Oh man. The summerish bad-times feeling is here, announced by my having caught whatever bad-times bug is going around that puts you to sleep all the time and makes your lymph nodes swell up like dirty pancakes. Summertime in New York, when humanity spills out past the slurry wall and begins touching everything with sweaty palms, rubbing hepatitis on subway handholds. Life, they call it. I get so depressed when the thermometer peaks past 80 for any significant amount of time I become another person. I forget who I am, that I'd rather be writing. Vibes everywhere, and greasy faces, and me without the cash to get out of town.
What are these movies? Crime film after crime film. I'm not cut out to be a cinephile, film nerd, whatever, one of these grey, semi-dentated people who show up at the Film Forum with three-year-old Tower Records bags full of newspapers and take up two theater seats while preparing a sandwich as the credits go up. I can't do it. I couldn't even enjoy Sam Fuller's The Naked Kiss the other day, and it's the sort of thing I suspect I might have enjoyed if it had been fall. Well, I couldn't help but enjoy the opening scene where the hooker starts beating a john up and then loses her wig and casually fixes it back on her stark bald head. That was great.
Bigger questions are emerging. How to get out of Iraq without leaving an apocalyptic gap in our wake? How to do it in the best sense of the pragmatic process, and not in the worst? In the heart of every ideologue is a murderer, someone who dreams of a historical cleansing. So here's the sense that, if the death of Zarqawi meant the death of a murderous ideologue, which ideologues are left, which ones are not murderous enough to remove from the context of retribution? Will Bush make the cut? Can ideology be reconciled to pragmatism? It's getting hotter out. The brain puts on shorts and eats a hot dog. Poetry. I've been working on sestinas all week and can't keep either Don Rickles or Celtic Frost out of them. This isn't a bad thing, but it's hard to use To Mega Therion seven times in a recurring pattern just because you thought you might like the challenge. And why is it that every new article that come out on the subject of poetry puts me on the defensive? The question of whether or not poetry is best expressed as the heroic mimicry of forms and emotions or as a flawed conjuration of them to me was settled long ago: why sideliners keep insisting on the former instead of the latter baffles and alienates me.
Anyway, this is the last week of the Film Forum's B-Noir festival. I'm going to make one last push, but the Tally of Mayhem is over (my program fluffed out on the last post and devoured it, at which point I did the old cost-benefit analysis and said forget it.) Movies, eh. I'll see if I can't pull it together.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:46 AM,
