms and legs, the most shoulderly of village men, and heaved him into air as high as their collective strength.

Again and again.  They lifted from the dust and heaved him up and flung him into air as high as their collective strength.

Many more times than once, each flop on a new spot, colliding with fresh pebbles and rock edges impacted earth catching a finger or elbow

or cheek flailing doesn't help these situations are governed by gravity of law.

Until, exhausted, even the hardiest sat.  Body bones.  206 of them. We used to think in these small terms.

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