ghosttype

Crossing Over (of sorts)

2011-11-12T13:17:00.000-08:00

PORTLAND

KOSOVO

At 5 AM the drinks are still flowing. At one end of the table the talk is about the gunfire on the Serbian border and the historical tensions that underlie the entire country A German journalist says “ I walked in to a courtyard theater to see the film about America, but I suddenly remembered how years ago bodies had been stacked in similar courtyards all over the region. I couldn’t help but imagine them there.” At the other end of the table the talk is of the loveliness of Prizen and the film festival – how magical it is too see films from all over the world projected on the city’s medieval fortress walls and over its gentle river. From some nearby café speakers Rhianna yelps about how she likes S&M, while above the town prayer calls begin.

PHILADELPHIA

The heat reaches a sullen100 degrees then breaks with lightening above the city. In minutes the streets are all downpour and cold sizzle. Wet and shivering, I nab a broken umbrella from the gutter as it sails by. A block later I give it to a woman trying to make a dry bed in an archway. She’d covered as much of herself as she could with a black garbage bag. The dark, wet plastic looks as if she’s pulled the soaked asphalt off the street to protect herself.

MINNEAPOLIS

After 2 years of filming, this is the city where the ghost of Dan Markingson walks gently in his mother’s home, peaceful after his horrific suicide; where Lucinda Williams wants her blood to flow red again into that whitening snow; where Carl Elliot appalls us with stories of medical horror and corruption but delights us with his constant, compassionate, black humor; where gold booths sparkle in gorgeous, tawdry bars and mayflies cluster like living hoarfrost on neon lit windows; where a Patsy Cline tribute band brings tears to the eyes of the old man dancing, seemingly desperately, with his wife; where a handsome actor tells me he specializes in gruesome death scenes and fills two hours with whisky, fake blood, the perils of playing dead, and flirtatious touches of knees and hands. Later, as we walk on a street showing the first signs of autumn, I realize that I don’t know when I’ll be back. The kiss outside the hotel feels like kissing the city goodbye.

PORTLAND

This is the first Halloween away from October Country. For the last four autumns my family ghosts were with me, either in person or on screen. Thanks to editing the new film, the terrors of this season are medical testing gone awry, drug induced suicide, and war trauma –haunting’s that belong to others but bleed just as easily into the holiday as any of the domestic terrors my family have to face. I catch glimpses of pharmaceutical side effects in the bubbly skin and the vacant eyes of a Walgreens’ monster masks. A plastic severed limb sets off flashes of the bloody photos and footage we were given by a very young medic who suffers PTSD from his service in Irag and Abu Graib. But just when I think there is no end to this grisly catalogue it is dispelled by the kids shrieking from house to house in their costumes; by the rubber and paper monsters that prowl yards and front windows; by leaving the horrors of the world in the editing room but putting just a touch of them into the murder ballads and ghost songs we play at our party; by watching Mike, handsome in his costume gray hair, smiling more than he has in days, flirting and mixing potions for the guests; by waking on all saints’ day to find myself curled next to a long warm body and the shaggy pants of a charming satyr on the floor beside the bed.

Sin City

2011-06-25T10:11:00.000-07:00

In Psycho Janet Leigh is told by the flirtatious tycoon (from whom she will steal $40,000) that she should “go to Las Vegas –it’s the playground of the world.” He also tells her that you can’t buy happiness, but “you can buy off unhappiness.” In 1960 these words may have raised Ms. Leigh’s eyebrows in arch disbelief but they seem to be very much be the case in Las Vegas today. There is plenty of contentment in the passing faces but, strangely, almost no really energetic happiness. Eyes gleam with a thousand lights but I see no exuberance provoked by the spectacle –only a glazed kind of gawking. In the casino the hands of the young and old move at the same mechanical pace over tables and slots. People are certainly enjoying themselves but this is gambling after all. All around dollar signs rise up and down in digital schizophrenia but I catch no joy or desperation at taking chance, winning, or even surrendering to compulsion. Instead I see a docile, lackluster determination to gamble and consume, to be drunk, to wear little and think less. The sins of Sin City are maddeningly placid no matter how much flash gets wrapped around them. Everything here is shattered by mirrors and plastic that give bright and buttery reflections; by explosions of colored bulbs and jumping pixels; by hyper saturated images that flatten and tame vice into the equivalent of a diner menu or travel post card. This place is the inverse of the carnivalesque – vulgarity and carnality here are drained of release and rebellion. I like some desperation in my sin please. It’s more fun that way and allows me, for better or (usually) worse, to know where pleasure ends and danger begins. It seems impossible that anything could be beneath the surface in Las Vegas, but the real sins here, the capital “S” sins of greed, excess, and waste are exactly that – hidden beneath their own display, waiting patiently for a wallet to empty, for a card to be rejected, for a glass to spill, a high heel to break– anything that could land someone in one of those “personal traps” from which “we claw and tear” discussed by Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh in the Bates Motel parlor just before hidden cash and an illicit glimpse of flesh lead to her murder.

THANK YOU SPRINGTIME!

2011-05-29T10:58:00.000-07:00

PORTLAND

SEATTLE

SAN FRANCISCO

PORTLAND

Thanks Portland – just when I felt (happily) strangled in your blooming, soothing, green life there on the sidewalk, rough and permanent “we torture.”

Thanks Seattle – amid the solicitations and iPhone instant loves and the doldrums of listening to steampunk authors, in their home-shod Jules Vern gear, pontificating on how their nostalgia trip will change the world – there she was on the sidewalk begging the police to just let her pray.

Thanks San Francisco – After the tight warmth of old friends and new beds, there at the Tea Party Tax Day Rally, a woman gave a full exorcism, in clunky, howling Latin, to drive away that freedom hating demon called Taxes. At home, a 23-dollar check was waiting. The first in 3 years.

Thanks Portland for the “Drug Take Back Initiative Day”. In a mega-store parking lot the cars line up drive-thru style, arms reach out with bag after bag of orphaned medicines. On the tables, in boxes and garbage cans, the colors and abundance of the pills put the spring blossoms to shame. Obviously the terms “annuals” and “perennials” now apply to prescriptions as well as plant life.

And one more thanks to the home town for a lonely night walk guided by Maker’s Mark and the compass of my camera lens, my head full of filmmaking blues and the day’s footage – a hat box full of prescriptions, an amputation in a medical center in Abu Ghraib, a swollen hand at prayer, and hotel sign after hotel sign. My mind edits them to the ever-present sound of the trains passing from north Portland to the south east. There is a dark ferris wheel by the river, a soft fall of pink cherry petals, and all the words written on the city.

NEW ADVENTURES IN FILMMAKING- midwest express

2011-03-24T19:37:00.000-07:00

PORTLAND

COLUMBIA

The Midwest rolls past the car window. Sunlight bouncing off snow gives a pristine, white-wash glow to the clapboard churches, the farmhouses. Even the endless anti-abortion signs look wholesome in this light. The radio waves oscillate between classic metal and a preacher listing the signs apocalypse in a mellow, unnervingly satisfied voice. We are leaving the True/False festival, talking of how green and nervous we were there two years ago, and how much we were helped (and continue to be) by David, Paul, Mark, Ingrid, AJ, Steve and Julia, Esther, Debra, Basil, Brian… What a pleasure it was to be there with Danny playing the music that has stayed between over the years. I watch Mike at the wheel, thinking how he gave me filmmaking and the life I have now. Feeling happy and full of luck, music rises in my mind, drowning the radio. It’s the waltz we wrote for my sad, unlucky family.

IOWA CITY

In Iowa City with Andy – a young Iraqi vet and anti-war activist. I’m running sound as we film him shooting. I forget to turn down the headphones. As he fires the sound is like a solid plane of metal vibrating and ringing between my ears. It passes leaving memories my grandfather’s earth red finger on a trigger; the scent of tobacco, gun oil, and birch bark in my nose; the taste of venison, rabbit, and squirrel in my mouth.

Andy holds my arm down and places the 14-gauge needle against the vein. He explains in a clinical voice that this large sized needle was used to inflict extra pain prisoners at Abu Graib – whether administering Insulin to diabetics or water to those who were on hunger strike, the idea was to break resistance even during treatment. To show this on film, I’ve volunteered my arm. The needle slides in, feeling like a leather worker’s awl in my vein. It’s painful, yes, but I’m relaxed. Andy says,“ The prisoners would be fighting, tensed all up, clenched- not understanding what you were saying – imagine how this would feel then.” He removes the needle and lifts my arm over my head. With our faces close, I ask him how he feels doing this. He joined the national guard all gung-ho, but became a medic hoping he could be in the war and do no harm. He says, “A lot of bad memories are happening right now, there is no good reason to use a needle like this on anyone.”

V.A antidepressants and picture from inside Abu Graib

MADISON

Filming the Protest over collective bargaining in Madison, I can’t believe the cheerful but determined focus of the crowds here. People here are finding their political identity rather than marking those identities with the kaleidoscope of issues and indignation typical of typical of actions in SF and NY. I watch Mike turn his camera to the rippling flag, to the bright, wind chilled faces. He’s all eye, all strong and restless arms as he works. He’s so lost in it, so compelling to watch when he’s shooting.

With A. once again. It doesn’t seem long since we last saw each other but we’ve both travelled so far since then. We talk city after city, country after country, places we’ve been, places we want to go – the world spins around the restaurant table, around the rim of our glasses, round his bed and his body.

ROCHESTER

In Rochester Minnesota, Jordan stomps through the wet streets and walkways that connect the downtown shops and hotels to the sprawling Mayo Clinic. He talks of all those in the city in pain and illness, all those who come there to cheat death. Under the night lit signs for adult bookstores and tattoo parlors he tells of how he’s learning survivalist skills for when “...it all comes apart.”

SAN FRANCISCO

... Stephen's big eyes, Andria's NC smile, Colter's voice, Amy sighing in the kitchen, and the rain soaking everything.

NEW YORK

Mike watches endless amounts tsunami footage. His mechanically calculating eye is attempting do to something mine cannot - trying through repetition to grasp the scale of the disaster. The radiation plume spreads across the screen – a digital blue stain swelling across the Atlantic. The Archangel Gabriel comes to my mind –the angel of the waters– plume and wave, a great wing above the sea, from the trumpet raised to perfect lips - a wave of sound announcing the end of days.

EDESTAKAINEN

2011-02-03T17:35:00.000-08:00

PHILLY

I’ve forgotten her name already, the name that appeared in rugged black as Bob pulled the charcoal across the paper taped to her grave. Seconds ago it was a sunny winter day, now the light dims, snow comes heavy in seconds. The world seems very, very black and white as flakes tumble and the trees behind the graves shake in the sudden wind. She was a spiritualist. She claimed she had a spirit husband that gave her very physical pleasure. She was also a sexual reformer in the 19^th century, jailed for a her book that prepared Victorian young ladies for their wedding nights and told them they had the power to say no and need not be “ravished.” Imprisoned several times for her corrupting radical ideas, she took her own life rather than face another sentence. Her name, the one I’ve forgotten, buckles in the wind as the storm tugs at finished rubbing. 10 minutes later the sun returns.

NYC

Peter tells me playful ghost stories on the street. He tells me to look up, then says it’s always scary when you see a shadow pass the middle window of three lit windows in a row. I see the windows but nothing moving. Two blocks later I tell him to look up. In the 1^st window of three is a cardboard silhouette of a man holding a knife.

After seeing Passolini’s “Mama Roma” I dream an Italian beauty salon. It’s the 60’s. The woman in the chair has closed eyes, high piled hair, and a face so impassive she could be a hairdressing dummy. Her blue eyes open mechanically as those of a robot. For two minutes she stares without moving. There is no recognition or focus in her vision. Her eyes close. Two long minutes later they open. The hairdressers around her say solemnly. “She is the Spirit of Ages. She is about to wake from her long sleep. See! She’s blinking.” Her eyes snap open again.

HELSINKI

Mike asleep in the theater. After a sad birthday and an exhausting flight, his face has regained its boyish gentleness. His eyelids catch light bouncing unevenly from the screen. They twitch. He's filming in his slumber. Up above us, a gigantic granular Jellyfish pulses as if it swam from his dreams.

At night, a hole is the frozen Baltic, a black swirl in gray ice. Stepping into the water, looking up. The clouds above Helsinki, white against the black sky, as if the shock of the cold has turned my vision inside out.

A tan hip on the paisley hotel bedspread. On the taught skin there is a long purple scar that matches the curving colors of the pattern beneath it. I want to ask the story. I want to take a photo. I do neither.

A big -eyed boy on the dance floor. The front of his shirt says "your mother is developer." He spins. The back reads " your father is fixer."

A stocky rocker and a fey boy with pinned up hair are standing, then suddenly fighting on the floor. Pulled apart I see two lines of blood running in a ^ shape down his neck.

The members of "Pertti Kurikka's Name Day" have Downe Syndrome. Their music is simple and strong. The lead singer's facial expression rarely changes, even when he's sings about being in church and needing to shit. Add it all up - the perfect punk bank.

Our hosts here are obviously witches. They have a knack for pulling strange and pungent potions out the air at parties – yellow, green, blood red drinks, tasting of herbs, berries, licorice, vodka, gin…. They delight in my easy drunkenness and share stories of drinking, sky diving, gun shooting, drinking, KGB activity in the Soviet era, drinking, and filmmaking in Lapland when the sun never sets. On the way home to the hotel at midnight, Helsinki is all dark clean lines and glittering snow. The wind shakes the hotel windows as I climb into bed. I dream a gigantic crow sitting on the roof of the building across the street. It breathes out gusts of black air and snow that strike the window.

NYC

Going home tomorrow if this new storm allows. I watch the snow thinking of Eddie giving us of one his free form Muslim sermons in a Philly diner. His swollen, damaged hands moved delicately as he explained that each snowflake has an angel, a personality. As the snow thickens, I imagine each flake is a tiny movie screen, each one showing a film that lasts the length of the fall from the sky to the ground, then flickers out on impact.

GLISTEN

2011-01-03T08:58:00.000-08:00

Glisten. Gleam. All this winter travel has me thinking of words like this. Storms ahead of us, storms behind, snow and ice everywhere we go. It’s been like travelling in a snow globe while the glitter fell. Glisten, glitter - pretty but tricky little words –soft when applied to soft and liquid things – hard when applied to hard surfaces that produce the same effect. The flowing water gleams, frozen it gleams the same. A bright reflection blinds a viewer precisely at the spot from where it springs. We have to trust our vision that the object’s surface beneath the light is the same as the surface beside it. A steel fender could be ice or water at the point where it glitters. The snow could be powdered with metal or glass. We can’t touch it to find out. In reaching to do so, we block the light and any gleam of transformation becomes fixed and dull. I don't mind - photography is a magpie art, drawn to all that glitters, lifting it from one surface to another. A photo is a little flake of light fixed for the eye, a little flake of the world.

PORTLAND

EDINBURGH

At night I looked at the castle through the window, trying to fill it with history – with specific events and specific lives that intersected in time, whose ripples continue wobbling all the way to the present moment. American that I am, all I did was stuff the castle and the entire city for that matter full of period dramas, ghost stories, and fairytale images. Meanwhile in the classrooms the work of other filmmakers brought fragments of contemporary Scotland to us –life from the point of view of a wheelchair, working class suicides, prostitutes and their saviors, shoemakers for ballet, WWII re-enactors, the nationalist overtones of the battle between red and grey squirrels… Cinema and travel –two versions of the same joy – the interplay between location and dislocation, in time, in place.

The airplane window frames the view beyond like the circular vignetting of a microscope. The land through the milky glass is flat, white patched, and divided. The low sun tints the snow a pale orange, making the blue contrasting shadows as bright as the snow itself. I almost expect the fields to move and shift as cells do when they touch one another, or divide. I imagine them shivering when the plane shadow pierces their membrane. The closer we descend, the more the micro perspective pulls away. Fields become epidermis. The frostbitten skin of the country rolls pasts, sprouting barns, silos, and snow coated suburban homes.

(found image -onion cells)

MINNESOTA

At the bar he explains the complexities of his love for his wife and being a young gay man with two children –one with a terminal illness. There’s playfulness, not grief on his on his face as he mimics playing music with his sick daughter. He smiles. His slender fingers stroke the tabletop and tap his glass. I’m amazed that an hour ago he existed only as a collection of flirtatious texts, e-mails, and sexualized images sent back and forth. Now we ponder each other, exchanging intimate, increasingly whiskey coated details of our lives. We drive off to a quiet, Christmas lit neighborhood. Above me on the bed his groans become something like a song, a great crazy sound that seems both released and swallowed. The goodbye lingers – little kisses and stroking hips. There is a feeling of emotional potential in air that we both savor easily, maybe because neither of knows when or if we'll meet again. Later in my hotel room I dream I’m eating Christmas lights, lit ones, plucked ripe from decorated yards. They have no flavor but the electric shiver on my tongue has the exactly qualities of sweetness.

ROCHESTER:

Follow the woman in the wheelchair, the one like so many here – a face stiff with pain and make-up; high, high bleached hair; and a leopard print shawl. She passes from floor to floor, moving through a hotel lobby that becomes hallway of shops that becomes an elevated walkway where snow hurls itself against the glass around her but does not give her thin bones even a chill. The walkway becomes a ramp leading through an entire mall full of Christmas shopping families. She rolls passed it all to an elevator. Down she goes beneath the city, through bank lobbies that never see the sun; ceramic hallways that hum with florescent light and advertisements of healthy families; display windows that glow with clothes, toys, mobility devices, and row after row of wigs for women going through cancer treatments. At the end of pink tiled slope, she slips away into some obscure ward of the Mayo Clinic. In Rochester a person can move for blocks passing shop after shop, banks, university halls, treatment centers – all without entering the outside. Between the buildings the glass skyways protect pedestrians from the winter and make it easy and comfortable for the many patients traversing on foot, on walkers, and in wheelchairs from one section of the clinic to another. Downtown is a city of glass veins, with buildings like chambers of a heart, sliding door ventricles, and the cellular flow of human traffic moving through it all. Almost everyone we meet here has given their body to the clinic at some time - either for work or because of illness or both. The punk kids here say this is a city built on pain and death; other citizens say it’s built on healing and give multiple examples of being saved by the clinic. At night, the crows gather by the noisy hundreds in the trees outside the towering clinic center –what do they think?

WISCONSIN

The winter outside means nothing in the painted jungle of the primate house. We are investigating the story of chimps on PAXIL. We expected to find ourselves baffled by the absurdity of the story, if not outraged. Instead we learn the drug helped with abuse and self injury for a young male within the troop and brought a family unit together. Apparently anti-depressants would be far more successful if we were under a form of public display/ house arrest and monitored by a team of psychiatrists and digilent keepers. The primates around us watch the interview with cool disinterest. Their eyes gleam softly behind the hard sheen of glass. That night I dream a gorilla in Mike's video monitor that is performing actions completely different from the real animal being filmed. I dream a snow covered midwest field divided by high black fence, topped with razor wire. Inside the bladed loops is a black gun, an automated weapon that is also a crow. It fires but this is also the flap of its' wings. I notice that the dark circles of the wire are handwriting - a prescription of course.

UPSTATE NY

Speeding back to NYC on the evening train, barreling into a blizzard –the world outside buffeted is going grey, going blue. The snow sweeps by in pale, unbroken lines. The Hudson is full of ice, a miniature arctic fading into a granular emptiness. Things are not well upstate but the wind and snow that scrub at the train seem to clean me of the of the stories of drugs and abuse that haven’t stopped; of Daneal’s commitment to her children but her enduring loneliness; of Desi’s absence now that she is living with relatives in VA; of the clouds of cigarette smoke that hang around my mom and dad; of how much their age showed in their hands as they tore at shimmering foil wrapping paper. The window is almost dark now. The valley and the river are becoming night sky. Flakes are like stars on the window. Far off Christmas lights hang in the dark like constellations. It think the train is flying. The whistle agrees.

(found Image)

NYC

PORTLAND

Back here the weather gives a dull shine to everything, a damp shine. The sound of rain surrounds all other sounds –the click of shoes, the click of cameras, the creak of the beds, Mike playing his favorite guitar lines, sweet and familiar from somewhere in the house. We're both so delighted and lazy now that we are home. The rain collects and moves on the glass like film grain. I think of the all the strange stories of pharmaceuticals we've collected while traveling and shooting, even while teaching and fucking around - everybody is on something, or has been, or wants to be. Watching the wet glass, I imagine pale blue capsules falling with the sound of raindrops, soaking into the Portland mud, sprouting back up with bright green leaves and pill-blossom flowers.

NEW ADVENTURES IN FILMMAKING

2010-10-26T21:44:00.000-07:00

ANY DOUBLETREE INN ACROSS THE U.S.

SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS

MINNEAPOLIS - MADISON - ROCHESTER

PHILADELPHIA

BROOKLYN

ROME

2010-08-31T19:34:00.000-07:00

Rome at the end of summer, at the end of the tourist season, with half the inhabitants away. Narrow streets give way to empty piazzas, opening suddenly onto the big attractions –the Coliseum, the Parthenon, surrounded by the last of the shutterbug crowds. The leaves on the broad avenues are parched around the edges and fall in the warm, traffic-scented breeze. The light has the quality of those romantic paintings that end up on cheap, classic paperbacks – the ones that spoke of ‘culture” to me as an NC kid. Falling low on stone and stucco light draws a gentle sense of age and use from these surfaces. Not that it’s all antiquity here in the Eternal City – contemporary consumerism barnacles everything and the Berlusconi media has updated the roman orgy for the airwaves, clubs, and private parties. If Daisy Miller were abroad now she’d have her trysts in a disco rather than in the Coliseum, ponder social position from a politician’s private villa rather than a drawing room, and die of a cocaine overdose instead of “Roman fever.” This kind of decadence weighs heavily on those who live here – those I meet anyway, who are firmly on the left. Hope for political change feels as autumnal everything else here.

Still, the films in the Gender Doc festival are well attended despite being shown on an outdoor dance floor. Moments after the applause ends, a thunder heavy beat hits the air, bodies wind up like tops about to spin, and the screen pulls up, revealing a stage show that conjures Fellini. I dance with woman whose skin is like salted leather but whose fluid energy draws a flock of gay boys to her. The heel of her white boot is a gyrating center of gravity. All we can do is orbit. Again NC comes to mind –those tawdry Raleigh gay clubs where I first saw people dancing furiously to forget about church. From out hips and eyes, the dancing woman and I send playful vulgar challenges to each other, getting closer, touching. It’s all wriggle and grind till we part. In a shop window the woman’s tiny but expensive heel would be a kind of repulsive insect to my eyes, but here, as she struts away, balancing the swing of her ass with quick turns and kicks, I am amazed how it has the power to step on Baptist steeples and the palaces of the Vatican.

For a line-up and commentary on the excellent films at Gender Doc- go to Pamela Cohn's wonderful film blog:http://stillinmotion.typepad.com/still_in_motion/2010/08/genderdocu-film-festivalrome-italy.html

UPSTATE UPDATE

2010-07-05T11:26:00.000-07:00

On the way into the valley. Trucks hustle by - moving billboards. The view of the sky above the hills fills with cloud-like chips, a pink face like a bubble-gum angel, meat, a mattress – like film clips from a strange story. Beyond the highway sun and cloud shadows slide over the hills, giving me a feeling of homecoming I haven’t had in a longtime –since before filming. If I didn’t know better I think it was a welcoming place. A host of popsicle and sunburn memories invite me back as I see the houses with their flags and banners. Then I see the sagging porches, the ragged yellow ribbons tied to trees, hands holding big gulp sodas and surly eyes watching everything and pretending to see nothing. Then I remember scenes of ice cream bought with the embarrassment of using food stamps, or of some pretty cousin laughing at a BBQ, hiding a black eye with heavy make-up made all too obvious by the sun.

It is always a shock to see the family these days, especially the women. I see more of them than I have in years but more often as images from the film than in person. It skews my sense of time passage. My mother looks older and worn but sweetly so as always. A now blonde Daneal plays with her son, proud to be a good mom, but the discontent is there. She talks of having another baby while panting to keep up with Abel. Donna appears, tired and obviously strung out from wrestling with old demons. She’s one tough fighter (metaphorically and literally –she recently broke her hand in fight) but at the moment she seems too thin to resist the weight of her past. And of course Desi, with those sharp eyes and that sharp mind, watches the battle –her own face looking shrewd and fragile under messy spikes of hair. Then off she goes, witty, ironic and whacky, all the qualities that need to be nourished for her to get out of here and have complicated homecomings of her own in the future.

Duluth and Minneapolis

2010-06-10T12:27:00.000-07:00

The hotel room doesn’t have a view of Lake Superior, but then again with the rainy weather, the lake is lost in the fog. Everyone tells me how big the lake is, how it has it’s own weather, tides, ghost ships and spirits. Seeing the waves fading quickly into the mist adds to the stories, to the size of the lake – so large it becomes sky, no limiting horizon whatsoever.

In the Kozy bar (the bar with the most police calls per year on record) we meet a long haired, happy drunk guy who tells us how another patron threw him down in lip lock – an incident that took place over a girlfriend. The other culprit is a shaggy gremlin of a man, toothless, witch wild hair, a leather cowboy hat. When asked if he kissed the guy he says shyly but with a proud, semi-toothless grin, “ I was pretty fucked up at the time! Our storyteller laughs hard and slaps my back but then asks “no offense but have you always had that high, ladylike voice?” Personally I don't think my voice that high at least I’m ladylike – maybe that saved me a trouble.

In the theaters at the Sound/Unseen festival, Portland lights up on the screen in “Cold Weather” and “Some Days are Better than Others” – it’s so strange to see the home town here, caught bright and beautifully in this grey Midwestern place. Rounding out the northwest block the fabulous Jennifer Maas’s “Wheedle’s Groove won the jury prize for its story of Seattle soul music. Then, moving east, Mathew Porterfield’s “Putty Hill” blew me away with it’s tender, creepy, mournful vision of the American lost working class – the darkness held in homes, in the posture and unspoken words of young girls – the gruff but strangely gentle perseverance in all the characters that made me think of my own family and all their strengths and ghosts.

We spend the last night inside the old North Shore Theater, a movie palace turned punk/rock show venue, turned strip club, turned back to a theater. We drink, talk, watch a film about Low, win an award, and then celebrate, trolling the streets then returning to do half naked- strip routines on the tiled stage, to sprawl and sip among streamers and balloons. Afterwards, with whiskey spinning my head, I lay thinking of the huge dark lake and the wind blowing from it across the town. I imagine the North Shore theater when it was a strip joint – girls working the poles in the chilly rooms with men, smiling wet grins at them –a wendigo spirit* with a star on its brow and bone ragged body, strayed from the lake, stands there among the patrons, spreading meaty hunger. The drink-dream quiets and I picture the empty theater, abandoned streamers moving gently in some draft.

* a wendigo is a wind spirit which causes cannibalistic urges, the more it consumes the bigger it gets

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendigo

Scratching The Surface - new travels for the new film

2010-05-09T21:20:00.001-07:00

There's a dulling science or maybe a doldrum magic at work in hotel rooms. How is that lurid floral bedding, tepid art, light-killing chintz curtains, and a host of industrial fixtures can combine to create a kind of sense-deadening harmony? And when exactly did these numb rooms become a comfort? After so much travel I now welcome surrendering my soul to transient, generic spaces; that feeling of my spirit becoming a substance as acrylic, polyester, and petroleum based as the objects around me. Even after short flight I happily throw myself on a bed that has the softness and texture of linoleum. Breathing in the scents of soap, disinfectant, and carpet, I let go of any nostalgia for familiar and well worn furnishings and ahhhhh – let myself become Sheratonized.

There is one unique quality to these rooms though – the light, or lack of it, is always distinct. In a 6th floor room in the Pacific Northwest, a hot light spears its way through the curtains as a breeze gently opens and closes the panels. The effect slows time like a ticking clock in quiet house. The shaft of light widens and thins, sometimes stretching over the bed. It's a king sized bed - the kind that makes one picture illicit lovers or lonely businessmen. Who else has been stretched out here, watching the bright line flash on the mauve carpet like the ray from a lighthouse?

OLYMPIA

The dance floor in Olympia is nearly empty but ruled by two longhaired men. On the left a man in his 50’s with his hair in a lank, gray ponytail dances beneath a hug, transparent balloon. His eyes have the peculiar glazed but focused look of a person consumed by their obsession. He certainly knows we are watching – his showmanship is superb – but he never looks away from the rising, falling balloon. It touches his wrist as light as a finger dabbing on perfume. Up it sails, allowing him a slow wide armed spin. It falls against his shoulder, trots down his soft arm. Tap. Up it goes and round he goes, all night. On the other side, a tall Native American guy is gray sweats takes to the floor and gives it up to every soul hit as if he were performing before an audience of devoted fans. He shakes his long dark hair; pouts and mouths through every longing, grooving, hurting lyric with his lips coated in shiny red; he raises his hands, nails gleaming with black polish, outward to receive the silent applause of the invisible thousands. I’m so convinced by the joy in his face that I begin to think of the disco lights sweeping the empty floor around as ephemeral security guards holding back the ghost crowd.

In the soft, mauve and white interior of her suburban home, we interview a woman about the death of her son, (For the sake of her case the location and details of his circumstances are left out). I’m running sound, so though she sits across the table, her voice is in my ears, eerily close. She speaks with a shaky combination of anger and sorrow as she describes her son's mental deterioration and her attempts to have him placed into stable treatments. Her demeanor changes though as she comes to the details of her his death. Her voice is stern and sure as she tell us that it wasn’t a normal suicide, not at all, that her son cut his own throat almost to the point of decapitation, that he slit open his abdomen and died with the box cutter in one hand and the other reaching up to his wrist in the belly wound he’s made. His note simply read “ I smiled through this experience.” She doesn’t finch, blink, or tear-up. She doesn’t choke back emotion. She looks me in the eye with a challenge and the table between us seems to waver though she never does.

NEW YORK

PHILADELPHIA

If you saw Eddie’s bright face, his sharp eyes and smooth skin with its deep tan-brown coloring, you’d be hard pressed to guess his age, let alone to see a trace of what’s been done to him. Eddie was part of the infamous, toxic skin experiments (and other tests as well) that took place on the prisoners at Holmesburg prison in the 6O’s and 70’s. The only visible evidence of his experience is in his hands. His fingers are double normal sized and their skin is stretched to the point of cracking. His nails are thick and sit crookedly, as if about to fall away. His hands moved oddly, like loose costume appendages as he gestures to the diner around us, telling us this is the breakfast joint for big Philly mobsters. If so they look like any other old men on their SSI sunday breakfast outings. This convinces me that every one is a cold blooded killer – especially the meek, watery and lost eyed man who politely asks for more ketchup. Eddie meanwhile is giving us a sermon on how the Muslim faith rescued him from darkness. He tells us the west is the Occident – OC – as in occult – hidden – where the sun descends… that U.S.Capiltalism keeps it’s power hidden and magical and satanic. He says he was that trying to live in these systems brought him to point of taking his own life but a holy fearful love of Allah stayed his hand. Behind him a tall balding man and a taller black tranny walk to the counter together with nervous pride. They talk note when as Eddie tells us with loving passion that a Muslim must pray 5 times a day simply to cool his eye from the things he sees in this world. The old men at the nearby counter don’t look up from their eggs and crosswords for anything but coffee.

ANNAPOLIS

Our hotel in Annapolis looks out over a tiny graveyard. Behind it, almost engulfing it is a mall. Shop signs read like descriptions of suburban heaven –Whole Foods, 24-hour Fitness, and of course Bed Bath and BEYOND – floating above the headstones. I spend an hour taking photos while birds chirp and the light becomes as peaceful and pastoral as in any rural churchyard. I wonder though about how much rest the departed are getting. The freeway runs just outside the gates. I imagine a host of exhausted, sleepy dead shaken by truck rumbles till Judgement day. I'm sure we will have disturbances in the night. I hope so. Nothing uncanny takes place however till the next morning. In the hotel gym I sweat on on the machines and look out the graves, at random (I swear - on my granny's grave) the song "Pretty Little Cemetery" comes through on a Pandora radio channel. The tune is a peaceful lullabye. Maybe the dead are happy next to the mall where they shopped, perhaps they are getting some rest after all.

SAN FRANCISCO

I took the photo above because there was something so cottony and compelling in the white scratches on the glossy mural paper, in the way the feathery texture was gouged into the image of the harsh sofa pillows. Back at Amy's house, I color balanced it with other pictures as I waited for Gannet to show up. He arrived shaking and weak spirited and I thought once again his health would prevent us from having any fun. He tried to be friendly but his body simply shut down. He stretched out on the sofa bed with weary but satisfied smile and closed his eyes. Seeing him drift, I realized how much I miss putting him go to sleep, watching all that ferocious energy ebb away from his taut muscles and fragile bones. The next morning I woke to the familiar sound of him scratching the sofa and giggling. I thought of the picture I'd taken and the weird music of all those mornings with him, preparing breakfast while he contentedly badger-clawed the couch. After seeing him ill on so many previous visits, it was such a pleasure to remember how happy he can be and how satisfying that happiness is, coming as it does from something as simple as a fingernail on fabric.

All Over The Place

2010-03-15T18:28:00.000-07:00

I’ve seen more snow this year than I have in 14 put together –streaking by plane windows in perfectly horizontal lines; flashing in the air of Helsinki like sparks from a sparkler; stretched out in rough, white ridges along the banks of the Hudson; laying in patches like fallen, deflated clouds in Missouri fields. But it’s the snow falling gently on NYC that sticks with me most. It's a special joy to look up and follow the dizzy path of the flakes, coming from the high beyond and above; then to look forward, watching the snow softening and flattening everything till the city seems thin and transparent as a film-strip - white flakes flickering like scratches on its emulsion. It’s here that snowfall and memory come together – in the deep and the flat – the silent tumble – the quiet touch carrying so much distance with it – melting away so quickly.

DONNA AND DESI IN NYC

Donna is delighted to have her photo in the Times and laughs, half proud, half dismissive at the tone of language in the article. "Who thought fuckin up would get you a review? I should have been getting them all my life." Her flippancy is true to form and she would just as soon talk about her new lover and getting in fights at the bar. Hearing her laughing though, I know she's very pleased. Rambling the city, Desi was the wonderful, self absorbed terror that I adore. During the Q and A's however, I saw a sober, thoughtful side of her intelligence that, no matter how much faith I've had in her smarts and self possession, I've never seen before. She wasn't delightfully cocky, or funny and mean – she was thoughtful and articulate in a way that made me worry less (a bit) about her future.

Sitting next to both of them during the premiere was one of that the most poignant screenings I've had yet. Their hands found each other as Donna talked onscreen about the scars mental and physical abuse leave on a person – and again during Desi's revelation about her father. Seeing them comforting each other in the darkness was a moment of tenderness I'd never glimpsed before. I wanted to reach out to them but knowing both (and not wanting a finger bitten off) it wasn't my place to do so.

UPSTATE

A quick jump upstate to bring Desi home - we had a lovely time on the train, talking the whole way. She has decided that the city is too big for her. She wants to leave the Mohawk Valley though and speculated about living in every snow covered town that went past the train windows.

At home, my mom had bronchitis and a body wracking cough that kept her and my father from attending the premiere. Still, they smoke constantly. The kitchen is half lost in sour fog and full of the click of cigarette machines. My father emerges from the basement to smoke, watches a few bloody minutes of a crime show then returns downstair to work on his delicate miniature houses.

Daneal had me over to her new apartment where she and her husband Michael played with their baby boy Abel. He's shy, smiling, and loves to grab shoes, hold them out at you and jabber as if explaining some secret function the have that only he understands. Ruby was with her father but markers of her recent presence were everywhere – purple socks with embroidered hearts, glittering balls, a pink petticoat, strange green and yellow toys I couldn't quite fathom. She's a ghost to me these days, but Daneal has her on weekends and talks endlessly about her. I don't want Danny to have anymore children but when I hear the focus and purpose as she talks about her babies, I think understand why her desire for more children is stronger than any logical argument we can give about her ability to support them.

The sun was almost summer warm on the skin – bringing me back from the phantom world of movie making with a light sweat the ran across my body. In the canyon park the heavy clothes were off, arms, legs, even chests were bare –everyone walked their gym muscles like pure breed little dogs. After so much winter introspection, even the corn- syrup light of LA, usually so revealing of the artifice of the city and it's people, felt invigorating and clean – completly physical, completely present tense.

But images always triumph in LA! And LA in her tawdry finest was our date as we drove downtown for the Independent Spirit Awards. Her white teeth, shiny hair, and glazed eyes were taken from billboards. Her slim waist and over-firm, overfull tits were pulled from hundreds of plastic surgery and weight-loss signs. Her long freeway limbs sparkled with traffic jam bracelets. Her skin was powdered with glass and metal. She’d draped herself in gigantic movie posters, traffic lights, neon columns, expensive hotels, cheap hotels, taco joints and empty side walks. Her perfume was exhaust and lemon blossom, sprayed on in clouds of the evening sky – green and sliced by searchlights. Very few of the guests and at the awards could match the elegance, seediness, and self congratulating ego of the city hosting them. Those that managed to shine in their own right did so with either an experienced, insurmountable glamour or virginal sincerity – everyone else seemed caught in the brothel logic of the place.

Helsinki

2010-02-03T12:00:00.000-08:00

The air flashing with tiny crystals that cross and shift with the direction of the wind, or in its absence rise and fall gently in tiny, lazy cyclones created by passing trams and warm air flowing from the doors of restaurants and hotels.

The snow orange and pink under the mercury lights like soft, loose piles of fish scales, gleaming and changing color.

Darius beneath lying beneath me on a sled. His body is the only warm soft thing in the entire night. I feel his booming laughter in my ribs. Through him I feel shape of the hill as we speed down with snow biting our faces.

Iris taking the vodka bottle from my ungloved hand, cupping her fingers around mine, blowing soft, warm and moist, till my numb fingertips tingle with returning blood.

Coming out of the theater after seeing “The Woman with 5 Elephants” ¬– a film about the translation of language but also about the translation of memory, experience, and nationality. Our English sounds alien against the background chatter of Finnish.
I think of the scene where the protagonist talks of ordering the threads of fabric as she irons. Another scene – her hand stroking the fabric of her tablecloth as she sternly grieves. I see shifting patterns in the cottony banks, in the snow moving across the street. I hear threads tightening, loosing, knotting, breaking in our voices and conversation.

The snow in the air never stops. I dream packs witches are sitting on the rooftops of the tall, linear Finnish buildings. They hold long bones and sharp knives in skinny fingers, scraping thousands of flecks of bone into the air.

(press play to see this video)

NYC

2010-01-27T15:44:00.000-08:00

Lack of (New Year's) Resolution

2009-12-28T22:30:00.000-08:00

So I'm leaving Portland again. Before I took off I wanted to write about coming home after 2 months of travel; of going down to SF and hanging in the gold and fog and quiet of Ukiah; of snow here in Oregon, of the sweet house Mike and I have made and what it means to me; of talking about God and sex and soul with Nathan in a foggy churchyard; sending words to far off Paul; of watching the dual reflections of the sun on the landing strip as we arrived in PDX, one going dark the other staying strong; of finding that Pauls and Peyton might lose one of their twins then finding out it was a mistake; of the heat in Tom's car, driving through the downtown rain; of cracking my head on a dance floor and getting stitches and taking them out myself, and thinking how the head got cheated- all thin skinned and exposed on a wobbly neck, while the heart gets all the affection and sits safely folded in the bloody dark. I really wanted to write about the death of Vic Chestnutt, and how for years his voice has placed all my little heartbreaks and discontents into his crotchety, sublime vision of life, of how the body and spirit, courage and cowardice in his words carried me through cancer diagnosis and made broke ol' me think that should treatments and options fail, I could, maybe, take my mortality into my own hands; of how "New Town" was the anthem that carried me to Portland... But what I will write about is the big wind that's spinning round the the house, picking up chimes and traffic and creaking trees and the voice of Vic on the Stereo as he sings memories of his momma's sewing machine. Tonight
this wind that seems so wide and hollow I imagine it whistling over all the sparkling houses in dark Portland. Tomorrow it will carry us up and of to NYC.

Home for the ....

2009-12-10T19:15:00.000-08:00

(photo by Desi)

(photo by Desi)
(photo by Desi)

(photo by Desi)

(Alice Cooper painting by Denise)

(donna's tattoo)

The house is full of sounds – cooking hisses and clangs, cell phones, gossip, groans of impatience, TV chatter, power tools grinding in the basement , babies crying or cooing… My sister and Desi have moved back in. Daneal visits with her gentle baby Abel. Chris twitches from room to room, throwing foul-mouthed jokes at my mother who pretends to be shocked. From upstairs Isaiah can be heard singing gospel songs… The house hasn’t been this crowded for as long as I can remember. Money and privacy are scarce – daily clashes inevitable. The sad fact is that the tension between everyone comes from the same qualities that make each one of them so special to me – my mom’s constant tending of her children; my father’s silence, so heavy with knowledge; my sister’s bitch queen strength and bar fighting habits; Daneal’s unending search for herself, Chris’s crazy-body physical comedy and sad, hard eyes; and of course, Desi’s ferocious awareness, anger, and the brilliant, dissatisfied wit she launches at all and everything in her path. They all carry their own conflicting weather pattern within them. On a minute to minute basis they come together, storm violently, come together again, storm again… The year has been free of the dramas that took place in the film, so petty ones have set in. They make me crazy but I love all the electricity they put in the air. As always they manage a good laugh at their own expense, give a sigh that shows their weariness with it all, and keep rolling on.

In Memory – Edward Zold.

2009-11-25T10:36:00.000-08:00

*

When I arrived in SF, everyone I met seemed to be searching for an identity that incorporated not only our sense of personal selves, but also our sense of being both a community and angry oppressed minority as well. Edward already inhabited this triangular identity, forced there by his early infection and kept there by his sense of justice and the love the community had for him. I had the kind of adolescent awe of him that one has for the people who come into your life and gently shed you of your ignorance. There were circumstances and conflicts inside him that I’d never seen before even if they were and remain all too common in the world around me. The funny thing is that however I admired him, when we started seeing each other, our private time was not about activism or spent engaged in the queer political struggle The times I remember best were hours in the soft light of his orderly room or walking from the Mission to the Castro, shivering and pulling each other close as the fog came in, happily talking about time and language and words, about Proust and Virginia Woolf, about the moments and images passing in front of us. I knew his HIV status, but if there was any sense of mortality in our exchanges it remained hidden inside the pleasure we took in each other’s company.

Nights were different though. We got dizzy with the fun of the times, fun that celebrated a strange, addictive mix of both pleasure for its own sake and as a resistance to the presence of death and despair. New to it all, for me those days had what Angela Carter (another author we both loved) called a queasy glamour. We protested, drank, danced till the everything seemed to shimmer before our eyes, knowing the whole time that this sparkle came from edges of the world that were hard and sharp as knives. In the late, red eye hours, off kilter in the wake of parties and 24 hour breakfasts Ed and I would make love passionately, but always with a nervous edge, a fear on my part and a recognition of that fear on his. His body was long and thin and soft – you could feel the bone beneath the muscle, easily feel his pulse increase as we got excited, feel the whole of him yield and soften even more as he came. Afterwards, as he slept, I could also feel him sweating heavily – a sweat that carried leftover sex and booze. I could feel his breathing quicken as dreamed and murmured uneasily. Some nights I felt him tremble. Almost always, at some pre dawn hour, I felt death come into the bedroom, and creep over the need of our minds and bodies to connect, leaving both of us alone in the dark. Perhaps it was only me who felt this, only my fears that cast the isolating pall over everything. I can’t ask Edward now and it’s with great shame that I write that I didn’t stay with him because I was afraid, not of infection – no one I’ve been with was more responsible, careful, or concerned with safety than Edward, – but because I was afraid of caring for someone who would be taken away, and selfishly because I was afraid of even the abstract nearness of death to my own life.

But if I owe to Edward’s memory to admit that I fled from even a glimpse of what he had to live with (and did so courageously) then I owe it to his memory to remember his face widening in a broad smile; the gentle, ironic light in his eyes that sprang from the hard irony of his humor; his deep romance with time and words; the brilliant, woozy, sometimes frightening comedy of his drunken states and the deep anger and pain behind them; and finally, the soft way he had of handling his books when he talked about them, wiping his hair out his eyes when he had something serious to communicate, of reaching out and touching my face when there was nothing else to say. A soft sleep and a peaceful sleep to you Edward.

* Photo by Brook Dillon

Some Glimpses in No particular Order

2009-11-14T08:29:00.000-08:00

London:

We left London early, by car with yellow gray windows that perfectly suited the windy, rainy city, lightening and rolling past. The roundness of London streets gave me the feeling of viewing all through a wide-angle lens -the gleaming dark cabs; the endless march of people on their way to work, grim faced under umbrellas - a sad parade for a sure. Broad chestnut leaves spun up and over the car, the pedestrians, clinging to building and billboards before wind snagged and gone. This image, especially tinted by filtered glass, gave me that pure tourist pleasure when the predetermined image of a destination matched exactly what the eye receives, - living cinema I suppose, but totally satisfactory. Sad as it may be London’s bloody, ghostly history, and its pop history is dearer to my imagination at the moment that the city's vast historical importance. We spent a blustery eve in White Chapel. Outside the windows of the bustling curry house, I kept picturing Long Liz and her ill fated sisters shivering at the cold and rain but more so at thoughts of the Ripper...

Sheffield

We’d been told that Sheffeild was very grim and industrial – we expected sulfur belching factories and beggers in half fingered gloves belching consumptive blood. Instead it was a nice town, on it’s way to being post industrial - the consequences of which went unseen by those of us in the film festival bubble. My liver however is seriously a dirty ol’ town now, and my ass is just recovering from an attempt at rollerskating. Here though we moved among the big powers of the Doc world, and I felt more than a bit Daisy Miller, or a character from Christina Stead’s sharp social novels about travelers learning their way in the hard edge world where business, idealism, and drink meet. The antidote, of course, came from seeing old friends (strange now to have pals that meet everywhere, regardless of country), general drinking madness, and dancing to sweet rock steady at the Brit-doc bar. Of course, the head and lung cold known as the Sheffeild Lurgy (sp?) is my new travel companion…

Florence:

Florence was a constant negotiation with iconic faces, bodies and monuments to both God and Commerce. In that sense I suppose, the spirit of the Renaissance is alive here. For an American, history comes down hard on the senses here - above, around, everywhere, waking to cathedral bells and viewing lushly sensual statues and high, ornate towers from every window and terrace. The streets however are pure contemporary consumer temples where floodlit clothes seems to have transcended the need of bodies to wear them and the grossly enlarged faces of models cast hard judgments on those passing by. Backlit lips, larger than my torso, should have given me the fear of being eaten fairy tale style, except that their monstrous pouts were completely self satisfied and devoid of any exterior appetite. Luckily there were of saints and angels, here and there in crevices and above doorways, to smile down and reassure that a life of transcendent consumption – all the golden goods of heaven await… Our guides to all of this, festival folk and a few new friends (all leftist thinkers) seemed caught between the warmest hospitality and gusto for sensual life and the darkness that hung over them at the political and even moral state of the their country. More than one bitter toast was raised before plunging into the best of meals.

Leipzig:

Leipzig was a funny place – Not the grim post GDR city I expected but another consumer capital. A lovely town actually that kept pre cold war essence and plunged straight into capitalist slickness. It would have been a predominately sober, intellectual festival experience except that luck brought us the Finns- Sami and Jukka, who made the wonderful Living Room of the Nation, and whose mix of dada absurdity and optimistic loopiness turned every day into a delight of deliberate cultural misunderstanding (and occasional nudity). We left on Halloween night, feeling homesick for all the American blood, guts, and monsters of the holiday till the weary faced bartender at the train station turned to me and said, “Hey American – HALLOWEEN!” and raised her hands into claws and made a werewolf face that broke into a broad smile.

My suitcase, my little travel house, bounced in the back of the cab. We hit the airport with passports and sleeping pills in hand. The U.S. Is waiting...

Lisbon

2009-10-29T01:25:00.001-07:00

(photo by Mike)

I'm missing Lisbon already - the winding, tile crusted streets, the gentle light, constant music, cafes with strong coffee and the constant threat of pickpockets. This is a city with both grandeur and grit. In a shady bar I watched a transvestite prostitute for whom any eye contact meant business. Two muscled handsome asked me to take their picture - muscled puffed - necks and faces red. I thought they were macho soccer fans, and they were, except that their legs were twined round each other. There was a hair in my whiskey, a fight over cigarettes at the dispenser, and a woman mopping vomit off the dance floor -forcing lively moves on the listless couple dancing there... In the theaters we saw Africans braving the film grain sand and heat of the Sahara to reach new lives, (Mirages) we saw a Romanian couple in their 8O's gently allowing death, tempered by long love, to enter their lives (Constantine and Elena) and we saw my family loved by strangers. Evenings were spent on a terrace, eating drinking and learning how much great cinema has been denied US viewing because of the cold war scholarship. On our last night we danced to Lisbon pop, ESG and the Clash with filmmakers and festivals volunteers - all I remember is hair and hips and eyes circling round, Cinta's hand in mine, Joana’s sly smile, Marta's boots... A woman's scooped neck linen blouse with golden spangles shaking, a boy's tight ass in white, wine stained jeans, moving across the dance floor. Winning the prize here meant something more than film credentials; it meant we touched the woman and men here who gave us such living glimpse of the place.

PS. Mike has a great selection of photos here!
http://www.octobercountryfilm.com/stills/doclisboa2009/album/index.html

Jet (lag) Set

2009-08-25T10:21:00.000-07:00

I’ve just come from Switzerland where ordering and categorizing are sources of national pride, still it's taken a week to get the chronology of the trip aligned. my brain has been this spinning globe, shedding the grid the marks it as it turns - longitude, latitude, time zones, borders all a muddle. NYC - hot, fire escape Brooklyn days; nights in 50's, hysterical America with Nick Ray... In Philly we talked with a former prisoner about the experiments done to him, horror stories from the maze of the prison, but he’s full of generous talk and love… In the Mutter museum, the pathological specimens float quietly, strangely calm, like sea horses or horse crabs, in their thick fluid… Outside NYC, photographing the beach and an abandoned military base, we think we’ve gotten poison Ivy and wait for the rash, we plunge into the curling waves in our underwear…Across the same ocean, in Locarno, a thunderstorm drenches the narrow streets, cobble stones flash, sitting in the light of the largest movie screen in Europe, people under umbrellas watch a couple fucking out their last days on earth… The boys on scooters crowd the rotunda, preening and pouting. The girls do the same till 1 am, then they scream and cry in Italian.

By daylight the clipped lines of the buildings – old and new – sit in contrast to the rugged curves of the Alps. To my mind there is a tension between line and curve everywhere here. The older Swiss don’t seem to mind but the younger ones do. On the shore of the lake, I talk boyfriends, lust, loyalty with a lovely boy. He trembles when he responds. I ask if it’s hard to talk about being gay. “No,” he says, “It’s hard to talk about feelings here.” He stands by the edge of the path. A sprinkler spins toward him, spraying water within a half inch of his shoulder but leaving him dry. “So fucking Swiss.” He laughs. The dark lake behind him is so quiet I think it has, Swiss and sensible, gone to sleep. I get in at 5 AM and lay staring at the metal dinning room table thinking that a ghost here would not be a flowing, ephemeral thing but the line of the table’s edge, a hand rail, a street sign, that suddenly take on ominous intelligence.

Back in NYC the lines of the city are age worn and chewed. The buildings seem warped with humidity. Damp skin. Damp hair, lots of it. A fan cools our naked bodies on a damp bed. It's a good thing in the end, all this humidity - It keeps the trip something physical. There's no forgetting the body to the flow of images. Sleepy at the end of a midnight party. Last night. My travel is almost over. There’s a see – saw in my mind. There’s a globe. There’s a hula hoop spinning round a tight waist on on the dance floor...

LA/DC/NYC

2009-08-05T22:36:00.000-07:00

between the passive, sterile environment of planes and airports, there is one large city of concrete, greasy steel, and elegant line; of static images and the mobile living and all shades in between (films -so many films); rain on battered brick;warm nights of skin and sweat and sheet and hair; dancing till 5 am, crying with a friend coping with cancer; Irma Thomas wailing through the night streets where the girls' dresses are brighter than the neon signs above them. Above it all, the moon, growing full and fat to remind me how little it all is....

Car Wash

2009-08-05T22:26:00.001-07:00

The excitement begins with the soap smell and the sudden wet, grinding, surround sound. Water rushes over the glass. In the back seat you are in a spaceship hitting warp-drive, a submarine caught in the Bermuda Triangle or in the belly of a deep sea beast... then it winds down and it's just Sunday, on the way to church. The last hope of adventure fades as you stand on the hot asphalt watching your dad drying the windshield and your mom vacuum the seats in their fancy clothes.

UPSTATE UPDATE

2009-05-19T11:40:00.000-07:00

OUT W/DAD AND CHRIS

HOME

DANEAL, MOM, ABEL

(c-section wound and tape)

HOME

Portland Spring

2009-05-08T15:53:00.000-07:00

I spent the afternoon watching petals playing confetti tricks, tumbling, teasing and chasing each other. To match Portland's exuberant spring I read Whitman. To temper Whitman's exuberance, I read Jack Spicer's ode to him. They've stayed on my shoulders, angel and devils both while the spring sends me happily restless, horny, and picture hungry all over the place.

I raised the camera hoping to catch the petals as they fell through the shadows of tree limbs. They fell, touched the sidewalk, then a wind moved down the street lifting them back up, high into the air. I felt an impossible reversal of time was happening. Maybe because it was my goal to freeze time, it seemed completely plausible for that instant that each petal would find the blossom it had fallen from.

Downtown at night. A Ferris Wheel stood by the river like a giant, heavy web. I could picture the spider that wove it –60's Japanese, all giggling rubber and shinning plastic eyes.I wanted to get close but police cars rolled along the street,shining spot lights into the empty fairgrounds.

I met friends and followed them into a dance club. A disco ball sent light shards into the air – a metallic inversion of the blossoms in the wind that afternoon. I watched the petals of light sail out from the spinning mirrors to coat and slide across the vain, lovely, dancing bodies.

In a velvety bar a young country band yodelled out tepid imitations. In another two old men stared at leather porn on an old TV. There are flowers on every table. In the neon and cathode light, they could have been real. One of the old men gave me a whiskey creased grin. "Hello, It's been ages..." he said, "Yes it has," I said, "since I've never met you before. " He smiled and turned back to the sling pounding on the screen. He looked at me once more, quickly, slyly. Both of us understood that neither would look again. I snapped a shot of the flowers –their fakery revealed by the flash. Spicer's poem whispered to me "the cocksuckers, Walt Whitman, were counting on you."

Durham, NYC, Philadelphia

2009-04-14T14:13:00.000-07:00

On the gray spring days in Portland, it’s common to see windows with the curtains open and warm electric light revealing the wall colors and pictures hanging inside. On this gray afternoon, my memories of the trip to NC, NYC, and Philadelphia seem the same – bright windows: framed, luminous interior scenes; pictures within pictures, places within places. In Durham, boutiques and restaurants do business in redecorated cigarette factories and the few remaining blue collar shops sit between rows of empty storefronts. In a bright hotel lobby there is serious film talk, drunken film chatter. In the ballrooms there are giant screens flickering with images from around the world. In Burma monks are battered by clubs, a man is shot in the street - the slow arc of his death shown from multiple angles. In Afghanistan a father weeps, prisoners are beheaded behind a square of black, hanging mid-frame, that blocks the sight of their necks but not their twitching limbs or the blood flowing into the dry earth. In India, a Muslim video-store owner remakes Superman – our skinny hero flies, fights, dances. In Russia, sleeping passengers on the Trans Siberian tell their prophetic dreams…

In Raleigh, miss Pork Chop opens the show by calling the audience a “pack of redneck cocksuckers, cuntslurpers, and white trash sons of bitches.” The audience agrees. In a park filled with blooming dogwood, I catch a trace scent of drying tobacco –imagined maybe, but with it comes the North Carolina I remember -– honeysuckle and chicken shit, the hot metal and asphalt of a trailer park, a dirt road and a dusty school bus, a black eye, a bloody nose, the word FAGGOT again and again, furtive sex in a shack in the woods, a girl I can’t believe loves me and we are running off to New York City together, we’re never coming back…

In New York and Philadelphia flowers bloom everywhere, bright and soft in contrast to the brick, concrete, and metal around them. The clouds break for a moment. A chill wind shakes a cherry tree. Petals fill the air, flickering like movie images in the sun. As the light fades, they land, clinging and trembling on the city’s hard-scrubbed surfaces.

The South By SouthWest Radiation Treatment

2009-03-20T15:37:00.001-07:00

Despite being at the South By Southwest Film Festival, I spent little time watching movies. Because of the festival and our own recent filming, Austin had become a town I associated completely with film, a town of images. Our second day there however, the temperature hit 81 degrees, burning a bright hole through the idea of film like celluloid caught in projector. Sun screen beat out screening rooms, I could barely take a picture let alone address cinema. Laying by the water or walking past the bright, battered murals and signs on South Congress I felt each moment sweating by, happily letting it go, happy to walk, watch, feel my blood beat and sweat flow. The photos are weak, and I missed some extraordinary films, but Austin has a physical memory now –my arms are marked with it, pink and still gently warm. Ingrid Kopp and I talked about what the skin remembers - South Africa for her, NC, for me, both of us agreeing that our skins grew nostalgic at the first touch of the sun's heat, remembering the tanned, blonde kids we once were, forgetting, at least along our exposed arms, legs, faces, the pale, thin skinned adults we've become... I told her that when I was in Cancer treatment, I kept sending my mind into the darkness of my body, searching for the disease but feeling nothing, no physical presence, no bone or blood or tissue wetness – not even temperature. During this time I craved light like never before -even San Francisco's foggy sun drew me away from searching fruitlessly for sickness, pulling me up to my own skin and through the skin back into the world. At night in Austin I carried the warm, solid world on my pink skin, happy to be there at festival dinners and parties, while we talked film, more film, and boozed the warm night way.

PS. PICS FROM SOUTH AUSTIN:

The complete history of Austin as presented by FoodMart.

The Texas Carne Asada Massacre at Polvo's

Shop window on South Congress

Lights on South Congress

SF RECENTLY

2009-03-15T09:59:00.000-07:00

TURK ST

Sure I could have danced to candy disco with pretty young men under disco lights that gleamed off walls hung with glossy 70's porn, but the real party, a party of one, was out on the street. I passed her the ragged stump of joint and we danced to the music bleeding from the club. Someone called her from the dark doorway across the street and she strutted off, stopping cars to shake her ass on their bumpers while the drivers cheered. I am amazed the the tenderloin remains unchanged, ringed in as it is by downtown and a gentrifying Polk St All that is drugged up, fucked up, down on its luck, racist, multicultural, multisexual, vibrant, and pulsing about SF is caught here. Let the lurid light shine in these darkening days.

GANNET

In the mission there was music as well, Gannet's gymnastic piano playing, his calloused fingers abusing the keys, forcing notes to backflip, tumble, launch and swing round. He was happy and talkative (with his new communication device) and led me round the house showing me new things and waiting by old items (like the blue desk in what was once my room) for me to use the old phrases and play old games. His laughter was full and wet. We walked to the store and I watched him with Alex, who has worked with him since before I left. They have such a calm relationship and Alex has made Gannet so independent. When I left them they were shopping, gannet lifting items and carrying them along to the next aisle. For the first time since I stopped living and working with him, I felt It was a good thing that I left, that he was in better hands than I had for Gannet to grow. I walked away missing the drooling little bastard, but not worried about him. That gave me a pain, a short selfish one, letting go of the worry that is so much apart of loving him. But it passed quickly as I hit mission St. and for once after seeing him walked our old hood smiling rather than holding back tears.

TRUE/FALSE

2009-03-04T14:52:00.001-08:00

(photo by Ingrid Kopp)

Confessions of a Film Festival Virgin

What a special kind of madness this festival was – arriving in the dead quiet airport – a 2 hour shuttle ride through what should have been Missouri but was only a dark road light by billboards for chain restaurants, chur, and adult bookstores. In town we meet and greet with only our films and a few drinks to open up communication. But it works and works well. The next day we get up, walk the bright and friendly town, go into darkness to watch the horrors and joys of life compressed and flickering, then come out to give praise and talk business. At night, after negotiating the shifting ground of the documentary film world and the flux of emotions brought on by the films themselves, we drink and happily deprive ourselves of sleep. By our last screening I was so raw from everything I’d seen that I could barely speak, let alone speak about our film. Seeing my family’s story among such work and appreciated by such a caliber of people split me right down the middle –it’s crazy to be so happy because your family is so sad. To complicate all this, there in audience were Genevieve and Logan who I haven’t seen 12 years and whose love I thought I’d lost. In the midst of all the loaded images, all the talking of film, there I was, held by Genevieve, warm and strong as ever. Thanks again to Paul Sturtz and David Wilson for an experience beyond anything I’d expected.

(March March Parade)

The Award Goes To…

It’s pointless to give a “best” list since I missed half the films I wanted to see and became pals with most of the filmmakers whose films I did. Instead I’ll give my 1st annual Completely Biased Appreciation Awards to some of the folks I met:

First of all the Tough Love Awards go to Esther Robinson, Debra Zimmerman, Jess Search, Heather Croall,Matt Dentler, Kirby Dick, and Rachel Rosen who took on our film like social workers considering the future an at risk child. Many folks helped but these guys really outlined our probation period. Heather also gets the “Why Am I Hearing Chains In the Room Next Door?” special prize.

Family Ghost Awards go to Rick Minnich and Matt Sweetwood (Forgetting Dad)who are not afraid of confronting emotional ambiguity. Also to Kimberly Reed whose bravery and intelligence are matched only by her elegance. Her Prodigal Sons looks at the complications of memory, identity, family love, and violence with sharp sight and unflinching tenderness.

Teen Spirit Awards go to the Brits – Ingrid Kopp, Nick Abraham (The Posters From the Walls) and Jamie Jay Johnson whose Sounds Like Teen Spirit shows us a Europe whose borders are drawn in glitter –a substance that bridges the gap between heartbreak, victory, and national pride. This film made me sure that my inner child is a 13 year-old girl (not just an immature drag queen.)

The Laugh At A Hopeless Cause Awardd goes to The Yes Men Fix the World. It’s delightful as always to see Andy Bichlbaum in action, shifting his persona from a self effacing Clark Kent to would be Superman. Splashing close behind is John Maringouin and Molly Lynch’s Big River Man – which is also the only film from the 4th dimension I have ever seen.

The Quiet Dignity Prize goes to Jean-Pierre Duret, both for himself and the quiet dignity he reveals in his young subjects. Because We Were Born is without doubt the most beautiful of all the films I saw at the festival.

The “Damn son, How’d You Get So Good!” Award goes to Darius Mardur whose Loot has one of the most powerful moments I have ever seen in a documentary and whose charm and inclusiveness make it apparent at first meeting how he got his astounding story.

The Balance Your Profession With Your Cocktail Glass Award goes to Brian Brooks
For serious engagement with the filmmakers and the parties.

The Best Live Performance In Front of A Camera goes to Kimberly Chew, the newswoman who interviewed us live. Seeming to pull a private TV signal into her body she transformed from a soft spoken woman focused on her lines into a full blown television personality –an impressive and frightening skill.

(Before and after)

The Dance Floor Award goes to me - an honor bestowed by Jamie Jay Johnson, who has seen Miss Junior Ukraine in action, (and because jumpin’ around to New Order got me hit on.)

Finally the Life Together Award goes to Mike Palmieri, but I’m the lucky one.

LONE STAR BLUES...

2009-02-18T20:40:00.000-08:00

AUSTIN CITY LIMITATIONS
On our way to Austin to start our new film on human guinea pigs for drug companies. Beside me on the plane a woman begins quilting – the needle poking with a glint through the cloth, rising, diving as we take off. Behind her, outside the window, a tilting patchwork of industrial parks and suburbs. Ghostly piped in country music fills the airport when we arrive. I see the walls are studded with metal plaques embossed with bats, cowboys, roses. Each one reads Texas, Mythology. Reality

LONE STAR LOVE

In Oil Can Harry’s I watch a gorgeous, ferocious drag show. Ladies from all over the west. There’s no irony here, no deconstruction or fun and filth – this is glamour as a form of possession. At the bar, the bar tender chats on and on about the city. A liberal jewel he calls it, and tells how everyone who escapes the rest of Texas is so happy to be here. “It’s bad out there you know,” he says with a solemn nod, then prances off behind piled, glinting bottles. I think of the state outside this rising “jewel” city, music soaked and ringed by sagging neighborhoods. Beyond a long darkness stretches north up through Nebraska, west toward California. Mathew Shepard and his restless ghost kin walk the empty roads out there. Meanwhile on the stage, eyes, dresses, and heels flutter and glitter. Lips part making soundless air fill with song. It may not be Gospel, but it sure is revival.

LAB RAT BLUES
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Here’s Paul. One of our subjects. He calls himself “just another lab rat,” and lives by doing clinical studies. For the past year he has lived in hotels and clinics. In his room he tells us that he grew up in group homes and that the behavioral rules imposed by drug test-studies give him comforting, familiar structure. Outside the clinics he has nothing to work toward, nothing to keep him out of trouble. He tells us other, harsher parts of his life that I’ll keep private. He show’s his many needle scars from giving blood. Finally, he demonstrates making balloon animals. We leave him downtown, making hearts and roses, standing alone in the turgid flow of Valentine’s Day partiers on 6th st.

ENVY THE WIND
Downtown Austin is harsh under the winter sky. We are here but not because October Country made it into South by Southwest – we heard the programmers loved it but still it was the last film not to be chosen. To beat all, Lucinda Williams is coming but not till we leave. After the grim days of filming Paul’s stories and worrying about the future of October Country, Mike and I lost it one night. In good ol’ country fashion we stumbled home and had a blow out fight. Slams and shatters. Tears and kisses. The kind of fight that eventually leads to carefully spoken admissions of fears, worries, and finally the return of love – that sweet, toothy beast that it is. The kind of fight that is not with your lover at all, but with all the world that comes between the two of you, the world that can only be beaten back with shouts and good cry. Afterwards I lay there thinking of Lucinda Williams singing with that rusted iron voice of hers “I envy the wind.” Whenever Mike used to travel, I played that song endlessly, slipping images of his body into the lyrics, envying the wind, the sun, the rain that touched him when I could not. He lay beside me, sleeping peacefully and I envied the dreams that touched him.

In the morning hugs with averted eyes and guilty smiles, we hit the town, driving into sunny clapboard neighborhoods with weary wriggle-limbed trees and brilliant Mexican décor on everything. I saw a poster of Lucinda Williams, looking outward toward the severe world. Integrity schtick, but I bought it happily, thinking this time of Sidewalks of the City. “Hold me baby, give me some faith…give me some grace…tell me good things, tell me that my world is safe." A yellow elephant watched over us. A gigantic cupcake spun atop an Airstream trailer. Somewhere Kitty Wells was singing. Everything was safe enough.

P.S. "Settle down on a hurt as big as Robert Mitchum and listen to Lucinda Williams" *

* lyrics by Vic Chestnut

Portland Recently

2009-02-18T19:48:00.001-08:00

Portland Recently

2009-02-05T12:15:00.000-08:00

I think it began with those windy days and nights, everything shaking, and the shake-up continues. So much change in a month or so. Snow, fog, sun, and the gloom returning. Neva is beginning to outwit her disability by learning her first word - placing her small fingers on my own and making a sign for MORE. MORE everything – food, music, play and MORE understanding. Last time I worked with her I left her crying in her mother's arms because I couldn't understand what she needed. Meanwhile there was scandal and protest and everyone on either side wanting MORE attention. Seeing the christian with his bullhorn, I wish we all spoke in Neva's manner - silently, gently touching. The fog came and quieted nights in the SE, making basketball hoops into strange necklaces, figures into shadows. Glowing all over the neighborhood is a sign showing a woman with an ecstatic expression that should illustrate joy over savings on home loan rates. But look at her, the teeth, the nails, the wide eyes - she's a sign of wicked times. I call her the Mortgage Witch.

UPSTATE UPDATE

2008-12-27T12:49:00.000-08:00

U.S Marine Club

Outside a tavern

Downtown

Dad at Dunkin' Donuts

Money, of course, is tighter than ever. The whole family moved in together to help make ends meet. The result = Donna and Daneal both leaving and no longer speaking to my mom and dad. Daneal is also proudly pregnant. Neither have working phones or e-mails so I didn’t see them at all this time. My mother sighs about the situation then suggests the title for the “October Country” sequel should be called “It never fuckin’ ends.”

Chris is back home and got his GED after years of struggling with the test. He came into our room, all sincere and twitchy, to tell us how he felt about the film. He said that seeing my mom cry because he’d gone to jail “…just fuckin’ killed me. I knew how they felt when I got out, but to see it, how it hurt them, that just slayed me. After all that, I’m here with them now. They gave me a key. Nobody’s ever had trust in me like that. I kept thinking about it and helped me to keep working and get my GED.”

Chris

Isaiah with cellphone self-portrait

I also have a new foster brother named Isaiah – a sweet kid who put himself in foster care to escape his family situation and is now in community college. It meets all my expectations of family strangeness to come home to the would-be-gangster white kid and the soft-spoken black guy both calling my parents mom and dad. Upstairs Chris stomps and mouths along with thick, vulgar rap. In his room, Isaiah cranks Christian pop and contemporary gospel, crooning along fervently. Not since we lived south have I heard anyone raising their voice to Jesus in our home – even then it was a drunken uncle singing along with George Jones’ cover of “Walk with me Jesus.”

Photo of Isaiah's mom in his room

The house goes quiet after midnight. The music and multiple TV’s switch off. Snow muffles outside noise. My mother’s plush animals, hard faced Victorian dolls, and far, far too many Father Christmas figures watch over the living room. Black enamel eyes catch the blinking lights of the Christmas tree. Through the window I can see the luminous inflatable bear on the neighbors’ porch. The rotund bear doesn’t face the street but smiles into the neighbors’ living room window with immutable, insipid cheer. My mother tells us, “She just lost her son. He was overweight and didn’t breathe well. He had some kind of other problems, you know…mental. In summer he’d sit on the porch, but this year we didn’t see much of him. It’s only been a month….” During daytime bear lies in a deflated puddle of itself, rising, filling with air and light as darkness comes on.

We gave the family money for Christmas, not large amounts at all, but enough to help at this time of year. My parents were subdued in their thanks. Their awkwardness was the measurement of their appreciation. Soon though, they were talking about the film and how weird it was that strangers knew about their lives, but that they were proud of the story being told.

Desi, true to form, jumped about doing money spell-casting moves from her favorite Japanese cartoons.

At Denise’s house the shades were down. She looked pale, moved slow, but seemed happy. When we gave her the gift, she wept.

Despite memories of food stamps, trailer parks, Salvation Army clothes, worried Christmas mornings; despite making the film about life upstate – my own life has come so far and is so full of comfort that I’d forgotten what money can mean. Getting money when it is badly needed gives bodily relief, like food or warmth. You feel it right in your blood. On our first day visiting my mother paid for the heat oil with a tight face that brought a host of anxious memories back to me. Thanks to all of our participation in the film the damn oil bill is paid till spring.

EMPIRE STATEMENT

2008-12-21T18:42:00.000-08:00

Snowing in SoHo

Meanwhile...

UPSTATE
All aboard the Empire Builder. With snow flying outside the windows, obscuring the landscape, the train seemed to have some of the smoke, blur, and bluster of the steam engine era.

SHOPPING
These days even Walmart is too expensive. My mother shops at non name brand stores.

Listening To Music Listen...

2008-12-14T23:36:00.000-08:00

After working with both of them, Neva and Gannet have shown me in a very unique way that listening, while centered within the ears, is actually a full body interaction with sound/vibration. Their entire skin is a taut drum that bounces with each sound wave. Their hands seem to be both reaching for the sound and releasing it as it moves through them. Neva's hand raises, opens and closes, as if talking or pinching. It's a dancers move. Meanwhile her eyes close or roll up, almost gone white, as if to shut off the visual world –perhaps exactly that. Gannet's hands and arms flutter, taking a gawky, exuberant flight with the sounds he adores -musical, mechanical, both. I've never seen a more pure, wild relationship to sound.

I've been trying for years to write about the Mowat-Wilson Syndrome kids and how music affects them. But I can't get past the vibrating surface phenomenon. Here however is a fragment from Jean-Luc Nancy's "How Music Listens to Itself" that struck me: "... if the term "entendre"(hear/understand) had to signify only sonorous perception deprived of form, as soon as signals from everyday life are no longer perceived, is it possible that listening can go beyond and immediate apprehension of emotional impulses, movements, and resonances confusedly dependent on acquired habits regarding rhythm and tonality (speed or slowness, major and minor modes...)?"

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Again Jean-Luc Nancy:

"Music is the art of the hope of resonance: a sense that does not make sense except because of its resounding in itself...That is to say, the opening of the world in resonance, a world taken away from the arrangements of objects and subjects, back to it's own amplitude and making sense or else having its truth only in the affirmation that modulates this amplitude."

I see that affirmation, the reflection of music listening to itself, in and through the hands, arms, body, and bone flutter that Gannet and Neva share as the music begins.

Snow Day

2008-12-14T20:10:00.000-08:00

I woke to the sound of the wind whistling over the new house. Beneath this was a silence I remembered from waking up on 4th grade school mornings, knowing it had snowed and almost certain, by the thick, muffling quiet, that school would be closed. This morning I opened the blinds above the bed and lost myself in spinning flakes and thought of winters back East.

For a while we all lived in my grandparents’ house. 3 generations in a hand built, 3 bedroom home. Each winter we put plastic covering over the windows to keep out drafts. Translucent but not transparent, the plastic reduced the world beyond to a milky blur. The house creaked and the plastic rippled constantly – ship sounds. When we couldn’t afford fuel, we heated the rooms with portable kerosene heaters. We were dizzy and headachy most of the time. Only the picture window in the front room was uncovered. It looked out to the ash woods across the road and two birch trees that grew in the front yard. When the snow fell really heavily the birches dissappeared -only the dark knots on their bark were visible, like black eyes hanging in white.

A storm came in one night, dropping feet snow. On the TV, the weatherman split into two, sometimes three blurry copies of himself as the wind spun the antennae on the roof. My grandfather had a heart attack that night. Using phone and CB radio, we called neighbors to help dig out the 20-yard drive to the house so the ambulance could get in. They arrived on snowmobiles and trucks with plows attached. We dug like crazy while my grandmother kept him warm. The big plow appeared at top of the hill, a strange angel with its wings parting the snow on both sides of the road and its red light spinning in the dark air. Behind came the ambulance. My grandfather was fine.

The simplest memory is winter on the Blue Ridge Mountains. A gentle snowfall softening and fading the old, hard rock hills till the only difference between sky and earth was color. In the distance even this distinction blurred.

It’s dark now and the icy streets shine the same as the streetlights above them. In places it looks as if the orange light melted down on the asphalt, then hardened again in long, dimly shinning rows.

Scraping the Surface

2008-11-29T23:04:00.000-08:00

The old house is being undone, the new house is being redone, and I’m in between both, part of me anyway. During moving, I had a tooth pulled and, drooling and lisping, continued hefting beds and boxes with blood on my tongue and my head in a vicodin happy haze. Trust me fellas, hernias can be fun! Slowly the house emptied, blank and exposed, smaller than it seemed while we lived there. I fell asleep in a new room and dreamed the house had floors made of hundreds of shinning pulled teeth. I woke from this dream thinking that the new place, which was built in 1902, would be unfamiliar and spooky. Instead it was perfectly quiet, still full of the bland, wholesome, family energy that it had when we first saw it.
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Today workers are sanding away at the newly exposed floors, sawdust settling on newly painted walls. Slowly we are erasing those who lived there recently and finding vague clues to the house’s past. there's a huge iron safe in the basement with the door removed, but lying nearby. At its clawfoot base, paint on the basement floor shows at least three coats of different shades and ages, all painted around the safe. It may have belonged to the original owners. Under the carpet we found odd holes in the floor, linoleum, and signs of old wear and damage. It’s believed that this kind of work stirs up ghosts.

The other night I fell asleep on the sofa with my mouth throbbing and dreamed I heard a car engine outside, throbbing as well, and making a high rise and fall sound like a crying child. Outside sitting in the crossroads of 33rd and Yamhill there was a white convertible, made of ivory I think. The top was down and inside were a man and woman, both very pale with long, white hair. I think they were the tooth fairy and the spirit of vicodin out for a joy ride. I should have put the pulled tooth under my pillow, maybe I would have found a prescription there in the morning.

Haints - collected stories

2008-10-27T18:05:00.000-07:00

Upstate NY

“All four of them were huffing glue. He said so, the one who survived. They were on the way back from a show in Syracuse and something came out of the woods, right in front of the car. The driver, his head was cut off. His body stuck in the wind shield. Ozzy still grinning on his t-shirt.”

“She had a restraining order but she came home from the late shift and found him waiting in her house. She ran out but he caught and killed her right there in the road. After that, they say you’d see her at night, running toward the passing cars. It was a dirt road back then. No one saw her after they paved it.”

“You can still hear her walking in the old jail house. She was the last woman hanged in the state.” “Why?” “Her husband beat her, so she killed him, chopped him and fed him to the pigs.” “No shit. I know some girls who should start raising pigs.”

“He went to work down at Remington’s, making rifles all week and doing the National Guard for the extra cash on the weekend. He liked it. He called it playing soldier. He never expected to leave the valley, let alone go over there. He’d been gone about a month when I saw him under that old tree. Just like grandpa. Grandma Bee knew he’d died in the hospital ‘cause she’d seen him under that tree.”

( from allemeda moody)
“I worked that factory all my life and ghosts don’t give me no peace except on Sundays. Anybody making rifles has got blood on their hands and they better accept it quick, else the haints will make them crazy.

West Virginia

“He ‘d lost his job and tried hunting to put some meat on the table. I don’t think he saw a deer once though, not as goosed up as he’d get. One night he found a dead buck on the side of the road. It hadn’t been hit, it was just lying there with its tongue hanging out. He shot it and tossed it in the back of the truck. He told his wife he’d bagged it and she was proud of him catching such a big one. They had it butchered and she cooked up the venison. His whole family got sick -–the runs, heaving up, and crazy fever. They thought it was food poison but after a week it didn’t stop. At night he’d hear kicking and banging in the back of his truck. He told his wife the truth and buried the rest of the meat in the back yard. They got better. He got food stamps and bought hamburger.”

Atlanta

Miss Thang 1.
She came up to Memphis. Miss Thang, Miss Thang, she called everyone, and that’s what we called her. She wore this big, fucked-up wig, like a country star. She worked the alley behind the theatre and called all her tricks her stage hands, her back stage Johnnies. She got strung out, always pissing us off and stealing shit. Somebody painted MISS THANG HAS THE AIDS,” all over the street. She did and she had to work there with everybody knowin’ it. We didn’t see her down there for while, then word got around she’d died in the hospice. If you think you got AIDS go down to the alley. If you got it, you’ll see her.

Miss Thang 2.
She had a chest like Dolly’s, a real good job. She said a Nashville record guy paid for it. The other girls knew she was some hick though. They teased her accent, “Oh, miss Thang fortigot her panties! She’s come all untucked.” When she worked her cleavage they’d yell, “Hey farm girl, you use cow-shit to make them titties grow?” She’d laugh and say, “Y’all know miss thang has it all.” Then somebody would say, “Get your operation and you might have a little less.” “Oh no” she’d say, “Mama’s got titties and a bottle to suck on, Miss thang has it all!” Some guys got hold of her one night. They cut off her tits and her dick, and left her in the dumpster. The girls say she’s out there still, watching over them. If they see her, or hear “Miss Thang’s got it all” they won’t go with any johns.

MONSTER SHOW

2008-10-27T17:52:00.000-07:00

stories from folklore and dreams I've had

GHOSTS

One night all the sheets in the city rose up and slipped out the window. They fell slowly toward the street, never striking the ground but billowing up into ghostly shapes, growing large dark eyes. There were hundreds of them –a floating parade that absorbed nearly all the sound around them - no traffic, no humming wires, only the rustle of swaying fabric.

Ghosts have sewing circles whenever their sheets and shrouds are torn. They display their rips and tears and flutter together, needles in hand. They sigh and shiver with each stitch. Those who are not damaged huddle together doing embroidery, they clamp wooden hoops on each other and set to work. In black thread they stitch in words like “ Patient” “Drowsy,” and “Dumbfounded.”

Ghosts of the hanged gather for a bit of fun at the gallows tree. Taking turns they use a shabby old noose as a rope swing. They attain tremendous height and speed as they sail along, wail ing out the crimes and circumstances that brought about their execution at the old tree – Thievery, rapes, forbidden trysts, lynchings, failed escapes–all mingling with giggles and shrill cries of playground delight.

If you find a ghost alone on a city street, lift its shroud. Beneath the hem you will see night hills and a sparkling city under bright stars. The sheet will fall like a theatre curtain and you will never be content in this world again.

WITCHES.

Your lover may be unfaithful or may be a witch. If you wake alone in bed at after midnight, check all around the house. If you find your lover’s skin you will know he or she has left it behind to ride the wind. Sprinkle salt inside the skin and your lover will never be able to get back inside.

If you shoot yourself in the head, and regret it, plump little witches will flock to the broken, pulpy mess of your skull. They will cry and carry on, but slowly rebuild your head with mud and straw. They will huddle together, wiggling their fat bottoms till their buttocks become the folds of a new brain. After your resurrection, the priests will tell you to find God but how can you with a head full of witches?

When you break an egg, toss the shell over your shoulder, crying “Witch, here is your boat.” When the floods come at the end of the world, a woman in a white boat with white sails will rescue you.

Be careful with your tears, witches collect them to make jewelry.

WEREWOLVES

There is a werewolf at the end of every dark hallway and there is a werewolf in every part of your body.

There was a boy who had cancer and called a werewolf to eat it out of him. He had to be careful the wolf ate only the disease and not the rest of him. There was a girl who had a broken heart and also called the werewolf. He did not stop at her heart but hollowed her out completely, just as she wanted him to do.

Look for a wolf everyday. You’ll find one.

THE DEVIL HIMSELF.

The Devil has a camera with a lens made from the eye of a suicide. No matter where you point it or what you see through the viewfinder, ghosts will appear in the photograph.

The Devil has a small jar filled with the night sky. Darkness floats in its center. At the bottom of the jar are two tiny golden wing-bones. This is the aborted fetus of an angel. It causes women to miscarry, sterility in men, and birth defects in the unborn.

The Devil loves to relax with his favorite book. This is a list of every scream ever uttered on the face of the earth. It is divided into chapters such as, torture, war, famine and pestilence, love, despair, and economics.

A Recipe From the Devil’s Cookbook:

Pearls before Swine.
Take ripe pearls,
boil them in a sow’s ear till they are soft and tender.
Season to taste with snobbery
Garnish with pretension.

Remember, if you feed the Devil, use a long spoon.