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Death, I notice, often comes with a smile and a kiss, a tender tuck of blanket into legs, a pull to the shoulders making shroud complete, a tender whispered secret. “Good bye” or “Good life”, it might be saying. But so does love. 2 The light of the cancer center is…
I watched my house recede to the invisible as the water rises and the slow flat boat ferries me away. My only baggage— the wife in her angels nightgown, my chihuahua, a revolver loaded with dusty bullets— all collapsing in the flow, dissolving into rot and mold, a place not all that comfortable…
Today I’m 64, complete with 64 shades of cancer, a strike, summed together a perfect ten, long as the feet of a bowling alley, gentle and delightful as the 64 centimeters of a lady’s footstep, filled with enough sadness for 64 six word stories about grief, grateful enough for 64 poems of joy and thanks.…
A fossil in foam, five toes under a formed sole, preserves the flight of a thousand border treks. A layer of thermite and blood settles the right pad of every hastily fled soul, a rusty preservation of the ash of those who were enflamed. Their left clod is encased with the dirt of…
In the stillness of a teacup morning in Amsterdam a crowd with yellow stars query each other, a collapse of suitcases and stuffed pillow cases huddled under a gas lamp at a corner square, while those in the stories above slowly turn away. A few days before the yellow stars were twenty-one children with…
The best time and light for film biographies is twilight. Everything old looks grand in the dying light and creeping shadows, and it hardly matters that the actorly imitation is a step or two behind the genuine article. At that age everything is reflection, memory, regret and sadness, hopes of resurrecting those youthful steps and…
Read More "Stan & Ollie: Finds the Sad Truth After the Visual Gag Has Shined"
If art is truly to be unique and great then it can’t be easily reproducible. If every frame of At Eternity’s Gate, a film about Vincent Van Gough directed by Julian Schnabel, is striving to be a reproduction of VVG’s art, a ray of inspiration on his vision, art, and process than it negates the…
Read More "“At Eternity’s Gate”: Too Much Van Gogh Ruins the Art"
Border is a caveman fairy tale, a love story about chromosomes gone wrong, a metaphor about how man can rise and fall to his simian origins. It never settles into an evolution of its own, always evolving into different passions, weirder ideas, tilting to sci-fi one moment, reality the next, always skirting the tragedy-happiness of…
Read More "“Border”: Rising Above the Tragedy of Chromosomes"
Burning refers to both physical and inner emotional fires. The Korean director Lee Chang-Dong delights in taking his movie, an adaptation of a Haruki Murakami story, right up to the edge of borders physical (the blare of a North Korean propaganda broadcast drifts over frequently); emotional-- between friendship and betrayal, love and jealousy; and mysterious--…
Read More "“Burning”: Lee Chang-Dong Searches for the Fiery Great Hunger of Existence"
