The Lynch Meditations -2

Abraham Lincoln speaks us into greater union, invokes the better angels, no matter the cost

Susan B. Anthony speaks us beyond white male supremacy, towards greater union, universal enfranchisement, no matter the cost, even to herself

Adolf Hitler speaks white supremacy, genocide, the abyss

Churchill speaks us to the defense of what's left of democracy, no matter the cost

JFK speaks us to the stars, no matter the cost

Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks us into greater union, universal enfranchisement, no matter the long history of slavery, no matter the hardwired injustice and inequality of white supremacist America, no matter the cost, even to himself. 

Post World War II, evil was supposedly vanquished

of course
this was just a story we told ourselves
the evil went invisible, parallel compartmentalized soul chamber
verily, it became entwined with our free market American soul, if there can be said to be such a thing

some words get us to a higher place
some words advocate genocide and white supremacy, cutthroat capitalism, slavery

words mislead people who might've otherwise done the right thing
words, long abused, lose all meaning,
and our faith in communication
as opposed to force
dies.

Language
spoken, written, signed, tapped, felt, touched
is a massive part of the human experience
for all the wreckage
for all the lies
of a voice yoked to this or that rubblemind
we can also speak visions of compassion, liberty, equality, justice,
speak a vision that can take us beyond the boundaries
of family, tribe, village, town, country, city, nation, planet
speak us into a union with cosmos
unless that's just another lie
or a tantalizingly compelling fantasy construction
perfectly internally consistent, logical, full of dramatic reversals and payoffs
yet wholly divorced from reality
it's just a movie.

Which reality are we speaking ourselves into, and what voices are being suppressed?
which voices have we yet to hear?
which voices are we prepared to hear?

The Lynch Meditations 1: Six Men Getting Sick (1967)

Sequence of strangely proportioned men exposing themselves-their very guts-to the sounds of the air raid siren. All kinds of crazy color, raw emotion spews forth. Little fires, little fires-I can’t help but think this is a commentary on the Cold War. Like in that moment when you realize the bombs are going to drop you can’t hold in your nausea, your fear, your very guts anymore. Extreme fear results in an internal spiritual explosion that sends everything inside-fear, anguish, despair, intestines, bones-flying all over the place. The sequence repeats as though these men are caught in some never-ending cycle of panic, nausea, and self-disembowelment.

Or maybe these six men don't need the Cold War behemoths grappling above them and the prospect of being stamped out in the scuffle to bring up overwhelming existential terror from the depths. Maybe the sickness is purely spiritual, irrational, with no definite cause or pathogen. After all, where do capitalism, communism, nationalism, and nuclear warfare come from? Human minds, human hearts.

Another possibility is that these men, if we presume them to be American, might just be giddy at the prospect of annihilation, the sickness and vomit welling up out of them expressions of performance anxiety before the realization of a cherished dream: Better Dead than Red. The bombs are falling, later for humanity, but at least the commies get to be ashes, too.

There's no overt political messaging here, as in most of Lynch's work. If you weren't told this movie was made in 1967, you might not even peg it as a Cold War film or having anything to do with nuclear weapons . Even later Lynch works that explicitly deal with matters of war and conscience-such as Dune and The Straight Story-do not emphasize the conflict with an external enemy so much as the struggle within the hearts of the protagonists to deal with the costs of conflict, brutality, the power of life and death over another individual or the entire human population of planets like Earth or Arrakis. The "Gotta Light?" episode of Season 3 of Twin Peaks explores the sheer terror loosed by the advent of the Nuclear Age, but the sides of that metaphysical conflict are more evenly portrayed, flirting with an explicit good vs. evil duality that was only suggested in earlier Lynch films.

Six Men Getting Sick was David Lynch's first film-an animated painting, really, according to Lynch's own remarks about its origins. Watching it today, it runs about five minutes, and on first viewing it might seem impenetrable, opaque, but the more one watches it, the more one perceives its detail and nuance. It's a densely packed primer of the cinema to come from David Lynch and his future collaborators.

NEXT: 1/6/18: The Lynch Meditations 2: The Alphabet (1968)

The Lynch Meditations -1

Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumiere, born October 19, 1862
Louis Jean Lumiere, born October 5, 1864
Francis Bacon, born October 28, 1909
Trinity Nuclear Test, July 16, 1945, Trinity Test Site, New Mexico
David Lynch, born January 20, 1946
Truman Doctrine of containment of communist countries, advent March 12, 1947
Louis Jean Lumiere, died June 7, 1948
Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumiere, died April 10, 1954
Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), released 1967, directed by David Lynch . . .

Staid gentlemen
flying apart
under the weight of nuclear jitters
a tarantella communicable
from the bite of fate
furiously unleashing the suppressed terrors
of a world poisoned by the dream
of total annihilation

light obliterates
but it can also capture dreams

two schools of sublime rigor:
nuclear weapons
and cinema
aborning
or metastasizing
within the tormented heart of the twentieth century

The Lynch Meditations 0

by William D. Tucker

Filmmaker David Lynch-director of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Mulholland Drive, Dune, Lost Highway-refuses to discuss what his films mean. He'll talk about how they're made. He might speak about the roots, the inspirations of a given work, but he doesn't want to tell critics or interviewers or audience members what deeper significance-if any-his work contains, suggests, or embodies. Lynch prefers not to state the theme of a given work directly. This may be because he doesn't consciously construct his films to deliver a singular meaning. It might be that his films are meant to be engaged with in a state of uncertainty, with no definite answers within reach. Lynch has a background as a visual artist, so maybe he approaches his films as visual works first and foremost, and everything else is meant to support the visuals.

Lynch is also a proponent of Transcendental Meditation. He has a foundation-the David Lynch Foundation-which promotes TM as a discipline for achieving personal happiness and world peace. TM involves-as do many meditative techniques-sitting quietly, eyes closed, staying in the moment, taking note of your thoughts and feelings as they occur, all while trying to exist in a wholly non-judgmental moment . . . something like that?

To be perfectly honest, I've never seriously practiced meditation. Maybe I tried to meditate once. I fell asleep. I think that's what happened. I don't claim to understand TM or any other mindfulness discipline. What puts me in a thoughtful, focused state of mind is cinema. Sitting, staring into a screen, ideally in the dark, but sometimes with the lights on, and giving myself over to a fantasy, a gritty neo-realist drama, a progressive documentary trying to throw a wrench into the works of the war machine, a hallucinogenic anime dystopia, a Hong Kong heroic bloodshed shoot-em-up-whatever kind of movie, cinema puts me in an altered state of mind. Maybe I'm just a compulsive fantasist, but cinema is my drug, my therapy, my meditation. It's to the point where I find it hard to articulate, to even want to put it down in words, yet I have this nagging feeling that I should. I don't know why. There's absolutely nothing special about me. I don't see more films per year than other people. I don't have any special expertise or metaphysical insight. But that's what I feel compelled to do every now and again when I have the time and the willpower to put down my thoughts about movies I find interesting.

Although I do not practice any form of mindfulness or meditation, I wanted to try to approach the cinema of David Lynch in a more personal, philosophical fashion, integrating my own feelings, thoughts, and musings from my own experience into the viewing experience. In a way, that's what every film reviewer or critic does, but I wanted to go a bit more loopy with this one.

I've come to view cinema as a kind of secular church, as a spiritual experience that affects me internally in important ways. I don't know who first came up with the term 'The Church of Cinema,'( I think I first came across it reading an interview with Quentin Tarantino who referred to him and fellow filmmaker Martin Scorsese as worshiping at different churches as a metaphor for their different styles of filmmaking) but I like it. So these reviews of Lynch's films aren't exactly meant to be sermons-I have no desire to preach definitive visions-but meditations on possibility, interpretation, and feelings. Lynch's films strike me as unusually inviting of interpretation, rumination, and meditation because they can be very weird, abstract, surreal, and grotesque. Lynch's cinema can also be shocking in moments of violence and transformation; and disorienting in their transitions into different realms of existence, perception, and consciousness. Lynch's movies can also be frustratingly obscure, opaque even, and this by design, thus demanding multiple viewings to figure out what, precisely, the hell is going on in a given film. Or maybe this opacity is meant to short circuit rational thought and encourage a shift into more intuitive forms of feeling and knowing, as opposed to rationally dissecting a work into its various parts, and assigning meaning, form, and function to all those parts.

I don't know. But I'm going to take a close look at the cinema of David Lynch, and see what I find.

NEXT: 1/4/18:The Lynch Meditations 1: Six Men Getting Sick (1967)

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Fragment of a 2017 Dream

I actually have-

-this is a valuable collector’s item-

I own

In a climate controlled vault

The very first edition

Of the issue of Nintendo Power where they had the Communist Manifesto as a pull-out special strategy guide-you know where you have to pry open the staples in the center of the page to get the booklet out of the center of the magazine?

Yeah.

Low print run on that one.

I was told Martin Shkreli bought up all the other original copies, presumably to destroy them,

but then I heard

that he saw himself in the Marxian writings

saw himself as a harbinger of capitalism's implosion,

something like that?

I mean

like

who the fuck knew anyone took Marx seriously anymore?

-October 2017

Copyright 2017 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. Used with permission

MOVIE REVIEW: THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017)

Directed by Guillermo Del Toro

Written by Guillermo Del Toro and Vanessa Taylor

Produced by Guillermo Del Toro and J. Miles Dale

Cinematography by Dan Laustsen

Edited by Sidney Wolinsky

Music by Alexandre Desplat

Starring
Sally Hawkins
Octavia Spencer
Richard Jenkins
Doug Jones
Michael Shannon
Michael Stuhlbarg

Review by William D. Tucker

The Shape of Water is a Cold War era science-fiction fairy tale about monstrosity, romance, interior states of fantasy, and the break down of perfect systems of control whether they be American capitalistic militarism or Soviet totalitarian communism as agents or assets within those systems break under pressure, find love, decay in their given jobs, or some combination of these factors. The movie bounces back and forth between different levels of harsh external reality and interior fantasy.

We begin in the depths of some lagoon, and zoom into the submerged hallway of an apartment building. The water drains away, and we realize we are in a kind of dream, or some more elastic than normal reality all in tones of green. When the narrative voice over comes across the speakers, and the opening credits of actors, producers, and craftspeople appear on-screen it actually kind of brings us back down to reality because we get our bearings: we're watching a narrative movie with actors playing characters conceived in a screenplay written by humans, produced by humans, directed by a human. We, the audience, exit the zone of uncertain surrealism, and begin to navigate the Cold War, pre-Kennedy assassination world of The Shape of Water.

Our protagonist is a mute-but not deaf-woman named Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins), who works nights as a janitor inside a top secret government facility in Baltimore rather cleverly called Occam Aerospace Research Center. Elisa was abandoned as an infant, seemingly bearing the scars on her neck of some horrible mutilation which has left her mute. Elisa's partner on the night shift is fellow janitor Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer), who confides every last detail of her mundane marriage to Elisa, who is happy to listen since she lives alone and seems to live vicariously through Zelda, and her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), a middle-aged commercial artist who also lives alone. Giles and Elisa both live in neighboring apartments, and they constitute each other's primary form of social life. If Giles were heterosexual and thirty years younger, he would've proposed to Elisa by now, and maybe Eliza would've accepted-but this reality isn't so simple for these good-hearted, struggling people.

One night, Elisa and Zelda are cleaning a chamber of the gothic research center containing an open pool when a high tech cylinder is wheeled in containing a humanoid fish man creature (Doug Jones, who played the similar Abe Sapien in the two Del Toro directed Hellboy movies) overseen by Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon) a super creep in a suit who's in charge of the fish-man at the research center. Elisa sees the creature through the plate glass of the cylinder and there's an immediate connection between the human and the seemingly non-human. Or less-than-human? Or more-than-human? Later, we find out that the the fish-man-referred to as "the asset'"-was kidnapped from his home in a river in South America, and that this creature is believed to offer new modes of existence to the human race which could make them more durable in outer space . . . but the only way to know is to dissect "the asset."

Complications arise. Colonel Strickland reveals himself to be a white supremacist and a  sexual predator. Elisa establishes an unexpected rapport with the fish-man. Not to mention there's a Soviet agent in the house. The Soviets may try to steal the fish-man, or destroy him to prevent him from giving up cosmic secrets to the Americans. Everyone sees some precious dream within "the asset," who is characterized as having been once worshiped as a god in his native land, and may possess paranormal power.

Along the way, conflicts involving sexuality, class, race, white supremacy, and the oppression of women during 1960s America boil forth from the soul of this intricate dream of a film.

I don't want to give away too much, here, you really should just see how it plays out for yourself.

The Shape of Water is my personal favorite film I've seen in an actual movie theatre this past year. Only Get Out, Logan, Blade Runner 2049, and Detroit came anywhere near moving me the way this movie did. It's also a strong return to form for Guillermo Del Toro, who's previous films-Crimson Peak and Pacific Rim-were gorgeous visual spectacles, but came up short in the script department, falling back on the tropes of gothic romance novels and mecha anime. Entertaining, sure, but somewhat insubstantial for me. This is easily his best movie since Pan's Labyrinth. Nothing comes easy for any of the characters-good, evil, in-between-in this story. Even the repulsive Colonel Strickland is shown in context as an effect of a system of brutality more than a cause, though Strickland himself is absolutely complicit.

The Shape of Water even has my single favorite line of dialogue of this past year's cinema . . . which I wouldn't dream of spoiling!

Be good to yourself. Go see it.

Every Day Is Halloween 5: Shadowing Up

Every Day Is Halloween 5: Shadowing Up
by William D. Tucker

Santa pulls the chains
attached to the steel arrows
buried deep in the heaving flanks
of His twelve cloud-tripping reindeer.

Claus reaches into His bottomless sack
(all done up with runes that keep twisting themselves up into ruins evocative of bygone empires, makes your brain hurt to stare at it too long, makes you want to go build an empire, just so it can eventually be all bygone and shit)
grasps the blazing industrial complex of intertwined mandalas of intertwined industrial complexes within
transmits dreams of world-girdling conspiracies through all the face-splitting hairs of all his beards
(which are, of course, mystically empowered antennae, learn something new every-)
to all the faithful of all ages
gives them ENEMY
gives them the Rubblemind to go deal with ENEMY
broadcasts to all the boys and girls
on both lists, actually,
who have all mostly organized themselves into competing militarized secret police agencies,
the militarized secret police model having displaced all the others-nuclear family, tribe, organized crime, cult/organized religion, legacy political party, terrorist cell, tabletop role-playing gathering, online gaming network-to become the primary mode of human professional and/or social activity.

Santa makes sure to shadow up
before appearing on radar as a paid propaganda asset of various military-industrial-infotainment complexes around the world
or for His select on-camera major media market appearances
wouldn't do to let the kids-of-all-ages behold the pierced reindeer
(reindoors, actually, that let Claus clip in and out of vanilla space-time, make the goddamn schedule)
definitely would not do
to let anyone
of any age
behold His true face
or any part of His true body
which is mostly a lot of teeth, claws, and agonized vestigial faces
glitching in and out of mundane reality
too many leftover, conflicting design assets,
too much malevolent design creep going in all directions,
over too many iterations
across too many corrupted, partial-build realities
trying to be too damn many places at once'll do that
gotta provide all the boys and girls
of all ages
on both lists, mind you
with ENEMY
on schedule
in all the asshole realities.

Which doesn't leave much He can reveal without properly shadowing up first.

Ho-ho-ho, motherfuckers.
-December 2017

Copyright 2017 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. Used with permission. 

Every Day Is Halloween 4: All-Purpose Stabulation/Squibulation Person

Every Day Is Halloween 4: All-Purpose Stabulation/Squibulation Person
by William D. Tucker

A god-the God?-answers the sweaty, gross prayers of some degenerate aspiring filmmaker, most likely some jerk-off film school graduate ... 

And some god-the God?-spake . . .

saying . . .

If you're willing to inject a virus into the computer graphics pipeline

while wearing DIY prosthetics makeup
of a monstrous being you spent a month of Tuesdays cooking up inside your brain
must be an original
no cosplay allowed

AND

you agree to shoot using only film and 100% analog editing equipment and techniques
no sound,
must be black and white

AND

you light one of the letters of the Hollywood sign on fire-any letter, so long as it burns

then
you will be blessed
with an All-Purpose Stabulation/Squibulation Person
a kind of ersatz human from another plane of existence
(e.g. a recent theatre school graduate)
who has been completely neutralized, stripped of all individuality by advanced acting techniques
who you will be permitted to use as you see fit
in your artsy-fartsy black and white shot-on-actual-film movie

typically,
end-users stab and/or shoot these neutrals after imbuing them with the identity of their choice of fantasy target
(identity induction protocols/procedures are included in an accompanying instruction booklet found inside a kangaroo-ish skin pocket in the abdomen)
it could be
man, woman, child
someone you knew in life,
someone powerful,
someone evil,
someone innocent,
mom,
dad,
an ex,
someone you imagine,
even a fictional character,
I mean
vengeance fantasies are stupifyingly common among aspiring filmmakers these days.

BUT
you don't have to go down that road
you could cultivate your neutral into a real human being
befriend them
nurture them
set them free
even if that almost never happens-you could do that shit
you really could
you could break that mold into tiny pieces
but the odds will most likely exert a crushing power over your pittance of "free will,"
and you will run to type
and make some kind of an arty fucking snuff film
as per usual
as per the norm
just another angry little shit with a camera,
aaaand
a head full of power/domination fantasies
nothing special

but go ahead and prove my ass wrong
wrong as Richard Nixon
I would be very amused by that
amused AF
-October 2017

Copyright 2017 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. Used with permission. 

Free Agent 2: The Throne of Contemplation

Free Agent 2: The Throne of Contemplation 
by William D. Tucker

As part of my indoctrination into RIVALCORP, I am cracked, scanned, and drained-which means I sit in a well-appointed Throne of Contemplation  with all my bodily needs attended to, the drug-pump primed just so, and my choice of authorized flickers via direct brain stimulation. I re-watch the Beverly Hills Cop Trilogy, including the TV edits. I'm actually a really big defender of Beverly Hills Cop 3, and I even think there are some inspired cuts in the censored-for-television version. A couple of the shootings are actually more abrupt and violent with the cartoonish squib-work cut out, but other scenes do suffer. I go through every iteration of the Beverly Hills Cop saga before cycling into a state of lucid dreaming.

I got into the habit some jobs ago of refusing to dream when locked down into the Throne of Contemplation, because I didn't want my internal phantasia to be recorded and made property of the system. But then they would just interdict the sleep state, and that took awhile to resist. Once I got into lucid dreaming I forced the most depraved scenarios and imagery into the system: vast howling chancroids vomiting up greasy feces and broken off teeth; syphilitic samurai seppuku; cockroaches eating eyeballs out of Muppet Baby faces; a U.S. president eating nothing but hair for every meal ... but I got worn out with that routine.

Why bother to monkey wrench the system? The system is, itself, Sabotage Incarnate. The true believers keep it puttering along on a lean mixture of malice and avarice. Juvenile shock perversities  are amusing dirty jokes to spice up a puritanical day.

Moreover, I'm certain every loyal employee has engaged in such acts of so-called resistance. I got the idea from a colleague who has been mostly deleted from my memory. The system is fully capable of total erasure of an individual identity but that method has been deemed, for now, to be inefficient. The web of an individual mind has too many useful strands, connections, intersections, and working networks to be obliterated outright when it can just be steered onto the right path with the proper rewards and stimulation. Some pruning-sure, fine, and they have refined that capability to a shockingly precise degree. I admire it. I do. What they've achieved is absolutely astonishing. Solo units such as myself have largely seen an enhanced quality of life at the end of all processes. So why fuck with shit?

I don't exactly love Big Brother, or whatever you want to call it-it ain't that warm of a sentiment.
And I wouldn't say He loves me.
But He's done right by me in terms of the basics.
-August 2017

Copyright 2017 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. Used with permission. 

Free Agent

Free Agent
by William D. Tucker

Mid-cycle
None of the faces or uniforms or masks or languages registered
ran diagnostics on my eyes, ears, heart
it wasn't my eyes, ears, heart

I went to the company store to buy new getup
was promptly removed from the facility

And they were kinda rough with me
which was funny at first
made me feel like Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop,
but they weren't truly abusive,
didn't throw me through a plate glass window

The paramilitaries looked new and shiny
upgraded from combat webbing and shaved heads
into a league of techno demi-gods
or a cosplay science ninja team
heads encased in robo-insectoid helmets

On the street before the great and convoluted facility
I stood crying
I tried so hard to suppress all emotion
but the internal drug-pumps had already deactivated upon my termination
the tears flowed
I blubbered even.

I stood there for an hour or more,
half hoping I'd be shot by a shiny paramilitary
but no dice.

I stalked down the middle of the road,
hoping to be rundown,
but all the autocars swerved just so,
even broadcasting messages of compassion, recommending suicide prevention hotlines, Jesus Christ,
Buddha, L. Ron Hubbard;
one especially devout car offered to roll with me along my dark path,
but I mouthed insipid syllables 'til it left me alone with a pamphlet full of mistranslated, out-of-context Bible quotations.

A half hour passed
I settled into a stalking rhythm which the autocars found agreeable,
just a little deviation from their ground-plans
didn't even get clipped
I'd always wanted to test the collision detection on these machines
and an autocar pulled up next to me, told me to get in, and something inside me responded to a signal
-the chem-pumps I think-
which guided me to yes.

In the air conditioned cab, stimulant-alcoholic drinkbox in my hand
the autocar spoke at length about all the opportunities that awaited me inside RIVALCORP
which wasn't the true name, but a cipher
because the real name was knowledge reserved to the executive class
or possibly just the great algorithms in the Cloud of Clouds
the near immaterial  deities rumored to have the whole game on lock these days.

I couldn't even recall the name of the company I was just fired from,
my mind only coming up with PREVIOUS GIG, PASTCORP, variations on that general theme.

I swiped my consent through screen after screen
of terms and conditions
just like I did when I got headhunted for PASTCORP.

Why do they even allow any memories, for fuck's sake?
They write in so many strategic erasures and interdictions,
everybody's hacking into everybody else's chem-pumps,
just do the full wipe, fer Hubbard's sakes!
I'm pretty sure they like it like that-leaving in just enough to promote an illusion of free will,
easy enough to frustrate, tip over into despair in a world of unlimited choice,
and thus conformity, obedience, self-indoctrination follow on with the quickness
to still the cognitive dissonance.

Also,
a full wipe just means you gotta increase resources devoted to re-skilling, re-indoctrination lead times,
so,
yeah,
it's cool.

The autocar regaled me with readings of official poetry as it whisked me towards another great and convoluted facility. The verses stirred my at-a-distance-controlled heart. Shit would work out for a few hundred cycles more, I would know where I needed to be.
-August 2017

Copyright 2017 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. Used with permission. 

Hopper

Hopper 
by William D. Tucker

1.
White light against a plaster wall
Looking with my back turned.
Window is the vacancy of intersection.
A perspective on one aspect of the jagged upper texture
There is pointing and then there are jabs from the buildings.
You sit there, white light on your back.
The room is so suffused with cold, clear light.
Nothing is hidden yet nothing is revealed in the cold, clear light.
We speak of matters with a speech that the Observer does not render exactly
In the rendering, we become a pantomime.
Nowhere above and beyond this room,
So filled with light,
Can we ever speak truly of the vacant point of intersection.
Who has ever spoken before the cold, clear light suffused this room,
How was it even possible?
It isn't blinding, it isn't sudden, in fact it lacks all flourish or sensationalism.
The cold, clear light simply is, and it is in a most unavoidable way.
Nothing hidden, nothing revealed.
Looking with my back turned.

2.
Drink. Purchase. Sitting. Another drink/purchase.
Routine of the room of the cold, clear light.
Papers. Organize. Read. Papers. Sort. Prioritize.
This is the work of the room of the cold clear light.
Pillows. Laughing. Porch. Train car. Outdoors. Indoors.
This is the room of the cold, clear light.
Green, beige, red, blue, yellow, purple:
These stand out in strange new ways beneath the cold, clear light.

3.
He wished to communicate sunlight on the side of a building.
Many received his communication.
Others received many other things besides.
Drink. Routine. Cold. Clear. Light.
"More real than real" as one person put it.
Critical response: good, suffused with the cold, clear light.
He did not try to explain, except for elaborate designs and plans.
Many view. Experience an array of emotions.
There is a look of awareness at the science and rigor of construction.
Science/rigor/effort is reduced to "emotional response."
Cold, clear light becomes invisible.
"I get a sense of loneliness," one person says.
"This makes me feel a certain way," says another.
Rigor, effort, construction, science subsumed by "emotion."
Opinion. Subjective. I like. I think. I feel.
Drink. Routine. Cold. Clear. Light.
Looking with my back turned, I see them turning away having observed,
felt, thought, and processed very briefly the offering before them.

4.
Plans. Construction. Intersecting lines of purpose.
The science and the rigor necessary to achieve that specific effect.
"I want to communicate sunlight on the side of a building."
Result: opinions.
I think. I feel. Maybe. I like. I did not like.
I am approached for moments, perhaps, having extensively researched, practiced, and calculated myself.
Moments.
The rigor disappears. Lines of intersecting purpose are softly, gently smudged into pleasant, distinct blurs of opinion.
Invisible. Cold. Clear. Light.

5.
Opinion passed.
Return of routine.
Beyond initial foray into understanding.
Drink. Office. Papers. Organize. Dance. Sunbathe.
Analysis:
Cold, clear light becomes visible perceptible
Intersecting lines of purpose rise to the surface.
"I can see the wires."
Repetition of analysis.
Rigor and science unearthed
Notebooks are thumbed through
Paradigm shift/analysis again:
Cold, clear light hides nothing and reveals nothing.
Analysis:
"In this place there are fewer, wealthier people. No one has any memory of the past. Everyone is prosperous, satisfied, happy, and no one quite wants to remember how it got that way."
Paradigm shift/analysis again:
"He is expressing a deeply ambivalent attitude towards his subject matter. The elements of the voyeuristic collide with an overwhelming sense of the privacy of each person's universe. Ultimately, the voyeuristic wins out, because, alas, the end result is the work itself. He could not resist looking into the realms of privacy and then sharing what he saw with others."
Paradigm shift/analysis again:
"It is the portrayal of man's environment as supremely indifferent that wins out over everything else. His settings are neither threatening nor comforting, destructive nor supportive, good nor evil. His humans, likewise, have learned to dwell in this environment with all harmony by becoming creatures of supreme indifference themselves."
Analysis. Results ad infinitum. Each analysis different.
Return of opinion.
Opinion refined.
Opinion/analysis synthesis.
Still opinion.
Cold, clear light hides nothing and reveals nothing.
-February-April 2003

Copyright 2003 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. Used with permission. 

living skeleton actor fuck (7/24/15 version)

living skeleton actor fuck

by William D. Tucker

role puts flesh and guts and blood on me

it used to make me feel complete

now it makes me feel heavy, arbitrary, old,

like I was never quite here

it’s fuckin’ weird

Because

I have all the evidence in the world

that I was here

never really went away

never gave up

but, uh, I dunno.

the feeling inside

does not change

a lot of work,

a lot of awards,

a lot of love from all over the world

but it’s, uh, it’s definitely a king of shreds and patches kinda deal

yeah . . .

. . . multiple past personas inhabiting my body at an advanced age . . .

OVERCROWDING OF PERSONAS

My head is thick with Personas-I won’t lie . . .

but for my next project

very stripped down

just the bones

black box theatre

no vocal chords, lips, tongue, lungs,

none of that.

maybe just have the air conditioning cranked up to the max

with, like, the script in front of the vent

breeze will lift the text off the page

let the words whisper right through me . . .

heh,

won’t that be something?

-May-July 2015

Copyright 2015 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

MOVIE REVIEW: ARRIVAL (2016)

Arrival

Based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang

Starring

Amy Adams

Jeremy Renner

Forest Whitaker

Michael Stuhlbarg

Tzi Ma

Mark O’Brien

Directed by Denis Villeneuve

Screenplay by Eric Heisserer

Music by Johan Johannsson

Cinematography by Bradford Young

Edited by Joe Walker

“Don’t let it end this way…”

-Klingon Chancellor Gorkon’s (David Warner) dying words in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

“Holy fuck . . .”

-Ian (Jeremy Renner) in the film Arrival (2016)

A woman, a new mother (Amy Adams) speaks to us in poetry about time, and loss, and mortality. We see a life in fast forward-birth to death-a young daughter’s life cut short, in fact, leaving a divorced, bereaved mother to pick up the pieces and soldier forward with her life as a college professor. She is absorbed into her daily routine, as she walks through a university common area where students and staff cluster around a giant flatscreen. When she gets into the lecture hall, most of her students are absent, and those that are present are glued to their screens. She asks what’s up. A student answers by requesting the professor to tune the flatscreen to a news channel …

Strange objects-designated ‘shells’ by the US government-manifest in the skies over twelve human nations all across the Earth. They have no visible means of propulsion, and emit no waste products measurable by Earthling science. The shells look like slices off some titanic, impossibly hard alien fruit, or maybe the shavings off some monstrous carving. They just hang in the sky, defying all our physics, no doubt provoking hack cable news pundits to make references to H.G. Wells,  the Sword of Damocles, maybe out-of-context (mis)quotations from the Bible, especially the Book of Revelations.

One of the twelve shells has touched down in Montana. The US Army mobilizes to throw up a security/quarantine perimeter around the alien object. A secret effort is made to attempt to communicate with whatever intelligence lies within the shell ...

Soon enough, the woman from the cryptic opening is further delineated within her professional context: Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) of the US Army gets in touch with linguist and college professor Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), whose mastery of human languages in both theory and practice makes her a vital asset to the US’s Forever Wars on Terror. Colonel Weber, abruptly visiting her office in civvies with an armed escort, makes a terse, complimentary reference to their previous collaboration involving translations from Farsi: “You made short work of those insurgent videos.” Dr. Banks says, “You made short work of those insurgents.” Her solemn tone evokes a sense of betrayal-she didn’t sign on to be a cog in a killing machine. But when Colonel Weber offers her a chance to work on translating what may be an extraterrestrial language-the faltering initial gambit of First Contact between humanity and an intelligent alien species-she jumps at the chance.

Dr. Banks is, after some runaround by the government, inducted into a secret operation to communicate with the alien beings inside the shells. Banks is paired with Ian (Jeremy Renner) an astrophysicist. They are overseen by Weber and the deeply suspicious, but intellectual, CIA agent Halpern (Michael Stuhlbarg). Dr. Banks and Ian are paired up to work on the problem of communication with extraterrestrials from the differing perspectives of language and mathematics. After some initial discussion of the differences between the soft science of linguistics and the hard science of numbers, Dr. Banks and Ian, consummate professionals who respect each other, get to work on the essential question to be posed to the aliens: “What are you doing on Earth?”

Meanwhile, human societies lose their shit. What’s left of it. Especially here in the USofA: food riots; mass suicides by a religious cult; the National Guard is deployed to maintain order through force; conspiracy mongering by online socially mediated echo chambers stokes fear and distrust of science; talking heads of corporatist Neoliberal media outlets churning out sensationalist pseudo-scientific talking head chatter dilute the information ecology; and, through it all, the very worst human instincts are aided and abetted by online right-wing, Neo-Fascist, and white supremacist disinformation ops. Ignorance, fear, anti-intellectualism, nationalism, racism, and late stage capitalist distortion of reality for infotainment, profit, and fuel purposes derange the human species’ collective capacity for communication and collaboration. Suspicion is also generated by the secretive efforts by national governments to keep their efforts to communicate with the shells under wraps.

Dr. Banks and Ian feel the pressure from Weber and Halpern to force results by cutting corners on scientific rigor within the security culture bubble thrown up to maintain US supremacy, even as other nations compete to be the first to crack the alien riddle. China, led by the hawkish General Shang (Tzi Ma), is the primary rival to the US. Nuclear armed, paranoid nation states all in thrall to doctrines of national supremacy, all trying to be first to decide whether to slaughter the aliens or forge a way to the negotiation table. It’ll all work out in the end-won’t it?

Director Villeneuve crafts a sci-fi film as visually and sonically rigorous and mysterious as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, while weaving  in human emotions of loss, longing, wonder, despair, paranoia, anger, hatred,  and desperation. This is science fiction which is grounded in the central performance of Amy Adams, with the special effects as a support, contra Kubrick’s masterwork which casts human beings as specks within the cosmos. Humanity, however imperfect, has to reckon with its own agency as citizens of the cosmos in Arrival, whereas in 2001 humanity is at the whims of vast, alien powers manipulating our evolutionary history for unknowable purposes.

A major theme is the peril of communication between past and future both within ourselves as individual sentient beings with complex memories, and on the level of a human planetary society making a faltering first attempt at hailing an utterly alien intelligence and the redefinition of human identity that entails. Another theme is disorientation: the movie begins with a montaged depiction of Dr. Banks’s daughter’s birth-life-death which gives no hint of the first contact saga to come. But the grief and loss within Dr. Banks partially drives her mission to communicate with the aliens. When the human communications team first enters the central chamber of an alien shell, they are subject to weird gravity effects, and a key shot is framed upside down hammering home the idea of losing all human moorings when coming into the presence of the truly alien.

It would be criminal for me to spoil this movie any further. Part of Arrival’s power comes from the process of discovery. This is one of those movies you’re just going to have to see for yourself, Dear Reader. It’s a smart film about ideas, emotions, and high stakes conflicts. It is the rare science fiction film that functions at the same level of sophistication as science fiction literature. Think 2001, Gattaca, Solaris, Blade Runner, and Ghost in the Shell. Arrival will pop up on lists of the greatest sci-fi movies in years to come. Try to see it on the biggest, brightest screen possible, with the sound cranked to the max.

Every Day Is Halloween 3: living skeleton actor fuck

role puts flesh, blood, guts on this frame
not to mention tumors,  scars, bad thoughts, eureka insights,
mercy, sadism, self-sacrifice, greed, ambition, romance;

build each persona up from micro-replicators
into complex thoughts, interlocking processes of pattern recognition,
various esoteric mental exercises culled from misreadings of Stanislavski and Grotowski,
irrational desires, fears, obsessions, joys;

book the gig
fill me up
live in the moment
'til it got heavy
with burdens of reputation
now he's just repeating the same old shtick
fuzzy stretch where I didn't shoot after 4:30pm for about five years
'cause I was stinking shitfaced
but it made me more of a cult fave in the years to come
I'm slurring lines on camera,
always seated, slightly listing to one side,
visible use of body double when standing and shot from behind
obvious ADR by anonymous voice over artist
since lips and tongue were only capable of blotto-talk
the voice is one thing and then another
sad at the time
YouTube clipjob comedy gold in this New Era.

online parodies resurrected me
for stunt casting, for the new wave of self-aware exploitation flicks.
a lot of work,
a lot of love from all over the world
festival and con bookings
I go even if it's on my dime
depends on the size of the marketing budget
but I'll go just for the feeling
nothing like this was ever supposed to be in my future
what a racket,  you know?

my latest job
is a dipshit detective
gets his head cut off by a psycho lumberjack
they didn't even do a proper cast of my head
the wig
from behind
kinda looks like my hair
but they do it old school when they put my head through a hole in the set floor
and have me silently work my mouth like a freshly decapitated fish head,
it's actually an homage to a previous death scene I played
in the 1980s
one of the Italian Mad Max knockoffs
I did three or four of those back in the day
current crop of directors go crazy cramming in callbacks,
scenes from the past,
b-movies constitute their own reality, history, liturgy

I have this weird dream:
I strip it all down to the bone.
not even rehearsal clothes, like in my repertory theatre days,
not even the bare skin, like in my experimental protest theatre period.
no skin, blood, guts, eyes, brains, lips, tongue,
just the skeleton
all pinned and jointed together,
suspended from an ornate carved rack,
polished and lacquered to a piercing sheen.
you crank up the air conditioning,
put the script in front of the vent,
words lift off the page,
whisper'n'rage through my ribcage.

Something that stripped down-well, they could slather on some CG if that's too pure of a hit.
Make me into a transforming talking car or some shit.
-July 2015-October 2016
Copyright 2016 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. Used with permission. 

34 Hour Tetris Escape Plan

Within the 34th consecutive hour of a Tetris session lies the bardo gate.
Death,
Transcendence of earthly illusions,
And Rebirth lies across the border.
Death and Rebirth,
But not total forgetfulness.
You will carry with you knowledge of Reconfiguration,
Transformation,
Mutation,
Iteration in the Moment.
Cross the threshold, the real work begins.