A Tale of Escape

The valley is blue, the mountains are deeper
An ocean of cold airless air silences the speaker.
Soft: the light breaks me, dear, must
She be left alone out there?

She rushes past the willow, the latticed yard
From the white bark house; she shivers resolutely layered
Against the wind so against the fire in the grate
Will not home come, yet
To welcome her nuptial calling.

Through the back roads and dusty purple bells
From star to star till the dusty trail ended
Across a freight running through town empty
His horrid smile different shades of whiskey
She wields his tire iron and breaks what she must break.

And grandmother, who is certainly a ghost now
Emits a perfume; a quickly dying scent that must be reapplied
Hides among a hill of trees and feels the bruises around her necklace
The low leaves showing stains of mascara.

In the winter neighborhood dogs cry outside
How silent it is between the hopeless howls
Silently, silently until the silence drowns them out.
She steps outsides. The ground cracks like crème brulee.
A face at the window begs her to stay.

And by her hair and gypsy cards she finds solace in the dead.
A specter to rival her own red room reflection
Reminds her in dreams what her grandmother said:
“Beat him soundly, the scent filled bed,
“The deep blue eyes begging to be lead.”

How wide the world outside our own
Yet how wide the wasteland we call out home.
Night has darkened the green highway signs
Once stating, “Try to leave, but you risk your life.”

She winds around the willow tree mauve, crinoline sashes
Hang from every stitch the words that so weigh her
She rubs the branches to reveal whitewashed plaster
And crowns her hair with olive leaves covered in mascara
To death – She spies the stars rising through tree cover
From the trunk where grandmother beat the bark with all the strength she could muster
Now the child takes the things that would enslave her
The dresses, the dishes, the love letters, saved newspapers
Herself surrounded, surrounded the tree
The roads outside tremor and the invisible sides of the mountain breathe:
Completing the alter of crinoline sashes
She pulls out her heart and a box full of matches.

The fire of freedom about her flashes.
From the smoke she rises to other mountain passes.

Persistance of Memory?

A Late-Viewer’s Review of Where the Wild Things Are

In this review I will not attempt to rate this film. I don’t mean to grade Where the Wild Things Are by any cinematic/aesthetic/critical scale, so I’ll leave that to the slew of critics who will watch all movies on their superficial level. Underneath the furry hides lies a semblance of childhood that isn’t quite fondly recalled.

The last thing to fade from our memory is light. A wrestling match amongst the bed sheets when we were seven is fused with the light coming through the window and through the sheets in our older minds, but there is a moment, probably forgotten, when one child has overpowered the other and there is an intensive fear of not being able to breathe. Max is thrust is similar situations three times in the movie: play gone too far, all air passages blocked and a tell-all panicked expression on his face while his arms move in frenzy to escape the deadly embraces. The moments in this movie force audience members to review their sun-spotted memories with that unsettling addition. He was playing too rough and I could not breathe.

The funny thing about Max is his ambivalence towards being eaten, perhaps an unconscious confidence in his immortality, or even, his ignorance about mortality and all that it entails. He is however very scared of being abandoned, a feeling he knows very well and abhors. He feels a need to impress the wild things so they will not leave him. The all-encompassing concern is not necessarily to rule, that being a more adult-like concern, but to simply be accepted. In the social circle of Wild Things, Max picks out a mother figure, another creature very similar to himself and a rivalrous, sibling-like character. The father-figure is markedly absent where the Wild Things are since, as it is a sort of parallel universe, Max hasn’t a father in real-life. His mind has constructed something vastly different from reality, yet is inspired by reality. His fantasy proves to be much more susceptible to reality the longer it plays out: families fight, friends lose trust in you and forts get destroyed, most frequently, by someone who helped you build it.

The end of fantasy is inevitable, so Max returns home to a mother anxiously waiting for him. The audience is then thrust into the mother’s shoes as we get a sense of the heartbreak she must have waited with and how terribly sad and wonderful it is that Max is totally oblivious to it.

I see this movie as an attempt to paint the true divisions between adulthood and childhood. Adults tend to view children as beings living out a sort of psuedo-life where only good things happen and any expression of pain is due to the child’s over-active imagination.

(To tie in with a point I was making earlier, this perception is probably thanks in part to our shoddy memories.)

Children are completely ignorant to things adults have a better mental grasp of: primarily mortality. They simply cannot know what shoving against the parent’s embrace does to the parent’s heart. It is the parent that can abandon them, the child, not the other way around.

In attempts to explain these dynamics, Spike Jonze takes a rather surrealist approach. There are hints of Oedipal complexity and World-of-the-Mother, but the most telling surrealist property is the dream-like execution of the plot. That is to say, there isn’t really a plot. Things do not happen for any real, coherent reason. Events are meant to mirror the anxieties Max feels in reality. Seeking “organic unity” within Where the Wild Things Are is a moot point, unless you happen to be Sigmund Freud.

That said, I’m afraid this review may reveal certain aspects of myself to strange readers, but I mean, I can’t claim any empirical objectivity when I review something. So go ahead: psychoanalyze me bitch.

Jonze… what do you mean to say? For I heard, “Ignorance isn’t bliss, and we are all children in the face of death.”

You the Crow; Me the Sparrow

My dear, dear wooden heart

A face I remember still on the Polaroid lens

Capturing musky sunshine and wheatgrass

Flushing seamlessly with your hair for it is the same color

As my bedroom walls

As my blood

As my lips, your lips, what we drew from each other

The color running through our tremulous chambers

Left paint on our teeth

My Revlon.

 

Oh my love

How unconsciously you tortured my generous arms

The black and blue

The rivets of salt water the fountain of youth.

Now maple syrup, amber eyes sings to me softly out of tune

Ever above me, always above me your cheekbones hide the moon.

We eat at a diner under a silent freeway

And I let you have my eggs

On your bed next to the propane heater

We tremble and lie still.

 

Still my pale palm searches the pillow for your tresses.

While I sleep my cheek feels the flutter of your lashes

While I dream I see you kneeling

You gaze upon your ivory tower

It’s chipped pedicure its corseted flesh

And I cry at the climax realizing I am only a fetish.

 

In the only photo of us we are sitting in a tree.

I am smiling.

I am happy.

Your face is covered with leaves.

Officially: A RUNNER

For the past three years or so, I’ve flirted with running a bit. Here and there, on the weekends. Initially to prevent myself from yelling at my father in high school and beat away some rage (so I have this thing against beating pillows. I like the feathers INSIDE), running became a go-to for stress relief my senior year. There was a mile-long stretch behind my house that gradually ascended to a massive water tank at the edge of highway 50.

When I moved to New York, I ran occasionally. Running in Central Park was nice but at times pretentious. I mean, I was running with people who sailed ten miles or so for laughs. Who walked around with futuristic goggles because that’s how fast they went (apparently). AND THEN there was the walk back to my apartment, covered in sweat, shirt and shorts conforming to every curve and a construction worker isn’t going to pass that up. Hell no, he’s going to whistle and harass with everything he’s got. Awesome.

While in New York, my running moved indoors. On the treadmill.

In the past year or so I’ve dropped it, than picked it up again, than forgot about it, than remembered “Hey… that thing I used to do that made me move faster. Maybe I should get into that again.”

But last month, for a birthday present, I received some new running shoes. And now I cannot stop. I’ve geeked out on running my friends. I pick up fitness magazines. I read research on training techniques. I look up half-marathon dates and spend hours creating playlists to complement the perfect run. I browse sporting good stores.

I browse sporting good stores. God damn.

At any rate, my future now incorporates the following: A master’s degree at a college with a huge green that I can run around. A string of vacations organized around major marathons. Adopting a Siberian husky that can keep up with my stride. Finding a man with calves just as sexy as mine.

Horizontal Inspiration. That’s what its all about.

My other shoes, by the way, are going here: http://shoe4africa.org/sendshoes.htm

Now if you’ll pardon me, I need to discuss Freud’s theory of the “uncanny,” attend a critical theory class, blah blah blah… and RUN INTERVALS!!!!! Yes.