Io Sono L'Amore

I am confused and a little embarrassed by the responses to "Io Sono L'Amore". Even the people who praise this movie are embarrassed by it. The Manchester Guardian is careful to slobber on Tilda Swinton's Wellies before tut-tutting without eye contact through another 9 paragraphs. Even Manohla Dargis from the NY Times, whom one would think could get this sort of film because she's really hot, is careful to mention that she's familiar with the whole art-film-as-bodice-ripper thing, and that if she wept a bit it was just that damn gorgeous but literate molar twanging away. Ah, yes--the senses. We took a class in those at Fillintheblankfordbridge.

Even Anthony Lane, who seems almost unembarrassable, begins by separating himself from those who may have just wholeheartedly loved it. First line of his review: "The best sex you will get all year, if that’s what you crave in your moviegoing, is between Tilda Swinton and a prawn." Funny, sort of, but also through-away for someone like Lane, and mostly useful as a kind of Purell for sincerity.

Part of what all this makes me wonder is. Well, first of all it makes me wonder if I'm an emptyheaded goof. And it's partly the frequency with which that question comes up that leads to my other, also perennial, question: Is a certain sort of sensual knowingness actually an innoculation against the senses? Because in my experience if you open yourself to the senses they will fuck you up (that lovely mulled wine phrase). We all have our stories, and it's hard to tell them because they are specifically beyond words. They're about how we come to remember that something is beyond words, about how a single full sensory experience can mobilize years of thinking.

"Io Sono L'Amore" is about that. It's also about the growing and preparation and eating of food, about various shades of saturated orange, about the way that gorgeous interiors come to have the appearance of a real world and ensnare us, and about the difference between bodies when they are owned and bodies when they are royal. It gives itself to certain excesses. But I think what embarrasses people is that the camera lingers on the textures of things in the way that the senses actually linger. Before we drag them back to the task "at hand". So many tasks never so much as civilly greet the hand. (I love that cloth also has "hand".)

And but love. It is a pagan eye that ranges from the grasshopper on a tendril to the spires of the Duomo di Milano, and finds oranges and reds everywhere--Swinton's hair, upholstery fabric, flecks of light on skin and on clay, spices and fruits--everywhere shades of orange. And when Swinton makes her final appearance, or disappearance, pumpkin orange and a gold that seems to trap light spread from the saffron wool rug that marks her sudden absence to illuminate the memory of everything you've seen for the last two hours. Please see this.

The New Vorticist Manifesto

That's Ezra Pound. I was going to put up a picture of Wyndham Lewis, too, but I thought better of it. Because of the way I'd end up being presumed to be Wydham, because of the history of this little rewritten Manifesto and the talent differential and all. I hope not because of my politics, which don't roll that way.

MANIFESTO:

1. In Action we would establish ourselves, given half a chance.

2. We start from Failure. The violent structure of adolescent clearness hasn't worked, except for the past administration.

3. We thought we would do the Work, but we were stymied by the System. About this we are still more or less certain.

4. Mercenaries were always the best troops, we thought, but now that we are paid, we're not so sure that Money is better than Belief. Besides, we're not paid very well.

5. We imagined we were primitive brawlers. Now we are Mercenaries in the Modern World, skilled but doomed to the trenches.

6. Our Cause is NO-MAN'S, ideally.

7. Remember that one night we set Humour at Humour's throat? We totally LOFAO!!!

8. We went after Humour a bit desperately, like Tragedy.

9. Look who's laughing now.

10. One possibility is to move to a little stone shed, preferably subsidized, on a provincial hillside in a distant country ruled by a sympathetic regime that appreciates Truth and Beauty, and hearing it from the likes of us.

Instructions for the Build-Your-America Kit (The final project for my Constructing America course)

You're going to assemble your own kit. Sources include everything ever done, said, written or made that seems to you in some meaningful sense American. You'll need a problem to work on, a collection of sources that offer possible solutions, and finally you'll propose a solution to your problem through a work of your own that draws on your sources and also includes your own best shot at an answer.

1. A persistent grudge or great hope to guide you. As you go through a day or leaf through a newspaper, what bothers you? What do you characteristically rant about or dream and plan about? Work on that.

2. Your own anthology of texts and test cases.

Once you begin to have a sense of what your area might be, begin to look around and see what has been tried before. If you're interested in American experiments in communal living, you might want to read about the Quakers, the Oneida Community, child-rearing customs among the Plains Indians, etc. If you're interested in vernacular architecture you might want to read about barn raisings, or Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater House, or the connections between Navajo adobe dwellings and modern passive solar rammed-earth houses. If you're interested in American forms of feminism you might be interested in reading about Puritan female healers, Mormon female priests, and the Seneca Falls Declaration. If you're interested in American health care, I really have no idea, but the school and the city are full of people who know stuff.

So many more things have been attempted on this continent than one could be aware of. Before you conclude that American music is only rock and country, check out shape note singing, the hammer dulcimer, and Ogalala chant. Become an expert on things in your chosen area that no one has ever heard of. Begin to gather a shelf of books, clippings, web links, diagrams, artifacts, recordings--whatever seems helpful. Begin to keep notes about what possibilities they suggest. These are your working materials. We'll ask to see them so we can talk with you about them.

3. Now make something that seems like a sort of answer to your problem or question or hope. What we will want you to present will certainly need to include historically grounded writing of your own, but might also include other sorts of work if it seems demonstrably connected to your research. We will want an essay but we might also be sold on the need for making songs, a barn, a health care plan, etc.

You'll have lots of opportunities to try out parts of your thinking with people in the class. For now, just dig in and start gathering and thinking.

IKNOWYOUHATEMEBABYBUTDON'TBREAKTHENEEDLE

When George W. Bush posited that "thee hater freedoms, thee hater wayalife," my greatest fear was that a bunch of American religious radicals would combine with religious radicals in other parts of the world and that they would collectively take aim at the mid-tempo alt-country rocker, which is the freak flag of guys like me, and is the only vessel fit to enskull the mythy conscience of my race, narrowly defined in the 19th C sense which guys like me know what that means.

The idea as I understand it is this: if a given song could not be discussed in a conference session entitled The Dust Bowl and the Radicalization of the American Folk Ballad: From Dust to Grit or Is the Answer Still "Blowin' in the Wind"?, then the songwriter must keep revising. And if, in mid-discussion no one raises an index finger, pad up, to the dropped conference room ceiling and mentions Springsteen in half-ironic reverence or reverential irony, then keep revising--(note bene: prolly needs cars). And these conferences really are worth something, a lot maybe. When Pete Seeger, who really was pretty fucking courageous, sits all knees and elbows and chin and bangoneck across from Hugh Hefner and has a televised conversation about the history and implications of playing an African instrument at a groovy televised sexual liberation party with bunny ears and cotton tails and Hef is really listening and asking groovy perceptive questions, then something good is happening. This really happened and I suspect it could not, now.

And I like all this stuff, truly, but it smacks of tourism.

(Why is it that we need to keep coming back to poverty in order to say anything smart about democracy. I think we do.)

But so. A couplethree weeks ago I went on a whim to see a local(-based) band called J. Roddy Walston and the Business. I'd heard a couple songs on the radio and I liked. Reminded me of a sort of cross between early Cheap Trick and Dr. Professor Longhair. Boogie-woogie piano and mic-assaulting caterwauling a la Aerosmith or James Brown or Bon Scott. And I'd been listening to and writing (Gawd hep me), yes, mid-tempo alt-country rockers for so long. In fact I graduated to them from G-major artmurmur poetgurgles that I wroted in the dry well of my soul. I do my best, really I do. But I'm really not sure that the message of rock and roll is :be here now", John Lennon having made the ultimate sacrifice notwithstanding.

This is a little bit interesting: the opening act was this guy who looked really good in blue jeans and wrote mid-tempo alt-country rockers and who it was real easy to tell rode his wallet in his front pocket and made a big point of being intimate good friends with the next opener, Shooter Jennings. Now Shooter Jennings is the more photocerebral--and somewhat shrunk as if abandoned in the parking lot of a Sunglass Hut in a steady drizzle--son of Waylon Jennings. And he wroted an album demanding that the O be returned to "country" and has pursued this whole plan of wearing country duds but more beat up (cf. 'poverty, fake') and being photographed in psychedelic colored lighting from arty angles. But his latest plan involves a concept album co-written and dramatically narrated by Bangor, Maine's own Stephen King about the last era-closing broadcast of an independent rock and roll radio station before the Total Take-Over of a Rock and Roll Hating (because duh) Totalitarian Regime that curiously resembles Abercrombie & Fitch except without those louver blinds. So Shooter strapped on one of them Madonna mics (even less plausible in a tiny club in Baltimore) and straddled a little crotch-level keyboard with also a guitar dangling from him and counseled us rockingly to abjure our conformist ways. He had one of those guitar players with girl-long hair who can't be fucking serious but who maybe is. And the thing is, Shooter just screamed and kept screaming, hitting some serious notes with complete and desperate conviction. And the guitar player just shredded scales and doubled big notes with power chords until I sort of stopped smiling and began to think, fuck, these boys mean it. They're goofy but that's not the issue.

And this has gotten so long because I don't even know what to say about J Roddy Walston and the Business. It was they who were the second opener. But what they really opened. Was my heart. (I mean it.) J Roddy swung his dirtyblonde ringlets at his (actual upright) piano and pounded and pounded and screamed out the sum total of all Anglo-African horror and longing, and spattered us with the cumulative effluvia and sifted gold of all patient river deltas. It was just blues and only rock and roll but Professor Longhair was there with magnolia breath, and I saw Jerry Lee Lewis with his half-kidnapped brides, Blind Willie Johnson testifying in oil-skid feathers like a pigeon, Dylan or maybe Jehovah in a prayer shawl of lightbulbs and hubcaps. And when I walked out ears ringing as if the room still hung ringing around me, there were thunderheads blowing in, and the storm smelled like rust and like honeysuckle and like the sea, and it descended in black tatters over the harbor and Fort McHenry until the last of summer broke in sheets of rain.

What I Thought When We Were Doing 'Heart-Openers' in Yoga Tonight

All I ask is a perfect meal with you without hindrance. No history. No story. No tomorrow morning. Just to sit there and face you and eat and drink and step outside what hard habit requires and to allow the possibility of a few more nights like this before I'm old and beyond repair.

Death to Everyone Is Gonna Come

So, is it morbid or just the kind of journalistic seeing that comes from a long education that makes me see death in every little moment between any man and any woman? I've had this idea to write 'obituaries' for couples, in which the entire history of a relationship can be reduced to a moment? It doesn't much matter whether the moment is final or fleeting or casual or dramatic. I mean: that Katie and Tomasz piece is sorta dramatic, in a small way, but his back to her, her leaning toward him, his beer-prop, their attention to their clothes seemed at the moment like ten million romance novels, long lifetimes of tragedies, and, inevitably, death. Not that I mourned as I watched them, but I did have the sense that the whole flirtation was weighted with doom, and that's what made it sweet? Love feels like fall. Fall feels like autumning in love. So beautiful and so sad and so neither here nor there but sort of suspended between what was and what will be, so lightly balanced like that bar trick with the saltshaker that you can hardly breathe, which I suppose accounts for the lightheadedness.

A Song Like That

We took a mortal roadtrip with West under construction
we had a good gas station map but we steered by intuition
I thought that I was some machine age brujo
and you were already pregnant though we did not know

you sat shotgun with your knees drawn up, your back against the window
you talked from Truckee to the Bay nonstop, til it all sounded like Basho
the breeze was slow like how you'd do me when we'd do
the sea was green like how you're eyes were blue

So make up your own version and don't get all offended
if mine has everything except the truth to recommend it
It made no sense the way it went the first time
So much betrayal and lies in your version and I'll but fire and trains in mine

So we got a place in Santa Cruz, you started waiting tables
and we barely paid the rent on time and I wrote when I was able
but the silence there grew smaller every day
I learned to live in it and had nothing to say

We had hunger, we had stars, you had her in September
and when she died the light went out, the world lost half its color
I think that's the last time I stayed up til dawn
sometimes it's almost cruel that life goes on

A Chinese landscape painting of the Blue Ridge near the Tri-cities
a double-exposed photograph where the the light is just like anti-freeze
It swirls bright and salty as the sea
and you lean in close cause you're in love with me

You make up your own version, it does not good to get offended
if mine has everything except the truth to recommend it
It's full of holes the way it goes the first time
so put betrayal and lies in your version but you're the fire and trains in mine

Brief Lectures on Knowing: Part 2

The image presented to the brain by the eyes is not a continuous picture but is actually full of gaps, maybe not an image at all but perhaps more like a page of computer code. The brain decodes the data and fills in these gaps without our noticing. This is curious and troubling. It does however offer promising possibilities for understanding how other people who are not oneself can be so deeply and importantly wrong about things. No, wait. Forget it.

The sense of being in a room with other people is a couple more levels of complexity and data-collation up. You have the sense-of-sitting-in-a-room-with-people. If you're a teacher you scan the room looking for whatever seems important: signs of questioning, comprehension, the desire to speak, boredom. And you hold in your consciousness all these people, and they--along with your own physical self-awareness and your awareness of your objectives in the class, and the annoying colleague loitering unaccountably by the doorway, and the desire for prime rib and beer and some other stuff--constitute a total social situation. And then this combined with the Chinese economy, Bruce Springsteen, the Shroud of Turin and stars dying or being born, constitute Reality.

But actually as you look around the room you can only see one face at a time. Or really you have to assume that it's a face because you can only focus, can only verify the precise visual print, of some small region of one face. And as you attend closer to this, even this becomes less certain. You begin to the notice the imperfections in your field of vision, the difficulty the eye has when tasked with seeing only one thing exactly. The whole machinery is build to survey and interpolate, not to isolate and verify. Writ large, this seems the condition of knowledge(, man). What we assume is the world is actually an unmanageably vast river of stuff gathered into a small number of familiar-shaped jugs. It only takes a small number of images and experiences to constitute a world, and most people seem to resist admitting new ones. Although there is a sneaky doubleness to how Nature has us respond to strangeness.

But so here's what I want to come back to:
1. In much the same way that consciousness creates (or is?) the simulacrum of a seamless reality from fragments of perception and fragments of memory, so political awareness is composed of isolated data run through a filter of assumptions.
2. Another thing this seems connected to is the experience of beauty. Particular key fragments can evoke responses to enormous complexes of experience: I see a basketball and remember the total experience of walking on a fall day down to Yreka Elementary to play in the crisp, woodfire air until my fingertips split along the prints. Or sometimes I see some small thing and think that maybe the world could be remade according to some pattern that it suggests, as if you could extrapolate from a cup of coffee to a just society. Which seems like something we both sort of think.

Driving the Baby-Sitter

He drove the mini-van through the stonewall streets of suburban Wellesley. She sat shotgun, shoulders tense but otherwise her demeanor was more like an anthropologist that an actual babysitter. At a stop sign they sat for a minute, blinded in the slow rhythm of passing headlights. He tried to see her face in the shadows and beams; her face was all shadows and beams.

She read somewhere--some novel that fell into her flickering attention during the chemo--that adults gradually lose their faces. The responsive and unselfconscious face that children have hardens into a shiny mask. That made some sense. He seemed all gauzed over with care and a kind of eager safeness, but still nice. And still sort of like a kid, or maybe it was only the studied appearance of vulnerability, although she wanted it to be real. He was trying to see her partly-collapsed face without looking.

And then they were driving along one of the last stone walls and the turn at the swing set was familiar and they were talking about her next surgery and the waiting and rehab. And she said that she was done with being afraid of death. That if she died that was okay but that life was so good, so so good, and she was done with being afraid to be corny.

He seemed to be thinking about how to respond, and then only pressed his lips together in place of a smile and they pulled up to her parents' untouched lawn. She was used to this, to the look of faces trying to see her face, and it didn't bother her anymore. She wanted to see their faces, too, and maybe it wasn't so different. For just a moment his face was his real face, and she had to get out of the car.