Poems of early January

I.

Dresses
Earrings
and absent hopes.
Another year perished,
another revolution averted or co-opted.

The acid lips of hairspray,
the cloying kiss of rum,
the taste of another wasted year.
-more poems destroyed
-more packages of pens
-more notebooks clothed in black leather
while we wait for oblivion
at the open bar.

People spend money they do not have
on vacations they do not desire.
Girls already beautiful prance like peahens
who have just discovered their
tails.

The general savagery of anisogamy,
the way valuable and lovely women
sell themselves for smiles.
They, who could have been queens,
standing with shadowed eyes and
heels estrappado.
Oh, such women make it
so very easy to not
fall in love.

II.

The palms are saddened by the world
and this carbonated air poisons us.

Cavitations in the ocean are going
to fuck with God’s titration curves.
A vicious spiral, but one of
finite cost:
we know history,
human nature,
and when persons are threatened
they turn murderous.
And while the birds are
burned alive
(planes too fast to flee)
they will not even have time
to wonder
why.

III.

We are pillaging the land
but this is nothing new.
The novelty is our perfection:
we have never been so good
at theft,
even when our fascination
was held by dark continents
and our own dark deeds.

and now our very beach towels
are the products of empire –
the poor of the world do not
even know how to dream
of what we have.

Soon it will be gone
all the lithium we can find
molybdenum.
titanium.
these are things we cannot replace
and we will want them
back.

but no solution will be found

We can travel everywhere.
We cannot change much.
A meal, a pair of shoes.
We’ve all got parasites,
worms twirling through our feet,
beliefs in god.
Oh well,
what can be done?
It seems impossible to know.
We underline our hopes and dreams
we give them permanence
it is unsure if this is a safe plan.

IV.

But everywhere there are strangers

Men with immaculate hair at four a.m.
although they’d just been sleeping.
Girls with micro-dresses,
like caricatures of nurses on Halloween,
blinding white but happily without the hat.

Even the sand betrays us,
with frigid spines fighting
our better natures,
the icy bite of Atlantic air
like a splinter from discarded hearts.

Icarus’s wings would not melt here,
no ambition could be considered.
Here he would have
boundaries
guilt
the bare heat of life denied him.

Madness is driven in absurd ways
on the wheels of a fictional chariot.
The faint greek rose of the sun
was painting itself on the tide.
The cruise ships like grand mountains
were bravely glossing over
the unmitigated death
of the previous days.
Then like snapping your fingers
they dropped over the horizon
and the salt was heavy in the air
so that no one could forget.

But soon they went back to sleep,
and I poured a bigger glass of rum
and walked down into the surf alone
and Aphrodite was smiling
and softly saying to me
“Yes, this is the way that I was born.”

Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments

Stung with Love is a new translation of Sappho's poems and fragments given us by Aaron Poochigian.

The case of Sappho is an interesting one, because so little of her work has survived. It is also interesting because various groups with vested current political interests in the perception of the past have throughout recent years attempted to appropriate Sappho's poetry. Entertainingly, the Victorians characterized her as the headmistress of a finishing school, presumably because they felt it'd help them understand her.

Because I don't speak Aeolic Greek, I can't really comment on how accurate the translation is, but I've always found Willis Barnstone's translations of Sappho to be my favorite.

For example, compare Barnstone's take on:

yet I
for one

would rather see her warm supple step
and the sparkle in her face than watch all
the chariots in Lydia and foot soldiers armored
in glittering bronze.

with Poochigian's:

And I would rather watch her body
Sway, her glistening face flash dalliance
Than Lydian war cars at the ready
and armed battalions

There isn't too much for me to say about this, I've read all of these poems before. However, because so little of Sappho's work has survived, any encounter with her ouvre is sure not to be prohibitively time consuming, and there are far worse ways to spend one's time.

Nightingale,
All you sing
Is desire;
You are the crier
Of coming spring.

For Andrea, on Feb 22

I flicked the deadbolt
down and to the left
with my elbow.

My hands were full.

All three were cold and the dates on them read
DEC 23
JAN 17
FEB 4
and they were nearly full.

Their caps were light blue
because the fat had been removed.

And with three dull thuds
they landed in a metal grave.

I opened and closed the door
again.

There is a can of tomatoes
premium
Red Gold
crushed
100% natural
half-filled with ash
sitting on my desk.

After loss, people like to grasp on
to everything
more tightly.

Old men with mirth in their eyes
falcon
ancient
azure
and hair as white as snow.

A young woman, impossibly young
confident
beautiful
pushy
but still kind enough to get me through a bit of hell
and wise enough to know when to say nothing at all.

They tell us that plastic stays around virtually forever,
That emperors and pontiffs will be reduced to naught
while the world of things we’ve thrown away
outlives our children by ten thousand years.

She was going to be an accountant
and there were months where
we drank more vodka than Russians
screamed curses out of windows
and kicked at oak leaves
while she stood on the stairs smoking
her cigarettes.

In my refrigerator another half-gallon
of milk
sits;
FEB 20
knowing myself
as I do
I think that I shall keep it for a little while.

When you can't sleep, you start looking for people to blame. It's best to start with myself, of course; coffee 'round midnight is bound to have consequences. So I sit and drink and listen to Thursday and wonder why I am still the person that I have always been.

(cast off the shackles) the whisper says, but I think that it is not the dog that says these things. So then, what could it be? I cannot believe that the devil is driving, not the now, he must sleep as well. And what to do with this newfound freedom?

I have not written, not really written, in some time now. It is the way that I punish myself for being alive. Each day I wake up and reflect that not much has been done. I learn some small amount in zoology, or else some miscreant of a med school womanlet tells me that she believes my voice sounds as a Russian's would.

What flattery! How could such a person know of my love of the Russians? Oh then, she starts to cull intelligence and cultivate vapidity; she rages against the dying of the light and the inability of her voice and body to get laid. She says that she is devoid of mojo, but such is not the problem. She is as all others are, you see, and her objectives are not so empty of discernment as she imagines them to be.

I tell her that her problem is an unrealistic expectation of intimacy. I tell her that even such as men can open thoughts to see that she is looking for a bandage for a wound. I tell her that not every man wishes to be the splint on a grevious wound. I tell her that in this desert the cities are made of gold. I think that she has stopped listening. So have I.

I know that the sun will rise soon. If nothing else, Hemingway has told me so...but again I feel that there is no poison enough for such as I.

I saw a television show today and it was cruel. It reminded my of what I have been, perhaps of what I will yet be. All of yesterday I was reminded of my beginnings. Oh, how I hate the sight of animals. With every cooing expression of enchantment for chickens or rabbits or kids, I remember my life as I hated it most. I tell people sometimes that I miss it, but I fear that I dissemble. I remember my fondest dreams then, of burning their buildings all down; being free of mocking voices and unwanted obligations, the taste of goat's milk mixed with powdered stock, the way that bits of solute would stick with evil smells to the side of a green plastic pitcher.

It is nearly funny. A friend of my girlfriend was married not so long ago. I have known the girl for a very long time, and I had never liked her much. I started hating her one day. Oh when? She had a bow in her hair, the pastelled pink of bubbling gum. We were eight years old. "Don't worry about him, he's just white trash," she said. She must have thought that I could not hear.

Is there a point to this? The answer to my and your question is a resounding NO. It echoes off of percussion chambers in the body with the rumbling of a Lambeg drum. We live, we eat and sometimes love, and we die. For a blessed few, it can be believed that artistry will preserve and protect the memory of our lives, but for the rest, we die as we are born. These are our lives. They are not much, but they are what we have.

Six and Seven

This place sounds like a slaughterhouse
And I seem to have misplaced my apron.
So, drenched, sticky like sugared water,
I finish my paper and drink my sixth cup of coffee.
I leave a bill on the table for
Alice, or Louise, or whomever.
Sol is hot.
I mustn't forget my sunglasses.

_______________________

It is a peculiar dance,
One that makes the dancers unaware
Of their spinning-twirling-singing story.
Eventually they forget that they are dancing,
The level of mastery endemic to the madman
Who, after long enough, embraces the shrunken cell
And imagines it a palace.

There are never moments of silence here,
But the din is less unique than that of war.
War, when death sounds in a thousand different manners
Before lingering, always, on the same note
That fades as we strain to define it.

Madness does not have just one taste,
But there is always a hint of salt left behind-
To preserve and protect when all other avenues are exhausted.
Even the slightest madness is superior to its lack,
Water scalding the dishes and scraping the grim
From our squalid eylids.

They, perhaps, wonder what I am scribbling,
But they know it is not for their eyes,
That, like a holy book, it sears all but the privileged few.

Not every language has a word for God,
Presumably they have had no need of one.
They've all got words for demon, though,
Dybbuk and devil and djinn,
And it is curious, indeed, that the qualities of all
Are so much the same as those of humanity.
The need to create evil in our own image
Is more interesting
Than the need to mold Great God to human frame.

Both the masochism and the sadism of these cultural touchstones
Is somehow sacred,
With people defending their right to evil
As strictly as their thoughts of peace.
One is never truly free if ones torture is chosen by another.

Coffee is good for thinking,
It sears then warms, all the while laced with sugar enough to satisfy the horses of Cortez.
How frightened those trampled children must have felt,
To be murdered by evil that their elders had not yet named,
With immortal gleaming terror flashing in the sun.
No songs would be pre-made to sing over their pyres (if any would survive to build them)
It was not the fault of the bards;
No one had imagined such a death so there had been no cause for the lyre,
And perhaps now there would be no new songs at all.

It is curious, too, that methods of murder so crude are needed,
And that subtle methods can appear so savage.
The slightest chemical change, and death can come so quickly.
This, of course, is how insects are killed,
Blocking production of an enzyme,
And any death of arthropod can usually transfer without modification
To a child or a seer.

Death is not a puzzle for the dying,
Nor particularly puzzling to the living unless one takes pleasure in being dishonest.
No matter: the swords sings as does the swan
And night falls on Jerusalem.

Salivating

The fighter tastes sweat with the faintest tint of leather. Not the worn leather of a jacket, softened by smoking cigarettes with muscled backs pressed to brick walls, but the sharp violent leather of eight ounce gloves just begging to find flesh; and that’s rather a lot of words to describe anything in that first sentence, but fight-sweat is complex and so is leather when you get down to sticks.

He had a name but didn't particularly need one, a name was just something to whisper or scream or condemn, none of these actions particularly novel. His gloves (which gave his sweat its flavor) were either red or black, as blood is red or black, but he did not notice. His disinterest was not directed at gloves, or colors in a particular way. He didn't see colors, you see. Not really.

He could distinguish between them, and that's a fact, but his was a drunkard's palate. People generally thought about color too much. Their eyes would flit around to catch a stranger's, to catalogue some hint of yellow or a sapphire's blue. It is always tempting, before a fight, to think in more grandiose diction, to muck about with words like Crimson and Raven, but it really doesn't quite matter what color blood is.

Bits of life of any color leave a stain that a connoisseur would find... distracting. Far better that a commoner take the ring, his shepherd's accent restrained, always quick to assent to conditions with no regards to their absurdity or extravagance. No one thought him the rube, though; he rarely spoke in any case. And speaking of unspecified cases, his particular case was one in which if you never lost you were never criticized, as if one were a prophet with pinpoint accuracy and a relatively peaceful alternative religion. He was sure that an ancient Asian man had commented on how one deed could unmake an emperor, and it made him wonder if the people really had been so dull as to need such an auspicious guru.

There were a lot of people being born, and so words were bound to be repeated even if they weren’t very useful. He was not sure why the unspecified ancient Asian of previous mention would have theoretically talked about emperors and not sultans or tsars; he supposed that familiarity with the other types of despot would lead to at least two new famous Asian thinkers to think famous phrases, and that's without all the pseudo-titles like "pontiff" or "Lord of all the Animals of Africa" thrown in, and every one as good as the other.

No word ends up being more important than the other when you get down to sticks. He liked that phrase and felt marginally certain that he had coined it. He didn't know if anyone else used it, though he supposed that, sticks being a common word and all, the phrase had been at least given a whirl by the drunk laying near the pile of burning tires after graduation. His assigned meaning was related to a condition so primal as to indicate that the weapon you held was the last thing on earth more deadly than your bare hands.

Not to knock bare hands, fractured skulls and crushed vertebrae tell few lies, but that last weapon really can make all the difference. It is certainly nicer than nothing; it is heaven's comfort to the bruised and battered. He thought that being able to use whatever was around you was a good goal, but that specific applications would require prohibitive amounts of time.

If he had wanted any other life, he would have wanted to be samurai. When life is so cheap that they sell it by the boatload to cruel men, being samurai would be the cure. He had read that samurai could take on countless amateur fighters, like that blonde in the slasher movie did. He could be a weaver of blood, an illusionist who spun the soul out of its core, a man who was remembered.

But being remembered might not be such a great payoff in the long run. He could just say "Fuck it, Archie, I'm out," and bite the tape sealing his hands to that goddamn set of black or red leather gloves. There are less dignified ways to hear the final bell, to be sure.

But no one in his staff was named Archie, so a different, more appropriate proper noun should be chosen. And then what if his egress was blocked by some unseen foe? Would the faceless men with cameras and microphones turn on him? Furthermore, what if he couldn't bite the tape off because he put his mouthpiece in early to avoid talking to people, and one cannot just spit one's mouthpiece into someone else's tunnel, it's not hygienic...

He wondered if his fixation on the whole blood thing had been distracting, as though it were his permanent theme. He didn't want to make that impression, in point of fact his last fight he had considered something more succulent, like the way an apple sounds when you bite it, or something of that order, but blood really was as good a trope as any.

He wondered what the other man's name was, and secretly hoped that his adversary was also known as "The Dragon" or something like that. Then, after he won and was sitting at some bar or the other looking disinterested in the whole scene, the pretty girl (who, after all, is very nearly always going to be present in such circumstances) would walk over to compliment his win. He would respond, "The problem with being a dragon is that there is always a slayer," and she would laugh, her sapphire sparkling unnoticed.

Did he really produce a canned response to offer a pretty girl just in case one was around after he presumably won the fight with whomever it was that he was fighting and that opponent happened to occasionally be called The Dragon? He took no responsibility for this, the tunnel was too long and his urge to make a bad joke had been suppressed for an admirable amount of time.

The lights hit his eyes and they pulsed, green as Medea herself, and he was relieved that there would not be much more thinking required. He wondered if The Dragon (he had decided it should be his rival's name even though it was very probably not) was more skilled than he was, was stronger than he was, and if he preferred penne or linguini when asked point-blank.

His saliva dripped and hit his glove and like a current that old black magic was coursing in his veins. So there's blood, again, and he wondered if he should have hired a guy named Archie instead of hitting tractor tires with sledgehammers, but what's done is done.

Ding Ding Ding.

Watchmen review

Two stars out of a possible four.



Roger Ebert, a film critic I hold in high esteem, has famously said on numerous occasions (I am paraphrasing) that the quality of a film is not determined by what the film is about; rather it is determined by how it is about it. I am going to be quite up-front about it: Zach Snyder does not make great movies. He makes flawed films with great ideas and a supremely admirable degree of fidelity to the source material. If you're a person who gets off on slow motion death, Zach Snyder is the man for you.

Watchmen begins with the death of The Comedian, and his last words are poignant if you’ve never seen a film with even the barest hint of a dying joke-teller. Down in the street, a smiling pin with a drop of blood fades into the opening credits. If there is one way to get into the heart of this reviewer, it's for damn sure playing a Bob Dylan song with pictures and names scrolling by. The score of this film is, honestly, a mix-tape that anyone with decent taste could put together in about ten minutes, but that doesn't detract from the raw power of perfectly chosen songs, as my already established opinion is that this is not a good movie. It is, however, about some very good things.

Many of the shots in the film feel as though they are lifted unchanged from the comic, and I suspect many of them are. There are many quick cuts, much slow motion, and too many words spoken that are never meant for any placement than the pages of a well-worn book. I am certainly not the only person in the nation that cringed when Rorschach said "abattoir" out loud, but I think that my cringe was associated with knowing that practically no one knew what that word meant. I am absolutely uncertain as to where I picked the word up, but I did read a dictionary before and that may have done it. I understand the concept of faithfulness to the source, and the importance of the clichéd nuance of language in film noir, but that doesn't excuse whoever it was that penned this screenplay from the vast incompetence that is his work. If he was a carpenter I wouldn't hire him to build a bookshelf, and if I did he'd probably only make it big enough for one book, and that book would probably be Pride and Prejudice.

To say that the acting is unremarkable is to do this film the greatest kindness I have granted today. Dr. Manhattan seems as though Keanu Reeves should have played his part, although even the patented "whoa" may have been too emotional for the jolly blue giant. Two and a half hours is simply not enough time for the character development that is necessary for the amount of faces we see. Nite Owl II and Silk Specter II have just enough chemistry to renew my conviction that covalent bonds exist. Their absurd coupling makes me wonder if Snyder just wanted to have a sex scene in the film that didn't involve rape or glowing people, although the particular version of Hallelujah used seemed so non-erotic as to be perhaps satirical. The really violent hornet in my eye, though, is the absurdity of Dr. Manhattan's moment of clarity regarding why human life is special: this guy manipulates quantum particles in entirely bullshit ways, but has never considered the astronomical odds against any particular person existing?

Watchmen is visually arresting, especially on IMAX (on which I had the pleasure to see it). The relentless onslaught of the rain drowns away preconceptions, shifting us into a framework for which no one is particularly prepared. The mere concept of a five-term Nixon is enough to turn my stomach. The "costumed heroes" are almost absurdly non-costumed with a few exceptions; it strains credulity to think that tiny little eyepieces would be sufficient to protect one's identity. The fight scenes are well choreographed, as is to be expected from Snyder's previous work, but Ozymandias's apparent ability to jump super-high and other trivialities regarding the non-super-but-still-more-powerful-than-human heroes are present. What all filmmakers need to do is take an oath, somewhere, that states that the damage of physical blows cannot be ignored merely because it'd be inconvenient for the main character to be cold-cocked in the first round.

A person would be forgiven for hating this film on the basis of our (unfortunately) constantly reinforced belief that of "The book is always better than the movie." These are people that either forget The Godfather's existence or cite the exception proving a rule cop-out. That, however, is no excuse for having boring actors, myriad clichés, and a fatal lack of directorial vision. Zack Snyder has nearly dogmatically converted two graphic novels to the screen, and they end up being mediocre films because film is a different medium and MUST be treated differently. If you sit down and ask yourself what the really unavoidable difference between Sin City and Watchmen is, it is that Robert Rodriguez actually fucking knows how to make a great movie.

Whether or not Moore intended it, the word watchmen refers to a Latin phrase which, roughly translated as all Latin usually is, can mean lots of things: two of the relevant definitions are "who will guard the guards" and "who watches the watchmen." I'm not knocking the quote, because it's a rather good one. It is subtle, has meanings on a number of different levels, and is pointed in both directions. Inability to guard oneself from one's guards is the nightmare of every cruel tyrant who yet breathes. Alternately, who will ensure that the populace is protected from their police force? However, the problem with Watchmen is not that it does not resolve its question. It is that the film never makes you care enough about it to ask it any question at all.

-------The text above concludes the review proper, what follows are thoughts and thematic ramblings, largely unedited from notes taken while drinking coffee at Waffle House at 2 a.m.

Parallels between The Dark Knight and Watchmen are impossible to ignore and irrelevant to spend much time upon. Nolan gave us a masterwork of the genre with only the merest hint of the phantoms behind his character's masks. The concern of Snyder's film is maniacally focused on masks, and as everyone knows, masks are important because they are chosen.

It is in the desperation and the dejection of the costumed heroes that thematic unity is achieved. Rorschach's mask, ever changing, effectively begs an age-old question: when does the mask become the face? The double-edged blade of his mask is that, of course, Rorschach blots do not actually represent anything. They are projectives, and this is in itself the most scathing condemnation of human nature this side of the Mississippi. Rorschach is a creature without a self, and staring into his mask is as dangerous as Nietzsche’s abyss.

Nite Owl II is a really boring character. The stereotype he represents, as a soldier who never really comes home from the war, is tragic in case-by-case studies but not remotely useful as a person with whom we are expected to be involved. Much of his character could have been played by Robin, and Robin is not a character that is usually associated with the word Watchmen.

Silk Specter II is apparently in the plot because it has no other women, and sexy business is useful to sell tickets. Her costume does not even have a mask; it is as though the filmmakers did not take her character even seriously enough to stroke the "ooooo secrecy" of the masked heroes properly.

Watchmen could easily have been enumerated by Nietzsche, and Dr. Manhattan is as ubermensch as they come. I couldn't stop myself from wondering if all of his body got relatively bigger when he got unnecessarily large to talk shit to Ozymandias and break his roof. Furthermore, Ozymandias is great fucking poem and it's sloppy to misquote it on that sphinx-like thing's plaque. I've got lots to say about Ozymandias, the poem and not the character, but that is a subject for another day.

The narrative places us following an admittedly insane man tracking down a conspiracy. Too soon we wonder (if we don't know already) if a conspiracy exists: The Comedian seems unsavory enough. Rorschach is predictably convinced and a trope progresses: where is the delineation between the mad and the sane? Who makes this distinction, and how many are sacrificed for following orders, and later denied recognition and platitudes from the very masses they have shielded?

And what is to be done when the moral thing is no longer the right thing? Justice is perhaps the most abstract of all ideals, and yet Rorschach has defined it in ways that (predictably) initially defy comprehension. The central statement of the film, insomuch as it makes one at all, comes when The Comedian shoots that one barely relevant lady and Dr. Manhattan tries to act concerned, and The Comedian says " You coulda changed the gun into steam or the bullets into mercury or the bottle into snowflakes, but you didn't."

The accusation is not directly pointed at our darling blue giant. The discomfort is attached to our own psyches: are we watching the Watchmen? How much are we willing, really willing, to cede to the reprehensible in order to preserve our specific way of life? How powerful do we want our guards to be? And if they were true ubermensch, we need look ourselves in the eye and admit that there is no good reason to expect them to help us at all.

This movie should have been five hours long, or else it should have not been made.