Contemporary Arab Films

Contemporary Arab Films:

Narrative, Social Commentary and Artistic Integrity

—Good-bye, sir.

—Where to?

—Madness.

—Which madness?

—Any madness, for I have turned into words.

—Mahmud Darwish

As a religion Islam embodies vast numbers of people and cultures across vast lands. The common thread among these disparate groups is the religion of Islam, a submission unto Allah, unto God. The central unity of such a religion, as with other religions that have a global presence, is the language of the central doctrines and dogmatic teachings of the religion. Thus, to submit, or to surrender, is to give one’s self up to the language by which one is to live one’s life. Similarities can be seen within the orthopraxy of Judaism’s 613 laws and the commandments of the Christian bible. According to Adonis language doesn’t exist to understand meaning outside of itself, but more accurately meaning is contained within the language and the rules that define it[1]. Arabic’s linguistic rules are not only a codified grammar that organizes thought into communicable modules, but legitimates artistic forms and mediums that can not exist, or attain legitimacy, outside of a religious context that also contained the political, inextricably linked to the religious. The plight of the Arab poet is a crisis of modernity struggling with the ancient past; one can not exist outside of the other. Although Adonis sees that this crisis, for poetry, has its locus in an attempted split of the new from the old, or of truth (al-batin)[2], from the language that justifies the truths, he admonishes us from peering at this problem from outside the very lexicon that prevents transcendence outside of itself. The crisis for poetry, on the level of language exists in regard to image and narrative for the Arab filmmaker. It is impossible to make a film of the Arab world without in some way borrowing from the rich mythology of its language and religion regardless of which language it is, it will always convey the Qur’an if it’s to be successful and bring a native viewer into the reality of its narrative. To scrutinize such a film one must in essence step inside the movie and not assume a truly “western” objectivity; this, according to Adonis, would be a mistake in the form of modern criticism, or modernity’s lens:

“If we are to treat the problem of modernity, we must first re-examine the structures of Arab thought. To question modernity, Arab thought must question itself. Arab modernity can be studied only within the perspective of Arab thought, on the level of principles and actual historical developments, within the framework of its specific assumptions, using its epistemological tools and in the context of the issues which gave rise to the phenomenon and have resulted from it. To study it from a western perspective would be to distort it and distance oneself from the real issues.”

(Adonis pg. 93)

The means by which criticism happens in film varies from filmmaker to filmmaker but this year’s crop of films in the Arab Film Festival[3] take different approaches to discuss culture and identity through the medium of film. Heaven’s Door, an Algerian film by Imad and Swel Noury, three interconnecting stories weave a haphazard chronology that moves forward and back through time so that the audience is entreated to partake in the “organization” or, a second retelling in reordering the narratives.

The first vignette concerns a young man by the name of Ney who digs ditches for a living. He supports his blind mother and adolescent sister. As the sole bread winner and head of the small but tight house hold the responsibility for the survival of the family is squarely on his shoulders. Fast money seduces him when his friends introduce him to Mr. Monsour, who says "Let's be honest, we are breaking the law, but we will make lots of money." The dynamics of the family, albeit in a foreign tongue, aren't that far removed from western archetypes of poverty and the struggle for survival in an urban landscape.

Ney’s world is the byproduct of globalization where American Rap music reigns supreme, the soundtrack of the film never really touches native tone, but instead keeps its frenetic pace with angry hip hop, youths break dancing, chase scenes through shadowy corners, over exposed cinematography where shapes become ethereal and rooftop vistas of Ney jumping rope to stay in shape. Money flows, for a while, but like all crime sagas, the street catches up. Ney is wounded in an altercation and sent to the hospital. He recovers and seeks revenge. The premonition that Ney’s life will end badly comes to pass during a shoot out in an apartment that leaves 3 people dead.

Flash forward, there's one survivor in the bathroom of the apartment, you don't know this until the second vignette that centers on the survivor, Salim, and his mother who is in a coma after being shot. Salim and his mother are taken in by an American ex-pat art professor whose dead husband was the brother of Salim’s now dead father. Lisa, Salim’s aunt by marriage, is a bitter woman who nurses her despair with Jack Daniels and a kind of labyrinthian solitude as she lives in a foreign land and society where her position as a woman precludes her from integration, and moreover, her national identity as an American ex-pat is yet another absolute road block.

The story takes a bit of a contrived turn here, Lisa, in her anger and solitude, unable to have children, is cold and distant. She sets harsh rules for the gentle Salim and expects a distraught child who walked out of the bathroom to find a scene reminiscent of the shootout at the OK Coral on his living room floor. With time Lisa melts and falls in love with Salim, "Je t'aime" she says to Salim as she tells him he's the son she never had.

The shadowy Mr. Monsour makes an appearance offering to take care or help out with the family by contacting the social worker, Jalil, who has a crush on Lisa. This is incredibly strange when you consider that Monsour gave Ney the address of Salim's father to exact his revenge and provided the firearms with which to carry out his plan. Eventually another relative surfaces and Lisa must give up Salim and his mother's still silent body in a painful agony that returns her to solitude. She says that there was a time before Salim and then there's the time after Salim. What will become of her is uncertain, but she chooses to go home for a bit to deal with her "phantoms" and dysfunctional family back in San Francisco. The collision of east and west is sharply contrasted by the way that families deal with each other. Lisa’s forced to give up Salim and his mother because by law she has less right as the wife of Salim’s deceased uncle, but more to the point as a woman. The struggle exemplifies the plight of a woman in terms of her lack of rights when those rights come into conflict with the demands of a man. The law is always on the side of a man.

Between the Vignettes a narrator reads poetry, obscure and haunting verses, illuminating, foreboding, somewhat beautifully lyrical and foreshadowing of events to come. Poetry becomes a living voice, not a cold academic rhetoric or a childish limerick, but an important part of contemporary society. The present drama and narrative is in essence couched in an older voice, something almost mythological in its reliance on an older traditional form. The living voice of poetry is in an integral part of the society as it legitimizes the film by its reliance on the past. This “eastern” paradigm recites poetry, as with the Ghazals of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the Pakistani poet, recitation is a normal part of every day speech, it’s a way of communication that realizes the present through the ancient, and in some way brings both speaker and listener closer to al-batin, the truth. Poetry’s presence, to the ear of the listener, is a kind of open ended question, however within the context of the film, however in terms of what Adonis posits as its absolute necessity to garner legitimacy, questioning is almost nonexistent, in practice politics is a sort of submission as must be questioning[4].

On a trip to the beach, Lisa meets a homeless woman, an old beggar asking for alms. She sits like a sage fresh from the desert and issues Lisa oracular wisdom about solitude; loosely put: some run from solitude because they aren't comfortable with it, some run to solitude because they can't live without it. Lisa's nature is of the first variety, the old woman on the other hand is the latter. As she lives, Lisa offers her money, and she refuses, saying next time, as if to mean “this time you’re the one in need”.

Through the first two stories an old man is seen in prison, in brief clips, an arresting image of solitude. The man’s identity is finally established, Smail, an old con, a sage in his own right who tells a younger cell mate "we are not friends, we are both here in this situation and have to rely on each other, when we get out we might be friends." The story of Smail starts with him at the slain man's apartment, recently release from prison, trying to procure a gun. He leaves and passes a young man in the hallway on the way to the elevator, Ney, the connections are now complete. Smail's story, and at this point, the whole montage, seems very much like narrative lines of Alejandro González Iñárritu Amores Perros, an older man has debts to settle in a self-righteous manner which comes off as compelling that weaves into the story of two younger individuals that exist at the pace of the world, rather than setting their own.

Smail takes up residence is in a small bungalow by the beach, he funds his life with a modest treasure that he stashed before going to prison for 15 years because he was ratted out by one of his partners. The details of his movements read more like those of Redford in Spy Game than Freeman in Shawshank Redemption. He acquires a fake passport, hooks up with his only dear friend left, Omar; he bids goodbye to his mother, who he said, in his prison monologues, is the only one who will wait for me. His contention is that wives and children will abandon you, but the love of the mother will keep you safe. This very much parallel's Ney's mother who says "mothers hold the keys to Heaven's Doors" and that "children must obey and respect their mothers for they have the power to curse their children" in the sense of 'I brought you into this world I can take you out.'

The familial hierarchy is confusing, for within both of these examples, it is the mother who acts like a kind of glue, but outside of the family unit, the mother is powerless, so her power is a kind of mythological power invested in by her children, and actuated by a web of curses and paradises that define ‘mother’. However, even in a distant land, the Sudan, the same mythological voice that represents “family” exists in Tayeb Salih’s The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid. The father of the story in essence is pleading for a kind of ancestral or tribal memory that sustains not only the family unit but the extended family. The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid, in a Jungian[5] sense, isn’t just a creation myth of how Wad Hamid founded the village, but places the village and the villagers in the story and creates a meaning for both villagers and tree just as the mother places herself into a position of mythological power over her son as a means to respect. So to does the father of the story end it by pleading for his son not to judge his past, the villagers and their myths too harshly[6].

As the narrative of Noury’s film pushes on, Smail arrives late, his mother is near death in the hospital; his goodbye is short lived as she never regains consciousness. With that detail of his life settled he sees the woman he lost when he went to prison, Omar's sister, and holds a quiet and painful conversation fifteen years overdue. While at the beach, an old drunk imparts similar knowledge about solitude and "being" in that Schoppenhauerian sense of being. He is the masculine component to the feminine solitude that Lisa experiences within society, Smail experienced it outside of society through prison. Albeit has left prison, he is firmly rooted in the prison of the past. Not too surprisingly, we learn that the partner who betrayed Smail is Monsour and that he's going to exact his revenge before vanishing to Bangkok. The killing field, and empty unplowed field of dead grass, is repeated ominously through the film and between Vignettes punctuated by a gun shot. The final scene is that of Smail driving off in Monsour’s BMW, his hand fondling the air outside the window in a playful and childish act of abandon. Everything is resolved, the curse comes true, Ney perishes, Salim melts Lisa's heart and Smail exacts his revenge.

Revenge isn’t at the heart of Algerian director Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s film Bled Number One. Nor is the film told through hand held shaky cam shots, on the contrary the film is very much in the spirit of cinéma vérité[7]. Although the film isn’t a documentary because of its fictive narrative, it retains the feeling cinéma vérité, through its moment in time portrayal and use of non professional actors and village locals for a cast. The soundtrack is a clever hodge-podge of ambient sounds that seem to somehow create background rhythms from conversations and the sounds of birds in the rural setting of the Algerian village. This montage is sharply contrasted by the climax “concerto” on the hill of Rodolphe Burger's heavy and haunting guitar solo.

The narrative revolves around Kamel, an Algerian ex-pat who returns to a small village in Algeria following a stay in France. The film's quiet moments reflect perfectly the nearly pond-like life of the village that seems to effortlessly revolve around the seasons and practices that are as old as the stones in the hills. A cow is brought to the village and slaughtered on film. The graphic realism highlights the tradition of Hillel butchery. After the cow is bled and dismembered all the meat is arranged in small piles on fresh cut leafy branches. The men of the village stand around this square and pray, wishing each other and the people of the Earth good will and of course, praise be to Allah. Each man then comes forward and takes one small pile of meat and puts it into a basket as his fair share of the sacrifice. The ceremony is a beautiful scene in stark contrast to the death of the animal. Together, there’s continuity to the lives of the animals and the people that links them to the land and vice versa. The disjointing effect of urban life where meat grows in supermarkets is instantly discarded and replaced with an agrarian tradition of inclusive community in this simple act.

The communal harmony of the village doesn't seem to last long. Enter a young band of ruffians who begin to terrorize the villagers with a brand of radical Islam. They go into the local cafe and declare that playing dominos is a sin, to which one of the villagers replies: "look, we're all Muslims, we're not rejecting Islam, but to each their own." The zealots are pushed out of the village and a guard post is erected at the road leading into the village following a meeting to mobilize the men of the village in defense of their way of life.

Now this egalitarianism is all well and good until Louisa arrives home and the darker side of this patriarchal society is shown. Louisa, as you later find out, has left her husband and taken their young boy Yanis. She has come home because she wants to sing American Jazz and Cabaret which goes against the wishes of her family. She is reprimanded by her Mother and urged to return to her husband. Louisa has a tired and half defeated look in her eyes as she listens to her Mother’s chiding and her brother Bouzid looks on, dubious and plotting. Flash forward, Bouzid is stumbling through the hills with two cases of alcohol and the religious zealots catch up to him and threaten to cut off his head. For a moment you think they’re really going to do it, but they eventually let him go. The next day Louisa's husband shows up to collect her and his child. Her husband spends the evening in the local cafe drinking and chewing tchim. In the cafe there are discussions of politics and what people are doing about their relative situations. There's no real animosity toward the west in the discussion, there is a kind of removal, an odd sort of objectivism about contemporary events that is disarming. Eventually Louisa and Yanis leave in a car with Louisa’s husband. Half way down the road Louisa's husband stops the car, steps out of it, throws her suitcase to the side of the road and then drags Louisa out of the car by her hair and takes off with the boy.

Here is where Louisa's troubles begin. For every insult that befalls her there is an injury waiting to happen. When she returns home late at night alone Bouzid, her brother, takes her to her room and proceeds to beat her bloody. She has shamed the family and he exacts a kind of revenge. The interesting parallel between this Heaven's Doors is the absence of a father in all of this. The brother is effectively running the household and distributes a kind of patriarchal justice, or at least has the final say in how things will happen. The sad fact of the matter is that Louisa is exercising her freedom of dissent with her spouse in a society where there’s no room for dissent either linguistically or through self actuation. She is ostracized by her family, shunned by her husband's family and beaten for her insolence. After this incident she is taken to the local cleric for advice and told to put her faith in Allah that the husband will come back for her. She is also told to absolve her sins by allowing seven waves to lash her in the face and then to run around the mosque seven times.

As effective outsiders, Louisa and Kamel share a strange attraction. Kamel calls Bouzid on his brutality and accuses him of not being a man for beating his sister. Although the villagers seem to be progressive and liberal in their contemplations about world politics, they don’t spring to support Kamel in calling out Bouzis. There is a definite sense that tragedy rolls down hill and that Bouzid’s castration at the hands of the ruffians is ultimately paid for by Louisa. Nothing can console Louisa at the loss of her child so she leaves the village for the city and her Husband's family who tells her he has taken the child and throws her out of her own home.

Distraught, she attempts suicide by jumping off a bridge and is stopped and taken to a mental institution that resembles more of a battered women's shelter than anything else. The occupants are all women, or at least we're not shown the male ward, but you get the feeling that they are all there for the same exact reason. The images and deft cinematography is reminiscent of Diane Arbus's photographs from mental institutions that are simply numbered, denying her subjects a kind of human dignity in terms of a name as they jostle through the black and white images in their stark white robes in their role as patient and subject blur the distinguishing lines of doctor vs. patient.

Louisa stages a concert at the institution in a long black evening dress contrasting the gowns most of the audience is wearing in a rather touching scene that is as odd as it is surreal. This performance is juxtaposed with two strange scenes of Rodolphe Burger sitting on a hillside with an electric guitar plugged into an amp and Kamel wandering around. These two scenes come in pivotal moments in the film, one in the middle and then the very last scene after Kamel decides that he's in love with Louisa, who is now gone, and that he has to leave the village and will go so far as sneaking into Tunisia, as he's going mad and his sense of democracy and women's rights is completely at odds with the accepted pace of village life. It is Rodolphe's guitar that closes out the film with a haunting melody. You never quite find out what happens to Louisa or Kamel for that matter, but you are left with the knowledge that life will not change much in the village, it can’t, its existence depends on the uniform continuity of the inhabitants that consider themselves Muslims but not extremists, however are all socially conservative if examined from the western perspective. This tension between East and West through the character of Kamel, is a kind of invasion, he enters back into his own community but is changed, and the community resists the change that he brings. Change in a sense is a form of madness within such a community as it is essentially contrary to the daily act of surrender that is both religious and practical in order to preserve the harmony.

Mohamed Al Daradji takes on a journey into post Saddam Iraq with his 2005 feature film Ahlaam. The film revolves around 3 people, like the triptych of Heaven’s Doors; the story in Daradji’s film revolves around three people in an impossible situation. Chronologically, the narrative begins in the “present”; the film opens in a mental hospital with two inmates reacting to the sound of explosions outside their barred cells. The brief and dark introduction is interrupted as a long flashback sequence explains their situations.

Ali is a soldier confined to the mental hospital after he was nearly killed in a US air attack in 1998 as part of operation Desert Fox. Dr. Mehdi is a young doctor fresh from the military service that he was forced to join when his academic career was cut short by his family's past history: his father was a communist and executed for treason. Mehdi isn't a member of the Bath party, and because of his family's traitorous past, can't continue up the chain, so he joins the army without realizing his dream of becoming a full fledged doctor. The last, Ahlaam, is a young literature student, who walks her cell still wearing the wedding dress she was in the day the secret police came and took her fiancé never to be seen again.

In the hospital, Ali is almost unrecognizable as a gaunt figure cowering in the corner thoroughly broken. This portrait of Ali is completely contrary to how he is show before coming to the mental hospital. From the beginning of his flashback sequence you quickly understand that Ali is a fundamentally good person: he gives money to those less fortunate, a ferry man refuses to take money for the passage across the Tigris, he is his mother’s pride and he takes care of his friends.

In 1998 Mehdi was a promising and over achieving med student who passes his finals and dreams of doing a master's degree. His over protective mother says "Son, don't study so much, rest, they say sleeping more and studying less will help you pass the test." As he sits by candle light in his home at a desk the size of a cafeteria tray, scribbling in his notebook and reading while smoking cigarettes. His classmates think highly of him, he has velocity and trajectory in his life, yet his father's crimes and subsequent execution forestalls his ascent, and he falls like Icarus into the ocean of the Iraqi military.

Ahlaam isn’t what you would call a beautiful woman, but she has a sweetness about her that’s compelling. She’s on the verge of becoming a wife, and as she says, dawning a true Abaya, becoming a woman in a certain sense. She is the bridge between families, between the future and the past when she finds herself in a mental institution, still wearing a wedding gown for the day that Ahmed will return and make of her a wife. Ahlaam and Ahmed’s love affair is short but intense; it’s made up mostly of words, declarations, and skipping stones across the river. There is a sense that mutatis mutandis will bring about even greater joy to the families and these two people, albeit arranged, there’s an assumption that they’re genuinely in love.

Ali heads up to the Syrian border with his friend Hassan who is openly critical of the regime. Ali quiets him over and over again, worried about who might be listening, and who could report Hassan. Hassan’s other problem, his hair, is falling out in patches, and he believes all his misfortune in life and in love stem from his "condition"; he's something of a Samson without a Delilah. If it weren't for his hair he would be braver, more able to cope with the realities of living in Iraq. When the bus full of soldiers reaches a checkpoint the security officers come on board and check the soldier's papers. Those returning late, or have lost their orders or passes, those with excuses other than what the document says, are removed from the bus, presumably, never to be heard from again.

Once Ali and Hassan reach the desolate no-man's land of the Syrian-Iraqi border there's not much to do until the bombs start falling. A joint US & Great Britain operation bombs the north. Their camp is hit. Ali is knocked out and shell-shocked, unable to hear. He wakes up bloody and stumbles around looking for Hassan who’s lying amidst a litter of soldiers clutching the stumps of where limbs used to be yelling for help or an officer, both in short supply. Delirious, Ali picks up Hassan and begins to carry him, looking for a doctor. Stumbling through the night he crosses into Syria and then back into Iraq when he’s picked up by military police, still carrying Hassan’s body. He's accused of desertion and thrown in prison. His trial is a mockery; naturally he’s found guilty and condemned to have his ear surgically cut off for treachery and cowardice. After the sentence is carried out he’s committed to the mental hospital.

The film resumes its “present” narrative chronology with a cruel doctor at the mental hospital who believes in electro shock therapy, yells at the patients, kicks them, and has about as much mercy as Torquemada. Mehdi is the absolute opposite; he has the penetrating insight to know that Ali isn't mentally insane, but that how you treat a man will determine how that man will live, and how he will react to such inhuman conditions. The chief psychologist wheels the screaming Ahlaam in for electro shock, and during the delivery of the first round the hospital is hit by a bomb.

It’s the morning after, 2 days, to be precise, before Sadaam’s regime collapses. Pandemonium has broken out, bodies are lying the streets, houses collapsing as a mostly civil society that has lived together under the unflinching rule of the regime comes apart at the seems. The patients are fleeing the hospital as it’s being looted, Ali and Mehdi try to intervene with the looters but find themselves targets when they get in the way of the looters. Search parties are organized to track down the patients and Ali begins to run around the streets, in nothing but his boxers, barefoot, looking for patients. Ahlaam's parents take to the street with a cleric to help them; they walk around showing people her picture, as she wanders seeing her husband in every strange face and shadow. Her dreams and her waking hours become one and the same and she suffers for her inability to see clearly. Her delusions serve to comfort her in that Ahmed is very much alive in her mind, but when every brigand turns into Ahmed her punishment becomes a prison not of her own making.

The story becomes a bleak portrayal of the worst of human nature when a sniper opens fire on innocent people in the street. There isn't any anxiety that isn't explored in this first film since the fall of the regime. The film understands and is capable of conveying beautiful gestures in the simple act of giving a naked man a coat, and how that has a resounding effect through so many other "coats" in cinema history, most recently The Pianist and the scene at the end where the Russian army officer quite bluntly says "why the fucking coat?" Ali is eventually shot down by the sniper while herding patients back to the hospital in a horrific moment, a naked soldier dying in the street.

These small codified messages, intentional or not, make the film a rich presentation of east and west, as the east's fate seems to rest in western hands. The final scenes of the film are exasperating as the family spots Ahlaam just as US soldiers arrive and fighting breaks out, she flees into a building they are barred from entering. "This is what I get for a lifetime of service and obedience, to be knocked to the dirt in my own country?!" cries Ahlaam's mother as she is toppled by a soldier. And up the flights of deserted stairs goes the frightened Ahlaam, lead by voices, the dead speak, and she answers. Finally on the roof, looking out over what Ali earlier called "beautiful Baghdad" the camera pans round and round and round and it ends, at the height of the narrative, rendering the audience unable to speak, unable to make any sense of the impossible situation, and equally powerless to forget it. The women of this film seem to suffer the worst atrocities when you consider how utterly powerless they are to begin with. There’s an understanding that women are due a measure of respect, but in the terrible scene of Ahlaam’s mother being knocked down by the soldier as she tries to save her daughter, that respect is lost and insult is added to injury as she cries in the dust of her broken country.

Respect and consideration cut to the heart of Jocelyn Saab’s Kiss me not on the Eyes. The film derives its title from a piece of Egyptian music that is and played during the film. The story is relatively simple and even predictable at times. A young girl, daughter of a famous belly dancer, is chasing her mother's ghost as she studies the dance. She is courted by a young man who she has affection for, but isn't quite sure she's in love with him. Love becomes equated with loss in the sense of possession and the fear of loosing him forces her hand, she agrees to marry. Not surprisingly, once married, her artistry, her dance, becomes a point of contention between her and her new husband who wants to keep her body to himself. She calls herself an artist, he sees her as his wife; the controlling hand of the patriarchal society creates the tension, the necessary tension, to allow Dunia, our dancer and protagonist, the courage to blaze her own trail.

The film really takes shape through the supporting cast and the tangential plot lines that are woven around Dunia’s somewhat hectic and complicated life. Take for instance her friend, a woman and a cab driver who runs what must be the only “American Graffiti” styled cab in all of Cairo with colorful vinyl seats, chach-kas and a matching attitude. Then there's the woman who runs the Guest House where the famous poet lives who struggles against the censors to keep 1001 Arabian Nights from being banned.

Egypt is painted as a wonderfully complex place, as far as its cinema portrays it. The secular government allows women more freedom than what is portrayed in the previous three films. Here they run businesses, teach at the university and live, what appears to be, a life that affords them the right to make choices. Yet, in all of this, a dark specter stalks the story and characters: excision, or female circumcision. It is estimated that 97% of all Egyptian women are genitally mutilated at a young age. Prescription holds that a young girl is to be excised when she begins to menstruate and this will help her lead a happier and more fulfilling life. The terrible act is at the heart of one of the sub plots involving a young girl named Yasmine, with a very old fashioned grandmother. A woman arrives in a black cloak and the procedure is carried out at home with nothing more than a razor blade. It’s a difficult seen to watch, as Dunia arrives too late to save Yasmine's body: "congratulations" she says to the grandmother, "instead of protecting her, you've made her just like you, her kitchen will forever be cold and not all the spices of the world will bring her cooking to life." This same grandmother had been trying to convince Dunia to have an excision, and that she, the grandmother, had found a doctor who would only cut out a fraction, instead of the whole clitoris.

It’s truly difficult to be critical without realizing that the criticism is a superimposition of one culture’s values on another. There’s a myriad of contradictions in making such a judgment when you take into account the west’s predilection toward advertising and how that advertising leads to our experience of other people based on what we see in regard to what they look like[8]. The lack of judgment based on action and true communication stunt our ability to interact with “other”, such a dislocation, person to person estrangement is not unlike a piece of us, cut out, with a visual razor.

To complicate matters of appearance, of living in her mother’s Ghost, Dunia is also a poet who apprentice for an intellectual, Beshir, who supervises her thesis on ecstasy in Sufi Poetry. Beshir begins to teach Dunia to trust herself while simultaneously teaching her about the problem in love poetry. The central problem seems to be one of direct addresses. True passion, a kind of rapture and suffering because of love is freely written about in lyric and song, but as for passion and love itself, the moment of departure rather than the aftermath of that departure, or as Beshir puts it "we're afraid of it openly" is completely stifled. This tension of aftermath vs. actuality, or real presence vs. assumed pitfall, is almost a modern analogy for the preventions/prescriptions of religion in dictating morality. The ability to live life undaunted according to a universal law of live and let live, like the men at the café in Bled Number One, may not be a fall from grace, through the eyes of a tradition built on religion, but a more fulfilling way to live, according to Beshir.

Dunia is hell bent on living as she wants to live. There’s a powerful scene when she says to the committee, as she attends an audition for a dance competition by reciting poetry while standing perfectly still: “I've never seen my body.” She sits down on the stage with her knees pulled to her chin, her toes wrapped in the hem of her skirt; this is her fetal pose where she is safe. As she discovers more and more poetry, listening to the now blind Beshir, the victim of an attacker wishing to defend Islam and its opponents who would have Egyptian society revel in the immorality of the Arabian nights, Dunia decides to look at her body. She buys a mirror and hangs it near her bed. She undresses out of the shot and then returns to the round mirror wrapped in bubble wrap that the mirror came in, still modest, but only in so far as the bubble wrapping is the appearance of modesty. She peers, opening the cellular curtain that surrounds her in order to take not of her body’s appearance for what seems to be the first time.

Mamhoud, Dunia's husband, becomes ever stricter, asking her to put her hair up when she goes out and asking her not to dance anymore. Eventually, as you might've guessed, following Yasmine's excision, a fight with Mamhoud, she flees her own apartment where he is now living, taking Yasmine with her, and winds up in the guest house where Beshir lives. There she discovers sensuality, she dresses in the garb of Beshir’s lover, the woman who runs the hotel, and enters his room, shaking the many gold bracelets on her left arm that Beshir is accustomed to hearing from his love. She steps into the role, breaking all tradition, marital vows, everything, to discover, or more accurately, pursue something taboo, and more importantly, something direct and real.

Dunia’s entrance into a sensual realm seems to reverberate in her dance. Her teacher says that there is equilibrium of the universe when you dance and that equilibrium is present through all the axes of the body from north to south, east to west front and back. It is only then, when she enters the room in garb, and the professor tells her "never dress as another, never disguise yourself, never wear another's makeup" that this seems to become a reality. The axes have realigned themselves because she has begun to live her life according to her own rules, even if she stumbles a bit in a dress that's too long for her. Dunia, in a sense, realizes her Gender on two levels, not only the ascribed gender as a social relation but a mental or internal understanding of that gender based on her ability to make decisions that help her identify with her inherent gender[9].
Dance, on the order of social interaction, and according to Dunia’s teacher, is a balance between heaven and Earth. One hand is arched toward the heavens, the other channels power into the ground. The posture that Dunia assumes is that of a whirling dervish in the midst of a dhikr. Knowledge moves from Allah, through Dunia and into the Earth. The hand gestures are similar to medieval painting, especially the depiction of Plato and Aristotle in Raphael’s School of Athens where they acknowledge heaven and Earth, or abstract ideas and a kind of practical dialectic. This double perception of dance is not unlike what Kowan calls both the “spectacle” and the process of “intersubjectivity” that the dancer enters into. In one sense the dance, for Dunia, is between her and the Earth, a kind of rhythm that happens from the beginning when she taps it, and at the same time it is about her past, about her mother’s ghost, a renowned artist in her own right.

To be caught between these fires, the past and the present, between religious prescriptions and personal desire are addressed by modern Arab film makers as they struggle with the price of surrender. The medium of film allows for a critical meditation on these problems, however, in order to be critical the story must live within the tradition as Adonis says, it can not be an outsider in its judgment and criticism.

The struggle couldn’t be more eloquently illustrated than in the 2005 Iranian film Café Transit by Kambuzia Partovi’s. Reyhan is a woman that seems to be caught in the world of Sharia while living on the Iranian border with Syria. Her husband owned a cafe before his death. According to tribal law she is supposed to marry her brother in-law and to join his family so she can be looked after. There are two things satisfied here, 1) family honor in that family takes care of its own, 2) established tradition and saving face for the dead, so that his wife doesn't shame his memory.

Reyhan isn't from this area, nor does she have any intention of marrying Nasser as wife #2. Nasser is somewhat diplomatic at first as Reyhan defies his wishes; she reopens the cafe and fills it with a domestic hospitality that brings to mind the hospitality of the Phoecians to Odysseus in Homer.

In addition running the café, Reyhan begins to take in strays of all kinds including a young Russian girl running away from the war in Chechnya, en route to find her sister in Italy. Neither woman speaks the other's language, but that doesn’t preclude them from crying on each other's shoulder through some innate understanding that can only described as the plight of the gender. According to Sharia Reyhan is only entitled to 1/8th of her husband’s estate, the smallest share, because her husband left no written will. The lion's share of the inheritance and the rights to the property of her husband’s café belong to Nasser. Eventually, Nasser's diplomacy runs out and he takes her to court. The café is closed and she’s locked out.

The narrative plot of the film is told through a kind of "remembering" and "witness" to the magic of Reyhan created through the eyes of the young Russian girl and Zakario a Greek Trucker who falls in love with Reyhan. There is a mystic quality to the food and the scenes of her cooking, chopping vegetables, grilling eggplants and potatoes, plates of steaming basmati rice and saffron with heaps of lamb. The film fits into that long tradition of "foodie" cinema punctuated by such gems as Big Night, Babbette's Feast, The Dinner Party, Mystic Pizza, Chocolate, Water For Chocolate, Eat Drink Man Woman, Fried Green Tomatoes, Vatel and maybe and the delightfully perverse, The Cook The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover.

The climax of the film and its virtual end are a kind of beacon of hope. Reyhan goes to the café across the road from Nasser’s, she asks the owner to hire her on as a cook or rent out the establishment to her. As she is unable to undertake land ownership herself, or even running a business, she bring along her husband’s partner and waiter to make the arrangements that she “doesn’t understand” or more accurately can’t according to the law. Nasser watches her, anxiously, from across the way, stubborn, and now in a position to affect his livelihood as his business did suffer while she ran the Border Café, and now she is in his backyard and this time there’s little he can do. Such an ending signals hope, and the potential for change. Each of these films deals with some aspect of the culture in which it was made in a critical fashion, weather it’s the pull of crime for the disenfranchised youth of Morocco, or excision in Egypt, Arab film makers are using the medium of film as a means for dissent, sometimes quiet and sometimes with a critical resolve that works simultaneously as narrative and social commentary without betraying their artistic integrity.

Bibliography:

Books:

Adonis (Ali Ahmad Sa’id), An Introduction to Arab Poetics, trans: Catherin Cobham, Texas University Press, Austin, TX, 1990

Darwish, Mahmoud, Memory for Forgetfulness: Beirut 1982, UC Press, Berkeley, CA, 1995

Faiz, Faiz Ahmed, The Rebel’s Silhoutte, Univ of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA 1995

Jung, C. G., The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, No. 9, Pt. 1, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ, 1981

Kowan, Jane K., Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990

McGrane, Bernard, The Un-TV and then 10 MPH Car, The Small Press, Ft. Bragg, CA 1994

Salih, Tayeb, The Wedding of Zein, Heinemann Education Books, Arab Author Series London, UK, 1978

Films:

Ahlaam, Mohamed Al Daradji, Iraq, 2005

Bled Number One, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, Algiers, 2006

Café Transit (Border Café), Kambuzia Partovi, Iran, 2005

Dunia (Kiss Me Not On The Eyes), Jocelyn Saab, Egypt, 2005

Heaven’s Doors, Imad & Swel Noury, Morocco, 2006

Other films seen, considered but not directly cited:

I know I’m not Alone, Michael Franit, 2005 (Iraq/Palestine Documentary)

Occupation 101, Abdallah & Sufyan Omeish, 2006 (Palestine Documentary)

The Blood of my Brother, Andrew Berends, 2005 (Iraq Documentary)

---

[1] Adonis (Ali Ahmad Sa’id), An Introduction to Arab Poetics, trans: Catherin Cobham, Texas University Press, Austin, TX, 1990 pg. 82.

[2] “The authorities viewed the mystical elements in these movements as constituting an attack on the law and practice of islam; this was because they made a distinction between ‘the evident’ (al-zahir) and ‘the hidden’ (al-batin), or between ‘the law’ and ‘the truth’, asserting that knowledge and truth come from ‘te hidden’, hence the possibility of achieving a kind of unity or union between God and existence and between God and man.” Adonis pg. 76

[3] San Francisco Arab Film Festival, 2006

[4] Adonis, An Introduction to Arab Poetics, pg. 84

[5] C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, No. 9, Pt. 1, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ, 1981, One of the key contextualizing ideas in the essay and study of archetypes is that individuals require myth as a means not only of describing natural phenomenon in age prior to scientific research, e.g. why does the sun rise, but more importantly, for the individual, as a means of writing yourself into the story and creating a sense of meaning and purpose for the individual. In a sense, this unique connection and meaning, becomes a shared conscience among a community of people. (pgs. 7-8)

[6] Tayeb Salih, The Wedding of Zein, Heinemann Education Books, Arab Author Series London, UK, 1978.

[7] The French movement of naturalism in cinema that evolved a new style of documentary film making, the rough translation means "cinema of truth" or from the Russian progenitor of the movement 'kino-pravda'.

[8] Bernard McGrane, The Un-TV and then 10 MPH Car, The Small Press, Ft. Bragg, CA 1994

“A spectre is haunting the mirrors of the modern world, the spectre of advertising. The genius of cinema, Frederico Fellini, once said in an interview: “Each person’s face is the perfect expression of the being of that person.” How far is that from the established way of seeing ruled by our advertising culture! Instead of seeing our self or someone else for who they are we see them for what they look like.”

[9] Jane K. Kowan, Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990, citing Edwin Ardener’s 1975 essay Belief and the Problem of Women: “The study of gender relations entails at least two levels of analysis of gender as a thought construct or category that helps us to make sense out of particular social worlds and histories; and of gender as a social relation that enters into and partially constitutes all other social relations and activities.” (Kowan, Pg. 8)

T minus 14 days...

love this shirt...

Holy Land

Here I come...

Fish Tank

Danny D. Drunk & Bashing Bush

Ok, not only is Danny DeVito drunk off his ass, while on the View, he bashes Bush in the process, which is all a little humorous considering how wrecked he is and that it was Clooney who got him that way...

The continuation of "For"

For Duncan McNaughton

Having tasted the earth - pomegranate's teeth incise a fictive tongue for lyrics. Oh baby, what is driven insane divines the sane's wellbeing. How is it you lick the phosphor off the tongue of a seed without being burned? Planted and growing share a natural causality like shit and shoe. Sheer cutting towns, passer by, by the sex shop store front, latex wakizashis inspires evolution: Valpariso rising son. It's a trick of the light when everything is visible, every impossible gesture green and horny with its own accusation; how you pluck a peach is the peach's doing. When you roam the two Romes and all the same shtick lights lavender, Jesus sitting with a high ball of cheap whiskey, your voice, and the horse echo of a horse people, sweep the veil past centuries of melting ice. Charles the map, the Thames and a locus of all Asiatic conflict brewed together like Raki.

The Ghazal Form

The ghazal (pronounced as something between 'guzzle' and 'huzzle') is a lyric form traditionally used in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu poetry. In the last 30 years, many poets writing in English have appropriated it, treating the rules more or less elastically. It was also used by some of the German Romantics two centuries before.

The basic elements are the refrain (radif), the rhyme (qafia), the couplet (sher), each occurring in a particular way in this form.

The basic unit is the couplet (sher), with a minimum of five couplets in the poem (and usually no more than 12). What is notable is that each should have an autonomy, an independence—hence the metaphor of five rooms in a house. Traditionally, there is no enjambment between couplets and there are a similar number of feet in each line of a couplet (keeping in mind that all the rules have been variously broken). With each couplet you can visit a new taste; often a theme or coherence of imagery develops.

The refrain (radif)—a short phrase, pair of words, or single word—occurs at the end of both lines in the opening couplet (which has its own name, matla), and then in only the second line of each succeeding couplet. See the following page for examples.

The rhyme (qafia)—if you choose to include it, and many writers in English don't—occurs just before the refrain. See the first example on the next page. Tough work in English, lots easier in Urdu or Spanish, I'd imagine.

The last element I'll mention is the makhta (signature couplet), which was traditionally how the poet added his/her name (penname, nickname, pseudonym, wordplay on name) into the last couplet to secure credit for him/herself in a culture of oral recitation. Some poets in English play with this (my four examples have this, but mostly by accident). Many poets just ignore this element.

For Urdu poetry, the Ghazal has often expressed longing, and this can be felt viscerally through the repetition of the refrain. To my mind, this repetition, plus the autonomous couplet, are the two elements of this form that are a gift to poets writing in English. The refrain you can turn around like an object, catching it in different lights, with each couplet.

You can also read a summary with links at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghazal .

A collection of ghazals in English with some interesting commentary: Ravishing DisUnities, Agha Shahid Ali, ed., Hanover NH: Univ. Press of New England, 2000.

The Lion's Ghazal

I’ve hidden the most whimsical nuances
between the sheets and the sheet’s nuances

whatever’s under earth you ask
torments the sky’s fanciful nuances

the bone diggers still deep in flesh
to ring elysian sleep’s stiff nuances.

How we fell and how the fallen free
the house and card’s subtle nuances

from uncut factory pages, scattering
our selves to the wind’s nuances.

It’s the separation of seeing and dreaming;
the problem of discernment has nuances

where you can’t tell if the lion at the table
hungers or is naturally licking his nuances.

-Leonid Shneyder

The Fountain

What does a 16th century conquistador, a contemporary doctor/cancer researcher and a 26th century astronaut have in common? Besides Rachel Weisz, not much, but they do occupy the imagination of Darren Aronofsky thus we're bound to go see them. Let's get this out of the way, it is not a great film, but it isn't a horrible film either as some critiques would have you believe. If you look on Rotten Tomatoes you will see an even 50/50 split in terms of reviews. Although a film requires 60 tomatoes to be considered fresh, vs. splats, it fascinates me to see people so divided over this film, and so evenly divided at that. It is the division, those pieces of art that we can't all decide on that seem interesting enough to go see, so at the very least you can decide for yourself.

So why am I defending Aronofsky? Well quite simply, because he has ambition and that comes out in this film. It came out in freshman and sophomore efforts, Pi and Requiem for a Dream. Aronofsky has quirks, not unlike penmanship, he has a definite way of presenting his films and motifs that run through them. Take for example the "eye" and when his characters get high in Requiem he films a pupil expanding and dilating as a way of punctuating the act and experience. Same too, all forms of movement, vehicular, is done in a kind of overhead manner where you might as well be suspended by your feet watching a car approach, and then the camera turns as it passes underneath it and you get a slight birds eye view of it speeding away and into a destination. It's these small touches that, small hash marks in Aronofsky's column, that make it impossible for me to hate The Fountain.

Visually the fountain is superb. Aronofsky takes aspects of the dreamy blackness of Arthur C Clarke's Monolith and expands it with today's CG to make a milky gas chamber of space where a bubbled tree floating through the pin prick cosmos seems possible, and steered by a bald headed, tattooed captain living on the tree's sap and his own memories to torture him for light years, an absolutely mesmerizing experience. It fits, not well, but does fit. What Aronofsky has mastered at a "young" age is pacing. Very few films are as well paced musically as this one and his previous efforts. There is a symbiotic relationship between Kronos Quartet and Aronofsky, they may have done a Vulcan mind meld, I don't know, but he is capable of using their music to absolutely pace the narrative and moods of his films. The music is there to help you feel what the picture and action convey. Here however, the music is so well done and planned that it no only suggests and heightens it gives you the amplitude of that feeling, paints the color of that emotion and explains why you should feel the way you do in a Peter Frampton sort of way.

The fountain is a visually enjoyable film in the same way that 2001 seems to be something to decode; the fountain's code isn't that deep. Or, it can be said that the script (Thanks John) is too simple. Aronofsky isn't asking questions of great profundity, he isn't asking fundamentally new questions, he's making his characters angry at the certainties in our world: death (not sure about taxes). And this problem, this dilemma du death, has been dealt with before: Frankenstein, Dracula, Jesus is a way of dealing with this certain problem. Our hero however decides to take the Mayan approach and go star tripping with a very large piece of mythical fauna in order to find his inner Siddhartha. These things don't add up, a researcher off his rocker because his wife died who says "death is a disease" isn't amounting to a story line that can't really convince you the reader that the researcher was a conquistador searching for the same thing and is en route to a dying star in order to be reborn in a future about 600 years off. You just don't buy it, but each sequence is kind of enjoyable on its own. You want more of those small soft moments between Jackman and Weisz, but Weisz doesn't make a very good Isabella of Spain, besieged by the Spanish Inquisition. It just doesn't add up because it doesn't follow history. For those of you that know a little history you will remember that Ponce de Leon is the one that history associates with the fountain of youth. Catherine married Ferdinand and together they rid Spain of The Moors and The Jews. They were comfortably in bed with the Inquisition and you kind of want to assume that the grand inquisitor in the film is really Thomas de Torquemada, even though he is named Grand Inquisitor Silecio.

These small inconsistencies make the film difficult to digest, but it's the eye candy, softly painted, not blazing guns and flying shells, but rather broad stroked sepia tones motifs and dim colors that drive this film. As The Chronicle’s critique so aptly notices, there a mandallas every where in this movie, something to remind us of the cosmic order and unity that exists in a moment of singularity. Isabel (the queen) is hiding behind a massively ornate mandalla when Tomas the Conquistador is summoned to her. These moments, these codexes aren't enough to make the philosophical meanderings of the story come together in a coherent narrative. Rumor has it that the originally requested budget for the film was 70 million and was cut in half. Maybe we are left feeling half cheated at the end because of this. Whatever you think of the film after seeing it, if you do, reflect on the fact that you will still have strings echoing in your head and a disdain for daylight, it is atmospheric and the atmosphere kind of sticks to your clothing like smoky bars.

300 - An even longer trailer...

Garth & Jeno - 12/1

Time to get your dancing shoes on... if you dare.

GARTH & JENO << Back2Back >> Dec 1st
Body: welcome to the start of the festive season at our sleazy den 222 Hyde.

Friday December 1st 2006

>>BACK2BACK<<

the cellar was home to a who's who of jazz renegades 50 years ago.
the wickedness lives on...

GARTH & JENO playin' records all night long.

1st Fridays at 222 Club
222 Hyde @ Turk San Francisco
10pm-2am $10
full bar 21+

Casino Royale

Casino Royale does bond what Batman Begins did for the caped crusader's listing series of shlock; the image and character have been reborn, reforged from something with a bit more grit, danger and darkness. Craig plays the role close to the bone, and here the bone is Connery, as the all time masterful Bond, the scrapper, the dark haired gentleman with just enough scalloped edges to even get the guys to nod. Lets face it Moore was great, he was truly a legend, but he's no Connery, and although he's eternally suave, mannered and a pleasure to watch, he's still no Connery. The last two, Dalton and Brosnan were meak attempts at replacing the mythic figure with serviceable substitutes. It didn't help that the dialogue, master criminals and plot lines of the previos six films (2 Daltons & 4 Brosnans) were so terrible that I think I stopped going to see them after the The Living Daylights. Yes, the 80s and 90s, and the early part of the 00's have been a sad time for what is in essense the longest running film franchise in history. With the last pair of Moore/Connery films (A View to a Kill & Never say Never Again), we saw the near death of the entire project. Thanks to a handy defibrulator in a glove compartment we can see both reborn on the silver screen.

The filkm is a true joy ride, although a little long, and the romance between Eva Green & Craig put on and over done in parts, it doesn't change the fact that you're having a good time. Yeah, you can't help but pump an imaginary fist in the air for this bond. He's not a nice guy, as a matter of fact, he's much colder in many respects than the previous bonds, and you get this feeling that its not comedy that drives some of his "hits", he actually enjoys it. From the openning chase scene that reads like a Spiderman script gone native to the beautiful locations and hotel rooms that the majority of us will never inhabit, Bond is back and you best beware.

What makes this film work aren't the special effects, they simply aren't that "special". In comparrison with the previous films this one might as well be low-B. There are no satellites threatening world peace, no madmen hell bent on global domination that run multi-national corporations. No, this film is far simpler, and more contemporary, it deals wtih terrorism, stock market manipulation (slightly overbaked), and more specifically, the finances of terrorists. So this is the meta plot, this is what you're supposed to be "following". But when you boil it down, you're really dealing with a poker game, hence Casino Royale. The heart and soul of this film is Poker, and mind you this is a departure from previous Bond films that featured the super-spy playing backarat and dice. No, our hero is playing good old Texas Holdem and as any good poker player knows, you're not playing the game, you're playing the man across from you. Whatever flaws this film has, come in the later half of the movie when our gritty bond makes an about face and becomes a softy. This is almost unforgiveable, except that you want to keep watching and find recourse to absolve Craig and the producers for making bond go soft, even for a spell. There's nothing really wrong with this film, at all, you can look, but nothing jumps out that you can't just say yeah, its not perfect, but it works "in" the basics, good plot, good characters + development and more importantly, and thankfully, good dialogue.

So if you're sitting around digesting turkey, and you're hard up for something to do and damn tired of all the holiday programming that is jamming the airways of our televisions, then I suggest you make haste to your nearest theatre and spend 2 1/2 blissful hours with Daniel Craig and his new persona... Really.

Robert Altman died today... 81 years isn't a bad run...

See ya man, and thank you for making this gem's melodic tune a household sound on the lips of many....



Suicide is Painless
(Mash Theme Song)
(Mike Altman and Johnny Mandel)

Through early morning fog I see
Visions of the things to be,
The pains that are withheld for me,
I realize and I can see...

That suicide is painless,
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please.

The game of life is hard to play,
I'm going to loose it anyway,
The loosin' card I'll someday lay;
So this is all I have to say...

That suicide is painless,
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please.

The only way to win is cheat
And lay it down before I'm beat
And to another give my seat
For that's the only painless feat.

That suicide is painless,
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it if I please.
And you can do the same thing if you please.

300

Ὦ ξεῖν', ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.

"Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie"
-Simonides

Wasn't this the point of PDF? Do CD's "go off?"

From "/."

mattnyc99 writes, "It's a huge challenge: how to store digital files so future generations can access them, from engineering plans to family photos. The documents of our time are being recorded as bits and bytes with no guarantee of readability down the line. And as technologies change, we may find our files frozen in forgotten formats. Popular Mechanics asks: Will an entire era of human history be lost?"

From the article: "[US national archivist] Thibodeau hopes to develop a system that preserves any type of document — created on any application and any computing platform, and delivered on any digital media — for as long as the United States remains a republic. Complicating matters further, the archive needs to be searchable. When Thibodeau told the head of a government research lab about his mission, the man replied, 'Your problem is so big, it's probably stupid to try and solve it.'"

Robert Jarvis

Photo by Robert Jarvis... just one of those great things you find on Flickr...

This guy is my hero! I want one....

For Slut-Muffin

For Slut-Muffin

Life in the ampoule vexing air and the hippest factions press their faces to the glass where faces were pressed into impression. Crazy, or mi vida loca, isn’t as crazy as the world appears when you sleep with comic book blankets; its just that sort of thing. Press play and sad bastards make merry with angry youth, teens and their pusher others transposed into the millennium’s head dance: this is how revolutions are dispatched into modular fashion. What a boot wants is a leg with an air of satisfaction walking through the door. How ever you fix the lamp the bulb will still burn out. Knowing fate’s a joker with a long series of questions I took it quite literally that tree roots have sex appeal and only the hands understand the soil’s mandrake forms.

Poetry Cage Match

Yeah, you got it, bring your Mexican wrestling masks to QuickMuse to see Paul Hoover take on Brad Leithauser.

For Slut-Bag

You said write it down, stick it to the paper and maybe it'll reminde you of how you stuck that year when blue panties rode higher than Heliosopical chariots and all the sad songs were made sadder because dreary seems to be in vogue. Happy music is for hapenstance but you've a lyric that'll birth the new maniacals. How many limping walks and down skirt draws that've festered those apostled waters. If it wasn't for the wine, then bars would be illegal and all that transpired an over ripened fiction. So who cares if we've a long walk and three red rings that never quite fit our hunter hands; there's more to waste that ca'tn be measured, more grime than shit house stalls; wait wait this is the best part when you hum a tune slapped together from our names.

Bounce

Just received Duncan McNaughton's new book in the mail... more on that soon.

Dark Writing

Dark Writing

must have a dream of itself

sliding slope the falling trails

feel yourself at home

a perpendicular pearl is plied

from the left to the right

from somewhere below the ink

as no ink

no ink

no ink

no ink

no ink

will seem itself unmade

the unmaking event efforts a forced reliance

ransom roles

three perjured blossoms we guilt or felt

kinetic care takers

crafted cores

frantic stones

they carry in stereo

sloppy ism trunks – slip and slide we WOOPS the line

liking to see redux pixel the possible

screen orgy oreo

I can feel the paper and the paper has a way of making me feel my pen is safe that in the dark I write that in the dark I’m writing and my writing has a core or a core of a written light or the corruption of my eyes that have parted with my ears that have left me smelling the state of something eaten once the skin has been peeled and pruned like hedges this writing is mute.

Kristeva - Craft Assignment

On this first

subject never is

what you are

[holding] in

to the [held]

onto what

is to be

a hold

and dapper gentlemen

milton’s not at stake

you’re nineteen

century wake

varicose and very close

to something familiar

they canals they radioed

to think is channel demand divine

what of virtue what of vice

what’s at stake

at burden at break

of

the O’s and hours

and at bay at boy

atta boy who you mean

to make a more precise

datum and corruption

the girl’s gone stuck

the girl’s gone stuck

the girl’s gone stuck

so this is how

to start the question

remand

deny.

Rituals & Vigilance Review by David Kauffman

David Kauffman, literature teacher at George Mason, reviewed Ben Hollander's Rituals of Truce & the Other Israeli, along with the recent book of poetry, Vigilance. The review is not only readable, but insightful and I thought I would republish it here for those that don't visit The Jewish Daily Forward.

Reinventing Politics, With Language

Books
David Kaufmann | Fri. Nov 10, 2006

Rituals of Truce and the Other Israeli
By Benjamin Hollander
Parrhesia Press, 137 pages, $12.95.

Vigilance
By Benjamin Hollander
Beyond Baroque Books, 220 pages, $12.

‘This is the time for political invention,” writes Benjamin Hollander halfway through “Rituals of Truce and the Other Israeli,” his imaginative meditation on the impasse between the Israelis and Palestinians: “There is no other time.” Look at the way the last sentence is phrased and you will see that he is right. For us there is no time but the present. This is our time, our only time. What shall we make of it?

Hollander’s approach to political invention originates in poetry. Though “Rituals of Truce” is a very readable collage of prose texts, memories, speculations and — yes — gags, it carries at its heart the ideal of so much vanguard poetry of the last century. It dreams of a rhythmic breakthrough to something beyond the dead certainties of our selves.

Hollander’s own identity is complicated. Born in Israel, he was 6 when he moved to the United States in 1958. Neither completely American nor authentically Israeli, he finds himself enmeshed in the odd and apparently central Jewish dream that he is Ariel Sharon, “the one in almost every Jew — even the one for whom Ariel Sharon is a nightmare — whose bunkered identity has been shaped and manipulated by fears of being sold out by the world for oil and which the insanity of his nationalist mythologies have conditioned him to assume and defend because he has come to trust no one.” And recognizing this vast contention in himself — his “native accent that has lost the vocabulary to speak” — Hollander asks, who can you trust when discussing the Middle East? Whose rights trump?

To get beyond this, Hollander suggests that we broaden our experience and receptivity. This is where the poetry and invention come in. Hollander orchestrates a sometimes funny, sometimes poignant set of quotations, dreams and fantasies about Israel, Palestine, the United States, terror and his own solitary self. He constructs a kind of fugue that attempts through juxtaposition and opposition to dissolve the “bunkered identities” it finds. Hollander’s methods and aspirations are very postmodern to be sure — the tutelary spirits of “Rituals of Truce” are the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and the German litterateur Walter Benjamin — but he both lightens and deepens this tradition by adding an oddly affecting touch of slapstick humor. At critical points he invokes not only Groucho Marx and Abbott and Costello, but also Donald Duck.

Hollander aims to catch the distant hum of possibility. Hollander’s insistence that we be vigilant, not only with the paranoid watchfulness of fear, but more importantly, with an open attentiveness to what could come to be, informs the peculiar structure of the somewhat forbidding “Levinas and the Police,” in his most recent book of poetry, “Vigilance.” “Levinas and the Police,” owes its uncommon length — it is over 130 pages long — to the fact that most of its lines consist of one syllable or less. This leads the poet to divide most of his words into their component parts:

s

o

like

hum

ans

to

gulp

down

ev

en

the

Sur

rounding

mouth

fuls

of

fog

and

snow

While such an experiment could easily fail, its effects in this poem are contradictory and quite literally stunning. You want to speed up (to get the end of the word, if not of the sentence) and yet you are compelled to slow down and actually take note of all the meaningful units that make up sense. The result is hypnotic, if somewhat frustrating and disorienting. And this, of course, is the whole point.

Hollander hopes that through such attentiveness and such disorientation we can find a way to think differently about ourselves and about our adversaries. Such an aspiration is flatly utopian in a very precise way — the poet claims that we can effect a radical break with the catastrophic repetitions that have marked our collective pasts “by transforming our imagination of history” and in so doing move beyond them.

It is easy to imagine someone dismissing this claim as both naïve and abstract. “Rituals of Truce” is about cognitive boundaries, not international borders, nor solutions “on the ground.” In the end, on the risk of being reductive, “Rituals of Truce” is interested in consciousness, and consciousness always looks wifty to political scientists and would-be realists.

But Hollander is not proposing new political inventions. He is imagining what a philosopher would call “the conditions of possibility” of such inventions — what would be necessary before a real political invention could be thought of, let alone thought through. And there’s the rub. Alienation, that fine modernist stance, is the cause of the all-important attentiveness that Hollander proposes. It is not the result. You have to have achieved a certain freedom from the fixed coordinates of your identity before you are willing to undergo the reorientation that Hollander’s work describes. To put this in political terms: You have to feel that the impasse you have reached is due in part to the limitations of your own approach and not just to the sheer evil or recalcitrance of your enemies. Or, to put this in religious terms: you have to accept the notion of other, equally valid, interpretations of revelation. You must undergo a willing suspension of your own belief.

Hollander’s fine and deeply humane piece of writing could — should — go further. The times really require a political invention that convinces people that political invention is indeed required. Religion will be a central part of this. Hollander is good at rethinking Jewish messianism — the very engine of so much of the settler’s movement. Yet among its real and imaginary voices, “Rituals of Truce” does not include any Islamists, only secular Palestinians. The book was written before the election of Hamas, and before this last summer’s war with Hezbollah, so the omission is more or less understandable. It does not negate Hollander’s project at all. In the context of the moment, the task that “Rituals of Truce” sets becomes even riskier and even more important.

David Kaufmann teaches literature at George Mason University.

This may now be less of a....

The midnight sun...

Call for submissions - Sidebrow

+++++++++++++++

Sidebrow (www.sidebrow.net) — an online & print
journal dedicated to innovation & collaboration —
seeks fiction, poetry, art, essay, ephemera, found
text, & academia, as well as creative response to
current posts and ongoing projects.

Submissions to Sidebrow are evaluated both as
stand-alone set pieces & as points of departure for
establishing multi-authored/multi-genre works.
Submissions that re-imagine, depart from, or explore
the interstices between posted pieces are highly
encouraged.

Sidebrow's inaugural print anthology is slated for
Summer 2007. Although all projects will remain open
beyond the publication of this anthology, the deadline
for inclusion in this first print edition is January
15, 2007. (Submission details may be found at
www.sidebrow.net/2006/submit.php.)

Current and forthcoming contributors to date:

Jenny Allan, Julia Bloch, Lawrence Braithwaite, Nick
Bredie, Mez Breeze, Amina Cain, Nona Caspers, Jimmy
Chen, Kim Chinquee, John Cleary, Catherine Daly, Brett
Evans, Brian Evenson, Raymond Farr, Anne Germanacos,
Paul Hardacre, HL Hazuka, Malia Jackson, Carrie Katz,
Susanna Kittredge, Richard Kostelanetz, Kristine Leja,
Norman Lock, Doug Macpherson, Scott Malby, Bob
Marcacci, Bill Marsh, Rob McLennan, L.J. Moore, Greg
Mulcahy, Cathi Murphy, Eireene Nealand, Daniel
Pendergrass, Kristin Prevallet, Kathryn Pringle,
Daniel C. Remein, Elizabeth Robinson, Len Shneyder,
Nina Shope, Kyle Simonsen, Ed Skoog, Anna Joy
Springer, Chris Stroffolino, Joanne Tracy, Chris Tysh,
Nico Vassilakis, James Wagner, & Derek White

Projects to date:

Build: Mother, I: A multi-author, multi-genre
exploration of seeds sown by Bataille.
(www.sidebrow.net/2006/motheri.php)

Build: Post-Hole: A multi-author, multi-genre
menagerie of grotesques.
(www.sidebrow.net/2006/posthole.php)

The Letters Project: Reviving the epistolary novella.
(www.sidebrow.net/2006/epistolary.php)

Page 24 Project: A chapbook concerning and consisting
exclusively of page 24s.
(www.sidebrow.net/2006/page24.php)

Litopolis San Francisco: Staking a literary claim to
the city.
(www.sidebrow.net/2006/litopolissf.php)

Work Seeking Work: Possible emerging projects.
(www.sidebrow.net/2006/workseekwork.php)

Other projects to be defined by future submissions and
response.

For more information, and to peruse currently posted
works, visit www.sidebrow.net.

+++++++++++++++

White & Nerdy

"Weird Al" Yankovic's music video from his new album "Straight Outta Lynwood" (in stores Sept. 26)

Ok this one goes way, way, way back...

wearable art

I think I found a new addiction... Threadless... a very cool concept in the evolution fo the T-shirt. Remember that crazy site, Am I Hot Or Not? The one where you submit a photo and people vote on your "hotness"? Well same idea, people submit T-shirt ideas, and the community at large votes on them, those with high enough marks get made into T-shirts that you can buy, and they go pretty fast. Most unique concepts and designs in wearable art I've seen in ages... so go check out Threadless...

Cheers!

Lebanon in Jeapordy

The Whitehouse has dumbed itself down in an attempt to reverse the Clinton years which saw an absolute romance with multilateralism and the UN. The Whitehouse of the Bush Regime has decided that we go our own way, and the willing can follow or another way to look at it woudl be to say "and you will know us by the trail of our dead." I'm just thinking out loud here. But what does it say to the rest of the world when we say that "Talking isn't a strategy?" Well lets examine the previous strategies? Hm? And where have they brought us? Isn't talking the first and most basic principle of diplomacy? I could be wrong here, I mean I'm only thinking out loud, but lets think of it in terms of couples and counseling, what happens when couples stop talking and wind up on some poor shrink's couch? They sit there with their arms crossed, bodies tuned away from each other, referring to the other in 3rd person, what happens when the lines of communication cease to be a strategy? So if we're not talking, as a strategic measure anymore, then I nominate some other country, like Iceland, to come in and be the shrink.


November 1, 2006
White House Sees Signs of Plot in Lebanon
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Nov. 1 — The White House said today that there was “mounting evidence” that Iran and Syria are involved in a plot to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora of Lebanon, but senior officials refused to describe in any detail the intelligence they said they had collected.

In an unusual statement, the White House said it was “increasingly concerned by mounting evidence that the Syrian and Iranian governments, Hezbollah and their Lebanese allies are preparing plans to topple Lebanon’s democratically elected government.”

American officials who were pressed today about the assertion on Lebanon said they had evidence that Syria and Iran were trying to engineer the creation of a new “unity” government that they could control, partly through the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. One senior American official, who did not want to be identified because he was discussing an intelligence issue, said there were also indications of “planning for a more violent” attack on the government, but he gave no details.

In the White House statement, issued by President Bush’s press secretary, Tony Snow, the administration said there were “indications” that Syria was trying to block passage of a statute by the Lebanese Parliament that would cooperate with an international tribunal being put together to try those accused of involvement in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. In a warning to Syria, the statement said the tribunal would be established “no matter what happens in Lebanon.”

Syrian intelligence officials, including close family members of President Bashar al-Assad, have been implicated in the attack. Syria has denied being involved in the attack in February 2005, which ultimately led to protests that forced Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon after nearly three decades.

In interviews in recent days, senior American officials have alluded less directly to concerns about Syrian and Iranian interference in Lebanon’s affairs. They have suggested that the concerns are one reason that the United States could not engage in negotiations with Syria or Iran, as several leading Republicans, including former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, have urged.

“Talking isn’t a strategy,” the president’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said in an interview late last week, before he headed to Iraq. “The issue is how can we condition the environment that that Iran and Syria will make a 180-degree turn,” he said.

MAAWG

Pictures from the Toronto MAAWG where I spoke on one of the Sender Sub-Comittee panels...



Panel discussion with Spencer, Greg, myself and Dennis.



We did it, we survived the panel discussion... and there's Dave "Agent" Smith looking very tempermental.



Half way through a very long night, and that's all I'll really say 'bout that one



Ah, the Sultan's tent, Moroccon food in Toronto that served Kenyan beer, how cool is that?

From Toronto

Airport blues

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Don't do this...

Go to a foreign city, drink, drink heavily, party with friends met in other foreign countries, have a good time, discuss old times, tell those tender lies that you're wont to do under the influence, then come back to your hotel room after shots of jaeger, vodka tonics and something they call a Caesar, and delete all the photos you've taken over the last three/four days... then you'll understand misery... FUCK!

I like this photograph...

Adonis and Cuban Art in Toronto

I was hoping to find a snippet of "The Death of New York" by the Syrian poet Adonis, unfortunately no one's put that epic online. In the poem there's a line about bridging the distance between Wall Street and Whitman, and then the more prophetic lines, written back in the 70s that in today's secure homeland seem like an all too foreshadowing warning. The ROM (Royal Ontario Museum, here in Toronto, had a featured exhibit by the Cuban artist, Carlos Garaicoa, who is exploring the "lived in ruin" or "inhabited ruin" that is modern day Havana. Following the 1959 revolution Havana had an exhibition of sorts, to display its beauty and architectural ingenuity in the hybrid of Spanish colonial architecture and island influenced urbana. This is no longer the case, not in the least... As we walked through the exhibit I couldn't help but think of the blight in Brooklyn, the abandoned spaces, buildings, boarded tenements and graffiti scarring the city. Perhaps, at the moment, Toronto is too clean for me. I want something in the middle, some sense of broken and something clean mixing into a place that feels like a well lived in sofa. I'm not at all moved by the architecture here, the city is more plasma screen than interesting brick. Things may be different outside of downtown, but here all the bars and clubs are exclusive and you wait outside as if it was Studio 54 or the Limelight for permission to be among the beautiful. I don't like it at all to be quite honest. I prefer a good saw dust on the floor kind of joint.












Death

We die unless we create the gods.
We die unless we murder the gods.
0, kingdom of the bewildered rock.

-Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said)


And now... to call Stacey Mae of Russia fame... read the blog posts from June if you missed the travels of Waldo in St. Petersburg... ah yes... Stacey...

Toronto 99

It started like a movie when two women kiss and you think this only happens in the movies - A round of jaegers for the house and T- was everyone else that wasn't in the bar. Outside a two homeless drunk argument using 'eh' to mean 'period' and his son's on a murder rap. This isn't a cold you can't stand but it won't turn off and every subway grate is a five star hotel like San-Fran summer in October. Don't call the tower a needle, for your eyes only doesn't mean bond, but it's an international cast of cutaways, velcro ties and undersized teddys. You can piss to the great one's scores or in le hotel there's french lessons when you stare at the wall or at your business. The color of money is always the season you're waiiting for. Kelsey's, JackAssers and outdoor dudes like to think that south of the border means couch bound warriors. I keep waiting to hear how we're welcome, how a french waiter might apologize the fifth time he crushed a toe. Every purgatory's a tonic waiting outside the century room for the fluid spilled on lot 332 where the lonely communist daughter trolls to stiff little fingers. There's a slight comfort in procedurals like CSI is a slice of meatloaf and potato with gravy. I watched the news and learned that it was our war, but their victim.

Jetway

Something dislodged itself when she shook her hair. A faint possibility that grew larger until the moment of introduction; it cascaded into a story about the friend who she should meet back home. This is a lie that's told in retelling the truth in order to make the lie true. Superior in all respects to being honest is being anonymous - and she knew nothing of nonexistence. I lay into my bagel unaware of falling crumbs and she went back to The Economist. All-seeds have this problem, leaving a little piece of themselves in the tracks of oncoming traffic. Squeezed between the truth and a lie I always choose selectively; one more friend without a name, one more jetway to hollow out and greet with cloud. I can see class definitions in reading material. The curtain's always drawn and it's 1 bathroom for the rear of the bus as another woman says "babies are the new handbag, I gotta get me one." She's wearing her hair wrapped up, hiding it too, while telling compunctious stories.

Please don't complain to the general manager

Two hundred some odd geeks, 1 hotel, one conference and one plea... priceless. Openning comments of the conference:

"Please don't complaint to the general manager of the hotel, the terrible connection in your hotel rooms is our fault. We told the hotel to strip out the connections out of the rooms so that we would have enough bandwidth here in the conference room. The hotel brought in a T3 at 1:30 in the morning to accomodate the rest of the guests."

Woooo hooo... assembly of geeks equals a scarcity of resources.

Central Park Dance Skaters or as I call them ROLLER DISCO

Toronto

It's cold and windy. Its not so cold that you feel it in your bones, but I could see the majority of my female friends shivering, while I mearly feel my skin tingle. I'm near the needle, the big huge tower, the one Seattle copied... hotel room is nice, everything is ridiculously clean and you can't smoke in the bars. I miss Montreal... maybe just a little bit, as being my frist Canadian city visited, it still seems like the best, regardless of context or anything rational like that. So I'm tired and need to sleep, a long day of presenting on a panel, covering problems back at the ranch remotely, and passing out business cards, although I think I've seen everyone here before, still, you never know who shows up, or who has moved to which company and is now director or Vee-Pee of what division, its fluid that way, but all too predictable. I hear there's an Art museum near by, hopefully on Friday or Saturday before I leave. In the mean time, a little thing I wrote from someone I saw in the airport, and someone who said I should start a poem like that...

***

Something dislodged itself when she shook her hair. A faint possibility that grew larger until the moment of introduction; it cascaded into a story about the friend who she should meet back home. This is a lie that's told in retelling the truth in order to make the lie true. Superior in all respects to being honest is being anonymous - and she knew nothing of nonexistence. I lay into my bagel unaware of falling crumbs and she went back to The Economist. All-seeds have this problem, leaving a little piece of themselves in the tracks of oncoming traffic.

I'm thinking of that "Wear Sunscreen" song...

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard.

Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.

Travel.

But you know here's the thing... I'm torn. Really I am. New York is a great city and embodies everything that you can think of as "city". It has the food, the architecture, the history, yet at the same time it has everything that embodies collapse. Broken bricks, eroding streets, urban decay, and all of this exists right on top of everything else. Yesterday we went to DUMBO, a neighborhood on the river across from Manhattan in Brooklyn, the Fulton-Ferry Park, this is close to the docks and the asphalt here is worn thin and the cobble stones below it are visible. The turn of the century seems to poking its head out and announcing the fact that its a long lasting construct than our modern age. The view of downtown is fantastic from the park. We walked around taking pictures and talking. Eventually, we stopped at a small cafe that made the most wonderful hot chocolate. When I say hot chocolate I'm not referring to a packet of swiss miss, but rather a brick of melted chocolate in your little paper cup. It was, as the menu item said, wicked, complete with chili powder to spice it up. From there it was off to Brighton Beach, for those not in the know, this is "Little Odessa", a predominantly Russian neighborhood where the signs on the stores are in Cyrillic and Russian. We bought some goodies for a party and then stopped at Cafe Kashkar for a nosh. It was almost like being back in St. Pete's, just a more sober version of our trips to Caravan Sarai.

There was a moment there when we stood outside of The Brighton Bazaar, a huge Russian supermarket bustling and bursting at the seems with black leather jackets, animal print clothing and cold stares from behind the deli counters. Mariya and I were waiting outside for Tom to pay. I asked her what she was thinking about, as she seemed a little deep in thought. She said that coming to Brighton always took the wind out of her sails. She went on to say that she didn't like this part of town, as it was a dream gone wrong. People came to this country to have things they couldn't have in Russia, and what they got wasn't something anyone really wanted. I don't know how accurate of a statement that is, people seemed to be enjoying this little transplanted corner of reality, but at the same time, it looked like Russia. Driving down Ocean Parkway I thought we were back on Moskovsky Prospect, but more than that, the immediate area of Brighton is run down, its that peeling brick and broken sidewalk. I don't know it well enough to be able to say if the people are happy, but they seemed content. She did make a good point when I said "this place is preserving some culture", she pointed out that it was just consumerism or materialism, hard to argue with that when you look around and see the shops, the buying and selling, this isn't culture... but there's the language and then there are the attitudes and foods... yes, one aspect of culture but not a defining quality by any stretch of the imagination.

This whole city is strange, the lines are drawn and they don't seem like they move often. Neighborhoods are separated and don't seem to melt with their surroundings yet it takes all these various hoods, from Spanish Harlem, to the polish of Greenpointe where we are now, to create the construct of New York. In derivative, it is an amalgamation of fiefdoms and differences. In reality, I don't think it can be comprehended how this leviathon lives and breathes, yet it does. One of these days I'll spend more than a weekend in the city.

Brazillian Concrete Poem as Representation Poem of a Representation

And this is titled "Square Box"

Something I saw... today

James Nachtwey has been in places that hollywood spends millions of dollars recreating to give movie goers a third hand rush. His photographs tell stories... and if you've a stomach for this kind of visceral stuff, then you should go look at them.



Hutu Death Camp Survivor - photo by James Nachtwey

Erdu Poetry

Ghazal

We all were killed
this our final
triumph

For we did reach the destination
we met your challenge
Beloved Revolution

and returned after dying
Oh victory

...

-Faiz Ahmed Faiz

This, in the search of the perfect lyriv poem as Paul sometimes mentions or refers to lyric poetry, or at the heart of everything is the lyric poem, one that is open, one that you rise up into only for a better view of the depths below, this is a little piece that caught my eye. More as I plough through this and other works... but he remind me of Darwish, and Adonis, maybe its the tone, or the heroism, or maybe the evocation of a haunting scape that seems at once as if it was desert and a vast expanse of ancient culture owned and unreachable, but this tone is a common feature in "middle eastern" or "oriental" poets, to borrow Said's term.

The Wind

So as not to be confused with Julie Christy's melancholy song, The Wind, let me tell you that the wind blowing down Fulton street this evenning is a ghost. It told me so as I was crossing the street, dodging traffic in the setting sun. It's still there if you want to meet it for yourself.

Dance like no one is watching...

A very big thank you to Bert for finding this...

An old translation of Jason Flick's Ms. Atomic Bomb

Three (3) a trios



Were she innocent or lean and lean as cut fine loin
I can’t know her mind she god-essed into higher fortune
he one lover, one comer, one come crazily
so say three bodies (lets not forget Ape-Ollo)
three bodily jargons just ready, ready set go
three bodies in two stories but what’s the third
not knowing who cares but three again three

{Oh-Ryan + Ape-Ollo} jealous lovers zeal
{Oh-Ryan + Art-A-Miss} jealous brothers lovers zealed

and so it goes combine and dine
chop chop dice and slice intrinsic to triad
one jealous man caused the death of another
this much is known, this much can still be seen
overhead randomized regalia star lit she weep it

Love poems are for sissys

Did you say

solipsistic

i love that

word

gently used

reeds and

willows

face me

speaking

about face

condensed

bread crumb

back toward

this way

walk this way

like the walk

of this road

will lead you

back to me.

A convoluted thing poem...

Let’s swim

to the moon, (ah-ha)
Let’s climb through the tide

pretend for a moment that this maze
of rooftop quadrants cradles me

your head a pillow book somewhere
near my breast beating hymns

to smoke; shorter than signal flares
siren wails and red carpets’ glare.

I’ve a thorn in my side
the same in English as in Spanish,

maybe a two tongued janus – jade us
now latch my lips for keeping

in moist and severed gardens
away from bone yard gravity

in the evening’s wound of the sun,
a shameless grammar appears

filching flirts from the underdressed.
Unhook my skin from the night

so that it might drape us over with yellow
stars the color of el camino headlights

pushing wheal barrows of dust into wind
seems possible when we’re left to

Penetrate the evenin’ that the
city sleeps to hide

moontop myths brought the fog
which will appear as it was

if perception went to bed.

...

Radial

I can’t draw a straight line
bodies aren’t lined

yet there’s a course to round
if my hands draw thighs

suggesting the St. Louis Arch
the same Cassiopeia at night as in

the slatted light in your bedroom
egg cartonned a captive grace

enough for expansion
as a road to a mountain

and maybe from obscurity
through the inadequacy of straights

your delicate smile appears.

The Departed

I read that title and I want to say "Dearly Gathered", or maybe I want to pretend I understand the cadence, or rather the origins, of southern baptist churches full of hell fire and brimstone. I want to be able to say that phrase with the lilt and swing and dipthongs of a regular healer in a revival tent locked in summer heat all sweaty and such. But this isn't what I'm talking about right now, no, I'm talkin' about Southie, I'm talkin' about Provedance, I'm talkin' about Scorsese's latest offering, and probably his best since the phenomenal Goodfellahs. Yeah, its mean, the body count is high, the blood letting copious, the swearing absurd and uncaring, no group goes unmaligned, the characters are straight out of a handbook or manual on Boston PD stereotypes complete with bigotry and colorful gestures, yet it all works, brutally so.

To say I was pleased when I left the film isn't doing justice to exactly how pleased I was in the pacing and progress of the 2 1/2 hour train ride through a "Havahd Sqweah" you never want to be caught in. Nicholson's role is like taking the Joker, genetically splicing in Tony Montana, adding in Keasy's mad mad mad hatter from the flight ot he cuckoo, stirring well, shaking, and then amping it up 10 notches. Yeah, Nicholson is a sociopath, a glorious one, with deliciously quotable dialogue. Its a boys film, did ya hear that? It really is. The lovey story is completely disposable, the film will work just as well without it, actually perhaps even better, as it won't have to compromise or seme like it has a hand out for the female movie going audience. No offense ladies, but really, does that makeup up for all the headshots that this film has, over and over again?

So what makes this thing work? The fact that its over the top without letting the joke get old. It keeps reinventing the joke in quirky little ways and builds suspense very well. The story becomes a little preposterous as we get down the road a bit, and even contrived toward the very end, but the one thing I must say, besides the brilliant Jach Nicholson, is a glorious performance by Leonardo Di Caprio. Yeah, I said it here and now, he doesn't suck in this role. Normally I find him tired, and I was ready to write off Scorsese for making his third film with Leo, considering how awful he was in Gangs of New York, and only moderately interesting in The Aviator, but its as if he came of age in this film. He's exciting to watch, interesting, you want to see him on screen, and are at the same time repulsed by Matt Damon who also does a fabulous job, and probably doesn't have to fake the accent. Di Caprio brings with him, finally, a bit of weight (thanks John), to the role, which makes the experience of watching him play a tough guy not only believable, but enjoyable.

Before I end this, let me say, that the film has an absolutely brilliant sound track, that opens with The Rolling Stones Give me Shelter and has a brilliant cover of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb a la Country/Western. I don't know who did the latter, but as soon as I'll find out, I'll post it here... Go watch it... if for no other reason than to see Scorsese do what he does best: paint with a brutal brush.

Guam

You should go and read Craig Perez's blog about Guam's attempts at self determination and their plea to the UN to continue the process of decolonization. As one of 11 places/states that are still considered colonies, it has the uneasy position of being not only the American Spearhead of the pacific, but a staging ground for future campaigns on the Korean Peninsula. Its an interesting read, and an important one for a people who were denied so much, so don't just sit there, go read it!

Well I know

What I'm watching this weekend... The Departed. Could this be? Could this be Scorsese's return? I mean after a stink bomb like Gangs of New York, you almost wonder who snatched the real M. Scorsese and replaced him with Jerry Bruckheimer. I mean, except for D. D. Lewis who was brilliant as always...

Paris, @ 140 mph

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had ... all » a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.

The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.

Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago

For Eugene Hütz

I have to thank you for the music, for the sacred darlings, and their greencard husbands. All night purples dancing mussolini vs. stalin: how to write nomad chronicles. Let's get radical on the border and claim that we're undestructable, whereas in the old time, in the old time it was not a crime. And since you were a twenty, we were once twenty too. Two fingered revolutions on Ave B., the coin skirt and real dirt. Fuck me! Globally speaking, you indigent punk, nu jenya! shto blat?! klass! Nu vot, and that's how you knew to fly, when the time's right -- Sally's contra-world underdogs strike.

For Aslam Saliyuth

It's a good thing ears give out before pulse. My jaw jacked back and left to right couldn't quite get off the carousel. You discovered yourself in the lights and that you could robot to jungle. Nothing better than marley in the morning except when you realize there's no odd shaped glass and paper umbrella when dawn shoots you dead in the alley. BPM as a measure of excitement; when the drum rolls and the head tolls. Can you stand acid when you're sober? Some sort of departure, knowing what we missed and what went missing. Do you still pretend its a strangers hand when coming your hair with your fingers? The thing about out is that one bleeds into another, promises stale, calendars fail to make clear every fading rumors.

For Benjamin Hollander

How do you know me here? I'm not the Russian hit man from your dreams with coffee. Sitting with your back to the world and your eyes peeled open is tiring. Your pile of debris, hashed marks, a stain from the empty cup you spoon feed froth. The last time it was tradition, we argued about process. The nineteenth century's liberal clap trap couldn't find a place between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Too many buckets to make a category, too few subjects for ontology. Olson didn't creep into the mood; but the territory seemed oddly familiar. The carrot cake is good but I can't dance to it; your gesture is fattening. When you're tired of the laughs think about how soon we'll be taken seriously out of context and smile.

Some Idler Invented The Idea

And some we thought were not the same
as some thought we must be aftermath
to something like we might have made
of ourselves we give our lot and give our game
we play it right away when we wear
the idea of us to find we can’t quite fit
these soiled clothes having grown
into instance when we’re shamed
we wept furiously wrapping our limbs
with what we could find and whittle
into the thing most preciously kept between
our joined sexes we must feel thus so alive
as to die for when we enter eden once more
will you ask me to pick fruit where only
brambles grow like the thorns worn most
easily around the time we parted
heading toward the dawn and the next day
will roads not find us faster from the scarce
calamity we made of not enough air
in our kiss we thought about other lips
we must’ve kvetched out our small smell
with taste we termed it mirth
we are all a pack of saddies in a mist
endlessly picking up new inventions
and since then have been somehow unwell
while we want to heal the sun
and resolve the moon’s adolescence
will it never cease to rain us into
an ocean shorter than we can swim

Oppen to Oppen

Oppen to Oppen

Had it been
water or something
permeating the stone,
which cracked
its own weight,
jerks right, about
face
toward faces

light and the marrow
which more solid
ground appeared
air on the way,
back from knowing
it had to be spring
in the dew,
hung by our eyes

or a momentary ghost
meant it wasn’t
a real abstract
contemplation,
rather incandescent
for a fixture
or furtive gasp;
those words.