Review: Cinema

Close your eyes and look at the light dancing around in your eyelids. That’s how the stars got names corresponding to classical mythologies. It’s free, and it ends when you are bored. I am not going to utilize the paragraph structure of the New York Times movie section or Variety nor give it a star rating, but I give it a check. The electric lights eliminate most of the night sky in most places, so this is what you’re left with. The camera is an imitation of the eye.

Melville and the magazines

When I try to escape America I, of course, get further into it. I sometimes tell European students it’s my job to know the place; it is helpful to break it down to its constituent parts.

All the empty buildings in Pittsfield, and no exhibition of Melville’s print collection!

Stravinsky has a quote in a book somewhere where he talks with adoration about how Ortega y Gasset ‘really knows’ America, ‘not just Melville and the magazines,’ and can prove this by producing his wallet photo of Jose posing with Gary Cooper.

‘Melville and the magazines’ becomes for me a sort of unattainable distance: Maupassant said he would lunch on mediocre food in the Eiffel Tower so that he wouldn’t have to look at it. Stravinsky’s arrangement of the national anthem is wonderful to sing if you will play at two notes at once; I get compliments at the ballpark.

This all comes to mind because I saw a headline that said “Hawaiian waters grow crowded with whales” and I thought it said “Hawaiian waiters grow crowded with whales”: 'Uncle Jim’s deep-fired, all-fat, real-gone/ whale steaks’ in heavy demand, or heavy supply.

On Foot

Dream journey: A guest at a Long Island beach house wanted to escape; I found the key to one of the sliding glass doors on top of the cutting board, took care that no one was watching, opened the fourth door from the left, and watched him make his way out through the dunes.

Town Meeting

An especially deep sleep, the personae from my dreams assembled in a municipal hall to reproach me for simplifying their plight in this space.

By the Shipyards

An old friend summoned me to meet his flight, or train since I wound up in a train station, where I found myself waiting with two of his other friends that had been so called. I wandered away and got hopelessly lost amid period rooms rivaling any museum’s, many of which were contemporary. I got bad directions and subsequently complained to the staff while standing in some sort of control room. I was told to leave the room, and as I entered a James Turrell room, it was clear that a staff member had been instructed to follow me in the room and fight me, and I fled because I thought this guy wasn’t worth messing up the installation. I arrived at a massive Chinese temple and a building that seemed to defy gravity.

The Print Collector

An act can carry with it many motivations; one is usually the nail that holds the will to the act, though not the obvious one. A dream diary: an affiliation with Surrealism, yes, light humor, but what chains me to it is the hoarding of narrative tableau. I keep the situations against me like a miser; unbearable is the moment when a story leaves me to never return. Neither certainty nor fear, but believing that beyond all the situations nothing lives, beyond the infinite reproduction of tableau infinity itself disappears.

Red Osiris

Dream Journey: I was on a domestic flight to somewhere in Tennessee, I think, seated near the back. People I had met before the flight that were going the same route in a rowboat met the flight as soon as we landed. One of the people on the plane with me named John who looked like John Cage jumped into the water and turned into a small red sea creature and broke into little pieces. I tried to put him back together to no avail.

Boarding the plane again I recounted this in a state of distress to the male steward and he shook his head and didn’t know what to do. Then there were large old hardbacks near my seat that I wanted to read, like Brecht’s diaries, and I wondered if I had brought them as a last minute whim, but an elderly woman dealer surfaced and let me look through the piles of used books on the plane.