Righting Frames Left

I am on the left-turn pocket, about to make a left. The wait hair-splits seconds to infinity, a very physical experience of eternity on a street-intersection, the kind in which your life feels trapped, and there is only one direction, there, into the abyss of the left, into its freedoms, chaos. I see faces in the cars, on the other direction, faces of pursuit, aggression, those who'd confess their day in frantic phone calls later, unnecessary calls they have to make just to have someone to talk to, to feel linked, networked. They are wearing sunglasses, as though to leave the sun out of their directions, ignore its illuminations, consider them distractions, nuisance. I am in the intersection of 5:00pm and 5:01pm, the intersection of life as abstract and life as material, bad decisions and worst decisions, fiction and non-fiction, poetry and reality. In a moment, I could crash, collide into another dream in the making, a city official, a president of a porn-company, a thief trying to be the best thief in the world, or a horny man having phone sex on his cell-phone. My life is on the line, and there are no lines to read in-between those lines. Am I in someone's surveillance camera? Am I in a movie-production set? I make the sign of the cross. Soon, I let that sign fade to insignificance, to the shadows of other crosses I've made before. The light is green, is yellow, is red, the color of anything, an empty sign, emptied of sunsets, death, crime, failure, genesis of ironies, the erotics of daily life, birth, or as myth before flights to nowhere.

Galatea Resurrects 15

Galatea Resurrects #15 was released last month. Thanks to Eileen Tabios for including my review. Below the excerpt is a list of this issue's contributors.

Inside the sound of words are entanglements fighting for coherence, or some sense of it, at least. Approximations of this coherence can materialize in imagination of the speaker, especially through the visuality of text, a compact architecture of curves and lines furnished by constitutions of desire in writing and printing presses, processes that may formulate a sense of accessibility and familiarity, through journeys in reading. Thus, implicit in certain theories of language is a dance that intimates copulation of perceptions between text-image and its equivalent sound, whether through orally-conveyed sound or sound produced that cannot easily be translated into decibels recognizable by human-ear – sounds of silence, or those in meditation, which may also include sounds in structure of movements, the sonicity of action, especially in the context of physical vibrations and physical geometries. And in this dance are certain modes of producing rules or memory set in principles, to activate hierarchy of evolutions, and inherent devolutions in progressions. [ More here.]

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 Access Table of Contents here.
Reviewers & Contributors

Aileen Ibardaloza
Albert B. Casuga
Allen Bramhall
Anny Ballardini
Barbara Roether
Camille Martin
Edric Mesmer
Eileen Tabios
Eric Dickey
Eric Hoffman
G.E. Schwartz
Genevieve Kaplan
Hadas Yatom-Schwartz
Harry Thorne
Jeff Harrison
Jim McCrary
John Bloomberg-Rissman
John Herbert Cunningham
Jon Curley
Kathryn K. Stevenson
Kristi Castro
Kristina Marie Darling
L.M. Freer
Lisa Bower
Lynn Behrendt
Margaret H. Johnson
Marianne Villanueva
Michael Caylo-Baradi
Michael Pollock
Moira Richards
Nicholas T. Spatafora
Patrick James Dunagan
Peg Duthie
Rebecca Loudon
Richard Lopez
T.C. Marshall
Thomas Fink
Tom Beckett

2010 recedes to evening

I took this shot around Halloween, up there, at the Griffith Park Observatory. The evening was a bit warm. Clouds took their nap, that evening, and gave it up for clear skies. That's why Santa Catalina Island is surprisingly visible here, a slight protrusion on the horizon. And thanks to the editor who accepted the image, for publication, including the caption I wrote. I think I'll submit a few more shots, to the Los Angeles Times next year. Southern California Moments is one way of touring Los Angeles, and other places around it; my photo is #35, on the slide (as of 12-31-2010).

Now a few years ago, I had also sent a shot of Los Angeles from the Hollywood Hills, to another paper, The Guardian(UK). But on that shot, I stood beside a tree, to include its image. I took the shot in the middle of the afternoon, facing that same side of the city captured above. But since it was a smoggy day, the effect can be depressing for some. I like the tree branches, their silhouettes. But the image caption - which I assume was written by that paper's travel-section editor - gave that image a different spin, as though the shot was taken after the end of the world. Here's that shot archived at The Guardian:

Intransitive Drive

Night lights can be comforting, while driving home from work. They give you a glow inside, shades and saturations of neon in salty fast-food, dripping greasy welcome to another phase in your day-night convergences. You don't want to drive fast, because you don't really want to go home yet. You pretend you are homeless, wandering, on the road, at home in anything intangible. You think about buying groceries, putting gas in your car, or stop by a convenience store for a cup of coffee. The options are laid out before you, ready to be ignored. You keep driving into what you're about to think or do spontaneously.

You don't take the freeway this time, but a longer route, through a road that winds downhill. Again, there's music in your car, but its volume isn't too loud. Traffic lights appear between long intervals on that road. You don't want to stop on a red light, and so you press on your gas the way you press in what can be. On your rear-view mirror, you see cars, and feel the shadows in your thoughts. Soon, you will tailgate someone yourself, who will get annoyed and slow down a bit.

Trees along the road uniform to colors of denied expectations, the color of shadows, silhouettes. You've opened your window a bit for some air. You glance at the time on your dashboard, still early for anything related to rest. You can feel the speed of your car. But the feeling doesn't have anything to do with adrenaline, maybe boredom, or that thing about driving that moves your body while not necessarily moving your body, that sweet sensation of being transported somewhere, into the rippling haloes of invisible moonlights.

BlazeVox Fall2010

BlazeVOX2kX Fall 2010

Contributing Authors: Alban Fischer, Amy Hard, Amanda Stephens, Amy Lawless, Amylia Grace, Andrea Dulanto, AE Baer, Anisa Rahim, Antony Hitchin, Brad Vogler, Barbara Duffey, Benjamin Dickerson, Bob Nimmo, Billy Cancel, Brian Edwards, Brian Anthony Hardie, Ashley Burgess, Carlos Ponce-Meléndez, Carol Smallwood, Caroline Klocksiem, Chad Scheel, Christine Herzer, Darren Caffrey, David Toms, Debrah Morkun, Diana Salier, Donna Danford, David Plumb, Ed Makowski, Elizabeth Brazeal, Eric Wayne Dickey, Erin J. Mullikin, Julie Finch, Flower Conroy, George McKim , Geoffrey Gatza, Sarah Sweeney, Geer Austin, Heather Cox, henry 7. reneau, jr, Howie Good, Ivan Jenson, Ian Miller, James Mc Laughlin, Jason Joyce, Jeff Arnett, Julia Anjard Maher, Joshua Young, Jennifer Thacker, Kate Lutzner, Kelci M. Kelci, Laura Straub, Martin Willitts Jr, Margot Block, Myl Schulz, Camille Roy, Megan Milligan, Michael Caylo-Baradi, Michael Crake, Michael Hartman, Nick Miriello, Nicole Peats, Orchid Tierney, Philip Sultz, SJ Fowler, Steven Taylor, Steve Potter, Stephan Delbos, Simon Perchik, Sean Neville, Sarah Sousa , Bob Whiteside, Ricardo Nazario y Colón, Santiago del Dardano Turann, John Raffetto, Bruce Bromley, Carl Dimitri, Gregory Dirkson, Jordan Martich, Natalie McNabb, Moura McGovern, Jennifer Houston, Robert Vaughan, Christi Mastley, pd mallamo and bruno neiva.

Silhouettes

There's nothing to worry now.
We've already smothered time
in the union of our silhouettes.

Spring of Fall

You are my addictive dissonance in this brutality, culled into grace-notes in whispers, flickering like apparitions on
my rear-view mirror.

Lagoon

Tearing out the margin of horizon, forgetting visions. Layers of accelerations drifting through tainted clouds. A bird is left behind, being left behind by its song. What would music sound like ahead? Distillations bared of something called the heart? The ground leaves dusts, like always. Gravity is still grounded, unsatisfied in its depth. There's the pack of cigarettes to finish. But there's no competition in the numbers. They'll consume themselves, eventually. It's just so crispy, this dawn, a blue-green lagoon one can dive into. A leaf leaves a branch, away from the water.

Hard As Water

We are falling into rhythms in footprints, railroads, entangled wires. I can feel the erosions, their fortified twilights, gleaming, incandescent as your elusive excuses. There are deformations in store windows I want to be, traps, tones, gothic melancholies, weekends. There are lines of movie-theaters in these deformations, broken lines, thin, large, vague. We fit in the lines, like sprockets, reeled into dispositions conditioned for modest, breezy illusions. Glamour takes my heart, cuts it into saturations of success. I am falling into a mob of eyes, into their crowded gloss. The car-chase finds its eternity, the heart of its driver's engine. Streets integrate into a lost city, a generation of dreams. We are falling, turning into prayers still inventing unsuccessful amens, reviving depths in our closed eyes. The language of premonitions is as tasty as cold water, sinking, becoming sea. This certainty is baffling, alluring as green in tropical spaces.

Monitored Mountains

They're just moments, stagnant as mountains at night. Television is gift, language that enrich our extravagant modesties, whispering glamour that guide us out from illusions of endings, finite dialogs. Pass the remote, the options, starred with recoverable, plastic scars. If you look at the top of mountains in the tube, watch the movement of clouds, the lake below, waves of humanity, passing through the outlines of their silhouettes. It's bearable. We are immortal.

Lake

They're soft on skin, as day leaves the sun. The rush home takes it away. But it lingers, and disappears into night, into television shows, soft pillows. Something wakes you up later, around midnight. You realize your window is not closed, and the waves on the lake are calm as ever. Things do take care of themselves sometimes. The rain could fall as the sun rises.

State of Los Angeles

We sun freeways with glamorous alienation, peace in absences, meditative confusions. Superficiality is not transgression, but way of breathing, of publicizing soul. Smog warms movements from one sidewalk to another, increasing desire to refuel at a caffeine pump. There are expectations to patch, delusions to nurture, disillusions to clone. There is nothing to abolish, except cravings without passion, crosses, and calvaries.

Film-Talk: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

I've seen this movie a few years ago, and the story still works for me. Bette Davis, as Jane Hudson, gives multiple layers of horror, in this thriller. Jane is hyper-creepy, mean, ruthless, and, above all, abusive towards her crippled sister Blanche played by Joan Crawford. Crawford's Blanche makes us hate her for being too helpless; on the other hand, we feel her helplessness and want her to be cunning and courageous against her sister's wicked madness. But our desire to see this vengeful side of Blanche is a fantasy how we want the film to be. If the script had granted that desire, it would have been a predictable, weak movie, even unrealistic. Thus, the script has to make Blanche's character sweet lollipop for Jane's insanity and madness in the Hudson horror house. Indeed, Blanche is destined to be forgiving, and prone to rational tendencies, even though her sister cannot stand her. But this is logical for Blanche; she thinks of and feels for her sister, in the context of family. Blanche loves her sister, unconditionally.

The Hudson sisters live inseparable lives since childhood, through show business. After their mother's death, they live together. In the beginning, Jane is the child-star. But as adults, Blanche's acting career overshadows Jane's. Naturally, this is devastating to Jane. One night, they drive home together, from a party; Jane is the driver. At their home's driveway, Blanche opens the gate into the driveway. But while Blanche is doing this, Jane accelerates the car, to pin her sister to the gate. The incident cripples Blanche, makes her dependent on a wheelchair for the rest of her life, and Jane's constant presence to serve her daily meals. But that's just how the script makes us think how Blanche becomes a cripple. The script is brilliant, this way, because it set us up to advance our assumptions to conclusions that it is Jane who cripples Blanche; indeed, this is not the case. It's in the film's final sequence, in the seaside scene that we are informed the truth how Blanche is crippled. We hear this information from Blanche herself. On that beach now dying, Blanche reminds Jane that, on the night the car was smashed to their gate, Blanche herself drove the car into the gate, to hit Jane; Jane cannot remember this, because Jane was too drunk that night. But there is more: Blanche was able to get out of the car that night, that's why Jane is the one accused of driving the car into the gate, then left the scene. The crash snaps nerves in Blanche's spine, and thus cripples her.

On one significant level, the film comments about aging movie stars, specifically has-beens whose lives once occupied a niche in mainstream consciousness of popular culture, through entertainment gossip columns, and television news. Bette Davis' Jane gives us an image of a has-been gone twisted, one who harbors over-saturated longings and fantasies to feel the adulations from the glory-days of her stage and movie career. In contrast, Joan Crawford's Blanche looks level-headed to be mistaken as a has-been, even though she watches television re-runs of pictures she has starred in; in that light, she seems psychologically intact or have forgiven herself for attempting to murder her own sister. On the other hand, Jane's madness escalates; Jane serves Blanche a dead rat and bird on two occasions, ties her up for trying to call her doctor for help, and then murders their African-American house-maid, Elvira, after she sees Blanche's mouth taped and tied on her bed. Pure wickedness, you might say. Bette Davis' eyes are two hurricanes of horror in this film; they beat any studio-generated screams and colorful special effects - digital or otherwise - that try to make horror movies scary these days. Those eyes stare, not simply to scare, but to suck possible victims into its claws, taking them for wild spins, into roads accelerating insanities, to grind them as its newest proteges.© 2010 Michael Caylo-Baradi

Directed by Robert Aldrich; Starring Bette Davis & Joan Crawford;
134 Minutes; in Black & White; 1962.

Film-Talk: The Inheritance.

The film looks into the issue of inheritance in families, specifically inheritance as obligation in the context of affluent families. Already a successful restaurateur in Stockholm after leaving his family’s steelworks business, Christoffer is forced to return to that business when his father kills himself, to escape from the company’s financial troubles. The son’s devolving hesitations to inherit his father’s position as head of that company is the force that drives the film’s plot. On the other hand, the force that weakens the son’s hesitations to accept that position is his mother’s unshakeable insistence that Christoffer assume company leadership. She, therefore, helps her son believe in his capabilities to lead the family company, because, based on her gut feelings, he is the right successor that can ensure the company’s survival. Thus, the mother inflicts or forces change into her son’s mind, the way mothers control their little boys to obedience. This view about the mother’s power in the film is justified, mainly because the story has not appropriated enough instances for Christoffer to exert will against his mother’s wishes for him to inherit his father’s leadership position. Christoffer’s mother fine-tunes the idea of family obligation in her son’s mind so well, to a point where his only exit out of hesitating to accept his inheritance is to relinquish his own plans for himself, plans that evolve around a life with his wife in Stockholm.

Directed by Per Fly; in Danish & Swedish w/ English subtitles;
Title in Danish: Arven; 107 minutes; 2003.

Chaka: Los Angeles Was His Canvas

About a year ago, the Los Angeles Times ran a story titled: "Chaka, from graffiti to gallery." Chaka got what he wanted: everybody's attention: especially from commuters, the police, and news organizations. Defacing city property was his ticket to fame; and based on the paper's photo archive from the 1990's, his name was everywhere in the city, on elevator doors, freeway signs, everywhere. He was, therefore, prolific as a tagger; this means he wrote and tagged property very fast, like he had a schedule, on a deadline. He was working for quantity, on as many surfaces he could put his name on. Thus, not getting caught was part of the art, quick escape from being spotted by authorities was a must. But of course, he was caught a number of times, according to the article.

You can just imagine the kind of discipline he had, working the city, giving it the best his hands could muster; no doubt he nurtured reflections his work  was a form of  valuable and unique urban art, because his pieces - really just his name - were created on-the-fly or, in some circles, as drive-by-art. He was chasing 15-Minutes of fame, but he certainly wanted more. In many ways, the city was his gallery, in the 1990s, and  that means he  already had his one-man show back then. Whatever work he  had shown in that gallery the article had reported could not have been the Chaka of the 1990s, but the Chaka who had left that decade, had been through the grind of the legal system, rehabilitation programs, and endless nostalgia about what was  or could have been.  Hopefully, he has re-channeled his artistic energies to engage in work that does not deface properties, including his own - his own reputation, that is - in the context of the legal system, so he won't go back to prison again.

Scrubbing Off Myth

Down, down, to disintegrating myths. Contours blur. The vaguing of hallucinations. Now is crisp as crispy chips, crunch, crunchuously crunch. Color saturations inter-penetrate, into hints of gray.

"Too much?" "Not much" "I see." "Yeah." "Oh Yeah." "Here?" "There, too." "I see." "It's ok." "Maybe." "More soon." "Oh, yeah?" "Yeah." "It's like, you know..." "I know." "You know what I mean?" "Totally. The meanest." "It's like, yeah,..." "Well, yeah." "Oh, yeah." "But I don't know." "Me, too." "Like, if it's like that,..." "I'm there, man, yeah." "Yeah." "Totally." "Totally." "April fools!" "The entire month, totally." "I can't wait for May." "The month of maybes. I can't wait for June." "Yes, you can." "That reminds me of 2008, elections, that video." "Yes, We Can." "Yes." "We." "Can." "Be fired anytime now." "And that could light our fire." "I see." "Yeah." "Totally." "April fools." "Yeah." "Right."

Color of Labyrinth

We live in colors, cities, callings, names, Los Angeles. We justify our textures, give them architecture, heritage, skin. You sit on a chair on an edge, drinking coffee, and there's a freeway below. Can you tell which movie you're in? Are you in a matrix? There are constitutions to obey, regulations, boundaries. Boundaries in indecision are necessary. The sun always shines. Endings only happen when the movie credits are rolling like unreadable text, dead scrolls, vague scribbles without history.

Between Our Eyes

We've been reading between the lines. We believe the invisible will take us somewhere. Be careful, a crevice, a hole, a whole. Sure, a soul, as well. Listen to the rustlings, of leaves, palm leaves. Our civilization is set on tropical mode, invasive blue skies, margarita resorts, salty cabanas. The veins of serendipity is never tired. We'll scuba into our neon hearts. If you leave me, I will find you, through the eye of the storm.

Los Bastardos (2008; Amat Escalante)

Read Full-Text at Latin American Review of Books.

AMAT ESCALANTE’S Los Bastardos is a film about two undocumented, migrant workers, from Mexico named Jesús and Fausto, played by non-professional Mexican actors Jesús Moises Rodriguez and Rubén Sosa, and traces their life as day-labourers within a 24-hour period through a narrative set in the vast collage of cities and suburbs of Los Angeles County.

The film opens with the two workers walking on a dry and wide river canal on their way to join other labourers waiting at a street corner for work. Together with four others, somebody hires them for a construction project. Then, after a full-day’s work, they get paid, go “home” to a section of a public park, and try to rest.

But their need for night-time diversion takes them to a quiet neighbourhood near the park where they follow their instincts. Something, after sundown, tells them they must rob a house.

Director Amat Escalante does not show us how they choose which house to rob; we just see them enter through a window. When the homeowner, Karen – played by professional actress Nina Zavarin – sees Jesús holding a shotgun, she screams. But she is able to control her panic and, shortly, she feeds them dinner, spends time at the pool with them, has sex with Jesús, then gets high with them before Fausto accidentally blows her head off.

When the homeowner’s son arrives home, he kills Jesús using their shotgun. Fortunately, since it was the last bullet, Fausto’s life is saved - he runs from the neighbourhood as fast as he can.

Now alone, Fausto finds employment picking strawberries and, as he does so, the camera zooms in on his face, slowly letting it dominate the screen. In this final shot, Escalante tries to capture or construct a quiet collision of chaos, alienation, and memories of violence from his life in southern California as Fausto scans something in the field not framed on-screen.

In 2008, Los Bastardos was an official selection for the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard award. Escalante’s first film, Sangre, had also been entered for the award in 2005.

Since its Cannes premiere, Escalante’s second film continues to gain critical attention that often stresses its quiet visual-texture and unexpected, violent ending. In many ways, its unapologetic use of violence stimulates perceptions about its Mexican director’s political views. Certainly, US-Mexico border relations, immigration and race are elements that can all be readily implicated in the film’s uneasy ending.

There are many instances of Jesús’ and Fausto’s marginal status in southern California that can be explored. Indeed, their determination to survive in that savage world reveal the strength of their characters. But that strength must deal with their sense of cultural dislocation and alienation. The development of this ineluctable collision weakens these characters, impacts the moral dimension of their behavior, and contributes to or empowers Jesús’ and Fausto’s reckless disregard for the world around them.

And so, Escalante succeeds in calling his protagonists bastards, thus aptly giving his film its title: Los Bastardos.

Read rest of article at Latin American Review of Books.

Days After Inauguration

What's the bird's eye-view around Washington, D.C., on presidential inauguration? Dizzy that there are more people, under their wings, a sort of delirious and happy panic to feel something more than historic? Can they sense something in that panic that makes them feel a bit human, be with them, flock with them? Does flying feel like traps, and walking fresh escape? Do older birds feel like something is invigorated, or re-invigorated down there, an idea, the shadow in a notion? It could be argued that attaching the word 'truly' to the word 'democratic' has reached a point of overused, but that emphasizing this overused can be considered unethical: because there's simply no such thing as over-used in this context, because these mouths are just celebrating, aligning themselves to something what they thought is impossible. There will, indeed, be prognostications of new dimensions, and the polishing of existing paradigms, while old habits remain, like a certain blindness among taxi drivers in many American cities not to let in some people in their backseats, a blindness that doesn't have the positive ring of color blindness. It's the most exciting time to use hyperboles, to chant the greatness of this and that, about a system that works, and takes itself seriously. There'll be inebriations of affirmations, both implicit and explicit, most would be optimistic, but a percentage of them too-optimistic and competes with incisive doubts about the new man in that house of American houses. The normal flow is to, indeed, be get caught in the excitements, to give in to the contagious yes-we-can spirit. What we hope also is that there's power in being skeptical, especially in the depth of this change we think we're in. We hope our eyes do not have the affliction that adores religion of surfaces. The 4th of November 2008 has questioned that religion, and the world has a reaffirmed awe about a country named United States of America, that, indeed, despite its recent history - often observed in horrific, archived footage of Selma, Alabama 1965 - the U.S.A. can be used as a paradigm of having a unified, national spirit.

© 2009 Michael Caylo-Baradi