Poem-A-Day #320 : It Is Hard Not To Think Of Gods As White Men

It Is Hard Not To Think Of Gods As White Men

I want Michael Fassbender to come in the room

right now - carrying a bunch of balloons - pink ones

It's important because it's January 14th and sometimes this is how these days go

The man who killed those two 30-year-olds has been charged with homicide - it -

I didn't know them and it isn't my pain - they were friends of people I know

And someone should talk about death today - all days - I wear my skull necklace

and pay for a painting of a canyon and it feels like a Turner storm and that is why I want it

I will never own Turner storms so -

Why Fassbender though - he came in first - I asked the universe

who should deliver January 14th balloons and it was him

We can talk about his choices of film if he is - in real life - this into comic books and video games

I often imagine being hit by a car as I cross an intersection - T-boned

is what they call it and it feels too graphic to discuss

But I imagine my body passing through showers of glass

swimming in a way I cannot in water - and I imagine what it would feel like

the rendering of bone and flesh and the images burned into retina that will never see again

In my head it is a jumble - like a screwdriver - a sort of whirl

An indecipherable - though maybe if you stare long enough but there is only a few seconds before the eye will hit the pavement - it is a cloud of brown colors washing over everything

A pop of sudden pink in the corner - the sun somehow still there

The face of a very European person taking souls out of the world

Michael Fassbender
Esquire Russia Sept. 2012

Poem-A-Day #282 : On Sean Bean's Numerous Deaths

On Sean Bean's Numerous Deaths

Does Sean Bean die in every movie he's in ?

I wonder about actors and their type - are we too so categorizable ?

Here is my face
what is gleaned from it - the breaking line of mouth
the slightly lower right eye and ear

Do you sense the phrenology of me - colors across the surface
of my glasses are light and dark and project a lot that could be metaphor or not

I think about the times Sean Bean has died in movies
each one a slow motion shot of his tortured face in scream

His eyes a crystal slough of ice

What type is it that dies all the time ?

His deaths have started and ended and coalesced plot lines  - have ended fellowships
and launched wars of secession

The ur-man

In the mirror my eyes are tired - they green - the red in my face
is amplified by the red in my face

A sort of repeating trance - spiral - would these lines start or end anything ?
there is a daylight ending and I have only stared into this window -

I fist the glass

Imagine the stack of scripts on Sean Bean's table
each with a death inside it

Poem-A-Day #262 : Notes on Ways to Get Through Life

Notes on Ways to Get Through Life

1
Take the Werner Herzog transcript and erase until poetry

2
Allow the wind to seal the shredding roofing

3
Sink the tubers until the petrify

Poem-A-Day #211 : The Relaxation

The Relaxation

     Around the fire
          we tell stories about the history of chess - about the moment when
a building grew out of the earth and tried to reach the clouds

Our toes are making shapes - the carpet would be plush
     there would be brandy and talk of bridges
          boredom and preamble - there would be moments of sleepiness

          This is the part of the movie before
the man in the mask grabs the woman asleep in the sleepingbag
     and slams her against the trunk of a tree until she is pulp

     The moment before Kevin Bacon's neck
          is pierced cleanly by the metal tip of an arrow -
and that arrow will sit there eternally - never disintegrate - not once be moved

No one tells those stories - everyone is breathing and hoping they will not come
the span of time is infinite - is the opening credits of some film about death

Don't Breathe

*
Water scares the shit out of me.

A day on a boat. Swimming in a lake. Spending time at a pool. These things do not calm me. To this day they call up a set of pre-made plans of escape.

The fear manifests in subtle ways.

Because I couldn't handle water in my face I insisted on baths until well into my teens.

The ocean is almost too much water to be afraid of so I can be near larger bodies of water without too much of a problem. I can even wade into water a bit. My height allows me to get fairly far out before I become buoyant. It isn't until then that the concern kicks in.

I'd be terrible on a cruise and have often thought about how I would deal with that situation. None of them are good solutions as they usually involve hiding from windows and fresh air.


*
I love horror movies.

The more full of tropes the better. I live for the moment when victims go up the stairs when they should go out the door. When they don't check to see that the villain is dead. I love trying to guess who will be the 'last girl' and who will die first.

Fede Alvarez
Photo by Gage Skidmore

It's a game. It's silly. It rarely scares me for real.

This evening I saw Don't Breathe. The movie was directed and written by Fede Alvarez. He also was responsible for the surprisingly good remake of Evil Dead from 2013

The premise is deceptively simple: three thieves enter a house owned by a blind vet to steal his money. The vet is not what he appears.

Where the movie enters into greatness is in how the premise reveals itself and plays out.

This is a brutal movie. It does not relent. The final act manages to up the ante of the film while subtly referencing horror tropes.

And it does this without being overly gruesome or falling into the pitfalls of torture porn that has ruined a lot of horror films in the years after the successes of the Saw series.


*
This circles around a question that I have about horror movies.

What scares us?

I'm sure that you have an example like mine. But these things are not what I'm actually interested in. Most horror movies don't actually depend on the things we are really afraid of. They play off making us jump and our natural inclination to be turned off by gore and death.

What I'm thinking about though is more what scares US. Collectively and culturally. What are WE afraid of.

Horror doesn't always feed off of cultural fears. But they inform it. The 80s were full of films featuring nameless, powerful, murderers coming after groups of beautiful youths. These fears can easily be tied to cultural fears of lawlessness and cold war fears of the 'other'.


*
Don't Breathe is set in Detroit. Most of the movie takes place in a lone house in an otherwise abandoned neighborhood.

It Follows was released in March of 2015 but made its way slowly into theaters. The story is, again, deceptively simple. A monster chases a young woman and wants to kill her. What sets it apart is that the monster is sexually transmitted. You have to fuck your way out of the death. This is a pretty good upending of the classic trope from 80s movies where the people who have sex usually die early in the movie.

The two movies both use traditional tropes to both utilize them and to break them. Though they do this while maintaining tension and refusing to make fun of the genre.

These are not the Scream movies. There is not an attempt to undermine or mine the genre.

Did you notice that both are set in Detroit? It's key to what I think scares America most in 2016. We are not afraid of terrorism, immigration, or any of that.

We are afraid of collapse.


*
Since the 1950s Detroit has experienced a 60% drop in population and even though the metro area of the city still has 4.3 million citizens Detroit has become the poster-child for what happens when an economy collapses in the 21st century.

This is what scares us.

The idea that a once-prosperous and important place could become unimportant and less wealthy goes against everything that American Capitalism promises. It proves us fallible. It says that the American Dream has cracks in it.

Setting these horror movies amid the collapse is a cunning representation of a new fear. The creature from It Follows and the vet from Don't Breathe also have faces. They are not the masked monsters from the 80s. They are people who look normal. They are us responding to collapse.

Interestingly, both movies also focus on white protagonists. And both manage to show a Detroit void of minorities. So it is not just collapse in general but specifically white collapse that is the source of fear. Don't Breathe renders this in literal terms with a brief appearance of a white supremacist. Both films also point out that the 'bad' parts of town are not where our protagonists live. They are not the white parts.

The danger is in the collapse. The breaking. And in the breaking the real danger is in what we do in response.

Do we retreat into our corners and stare at each other in fear. Lashing out when one comes close to us.

Or do we try to build something new.

Poem-A-Day #122 : O'Clock

O'Clock

Every thing is a mirror for mortality

The tick of the clock is obvious though it hides gears wearing each moment rounding their teeth like a rodent itching a plank of wood

Think about the grease pasted over the turning mouths

In the back of the mind a story about how oil is the remains of dinosaurs that was pressed like apples until the cloudy mists collected in cloudy jugs

The clouds settle themselves on the horizon like vinegar under the oil blueness of sky

A news report of a bird wing preserved in amber and then the image of a bird losing its wing in the thickness of tree sap the image of it chewing its own limb off

We always end up talking about James Franco cutting off his own arm in that one movie

Not 127 Hours

Poem-A-Day #84 : Button Mashing

Button Mashing

Run fast - until your feet become wheels of fire
     until you turn into a video game hedgehog

               Collect those fucking rings asshole

put them on your wrists - bangle - the sound would be a monk ringing a bell
     his two-toed slippers taking half steps taking calm to the Nth

               Around him everything else speeds to blur

Which one is the one that resonates on the mountain of your heart
      and the popping of it - how many woodland creatures pour out of that piñata

               Oh confetti raining the street in midi wind chime tones
               pile until you form the face of god

Poem-A-Day #30 : Glow

Glow

I sit in the light of a thousand LED lights - it's comforting - they last thousands of hours - that something will last longer than the cells in my face

It's like the lighting in Barry Lyndon - flickering bonfire on the skin
Let's put on our topcoats and dance the volta - let's dance the volta like it's the Restoration and our hair is piled in powder and curls with a model sailing ship on top

A brown swirl of water comes up over the bank of sand - it foams like sewage - the sound of it absorbing is the sound a tree pressing its roots into earth

What is this circle of lights here for - it's in the trees of this forest - fireflies can't hold a - they dance in the wind that whips itself the wires are barbed cat-o-nine tails are lashing the molecules of oxygen are burning them and scattering them

It's difficult to understand - it's a stone rolling itself down a hill and breaking the surface of an ice cold lake

Source: Paper Lantern Store

Waiting

I've been teaching.

Which sounds like a confession of some kind.

Today we watched the 2001 film version of Waiting for Godot. I am always suspect of film versions of plays. They are rarely good. Theater translates poorly to film. Almost worse than fiction does.

When it works it's because one of two things have happened in the process. Either the film has managed to cover up the stage origins of the work or it embraces them and allows the film to be 'stagey'.

Can we talk about how Julia Roberts stopped
smiling like this sometime in 1997?

Let's talk about Steel Magnolias.

Which I bet most people don't even know is a play.

I'll start by saying that the movie is real good. In a specific late 80s way. A big hair Olympia Dukakis Pretty Woman era Julia Roberts Dolly Parton in 9 to 5 way. Think about Beaches. That's what I'm talking about.

The play was written by Robert Haling, who adapted the work into the screenplay. It is based on his own sister's death from diabetes. He wrote a short story version first, then changed it into a play within 10 days.

It is a rare example of a work moving quickly form one stage to another. The play premiered in 1987. The move in 1989. Though it never went to Broadway until 2005.

It is most certainly an example of a plays origins being masked.

But it is also a very rare example of a playwright being responsible for the film.

On the other end of the spectrum is another Julia Roberts movie, 2004's Closer.

That film is also written by the original playwright. In this case, Patrick Marber. He also wrote the screenplay for Notes on a Scandal FYI. A film you need to see now.

The play actively refuses to be solid. It is one of roughly drawn character and scene. Things are implied. Plot is left out until afterwards, then only mentioned. Scenery is sparse. It is very post-modern.

The movie takes a note from this. It leaves the characters broadly drawn. It keeps the settings simplistic. And it feels stagy. In this case it makes the whole film feel wooden. Awkward. Distant.

Like it's all being kept from you. This is where the translation from stage to film can go wrong.

The Godot film we watched was basically a stage production with good close-ups. In this case it works. But this is because the play is already strange enough to hold up to the glare of cameras. And the film makers wisely decided to make it a stage production filmed with nice close ups.

And it draws you in like a stage production. Steel Magnolias pulls you with melodrama and sweeping southern town charms. Closer pushes you away. It's hard to say which is better. I prefer to be reminded of the format. I like the disconnect of knowing it's a production. But there still needs to be connection. And sometimes a screen keeps that from happening.

All Is Gravity

A body floating in an expansive void.

One being. Alone.

Every element of the environment out to kill them.

No way to contact anyone.

No way to get home.

Nothing but wits. And luck. To save them.

This is the basic plot of two high-profile movies in theaters right now. Gravity and All Is Lost.

Each begins with an almost immediate calamity that leaves our 'hero' alone and adrift. A breath from certain doom. In Gravity, Sandra Bullock is at first given the safety of George Clooney. But that is soon taken away. Robert Redford has no one from the start. Neither movie has much dialogue.

Both include sweeping views of the isolation of the characters. Disorienting rolling camerawork that conveys the instability of the moment.

Both films present road block upon road block in front of the stranded figures. Bullock must deal with fires, explosions, crashes, suicidal thoughts, broken everything. Redford must deal with fires, crashes, suicidal thoughts, massive storms that might as well be explosions.

Leaving the theater after All Is Lost this weekend I was overcome with a sense of 'why?' about these two movies.

Why now?

Why stories about such absolute isolation. About death. About silence.

About survival.

Because both of these movies end with impossible survival in the face of all of this. In fact the endings of these movies are almost metaphoric in their need for the characters to come through the fire and still not die. To, at the last moment, be saved, reborn.

J and I were talking and I feel like this is some post-Iraq War psychology. Though real American in its focus.

Hear me out.

You can pretty safely argue that post-9/11 the US was in a serious state of PTSD. Lashing out and going through the many stages of grief. The fact that other countries took the brunt of that is deplorable. But it is.

Are these movies a sort of selfish 'we came through that' played out on the screen? I'm sure there is some of that at play here. At least from a cultural stand point. We as a country certainly didn't actually deal with anything post-9/11. Most Americans certainly felt little of the impact from the decade of war we are emerging from.

That the movies are about death but against all odds the protagonists survive. I see them as attempts at explaining human will. Ingenuity. That we can face great darkness and come out into light.

The final scenes of both movies involves the character literally reaching for light. Bullock crawls out of the space craft and then onto a beach. She stands in the rays of the rising sun. It shines over her as she stumbles, like a new born, into the future. Redford is drowning. Is actually in the process of giving up, when a hand reaches into the darkness. He reaches up. Rays shining into the water from above.

Fade to black.

Culturally we are in a dark place. The economy has improved, but not for all. Politics has become overly fractured. There are little wars igniting and smoldering all over. We send drones to fight our ever elongating wars. Zeno's dichotomy playing out in real time, these wars are in a perpetual state of 'ending'.

Quetzalcoatl. Dies in fire to be reborn.

That these movies seem to predict a light at the end of the tunnel. That both seem to use their respective isolated environments as a sort of parable for the death/rebirth cycle and the improvement of self speaks to a rebirth through fire. Bullock in the shower of space vehicles entering the atmosphere and Redford literally starting a ring of fire that he is submerged beneath.

Psyche as phoenix.

J pointed out that the end of Zero Dark Thirty could be interpreted in a similar way. The final shot of Jessica Chastain sobbing uncontrollably, alone, in a plane can certainly be interpreted as the culture realization of what we have spent the last 10 years doing.

If Chastain represents America going through the post-9/11 stages that America did. Then do Bullock and Redford represent our hopes for what comes next?

A Problem

I had a long talk with JG today about the resurgence of the black servant in media. Movies like The Help, Django Unchained, and the upcoming The Butler. Our discussion was focused on the inability of America to face our past discretions.

We are a country of teenagers. We crash our car while drunk. Our parents are indignant and ground us for a month or two only to give us a much nicer new car after the punishment.

That simplifies the problem but we have an inability to discuss these things. We look at films like Django and wring our hands, but is the message being absorbed? We acknowledge the problem but do nothing to fix it.

I wondered aloud if we even notice the problem. Isn't there a possibility that some see a film like Django or The Help and think that these problems were in the past? That we already did that civil rights thing?

I have the same issue with Zero Dark Thirty. A film that talks about important issues. America has spent 12 years fighting unwinnable, money draining wars. And what have we gotten in return? Bin Laden is dead, but do we feel better? Do those 3000 people come back?

The final shot of ZDT is of Jessica Chastain, alone on a military plane. Her face takes up the whole of the frame. She has just 'won'. She got Bin Laden. She saw his body. Her face twists and she bursts into tears. The battle that she waged for 12 years has left her hollow and destroyed. She has lost her friends. She has spent all her time and energy 'getting' this man. And for what?

At one point in the film Chastain tells a marine that he is there to get Bin Laden for her. To kill him for her. She says she was left alive to get Bin Laden. Clearly, the character becomes a stand in for all of America at this point. We are the lone woman, spoken of as being 'young' and 'fragile'. We are the one left standing, we are there to dole out vengeance.

Kathryn Bigelow has come under considerable criticism for the portrayal of torture in the film. I can't help but feel like the critics are just incapable of stomaching the truth of what America spent 12 years doing.

I conflate these two types of not dealing. Race and War. The arguments for and against each are more nuanced than what I have glanced at here. I can't help but feel that we suffer, as a nation, from PTSD around both of these issues.

We avert our gaze from what causes us nightmares.

Sometimes we acknowledge the events. But only in certain terms.

Disney won't release Song of the South on DVD in the US. It is widely available in the rest of the world. We spend more time discussing whether Tarantino can make a movie about slavery than what is int he movie. Bigelow is called out for historical inaccuracies and the ambiguity of her 'statement'.

We are doomed to spin our wheels. To repeat.

Octavia Spencer won an Oscar for playing a sassy maid in The Help. The first Oscar won by a black actor was in 1939, when Hattie McDaniel won for playing a sassy maid in Gone With the Wind. I think Spencer is a great actress, but is this the best we can do?

THIS!

THIS!

1) Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop

[Room With Eye] 1930 Maurice Tabard

2) Fruit Salad Tree

From their website:

A fruit salad tree, developed by the West Family, who established the Fruit Salad Tree Company in 1990, in New England, New South Wales, Australia, bears up to six different fruits of the same family on the one plant. All fruits retain their own individuality, with staggered ripening times.

There are four types the company offers: stone fruit, citrus, all-apple, all-nashi. You can mix and match and even list your preference in order of the fruit you want dominant on the tree. So far only available in Australia.

3) Stoker

Oldboy is one of my favorite weird movies. Director Chan-wook Park is bringing his particular brand of awesome to the US with Nicole Kidman in tow. Stoker looks creepy. Maybe incestuous? No matter it will be bat-shit great.

THIS! 8/24/12

THIS! on August 24, 2012

1) Christopher Lee's Charlemagne

2) Dinosaurs

NASA discovered small dino tracks in their literal backyard. The Christian Science Monitor discusses it here. The feet in question belonged to a nodosaur.

Which was a giant spiked armadillo apparently.

Also, someone buy this blanket for me right this second. It's not my birthday or anything important, but really, I need it.


3) Racism

I really really hate Michael Chabon's new book. Like so much so that I may decide it isn't worth finishing. I really want to write a review but it's like totes not good y'all.

There is a LONG post about this that I am working on in my head about racism, white privilege, and the place of artistic licence in all of it but...it's questionable career-wise considering I have sent a query to his agent to rep my novel...

Yes, I just wrote that and meant it. Oh the pitfalls of the industry! Life is so hard! Le sigh.


4) Kaseem Reed

Dear Democrats, more of this please. Love Michael

White Noise

Middle-aged white men are not the only ones who feel sad.

Let that sink in for a second.

Now think about the books we hold up as 'best' and 'classics'. I don't want to rail against dead white men. I'm not about to attempt a dismantling of an ivory tower. But the majority of books are about middle-aged white men who have ennui.

I've been reading White Noise by Don DeLillo. It is the second book of his that I have tried to read. I picked through 20 pages of Underworld in 2005 and put it down with it leaving no real impression. I came to White Noise with few expectations. It was a book on my shelf that was unread.

DeLillo reminds me of Philip Roth. They both trade in a sort of suburban distopia full of bored men and women that is meant to equate to depth of story. The main difference is that I don't find DeLillo as preachy and in some ways he even seems aware of the absolute obnoxiousness of his characters.

White Noise centers around the fear of death. There is even a pill presented that is meant to defeat this fear. Is this the only remaining fear middle-class America has? That is takes 300 pages to explore the idea and manages to say little on it is telling.

The book is full of beauty. I don't want it to be thought that DeLillo is a bad writer. He and Roth have moments of sheer brilliance. DeLillo manages to come up with insane non sequiturs that hang together like a beaded curtain and make the plot of his novel. That the majority of the actions in the novel are designed to keep the characters in stasis belies the use of plot as a description.

A group of professors talking at lunch about where they were when famous deaths occurred. A speech about how both Elvis and Hitler were mama's boys. A young child riding a tricycle across four lanes of traffic while elderly women watch in horror. The noxious cloud of black that chases out protagonist to the point of driving his family in their station wagon off-road and across a stream at full speed.

That you cannot glean a plot from any of those moments is my point exactly.

These are vignettes masquerading as novel. They are partially related moments that feel like an author coming up with 'cool' things that should go into a book. Then they are hung onto a message of melancholia and death in the mid-west, in a man-made environmental disaster, in popping pills and cheating on spouses.

This is the problem with these books about middle-aged white ennui. They are loose arrangements of things that sort of make up a story. We hold them up and call them great because they reflect us so clearly yet do little more.

Ulysses, Portnoy's Complaint, White Noise, In Search Of Lost Time, Love in the Time of Cholera, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby. I would argue that all are about wealthy or well-off white ennui. Even Marquez, who manages to fall headlong into this trap. Just read Memories of My Melancholy Whores for proof.

It's all over other film as well. Look at A Single Man or A Serious Man...both men are the same really. A Serious Man, a Coen Brothers film, is at its heart an adaptation of White Noise. They are both about the mid-west. About college professors. About unhappy marriages and nostalgia for the past. Both seep in unfocused sadness while giving their characters undefined terminal health problems. Both have a disaster at their core. One in the middle, and one at the end.

Neither manages to clarify anything. Both have moments of brilliance bracketed by yawning expanses of 'why am I paying attention to these sad terrible people'.

Books On Film

When books are turned into movies there are two possibilities: 1) The movie is a made into a separate artistic endeavor and can be viewed on its own merits; or 2) The film makers are too slavish to the text and the film ends up a needless retread that is only there to milk $ from the party faithful.

Could have been so good.

The 1986 film version of Umberto Eco's 1980 novel The Name of the Rose is an example where the film manages to stray just far enough. The novel is a basic whodunit set in an Italian monastery in 1327.  The novel is at its core a Sherlock Holmes book wearing robes. The plot involves several murders inside the walls of the monastery that are linked to a shocking mystery buried within the walls of the monk's library.

The movie involves Sean Connery as an Italian Monk and Christian Slater as his side-kick. Below is the first 9 minutes of the film. Just look at it. Really.

The book is darkly humorous and the movie manages to stray more into silly territory, but it works. If you're going to make this movie and make it borderline hilarious, put 007 in there. Just look at the poster:

"Who, in the name of God, is getting away with murder?" Indeed. That poster and the clip above do not really seem to go together. If I told you that this was a film where you see an under the legal age Christian Slater naked, where monks kill each other in gruesome and strange ways, where the plot hinges on Plato and a labyrinth...you would tell me I'm full of shit.

If I said that it was the little-known sequel to The Princess Bride, you'd believe me.

It's a shame that the film is no longer on Netflix streaming, but it is available on disc. I highly recommend a night in with it. And you should also read the book. It's quick, smart, and manages to keep you slightly in the dark to the outcome.

There are so many book films these days that it's hard to weed out the crap. What are some other book to film adaptations that you would endorse?

Dust Jacket : Women With Men

Women With Men (1997)
Designed by: Carol Devine
Photo by: Ernst Haas

The cliche of photos telling a thousand words is easy to roll your eyes at. A moment frozen in time is ripe for the projection of the viewer.

This photo by Ernst Haas is no different. And also is an example of the cliche being proven true.

Look at the face of the woman. Really look at her expression. The man is kissing her cheek? Whispering in her ear? She grasps his jacket tightly. Behind them is a train. Which explains everything and nothing. Is she leaving him? Him leaving her?

The simple title and author treatments put center focus on the image. This is a book about relationships. Complicated relationships. Ones that may need more than a thousand words to explain.

Haas' photos are strange. There is always a mystery. His most well-known works are purposefully left out of focus and blurry. He used dye-transfer to create saturated colors and enhance the moods. He was all about the question behind the image. About that story that isn't being told. If a picture says a thousand words, his speak only riddles. Beautiful riddles.

On the set of The Misfits 1960.

Within 12 years of becoming a photographer, Haas had a solo show at MoMA. In 1964 he created the opening sequence for John Huston's epic film The Bible. He also worked on the sets of The Misfits, Hello Dolly!, Little Big Man, and Heaven's Gate.

I love photography on book jackets. There is something visceral about a photo. Great paintings or text or illustrations are fine, beautiful even, but a photo gives you real people to deal with. Emotionally. Those people exist. You must deal with them in relation to the book in your hands. That woman and man in a train station felt things. And now I am looking at them.

Photography implicates us in our viewership. It points a finger back at us and says, You are witness to this. The Haas photo on Ford's book reminds me of the cover of Antony and the Johnsons' album The Crying Light:

The photo is of Kazuo Ohno in mid-dance. Ohno was a seminal modern dance artist in post-WWII Japan. He is most well-known for his butoh choreography. Butoh is a dance form that rose in the 50s to  deal with taboo or grotesque subject matter. You can see it as a reaction to the devastation of war, to cultural upheaval, to life itself.

They are actions that say a thousand words. Actions that the viewer must fill in. With emotion, with themselves.

Dust Jacket is a sometime article about the design and art of book covers. The idea is to shine a spotlight on the work of the designer separate from the author. Literally judging a book by its cover.

Wherein I Use The Name Paul Giamatti Seven Times

Last night my boyfriend J and I were rummaging around our favorite local book store, Unnameable Books on Vanderbilt Avenue. Unnameable is about 2/3 used books and 1/3 new. They have the best poetry section of any book store I've been in in the city. It stretches over a whole wall and includes many harder to find titles and big name poets/publishers.

William Makepeace Thackeray,  happy

J found a great old copy of Vanity Fair that included Thackeray's original drawings and approximated the appearance of the first bound edition. It has a really odd cartoon drawing of Thackeray himself on the cover holding a Greek comedy mask.

On this trip I didn't pick anything up, but as we were checking out we did notice a copy of Henry James' The Golden Bowl by the register. It was face down and the back proudly displayed its Penguin logo and design scheme.

I've always loved Penguin's design. The use of out of context paintings and those black bars with simple elegant white and orange writing. Classic, simple and somehow evocative of the 'greatness' of the books they publish.

For their 60th anniversary they have added the tag line 'The best books ever written' on their classics editions. That was 6 years ago. I've never noticed it before. It hovers on the back of the James right above the UPC. It looked like a ridiculous blurb that someone would paste onto a copy of Infinite Jest or Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It felt out of place and bombastic. Not like Penguin at all.

I picked up the book to examine the quote and realized that it was Penguin saying this about themselves and got a little grossed out. I give them credit for having the balls to put it out there like that, but still. Ew factor high.

While I was holding it a man came up startled and jokingly accused me of stealing the book. Saying, 'Are you taking my Henry James? Don't steal my James!' I laughed and turned to tell him that I was just  looking at it and the man was Paul Giamatti.

Two quick things. 1) I had noticed that Paul Giamatti was in the store with J and I earlier but I do not get silly around celebrities. They are people. I have waited on many of them in my days and have even dined with a few. They aren't that interesting, really. 2) This is my second odd run-in with Paul Giamatti. I feel like you have to use his whole name when talking about him. Some people are like that.

My first Paul Giamatti run-in was at the Met with my good friend H. We were there to see a fashion exhibit and had paused in front of a painting or photo, I don't remember, but we turned and there he was. Alone. Staring at the art in front of him. He looked sad. Maybe he's just a sad looking guy? I don't know, but he looked sad that day. Maybe it was because that John Adams mini-series was just out and getting bad reviews and his face was plastered on every bus in the city. H and I joked that we should go say hi and offer him a hug. We were very close to doing it but decided to leave for cookies and coffee instead.

Also. J had recently sent me this clip:

That, dear friends, is from the 2000 movie Duets. Staring...Paul Giamatti. Who I forgot was even in the movie until I saw him there. Also, Andre Braugher! Who's currently on that silly TNT show Men of a Certain Age with Scot Bakula and Ray Romano.

Thomas Hardy would take the book

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that J and I are currently in the mood for classic books. I have been reading Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. And I would be reading The Golden Bowl if I had run screaming from Unnameable with Paul Giamatti's book like I kinda sorta maybe wanted to.

Re-Read : The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Publisher: Scribner (1925)
218 pages


As I write this the 7 hour 15 minute long staged reading of Fitzgerald's 'greatest' work is playing in London's West End at the Noël Coward Theatre as part of the annual LIFT Festival.

I mention this merely as a starting point. That this production, Gatz, created in 2006 by Elevator Repair Service, exists at all is telling of so much of Gatsby's allure. And of its failings.

We all know the story: Gatsby is a rich man, Nick is not. Gatsby pulls Nick into a world of opulence and wonder. Gatsby loves a married woman. That woman's husband is also engaged in an affair. It all ends terribly. Nick goes back to reality.

That is the trailer for the Baz Luhrmann movie, out this Christmas from Warner Brothers! In 3-D! Which begs the question: Why Gatsby? Why now?

In a recent Sellers post I touched on how I think our attraction to past eras of perceived glamor seem to coincide with periods of economic downturn. In that post I was focused on the Tudor period. I touched on 20s and 30s fashion making a comeback as well as the re-emergence of Dallas in that post. We have a strange cultural blind spot for certain eras; the 1920s, 1950s and apparently Tudor England.

Nostalgia overwhelms reality.

Tudor England was not sexy. It was political havoc and many (most) were killed in the process. And that is what is interesting about why we seem to be having a Gatsby moment. The 20s were dark, full of crime, and led to the Depression. The book is racist, classist, and sexist. The characters are unlikable, rich, white, and many die or end up in a sort of arrested development because of their wealth or 'position' in society.

So are we feeling like the 20s represent the early 2000s? Are we trying to explain our situation through the past? That's interesting because of how the book ends:

He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch our arms farther...And one fine morning -

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

This is one of the greatest closings in American writing. I would argue this is why the book is still around. Why it is read and loved. This final passage takes what is a basic pot-boiler and twists it into a cautionary tale against vapid wealth, against nostalgia. We are held by our past and that hold will destroy us. In large or small ways.

I will go into my views of how reading this book now vs. high school felt in part two of this post.

Re-Read is a sometime article where I go back and read a book from my childhood over and examine the threads that I find in my current adult life.

Dust Jacket : The Thirty Years War, Pt. 2

The Thirty Years War(2009)

Designed by: Jill Breitbarth
Painting by: Feodor Dietz

Read part one HERE.

I went over the history of the war and the players in part one. There I touched on the image. How it plays with the central figure in black. Now I want to focus on the image and how it draws me in.

In Breitbarth's crop of the Dietz painting, the man in black takes center sage. The sky is shortened and what we see is a man about to hit a horse. Behind him are faces, watching intently. Are they an audience? Is the man in black the good guy or are they? The ambiguity alludes to the strange politics of the war itself, but the image is one that fascinates.

A lone warrior against unbeatable odds. No matter who is the 'good' and 'bad' one man against what appears to be an army are not favorable odds.

And this scenario crops up in dozens of films. Each time in almost identical ways:

The idea of the lone avenger. The ultimate underdog situation is hard to resist. Oldboy and Kill Bill are examples that are numerous. Look at most action films and this situation will come up at least once. Of course war would look more like this:

Without Orcs.

The David versus Goliath ideal is a natural draw. We want a savior, a sentry, someone who against all odds will come through. It doesn't matter who is good or bad really, we want the thrill of what will happen. The suspense. The idea that someday that lone warrior may be us.

That man in black will attack the man on the horse. The crowd of faces will stand for a moment in disbelief. Depending on the outcome of that initial face-off, that man in black may face that crowd. And it will be epic.

THIS! 5/25/12

THIS! on May 25, 2012

1) Star Wars Weekend

This happened. And will again. Every Friday-Sunday until June 10th.

2) Law Of The Sea

This treaty was signed by the rest of the world in 1982. The US has yet to even get close to signing it. Sen. John Kerry thinks he can bring it back and pass it. There are currently 34 countries that have either not signed or not ratified LOST.

A few other international laws the US has not signed:

The Kyoto Protocol (1997) - The greenhouse gas treaty went into effect in 2005. Aside from the US  Afghanistan, Andorra and South Sudan also have either not signed or ratified the treaty. Canada renounced in 2011 days after the Durban agreement and the revelation that Canada had actually increased emissions 17% since 1990.

CEDAW (1979) - This law went into effect in 1981. It is a sweeping anti-discrimination and series of protections for women from abuse. Seven UN member states have not ratified, signed, or acceded the treaty, they are Iran, Palau, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Tonga, and the United States. Palau and the US signed the treaty but have not ratified or acceded it. The law has come under fire for being ineffectual, specifically in regards to so-called 'honor killings' and the promotion of 'western' values.

CRC (1989) - The law went into effect in 1990. A basic outlining of the rights of children and forming protections for them under the law. Somalia, South Sudan and the United States are the only countries in the world to have not signed or ratified the law. The US did sign it, but has yet to ratify. President Obama has called this 'embarrassing'.


3) Horseshoe Crabs

Neither related to horses nor crabs but over 450 million years old. Discuss.