In the late afternoon, I sat outside at a cafe with J playing chess and eavesdropping on a nearby conversation. A man was recounting the time when he was nearly killed while riding his motorcycle on Sunset. Apparently, he took a corner too fast, a corner that proved to never end, and was being dragged toward the center lane dividers; the yellow caution sticks drawing ever closer; magnetic. In an instant and recognizing the impending impact, the man veered between the sticks and into the oncoming traffic. He was faced with a truck (because of course it had to be a truck) barreling toward him, its yellow headlights blinding. He pulled the handlebars of his bike, the truck so close that he could feel the air compressing against the vehicle’s side skirts, pushing him away. Maintaining his momentum, the man careened back into the correct lane and further, to the shoulder. A shaky breath, the weight of narrowly escaping death, he felt someone pounding on his helmet. It was his new girlfriend, his first time taking her out for a ride. She had peed herself.
-
Laying around with R, my ear pressed to her chest. Almost instantly, I could hear the rhythmic, dull thumping of her heart. Unexpectedly, I began to hear more, the squelching and gurgling of ventricles and valves. It was riveting; mildly repulsive but totally captivating. I thought of a few scene ideas. My ear, suctioned to her chest, popped when I looked up at her, and I noticed the outline of my earlobe indented on her chest like a hickey. I could even make out the inner folds, the antiragus and antihelix, which formed a soft pink M in the wider traces I left behind.
An Air India 787 crashed today, killing all on board except one forty-year-old man who walked away relatively unscathed. The incident has an uncanny resemblance to the plot of M. Knight Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. Is Vishwashkumar Ramesh our secret superhero?
Went to ZE’s play tonight; an avant-garde clown affair. The production was split into five acts with each act featuring a different performer. The first performer favored conversing with an Alexa-inspired android named Lola about her anamatronic desires to control humans. The dialogue was clever and the actor’s admirable control over his body elevated the physical comedy. To top it off, he employed a small puppet to retell the myths of Sisyphus, Icarus, and Narcissus. The second act was my favorite, a Waiting for Godot-like absurdist piece about a woman who wants a cake at her birthday but does not want to eat any of it. The actor did an awesome job of using voice modulation, physical comedy, and props to articulate a sense of things falling out of rhythm; disorienting in real time. The third act was largely forgettable, altogether reflective of current events. Its proximity to reality muddled my ability to suspend my disbelief and engage with the piece in any meaningful way. There was a somewhat comical dance number set to B.Y.O.B by System Of A Down, which was at least enjoyable to hear coming through the large auditorium speakers. The guy sitting in front of me and I had a fun time rocking out in the dark. I was most anticipating the fourth act, as the performer had wildly entertained the crowd during the pre-show with a series of vulgar jokes and uncomfortable audience interactions. As a complete act, the performance was lackluster; a thin plot bouyed by ostentatious gestures. Jokes were primarily about sex (and he really left no stone unturned here) or race (he, a black performer and we, a mostly white audience). But these topics grew shallow quickly and came to feel like low-hanging fruit after a time. As R pointed out, she found herself laughing not because of the quality of the humor but because of how uncomfortable she felt by the performer’s commitment to vulgarity. Credit where credit is due though, he did have a very funny sketch advertising the many benefits of a time travelling vehicle which was my favorite single moment of the show. By the time the first four acts were complete, the show had run on for ninety-minutes and I was beginning to fatigue. The fifth perfomer, much like the third, was much too on the nose with her delivery, spelling out the ideas present in the show that, quite honestly, needed no further shading. Her costume design, however, was the most inventive: she wore a nude suit, proudly displaying eight plump breasts to which she held her children (hairless rabbits, of course). The show ended entirely when her husband, the first performer bedecked in large boils and a penis on his head, limped onto the stage with a bag of In-n-Out burgers. The cast devoured them as the lights faded out.
-
Reworking a story I have been tinkering with for too long. I find myself getting lost from time to time in the nitty-gritty of scene writing, rather than prioritizing the broader outline. I have a rough outline too boot, it is just, well, rough. The few opening scenes I’ve written are dynamic but anyone can write an intriguing first five pages... I fear my stagnation on the page, retreading the same tired ideas, pining for tidbits of new story, reflects a broader lethargy in my life. I am really feeling like Gregor Samsa these days; a roach on my back; flailing.
I wrote the above note this morning and promptly went outside to find a parking ticket waiting for me. Rent is overdue as well. I went to a cafe down the street and read the Metamorphosis straight through over lunch. It has been over three years since I read it in a park in Philadelphia; with S, we laid about on a hammock that was not attached to any tree. Today’s reading was much richer. I felt an unexpected and pervasive pity for Gregor while simultaneously being disgusted by his predicament. I cringed and yet I sat on the edge of tears. I wanted to hug R and called her after finishing the story; the best I was going to get was her voice. Kafka is just the type of writer I am looking for right now, for numerous reasons, and I am suprised that I have not read more of his work. The Trial is on my bedside table.
Dinner with A and J then Wes Anderson’s latest, The Phoenician Scheme, with A. J spoke highly of the film and I went in with favorable expectations. The film was beautifully costumed and choreographed; everything was buttoned up and battened down. I left the screening feeling emotionally apathetic, unaffected by the story. After some rehashing with A, I pinpointed my primary grievance: the acting. In early Wes Anderson movies, the characters (and by extension, the actors who play them) are so vibrant with personality. There is a genuinely human quality to the performances, a sense of real people with real issues on screen. But in Anderson’s latest three films, the acting performances have felt much like the rest of production: overly stilted and technically perfect. In creating characters who move with the choreographed precision of his camera, I fear Anderson has sucked the very marrow from his actors’ bones. I am left feeling little for them. Although this evolution is subtle throughout his filmography, I return to Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums with a newfound appreciation for their charming acting quirks and sense of actorly spontaniety. Anderson, for me, is in an era where the development of his personal visual style has begun to diminish the quality of his storytelling, like Malick after The Tree of Life.
-
For me, of the Photo-Secessionists, the photographs produced by Edward Steichen, Anne Brigman, and Paul Strand stick out above the rest. Viewing their work, I get the sense that each had honed an eye unique in its quality, compositionally rich and harmonious in its use of shapes and shadows; distinctly photographic. Brigman’s pictorial photographs prioritize relationships between the human form and nature, often crafting their union through compositions that might recall scenes in the Bible. Although she was not the only photographer working in the Pictorialist style and nodding to a biblical past, her work vastly exceeds others’ for all the photographic reasons mentioned above. Strand, on the other hand, particularly in his work in the mid-1910s, clearly represents a more “modern” approach to photography, especially in regards to street and city subjects. His images incorporate none of the intentional softening of the photograph, a hallmark of Pictorialism. Instead, Strand prioritizes sharp focus and a forward-thinking sensibility, using people and buildings not as subjects but shapes in broader compositions. Steichen’s images are the best of both. As a Photo-Secessionist, it is hard to find a photographer who was more prolific than he and yet his style continued to evolve, pushing Pictorialism to its limits and then himself beyond it. I would say that he also took Pictorial portraiture to its nth degree.
-
Watched Portrait of A Lady On Fire tonight with R and at the closing credits felt the sensation that no living moment could match the angelic tone of such a composed array of interactions.
-
The feeling to write a great many things. It has been a while since I jotted anything down here. Frankly, I do not know why I keep this page when there are other places I write more frequently and with greater depth. Sometimes this page becomes relevant. I guess that gives it all the meaning it needs.
I was at work the other night putting a new headline on the marquee when I saw something I will not soon forget. A police officer arrived at the nearby intersection and idled his partrol car there. His sirens were off, though the light bar atop the car was blinking yellow. The officer stepped onto the curb. Even in the darkness, I could see that he was a big man with bubbling muscles that seemed to strain his uniform. Despite this, his demeanor was calm, nonchalant, as he walked toward a small real-estate office directly across from where I was taking letters down off the marquee with a long metal pole. In front of the office was a row of shurbs and a solid brick wall, no more than two feet tall, where people sometimes sat while waiting to be seated at the restaurant next door. The office was closed because it was a Saturday night and the restaurant hardly attended because its clientel are primarily film people and they were all at home watching the Golden Globes. The policeman approached the low brick wall and began gesturing to, then talking at, something obscured by the wall. I assumed he was telling a homeless person to leave, as sometimes they will nest in entryway nooks on the street. He knealt down, then quickly stood up again, ambling back to his patrol car in a shuffling speed-walk that bodybuilders tend to adopt whenever they have to move around quickly in spite of their unnaturally large thighs. I concluded taking the old letters down off the marquee and began replacing them. The policeman found a pair of black latex gloves and returned to the office. He knelt again. A man walking by, fresh from the restaurant, stopped to watch for a moment. He had real concern in his posture and peered from a distance like a crow who has seen some shiny thing. It was not until the worried man appeared that the situation appeared bizarre. For his part, the officer was not displaying any urgency, calmly repeating: “are you alright?” It was clear to me that someone was lying on the ground. Soon the worried man drifted away but not without giving a few more worried glances on his way out. The street became quiet again. The officer stood but this time had someone’s arm in his grasp. The body of a woman followed. She looked well-manicured, certainly not homeless. The officer held her for a moment, her torso suspended above the pavement, and I could see that she was unconscious. He slowly lowered her back down to the ground and tapped his radio on his shoulder. He spoke into it and we made eye contact. He looked away and I continued putting up the marquee, waiting to see how the situation would unfold. For the next fifteen minutes, the officer stood awkwardly across the street, silhouetted by the few lights in the real estate office. I sensed that he was watching me put up the marquee. A few restaurant patrons nodded to him as they passed, then saw the woman and scurried away. Eventually, a fire truck arrived in a blaze of flashing lights and, disappointingly, parked itself between me and the scene. Four firemen dropped down out of the truck and went around it to chat with the officer. An ambulance arrived shortly thereafter and parked in front of the firetruck, next to the restaurant. An excited feeling overtook me, as I could see the back of the ambulance and knew there would be some resolution to my morbid curiosity. I have put up the marquee many times before but never had I been treated to such a spectacle as free as this one. The EMTs lifted the stretcher from the ambulance onto the curb and wheeled it out of sight. There was a time then when I could not see what was happening and the circus disappeared into the back of my mind as I continued my work. But the EMTs soon re-appeared with the woman on the stretcher. She was strapped down and tucked into a blanket that was drawn up to her neck. Her hair was matted back against her scalp and her face was flat, asleep and indifferent. They loaded her into the ambulance and shook hands with the firemen before climbing into their vehicle. The ambulance’s emergency lights turned off. It was then that I knew she was dead. The ambulance drove slowly down the street, then turned a corner and was out of sight. I finished putting up the marquee and went inside. I wonder how many dead people I have walked past in my life, sleeping behind brick walls?
-
Train Dreams is a film I have many thoughts on. When I watched it, I found it slow but not methodical, airy but not delicate. I wanted it to end and when it did I did not miss it. The cinematography felt uncoordinated and, though “beautiful”, not profound in any way to me. There were some shots that captured my attention and imagination (Grainier rotting in his bed, for instance) but on the whole I struggled to sense a rhythm in the images. I was disappointed. I was especially disappointed because so many people had said to me “Eli, you’re going to love this movie” and “oh my god this is your movie”. So I watched it eagerly. Ultimately I think people saw a slow movie with nature and thought I would like it because I like Malick and made Penumbra. But it wasn’t Malick and I probably wouldn’t ever make Penumbra (the short) again. But people absolutely fucking adored this movie and I just could not for the life of me understand why; I just didn’t feel it. Beyond that, it did not feel real. It felt like a bunch of modern ideas cosplaying in the world of early 1900s northwestern loggers.
I read some professional reviews first. Critics seemed pretty unanimous in their praise, quick to point out the spellbinding cinematography. I did not disagree with everything I read, but with a lot of reviews (and as I have felt with other film reviews), I just kept thinking that we had clearly watched different movies. So then I started hunting for critical reviews and the few I found shared some of my thoughts - it just kind of felt “meh” - but also pointed to the dramatic departure from Denis Johnson’s book, from where the story was adapted. So I read the book and holy shit it was great. But it was great for all the reasons the movie was not. It was nuanced, ultimately apathetic to Grainier’s existence but, I felt, intensely aware of the mythologizing of good and evil that takes place across the scope of one’s life. The movie had no such mythology. It was painfully on the nose with its resurrections of the past. He remembers the Chinaman so we see the Chinaman - this sort of thing (why not a piece of driftwood that he sees floating down the river that he thinks is the Chinaman, but it isn’t, which thus connects him to broader memories of the forest and surrounding landscape and and and and ... ). Showing us his memories is boring, I think. Why not show us how his memories continue to invade and shape his perceptions of his present reality? To me that feels more true to life. Aside from the mythology the book treats the West, and more generally life, with a truer scalpel than the movie. Violence and evil have their grubby mitts all over the book, finding their way into the most banal of interactions. The movie paints evil as extraordinary or distant except when it is convenient to drive what little plot there is. The same is true for regrowth, birth, beauty. I still cannot get over the near total denial of the mythological underpinnings that make up Grainier’s world. That is all there is to life! That’s it! Rocks are rocks and trees are trees and tragedy is tragedy until we imbue them with meaning. But that’s the thing about meaning, it’s completely made up! It’s all just fiction to make the nonfiction feel more orderly. She-wolfs and he-wolfs connect us to our animalistic roots; imbuing the trees with a coda (do not touch them and they are friends; cut them and go to war) humanizes them; believing that your wife and child died in a forest fire because a dead Chinese laborer cursed you reaffirms a belief in cosmic justice, retribution, karma. Grainier, a man who seemingly just drifts on by, slowly accumulates experiences and builds for himself a subtle web of connective tissue through his life and then he is gone.
I could go on and on and on and have already talked R’s ears off about this and likely ruined both the book and the movie for her but I will end on this point. The conclusion of the book is so damn small and delicious and massive and profound; the ending of the movie is momentarily cathartic. The book ends at its greatest point. The crowd knows the boy-wolf is really just a boy in a costume. But (but (but) but) if they allow themselves to just believe for a moment that he is real, and that boy-wolves are real, and mythological creatures walk among us, then the whole of the universe is opened to them. If they just believe in the mystical, even for a single damn second, and suspend their disbelief in the unreal, they will see God. That’s what I got from the book. The movie does not hold a candle to such an awe-inspiring revelation.