Revenge parable:
A dispute careens off-track—
Shattered eyeglasses
Blind and brambled in the weeds.
A kiss under the blood moon.
What I’m Listening To:
“Hope is a muscle
That allows us to connect”
—Bjork / “Atopos”
First Casket, Secret Casket is new film about a benighted romance between a Cuban-American sugar cane harvester and a seldom-acknowledged singer in a punk band. The former is a political pessimist spewing the obloquies of the late 1970’s to an uncaring world, while the latter belches and squelches profane lyrics—beneath a rapturous red gravity-defying mohawk—in and around Miami’s Little Havana.
The film is liberally intercut with outtakes from Scarface, but with all of Al Pacino’s scenes excised. Pacino’s dialogue is left extant—resulting in 2 hours of clear or black leader interspersed with the scenes from the 1983 remake.
Remarkably, the director achieves this without cleaning the film gate during filming—and, in fact, purposefully gunked-up the internal camera woks, during shooting. Resulting in layers of chapped celluloid and incidental detritus building up on the images, creating a Brakhage-like palimpsest redolent with possibilities, but ultimately imbued with failure.
The layered soundtrack which is a random assemblage of Mr. Pacino’s laughably poor take on a Cuban accent mixed with found recordings of the internecine tactical meetings of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the proceedings of Miami-Dade County traffic court, and Balinese gamelan rhythms prove exultant—like aural toxic shock.
Imagine subcontracting your prefrontal cortex to fermented fizzy lifting drinks. It’s genius. The film’s lone redeeming feature.
Here, we are introduced to the masterful intimations of boilerplate pop constructions at their logical end. Imagine dipping a $75,000 fur into a punch bowl of Sunkist and Pop Rocks—it’s that astoundingly effervescent, empty, and bereft of any trace of intellectual heft.
Do you remember the 18-minute gap in the Watergate tapes? It’s nothing like that—nowhere near as satisfying.
The story of a recent migrant to the land of rape and money is seen as dredger seduction—all disco, punk, and inflationary pressures without the cowbell and horn flourishes, 3-chord anarchy, or regulatory meddling by the Fed.
This film is analogous to Ed Wood meets Jean-Luc Godard—both on their lowest “off-days.” If you recall Godard’s observation: “It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to,” you’ll find the raison d’ê·tre for this epic voidoid—without the justification.
The film is a stunt by a timpanist who lost his pen, and a teapot without a dome or the scandal. Bound for the shredder and the kickback bins of film history.
What I’m Reading:
“Poem in which I have a father.
Poem in which I care.
Poem in which I am from another country.
Poem in which I Spanish.”
— Paola Capó-Garcia / “Poem in Which I Only Use Vowels”
I am an agglomeration of symptoms—
purposefully askew and tinny.
Closer to your interior benchmark—
akin to brainy and quicksilver—
but with HEAVE!
Diffident ain’t the workshopped word you’d use,
closer to big shrimp without the sea.
I really don’t know what I’m going on about,
but there’s something here I want to convey
about a dark impulse, black mold, and slow discord.
About density. Decency. About freedom leaking. Deflating.
(Then we clank to a full stop.)
What I’m Listening To:
“Our differences are irrelevant
To only name the flaws
Are excuses to not connect”
—Bjork / “Atopos”
Good Morning Resignation.
Bub Linkman is a downer. We are not a good match. We are unable to scheme moves, sketch delphiniums, or libretto overtures. We are unable to accent our annoyances and poorhouse vistas.
Please call me the manageress novitiate of butcher despair for my dispeptic requirements.
Bub Linkman has assured me he is a journeyman working to resolve this itch as quickly as possible. I don’t believe him, or believe in him.
I’ll thank him for his patriarchy and cake and be on my way.
What I’m Reading:
“Deceit,” I said, quoting our leader, “is the ice pick in the kidney of trust.”
—T.C. Boyle / “SCS 750”
Back from the sun’s glare—
Fog obliterates the sky—
It’s good to be home.
The birds shroud their songs in gray—
We swab our nostrils for plague.
What I’m Reading:
“Eat and write or die.”
— Jim Harrison / The Search for the Genuine: Selected Nonfiction, 1970-2015
The twelfth day of the month was Copperhead Monday. Serpentine was the look we were going for. Beatific upper register notes is what Maria was reaching for: Ta da la ta da la dao, was what she sang to a supper club of adoring mengeese eyeing a pair of lady rattlesnakes.
Midnight. Tuesday morning. Applause. Thunderous.
Savorous twistings of moonglow hairs into chignons and much dispensing with shoes and underthings. There was nothing like a cobra line dance to make it libertine-free and parsimonious-lite.
(I, the author, heard someone order a chocolate stout. “Not served here,” was the reply.)
Vehement—something akin to buzzards on parade: wing-wide convection current surfing loafers—something free, not imagined, not paid for, not patented and surely made to disappoint.
Asseverations to “live fully and create in the midst of the desert” notwithstanding, Maria went home alone.
What I’m Reading:
“Rimbaud said, ‘Everything we are taught is false.’ I believed him when I was eighteen and still do. Writers are mere goats who must see the world we live in but have never discovered. I write to continue becoming an unmapped river. It suits me like my skin.”
— Jim Harrison / The Search for the Genuine: Selected Nonfiction, 1970-2015
“What’s hard about art is getting any good—and then getting better. What’s hard is solving problems with infinite solutions and your finite brain.”
— Elisa Gabbert / “Why Write?”
“How do we go on living when the very things we once depended upon have become undependable?”
—Elizabeth Rush / “What Antarctica’s Disintegration Asks of Us”
Some say calamity
and some catastrophe
is beautiful”
— Maureen N. McLane / “Some Say”
“You mustn’t assume that aesthetic expression is the prime motive for writing; it is really only a means to the more profound end. So don’t worry about it if you write out of sadness or hate or love—fear—or fascination, the important thing, if you wish to do it, is to write.”
— Ralph Ellison / The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison
“Even when … I started writing fervently about climate change, I must admit that I didn’t initially imagine myself living through it in this fashion—as so many of us have in this globally overheated summer of 2022.”
— Tom Engelhardt / “The Twilight Years of American Hegemony”
“… we can’t solve the climate crisis without solving the problem of inequality.”
— Damien Gayle / “Down to Earth”
If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies”
— William Faulkner / The Paris Review Interview
What I’m Listening To:
“Have you seen Gary with his tinfoil ball?
He used to love to kick it with his stumpy
legs”
— Dry Cleaning / “Gary Ashby”
Sometimes you feel like a target
Sometimes the memories clamp like straight jacket confines
Sometimes you have to visit family
Sometimes it feels like home again
Sometimes you’d rather be anywhere else in this bent and melting world
Sometimes you have to leave again
Sometimes, nearly always now, you prefer your new home
Sometimes the old hometown is a millstone dragging you down to the bottom of Biscayne Bay
And you’re happy to leave it again, and again, and again
And you’re on the road again.
What I’m Reading:
“I am not yet 40, and in my lifetime, climate change has gone from something that we thought would happen in the future to something happening now to something accelerating at such a surprising pace that it makes most of our feeble attempts to reckon with it outdated before they even get underway. This great acceleration has now reached all the way to Antarctica.”
—Elizabeth Rush / “What Antarctica’s Disintegration Asks of Us”
Like the cormorant,
Drying its wings in the sun,
I am melting fast.
Welcome to New Florida—
‘State so Right(!)—you’ll leave it twice.
What I’m Reading:
“Useless! Useless!
—heavy rain driving
into the sea”
— Jack Kerouac / “Useless! Useless!”
The prelate drafts an encyclical announcing that the werewolves and camellias will be delivered on Friday to all diocese in the mountainous regions. It encourages all Englishmen and yogis to traipse about nude and re-stage the highlights of the Inquisition.
The document goes on to explain that castanets, “fingertip cymbals” (for he has forgotten that they are called zills) and censers will be distributed liberally among the cairns about the ridge tops—“Help Yourselves,” he flourishes in his complicated calligraphy.
He insists that discussions of reincarnation will not be part of the programming. And furthermore, that “Virgins Need Not Apply.”
He’s buoyant with his ideas, they come to him in torrents. He surmises that it must be something about that moldy bread at breakfast. He continues with momentum:
“Recently 50,000 perforations were distributed throughout the bishopric. The adhesives which bound them were of an open-ended and mysterious nature—lacking in optimism and alternating and overlapping in swells of violin trills when touched or added to morning cereals. They are altogether too piquant and picaresque for our flock’s conservative constitutions—Please Avoid! Toecaps and personal backyard derricks will be distributed in their stead. A recurrence of tedium and inefficiency is all that is required and asked of you. OBEY!”
But a sort of boredom swamp bounded by alienation hammock islands spread out before him. Never has he been gripped by such a visceral ennui—as if it was bequeathed to him as a grand heirloom that he should wear around his neck.
And he does! He wears it around his neck.
And it is heavy, baby. A ‘heavy-o-sity’ he’s never experienced—or maybe once, when he missed the 1847 College of Cardinals’ sabbatical.
He considers the Ancient Mariner and the awful pestilential albatross crawling with monosyllabic bird mites (wa, wa, wa, wa, wa…they stridulated) around his neck, and the ‘heavy-o-sity’ becomes too much to bear.
He tears up the draft encyclical, inkwells his pen (he never liked the damn thing anyway) and laments, Why’d I ever take up writing? He descends to the cellar for a bottle of wine.
There is no remuneration in fermentation, but the bottom of a bottle is as good as any place in this world, he reasons.
And he adds: At the least I’m not in Florida, so I have that going for me. But there was something poetic about werewolves and camellias…
He’ll eventually come round to that.
What I’m Reading:
“The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve … something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness … The writer writes to serve that great cold elemental grace which knows us.”
— Joy Williams / “Uncanny the Singing that Comes from Certain Husks”
thee istsfor manity reader 