Wednesday, January 31, 2007

at the rack

january books I read worth reading:

confessions of a memory eater by pagan kennedy. the premise of the book is a guy who gets to try a pill that allows him to relive his best moments in life. kennedy weaves in the thomas de quincey book confessions of an opium eater which was published in 1822. it's a quick read, less than 200 pages, but entertaining.

y: the last man volume 8, kimono dragons by brian k. vaughn. a graphic novel series that I read whenever a new volume comes out. it's basically a summer movie about the last man on earth after a weird disease wipes out every other male on the planet.

fables, volume 8, wolves by bill willingham. another graphic novel series with the premise that characters from fairy tales are living in the modern world. another summer movie, and lasting about as long in the brain.

madmen and specialists by wole soyinka, play by wole soyinka. my favorite thing I read this month, it has a few paragraphs that seem to exist like poems and yet they don't interupt the narrative or how you'd imagine it on stage. the themes in the play seem meant for today even though the play was written in 1971. from the book jacket: "madmen and specialists is wole soyinka's astonishing dramatization of the power of propaganda and political repression, written shortly after he was released from prison".

wizard of the crow by ngugi wa thiongo. a book about the fictional republic of aburira and the post-colonial experience in east africa. that would be one way to explain this book, but there's really no way to really explain it. it feels like thiongo set out to explain the post-colonial experience of a country like this, and he also subjects it to satire while somehow adding in touches of magic realism and the effects of a love story on the least powerful people in the story. a very, very good book and also a very big one in ideas and humor and pages coming in at 766 of them. thiongo was also imprisoned, in kenya in 1977, for his writing.

lastly, I'm halfway through hotel world by ali smith. smith reminds me a bit of jeanette winterson in that she seems to be able to make words bend the way she wants them to. I'm not in love with the whole book, it feels a bit contrived at times, but she does have moments where you just agree with it. the book is five woman partially connected to a hotel called the global hotel. here's a paragraph about a homeless woman who camps out outside the hotel: "she has shattered her insides, living the way she is. she knows she has. it isn't funny. it comes over her like misery. she has broken her insides, burnt them out, then heaped them over with ground as if to stop the burning. beautie, truth and raritie. grace in all simplicitie. here enclosde in cinders lie. enclosde, spelt backwards at the end. nclsd. shakespearian. shksprn. the library here in this town is good. she thinks of the library instead. it is better than the one in bristol. it stays open longer, generally, and the librarians rarely throw anybody out, even somebody getting some sleep. she has been reading metaphysical poets. truth and beautie be. or: I am rebegot. of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not. poetic darkness, Else thinks breathing carefully, has an extra e, as if a longer kind of darkness than the ordinary kind, and a capital D. Darknesse. essence of dark. she has read a poem about a boy who acted plays in front of queen elizabeth the first, was good at playing very old men and died aged just thirteen. Else also likes william butler yeats. I went into the hazel wood. because a fire was in my head. go your ways, o go your ways. I choose another mark. girls down on the seashore. who understand the dark. she can't be bothered with novels any more. she has read enough novels to last her a lifetime. they take too long. they say too much. not that much needs to be said. they trails stories after them, like if you tied old tin cans to your ankles and then tried to walk about."

Friday, January 26, 2007

over dinner I give you a lamp and a lazy boy, an electric slothful manifesto. you ask if I want to sleep with others and I say “yes, but not really, not in any meaningful sort of way”, and we laugh like jesus. “how much do you think dying is like living”, I ask. you say “hold on”, with that one finger the way you do, which I would guess will be your own dead end in the end, or as the end, of grace, which is everywhere. the next day you give the lamp to your cat and she uses it to find all her missing cat toys at the back of your closet. it’s back there that she notices your shoes which is when she first figures you for a girl, and because of what she has seen us do, me for a boy. do you ever wonder how other people figure this out. done with it your cat leaves the lamp outside your front door where your guitar strumming neighbor finds it on a sunday. she thinks “music now! musicians unite!” and takes it inside. she sets it beside the bathtub where she sits playing the only song she knows over and over until the guitar neck catches the cord knocking it into the bath and your neighbor dies of broken election promises before the paramedics can susitate her. a big burly guy in his cool outfit susitates her for hours like a frightened rabbit, like the formula for pi, like the peace that night mostly brings, crooners and pendants handed down like elementary school primers, basic lights to lead a way, a lamp, but not for the blind to see, but so we can see those who rob them, which is what the susitator did, he stole the lamp and six months later he put it out on the sidewalk with some other junk to sell and that’s when I stole it back. in my room that night you say “turn that thing off you tired human being”. in the dark then I think, “no, I really don’t want to sleep with anyone else, maybe just touch them a bit, or see them naked in the dark”. I think about that cripple I heard about in a song and the one I read about in the book I was reading that day and realize they are the same cripples, the masochist that I am and all of the same cripples.

the girl with the moon under her skirt

it’s only when I see the women with the moon hidden under her skirt that I realize I don’t really know what she looks like although I do know that she has the moon under there.

it’s like going home to a home you used to live in and strangers live there and it smells wrong and you want to say things to them like “do you want to know what we did with the bodies”.

instead it forms, half-smiling, kissing the top of the hill on hayes street.

the girl with the moon under her skirt hangs a new man on her arm. you mark this on your calendar and they direct deposit it into your bank account pointing towards a pension in your pocket. all your money is on file somewhere with the astronomer’s reports, they’ve figured out its missing and start asking everyone where it is. when they get to you they ask the cramp in your leg, but the cramp says nothing so they ask your broken left foot who you’ve name hermann. hermann claims ignorance even though he knows, even though hermann is a time bomb sent to blow up the planet, although he wavers on that. poor broken hermann.

when the pictures come back from the space probe the astronomers can’t tell that the moon is hidden under her skirt. they do see the low-cut tops she sometimes wears, they catch her being herself which most pictures fail to lasso, they have figured out her orbits, where she goes on vacations. you sidle up to her in one of these photos and say “let’s get out of here”. she nods, she glows, she lays face down when she sleeps, a cat on the bed, a discothèque behind her eyes, an empty feeling commute, a view only blocks away and people find themselves without us no matter how much we wonder why.

Monday, January 22, 2007

edwards drive in

conversations with other women--

a man runs into a woman at a wedding. they start to flirt and talk and find that they get along. throughout their discussion, the man talks about certain memories as if they were common to the two of them. we gradually learn that there may have been a previous connection between these two when they were younger. this just leaves more questions as their past is slowly revealed.

helen bonham carter plays "woman", she goes unnamed and she's mostly perfect in this movie. the movie is shot on a split screen and each side of the screen concentrates on either the woman, or the "man" character played by aaron eckhart. this technique is used mostly to the benefit of the film. good, not great movie, but worth seeing.

Monday, January 15, 2007

edwards drive-in

"duck season" directed by fernando eimbkce is a mexican movie that's a bit like "the cat in the hat" shot in black and white using two young teenagers, a next door neighbor and a pizza delivery guy. the movie starts a bit slow then surprises you and then it does was all really great movies do, you forget you're watching a movie and it involves you. it's a very small movie but also very sly in that it gets bigger with the ideas it presents. "independent" film-making and not just in name only. my favorite movie I've seen in months.

Friday, January 12, 2007

she says “mr”
but I pronouce it "mister"
hear it the way pink nasty and will oldham sing together
a tried response: “okay miss”
no, not really
“yes ms….”
better maybe
and sometimes I like to imagine that time goes backwards one hour at a time, some of them in records and record-keeping, some in movies, theaters, trains rounding off the tops of mountains
or all the way back to high school, “excuse me ms., that hour in 11th grade when you were sitting on the grass by yourself at lunch right as the day started to warm on your skin, what were you thinking”
or can you tell me about the first hour you spent with anyone you eventually fell for
or what was your favorite early day mining entrance
or sickly lights and sugar water

I’ll trade,
for instance, I can tell you about every hour in which I’ve broken a bone. during the first one I was a rocket ship in the front yard of a house that no longer exists. houses then, like the warm hands that hand you something in a soft childhood hour, die. during the last one I was in golden gate park, it was one of the many sweats we get that let us forget, good groans and the places we go even though we’re not sure of welcome, another falling or fell into, another rocket ship landing, eyes around the room, but still, that’s my idea of pluckiness

now,
sound-triggers
pull-backs
or perhaps things just happen
either way I’ve buried the lead so let me begin again,
my last favorite was in may, a street in the east village, not paying attention, the way the air moves down an possibility, talking to someone just met, we wanted to talk, we knew something already, we heard the background and the heat unbuttoned our jackets and the street will never have a name which is okay because we, or maybe me, keep track of too much, and this, like the leaving that would come hours later in brooklyn outside a bar where he said “it was good to meet you” while the subway raised a glass to the just then religion, and a drip from the ceiling, mouths full and emptying out your pockets onto the top of the dresser in the dark