Death is the end of life.

But maybe not for me. 

Your gift

is the breeze. 

Sending someone down the right path

could lead them away from you. 

And that is beautiful

or close enough.

— Catharsis, Duende

Tell me

your secret name.

I miss

the violence. 

Am I

night?

The body

breaks.

— Devendra Banhart

Violence

at a distance.

We look at the world once, in childhood.

The rest is memory.

– Louise Glück

What if

this is the best possible hellworld? 

The classiest guy

on trash night.

Beauty

is meaning.

Way

leads on to way.

— Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Your imagination pointing

in someone else's direction.

Not a lack of understanding,

but a total misunderstanding of self.

The original

retro-verse.

The devil

has better writers.

As pearl-like the possibles

went floating away.

— Monica Youn, Redacre

The ocean is vast,

and so am I.

You're not a loser,

you're just lost.

Does God

grow?

We are always

beginning and ending.

It's like a shadow on me

all of the time.

I wanted to hear God speak

and I heard knives being sharpened.

Did you give more than was given?

Did you pay more than was paid?

Surrounded

by sickness.

Memory

burns.

The son

of boredom.

— Suzi Gablik describing René Magritte

Curiosity killed the cat

Because it was chasing what came after.

Cetians died eagerly,

curious as to what came next.

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

Not ideas, you know,

but a way of putting them.

— George Eliot, Middlemarch

If death catches us

we only have ourselves to blame.

– Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Be careful of the worlds you enter;

they may not let you leave.

A corporate attempt

to soothe my nerves.

— Some guy in Listening To Kenny G

We did not know things;

now we know some things.

— Barry Petchesky, The universe came to us

As long as you don’t like yourself,

you can still become something else. 

How broken I am.

Dear Evan Hansen – 1/5

The criticism gets piled on how the main actor looks when I think the pointing fingers should follow the line all the way down the spine of this thing. I'd love to stop at the notch called 'Stephen Chbosky' because boy oh boy is he a bad filmmaker who makes bad choices: Ben Platt's hair, Ben Platt's hunched shoulders, Ben Platt's moist upper lip, the anxiety-induced breathlessness in Ben Platt's songs that at least doesn't seem to be there in the original cast soundtrack; the complete lack of artistry apparent in everything he's ever done. But I think the finger has to keep going further back and through to the source material: cloying, optimistic, believe-in-yourself songs placed in the mouths of awful people who are doing awful things. There is dissonance here, and I can not bring the two things together in my mind.

To commit suicide in Buffalo is redundant.

A Chorus Line – 2/5

If I squint, I can see why this might have been powerful on stage. Unfortunately, the music. 

I hated it, but I wasn't interested in it enough to listen to it again to find out why.

Yesterday – 1.5/5

I watched this because I tend to be surprised by Danny Boyle as a director. He tries new things. All the new things he tries here are bad. The movie posits that a world without the Beatles is a world that's infinitely worse and no, it's a world that's very much the same actually. What it instead puts forward is a newfound appreciation of the Beatles if only in knowing that everything they made could have been exactly what was, but worse. Musicians with talent enough to be good, but not great. If history was made by a bad cover version. Beyond that—Himesh Patel carries constantly a look of confusion and constrainment that gives me anxiety, and his love interest is someone who asks a man who has devoted his life to music to instead choose her at his moment of ascension. Pffbt. 

Do not forget who put the crown on your childish head.

300: Rise of an Empire - .5/5

Did you know this movie cost over $100,000,000 to make? That's hilarious. 

I watched this movie by accident when the Greek tour guide, showing us the Thermopylae pass, wanted to expose us also to the historical and emotional context of the battle of 300 Spartans using the power of cinema; only he bought the wrong movie and so showed a brutally violent and explicitly sexual movie to a group of aging church-goers. ¯\ _(ツ)_/¯ An even worse imitation of a rotting fruit; Zack Snyder's grunt-rock aesthetic gets even uglier, even stupider, and—the anecdote at top notwithstanding—somehow even cheaper. 

We don't get a lot of things to really care about.

Pig – 3/5

I feel like the impetus of this was 'can we start from a premise as stupid as John Wick, and be as well-made?' And it is, and it is. Blood and bullets become herbs and spices. An assassin hotel becomes an underground chef fighting ring. It's a Microsoft Word find-and-replace script. I remember every bullet meal I ever shot cooked. I remember every person I ever killed served. And friends, long-time readers, movie fans—I truly have nothing against this method of moviemaking. Idiocy, taken seriously, is my chef's kiss 😘. It's just that it's taken so seriously. So seriously. There is a balance that was lost. John Wick 2 and 3 showed what a miracle John Wick 1 was. And so here, too, lies another in its shadow.

You can't be ugly except to people who don't understand.

Beginners – 2.5/5

Ah, the 20th Century Women cinematic universe. That movie made me want to be a Mike Mills fan, but in the thinly-autobiographical this (and the equally uninteresting C'mon C'mon), the only thing I find I'm a fan of is his mother. Whether as Annette Bening, as Mary Page Keller, or as Gaby Hoffman, the mothers are the only ones who have any spark, any mystery, anything worth knowing. Christopher Plummer is just Old Gay Man. Ewan McGregor is just Sad Man In Love. Mélanie Laurent is just a French Object. In 20th Century, there was a whole life.

That era has passed. Nothing that belonged to it exists anymore.

 In The Mood For Love – 3/5

Listen, friends, I will appreciate the artistry on display—the pretty pictures, a lack of lingering when someone else most certainly would have lingered, in love with their own work; the ability to paint a portrait with broader strokes than most—but this was not meant for me. I cannot abide a romance with no humor; a romantic- with no -comedy. What's fucking without the fun? You may disagree! And that sets us apart. 

And leaves the world to darkness

and to me.

— Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Thomas Gray

The purpose of growing is to get bigger,

not smaller.

Where do you go

to find yourself again.

A place

that calls us back.

How could my cheeks be full,

my head held high, my heart not wrecked, my body not broken? 

… 

My friend Enkidu, whom I loved, has turned to clay. Am I not like him?

— Gilgamesh

Well, we could do a fart comedy.

But it’s also okay to make a fart drama.

– Daniel Scheinert

It prevents the spectators from forgetting unreality,

which is the necessary condition for art.

– Jorge Luis Borges, The Secret Miracle

Places we’re afraid to enter

because we’re afraid we won’t know how to leave. 

A chubby little salami.

Riders of Justice – 4/5

An action movie about coping mechanisms, homina homina. Genuinely touching and genuinely hilarious, moving easily between them. It's very good; I've no more to say.

I'm a little bit lonely these days.

Rushmore – 3.5/5

I never really thought much of it and, 20 years later, I'm on the other side of the fence. Ain't that the way it always be. I might have then complained of its artifice; in retrospect—and by comparison—it's one of the least artificial of Wes Anderson's career. There's an awkwardness, an unsteadiness, a genuine dweebishness that runs through it. It's not as perfect as he would one day become. Maybe that's the throughline of his career: people who fuck up because they're trying to be perfect. The flaws make us forgivable. There's also a willingness here for everything to not feel the same throughout. Max Fischer stands out because he doesn't know how not to. And Olivia Williams is just wonderful, isn't she? 

There are countless men

in the air, on land and at sea,

and all that really happens, happens to me. 

- Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of  Forking Paths

By the pricking of my thumbs.

The Tragedy of Macbeth – 2.5/5

Well don't I need to take a college credit course on reading Shakespeare. Thank god for subtitles; blessed be the pause button. I think with this movie I finally start to understand Denzel as an actor; he's unpredictable; perhaps sane, bordering on not. He carries crazy well. He takes it with him off-screen. He's somewhere else, in a one-man play, and indeed I think he could have pulled it all off on his own; he need no other. Mostly. Kathryn Hunter's the only one who rises up to meet him. Everyone else is starring in some other, lesser movie, and they drag it down around them.

We will be told

which burning Asians to take seriously. Slowly. Later.

— Trip Without A Ticket, The Digger Papers

Finding that just-right patch of ground, you might even say,

is half the trick to growing old.

It's Your Friends Who Break Your Heart, by Jennifer Senior

I want to be just like a melody.

After Yang – 3.5/5

The soul is a shelf, and the illusion is that we are filled by the things we choose to keep—or discard. But, mostly, it's the things we have no choice in. The things that stay that we want to discard, and the things that wave goodbye as we cling for them to stay. Whole memories—minutes, hours, days-long—become little fleeting visuals; no longer stories, barely moments, not worth repeating, hazy as they are. I think there are times the movie approaches self-parody; brief recordings of light reflected on walls, children's laughter, women's smiles, wind blowing; the flashback montage of every dead girlfriend who died before the movie starts. It's so gentle as to feel inhuman. In a movie about life's preciousness, it feels overly deliberate. You can't paint a full portrait with snippets. So, like memory then.

The search is what anyone would undertake

if he were not sunk in the everyday-ness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

– The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy

Round and round the shutter'd Square

I strolled with the Devil's arm in mine.
No sound but the scrape of his hoofs was there
And the ring of his laughter and mine.

– Enoch Soames, by Max Beerbohm

mot juste

The exact, appropriate word.

A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.

It sniffs — it sucks — it strokes its eyes over the whole uncountable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why? I can trace them. I can even, with time, pull them apart again. But why at the start they were ever magnetized at all — just those particular moments of experience and no others — I don't know. 

— Equus

This is love.

It is a mass of ice
melting, I can't hold
it and I have nowhere
to put it down. 

– Molly Brodak, by Molly Brodak

There's freedom

in losing.

We loved you then we left you.

Ain’t that how it goes. 

Who the hell

wants to be happy?

There was a whole life

before you.

Sotto voce.

In a quiet voice, as if not to be overheard.

God bless

the broken-hearted.

What else has been hidden

by summary? 

— Simon Sarris

As it happens,

I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for oneself depends upon one’s mastery of the language.

— Joan Didion, Slouching towards Bethlehem

It works perfectly;

though on rare occasion, you may become a fly.