Movie Impressions

A set of vague impressions on the movies I have remembered watching this year:

True Grit

The Coen Brothers wield the tools of cinematic narrative with understated and quirkily felt virtuosity. This movie again demonstrates a Coen-signature rhythmic command in the integration of the narrative canvas with the life of the characters. Self-audiencehood, or "keenly anticipating detachment", is crucial to the directorial charisma which draws the viewer into the story. Here, the detachment flowers into warmth - we are made to identify finally with the emotions of the characters, the situations, and the myths of the genre. Great acting from Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld temper down the potential risk of disunity when directors whose styles are wedded to unconventionality attempt a straight on genre-remake. There is slight dissastisfaction therefore in the abrasion of storyline and vision, but the sheer skill of all involved lifts the movie into a highly convincing revisit.


Le Notti Bianche

After finishing the movie, I had to look up Visconti. I think it shows a great director at the height of his powers. I cannot recall a more powerful command of the moment in any movie. This was the most fun I had watching the movies in a long time. It is ardent, ardently made, and full of unspeakable things, like all truly great movies. I love Visconti's visual style, a sort of grey area between neorealism and Fellini-esque projection that in a surrealist way, seeks to arrest one into the lived life of the characters. It is full with balance and the impossibility of balance, full of beauty and sadness, and is a kind of emotional statement about duality itself. Brilliant acting, complemented by a soundtrack by Nino Rota, seals this as an all-time favourite. For an example of Viscontian brilliance that sends many directors back to film school, watch the mini-climax in the opera-approach scene. One feels more in that one minute climax alone than one usually does in whole 2 hour movies.


The Silence

What a strange movie! It is a kind of Bergmanesque labyrinth, impossible to approach, and it masks precisely where it reveals. Two sisters, and the son of one, are on a trip, and the story surrounds their taking up lodgings in a hotel in Germany. The landscape is vaguely prewar, but it is impossible to tell. As one expects something along the lines of Winter Light, one gets confused quickly - nevertheless, all becomes clear in recognizing that the two sisters represent two portions of Bergman's psyche - the rational and the sensual, with Bergman as perhaps the boy himself, albeit a strangely silent, impenetrable, opaque one. This movie trades in dualities, and represents the death of "the rational one". But does it? A role reversal, and that of our sympathies certainly takes place - and the death of the over-rational mother brings about an even greater coldness in the dominance of the sensual, as if the sensual existed now only through the judging distance of the camera, a camera that itself rattles away from its previous balances, the debris of its confrontations with the sensual within itself, leaving the scruffy, unrevealed boy behind.

Aargh 2

Pleated footsteps drift
into furrowed corners,
pruned, with the showering
dryads, the lapping locus
of my limited time, its livelihood.
Yet unattained, sore from sated
greetings, unencumbered still.

You would shrift the seconds,
rend the curtains that
have broken my life,
its cotton prison. Yet,
unfleetingly, the seconds
gaze towards my troubled
tapping fingers,
for they grasp at air, still.

What crudeness lines the skin
of driftinghood, its tidal
morass, a pound of
empty salt living without
worth, breathing its
decomposed dryness?


He would storm
the rock of
mountains to
sink in caves.
Or task the
dreamer to sleep
better in the
garden of illusions,
to run, push, those
breathed up
hormones,
better.


Yet it drew,
like an artist,
rich in the whore-daemon
of its tar-stroked thoughts,
travelling the pavements
of insight, and
watching the silent eyes
of passersby, lovers
it never knew.


Still untaken.
Still untaken.
Still untaken.
Still bursting, still breathing,
still hoping, still re-filling,
this gas-tank of
my Being.

Unprovided, these thoughts rush
like little children, through
the twilight of my life,
oblivious to the
autumn, to the
staring trees, against the
deep blue sea-salt
broken sky.


These calculators! What freshness these numbers have brought to us. Like a strange inexhaustible crossword, it shines like luminous rocks, loving our embrace of the impossible labyrinth.

What a pusillanimous existence! To collapse into a garden bench, where benches have grown into tired men like gold-masks, hidden in the distractions, like soil, for example.


Yes, this bleeding of
grownup soles.
You'd thought they'd cracked,
by now. I tried to sever
my legs from my soul,
or at least,
to twist them out of
shape, so one
moved forwards,
instead. Yet the pen-strokes,
like the Satan-cane,
or that bloody
birthday cake, or
smiling and unpretending friends,
they still form, like
a landscape painting,
a noose,
a life I breathe,
suffocating.


I love being a hypocrite.
I love being a pretentious,
self-whistleblowing
scarecrow to my conscience.
But our acts are
the cleverest ravens.

- Terrible joke/lie.

The page is filled.
These lines-
they cut into life,
quartering it into dungeons.
God is always,
above all, a jailer by profession.

Aargh

How the hell does one defeat one's own brain?

Gibberish

Let us express some inexpressible thought,
bursting through the unrhythms of words and silences!
Disastrously banal, these seconds,
as they tear across the earth-drawn curtains
bound to the de-energized root of
my agential deanatomy!

Pouring fine-billed audiences out of
velvet cushioned halls in that darkest era
of man. A croaking sigh that wanes into the unnoticing
beach fair, tearing at teapot-quivering anticipations,
and a butterflies warmth, as it flutters over
into the lungs of pneumonic breathed men.

What poorly caught drift tempered the bawdy eyelids
or the cusp smoked silverware tunes, or the yarns, unspinnable
in a neuronic knot, as it tugs and pulls, tugs and pulls.
Wowee, the purple king chokes with delight
at the hideous, horrendous sight. Well, someone
had to go, if not dragged and kicking,
then stabbed, and thrown off the windows,
for gravity to lend a windy embrace.

How quickly time rots!
Yesterday's giftwrap has been turned to waste!
Recycled souls still ponder over trashbins,
Full of stale smell. They
love the smell and taste of urine.
Like connoisseurs.

Scotland

Scotland Images

In the Hostel

What loneliness, how it breeches!
The ear freezes from
this counterfactual screaming,
but the ear
listens, and cries.

See how it pokes this
Decoy, voyeurish, unmanly
Heart. Vanishing in this hearth
Of words, like firewood licked
Away by time, by words.

Deeper and deeper you
Dream away poverty.
For there attains the greatest
Purity, wealth, truth.

So the deepest soil conceals the darkest springs to seed the plant of life, for life is but soil in which the vineyards of fulfillment grow, above us, towards the sun.


In the twilight lowland highways

William Wallace
And Americanism as frothy pies.
“How turgid and disgusting!”
Hamlet heads cried.

As prating, syncopated dawn arrives,
And flushes towards needless noon.
It hangs its head in evening fog,
Evening – wounded and hollow,
Like life across an empty spoon.


Scotland in a paragraph

One begins travelling with several expectations: this is the starting point of a trip one takes when one travels, and its consummation with fact brings the conceptions of agent alongside the sensations of the aesthete, enhancing the novelty of the experience. I justifiably expected little from any landmass within a three hour train ride from England, and had the pleasure of having them smashed by landscapes comparable in muscular scale and sublime beauty to bolder alpine ranges, and a Moorish, otherworldly uniqueness that spoke of lower England expressing itself through someone else, perhaps - its unconscious.


Mounting Arthur's seat

This hill overlooking Edinburgh is indeed natural Scotland in miniature, a display of robust wildness that is well-tempered in the shade of its self-recognition, tussocked against the unclarity of its marine winds, expressing itself in a tone continuosly dry and fascinating, like a desert in possession of an unwilling inheritance of volcanic wealth, and rebelling in the inevitability of its nature. It overlooks Edinburgh, the city of intimate voyeurs, where display is meaningful still, still untainted in the purity of the rural-inflected heart. And what of the clamborous travellers, rich with the winds that continue against the hills in the sunshine bright? Our stares ascend to the endless air, but the life of the city, and its momentous history, wafts.

Aphorisms/Platitudes

Vision is always directed outwards: especially when one introspects.

Our lives are full of error: correction comes in the memory.

Ranting 2

Jarbrook

The stopped up muse reads:
The hidden hand, the gravestone
we struggle to read, to interpret into words. To translate
into the rhythms of the long slide.

I am lost in the confines of that spurious freedom
so charged with its unnatural gait,
dragging souls like sacks, on the wound-tilled floor.
Of that workshop, which remains when the dust has settled.

I see the dirt that lies before us. That sick playground,
when hopes are dead, and lies are spun.
Or was it desire alone that could breach all meaning?
Either way, its incredible.

Ranting 1

Turnstiles stilled into reaping stoneware. Crowds of sandfly men descend on God's failed infant vision. Despondent, we pace the pools of unflapping, irreplaceable clouds, arching fierce backs against endless valleys carved by the brazen mountains.
Heaps of sharpened clonkers fill the clog-wheels of deripening eyelids. We flash blind. No crowd in the cruel souls, or the seeming drum-cries. Tarpulin sails, I stand and sit and nowhere sit still.

Purblind, unfolding the courage-canvas of harpooned minds, fighting the prurient tide, but dearthy of creeper's dry, baked yore. Pounding at the prison shaft, at the draking foundling lane of lights, that hide, swiftly, concealing more curtains , dream after dream, forking truth in overcooked cries. Dreamt spiels in Devil's kitchen, pouring blood with no slime or grain of soundless trust. Petering forth sunlight, powerless in baptism, dream-frozen, streaking, sparking, across black skies, inexhaustible as Lethe bound truth.

Pertaining, referring, still sicker beyond chasms of time, chasms ground into brick-belief rock, that fall, from the flushing heights, in heightless, terrifying descent into the dead schools, into the schools of the dead, that breathing time of gushed up lungs.

Pie-like, we slice at youth, each content with his crusty, meatless share. But as midnight springs, the stroke of unopened truths, of unspoken circes, line the floorboards to darkness, while the red cloth will blindfold decoloured eyes.

Every future is inflamed with the violation of anticipation as every past is stained in the mudground of truth. One extinguishes in the deed or perishes in the noxiousness of its unfilled waste - to be frozen and rethawed like a self-regenerating birthday cake.

Another one

The ground is alive, and full of call
for the knees embrace, the flowering eyes.
Ineffable, as the earth-thrilling root,
or the time-spilling river,
it tills the purple-plumed evenings,
where the glancing of wind's soft face,
turns silence into shudders
at what was lost, lungly.

Receding shadows,
the rock-strewn marshes.
Green plaited pathways on which
harried footsteps turn, discern, the breadth
of life, the contemptuous
sole, inexhaustible crest. That awaits,
past the Coventried cries,
or the plainness of the autonomy
of solitude pain,
storing truths like a lie,
for winters that never come.

Coffee Induced Spiel

We do not dream of sanity
but we peer towards its
icy depths, its pools of
partied, encrockeried
fish, upturned, gaping towards that
emblazened sun, which
scorches us, duneless nomads.

I danced on the glass ceiling,
or the paved underground
but the taxies in their sliding
smiles, unthreaded, unwoundable,
would reverberate like plaintive
echoes into the glass ceiling
that cracks from above in
impossible hope, hopeless and
happiest where
there lay no hope but in the present.

So the Brooklyn tread,
or the Coventry constable,
would line in pillored graveyards,
to the ragged tunes of nursery
rhymes, pealing from the bells,
like music, tolling between our lives
to still the truths of silence.

Mind-Whirl

Tied, sherman clouds wander with leaf framed eyes
stealing apples from caterpillar's dunes and stately pies.

Dearthful, or rare, with crop coloured tourettes.
Dreamy, like arch-blithed angels, deheavened.

Spin, like a cocktail merry go round,
Trouble, in a secret town.

Purpose, a shining sword,
Bleeds air, makes cowboys clowns.

Turpentine, like Mark Twain's feuds,
leap like serpents into Loch Ness's hood.

Evenings, like overdrawn hues,
Extracts beetlejuice, like brewer's droop.

Sydney Shoemaker, the philosopher's don
eats mad men in Alcatron.

Wasted ink, like bating breath,
Peters out, as years undress.

Untitled

The four "horsemen" chatter in their teasets, roomed by ornate furnishings. One breathes an androgenous sigh lifted on a nasal tone, against the soft cackling of firelight in the background. He is the gangleader, the man with the soft white hardboiled hair, and the dogmatic eyes, fierce and knowing, like a robeless priest clutching to the scroll that refuses to unfurl.

One imagines that he must have stalked Conquest to boredom, or dimmed the tide of Death that foams around us as abandoned shells, through the use of a device at once hollow and useful and dependable and helpless. Of course, only the accursed nature of the present - that is the latent idea, the innate joke, that finds twisted celebration in the fact. Tough-mindedness - like a turtle that parades its scarred shell, to no less than children, weaned on demanding lies, and still captivated, as always, by the nature of the sick exhibition.

So the sordid gang crept along the pathways of its reptile truths, knocking, as it were, at the door of hermits, begging for assistance, and receiving none. It was as if yore responded to yore and found them merely sensate and severly lacking, as if they were repacked into ideas that lept into unkempt mailboxes, but fell out through the ages.

So, what of this impossibility then? We speak of inevitabilities here, such as the wingless crow, or the dirtface Ron. Well, believe it or not, it clatters like a wheelbarrow over diminished cobblestones, carrying earth, that unknown entity, too numerous to handle, yet convincingly amorphous, like water.

Coffee Coloured Moon

Blown dried teardrops lace the speedless ascent of the sun. Prithee, typing weeds still sprout like confections from burnt bakers hands. The intimate grimace of delights unfurling into diverging tracks, and the strange tremors as the boarded up railhouses collapse. Men pour out like wine on desert sand, escaping the inescapable dunes, but the Clint Eastwood figure already treads away with ghostly imminence on the magical beige-maned horse.

Turning to greater trivialities, and the profound mansion that lives off its moss and its cackling rough stone, we dance like jolly goblins around the rainforest grass, stretching over undefined heads and the ripping heat.

The moon is the remain of the coffee coloured stains, and still, and stark, like the ancient stone that could not turn to green cheese and lies in Merlin's suspension,
lifeless yet cratered, orbiting yet encaged, marbled yet uncooked, admired yet nonexistent, romanticized yet misundestood, feared yet dominated, appetizing yet uneaten, tide giving yet tide spurning.

The way it is

Every desperately independent thinker wishes to capture the spirit of the age, or rather, the spirit of the life of the society in which he hovers below, around, and above in an assuredly simplistic, graspable formula, that merely satisfies the need for self-justification, or a feeble self-satisfaction, in the attempt at his truth, at a digestible present.

Here is such a modest attempt, caused by a mania, induced as always, by reading the economics textbooks. Its an exaggeration, and a projection, but it nevertheless aims at truth. It is associated in my mind with "Born to Run" by Springsteen.

Bleed for the sun, suck from a fungal fountain.
Material Institutions!
Gyrating for the transcendental in the alcohol tunnel.
Life does not exist, raping, scrubbing the future.

The age of narratives.
The great man wedded to the great system,
like life to philosophy, love to smelters' waists,
where dreams are dissected to spill industrial broth.
And sin is the social reject boiling under a stately flame.

One will cry out for a transcendental public life - for Napoleon.
He is dead, but we will resurrect the dead, with the unborn youth as the unhappy audience of our various magic tricks.

Nothing

On the triumph of gleaming eyebeams
like soaked stains, grinding chills,
behold, a green tomb,
lies leafy and shrouded in mist.

Truth! What is this faery?
The faint lifeless fingers of this soft hand.
She leads me to this garden;
it shimmers like early spring.
The mist grows heavy here,
but the sounds seep into
twitching, enraptured ears.

The lifeless path is strewn.
Most drearily, the air is moist,
and sight cannot seize the roses,
it gazes forward, backwards,
at my own hands
in this strange wilderness.

Where is the goal?
Truth as the shining steed,
Where the footsteps slow and crouch
and the knees bend, and the heart beats content,
unturned by the gyre of scattering seeds.
I hear the fountain,
it replays, memory like, crisp and sore,
but it spouts, gurgling at its gargolyle lips.

What ancient lives
the house enshrined, what deaths
have planted this steady house
to the soil of a deepening past,
one cannot say,
for all questions and all answers,
unlike men and lusts,
live elsewhere.

Random Constructs

Visions

Light as impurity
schools the breams of closet tyrants.
Like prating elfin flowers
caught among the reeds groaning
alongside the roar of an impossible rapid.
Trellises.
A lesson for young children, still gearless,
still undetermined and inevitable.

Childhood Scenes

The fan windows, and the balcony
on which settled the sooty dirt,
the sand of an hourglass,
skin-like with perpetual grime.

Silence. The air is heavy;
it presses.
And the sunlight shafts and bends,
the golden morning turns to yellow,
and strides for the intensity
and the scorch of noontime.
Where the dread of noise begins,
and life unfolds its deep-rosed curtains
to the whispers of yearning,
through the wounds of words
for the untold seconds, the death-bound hours.

Images

Vesuvius

God erupted semen at Vesuvius.
The superheated steam
rushed over tangled olive plantations
enriching even the unfeminine earth.

Homer

I imagined Homer as that pretty schoolboy
in the black and white photograph.
His glance into the camera
reveals a sensitivity
but a sexuality of a sexuality
that doesn't recognize itself.

He plays football, that one.
He plays for the school team.
He lives like a normal idiot,
totally unaware.

There is a trash bin,
in the corner of the intersection where he lives.
It reminds him of his closeness to home,
every day as he walks past it.

Mountains

I will thank you gratefully, one day.
I am sorry for the distance.
Like the looming mountains in the distance
I will take a last long look at you
before the lonely highway of my life turns away.

Dog Food

My dog ate the textbook of life,
for it made good dog food.
I am left with human books
But the Bible is inedible.

God said...

God said:
I have a metaphor for love or attachment.
It is called Truth.

He said:
I have a metaphor for Truth.
It is called ethics.

He said:
I have a metaphor for ethics.
It is called social life.

He said:
I have a metaphor for social life.
It is called the individual.

He said:
I have a metaphor for the individual.
It is, of course, myself.