The Five Obstructions

Jørgen Leth assumes a Sisyphean task, as assigned by Lars Von Trier, and descends into a creative hell of his own choosing. Leth’s assignment: Remake his own short film “The Perfect Human” numerous times using various constraints dictated by filmmaker Lars Von Trier. Leth accepts the challenge and I had to wonder how two American filmmakers would handle a similar duel. It would be interesting to see Christopher Nolan go up against Tim Burton, for example. The sparring could most easily be compared to a game of chess, were it not that Leth seems nearly gleeful in some existential way in his knowledge that accepting the challenge means he is already the loser. Or do I mean winner? Somehow this acceptance riles Von Trier all the more as he realizes that Leth’s centeredness makes him nearly impenetrable and not the target that Von Trier hoped he would be. The final obstruction finds Von Trier in an attempt to “become” Leth, as he commands that the latter pronounce dialogue written for the “perfect human,” which we now realize is Leth (according to Von Trier, anyway.) If any, or all that, is confusing it won’t be after you watch the film. Interspersed throughout, Leth’s original 1967 short film, “The Perfect Human” perfectly underscores “The Five Obstructions,” which is the best documentary I’ve seen recently.

Direct any calls to Waveland Bowl this weekend. I'll be hitting the '08 Lebowski Fest and rolling a few games. We'll be working in shifts.

{from} Life Cannons

We thaw to change and break the anger of its days,
when beaches stretch to the vision of some Goofy, who

plates a table for a last supper had by cartoon seagulls.

As when Buster Keaton stands and the framehouse falls around him,
or the singing of "La Marseillaise" in "Casablanca."

Else Snow White kissing Bashful and Dopey on the head in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

Like Jimmy Stewart in "Vertigo," approaching Kim Novak across the room, realizing she embodies all of his obsessions—better than he knows.

And John Wayne putting the reins in his mouth in "True Grit" and galloping across the mountain meadow, six-shooters in both hands.

Remember Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta discussing what they call Quarter Pounders in France, in "Pulp Fiction"?

The Man in the Moon getting a cannon shell in his eye, in the Georges Melies film "A Voyage to the Moon"?

(Urgent, ringing telephone.)

Nearly identical to the way Zero Mostel throws a cup of cold coffee at the hysterical Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks' "The Producers," and Wilder screaming: "I'm still hysterical! Plus, now I'm wet!"

Marlon Brando is still screaming "Stella!" in "A Streetcar Named Desire."

Jack Nicholson is still trying to order a chicken salad sandwich in "Five Easy Pieces."

However, the ambiguous pair of lips in "Citizen Kane" no longer pronounces "Rosebud."

How about the haunted eyes of Antoine Doinel, Truffaut's autobiographical hero, in the freeze frame that ends "The 400 Blows"?

What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate, Cool Hand Luke.

Anne Frank said "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."

We need Jean-Paul Belmondo to flip a cigarette into his mouth in Godard's "Breathless" and Moses to part the Red Sea in "The Ten Commandments."

We need to find an old dead man in a child's swing, his mission completed, at the end of Kurosawa's "Ikiru."

We need to hear the word “plastics” in the “The Graduate.”

We need "There's a spider in your bathroom the size of a Buick!" from Woody Allen in "Annie Hall."

We’re running down that hill with Indiana Jones being chased by 100 Pacific islanders with bows and arrows as he leaps into a plane with “Snakes!”

You are the knight who plays chess with Death, in Bergman's "The Seventh Seal."

And “We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!" according to Alfonso Bedoya in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre."

We need "I want to live again. I want to live again. Please God, let me live again."

We need "Forget about it, Jake. It’s Chinatown."

Literago

Las Vegans at the edge of sleep
desire and satiate that desire by
accessorizing to where
she bites off a piece of wind
and blows it upward into birds.

The loaded hell of your mouth
yawns big as Wednesday
cusps each evening with a stiletto that
sidewalks as earth’s icing at the
ledge of oligarchy.

Mystique, in league with
captives of perspective,
like a swarm of advertisements
perambulates along the avenues.

According to Robert Samuelson at Newsweek, Barack Obama has already failed.

Florida schools are now permitted to use the term "evolution" in their curricula. Just as soon as they familiarize themselves with other recent events, they'll be ready to join us in the 20th, I mean 21st, Century.

Bush's approval rating is the lowest in the history of surveys.

China has banned foreign cartoons. Spongebob and Patrick, those weisenheimers, will have to take their subversive underwater shtick elsewhere.

Danny Ocean is the UN's messenger of peace? I voted for Elliot Gould. C'mon. Don't you remember "Capt. John Francis Xavier 'Trapper John' McIntyre"?

Night by the Encyclopedia

I loved you then, mostly for your tacos. They were like
small victories in the second Boer War (or Tweede Vryheidsoorlog).
I read The New York Times for the typos and
occasionally would run,
like a fool I know,
to the feed store to get more tangerines. And nothing could
quench our thirst for history

as explanations drifted through the streets like two discarded newspapers.

My path of snow that runs through night
could it be said that we were in love
she announced to the room as if asking for more salsa

as the television removed its clothes.

And what voices were so busy polishing our eyes
for another day of symmetry where the mountain sleeps?

Canadian poet Rob Mclennan is relentless...his online posts are voluminous and he’s a publishing monster. Swimming around in the world of Ottawa poetry is nearly making me forget this marathon Chicago winter. If it’s this cold here, the folks even farther north must be solid.

My collaboration with Joe Kimball has finally been published in the new issue of Mome. Here's one of my shlocky storyboards alongside a panel from the finished piece.

Ticket to What

This isn’t nature’s duel weakness,
truth comes early in the throat
a blanched monkey, stout as birth.
Hellborn and helpless these months
ache like inconspicuous stems.
Criminal grapes fill with echoes.
My pleated lives really feel,
cycloptic beasts who, greenish, need
and we’re brained and dying among false
trembling flowers. Early or die
just for the taking. What they do to you
come a month. We’re empty,
good. Might live, expect something more
than dimes for food.

The happy confusion of Amy King-- one of my favorite poets.

Orbiting Planet You

Tell the forest leaves to quit their labor
my heart is a candelabra of dice.
Here in your studio of dreams
among autumn clocks I quince.
If I could ice your anesthetic,
echo an ocean twelve years.
But your shimmering voices
the quality of your amber.

The General panics
earlier brandishing gentians.



Itself cognition,
rhetoric reveals its sores.


What jazzing hands
Take your grievances to the particulars?


Life pancakes as
The faraway uncertainties.



You are coconuts -
Mount Fuji in drag.




What shrine to realism
burns in moonlight.

Because I write poetry, I often get into conversations with nonpoets about writing and writing poetry in particular. When recently asked about poetry by a person whom I know who holds many advanced degrees but doesn’t often read poetry except as a mental exercise or dessert to his main dish of academic or sociological regular reading, I found myself recommending poets whose work I don’t even read. It crossed my mind that living in this country and continuously consuming the goods and services offered here in the U.S. often leads to a practical view of art (for the nonspecialist). Time won’t be invested (even fifteen minutes) if there won’t be some kind of return on that investment, i.e., what’s in it for me? Art is intrinsically not a practical endeavor but leads the viewer or creator toward an aesthetic experience, i.e., art isn’t typically utilitarian, architecture notwithstanding. So, I ended up finding myself talking about Gary Snyder’s poetry because of its relative accessibility. Snyder used plain language to explore concepts and philosophical questions related to his own quest for understanding and he has lived his life on many continents as a proponent of eco-awareness and green-consciousness before those terms had really even entered the popular vernacular. So, why wouldn’t I recommend to a non-writer of poetry the poetry that I admire and read? I guess the self-editing involved as I size-up the asker of such a question leads me to make certain assumptions based on the asker’s appearance and the context of the question as related to the tone of the conversation that preceded it has a lot to do with my response, too. I’m going to make a conscious effort to not self-edit in the future though when asked this kind of question, because it would be better for anyone interested in reading poetry to dive right in to the best poetry written versus to read selections that are *accessible.*

The more genuine answer would be to say that it would be a good idea to dig up a copy of The Desert Music by William Carlos Williams, Harmonium by Wallace Stevens, The Tennis Court Oath, by John Ashbery, Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara, or even more recent titles like A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow, by Noah Eli Gordon, or Do Not Awaken Them With Hammers by Lidija Dimkovska. Picking up great anthologies like Bay Poetics or The City Visible is a good way to gauge what’s going on in poetry right now, too. No more will I recommend poets I don’t even read, although the writing itself may be worthwhile. I shouldn’t do any more corrective steering. I’m not even driving the car.

Another City Visible review... This one by Tom Hibbard.

I'm going to finally make it over to
Intuit Gallery today to see the Henry Darger exhibit. Darger lived out his reclusive life in his one-room Lincoln Park, Chicago apartment working as a janitor by day, but at night working on his 15,000 page novel, complete with illustrations about the angelic Vivian Girls, who lead a rebellion against godless, child-enslaving men. Darger attended church daily and rarely spoke, so when his work was discovered by his landlady months before his death it started a landslide of interest in the man who some consider the most amazing of the "outsider" artists. The documentary In the Realms of the Unreal by Jessica Yu that PBS ran a few years ago is interesting to say the least. Darger was certainly the most prolific of all outsider artists. At the time of his death in 1973 he was working on the 3,000 page sequel to his voluminous first novel. His landlady eventually became executor of his estate, which comprises thousands of original illustrations meticulously drawn by Darger himself, in addition to the handwritten pages to what may be the longest and most bizarre novel ever written.

Bill Berkson gave me advance warning that the MoMA edition of In Memory of My Feelings that he edited has been remaindered, so I picked up a copy on Amazon for twenty bucks. It's an incredible bargain and wonderful book. I'd scramble over to Amazon.com and see if there are any still available. And here's a photo of Lana Turner (nearly) collapsing.

You've Put Off Writing Long Enough

He was continually greedy for the stars
and chunked belief with an ax called god
night’s beautiful throat
more thorn than shadow
entered the sepulcher of all he shot
and grey were the ochre crosses of his days.
He slept at night a tender sleep
warmed his spirit in a needle’s womb
boiled a compass to make a tear
wandered the calendar of a yellowed year
and fought in horror the waiting deep
lining moonlight with his fence of sighs.

Miracle of Apples

Someday the apples will be liberated, the pear
will start a revolution and the banana will
commit suicide, rather than be executed. In tense meetings,
the cantaloupe has come up with a new political system.
It exists at the center of an ovoid universe, on a long summer afternoon.

You dream of secret conversations that drip with sticky, pink juice.

Yesterday, the pomegranate gave a speech and received a rousing ovation.
But at midnight, patrols of vegetables rode through town,
plastering posters of the banana on every available wall.
Grapes everywhere were deceived into joining the
knives, forks, dishes, mugs, and even a glass of wine.

Now dinner has descended upon me.
They will lead me to my ordinary death,
as real as the breath of a cannibal.

The snooze award goes to the poet Louise Glück. How this Pulitzer prize-winner reached the heights she has is a mystery on par with missing planes in a certain northeastern region of the Caribbean or how the ancient Egyptians managed to lift tons of stone in desert heat to construct, without mortar, structures that have lasted centuries. Glück also won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Academy of American Poets Prize, numerous Guggenheim fellowships, and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States (2003-2004). It may be that she is an award-winner because her poetry is such a non-issue. It offends no one, possesses no memorable lines, does nothing to re-invent the language, and uses the most prosaic, flat language imaginable. It lumbers in a boring fog. I stumbled across this excerpt from one of her poems at the Poetry Foundation Web site.

Midsummer

On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry,
the boys making up games requiring them to tear off  the girls’ clothes
and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last summer
and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones
leaping off  the high rocks ,  bodies crowding the water.

The nights were humid, still. The stone was cool and wet,
marble for  graveyards, for buildings that we never saw,
buildings in cities far away.

On cloudy nights, you were blind. Those nights the rocks were dangerous,
but in another way it was all dangerous, that was what we were after.
The summer started. Then the boys and girls began to pair off
but always there were a few left at the end , sometimes they’d keep watch,
sometimes they’d pretend to go off  with each other like the rest,
but what could they do there, in the woods? No one wanted to be them.
But they’d show up anyway, as though some night their luck would change,
fate would be a different fate. . .

Emotion recollected in tranquility? Wordsworth must not have meant for his prescription to result in a state of catatonia. When compared with the poetry of someone writing at the level of Anne Sexton it becomes clearer how Glück is just riffing. Sexton used enjambment to create momentum or stop it, interesting or shocking imagery, abrupt shifts in tense and perspective, and touched upon universal themes that resonate in the imagination. Writers like John Ashbery also churn out consistently surprising lines that take the reader someplace unexpected. His diction is like watching fireworks in a barely remembered dream. The laxness of Glück’s lines don’t give the reader the impression that the poem necessarily even requires any line breaks. It could exist just as easily as a block of prose. The experience she points to isn’t overly sentimental, which is the main fault of most bad writing, but she provides annoying over-direction. Poets like Pierre Reverdy knew that the human mind is able to make many unseen connections when presented with an outline with lines missing. Poets like Glück provide too much information. Poems are objects that shouldn’t explain themselves. The narrative aspect of poems like this override what poetry is. Poetry is figurative language that uses techniques like parataxis, metaphor, rhythm, enjambment, alliteration, imagery, apostrophe, personification, allusion, and other elements to give language a spatial quality. Poetry isn’t the medium used to convey information. That’s why we have newspapers.

A masque/ Beyond the planets.

The Poetry Foundation Web site is a tad bit wheezy, but I get a kick out of the idea of "celebrity poets." Call me the romantic capital "r," but I do believe that to a certain extent poets are born and not made. What I would term "Lizard King" syndrome drives fans of celebrities to pick up their books of poetry to get a taste of the inner-most thoughts of those said celebrities. I'm being sincere when I say that whomsoever felt any comfort in books like Touch Me by Suzanne Somers is welcome to it. I'm somewhat of a populist in that I hope those who come to poetry do so for many varied reasons and it's been a blessing and somewhat of a curse for me, so I do hope that poetry provides something more than an intellectual game for those who read it. As a 14-year-old I remember very clearly buying No One Here Gets Out Alive and reading for the first time about Jim Morrison's infatuation with the writing of Arthur Rimbaud. I don't criticize those who would scramble to buy a book of poetry by Alicia Keys. The best thing that can happen to someone reading poetry of any kind for the first time would be that it spurs something to happen. If the reader of Ally Sheedy's or Billy Corgans' poetry goes on to become whatever it is they feel they need to be then all the better. Poetry isn't about an experience it is an experience. At the very least it's been proven that reading poetry increases ones ability to think abstractly. Wallace Stevens would be the prescription if that's the goal. Just don't ask me to ever give up my treasured copy of Listen to the Warm by Rod McKuen. It's the Plan 9 From Outer Space of poetry.