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Cine Stuff

assayas - besson - cocteau - coen - egoyan - fincher - greenaway - imamura - inarritu - iwai - jackson - kitano - koreeda - kubrick - lee (a) - lee (cd) - lynch - mcquarrie - medak - miike - miyazaki - mizoguchi - murakami - riakano - noe - oshima - raimi - scott - shyamalan - suzuki - tartakovsky - tsukamoto - waters - wenders - wong - woo - yukisada - zhang



majia walks in the room, looks at the tv, says "oh, shit," walks to his room, closes the door, the thump of it, the sound of the film.

johnny's dad walks in the room, doesn't say anything, walks right back out, johnny and i, in high school back then, laugh our fool ass off.

i got a cineaste somewhere, sweet hereafter era, egoyan says something bout not judging realm a the senses based solely off the castration clip, that that's not all there is to a circus. johnny's dad walked in on the rape bit in kids. majia walked in on the rape bit in irréversible. majia comes home next day to find me watching finding nemo. coincidence, not balance; just what i'd gotten that particular—to me, random—day. majia says a little more en route to his room. smiles a little. laughs a little.

his room, my room, the room with the tv, are all in an apt in shanghai that we're paying way the fuck too much for. the furniture don't fit. the tv's decent, like the washer (automatics some sorta grail over here), he does the floors i do the porcelain, the walls are too thin an i got this construction site shining floodlights an shite in through my bedroom eyes everynight.

cozy, but underneath that, crap.

the couch kicks ass to sleep on (better than the bed, latter flooded in floodlight), pass out on, make out on, you just sorta sliiiiiiide on down to the floor without even noticing it, back now turned to some jane austen flick (you're not missing much—that guy she doesn't like, she marries him) and you can hurdle it easy when making the bee line from bed to door to cab to work ten minutes too late, someone's cigarette ash in yr eyes, smoke in hair, imprint of some titstand's jewelry in the fat a yr forearm.

girls with hitomi hair who aren't underage.

nine am last calls an sunrise specials vomit in the streets a birmingham.

and movies through the hangovers.

the first time i saw nausicaä was in this room in this overpriced apt. first time i saw oasis. first time i saw, hell, anything pirate and recent and unavailable stateside. sometime's there's a trade-off; first time i saw attack of the clones twenty some minutes was missing. was funny, they fly into this hole and land, all badass ninja "we will save you, ewan!"—then natalie portman's saying "i love you now we must die. boo hoo the hut."

george lucas ain't that much a smart ass.

or the aforementioned irréversible. i buy a copy. "有英文吗?" "有。有。" back home and... no. mei. you. back outside down the street trade it back (maybe for finding nemo, i dunno) next day different store different copy, different label, two discs not one, check it, english 有的, back home... craps out. in the rape scene.

irony's a skunked term, so i won't say it was ironic that it took me over an hour to get through just the very 10 minutes a the film where trauma is pegged to time dilation in the dunne book's proposed post-death dream (vs nostalgia, eg in after life). but it was, more than in part, why majia walked in on just that bit. me swearing, screaming (fuck the neighbors, old women chewing me out cuz i don't have the key to my roommate's bike), then back out down the street same place buy it again "wtf, you didn't want that!" "it's, er, fr my friend" back home, switch the discs, get through the bit that won't play, switch the disc, start in the midst a the bit, i seen this already i seen this, then on to the fin, majia somewhen in between.

room i first saw eraserhead in had a bubble in the ceiling. you could sit on the roof, and there was this bubble sticking out of it, and you could see inside. wave at people. shine laser pointers.

room i first saw sexy beast in at one point had four people sleeping in it, three on the floor, christina kicking me in the head, jonathan snoring through my lack a sleep, the sun up the lights out, fifty empty bottles a beer between here and the door. twisted sheets and sofa cushions and me asleep on the floor.

room i first saw city on fire in was in a college dorm, full bar under the bed, alarm clock in the trash can, foil in the windows so who knows the sun is dark and cold? alarm clock, now out a the trash, fails to go off, i out the door on the bike cross a quad show up for my only honors class final half an hour late. i'm one a the first five to leave. i get an a. grades come back, tuition cheque clears, next semester comes, i'm still here.

room i first saw better tomorrow ii in was an eastbound bus. no english subtitles, so i had no idea zhou runfa was supposed to be in nyc. looking for mr. perfect was a northbound bus, tongliao to huolinhe, huolinhe end a the highway, coalmines and siberian vistas and wind so cold it blows your nerve cells straight off your spine, leaving you blue-lipped and trembling with yr view a the grass and the lands. god of gamblers musta been a to or from zhou, whereever she was, wherever she is. dead for all i know.

i saw the terminal in an airplane, westbound, somewhere over the pacific. taipei to hk maybe. i left the headphones off. had i put them on, maybe—just maybe—insomnia meets its match.

but buses and planes and hard seat trains all run one into another into yet another, a dim green light, the back of someone's combover, no lav, a lav the size of a bag of golf clubs, window seat, aisle seat, riding bitch, some chinese kid kicking crispen's seatback again and again and again from shenyang to shanghai or shanghai to shenzhen. in korea a stewardess upgrades me to first class for free.

hot chicks must have a pretty good sit, free first class and shit.

if you turn all the lights off, wait till after sunset or dress yr windows up in foil, the room just disappears. there's this faint haze of blue dust, like atmosphere seen from space, glowing just around the screen, maybe enough if they cut to black you can see yr hand, or the remote, or the namespace that says "sony" or "lg" or "magnetbox." yr 4:3 or 16:9 screen doing its thing in the dark. nothing more.

it sucks if yr phone rings, when the path to it lies somewhere through the room that just disappeared, the buzz buzz noise, or if you've got some cheesy pop song set as a custom ring (hot snakes' "i hate the kids" or elefant's "lolita" are particularly good choices for teachers) then that.

here's how a harem girl dances.

movies you can fall asleep to, little black pills with soundtracks, terminals sans product placements, nightcaps. dune's the bomb for this (that yakko wakko & cute drop), anytime after 3am, anything short a 5 cups a コーヒー, jürgen prochnow says "there's something sleeping inside each of us" and i'm sleeping inside my disappeared room, one arm on the floor, another pressed between 啤酒肚 and 沙发 cushion, wake up at 5am to "main menu" and a 60 second audio loop, turn it off, roll over, pass back out. wake up, breki, taxi, 上班, 下班, beer. repeat and rinse and repeat and rinse.

jelly bellies and samurai jack. strike the empire #7 grey and lingua negra black.

chomsky and rushdie's bodyguards. and mars attacks!

film caught in the gate melts in the heat of the bulb.

the earth rotates about its axis, and wobbles like the dumb drunk bastard it is.

time eats holes in yr socks.

an so we wear em inside out.

repeat. and rinse.