A Bus

A bus crashed into the heart of the city, and bled. Pieces of broken glasses were scattered; their edges were caked with blood, hardened by sun.

A Bicycle

A bicycle moves on a sidewalk, leaving steps behind. They followed its direction, anywhere in the night.

Devil Wears Prada

I've seen this movie a few years ago, and still remember some of the faces in that film, Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci, and Anne Hathaway. And then I decided to see it again in fragments on YouTube, because I stumbled into clips of the movie on YouTube, while looking for trailers of indie movies I hope to see soon. Watching the movie this way, in many ways, revised the momentum of the story, because when I stumbled on a clip in YouTube that's interesting, I'd put the movie aside and see those other clips that may or may not have any relation to Devil Wears Prada. Specifically, this fragmented process of seeing the movie is not concerned about seeing the movie's totality the way one would watch it on DVD or movie-theater. Here, the process uses the imagination to fill in images and narratives that could be included in the film; the idea of 'filling in', here, may be akin to the way the imagination extends elements to any movie-watching experience. But 'filling in', here, is different in that it attempts to substitute elements that are in the movie's original, story-line version. And so what happens in this idea of 'filling in', I think, is the emergence of the creative process to finish the movie or even extend it in ways that feels one isn't leaving it with loose ends.

~

And regarding the film's title, I know it's witty and funny. But it does say something about how we think of devil, that it's choosy and prefers high-end fashion clothing and accessories. I wonder if the devil is still devil if it wears something from thrift-shop stores or from a swap-meet stand. That devil wouldn't be much of a devil anymore, but less of a devil, and perhaps someone closer to angels (?). To reduce the devil to elements of cheapness, to poverty itself, would probably ruin our language or idea about devil, destroy our myths of it. And the devil wearing Prada, a product from a country of Catholics? One would think the devil could avoid wearing something from a country of many churches. Is this coincidence?...:) Or simply human nature thinking in dualities, that the moment we think of something, its immediate, corresponding opposite will surface in that line of thought.

Metazen

We're missing spoons. But that's ok. Forks will do. Sharp enough to dig into things on our plates. Identical sharpness. Identical possibilities, diggings.

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.

Whaled Songs

This is our border, our bodies. If only song is not about building borders itself, lines, punctuations, notations, lyricism, the limit of octaves. If only I can dissolve further into ocean, down there inside, where notions of beginnings and endings circulate through the glassy charms in our eyes.

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.

Film-Talk: All About Eve

In this movie, I've always wanted Bette Davis to play the conniving role of Eve, played by Anne Baxter. But mine is unrealistic fantasy, because Bette Davis is not young anymore when she was cast in this movie. Eve has to be someone younger, or who looks young enough to evoke dimensions of innocence and driven to achieve a dream. And too, the Eve character, here, needs a face that can look cold and composed, while suffering internal panic and hysteria. Baxter's face can assimilate to that character of face.

At first, Baxter's Eve has that small-town-girl quality about her, dwarfed by big dreams to be a star; but Baxter slowly peels out the that innocent little girl, to reveal a monster beneath nice, accommodating demeanor. And like many human beings who have added monstrosity as part of their humanity, Eve's monstrosity, here, has moral dimension, if one prefers to empathize with her dire conditions the script has, initially, set for her. Like the Eve from Genesis in the Bible, Anne Baxter's Eve, here, is also driven out of her home. That is the turning point of Eve Harrington's life; from then on, she develops resolve that evolves into brewing passion not to be defeat's victim, but rather its agent, ready for destruction of any sort, in the name of survival. However, her idea of survival is not the basic idea of being able to eat three meals a day. Hers is survival to replenish a bruised ego, to heal it; fame and success appears to be the potent remedies that can recover the equilibrium of that ego.

Eve's focus and determination to be a star is sometimes too calculated to be realistic. These calculations give her life, organizes it, giving it air. Eve fantasizes being the star that Margo Channing is, every-time Eve sees her on-stage. And Eve watches Margo's performances over and over again, with the obsession of a stalker. But what Eve lacks in these fantasies is the opportunity to enter the tight circle of theater community she wants to be part of. One night, she grabs an opportunity, and acts her way, with convincing believability, into one of the inner circles of that community, a circle where she befriends a playwright, director, producer, critic, and Margo Channing herself. Eve is able to penetrate into that circle through one of the film's weaker characters, the playwright's wife, Karen Richards played by Celeste Holm(the real-life mother of Ted Nelson, the one who coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in a 1965 publication, around the time this film was about to be made).

I remember, at least twice, Karen's Radcliffe background is mentioned; and I resisted thinking the Harvard in her is no match to a small-town girl's mind. But of course that's not a fair assessment of Karen; her Ivy-league background is but an element of who Karen is. But it's tempting to view Karen as some sort of sidekick; she is a playwright's wife, a friend of Margo Channing, and, most unfortunately, a pawn for Eve's ambitions, especially the part where she conveys to her playwright-husband to make Eve Margo's understudy. In doing this, Karen gives Eve an opportunity, because Karen believes in Eve's talents and cannot sense anything suspicious about her. And yes, Karen seems the only one who has been had by Eve; but she is not alone in this, eventually. Karen, her husband playwright, and Margo's fiance have all been had by Eve, including Margo herself. However, in Margo's circle, it is Margo's maid or personal assistant - Birdie Coonan, played by Thelma Ritter - whose suspicions about Eve, from the start, will help Margo see Eve differently. But initially, Margo doubts what Birdie senses in Eve. Indeed, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's script needs Birdie, as someone who sees the world outside the glass box of theater life. Somewhat instrumental in making Margo understand what Eve is all about, Birdie appears to be the only one who sees the real in Eve. But Eve surpasses Birdie, in this context, because Eve not only sees the real, she is able to see beyond it, and bravely transforms it through power of will and madness. Eve has learned something from her hard life, and uses that to map her future, through the savage, cunning mind of ambition.

Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz; 20th Century Fox; 138min, 1950.
Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, Thelma Ritter.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: On Authenticity, Single Stories, Africa, Stereotypes, Achebe, Colonialism, & More.

It moves, digs deep in the blood, because it must, and it doesn't care about skin-color, politics, religion, even love. It moves, because it is against death, physical death. It moves because there's no other way to be. But in that movement is bloodshed, violence, the revelation of time as human face.

Slide Show: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Genius at Work

I like the part when the voice talks about the map that tells where Henri had taken his pictures. That makes me think of Google Maps, Flickr, or other software that mechanize their engines, about how they grab pictures from anywhere in the internet and map them where they are taken or where its photographer is from.

Source: New York Review of Books Blog

“The art of photography is deliciously impure: its aesthetic triumphs and traditions are inescapably enmeshed in the messy world of work.” So writes Peter Galassi, curator of “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century,” the Museum of Modern Art’s ambitious new exhibition devoted to the work of one of the most brilliant photographers of the twentieth century. On view through June 28, 2010, the exhibition presents Cartier-Bresson’s work in a daring way—his most iconic masterpieces share wall space with lesser-known photographs from throughout his career. In this audio slide show, the photographer Dominique Nabokov—whose own work appears regularly in The New York Review—talks about the exhibition and the ways in which Cartier-Bresson’s daily works reveal his genius. An additional photograph from the exhibition appears in the May 13 issue of The New York Review.

—Dominique Nabokov interviewed by Eve Bowen;
slide show produced by Eve Bowen and Sean Hagerty

2010 FESTIVAL DE CANNES 12-23 MAY

I love this poster, the light drawing, a brilliant idea, indeed. Film uses light to paint stories. And stories are supposed to illuminate, and give us light, the light of mystery, myth, desire.

Now Juliette Binoche's black outfit is interesting. I'd like to think this outfit represents a state of mourning, in the context of many things, the world's economic condition, the bombings, prices at the pump, and, speaking of pump, that environmental disaster down there at the gulf, the gulf of our earth-soul bleeding oil, indeed.

The most exciting to watch during festival opening day, are the video-documented Photocalls in the festival's website, wherein the director and cast of films selected in major prize categories pose for a mob of photographers.

Allen Ginsberg

Image Source: The Village Voice

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.

ISYBW: Breathe: Close Your Eyes: Be.

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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.

Conditioned To Spring

Petals bloom into flowers, time, incantations. There are renewals, reversals, reprisals, re-dedications. Things huddle into gatherings for something bright, new conditions, probabilities. Elements cling, leave, disperse to intentions, destinations. Revolutions are plotted, rejected, re-imagined. When flowers don't bloom, they want to bloom, engage the world, its green, pollutions, populations, disintegrations. There is music in the air, grace-notes inundate filtered ears.

Cruising on Revisitation

Appeared at Kartika Review (Issue 4, Winter 2008) &
Blue Print Review (Issue 22).


The car slices through my old neighborhood, pulsating
apprehension. I retrace years, habits rigid and busy as
intersections, sidewalks crowded as thoughts in

meditations. The familiar has new layers now: structures
are less structured, transforming blocks, towering over houses,
memories, how people used to move, body language

now busy on new narratives. There are more parked
cars, too, than children on the street, glossy imports, repainted,
frames modified, all shinier than innocence. Familiar

street names huddle over each other, in my car, in my
head, hiding intimate secrets, refusing to clarify
their spellings, to confuse visitors, directing them away from

the neighborhood, from the altar of pride in place: home. I
see front lawns; they visit my childhood afternoons, drafting
shadows, mothering children not to

leave the yard. Their voices enter children's ears, but are
not understood. The children run, towards the street, down
the sidewalk, to their friends, to be soaked in the

summer of play, sweating giggles. I pass a boy running
towards someone, perhaps his father, an uncle, his hero. He
is running towards expectations, something greater, his

complicity with power unrestrained, understood like
unspoken cataracts. He understands religion of obedience, and
kneels before it; he'd defend it like a nation, and devour its

maturity like a fooled saint. After the red light, the boy is
still running, on my rearview, running from Manila to Disneyland.
He does not disappear, and refuses to. There is anger in the

refusal, becoming form, resembling
power, one that builds cities,
hungry, imperial as child's needs

Nam Le: To Write or Not to Write an Ethnic Story

Read this essay's full-text @ PopMatters.com.

Books these days, like critically acclaimed films or music albums, often have their own websites; this is especially true and critical to first books written by an author whose future longevity in letters is affirmed with near-unanimous enthusiasm and positive prognostications by a significant pool of critics, from different periodicals, worldwide. In some ways, if a book’s website contains a wealth of information about and from its reviews, news of readings, and author interviews, one might sense that a curious personality emerges about the book itself, a personality that, in some ways, competes with the popularity of its author. The website Nam Le Online.com for the short story collection The Boat convincingly illustrates this case.

In the website’s cover page, we see the image from the book’s hardbound front-cover instead of a picture of the collection’s architect, Nam Le. The image is taken from Long Island during a hurricane by photographer Clifford Ross, part of his black and white “Hurricane” series. In the image, the eye is immediately drawn to the frozen hurricane waves about to hit shore. Whatever final print process Ross used to emphasize the waves, the result illustrates the force and violence in them, frozen into sculpture-like, resplendent whiteness, almost losing any suggestions of transparency that characterize the colorlessness of water.

It’s important to underline the image of these emphasized waves not necessarily because of its association with boats but more so about notions of travel, and I’m specifically concerned about travel in the sea of imagination here. Travel in that open sea can, indeed, be perilous, but nevertheless travel that has its requisite departures, doldrums, and arrivals. The hurricane waves in the cover image are arriving waves; and this, in many ways, is what the stories in this collection are about.

The stories are not about arrivals per se, but rather about approximate ideas of authorial arrival, about notions that an imagination, an author from a specific cultural background has arrived in the imagination of its diverse other(s), and can, therefore, write about their lives, especially through their voice, in our day and age. These italics are necessary, because an author writing about the lives of others from another cultural or ethnic background is as old as Shakespeare giving us Othello and Caliban, the African American experience in Mark Twain, or the Asian experience in Pearl S. Buck; those are indeed different times.

But ours is a time wherein the ideals of high colonialism and imperialism can be easily demonized, even though their vestiges still exist in clandestine processes that remain illusive, ineradicable, or questionable in everyday life. Although the term ‘post-colonial’ grates on some ears, it opens a universe of perspectives and perceptions, especially when attached to author names whose cultural milieu had experienced colonial administration and its equivalents, including Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipul, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ninotchka Rosca, or Ngugi Wa Thiongo.

It’s fair to argue that the foci of these authors’ narratives are derived from the specific cultural or ethnic backgrounds of these writers; and that if they do step outside the boundaries of their culture, they do it with utmost calculation and caution. Thus, in our day and age specifically points to a certain syndrome of guardedness and suspicion when one writes, especially in the English language, about the experiences of the other today, because of issues regarding narrative and authorial authenticity. When authorial authenticity is undermined an author can be accused of stealing and ventriloquising someone else’s experience, or indulging in laboratory experiments in voice, a sort of travel in imagination that cannot evade accusations of exoticizing the experience being written about.

One can further argue that the voices that express this syndrome today reign stronger in the United States; for example, reviewing Le’s collection for the New York Times, novelist Hari Kunzru has accused Le of indulging in writing that “hovers between reportage (conflict, crime, guns, and drugs) and picturesque travel journalism.” But those on the other side of the Atlantic are equally critical; in the Financial Times, 2008 Booker winner Aravind Adiga writes that “there’s so much skill in these stories that it takes a second reading to realize just how many of Nam’s characters are, ultimately, caricatures”.

On the other hand, these articulations of literary misconduct are tempered and at times inebriated with praises about the author’s skill and talent, all collected in the book review section of the book’s website; hard-to-please New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani even writes that “in most cases [Le’s] sympathy for his characters and his ability to write with both lyricism and emotional urgency lend his portraits enormous visceral power”. But then sometimes the accusations linger a bit longer than the applause, which makes us look more closely into these praises, and locate them in a certain context of correctness that may not necessarily be overtly political, but rather hides something more personal and private, such as the boundaries of individual experience in a specific cultural context.

Now to what extent Le is affected by the less positive reception to his book is probably a non-issue for him, at this point, at least; because the kind of critical attention he and his book have garnered seems to indicate something momentous about the notion of authorship, especially who can speak for whom, in our time. But it’s also fair to speculate and assume that the publishing industry has already embedded layers of strategic marketing plans before this book’s success, and the almost guaranteed revenues for future publications by Le.

On the question of authorship, “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” the first story in the collection, touches on this issue in the context of the ‘ethnic story,’ making it an intricate part to the protagonist’s relationship with his father. When this story first appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story (All-story.com), in the journal’s summer 2006 issue, it created a small buzz on some internet discussion boards, especially among my friends, because of the protagonist’s name. These discussions explored the idea of Nam Le the author using ‘Nam Le’ as the name of the protagonist in this story; and this use is somewhat peculiar, because the reader of that story is tempted to consider the Nam Le in the story as Nam Le the author. This temptation, indeed, creates an easy argument that the story is autobiographical.

But the more skeptical readers of fiction may shy away from this easy argument and speculate ironies on Le’s intentions regarding this name similarity. Thus, a somewhat overdetermined argument can be posed that Le may have, unconsciously or consciously, created a reversal of assumption for those readers, in that by using his own name as the name of the protagonist in the story, he quietly subverts the usual convention of that reader to easily assume that the subjective aspects of the character’s life are immediately derived from the author’s life. The name parallel thus gives the critical reader some pause to be suspicious about the story’s autobiographical elements.

As the book catapults Le into fame and more information about his personal life is revealed and repeated in numerous interviews and book reviews worldwide, we find out that Nam Le’s life-story is quite identical to the Nam Le in this story: he, too, was Vietnam-born, grew up in Australia, became a lawyer, and then became a fellow at Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But the similar details may be the extent of this story’s objective autobiographic nature, because the subjective aspects of the story rely on Le’s literary tools for the fictive inner lives of his characters.

But I somehow had to elide the fictional aspect of their inner lives, because Le convinced me that here, the real-life Le is just telling his life-story ‘like it is’. And perhaps this is where we experience Le’s skills, when first-person fictional narrative gives us convincing believability, rendering incisive personal documentation, because the sleight-of-hand is embedded in the innocent fluidity of prose. Thus, when Le writes—“Fuck it, I thought. [...] I would write the ethnic story of my Vietnamese father. It was a good story. It was a fucking great story”—I felt he was documenting something verbatim, just two and a half days before he submitted his piece. At this point, Le gives in to what his friend has told him, that instead of writing stories about “lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans—and New York painters with hemorrhoids”, he could, indeed, write or rather “...totally exploit the Vietnamese thing”.

Read the rest of article at PopMatters.com.

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.