beginning of the end of innocence

I loved you for your mind until it seeped from your body in whisky sweat and beer shits. I loved the way you could turn a phrase, and then the phrases turned against you.

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I was hiding under my bed. My child's logic had convinced me that the cover of bed would protect me from the impending world's end I had been warned about the day before.
"The world is gonna end tomorrow at two pee emm," Eric had told me, quite matter-of-factly, as we sat on the lawn playing with trucks and wooden blocks.
"How do you know?" I had asked.
"My dad told me."
In my three year old mind's eye, the sky ripped open from one end to the other. The sun turned a cold white nothing as clouds of black locusts swarmed to engulf us. "Oh," I muttered.

"What are you doing under there?" It was my father. I had been discovered. I peered out from behind the pink dust ruffle at warm blue eyes, crinkled softly at the corners. He was on his hands and knees, smiling jovially. I wrinkled my brow and sniffled. "Jana? Why are you under the bed?"
I shrugged and looked away. So, he doesn't know. Oh, how could it be possible, not only to be lashed to this heavy burden of knowledge, but now to have to break the news to my darling father. I couldn't bear it; I couldn't stand to be the harbinger of such terrible news. I squeezed my eyes closed tight against the sobs pushing upward.
"Sweetheart, what's wrong?"
I crawled further back into the confines of under-the-bed, curling into a tight ball and hugging myself against the impending disaster of nothingness I could not dare disclose. I sobbed uncontrollably for a moment, and then I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up. "I can't help you if you don't tell me what's wrong." His soft eyes had grown wide with concern. "Did you hurt yourself?"
My only response was a choke of tears. How, how could I tell him the awful truth?
"Jana?" he asked again, tugging gently on my arm. My tears continued, unfazed. He gripped my arm harder. "Jana," he said, his voice becoming stern, "come out here and tell me what's wrong." He was serious now. Fragments of understanding darted in and out of my head. Was it more important to obey my father, or to protect him from this tragic news? I could not figure it out. "Jana!" He raised his voice and gave my arm a firm tug. I slowly unwrapped myself and crawled toward him, emerging soggy and red from beneath the bed.
"Now tell me what's going on."
This must be a cruel joke. Surely if Eric's father knows, my own father must. Fathers were infallible, as far as I could tell, and they shared a common knowledge unknown to little children. Why would my father play such a mean joke on me? "Don't you know?", I asked, turning away to cry.
He just wrapped his arms around me and held me close, rocking me gently. "I can't read your mind," he laughed softly, "you have to tell me what's wrong."
I pushed him away, annoyed and confused. "The world is going to end!"
He huffed, hiding a half-smile. "What?!"
I spied his amusement. He must have known all along, and now he was laughing at me. I pouted flamboyantly.
"Who told you that?"
"Eric did, yesterday." I paused, waiting for an explanation, but he only looked on, so I continued. "He said the world would end today at two."
My father smiled and looked up. How could he smile at a time like this? Didn't he understand the implications of what I was telling him? "Oh honey, Eric's just been teasing you."
"No, his dad told him!" Why wasn't he taking this seriously?
"Well, it's five to two now, so we'll just sit here together and wait, and if two comes and goes and we're still here, we'll know it wasn't true."
I gasped and hugged him tight. Five more minutes and everything would end. This beautiful world that I had only just begun to discover would be torn from me. A vast, impossible nothingness waited coldly on the other side of two o'clock, baited breath blowing hot and sticky over the back of my neck. "What if it's true?" I whispered.
"It isn't true, sweetie."
"How much longer?"
"One minute."
I held my breath. In my mind I pictured my mother, glowing in the afternoon sun. She was smiling and waving at me, wearing a white dress with tiny blue flowers, her hair tumbling down her back in loose curls. She called my name, her face warm and beautiful. She was the most beautiful thing I could imagine. I would never see her again.
"How much longer?"
"Thirty seconds."
I tried to remember what a second felt like. I knew it was less than a minute, but how much less? I wished my mother was in my room with us, wished we could all welcome in the end of everything together. I thought of her, alone somewhere, unaware of the fate that was nearly upon her. How cruel, how awful and unfair.
"There, look." My father held his watch up for me to see. 2:00 blinked black against the gray background.
"But . . . "
"It's two now, and we're still here, and nothing has changed. See, Eric was just teasing you."
"But maybe it will come in another minute." Eric's father couldn't have been wrong about this.
"No, sweetheart, it isn't true. Eric lied to you. Remember how the prayer goes? 'World without end, amen.' Eric was just trying to scare you."
"But . . . why?" My mind danced in a thousand different directions. He was my friend, my best friend. The word 'lie' tumbled around my head, bouncing to and fro. A lie was a sin, and a lie was something you could be punished for. A lie was something that bad people told. You could lie on a bed, and you could also lie on the floor. You could lie down or you could tell a lie, but these were two different things. I understood how to lie down on something, but I couldn't figure out how to tell a lie, or more importantly, why to tell a lie. What was the point of something like that?
"He was just teasing you, because he likes you."
You lie because you like someone? Oh, I thought, I give up. People don't make any sense.

I forgot to learn not to forget what I learned

pearls of wisdom from the jana of one year ago:

Yes, as far as I can see it, the more you learn, the less you know. Truths that seemed so concrete dissolve before your eyes. Values you held so dear become trite and confused. The very fabric you thought held the world together turns out to be nothing more than a glare from the sun, and it comes and goes as the earth turns in orbit. The search for knowledge is futile, and yet, YET, it is our ultimate nature to keep searching, even when all hope seems lost, even when any concept of TRUTH becomes just another hidden message written in disappearing ink. Search until the day we die, and maybe, maybe in that final moment some illumination is provided. Or if we’re lucky, learn before the end the ultimate truth, the one that hints itself at us our whole lives but that we are much to logical of creatures to ever believe – this world is chaos, there is no understanding, no KNOWING. I guess, as long as we can keep the journey as fulfilling as possible, that’s really the key.

Inland Empire

Before writing about Inland Empire, I thought I'd listen to Mark Kermode's review, because I was sure it would be a terrible pan and it would give me something to react against. Turns out that Mark Kermode loved it, reconfirming the fact that Mark Kermode is the most brilliant film reviewer working. If your movie taste is at all similar to my own, I highly recommend checking out Kermode's podcast, which is informative, often dead-on, and very entertaining in a posh british sort of way. Good stuff.

But yes, back to David Lynch's magnum opus. Inland Empire is three hours long, shot with dv, more or less completely lacking a coherent plot, and it's fan-fucking-tastic. If you expect your cinematic experiences to 'make sense,' 'tell a coherent story,' or 'follow a three-act plot structure,' then I'm afraid you might find Inland Empire a bit of a disappointment. For an aspiring filmmaker like myself, this film was, in the first, a testament to the fact that you don't need high production values or fancy equipment to make a great film. Of course, this fact is also apparent in the early work of directors like Robert Rodriguez and John Cassavetes, but it is quite rare to see a successful and established director take the skills acquired from years of filmmaking and apply them back to a super low-budget format. The results are . . . inspiring, to say the least.

All of the classic Lynch tropes are there -- powerful sound design, strange and deformed characters, red velvet curtains . . . and the themes of changing identities, the distance between what you see and what you think you see, etc are continued and explored further. In a David Lynch movie, and especially in Inland Empire, 'continuity editing' is often just a ruse, and you are made constantly aware that the normal assumptions the brain automatically makes to link shots and scenery together simply don't apply. As this is something I'm quite interested in exploring in my own work, I find it incredibly exciting to see such a fascinating and established director playing in these ways.

Perhaps one of the greatest things about a Lynch movie (made more so by the incredibly scope of Inland Empire) is that, upon leaving, there are several hours during which the entire world looks like it has been cut straight out of one of his films. He has an eye for the bizarre that surrounds us, the strange that emerges readily from the mundane it hides so loosely behind. Part of the appeal of his films is that they give us the chance to see the world through his hyper-sensitive eyes, which make the every-day so exciting and strange.

No, it is obviously not for everyone. If you haven't liked his previous work, there is no way you'll like the new one. I expected overindulgent nonsensical ramble, and would have been happy with that. I was surprised, however, to find the film much less overindulgent and nonsensical than I had anticipated. Still, for three hours without a coherent linear plot, you have to be a fan to start. Which I am, and made more so now. It's good fun . . . the dance sequences are amazing.

The excitement for me, is this: I can watch The Last King of Scotland and be amazed, and say that's a great film, fantastic, incredible. But the actors, the production value, the on-location shooting, all mean it is only something I can watch and enjoy. I can't imagine being a part of anything like that, or, obviously, making something like that. With Inland Empire, not only is it fantastic, beautiful, good actors, multiple locations, etc . . . but it is not so out of reach either. It isn't just amazing, it's also inspiring. It gives me some ideas to work toward. Which is why, though I would say that Last King of Scotland is a better film, I am more grateful for having seen Inland Empire, because it offers more nourishment.

winter: fade to black

I should really stop writing so much poetry... Look for a discussion of David Lynch's new 'Inland Empire' coming shortly. Until then, a little poem about spring:

The Ides of March are burning
and the North Sea tide is turning
The evening sky still glowing
over wind and showers blowing
over rivers heavy flowing
The temperature is rising
which is not at all surprising
for the Ides of March are burning
Yes my darlings, spring has come.

lay down your arms, it's christmas

relaxation.
the marathon of work and stress ends. i am fulfilled, i am alone.
my mind tells my body it is time to rest. my body responds by shutting down.
we drink in a pub and listen to fiddle and mandolin, we break two glasses, we laugh and hug, we sing.
my mind tells my body it was only fooling, we cannot rest because the work in not finished. my body responds by shutting down.
fever dreams of sped-up worlds and anxiety and love making. fever dreams of absent lovers. tossing, turning, sleep paralysis, phantom pains. hallucination, psychosis. fever dreams.
my heart is singing, he says to me in gaelic. my heart is singing.
a weight lifted creates an absence. nothing survives in a vacuum. another weight is added to compensate for the one lifted.
never good enough, never good enough, the dishes are never done.
it is better this way because i get more work done, i tell her, that's what i tell myself, to keep from minding about being alone.
but it is nice to feel something so strongly, i tell her, even if it isn't always good.
but it's more productive the other way, i tell myself.
she feels the knots in my shoulders and gasps.
my mind speeds up, my body shuts down.
count to ten. breathe. relax.