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.
Intransitive Drive
after a Bad Romance (Lady Gaga),...
†††
And to some, what trails
a period of bad romance is an
age of permutations,
which probably nurtures
eras of reputations.
†††
Mood in Age of Permutations depicted here:
Poem originally appeared at BlazeVox 2010.
And for recent discussions about poetry, visit:
Galatea Resurrects #15.
Edited by:
EILEEN TABIOS.
Pollinating
Santiago Bose, "Can't go back Home again", Mixed Media, 87 x 123, cms, 1998.
We dissolve into wounds, the way moonbeams huddle in scent of flowers knotting redundant dreams into symmetries in foreboding. Our convictions slice us through colors of blood, into a body, of convulsions, erratic, rhythmic as bees buzzing around premonitions blooming petals of a city pollinating.
Los Bastardos
Read this essay's 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. [1]
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. [2] Escalante’s first film, Sangre, had also been entered for the award in 2005. [3]
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.
Californios
Escalante’s initial image of southern California is a steady shot of a wide river canal, part of a drainage system that often saves the region’s vast assemblage of suburban areas from catastrophic hydraulic asphyxiations during the rainy season.
This shot is held for so long that, for a while, we suspect the two slow-moving objects in the middle of the screen are animals heading towards the camera. Eventually though, we recognise an older adult male, in his thirties, and another who appears stuck in the twilight of adolescence and adulthood: Jesús and Fausto, respectively.
Showing the small-ness of these two moving objects before we recognise they are people de-emphasises the humanity of the workers, and underlines the dominance of the concrete structure they are walking on - a vast structure built on the complex and calculated union of technology, ideas, manpower, politics, and funds.
Read this essay's full-text at
Latin American Review of Books.
Directed by Amat Escalante,
2008, 90 minutes (English and Spanish)
Mantarraya/Tres Tunas/No Dream/
Foprocine/Le Pacte/Ticoman
Notes:
1 Los bastardos at IMDB
2 Cannes Film Festival link
3 Short article about director on Cannes Film Festival website
Edgy Evaporations
To be in labyrinth of colors probably feels like being trapped in morning dew on edges of petals. There's the scrambling before total evaporation, when night's constitution of dreams disintegrates like words disappearing during acts of reading. The sun perfects this abolition, into flames of intensity, in movements where our quotidian avoids abortions in ordinariness.
Omar Musa "Hemingway"
I first watched this at Mascara Literary Review.
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.