I think they wanted a world bereft of values
where bands would play across apocalyptic land
and claim the dead Earth
to claim nothing from us
so we could finally find how simple it was to love
just one for the rest of our life
just a needle for ruin
and a heart to rebuild
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
"Happy Together" (1997) Dir. Wong Kar-Wai
How many cycles of death and rebirth does the human soul go through in a lifetime? For one who has shed the notion of a self and truly lives in the moment, it may be as simplistic as the cycles of sleeping and waking, like shedding skin that floats away without a trace. For those with a more tenebrous existence, however, rebirth is not a luxury. The weight of human experience in all its infinite complexities can quickly turn to despair; one soon wishes to hit rock bottom simply to know when they can climb back up again, yet even this process can turn into a maze with no escape. For suffering preceeds death and rebirth of the soul, and it can be nearly impossible to gauge when life is on its downward spiral or its steady rise. Such is the existence of the malcontents, the suicidals, the addicts, the vagrant drifters.
And those in love.
Hong Kong's hopeless romantic Wong Kar-Wai, with his loose, improvisational approach to filmmaking and his love of impressionistic mood-driven narrative, has always seemed to possess the superhuman quality of capturing the enigmatic process of love. His films delight in the cycling of visual and aural leitmotifs (Chungking Express's inexhuastible use of 'California Dreamin' and 'Things in Life', the slow triplet waltz and recurring settings of In the Mood for Love), yet seem to leave the viewer with the feeling of having embarked on a life-long journey. His characters possess a language all their own, trading in-jokes and staccato improvisations, and yet there is immense clarity to the ethereal speech. Indeed, Wong Kar-Wai's approach to film is much like love itself; cyclical, complex, painful, passionate, both insufferably miserable and stunningly beautiful in a single frame.
* * *
Though his international calling in Chungking Express teased at his darker musings on love, it kept an altogether light mood, focusing on his protagonists' amusing quirks in the face of crushing pain and agony. His follow-up to Fallen Angels, 1997's Happy Together, however, possesses little of that diffusing charm. Instead of turning to canned pineapples, his characters turn to alcohol, cigarettes, sex, and violence to bring on catharsis; when their dreams of exotic locales and rejuvenated love break down, the film's dysfunctional couple turn against each other, desperately seeking rock bottom just so they can start climbing back up.
Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yui-fai (Tony Leung) are already in a state of advanced breakdown from the film's onset. As Lai relates, Ho constantly assures him that the two will "start over", each successive restart running shorter than the last. The two decide to leave British Hong Kong (another Kar-Wai touch in his subtle insertion of historical perspective) for Argentina, attempting to literally change their world to fix their relationship. The plan is short-lived, however, when the two part ways on a car ride to Igauzu Waterfalls.
Broke and desperate, Lai takes up a job as a doorman for a small Argentian pub, the aptly titled "Union Bar". Fate brings Ho, a destructive and compulsive spirit, drunkenly stumbling into the bar with a small entourage of new boyfriends. The subtextual cat-and-mouse game between the two destructively resumes, with Lai and Ho back together on tenuous terms.
With Christopher Doyle's masterful cinematic brushstrokes, Kar-Wai adeptly conveys not only the cyclical breakdown of passionate relationships, but also the outside world's bearings on it as well. Ho and Lai's passion cages them in a solipsistic world; Argentina's gorgeous streets and rivers matter little when they are in love, strangers' faces blur in soft focus, and the two lock themselves away, both literally and figuratively. Yet when the eventual breakdown comes, the world is harsh and sharply in focus; Doyle brings sharp greens and reds, yellows and blues to the palette, each their own emotion and character. To jump from a dingy apartment filled only by ambience and the slowly escalating dialogue of Ho and Lai to the colorful bars and brick street decor is a sharp juxtaposition of the world when one is in love, and the same locale when one feels completely alone. The almost seamless transition from gorgeous black and white to fully saturated color also feeds the stark contrast of overlapping changes. Pain and suffering carry on from one cycle to the next, threatening to drag Ho and Lai back into their personal hell.
Wong Kar-Wai takes pleasure in detailing this re-entry into different worlds, these overlapping cycles of love and loneliness. At the crossroads of their first breakup in the film, Lai seems to be in the more precarious position, penniless and completely foreign to the world around him. To be the one who follows another's promises in love, to journey far from home, and then be left in the cold is a loneliness few could ever experience. Yet it is Ho who seems more lost, a slave to his own impulses. Kar-Wai only subtly hints at Ho's downward spiral, but much of Happy Together's brilliance is in the process of Lai's redemption and Ho's fall from grace.
Ho's volatile ways threaten to draw in Lai as well, but Lai's violence is only counteracted by his new acquiantance in a claustrophobic soup kitchen, Chang (Chang Chen). Chang's physical journey to the lowest point in South America may seem a far-fetched metaphor for the release of his (and Lai's) pain, yet Chang's eagerness and genuine demeanor make the journey a truly reaffirming endeavor. It is only fitting that the relationship between Chang and Lai is a deeply platonic friendship; whereas Lai constantly looks to Ho for passion, that passion is inseperable from his self-destructiveness and causes suffering wherever he goes. Chang, however, embodies the spirit of friendship and stability; ironically Lai finds that it is not destruction and catharsis that causes rebirth, but just the opposite. For all of Ho's accusations of Lai's "dullness", it is his grasp of stability that eventually pulls him out of misery. In the beginning, Lai tries to find love without a home, and by the film's conclusion, he returns home without a love.
The exchanges between Chang and Lai serve as the film's emotional anchor, especially when contrasted with Lai and Ho. As their friendship blossoms, Lai comes to feel more at home in his dingy workplace than in his apartment. However this short period of happiness fades just as quickly when both Chang and Ho depart Lai's life (on wildly different terms). Chang begins his journey to the bottom of South America, while Ho storms off in anger.
Critics have found much to see within the triangle of Ho, Lai, and Chang. There may indeed be an unspoken love triangle, yet Wong Kar-Wai intelligently leaves the conclusions open and instead focuses on their effects. Even after meeting Chang, Lai finds himself descending once again, his life paralleling Ho's promiscuity as he settles for emotionless sexual encounters in the face of bitter loneliness. It is here where both Lai and the audience understand Ho's predicament; he is trapped so deep in the cycle of love and loneliness that he has lost his way to the redemptive possibilites of the world around him. Lai is lucky enough to find it through Chang, but Ho's fate seems fatefully sealed.
* * *
Happy Together concludes on a somewat mixed note, with Lai returning to Hong Kong via Taiwan (where he visits Chang's family). As Wong Kar-Wai is so fond of, history fills in some of the gaps of what would seem to be a very open-ended conclusion. Presumably returning to a China-led Hong Kong (the official handover was completed on July 1, 1997), Lai is once again heading for what seems to be a "new" place in his life. But is it? Hong Kong's culture and British rule would certainly not fade away overnight, and it was clear from the outset that for the next 50 years the city would maintain many of the laws and customs that made it such an aberration amongst Chinese cities. A new place with the same old story. Lai has found his way out of one cycle, but as with life, there is no winning. To pursue love again is to approach the same cycle of death and rebirth, of jubilation and misery. Yet it is the experience of being reborn from his tumultuous relationship with Ho that leaves the viewer feeling optimistically for Lai, and for the birth of new love.
And those in love.
Hong Kong's hopeless romantic Wong Kar-Wai, with his loose, improvisational approach to filmmaking and his love of impressionistic mood-driven narrative, has always seemed to possess the superhuman quality of capturing the enigmatic process of love. His films delight in the cycling of visual and aural leitmotifs (Chungking Express's inexhuastible use of 'California Dreamin' and 'Things in Life', the slow triplet waltz and recurring settings of In the Mood for Love), yet seem to leave the viewer with the feeling of having embarked on a life-long journey. His characters possess a language all their own, trading in-jokes and staccato improvisations, and yet there is immense clarity to the ethereal speech. Indeed, Wong Kar-Wai's approach to film is much like love itself; cyclical, complex, painful, passionate, both insufferably miserable and stunningly beautiful in a single frame.
* * *
Though his international calling in Chungking Express teased at his darker musings on love, it kept an altogether light mood, focusing on his protagonists' amusing quirks in the face of crushing pain and agony. His follow-up to Fallen Angels, 1997's Happy Together, however, possesses little of that diffusing charm. Instead of turning to canned pineapples, his characters turn to alcohol, cigarettes, sex, and violence to bring on catharsis; when their dreams of exotic locales and rejuvenated love break down, the film's dysfunctional couple turn against each other, desperately seeking rock bottom just so they can start climbing back up.
Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yui-fai (Tony Leung) are already in a state of advanced breakdown from the film's onset. As Lai relates, Ho constantly assures him that the two will "start over", each successive restart running shorter than the last. The two decide to leave British Hong Kong (another Kar-Wai touch in his subtle insertion of historical perspective) for Argentina, attempting to literally change their world to fix their relationship. The plan is short-lived, however, when the two part ways on a car ride to Igauzu Waterfalls.
Broke and desperate, Lai takes up a job as a doorman for a small Argentian pub, the aptly titled "Union Bar". Fate brings Ho, a destructive and compulsive spirit, drunkenly stumbling into the bar with a small entourage of new boyfriends. The subtextual cat-and-mouse game between the two destructively resumes, with Lai and Ho back together on tenuous terms.
With Christopher Doyle's masterful cinematic brushstrokes, Kar-Wai adeptly conveys not only the cyclical breakdown of passionate relationships, but also the outside world's bearings on it as well. Ho and Lai's passion cages them in a solipsistic world; Argentina's gorgeous streets and rivers matter little when they are in love, strangers' faces blur in soft focus, and the two lock themselves away, both literally and figuratively. Yet when the eventual breakdown comes, the world is harsh and sharply in focus; Doyle brings sharp greens and reds, yellows and blues to the palette, each their own emotion and character. To jump from a dingy apartment filled only by ambience and the slowly escalating dialogue of Ho and Lai to the colorful bars and brick street decor is a sharp juxtaposition of the world when one is in love, and the same locale when one feels completely alone. The almost seamless transition from gorgeous black and white to fully saturated color also feeds the stark contrast of overlapping changes. Pain and suffering carry on from one cycle to the next, threatening to drag Ho and Lai back into their personal hell.
Wong Kar-Wai takes pleasure in detailing this re-entry into different worlds, these overlapping cycles of love and loneliness. At the crossroads of their first breakup in the film, Lai seems to be in the more precarious position, penniless and completely foreign to the world around him. To be the one who follows another's promises in love, to journey far from home, and then be left in the cold is a loneliness few could ever experience. Yet it is Ho who seems more lost, a slave to his own impulses. Kar-Wai only subtly hints at Ho's downward spiral, but much of Happy Together's brilliance is in the process of Lai's redemption and Ho's fall from grace.
Ho's volatile ways threaten to draw in Lai as well, but Lai's violence is only counteracted by his new acquiantance in a claustrophobic soup kitchen, Chang (Chang Chen). Chang's physical journey to the lowest point in South America may seem a far-fetched metaphor for the release of his (and Lai's) pain, yet Chang's eagerness and genuine demeanor make the journey a truly reaffirming endeavor. It is only fitting that the relationship between Chang and Lai is a deeply platonic friendship; whereas Lai constantly looks to Ho for passion, that passion is inseperable from his self-destructiveness and causes suffering wherever he goes. Chang, however, embodies the spirit of friendship and stability; ironically Lai finds that it is not destruction and catharsis that causes rebirth, but just the opposite. For all of Ho's accusations of Lai's "dullness", it is his grasp of stability that eventually pulls him out of misery. In the beginning, Lai tries to find love without a home, and by the film's conclusion, he returns home without a love.
The exchanges between Chang and Lai serve as the film's emotional anchor, especially when contrasted with Lai and Ho. As their friendship blossoms, Lai comes to feel more at home in his dingy workplace than in his apartment. However this short period of happiness fades just as quickly when both Chang and Ho depart Lai's life (on wildly different terms). Chang begins his journey to the bottom of South America, while Ho storms off in anger.
Critics have found much to see within the triangle of Ho, Lai, and Chang. There may indeed be an unspoken love triangle, yet Wong Kar-Wai intelligently leaves the conclusions open and instead focuses on their effects. Even after meeting Chang, Lai finds himself descending once again, his life paralleling Ho's promiscuity as he settles for emotionless sexual encounters in the face of bitter loneliness. It is here where both Lai and the audience understand Ho's predicament; he is trapped so deep in the cycle of love and loneliness that he has lost his way to the redemptive possibilites of the world around him. Lai is lucky enough to find it through Chang, but Ho's fate seems fatefully sealed.
* * *
Happy Together concludes on a somewat mixed note, with Lai returning to Hong Kong via Taiwan (where he visits Chang's family). As Wong Kar-Wai is so fond of, history fills in some of the gaps of what would seem to be a very open-ended conclusion. Presumably returning to a China-led Hong Kong (the official handover was completed on July 1, 1997), Lai is once again heading for what seems to be a "new" place in his life. But is it? Hong Kong's culture and British rule would certainly not fade away overnight, and it was clear from the outset that for the next 50 years the city would maintain many of the laws and customs that made it such an aberration amongst Chinese cities. A new place with the same old story. Lai has found his way out of one cycle, but as with life, there is no winning. To pursue love again is to approach the same cycle of death and rebirth, of jubilation and misery. Yet it is the experience of being reborn from his tumultuous relationship with Ho that leaves the viewer feeling optimistically for Lai, and for the birth of new love.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Erad
stole it all from a ghost at gunpoint
dug our graves nail by nail
days down there were bottomless
our arms they turned so frail
liquid by the liter
to feed the bottom feeders
solid by the ounce
drowned us by the pound
they put us in some
foreign old beaker
just to see our magnetic attraction
and the obvious explosion
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Stream
state by state, street by street her best friends are faded love songs and what's a girl to do but throw caution to the wind
float across the desert
find water for roses
oh what's a girl to do
Monday, March 22, 2010
Mens Rea
I traded in my baseball cards and coloring books for a speed kick,
and once the needle dried up, I bartered it for a lifetime of bibles
and screaming withdrawals,
and now I'm a happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy
lamb.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Kids, Alright!
the children draw in the abstract. lines that don't fit quite right, color schemes that make little sense, and proportions that stretch the imagination as far as it can bend.
the adults smile and place the drawings on the symmetrical refrigerator doors of their neatly aligned suburban floorspace. But every time they see it out of the corner of their eyes, they sweat with nervous impulse. The triangle of a hat breaks open and floods color, the words 'I love you' seem to have been pasted together like a ransom note, from a million newspaper clippings, a separate dimension and thought and color for each letter.
The children declare their love in crackling voices that scream and cry at the same time. Maybe they are conveying a thousand emotions, maybe two, but never one. A child's mind is never in one place. The adults smile but can never truly return this complex form of emotion, pasted together from a mind not quite at ease, drawing half-formed circles instead of morse code lines and dots.
For our sanity and theirs, the older we grow, the more trained and deliberate become the words. I love you. One mind. One emotion. One life, one death. One lie.
And in our most insecure moments, we awkwardly grip the shortened, blunt crayons and start to dash it all over the walls without thought and malice.
And then our fear of steadily declining property values sends us spiraling back to earth.
Silly children.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Seven and a Quarter
7 and a quarter what I work for and pay for and die for and try for, to come home and sit and blow it off on drink and to think and forget the rotting stink and a day later and go back to 7 and quarter the price I'd victimize, stigmatize, sexualize, murder and scheme and dream today and rob you blind to cop some porter cause I'm slave and a killer to 7 and a quarter
7 and a quarter is the price of my silence cause I've got dreams too, from the bank on loan to the road alone and I stretch my hand out to you and here's my mind to find in the dark of a car or catching your breath from behind bars with liquor on the beat and cops knock you to your feet on a salary more than yours and can afford some oppression with a stick they extend like a hand in the dark cause daddy he never lit the spark never told you good was bad and work til your dead cause that'll make you happy, and if the slavemaster's name sounds like law and order, then I'm just a slave to 7 and a quarter
Living wage runs away on a bumper sticker stuck to a car I can't afford pray the Lord everyday and smoke your troubles away, trade Gold for Jesus and bullets for the Devil yet guns shut the mouths of hell's little rebels, maybe save up on 7 and a quarter and one day you'll be a soldier of fortune with your guts spilling out on some rich family's meal and then you're caught running before you can reel and its the love you steal day by day that you thought could keep the hate of ages away but it don't and your dead but your body still moves and you're drugged with the weight of a shame you can't lose, and there goes 'living wage' on another car you can't own, you're a dog so eat shit or break out the bones
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