Cucamonga Isn't Better Than I Am?
Lullaby Doubled and Cut Short by Geof Huth
Sometimes words are so simple they do not seem to exist and meaning seems as clear as air, as crisp as whistling moving through the air on a wide flat still plain.
Listen to the song as you read this.
A book may be made of pictures and the words may be handmaidens to those pictures, but the words still carry it along.
The words tell us where we are.
There once was a place named Cucamonga until it became incorporated, though whatever it became incorporated into has never been verified.
A book may have a soundtrack, which may come with it, which may exist separate from it, which you (the reader) may imagine, or even listen to, while you read a book.
The main text of the book is Mrs Eaves cut by Zuzana Licko, even though her cutting was done digitally (the typeface entrances me because it is classic and yet unworldly; each of its many ligatures seems to me a micro-visual-poem all to itself).
(I read Wise Blood while listening to Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks over and over again; I read Elizabeth Graver's Unravelling while listening to Natalie Merchant's Ophelia obsessively.)
I am Hazel Motes, at least in the eyes.
The books are the music; the music is the books.
We are compressed into the miniature space of perception where text and image and music are one, or intermingled.
A little bit of Cucamonga lives in all of us, though maybe it is only that we took a wrong turn in Cucamonga and ended up someplace else.
I write in sentences even when the sentences are paragraphs.
Maybe it is the Lagavulin that is giving me a headache or maybe it is the thinking that won't leave me.
Super 8 is a motion picture film I rarely used; my movie camera was 8mm, which means it shot 16mm that would be cut down the middle into 8.
A film is a story (or it is not), and if the story reveals itself slowly it is more erotic (even if it is not).
Art can only be erotic (le plaisir du texte, s'il vous plait, and our bodies are textual, sextual).
It is emotion that drives us, through the eyes, through the ears, through the touch of skin on skin, the taste of another, a scent that returns you to...
Through the earth, and down and down deep and reamed into the earth.
If a monster movie rarely shows the monster, if the story provides glimpses of itself in layers moving up and into someplace else, if the people of the movie work as people do and bad things happen, if you give away your most precious possession to make it work, there may come the worth of a night's sitting in a darkened room filled with strangers to trick yourself into believing you exist and will persist, at least for a while.
We are given over to the terror of it: not the terror of the monster but the terror of who we are, of who we have failed to keep ourselves from being.
When we cannot believe in love, we believe in compassion.
Who deserves to live? and who deserves to die?
Night is no more frightening than day, but the clarity of daylight allows us to confront our fears.
"Amores perros," I whisper, and spit into the night that spits back, and harder, at me.
If a photograph is blurry or cluttered or has almost nothing within it but sky, why do we still feel its pull?
Trout Fishing in America Replicant, or the Zombies among Us.
Everything is a model of something else, even the runway models.
A plane takes off.
The sounds of the world are messy and indistinct, a mush of sounds, so loud we cannot hear a heartbeat, or a breath, or the gentlest kiss.
For some photographs, a specific set of sounds are set aside for it.
I made a film with my friends when I lived in Bolivia, but we never watched the footage, and there was no sound.
The voice is a sound, even when we cannot hear it.
When Barney says, "Don't cry for me. I'm already dead," we are meant to laugh.
Fear is a reaction; anger is an energy.
I make references to nothing because I have no books of references or references to books.
The monster represents us, of course: we are frightening, yet somehow gentle, and we must escape from this place.
These words do not tell you enough to make a decision about the book, the movie, or existence itself.
Cucamonga isn't better than I am?
_____
VanderLans, Rudy. Cucamonga. Emigre: Sacramento, Calif., 2000.
Super 8. Written and Directed by J.J. Abrams. 2011.
Existence.
ecr. l'inf.
Sometimes words are so simple they do not seem to exist and meaning seems as clear as air, as crisp as whistling moving through the air on a wide flat still plain.
Listen to the song as you read this.
A book may be made of pictures and the words may be handmaidens to those pictures, but the words still carry it along.
The words tell us where we are.
There once was a place named Cucamonga until it became incorporated, though whatever it became incorporated into has never been verified.
A book may have a soundtrack, which may come with it, which may exist separate from it, which you (the reader) may imagine, or even listen to, while you read a book.
The main text of the book is Mrs Eaves cut by Zuzana Licko, even though her cutting was done digitally (the typeface entrances me because it is classic and yet unworldly; each of its many ligatures seems to me a micro-visual-poem all to itself).
(I read Wise Blood while listening to Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks over and over again; I read Elizabeth Graver's Unravelling while listening to Natalie Merchant's Ophelia obsessively.)
I am Hazel Motes, at least in the eyes.
The books are the music; the music is the books.
We are compressed into the miniature space of perception where text and image and music are one, or intermingled.
A little bit of Cucamonga lives in all of us, though maybe it is only that we took a wrong turn in Cucamonga and ended up someplace else.
I write in sentences even when the sentences are paragraphs.
Maybe it is the Lagavulin that is giving me a headache or maybe it is the thinking that won't leave me.
Super 8 is a motion picture film I rarely used; my movie camera was 8mm, which means it shot 16mm that would be cut down the middle into 8.
A film is a story (or it is not), and if the story reveals itself slowly it is more erotic (even if it is not).
Art can only be erotic (le plaisir du texte, s'il vous plait, and our bodies are textual, sextual).
It is emotion that drives us, through the eyes, through the ears, through the touch of skin on skin, the taste of another, a scent that returns you to...
Through the earth, and down and down deep and reamed into the earth.
If a monster movie rarely shows the monster, if the story provides glimpses of itself in layers moving up and into someplace else, if the people of the movie work as people do and bad things happen, if you give away your most precious possession to make it work, there may come the worth of a night's sitting in a darkened room filled with strangers to trick yourself into believing you exist and will persist, at least for a while.
We are given over to the terror of it: not the terror of the monster but the terror of who we are, of who we have failed to keep ourselves from being.
When we cannot believe in love, we believe in compassion.
Who deserves to live? and who deserves to die?
Night is no more frightening than day, but the clarity of daylight allows us to confront our fears.
"Amores perros," I whisper, and spit into the night that spits back, and harder, at me.
If a photograph is blurry or cluttered or has almost nothing within it but sky, why do we still feel its pull?
Trout Fishing in America Replicant, or the Zombies among Us.
Everything is a model of something else, even the runway models.
A plane takes off.
The sounds of the world are messy and indistinct, a mush of sounds, so loud we cannot hear a heartbeat, or a breath, or the gentlest kiss.
For some photographs, a specific set of sounds are set aside for it.
I made a film with my friends when I lived in Bolivia, but we never watched the footage, and there was no sound.
The voice is a sound, even when we cannot hear it.
When Barney says, "Don't cry for me. I'm already dead," we are meant to laugh.
Fear is a reaction; anger is an energy.
I make references to nothing because I have no books of references or references to books.
The monster represents us, of course: we are frightening, yet somehow gentle, and we must escape from this place.
These words do not tell you enough to make a decision about the book, the movie, or existence itself.
Cucamonga isn't better than I am?
_____
VanderLans, Rudy. Cucamonga. Emigre: Sacramento, Calif., 2000.
Super 8. Written and Directed by J.J. Abrams. 2011.
Existence.
ecr. l'inf.
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