Video-Clip Source: thecamerawalls
BlazeVox Fall2010
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.
Ascent
James Dean
He crashed his Porche Spyder 54-years ago, while on his way to Salinas, for a car race. His star never stopped shining after that day. Three movies, and some tv shows, plays, ads. Of course Hollywood's publicity machine helped create his stardom's luminosity, after his death. It's like, him as object of desire these days is an indication of educated nostalgia, about the 1950s, how pivotal that time was, before the upheavals that would define the explosions in the 1960s. But object whatever, I like Jimmy in those three films, convincing, maybe subtle, somewhat comprehensive. I say comprehensive, because, at least for me, he deeply understood the characters he played. In his films, he gives his audience wild ride into the mind of these characters, the labyrinths in their minds, exploring their unconscious, like he's putting them on a lab table. I guess most good actors do that. I could feel this in Brando, too, although I have reservations about his ability to get into a character, when compared to Dean. And I think Jimmy did something more; he was crazy enough to give in to the crazy hearts of the characters he played. Now these characters exist in a writer's imagination, and what Jimmy did was extend the dimensions of these characters, gave them new worlds to live, and perhaps even not want to live in. In some ways, this extended space is forbidden zone. To enter that zone, I think, is not so much sentence to a mental institution, but a form of autism, in a solipsistic world, where only few are allowed or are meant to be in.
Paris Fashion Sense
I'm wearing you like Paris has lost all its lights in your teardrops, slowly washing me down the Seine.
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.
When Summer Recedes Around Punctuations
You prefer sky, instead of blue-skies. Brown grass feels damp. Your angry words are like silhouettes of branches without leaves. You lean on me, and feel like winter has arrived early to freeze our familiar gestures.
Forearmed - Alfonso Ossorio
We did it in the eye, beyond apparitions of obligations. We fertilize terminologies now, become secret kingdoms in ideas, you and I, ablutions for this civilization. We hang around halos, and feel the justifications in sainthoods. Why do we feel the cross in religions, the cross in their moral aptitudes? Why do we feel that the moment we cannot see these crosses, we're somehow blind?
James Baldwin
James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924. I celebrate his birthday through this intimate interview; him: not the fire next time, but a fire in time. He is candid. The honesty: crisp. The interview is idea on things destiny, controlling it. He looks somewhat ecstatic in this conversation, as though he doesn't have any regrets, or if he does, they have been dissolved in the flow, of the moment, words, giving.
Perdition
The persistence in your smile. The crowded obligations. Your pungent sweetness. The way you deface dictionaries.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)