He hit the snow plow driver with a shovel. He cut the man’s brow deeply over his left eye.
A neighbor said:
“Incidents like this don’t usually occur in this neighborhood.”
Another said:
“With all the problems in this world—the war, the terrorism, the plague … why are we trying to kill each other over moving snow properly? Why can’t we all get along? This is not that type of neighborhood. This is the safest city in Massachusetts. Why don’t people think about what they’re doing?”
A third neighbor said:
“What I fear most is that there are two more storms on the way. It’ll only get worse before it improves. It’s really just a matter of time.”
What I’m Reading:
“Anyone could be an idiot or a jerk, separately, but the combination of ignorance and meanspiritedness—that was special.”
Let us go then, you and I… Like a patient… lobotomized with Trotsky’s ice-pick. Let us go, through certain half… dim back-alley Havana streets where “los gusanos” dare to meet—away from the teeth of the revolution. Let us count those that fled, let us count those that are dead, upon the tires and detritus taken by the gulf stream…
That was all she managed to write before she wrote: the hell with this and left her pen upon the sheet—atop the desk flecked with underwater light as the sun sickened and dropped to its nightly torpor. Here came the darkness and all she had was a useless page, a throbbing writing blister, and bare feet on the cool granito floor—dusty in patches, and littered with small particles that she couldn’t see but felt like tiny talus fields at the edge of her desk. The nightly ceremonial firing of the cannon from Morro Castle snapped her out of her stupor, and soon she would hear the drunken pelotons of tourists making their way through the street out front—with their old city cliches and their first world cavils.
There were many nights she wished she could have gone with her brother on the raft of tires and taken her chance on the vagaries of the Florida Straits—especially now—that his escapade had resulted in her eviction from so called privileged housing in the Old City. She, again, attempted to make her mother’s style of lemonade out of this harsh cask of lemons—so she reasoned that she would no longer be kept up nights by the drunken Europeans’ and Russians’ tone deaf renditions of the folk songs they heard every night on vacation—and that she’d no longer be subject to the leers, propositions, and manhandling by these “elites” that humanity kept flying into the island. Maybe her aunt’s place in Pinar del Rio would be a quiet and more productive place to translate Modernist poetry into Quechua…
What I’m Reading:
“The ice cubes were melting. The species were dying. The last of the fossil fuels were being burned up. A person collapsing in the street might be collapsing from any one of a hundred things. New things to die of were being added each day.”
I’m lost without a clear linear narrative upset by temporal disjunction and chagrined by jump-cut edits. I have no way of disengaging from this nightmare. I’d just like to fall asleep. I’m certain this is the devil’s work, and the devil doesn’t speak in lap dissolves or imminent fade outs.
What I’m Reading:
“I do not want films to show, as in existing documentary (the only direction film has taken to free itself from photographed drama) but to transform images so that they exist in relation to the film only as they flash onto the screen …exist in their own right, so to speak.”
Curved cortices, consciousness of the othered, you lack in your miles of half-smiles and squander. Incisors bared, inward-turned, glint slick with palaver strings— as sibilant missiles cut involute trails into a sky of ruined trajectories. Growling cur restive.
What I’m Reading:
“But there was so much more hate than any of us had the capacity to understand. Hate seemed to spring from the deepest core of our beings. Years later, all you had to do was peep through a peephole and there it was for anyone to see-a whole world of vitriol, entirely without end. It seemed that rage was what we were made of.”
4/10 Called at 3:41 when banging/noise began and apprised X., but as it stopped after a couple of minutes (and hoping it wouldn’t recur) I suggested I’d call back when it started again.
— test stain on floor
6:57pm continued thru 7:11 Spoke with X. again. He said he would call them, and I assume he did because it stopped after 14 minutes.
— scrub kitchen floor
4/12 1:43 pm continued thru 1:46 Spoke with Y., and suggested to him that maybe a parent was indisposed and that I would call again if it went on longer—it stopped while I was speaking to him.
— caulk shower holes
4/13 Started at 12:55-12:57pm, stopped before I called the desk. Again 12:59-1:01pm, then stopped. Did not call.
— connect electronics
4/23 Called Z. at 12:56, after a couple of minutes of same noise it stopped at 1 pm.
— bookcase lights
4/27 A couple of minutes of the noise and then a crash. It stopped.
— clean/paint balcony divider
What I’m Reading:
“… in every human there is both an animal and a god wrestling unto death.”
Did you notice you don’t stop ‘til you really stop?
What does that even mean? Panta said.
Well, Moira said, imagine a bunch of barking dogs or cats meowing to Jingle Bells, it doesn’t stop in your head even when it stops in real time. You’ll never rewire those synapses to do anything else; they’re forever programmed to bring those dogs and cats back in moments that you least expect it, or want it. Forevermore, those neural connections will do nothing else, those electrochemical passageways will do nothing but wait in ambush to bring it back at inopportune moments.
It sounds like you’re describing PTSD, Panta said.
I’m describing a bad dream. A greenish and sick nightmare. No more. Make it stop.
What I’m reading:
“My whole process starts by free writing dialogue. Before I even have characters. I’ll write a sentence that has some traction for me. And then I answer that sentence.”
—Vanessa Veselka / The Creative Independent interview
S. understands nothing. He tries, squint-eyed, to turn his brain over. Without spark, the ignition doesn’t catch.
S. sees himself, monochromatic, on the screen of his childhood 1974 Panasonic. He’s talking globular in a rectangular city. He makes connections obliquely — only in transient bursts. He needs raiment for the soul but finds defenestrated appliances and tatters in mounds in their stead. He walks a bray of winces in piles of miles of monticular hunger. Nothing for the stomach and nothing for the next life. He quanders in squandered lines of obtuseness. A sign up ahead reads: “Squelch and Skronk, $2.99/lb.” He makes a beeline for the whole ball of wax — a hive of astute astringency on loan — from a god lost in this corner of the universe…
He’s lost in the reticular coldness of the attenuating picture — a cathode ray tube snow (fuzz from his childhood in 1974) and a muzz of voices echoing from the exhaust vent above his head. He’s one with the toilet seat now, one with his pins and needles thighs, and uncomfortably prescient.
He continues his note: … all will be needling shit this new year… Happy so and so… New Year so and so…
“Screw ‘Auld Lang Syne!’” he says. “Screw Robert Burns?” he says to his reflection in the mirror.
And some person outside his hotel room door — which is disquietingly close to the bathroom door (for hadn’t he last night passed one door where he swore he heard a fugue of wet untethered flatulence, and walking by another door heard wretched retching and moans?) — why did the man outside his door continue saying “hogmanay” this and “hogmanay” that, and what was that infuriating accent?
S. understood nothing.
What I’m Reading:
“The croaker lives out Long Island … light yen sleep waking up for stops.change.start … everything sharp and clear antennae of TV suck the sky … The clock jumped ahead the way time will after 4 P.M.”
Conceptual Film: Critical Focal Acuity 2 (Shot / Unshot) In A Can
Series of found film cuts as the camera racks out of focus / or shoots unfocused footage
(Asynchronous sound: random and obtuse observations)
Series of stills from said shots
(Asynchronous sound: mundane observations)
Series of cuts of shots slowly resolved into focus
(Random aural cut-ups chosen via chance operation)
Fade in / Fade outs to black leave 2-3 sec black between shots
(Tank tracks grinding as Exit Music)
What I’m Reading:
“In order to reproduce the colors of nature in our films, we have painted nature black and white. Startle the cuttlefish. Harvest the sepia. The literal color of fear.”
