Undine

'Dear Salvation Army' - a poem by Dawn McGuire

2012-02-10T11:11:00.000-08:00

You can have the goat
I got for reading my poems
In Willits
He has balded my yard

Now he's grazing my books
The bible from when I was baptized
is his favorite so far
He is a brindle-colored goat

and under other circumstances
a fine reward for a reading
The poet before me
got fish

Please arrange pick up very soon
I am okay with losing Leviticus
Would like to save Mark
and Ruth

available at IF SF Publishing http://ifsfpublishing.squarespace.com/storage/DawnMcGuire_Interview.pdf

Papaya

2012-01-25T12:22:00.001-08:00

Route 1

2012-01-24T10:00:00.000-08:00

Quote: William Faulkner

2012-01-24T09:28:00.000-08:00

"The past isn't dead, it isn't even past"

Bracken fern

2012-01-23T12:59:00.000-08:00

The red room in Newburyport

2012-01-20T12:52:00.000-08:00

Quote: Marshall McLuhan

2011-12-30T22:24:00.001-08:00

"The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers"

Quote: Robinson Jeffers

2011-10-15T22:38:00.000-07:00

"Only tormented people want the truth."

Sir Francis Drake Blvd.

2011-10-13T13:44:00.000-07:00

slug mating

2011-10-10T09:07:00.000-07:00

Found this on Ron Silliman's blog, among other nuggets;

Quote: Owen Barfield

2011-09-29T16:14:00.000-07:00

"Consciousness is not a tiny bit of the world stuck on the rest of it. It is the inside of the whole world."

All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.

2011-09-29T08:20:00.000-07:00

Do Americans censor shows of traumatized children's art? They do - when the traumatized children are from Gaza. Oakland's Museum of Children's Art has cancelled its scheduled exhibit this month due to pressure from local groups. Here are some of the images our community has been saved the trouble of seeing.

Signature

2011-09-21T10:21:00.000-07:00

Quote: Picasso

2011-09-15T20:14:00.000-07:00

"We all know that art is not the truth, art is a lie that makes us realize the truth"

Quote: Robert Duncan

2011-09-05T13:29:00.000-07:00

"There is not a phase of our experience that is meaningless, not a phrase of our communication that is meaningless. We do not make things meaningful, but in our making we work toward an awareness of meaning; poetry reveals itself to us as we obey the orders that appear in our work."

My home town

2011-08-31T11:17:00.000-07:00

The Mission

2011-07-22T09:50:00.000-07:00

Frameline 35: 'Absent'

2011-07-16T16:51:00.000-07:00

This unusual thriller from Argentinian director Marco Berger is a complete departure from his debut Plan B. Both films are psychologically astute, intelligent and erotic, but Absent swerves into much darker territory with its study of youthful obsession, sexual taboo, and paranoia. In a clever twist on the seduction-of-a-minor theme, so prevalent in anti-gay rhetoric, 30-something swim-coach Sebastiano (played by Carlos Echevarria) is tricked early on into first driving his 16 year-old student Martin (Javier de Pietro) to a doctor's office one evening and then extending his hospitality to a couch for the night when Martin's supposed arrangements go awry. The relentless way this innocent-looking boy draws the well-intentioned but increasingly nervous older man into his web of attempted seduction is developed in tense, spiralling detail, with claustrophobic sound design and camerawork, but at some point the discomfort it generates splits into divergent streams in the viewer's mind; one stays with the action, while the other begins to question the film's intentions - its bowing to genre conventions and persistent invocation of Hitchcock become a shade too heavy-handed, perhaps ironic (?), close to parody without ever exactly crossing the line, and for some time we are unsure just where Berger is going with it all.

Given the revelations in the second half of the film these self-conscious effects make wondrous sense, and I marveled all over again at the intellectual facility of this young director for whom elements of film grammar/history double as psychological clues and even plot devices. The slightly ramped-up genre tropes refer not to the action after all, but to the windmills in its unfortunate protaganist's unconscious mind, and when events swerve into more dreamlike territory the sense that we are witnessing the exteriorization of a sealed, completely occult experience intensifies, with layered cuts, sequencing distortions, and obscure visual keys (darkness, shots through water, through glass, broken windows, eye movements, eyes ... ) which extend the ominous effects of Carolina Canevaro's weird soundscape and Pedro Irusta's incredible, spooky, thrilling score.

Berger has commented somewhere that he makes 'gay films for straight people', and it's true that straight audiences will identify completely with the characters in both Plan B and Absent. They hover on the cusp, they are straight people who find they are gay, or gay people who think they are straight; they are embroiled in scenarios as complex, challenging, or ambiguous as any we have seen or can imagine - and when sexual orientation comes in as somehow integral to all that, we respond to their situation as if it were our own. It's an oblique approach to the theme which works well, completely sidestepping the 'otherness' that usually inflects gay films and situating characters inside our shared predicament. I hope he finds the crossover audience he deserves, for his sake, but mostly, for ours. We all need films as good as this. Berger is a master already and he's barely out of film school - its phenomenal.

Midsummer

2011-06-28T22:49:00.000-07:00

Frameline 35: Three reviews

2011-06-12T16:02:00.000-07:00

Four More Years:  This film is a class act from beginning to end, hilarious, delightful, and very clever. Its script alone should win every award going. It is sharp, fast-moving, on-target, and very, very funny. Why can't we have more of this kind of screenwriting over here?  We used to have Woody Allen, but he is churning out the same tired old stuff these days and this film from Swedish director Tova Magnusson-Norling is completely fresh. The acting is great as well, the characters intensely lovable, and the concept - the leader of the centre-right party in Sweden falls for the second-in-command of the victorious socialists - is superb. I can't even begin to imagine how funny it must be for Swedish speakers familiar with the scene. But we get the gist of the tax-cut/tax-hike rhetoric, even if it is laced with references to things like the North Bothnia Rail Link. Actually the North Bothnia Rail Link part is important. I should like somebody to text me about the North Bothnia Rail Link in that way. And have I mentioned the Serbo-Croatian, Social-Liberal aspects of bisexuality yet? See this film.

Wish Me Away: I wasn't ready for how complex and passionate this documentary about country music phenomenon Chely Wright's coming-out was going to be. If you like soul-searching stuff, and I do, this film is one of the stand-out events of the festival. Quite apart from the in-depth revelation of how intelligent, thoughtful, courageous, divided, and conscious one human being can be, it really opens up the issue of just what it means to be gay in homophobic country with a crowbar. It is hell. People have to subvert and destroy themselves - especially people who dream big, apparently. Chely Wright is a kind of superstar, and was an icon in the country music scene, a virtual archetype of beauty and goodness to a community saturated in hate for gays and other differently-oriented types.  Her journey as documented here is intensely moving; I cried my eyes out.  Her on-camera deliberations are a complicated, eloquent testament to just how thorny and profound a human predicament like this can be. Coupled with fascinating footage of meetings with her spiritual advisor and publicity agents, editors, tour-managers, make-up artists, friends and family, it is a rich and beautifully-crafted film that will make you realize, if you don't already, what is at stake emotionally and spiritually for GLBT people everywhere.

Last, Fast Ride - The Life, Love and Death of a Punk Goddess: This is one of those films that sometimes crop up at Frameline, where the subject is only incidentally gay or lesbian, but the issue at stake is something else. I like that about this festival. It illustrates how GBLT issues bleed into other issues, like feminism, or 'values'-politics, or media representation, or any area where the political and personal collide. In this case the late, great, and beautiful punk-rock star Marian Anderson's sexual orientation is not exactly the point; nor are her sexual antics on stage, or even her outrageous acts of provocation generally, though these get closer. It is that she was a victim of childhood sexual abuse by her father, an alcoholic, violent cop. Everything that comes after, and there is a lot, can be seen in the light of this traumatic original sin. Her life becomes an object lesson in how profoundly destructive such early trauma can be. No doubt she means many things besides to many people, and I don't mean to deny any of that. On the contrary, her achievements, her fearlessness, her energy, and raw talent (her voice alone is incredible), not to mention her sweetness and intelligence, as illustrated here in several interviews, contribute to what is at least my understanding of the magnitude of this crime against her, because it becomes abundantly clear as the film goes on that the effects of her sexual abuse were so far-reaching that no amount of personal talent, courage or virtue could save her from its destructive legacy. It is a tragic film, a study in identity and struggle and loss, but I was filled with admiration for how fiercely this woman fought to define herself against unbeatable odds, and filled also with a renewed sense of disgust and hate for the men who perpetrate such crimes against children. Fans of local punk scene will love it as well. There are tons of stunning performance clips, and interviews with Tim Armstrong of Rancid, Dexter Holland of The Offspring, Becky Wreck of Lunachicks, Texas Terri, Daniel deLeon, Greg Langston, Fate Fatal, Ginger Coyote, and more.

Quote: Walter Benjamin

2011-06-05T18:11:00.000-07:00

'There is no document of civilization that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism.'

from 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' in Illuminations

Castro Street

2011-06-01T21:37:00.000-07:00

Quote: Emerson

2011-05-27T21:48:00.000-07:00

"The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent"

Quote: Rosa Luxemburg

2011-05-22T23:25:00.000-07:00

'The first revolutionary act is to call things by their true names'

'Balanced Individual' by Michael McConnell

2011-05-17T22:02:00.000-07:00

more from this local artist at www.poopingrabbit.com

SFIFF54: 'Another Earth'

2011-05-05T10:30:00.000-07:00

Another Earth: I loved this film. It's basically a character drama exploring themes of loss, guilt, and atonement, but the presence of a second, identical earth on the horizon, with all its quantum implications, gives the film a brooding, crepuscular feel, an ambiguous atmosphere that hovers between menace and possibility. Its a brilliant debut, intimate and powerful, and possessed of the sort of integrity that can characterize indie productions when they are conceived and developed from the ground up by ensembles as intelligent as this.

SFIFF54: 'Nostalgia for the Light'

2011-05-04T13:14:00.000-07:00

Nostalgia for the Light: This brilliant film from Chilean director Patricio Guzman succeeds on so many levels it is hard to summarize. It creates its own level, it's a miracle that exceeds the sum of its parts. Elegant commentary and dazzling images (of deserts, bones, moons, stars) attain a sort of harmonic convergence in which history, astronomy, and ethics align. In revealing the ecstatic relationships between human and celestial bodies, light, time, space and memory, Guzman manages as well to bring reason and compassion to bear upon his country's darkest and most secret crimes. It's a documentary - but it's also an astonishing work of art.

SFIFF54: 'Aurora'

2011-05-02T00:05:00.000-07:00

Aurora: An unforgivably bleak and tedious attempt to render the texture of one man's despicable mind, this 3-hour exercise in testing the limits of audience endurance fails to justify itself psychologically, philosophically, artistically, or in any other ways relevant to sentient life. Director (and star!) Cristi Puiu must be satanically depressed, or worse. Avoid at all costs.

SFIFF54: 'The Mill and the Cross'

2011-05-01T10:40:00.000-07:00

The Mill and the Cross: Lech Majewski's intriguing study of Bruegel's painting (the Way to Calvary) zooms in on vignettes within the canvas and then develops mini-episodes from there, sliding backwards and forwards in time and in and out of the picture as a whole, until all are unified under the by now greatly expanded 'sign' of the painting. With a dramatized Bruegel (Rutger Hauer) explaining his political, social, and aesthetic motives, the painting is transformed into a miraculous freeze-frame of a convulsion in history and society. You have to see it to know how artfully this effect is achieved.

SFIFF54: 'Silent Souls'

2011-04-30T13:35:00.000-07:00

Silent Souls: Cinema might be the best medium yet for conveying the symbolic nature of cultural forms, and Siberian director Aleksei Fedorchenko's lovely adaptation of Aist Sergeyev's 'The Buntings' is a case in point. The Merjan (Russian/Finnish) burial at the center of this lyrical film doubles as ritual for the vanishing culture itself, but it is not a complex or sophisticated film - its virtues lie in its simplicity, its physicality, its poetry, its tenderness, and its quiet beauty. Some of its scenes and images - the drowned typewriter, the ribbon ceremony, the incredible choral scene, the naive poems - are pure illuminations, limpid and inspired.

SFIFF54: 'The Deep End'

2011-04-26T23:20:00.000-07:00

The 10 shorts in this compilation are all, in one way or another, meditations on the rural or urban environment, and with the exception of Hell Roaring Creek (more about this film in a minute) they all say as much about the means of observation as about the object observed. A variety of complex effects amplify the subjective tone of the work so that the act of seeing/feeling what is seen/cognizing/interpreting is consistently foregrounded and, as we know generally, there are as many ways of seeing the world as there people to see it. Some pieces, like Louise Bourque's overtly expressionist 10-minute a little prayer (H.E.L.P) were very powerful - its distressed images of a bound, gagged, and inverted Houdini, accompanied by layers of frightening aural effects, were actively nightmarish; others, like T. Marie's 6-minute Slave Ship, a silent, painterly manipulation of Turner's 1840 masterpiece (dedicated to recently-departed poet Leslie Scalapino) were haunting and beautiful. The visual fantasia of Katherin McInnis' 2-minute last resort, a collage of layered close-up stills shot inside an abandoned and decaying hotel pool was utterly exquisite, saturating the eye in image after image of proliferating colors and forms; and Vincent Grenier's 9-minute Burning Bush was a positively hallucinogenic digital trip organized around one or two static takes of euonymus leaves on a garden wall.

But most remarkable to my mind was Lucien Castaign-Taylor's transparently shot, unmanipulated pastoral Hell Roaring Creek, which records in two or three long takes the passage of a flock of sheep across a creek at dawn. The simplicity of this film is absolute; it is perfect. Its pristine, untouched images have the distilled quality of something essential, and together with its lush sounds (of water on rocks and the calling of lambs) it adds up to an experience both ravishing and complete. The longest piece at 20 minutes, it comes last on the program and balances the other more process-oriented and expressionist segments perfectly - an inspired bit of curating, I think, from Kathy Geritz and Vanessa O'Neill. Their sensitive work on this project is a credit to them as well as to the artists they have chosen to present.

SFIFF54: 'World on a Wire'

2011-04-24T21:30:00.000-07:00

World on a Wire: As if over 3 hours of futuristic 70's German TV is not remarkable enough, throw Fassbinder in the mix and you are granted a sort of unorthodox version of bliss. For all his New Wave affiliations (cf. Alphaville) this legendary enfant terrible is really in a class of his own. World on a Wire is packed with his signature tropes and themes, from the slightly hallucinogenic outre aesthetic and carnivalesque characters to the withering critique of capitalism, power and convention. Bizarre, complex, delightful - and important, in film-historical terms.

SFIFF54: 'Miss Representation'

2011-04-23T09:45:00.000-07:00

Miss Representation: As director Jennifer Siebel Newsom was quick to point out, her documentary is a 'call to action' for those of us who want to be liberated from the gender constrictions that suffocate our lives. Crammed with archive clips, images and interviews, it is a fast, convincing, powerful and sometimes shocking (for those not over-familiar with routine TV talk show content) look at the degrading treatment of the female in contemporary media, its all-pervasive influence and its connection to capitalism and power.

SFIFF54: 'End of Animal'

2011-04-17T15:15:00.000-07:00

End of Animal: This thoroughly weird and original first feature from Korean director Jo Sung Hee takes a pregnant girl, her cabdriver and a third, uncanny stranger deep into a kind of sudden purgatory or lateral zone and leaves them there. Because the film maintains its allegiance to life's ordinary surfaces, its dead cellphones and stalled cars, torn maps and broken heels, we identify easily and so are all the more disturbed by what unravels on the human plane. Its weirdness speaks, that is, to some unspecified fear we all share, something immediate and unconscious. But the film is not without its humor or irony either. A truly surprising, unsettling, and odd experience. Don't miss it.

SFIFF54: 'The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975'

2011-04-14T09:38:00.000-07:00

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975: This stunning documentary is about as close to perfect as a film can get. Assembled from a cache of original footage found in Swedish TV archives, it presents the Black Power movement as it should be seen, transparently, without establishment 'enhancements.' Gracious, perfectly-pitched to the intellectual caliber of its material, it explores events, issues, and personalities in considerable depth. And what personalities! See it for the interview with Angela Davis alone. Or the early speeches of Stokely Carmichael. Because characters like theirs are given so much unmediated airtime, their charisma touches what is already an exquisitely beautiful, brilliantly organized and powerful film with something approaching genius.

SFIFF54: 'The Redemption of General Butt Naked'

2011-04-10T21:06:00.000-07:00

The Redemption of General Butt Naked: A jaw-dropping study in megalomania. This savage Liberian warlord whose victims number in the tens of thousands is fooling no-one with his contrite Christian pastor act. Or is he? Many heart-breaking scenes of survivors succumbing to his rhetorical powers, such as they are. This is where the film gets a bit sickening. Arendt's banality of evil comes to mind.

SFIFF54: 'Page One'

2011-04-10T18:31:00.001-07:00

Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times: The collapse of advertising revenue, exploding competition, the 'End Times' debacle, Judith Miller, David Carr, Wikileaks, Twitter ... it's all in this bright, relevant, fast-moving, and at times very funny documentary about the recent travails of the NYTimes. The film's pro-Times ("good journalism/the public trust") sentiments are clear, and there isn't enough coverage of the alternative view, but it's still an unprecedented inside look at one of our most beloved institutions as it confronts the specter of its own extinction.

SFIFF54: 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams'

2011-04-06T19:39:00.000-07:00

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: This enchanting study of the 32,000 year-old cave paintings at Chauvet Pont d'Arc is the apotheosis of Herzog's perennial landscape-as-mindscape theme, exploring the interiority of the earth itself, with much attendant hypothesizing. Beautiful (in 3D!) and powerful in a cumulative sort of way, with superbly evocative music. The usual sprinkling of flute-playing, bone-sniffing oddballs who usually enable Herzog's strategy of ironic defense can't deflect us any more from recognizing his personal fixation on the mystical and sublime.

-5 (Negative Five): a poem by Chelsey Minnis

2011-04-05T12:54:00.000-07:00

-5 for debating
-5 for misuse of the tractor
-5 for altering the chore list
-5 for pinecone throwing
-5 for misplacing shoes and other personal property...
-5 for delaying, kicking dirt, separating, tossing thermos off lookout rest-point, non-listening...
-5 for cracking twigs
-5 for excessive yawning
-5 for loud whistling, touching people's hats without permission, putting Jared's comb into the fire, misuse of the grill tongs, burning, failing to comply with cleanliness of common area, spilling trash...
-5 for improper conduct while fishing...
-5 for euphoria, obstruction of doorways, fire hazard...
-5 for "misplacing" trail map
-5 for scattering birds, meaningless interjections during staff meeting, lingering and/or petting the guide dogs...
-5 for delayed objections
-5 for exaggerated enthusiasm about trail walk
-5 for tracking mud, solitariness, obsession with fishing lures, reluctance, inability to initiate social interaction, furtiveness, secrecy, paleness...
-5 for loud humming during rest hour, loud buzzing or humming sound, destructive theorizing, misuse of and/or staring out of windows...
-5 for refusal to read information packets, emotional recklessness, bad sportsmanship, lateness...
-5 for improper storage of personal food, repudiation, defacement, refusal to return group mascot, lack of effort at horseshoes, hoarding the first aid kit, contradictions, negligence, spitting...
-5 for misuse of the fly swatter...

from 'Bad Bad' 2007

Box of pastels

2011-04-04T19:55:00.000-07:00

Quote: Carlo Emilio Gadda

2011-04-04T19:50:00.000-07:00

" ... to know is to insert something into what is real, and thus to distort reality"

Excerpt from a prose poem by Ron Silliman

2011-04-04T11:56:00.000-07:00

Revolving door.

Revolving door. A sequence of objects which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line.

Revolving door. Fountains of the financial district. Houseboats beached at the point of low tide, only to float again when the sunset is reflected in the water. A sequence of objects which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, camels pulling wagons of bear cages, tamed ostriches in toy hats, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line.

Revolving door. First flies of summer. Fountains of the financial district spout. She was a unit in a bum space, she was a damaged child. Dark brown houseboats beached at the point of low tide - men atop their cabin roofs, idle, play a Dobro, a jaw's harp, a 12-string guitar - only to float again when the sunset is reflected in the water. I want the grey-blue grain of western summer. A cardboard box of wool sweaters on top of the book-case to indicate Home. A sequence of objects, silhouettes, which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, dromedaries pulling wagons bearing tiger cages, tamed ostriches in toy hats, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line.

from 'Ketjak'

Quote: Marianne Moore

2011-04-02T23:13:00.000-07:00

'The cure for loneliness is solitude.'

Limantour

2011-03-28T16:06:00.001-07:00

Quote: Jean Genet

2011-03-26T21:42:00.000-07:00

My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.

Oyster shell dust, Point Reyes

2011-03-26T18:11:00.001-07:00

Jonathon Coe 'Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of BS Johnson'

2011-03-24T13:39:00.000-07:00

The atmosphere of reverence that has attached to this horribly unsatisfactory biography (the Boston Globe calls it one of the finest literary biographies ever written) is just incomprehensible to me. Have reviewers actually read the book cover to cover? It's as if they are more excited by the idea of one iconoclast (if that's what Coe is) taking on another than they are by the book itself. We are encouraged to consider it a literary biography, by which I think is meant an examination of the work as opposed to the life, but it is subtitled The Story Of BS Johnson (no doubt ironically, given Johnson's famous rejection of 'stories' as 'lies') and this is most categorically not a story; nor is it, incidentally, an analysis of Johnson's novels. Perhaps his failure to work the material into a narrative or even a cogent analysis is Coe's deft tribute to Johnson, a nod to his hero's (or antihero's - he can't decide) attitude of refusal and nonconformity, but the result is painfully glib. His offhanded or exasperated authorial interjections varnish what is otherwise a rather dreary ledger of accounts, a catalogue of every business transaction and project Johnson ever undertook in film, TV, theatre, poetry, and the novel. It is mostly illustrated with letters, and of those a preponderance of business-oriented exchanges between Johnson and his hapless agents and publishers. We do encounter extracts of plays and TV dramas; there are a couple of poems, and some letters to friends, but most aggregiously there is practically nothing from or about the novels, which works are the absolute bedrock of Johnson's achievement. Instead we get a slight, in every sense of that word, synopsis of each novel at the beginning of the book, 16 pages in total, before we move on to what is evidently for Coe the more pressing task of registering BSJ's every career transaction over a period of about 15 years or so until he died in 1973. What is clear is Coe's developing distaste for his subject, coyly evidenced by his repeated sampling of Johnson's absurdly inflated self-appraisals, and of his sometimes hysterically defensive posturing vis-a-vis the English literary establishment and its obtuse intellectual positions. Judging from this sour, malnourished and poorly imagined effort, things have not improved much since Johnson's day.

The organization alone is horrible, more like a school project than a book, with ruled-off cubbyholes for excerpts, and isolated sections which briefly 'contain' different approaches to the material; one for novels as mentioned, one at the end for an attempt at analysis (again, just 33 pages), and a lone chapter of quotations from Johnson's friends and colleagues, which might have gone some way towards humanizing the man had Coe taken the trouble to assimilate them. The whole thing is a nightmare, a catalogue of meaningless facts, absolutely lacking in creativity or even a willingness to organize the evidence into something resembling a true biography. So many questions go unanswered, unacknowledged, questions about the work as well as the life. Why was he so tortured? How successful was his method? Did he sacrifice content to form and if so, why? How did his interrogation of form relate to his experience? How did his art reveal (or conceal) his personal preoccupations? How successfully did he continue the tradition of Joyce and Beckett, his avowed literary idols? What were his relationships like, his childhood, his marriage? Unbelievably, the most important of his early love affairs, a relationship Johnson himself considered as devastating as anything that had ever happened to him, is flatly dismissed by Coe as a piece of immature grandstanding unworthy of his consideration.

I can only conclude that the curious work and the complex, baffling personality of this writer are simply beyond Coe's powers of comprehension, as they might be to many of us, but we are not burying him all over again in a mountain of meaningless, lifeless, superficial, unexamined and disconnected material masquerading as an honest work of biography. The revelation at the end, which resembles nothing so much as a cheap mystery novel gimmick, does not redeem it either. Will Self, a more dazzling and innovative writer by far, has remarked of Coe that he takes an artist's pleasure in the cultivation of a certain kind of tedium vitae. I couldn't have put it better myself. Let's hope Johnson's case will not rest here.

Quote: Milan Kundera

2011-03-16T22:03:00.000-07:00

" ... the novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel."

'Exposed' at the MoMA

2011-03-15T17:50:00.000-07:00

The SF MoMA will continue Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera since 1870 through April 17, so there's still plenty of time to see it, but be prepared - it is shocking and perverse, though not unbeautiful. I didn't make a note of photographers' names, but there were many images I'll never forget. This iconic image of Thich Quang Duc protesting treatment of buddhist priests by South Vietnamese authorities in 1963 functioned as a kind of fulcrum, positioned as it was in a glass case in the center of the room, but the images fanned out around it were just as extreme. A spinal column sticking out of a truncated torso in a pair of shorts. A would-be suicide on high scaffolds. The blackened but otherwise perfect face of a man burned by Nazis before he could squeeze out from under floorboards into open air. A police dog lunging like a bullet at a black man in the South. A lynching. An armored British Army hut like some space pod bristling with black spears on a little street in County Armagh. Surveillance shots of British suffragettes. Disintegrated remains in Rwanda. Burning oil fields in Iraq - 'the mother of all battles'. The whole thing was stunning, awful. I thought somebody should be filming us. The voyeur motif so clearly implied us, the consumers of art and images flocking like bats to open wounds. We pooled up around particularly shocking images in corners, we bumped into one another, looked at one another uneasily, tried to communicate our dismay and hide our fascination. Not so surprising, I suppose. But there was awe and reverence in the room as well.

Quote: Sharon Doubiago

2011-03-12T22:19:00.000-08:00

'Grammar makes you lie, I've always known that. That's partly why I'm a poet ...'

from My Father's Love, Vol. 2, 2011

Yemen - by Gwen

2011-03-10T00:42:00.000-08:00

'Bag of Mice' - a poem by Nick Flynn

2011-03-04T19:42:00.000-08:00

I dreamt your suicide note
was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag
& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag
opened into darkness,
smoldering
from the top down. The mice,
huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag
across a shorn field. I stood over it
and as the burning reached each carbon letter
of what you'd written
your voice released into the night
like a song, & the mice
grew wilder.

from 'Some Ether: Poems'

Excerpt from a novel by William Golding

2011-03-03T18:09:00.000-08:00

' ... perhaps the truth of life and living lies in the strange things women do and say when they are hysterical.'

from 'The Double Tongue', 1995

The Mission

2011-02-28T16:42:00.000-08:00

Quote: Slavoj Zizek

2011-02-28T16:31:00.000-08:00

'The unconscious is outside'

Zizek quoted in Victoria Nelson, 'The Secret Life of Puppets', 2001.

Excerpt from a poem by Robert Duncan

2011-02-28T16:27:00.000-08:00

The great speckled bird who broods over the
Nest of souls, and her egg,
The dream in which all things are living,
I return to, leaving myself.

from 'Tribal Memories: Passages 1' in Bending the Bow

Quote: Jorge Luis Borges

2011-02-28T11:20:00.000-08:00

'The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors.'

from 'Kafka and his Precursors' in Labyrinths.

The Wild Side

2011-02-25T12:06:00.001-08:00

Quote: John Updike

2011-02-25T12:02:00.000-08:00

"Being ourselves is the one religious experience we all have."

from his introduction to Bruno Schulz, 'Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass'

Jon Fosse 'Aliss at the Fire'

2011-02-24T12:54:00.000-08:00

Experimental literature is alive and well - in Norway. Jon Fosse's Det er Ales has just been translated into English by Damion Searls, who stated in an interview with Scott Esposito last week that it is Fosse's best novel - visionary was a word he used more than once. He's not kidding. Fosse's minimalist language and very long sentences (the first period came on page 43) are unusual enough, but his subtle shifts in perspective, which are really seamless transitions from one character's inner voice to another's within the same perspective, as though there is only one, a single stream of consciousness occluded by clouds of unknowing, together with his extreme compression of time and starkly mythic topography of fjord and fire together create something weirdly compelling, a sort of modern gnostic document. Potent symbols evocative of pagan ritual burn, glitter and fade across a landscape which is both inner and outer, a hermetic mystery; words like wood, boat, wool, coffin, hair, body, fish, window, boy, flip over in waves of incantatory prose like the flotsam and jetsam their author claims elsewhere to be the essence of his poetry, images which float into sight in the process of writing and create their own meaning. We begin to draw lines between objects in an obscurely imagistic way, as though there is a picture beneath the pictures we are given and we only have to focus or perhaps un-focus our inner eye to see it. It's an encounter with something very rare, even occult, but it takes place in 2002 - or an expanded version of it. Time is layered, braided, or blended completely; in one scene, Signe hangs her coat over the coat of the (ghost?) Aliss who hangs it on the same hook a hundred or so years earlier. It really is a kind of ghost story, a meditation on memory and loss, and the distorting effects of grieving, a grief which can be never-ending and calls into question just who is grieving in the first place. Grief simply is. Perhaps it happens to something rather than someone; perhaps people stitch it into the fabric of time or place.

The only living character, properly speaking, is the middle-aged Signe who has lost her husband Asle and still waits for him in their home by the water, though she knows he is not coming back. Into the contorted space of her memory and longing float the shades of Asle and his ancestors, including that of his great great grandmother Aliss, who burns sheep heads in the fire, who saves her boy from drowning by speaking the name of God, who is powerless to save her grandson Asle from the same fate, or indeed her great great grandson Asle from his. Events are subject to the same ritualistic treatment as words, deaths mirror one another as if ordained, or at least, connected in the same inevitable, unbreakable way that moments are connected, or generations.

It's impossible to isolate one scene or sentence without the feeling of having taken it sacrilegiously out of context, perhaps even killing it. Which is another way of saying, I can't find a quote that conveys what I want to say - no fragment can do justice to the whole. There really aren't any fragments anyway. It's a single, sustained literary gesture, one long sweep of the eye.

Fosse's books and plays are much celebrated in Europe. It's time we knew him better over here, and this beautiful book is the perfect place to start. A swift read at 106 pages, its strange effect lingers like the green spot at the back of the eye after a sunset.

Quote: Gerard de Nerval

2011-02-24T12:27:00.000-08:00

'Madness is the desire to be recognized by an ideal other who functions as a transcendental being.'

Forgotten at The Vogue

2011-02-12T12:38:00.001-08:00

Excerpt from a novel by William Golding

2011-02-12T12:19:00.000-08:00

Following is a passage from Golding's fourth novel, Free Fall, in which the transfigured artist and prisoner-of-war Sammy Mountjoy perceives the world anew after a spell in solitary confinement and a spiritual crisis;

Huge tears were dropping from my face into dust; and this dust was a universe of brilliant and fantastic crystals, that miracles instantly supported in their being. I looked up beyond the huts and the wire, I raised my dead eyes, desiring nothing, accepting all things and giving all created things away. The paper wrappings of use and language dropped from me. Those crowded shapes extending up into the air and down into the rich earth, those deeds of far space and deep earth were aflame at the surface and daunting by right of their own natures though a day before I should have disguised them as trees. Beyond them the mountains were not only clear all through like purple glass, but living. They sang ...

Happy Day!

2011-02-11T10:51:00.000-08:00

What a great day for Egyptians, for the Arab world, and for people everywhere who believe in freedom! Goodbye Mubarak! The people were stronger than you, despite your brutal police, your torture cells, your corruption, your billions in American aid!
Rejoice!!!

Excerpt from an article by Slavoj Zizek in The Guardian 2/1/11

2011-02-05T11:10:00.000-08:00

The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned ...

see the rest of this Guardian article here

Thai Bui show at Menlo College

2011-02-03T17:20:00.000-08:00

I love this artist. A small selection of his work is currently showing at Menlo College in Atherton, and will run through about March 21. For a Spark documentary segment about this artist, click on Thai Bui Sculpture in Links, to your right.

Excerpt from a poem by Eugenio Montejo

2011-01-28T16:43:00.000-08:00

'Honor the ass, honor his box of butterflies
where he stores the blows of God and men
and never complains.'

from 'Honor the Ass' in Alphabet of the World, Kirk Nesset transl. 2010

Jack Davis show at Magnet, 18th St.

2011-01-26T22:25:00.001-08:00

SFIndiefest 2011: 'Gabi on the Roof in July'

2011-01-22T16:12:00.000-08:00

This film took me completely by surprise. It's straight out of left-field, totally, rigorously unlike ordinary films, ie. the micro-managed top-down productions we usually see. John Cassavetes comes to mind, updated to 2010 and populated with a lot of people we recognize if we have lived in New York or San Francisco, young, talented, arty people who are devoting their energies to self-expression without having first developed much self-awareness or responsibility. Twenty year-old 'feminist' artist and Oberlin College student Gabi visits with her older, slightly more established artist brother Sam for a summer in New York and ignites, through a series of provocative gestures, a state of ever-more inflamed and contradictory relations between relatives, friends, lovers, ex-lovers, roommates, freeloaders, and others. But the action is not strictly scripted, so everything just develops normally, with the right amount of levity, hesitation, bravado, and release, meandering through uncharted terrain in loosely connected chapters that reflect the episodic character of ordinary life. As director (and co-writer, actor) Lawrence Michael Levine explains in his statement for the film, he has collaborated with (co-producer, editor, actor) Sophia Takal and others to make something closer in feel to a jazz-combo performance, in which the ensemble creates and interprets together, seeking the unexpected, the extraordinary, the miracles only a well-prepared combo can play. Characters are based on real people - probably Levine and friends, only moved over a couple of inches from the film to the visual art world - and the script is developed through ongoing improvisations that deliver a product so authentic it makes even traditional verite techniques like hand-held camera etc. seem contrived.

Youthful, experimental ventures like this can be associated with dodgy production values, but there's no evidence of that here - Gabi is transparently produced, lucid and elegant; the sound in particular is perfect - we hear the whole galaxy of exhalations that go into the experience of a real conversation. The acting is stellar as well. This is no bunch of amateurs coming together in unschooled defiance of professional norms. They are clever, provocative, imaginative artists with rich backgrounds in fringe, off-Broadway and indie-film work (with a lot of Columbia graduates in the mix) and their fresh approach is clearly grounded in the familiarity with conventions that effective subversion requires. Gems like this are few and far between (though Levine lists ten of them made in 2010 alone, see his blog), so don't miss this one's single showing at the Roxie, February 5th as part of SFIndiefest.

18th Street

2011-01-21T12:24:00.000-08:00

Quote: Henry Thoreau

2011-01-21T12:15:00.000-08:00

Why have we ever slandered the outward? The perception of surfaces will always have the effect of miracle to a sane sense.

Excerpt from a novel by Tobias Wolff

2011-01-13T22:40:00.000-08:00

The life that produces writing can't be written about. It is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind's business and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way; and when a few survivors break through to our attention they are received as blandly as waiters bringing more coffee.

from Old School

Little green spot

2011-01-04T22:58:00.000-08:00

Quote: Hegel

2011-01-04T22:55:00.000-08:00

'The spiritual eye stands immediately at the center of nature'

John Carey's new biography of William Golding

2011-01-04T11:54:00.000-08:00

Following are the first four paragraphs of William Golding: The Man Who Wrote 'Lord of the Flies', reproduced here because they are so fascinating. How could you not want to read a book about a great writer that begins like this?

His earliest memory was of a colour, 'red mostly, but everywhere, and a sense of wind blowing, buffeting, and there was much light'. Together with this was an awareness, an 'unadulterated sense of self', which 'saw as you might with the lens of your eyes removed'. Whether this was actually a memory of his own birth, he is not sure. If so, it was remarkably trouble-free compared to his mother's experience of the same event. As soon as she had given birth to William Gerald Golding on 19 September 1911 she said to his father, 'That'll be all.'

In his next memory he is eighteen months old, maybe less. He is in a cot with a railing round. It has been pulled next to his parents' brass-framed double bed because he is sick with some childish ailment, and feels a little feverish. It is evening. Thick curtains hang over the window, attached by large rings to a bamboo pole. A gas jet on the wall gives a dim light. He is alone in the room. suddenly something appears on the right-hand end of the curtain pole. It is like a small cockerel, and its colour is an indistinct and indescribable white. It struts along the pole, its head moving backwards and forwards. It knows he is in the cot, and it radiates 'utter friendliness' towards him. He feels happy and unafraid. just near the mid-point of the pole it vanishes and the friendliness goes with it.

He hopes for it to return, but it does not. when his parents come to bed he tries to tell them about it, using the few words he knows. 'Thing' he says, or rather 'Fing', and 'Come back?' his father laughs, and assures him kindly that the thing won't come back, he's been dreaming. But he knows it was not a dream. Seeing it was not like dreaming, nor like waking. Its friendliness was 'like a whole atmosphere of natural love'. It seemed to come from 'the centre of all rightness'.

Struggling to tell his parents about it brings him for the first time up against 'the brute impossibility of communicating'. when he grew up he came to wonder quite what he had seen: 'Was it an exercise of clairvoyance before growing up into a rationalist world stifled it?' But he remembered it as one of the most powerful experiences of his life, a glimpse of 'the spiritual, the miraculous' that he hoarded in his memory as a refuge from 'the bloody cold daylight I've spent my life in, except when drunk'.

Pescadero

2010-12-31T17:16:00.000-08:00

Year's End Book Round-Up 2010

2010-12-31T10:47:00.000-08:00

Following are some of the books I enjoyed this year, listed in no particular order, but I'll try to group them according to genre. Some are recent releases, some are old, one is quite old, none ancient. I think I'll make it a standing New Year's resolution to read at least one classic a year. I haven't read any Hawthorne yet, so I hereby commit to The Scarlet Letter. I've been meaning to read it since I saw Melville's dedication in Moby Dick. Last year's resolution was to read more women writers, and it was an inspired decision. I discovered Vivian Gornick, Lorna Sage, and Deborah Eisenberg, and dipped into (or immersed myself completely in) Sharon Olds, Kim Addonizio, Sharon Doubiago, Pat Barker, Hilary Mantel, Mary Gaitskill, Eleanor Wilner, Mary Karr, Patricia Hampl, and Fanny Howe. Right now I'm reading the diaries of Katharine Mansfield, the John Middleton Murry version, despite accusations that he edited all the darkness out of her. The alternative was the complete journals and notes, but it was too big and too expensive, and it includes shopping lists and 'to do' notes - no kidding. There's only so much reading time in life. One of my biggest complaints. I'm also closing out the year with Frank Bidart's Stardust and a wonderful and strange book about non-linear thinking by Stephen Harrod Buhner called The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature. Its one of those books that confirm what poets know only in a different register.

First prize goes to Cormac McCarthy for Blood Meridian. I think it might be the best novel I have ever read. It might not even be a novel, though of course it resembles one. It reads like something else entirely, some sort of extended invocation to the gods of the underworld that rule our lives and have delivered us smoking from the mouth of the pit ...

POEMS AND PROSE POEMS

El Nino by Sharon Doubiago (1989)
It's my favorite Sharon Doubiago book, and a bit different from her poetry collections in that each fragment or 'story' is a simple retelling of some episode in her life. The pieces are fresh, unworked-up, direct. And in many cases, as magical and strange as anything she has written elsewhere. Some stories are just 5 or 6 lines long. My favorites are transcribed conversations or snippets of monologues overheard in bars up and down the Mendocino coast. They manage to situate some extreme sense of delicacy and wonder right square in the middle of our lived lives. The lived lives, that is, of poets, drinkers, bartenders, fishermen, drifters, hitch-hikers, fiddle-players, Vietnam vets, and the boys and men this poet has loved along the way. It's a beautiful, surprising, completely original book, romantic and gritty at the same time, and, for Northern Californians, delightfully recognizable as well.

The Caged Owl by Gregory Orr (2002)
A fantastic 227-page collection of the beautiful, incomparable Gregory Orr, whose tragic sense of loss and wild, almost hieratic ability to transfigure death and find meaning in beauty is a constant source of wonder for me. Lyric, mythic, stripped to essences, his words have an absolute quality, like things religious, or alive. 53 pages of new work plus selections from all his other books since 1973. Here's one. I can't start quoting people all over the place or I'll never get this finished before midnight, but for Gregory Orr I will make an exception. I love this poet.

Singing the Pain Back into the Wound
I crouch naked at the wound's edge
and call its name softly,
until it hovers over me and I am clothed
in its shadow. Then I throw ropes
over it, pulling it down into the wound
that its body fits perfectly
like a fish-shaped cork.
Its wings beat frantically. I lash them together,
fold them carefully into a black
bundle on its back.

Lucifer at the Starlite by Kim Addonizio (2009)
I tried to hold out until this came into paperback, but in the end I had to have it ASAP, because Kim Addonizio is that good. I love her defiant, clever, disillusioned voice, her ordinary, contemporary, sometimes tawdry subjects and the elegant aesthetic she brings to them. Her closings are small masterpieces of concision and inclusion, making each poem a perfectly finished object, a microcosm of some understated universe we might otherwise have overlooked. She is the most accessible poet I know, but there is some indefinable quality at the center of almost every poem that speaks precisely to things mysterious and profound. Another local - I think she lives in Oakland and does workshops there.

In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 by Frank Bidart (1990)
I was oblivious to this incredible poet's existence until November, but now he is at the center of my universe. This collection covers a lot of territory and so is an excellent introduction to his oeuvre. There is nothing else out there like this. His voice is utterly unique. Long poems, discursive, philosophic, crammed with italics and upper case letters and other signs of admonition and emphasis, freely ranging across ages and continents, with scholarly musings and newspaper headlines elbowing each other across the pages in long, impassioned arguments for or against various positions, they dissect human motivation with the precision of a surgeon while remaining completely subjective. Loathing, desire, madness, denial, its all there, in poems that work out intimate problems in Bidart's own life as well as extended meditations from the perspectives of others. The 28-page War of Vaslav Nijinsky is an event in its own right, as is the indescribably brilliant First Hour of the Night, clocking in at 36 pages, but his poems about his mother and father and his struggle to separate from them are just as startling in their originality.

The Light the Dead See by Frank Stanford (1991)
Local poet and independent publisher Brooks Roddan introduced me to Frank Stanford this year, and within minutes I was blown away by his stunning, inimitable voice. I say this about all my favorite poets, and it is always true, that their work is utterly unique. Frank Stanford's poems are small legends cast in the soft yellow light of his native Mississippi and Arkansas, peopled with snake doctors and knife throwers, bootleggers, fishermen, midgets, drunks, children and animals and enormous hogs with names like Holy Ghost. Dreamlike and weird, they have the qualities of parables set in some sort of mythic, uber-American space and time. The poem 'Hidden Water' might be perfect, if there is such a thing.

The Monster Loves his Labyrinth by Charles Simic (2008)
I have only a passing acquaintance with Simic's poetry, but I love this little book of poetic vignettes. The first section in particular is crammed with tiny, luminous moments of irony as they occur naturally in people's lives, and each fragment is complete as both a narrative, with a small twist, and as a poetic statement. The best of them point to an almost impossibly paradoxical quality that adheres to the details in life, and it is something we recognize and determine to notice more pointedly from now on. Some of the more aphoristic lines fall a bit flat - at worst, they are inflated and dull, like ideas that have come to the great man as he tied his shoes or ate his cereal, lines which impress him enough to transcribe whole when they should have been woven obliquely into something more crafted. Some, like The child-beaters took their little son to church on Sundays are wry and successful; others, like A broken refrigerator in the yard next to the plaster statues of the Virgin read like enigmatic poetic seeds, and there are some real gems, humorous and odd, like this one, In a zoo I noticed many animals who had a fleeting resemblance to me, but I think we can do without lines like Birds sing to remind us that we have a soul altogether - and there are a few of them. It's a mixed bag, but fascinating anyway.

Strike Sparks by Sharon Olds (2004)
Sharon Olds rules. You can't read a poem like 'Why My Mother Made Me' or 'I Go Back to May 1937' without knowing you are in the presence of a master. People who complain that she is too confessional or too hung up about this incident or that in her childhood need help. Strike Sparks pulls poems from all 7 of her collections and shows the remarkable integrity of her vision, unwavering in its intensity over a period of 22 years. Here is real human life, physical, painful, joyous, sexual, and above all, imaginative, as if the imagination of a person is a physical organ which pulses, flinches, bleeds, breathes, and emits electromagnetic waves in the form of words and ideas. She is the only poet I have written to in an ecstasy of gratitude and awe. I didn't send the letter, but you get the idea. If you only read one poet next year, read Sharon Olds, the poet who prayed to Satan for her voice, and got it.

OK that's it for poets.

MEMOIRS AND ESSAYS

Bad Blood by Lorna Sage
Hands down the best memoir I have read this year, maybe because Lorna Sage is English, like me? Probably because she's just brilliant. She died right after it came out in 2001, a terrible loss for readers everywhere. All her other stuff is academic. See the review listed under Lorna Sage to your right.

The End of the Novel of Love, Fierce Attachments, The Men in My Life, and Approaching Eye Level, by Vivian Gornick
I inhaled all four of these books during one sunny week-and-a-half in late October. The pleasure was so intense I just couldn't get enough. Fierce Attachments, the memoir about her difficult relationship with her mother, past and present, and the childhood she spent in the Bronx as well as her pivotal relationships with 3 men over the course of her life, is the book for which she is rightly famous. It is dazzling. Jonathon Lethem is not exaggerating when he says, in the introduction, that it has that mad, brilliant, absolute quality of all timeless classics. But her critical essays are even better, if you like that sort of thing, especially those collected in The End of the Novel of Love. She analyzes several different writers, most of them women and some of them lesser known novelists like Clover Adams, developing in beautiful, lapidary sentences her contention that romantic love has steadily been written out of the modern novel as a metaphor for success as female writers have tackled the issue of their own independence. Succinct and insightful, every essay is a jewel in its own right, but together they make up a book of considerable theoretic heft. And yet she is light, radiant in fact, readable, never ponderous or academic. Her treatment of issues of desire, suffering and disappointment is the most sensitive imaginable. The Men in My Life is a similar venture, except it explores male writers as diverse as Loren Eiseley, HG Wells, Randall Jarrell, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Allen Ginsberg, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, James Baldwin and VS Naipaul. Finally, her collection of essays about contemporary life and culture Approaching Eye Level contains probably the most searing portrayal of loneliness and disillusion I have ever read, though it is absolutely unsentimental and even quite funny in parts. Chapter 5: 'At the University: Little Murders of the Soul'. Read it, and know.

A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley
Finally I get to use the words flawed masterpiece in a review! This book is it. Flawed, because its unexamined misogyny splattered all over the place makes it hard to read in places. But a masterpiece nevertheless, one long, sustained, glorious, irreverent, hilarious, and sublimely written rant about failure, drunkenness, and alienation in fifties and sixties' America. I rarely read a book twice, in fact I've only reread 2, not counting stuff I used to study in school. This is one. The other was The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller. Go figure. Actually, I reread that this year too, so I'll stick it in this list somewhere. Anyway, Fred Exley is forgiven, since he has suffered so much for his own sins, and because he's such a great, great writer, at least, in this work. One of these days I'm going to write a post about writers, artists, and their sins. If they kill their wives (Carl Andre, William Burroughs), have sex with their kids (Woody Allen), have sex with other people's kids (Roman Polanski), exploit lost souls (Andy Warhol), or rape women (Arthur Koestler), should we enjoy them anyway?

All the Strange Hours by Loren Eiseley
This is a strange little book, something I would never have ventured upon without the prodding of Vivian Gornick (see above). It was some quality of compassion in her review, and curiosity on my part, made me want to see for myself what ailed this famous anthropologist. It is a very unusual read, something like a confession of secret heretical religious conviction delivered at the eleventh hour (Eiseley died shortly after publication) which can be read as a psychological document not entirely unlike those famously popularized by Freud, though without the analysis. As Gornick points out, Eiseley is largely or wholly unconscious of his own message, which is one of crippling, agonizing disappointment. It is also a beautifully crafted work, not in its organization, which is haphazard and eccentric, but in its sometimes achingly lovely prose.

The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliot
If you don't already receive the daily emails of this local writer, you might like to check them out - go to http://www.therumpus.net/ and sign up for the Daily Rumpus in the top right corner. They are sloppy and personal, a writer's public private life. The Adderall Diaries is a book about compulsion, creativity, violence, and not-belonging, and it skilfully weaves together two interlocking narratives in its accounts of a Bay Area murder trial and of the author's own childhood and personal life, growing up in group homes in Chicago, moving to SF, kinky sex; the issues that pertain to both accounts combine to tell the story of this man's life. Not, as Vanity Fair would have it, the work of a genius, but brilliantly organized, compulsively readable, and sort of edgy. Lots of SF references too. Local writers get extra points in my world. It's inevitable, we love to see ourselves reflected.

The Liar's Club by Mary Karr.
The classic of the genre, really, this is the most popular memoir out there. Not surprisingly. Karr's voice is arch, witty, and tough, inflected with plenty of Texas drawl and influenced by the storytelling prowess of her father, whose 'Liar's Club' of beer guzzling men met in a neighbor's garage. It is a riot. Brilliantly written, canny, hilarious, and profound, it is both wild and masterfully controlled at the same time. This woman's childhood would have felled a lesser soul, but as a writer Karr is its fabulous incarnation.

My Father's Love by Sharon Doubiago
I posted a review of this book on its Amazon page, because I loved it, and it struck me as important in a social-political sense, being an unflinching account of child sexual abuse and the confusing, sometimes devastating reality of living with, and loving, an abusive parent. There are parts which could only have been written by the poet this writer is, beautiful, magical passages in which she fully inhabits the perspective of her child self and tells the story from there. Meticulously documented and full of photographs, it is more than one woman's story - it is a rich account of its time and place as well. Second installment forthcoming from Wild Ocean Press.

The Love of my Life by Cheryl Strayed
I came across this essay in a book about grieving called In Passing which I found in the free box outside Phoenix Books, and while most of the collection was pretty blah, this one essay stood out like a jewel. It can be found in the much more exciting Best American Essays 2003. This is hardcore grief writing - the woman practically lost her mind, did, in fact, lose her marriage, as she went on a sexual bender that lasted for years - and she writes about it all with the clarity of an angel, or a person transfigured. It is a wonderful read.

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
Having never read any James Baldwin before this year I was unprepared for the intellectual detonation that a first encounter with this brilliant thinker can bring on. Everybody else seemed flabby and soft in comparison. How to describe his particular brand of genius? Polemical doesn't even come close. His mind is so razor-sharp, his technique so diamond-cut, and his argument so terrifyingly passionate and true. The relevance of his insights to today's social problems is astonishing as well. Astonishing, and terrible. Contemplating his sophisticated hyper-articulate argument was one of the high points of my year.

Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime by Patricia Hampl.
I'm not sure I can give a faithful account of this writer since this short book is all I've read of her fairly prolific output. I've read an excerpt of her memoir A Romantic Education and it was lovely, elegant and wise, but Blue Arabesque was slightly disappointing. Perhaps because the subject, an aesthetic awakening, is so close to my heart (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is an all-time favorite) and not written of enough. It starts out well; I especially liked her assessment of modern fractured consciousness and the loss of what was our birthright, the uninterrupted gaze ... the world ordered inwardly by seeing, the act of unbroken private attention that was an expression of integrity clasping imagination, making sense, making "vision". Though I disagree that our modernity is necessarily the villain, it is refreshing to stumble upon so sensitive an account of what seeing can actually mean, seeing in the sense of the uninterrupted gaze, that is, seeing as a way of being ...
Anyway, I wanted more of this, and less of the padding (as I saw it) that was her attempt to render episodes in the lives of Matisse and Delacroix. There were many beautifully written passages, some overwritten passages, and some rather amateurish lumps that went on too long and lost my attention. But I love what she said in an interview about nuns and the contemplative life, and I loved the excerpt of her memoir in the collection Writing Women's Lives, so I'm not giving up on this writer.

Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature by Kathleen Dean Moore
I picked this up at Point Reyes Books, the best spot to find writing about nature and ecology, the imagination as a natural phenomenon, sensory intelligence, craftsmanship, etc. - ie. the dream bookshop for a certain sort of mood. The book is a series of essays about the author's immersion in the natural world, in country living, wild country, deserts and snow-packed ridges, rivers and forests ... her minute observational skills and poetic gifts are everywhere in evidence, and she develops a parallel theory about human nature and the 'solace' people can experience when they are tuned to the rhythms of their environment. Some absolutely beautiful passages and images, fine textures, details.

THEORETICAL STUFF

Gathering the Winds: Visionary Imagination and Radical Transformation of Self and Society by Eleanor Wilner (1975)
This is a knockout book, completely unique, brilliantly imagined and researched. I love it when poets go all theoretical on you and this book is one of the best - she doesn't just consider the role of imagination in human consciousness, but develops an entire ingenious argument to the effect that imaginative patterning and mythic or visionary thinking correlates directly to the state of emergency and disorder an individual or a society might suffer, acting upon events in a way that changes the course of history and human development. Three elegantly presented chapters consider the agency of vision in preliterate societies, the mythic imaginations of Blake, Beddoes, and Yeats, and finally, the most astounding chapter of all, a consideration of Marx's thought as the ecstatic 'materialization of the ideal' that promised redemption to an alienated, divided world. Wilner brings her own version of synthesis (scholarly and poetic thought) to the project, so that the book is, like its subject, a sort of vision in itself.

Re-Visioning Psychology by James Hillman (1976)
Either you love Hillman or you think he's a Jungian nut, but if you love him there is no end to the pleasures of reading and rereading him, and, fortunately, a long list of publications to work through as well. Re-Visioning Psychology is one of his first, and it lays out the essence of the argument he is to develop in various ways later on. Come to think of it, he might be a Jungian nut, but perhaps this is what I love about him. He is a fearless advocate of the soul, of the multitude of voices and visions, which he plainly calls gods and demons, active in our psyche, of relativity in the inner world (departing from the Jungian project of individuation) and of inspired commands to 'stay with the image', which is music to artists' ears. But none of this goes anywhere near to explaining how radical, how utterly paradigm-shattering his thinking really is. At bottom, he is arguing not just for the 'polyvalence of the psyche' but for its non-human essence, which hauls him into the category of a visionary, in my eyes anyway. See chapter 4 on 'Dehumanizing'. Our souls are not ours.

The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902)
This is one of those books I have always meant to read in the interests of research, since it is mentioned by other writers about as often as, say, The Golden Bough is mentioned, as an influence and even a source of inspiration. James is a Victorian writer, so there is a lot of unnecessary connective tissue everywhere, but his insights are clean and clear. There is no Freud in it at all, nothing weird or occult, nothing theoretical really, just observation and reflection and a lot of first-person accounts, which are the life of the book. The testimonies of people converted after long struggles with their souls are riveting; they have a curiously Buddhist flavor as well, something to do with abandoning the self, the ego, etc.

NOVELS AND STORIES

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
John Banville said Blood Meridian "reads like a conflation of the Inferno, the Iliad, and Moby Dick", and he wasn't exaggerating. It blew my mind. I had to take it in in short, ten or twenty page intervals and then put it down, in case ... I wasn't sure exactly ... in case perhaps I'd suffer some sort of adrenal shock if I kept on ... Mephistophelian ... utterly bewitching ... the beauty of its prose unearthly. And because that prose (it's really poetry) is in service of such relentless brutality the experience of reading it becomes almost a moral affair, religious, in the same way the Inquisition was religious. It's a kind of inverted oracle, an apocalyptic vision with its head on backwards, staring at our bloody roots. It's not a 'book'.

Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg
Thank God for Deborah Eisenberg, whose stories I read between bursts of Blood Meridian in order to refresh my palette. She is the perfect antidote to McCarthy's unremitting darkness - wry, witty, sophisticated, elegant, urban, contemporary - Twilight of the Superheroes is her latest collection and it's brilliant. Her stories are miracles of condensation, precise yet enigmatic - she's our Chekhov.

Herman Melville's ; or The Whale , ed. Damion Searls
My version of this is actually an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction from summer 2009, and I haven't read it, but I had to own it as a sort of art object in its own right. It consists of all the bits left out of Orion Books' Moby Dick in Half the Time, published in 2007 as part of its Compact Books series. Some chapters are almost intact (ie. completely cut), some riddled with omissions, one consists of the single word - Hark! I feel delighted just contemplating it. It's fun, eccentric, conceptual, and it can carry just about any meaning you want to bring to it, depending on your feeling for the original, or for literature in general.

more later ...

Quote: Robert Frost

2010-12-15T11:35:00.000-08:00

"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting."

Quote: Henri Matisse

2010-12-12T19:12:00.000-08:00

"I am made of all that I have seen"

Quote: Karel Capek

2010-12-06T17:56:00.000-08:00

There is "another type of wisdom that doesn't judge but looks ... seeing is great wisdom"

The wreck of the 'Point Reyes'

2010-12-06T00:46:00.000-08:00

John Berryman

2010-11-29T19:09:00.000-08:00

I just read an astonishing interview with the poet John Berryman in the 1972 Paris Review #53, available here. It includes some analysis of his method, particularly in relation to the writing of the definitive Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and 77 Dream Songs, and this spills over again and again into colorful, passionate accounts of his life, his loves, his breakdowns and hospitalizations, his religious conversion (to "the idea of a God of rescue"), his love of Yeats, his friendships with Delmore Schwarz and Dylan Thomas, his teaching crisis in the critical period after the Kent State riots, his opinions vis-a-vis fame or an indifferent public, poetic gifts vs. achievements, confessional poetry, suicide, ambition, group therapy, scholarship, female characters in literature etc, and a whole slew of references and anecdotes, all fascinating in their way, to or about fellow writers, his influences, mentors, colleagues and friends, from Saul Bellow, Robert Lowell, and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Eliot, Whitman, Housman, Freud, Shakespeare, Augustine and Pascal. But its not just the wealth of detail that makes the interview so remarkable, packed as it is. It's Berryman's wonderful voice. He comes across as cultivated, balanced, authentic, and passionate, a man you wish you could meet and can hardly believe is the same person as the intimidating, fire-breathing workshop demon described by Stephen Spender, nor the legendary alcoholic or even the tragic suicide he shortly proved to be. Then again, he descibes his process in somewhat terrifying terms, terms which seek to make a virtue of what must have been in fact an excruciating experience. "The artist is extremely lucky", he maintains, "who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business", adding, in case we weren't sure of his commitment, "I hope to be nearly crucified." That his ordeal ultimately dragged him over these imagined limits has been, I think, our great loss.

Trail to Indian Beach

2010-11-13T14:44:00.000-08:00

Quote: Frank Bidart

2010-11-13T11:15:00.000-08:00

"We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed."

from 'Borges and I' in Desire

NB: David Foster Wallace intended this line as a possible epigraph for his final (unfinished, forthcoming) book, The Pale King.

Squaw Valley

2010-11-09T23:37:00.000-08:00

Excerpt from an interview with Patricia Hampl

2010-11-09T22:04:00.000-08:00

Following is an excerpt from an interview with Patricia Hampl by Katherine Jamieson in last month's Writer's Chronicle, Vol. 43 #2.
There is a nugget of wisdom here for writers of creative non-fiction.

Jamieson: How do you help your students break out of a psychological self-focus in their writing?

Hampl: I encourage attention, descriptive writing. Not just looking to the past, not trying to understand it, but to attend to images almost as if they were photographs, and to write those. To discipline yourself to say what you see, rather than what you feel. Let the feeling flow through the seeing. I think it's a liberation.
One of the things that meditation tries to liberate you from is the terrible strictures of feeling, of the emotional batting about of rage and joy and anger. Mostly anger and frustration. All that thrashing around. Describing what you see liberates you from those feelings that are strictures.
They feel like your reality, but they aren't your reality. Your reality is your ability to see and say. But we think our reality is our ability to feel. Try just off-setting that a little, and saying my truth is saying what I see. It offsets the self, just a bit.

Club Foot Orchestra plays Sherlock Jr, Caligari, and Nosferatu

2010-11-08T17:19:00.000-08:00

San Francisco's Club Foot Orchesta has been around in one form or another since founder Richard Marriot formed the house band at Club Foot, the Bayview's arthouse-music venue, back in the early 80's. An eclectic bunch of classically-trained and avant garde musicians, CFO has come to be known best for its original scores for early silent films and performances in theatres around the Bay Area, but its not often that we get the chance to hear them, and certainly not in back-to-back performances for three classic films at the Castro, so get ready for an afternoon and evening of unusual delights this coming Sunday, 11/14. Two screenings of Buster Keaton in the 1924 surreal comedy Sherlock Jr. kick off this all day marathon, followed by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the bizarre and subversive expressionist film for which Marriot wrote one of his most widely acclaimed original scores, and finally the first Dracula film ever made, FW Murneau's 1922 Nosferatu - its score incorporates Middle European waltzes, klezmer, and gypsy music with some comic/ironic touches mixed in. Visit CFO website for more details of Sunday's program, including film clips and samples from their entire repertoire.

Lake Tahoe

2010-11-01T19:30:00.000-07:00

Quote: Czeslaw Milosz

2010-11-01T19:09:00.000-07:00

"When a writer is born into a family, that family is finished."

Quote: Thomas Jefferson

2010-10-30T18:46:00.000-07:00

"A society that trades liberty for order will have neither, nor will it deserve them."

McClure's Beach

2010-10-25T20:05:00.000-07:00

Quote: Albert Einstein

2010-10-25T20:03:00.000-07:00

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

MVFF33: 'Black Field'

2010-10-21T13:21:00.000-07:00

This striking image by DP Marcus Waterloo from Vardis Marinakis's film Black Field is as good an introduction to the film's merits as anything I could say. Speaking in strictly visual terms, the film is a pure delight. The first third of the movie is so loaded with potent symbols that viewers might sense the coming of something miraculous - but, radiant cinematography aside, the whole does not really live up to expectations. It is still a beautiful film, with a confident, assured pace and masterful touch, but its themes are smaller than we are led to expect after witnessing the fantastic chiascuro images of the early scenes. It is a period drama set in Ottoman-ruled Greece in 1654; an escaped janissary (a Christian forced into service in the Ottoman army) washes up on the doorstep of a convent, where he is nursed (in chains) back to health and escapes with one of the nuns, who turns out to have been a boy all along. Their path takes them through some enchanted country, green and delicate, with rocks and pools glittering in patches of filtered sun or looming out of coils of mist. It all looks so much grander than the human story unfolding within it, which is essentially one of sexual awakening or gender liberation - no insignificant thing, to be sure, but not epic enough for this stage. I was wanting The Seventh Seal, or Macbeth, or something of that order. Early scenes, like that of the nun lying like a statue of carved stone in her stone-colored shroud, of an iron key in a slice of sunlight, the beautiful naked body of the man in chains attended by silent, black-clad women, the cremation and burial of the horse, the fog and flames and lightning, not to mention the liturgical atmosphere of the entire set, all combine to stir up the grandest possibilities imaginable. The film wants more gravitas to fulfill its promise, more complexity, perhaps simply more death, which would balance the life-affirming principle at work in the human theme and embody the shadows of its visual register. As it is, we are left with the curious feeling of having watched two films spliced together, and the loss of the one we want spoils the one we get.

SF Docfest: 'May I Be Frank'

2010-10-18T13:22:00.000-07:00

There is an avalanche of festival films in the Bay Area right now, what with the Mill Valley, the Docfest, Berlin and Beyond, the Arab Film Festival and French Cinema Now presenting back to back throughout the month of October, but one film you absolutely must not miss is local documentary May I Be Frank. It's a wonderful story, funny and profound, inspiring, even miraculous. It documents the transformation of middle-aged, overweight, prediabetic, depressed, somewhat drug- and alcohol-addicted Brooklyn transplant Frank Ferrante as he submits to a 42-day diet and holistic health regimen organized by servers at San Francisco raw-food temple Cafe Gratitude. We expect to see some pounds shed, some improved body function and perhaps even a little attitude adjustment, but Frank's transformation is far more radical than that. He takes everything on, the failed relationships, the anger, the myriad complex patterns that keep him locked into a life of drug abuse, lethargy, and disintegration. The film becomes ever deeper and more astonishing as layer upon layer of Frank's entrenched habits peel away. It is the most far-reaching detoxification experiment I have ever witnessed, enlightening in so many ways - we learn about the physical dimensions of negative thinking, the spiritual dimensions of nutritional well-being - and there can be no doubt after watching this film that the path to total physical health is a spiritual one. It is also a difficult and painful experience. As Frank himself remarks in his ongoing blog, "what started out as a film about raw food evolved into a film about drug and alcohol addiction, broken families, frayed relationships, intention, commitment, healing, redemption, and the power of love." This statement really says it all, except for one thing - Frank is a very funny guy, and his humor makes this journey of high colonics, mucoid plaque and wheatgrass shots a truly delightful one. On another level it is a west versus east coast story, pitting affirmation against refusal, but it's not really a battle because we root for Frank the whole way, in all his incarnations. Let's just say, you can't fail to notice the stereotypes at work and play - they make things funnier and more exciting. People all over are going to love this movie, but west coast and especially SF residents might, like me, feel vindicated as well. For Frank Ferrante and folks like him, as well as all the rest of us, the place to be is definitely here.

Plays 10/22 and 10/25 at The Roxie.

Fort Funston

2010-10-11T23:44:00.001-07:00

The Cinema of Transgression Manifesto, Nick Zedd,1985

2010-10-11T15:56:00.001-07:00

...

The Cinema of Transgression Manifesto

We who have violated the laws, commands and duties of the avant-garde; i.e. to bore, tranquilize and obfuscate through a fluke process dictated by practical convenience stand guilty as charged. We openly renounce and reject the entrenched academic snobbery which erected a monument to laziness known as structuralism and proceeded to lock out those filmmakers who possesed the vision to see through this charade.

We refuse to take their easy approach to cinematic creativity; an approach which ruined the underground of the sixties when the scourge of the film school took over. Legitimising every mindless manifestation of sloppy movie making undertaken by a generation of misled film students, the dreary media arts centres and geriatic cinema critics have totally ignored the exhilarating accomplishments of those in our rank - such underground invisibles as Zedd, Kern, Turner, Klemann, DeLanda, Eros and Mare, and DirectArt Ltd, a new generation of filmmakers daring to rip out of the stifling straight jackets of film theory in a direct attack on every value system known to man.

We propose that all film schools be blown up and all boring films never be made again. We propose that a sense of humour is an essential element discarded by the doddering academics and further, that any film which doesn’t shock isn’t worth looking at. All values must be challenged. Nothing is sacred. Everything must be questioned and reassessed in order to free our minds from the faith of tradition.Intellectual growth demands that risks be taken and changes occur in political, sexual and aesthetic alignments no matter who disapproves. We propose to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men. We pass beyond and go over boundaries of millimeters, screens and projectors to a state of expanded cinema.

We violate the command and law that we bore audiences to death in rituals of circumlocution and propose to break all the taboos of our age by sinning as much as possible. There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed. Since there is no afterlife, the only hell is the hell of praying, obeying laws, and debasing yourself before authority figures, the only heaven is the heaven of sin, being rebellious, having fun, fucking, learning new things and breaking as many rules as you can. This act of courage is known as transgression. We propose transformation through transgression - to convert, transfigure and transmute into a higher plane of existence in order to approach freedom in a world full of unknowing slaves.

The Cinema of Transgression Manifesto was written in 1985 by Nick Zedd, under the name Orion Jeriko, and first appeared in his fanzine, The Underground Film Bulletin.

MVFF33: 'Katalin Varga'

2010-10-09T16:06:00.000-07:00

British sound artist and director Peter Strickland's beautiful first feature Katalin Varga is an impressionist film that resonates as much on the aural plane as on any other, so visual cues and plot development get behind what is often simply a powerful mood or feeling-tone signified by sophisticated effects in sound design and musical composition. It is a reversal in the usual order of things which haunts the mind in advance of events, and that implicates viewers in a weird way, weaving images which are spontaneously imagined together with those onscreen. In an interview with The Guardian Peter Strickland speaks frankly of his influences, and there are as many that have traveled through the ear as through the eye, including albums by The Cure and Suicide and the soundtrack (by Popol Vu) for Herzog's Nosferatu as well as films like Night of the Hunter and Paradjanov's Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors.

He speaks at some length as well of how the film came to be made. After suddenly inheriting 25,000 pounds from an uncle, and wondering briefly whether he should use the money to buy a flat, he set out instead for the Carpathian Mountains in Romania to make his first feature film with a crew of 11; the entire script is in Magyar translation, which Strickland doesn't speak but the actors do, so there was a lot of room for improvisation; without real access to the language, his ear was as tuned to the ambient sounds of "goat bells, crickets, and wind" as to human voices. The result is a film that situates human speech and action inside a broader natural context, so that the environment, which is after all the classic vampiric locale, begins to assume agency of its own. Landscape in this film is an obscure and fatalistic protaganist, deeply supernatural.

Hilda Peters plays the title character Katalin, who traverses the country with her young son in search of the men who raped her. Her performance is astonishingly protean, as she morphs from loving mother to trauma victim to seducer to avenger and back in the course of her quest. Her face alone is worth the price of admission. And the incredible face of her nemesis Antal, played by Tibor Palffy, completes the picture. They are profiles carved into opposite sides of the same magical coin. As soon as we see Antal we know - exactly what it is impossible to say - but we are charged with a sense of knowing, of significance, and his role thereafter fulfills this expectation in surprising ways. Pasolini was the great champion of 'real' faces such as these, and Strickland's casting illustrates his point to perfection. The right face carries the full weight of the story, its larger meaning as well as its specific human one.

With its haunting score (by Geoffrey Cox and Steven Stapleton), gorgeous photography (Mark Gyori), lean, intense dramatic arc, and forays into magical thinking and dark, folk-inflected myth, this film is a must-see for lovers of art, of music, and of the supernatural. Plays Smith Rafael 10/8 and 10/15. Also check out Strickland's sound world at http://www.soniccatering.com/. Here's the trailer;

MVFF33: 'Cut Poison Burn'

2010-09-27T13:13:00.000-07:00

According to Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of DNA Dr. James Watson "the National Cancer Program is a bunch of shit", and this important film tells why. Wayne Chesler's Cut Poison Burn documents the ways in which pharmaceutical companies, and their creature, the American Cancer Society, in league with the American Medical Association and the FDA, govern the state of cancer treatment and research in this country by absolute decree, rewarding political candidates and CEOs and failing, to a staggering extent, the actual victims of this dread disease, their families, and the many brilliant independent research associates who struggle in vain to advance a real cure. Audiences will be interested to learn that a patient's life expectancy in 2010 has not, except in the case of 4 known cancers, increased at all since the 1920s when cancer research began in earnest; that patients today experience far greater suffering and diminishment in quality of life; that apparently benign fronts in the 'battle' such as Breat Cancer Awareness Month are PR fronts for purveyors of lethal drugs like Tamoxifin, known to cause uterine cancer in women; that research teams in universities across the country are routinely denied development grants for promising breakthroughs in non- or less toxic treatment options and are effectively squeezed out of the field anyway by FDA stipulations that new treatments be subjected to a staggering $1.6 billion of industry testing in order to qualify for approval. Since pharmaceutical companies (which constitute, incidentally, the largest lobbying sector in Washington bar none) are the only organizations capable of supplying such sums they have the entire industry of cancer research and treatment in a state of lockdown.

To make matters worse, parents of children with cancer are required by law to subject their kids to the entire battery of 'conventional treatment options' before they are allowed to seek alternative paths, and then only when the medical establishment has declared their child unable to withstand further treatment, a situation which usually involves the child being reduced to a virtual vegetable, bloated, hairless, riddled with secondary cancers, liver disease, and a whole host of other horrifying conditions including bone malformation and brain damage. The film follows the story of the Navarro family, who fight to the point of congressional hearings for the right to treat their 4-year old son at an alternative treatment facility in Texas. This facility, established by Polish Doctor Stanislaw Burzynski, has been treating patients with a non-toxic, non-patented amino-acid drip with enormous success, but the FDA had already barred the way to his door for the Navarros by reducing his clinic access to end-case patients only. The fate of this clinic is an interesting sub-plot in itself. In its determination to defend pharmaceutical companies' rights to dominate treatment options, the FDA waged a 13-year, $8 million legal battle to indict Burzynski on any and all charges available to the legal imagination, 75 counts in all, but were forced to merely sideline his clinic after prosecution failed on all counts to eliminate him from the game entirely. The fate of Dr. Burzynski, of other alternative-treatment practitioners, and of innovative scientists and research teams who have for decades now been thwarted and smeared as quacks by the ACS, not to mention the fate of patients like Tommy Navarro and tens of thousands like him, makes for a very sobering, sometimes infuriating, sinister and heartbreaking film, but it is an object lesson in how our country works and how, moreover, our own possible health trajectories might play out. I should add that the film is expertly produced, narrated, and formally balanced, not at all in the manner of some of Michael Moore's more strident if admirable efforts. It is an example of what great documentary filmmaking is all about. See this film. Playing 10/8 and 10/10 at the Smith Rafael Theatre in San Rafael. Jim Navarro's ongoing struggle for our right to alternative treatment options can be explored at http://www.cancerbusters.us/

MVFF33: 'The King's Speech'

2010-09-19T13:18:00.000-07:00

As winner of the People's Choice Award at this year's Toronto Film Festival, Tom Cooper's The King's Speech is set to become a hit with mainstream audiences in the States, as previous winners Precious and Slumdog Millionaire were before it, and owing to the performance of middle-aged heartthrob Colin Firth and of supporting actor Geoffrey Rush it will more than likely be a major presence in next year's Oscars as well. Yawn! At least with its nods to Bollywood Slumdog was fairly honest about its sugar content, but The King's Speech just pulls unremittingly on audience heartstrings without any irony whatsoever, sawing away at our pathetic fascination with well-dressed, well-meaning British gentlemen who are afflicted with an endearing touch of social anxiety but whose morals and conduct are above reproach. It's a caricature of Englishness that Colin Firth has built an entire career on. Here we find him one rung further up the ladder than usual - he is King George VI no less - but the character is essentially the same as the one he always plays, with some minor variations.
Bertie, as he is known to his friends, has a fairly debilitating speech impediment which interferes with his royal duties as Duke of York but which threatens to become overwhelming when he is suddenly catapulted to the throne in the wake of his brother Edward's abdication in 1936 (to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson). Fortunately for Bertie, his enterprising wife Elizabeth (played with predictable charm by Helena Bonham Carter) has already secured the services of unorthodox Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue (played by Geoffrey Rush), and the film is a study of their developing friendship, essentially of the ways in which Lionel manages to thaw out his heavily armored aristocratic client in time for him to embrace his royal destiny and deliver the speech of his life over national radio as Britain enters the war with Germany in 1939. You know you are in for some pretty high-calorie low-nutritional fare by the time Bertie makes his first breakthrough speech in Lionel's office, and the film continues in this vein as Bertie opens and snaps shut and opens again in the course of his treatment. It is a cleverly written and staged production, with enough humor and appropriate (superficial) questioning of privilege and class division to make us feel cosily acknowledged, but the story is chockful of that cloying sentiment which is symptomatic of emotional ill-health and is the unfortunate state of quite a few British films these days, another anodyne and intellectually-retarded exercise in winning the hearts, minds, and dollars of American audiences who don't know any better and don't want to. I enjoyed it - but not with the part of my brain that thinks.

Bolinas

2010-08-14T10:14:00.000-07:00