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

"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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 

School Days

you look forward to the days when the weather man, with his metered-pointer so reminiscent of Catholic school nuns who smack the map as if they were at war with Geography itself, points to your dark corner of the world and lets a smiling dark cloud precipitate on your town.  the days where its warm and sunny, you watch the window and some ecological spirit draws images of couples and friends taking in the warmth, and the window stays clear, and though you seem to be in a position of power looking at the window frame like a movie, your hands never reach through, but always stop and end the game of miming you play in your lonesome boredom.

but the rain, it fogs and streaks the windows, and you can smile at ease because it seems to cry for you, and the heavier the rain the more you know that everyone is stuck inside.  So now you can watch the window-frame like everyone else, like the feeling of warmth and company of the world premiere of a sitcom, the sick pleasure you take in watching the same corporatized adverts as everyone else, and you shout from the rooftops, your voice ugly and crackling, but the rain drowns it out, and the kids are all at home, and for once you're not alone, you're not alone.  Take a walk, and then you'll never walk alone.

Scarcity and Economics

do you dream of substance by day, and pay for numbness by night? You dream of a world where you'd sell them down the river for a handful of pills that melt into your hands and turns your veins black to match the liquids running from every orifice, until the digital age turns your loved ones into resizable pictures and cropped out photos, and voice becomes a stretched moan from speakers the finest money can buy, five and a fraction times the voices moaning around you, lost in the aura of feigned sexual pleasure and gap-toothed smiles painted over by a firebrand whitewashing, and its your only revolution, the cycles of sleep and wake, where you trade your friends for cards and bubblegum and burn the sun by day, where you step into the rain and think you're home again, but the mad honks of headlit horns send you running like a fox, diving behind cars and catching a sickly cold, dying alone in a room that smells of the stink of rotting food lost behind packaged memories that tore through the generations, when your family was in chains but chained themselves so they said, and lived without mediated experience until they found the camera, so we live, we die, we own, we dispose, and throw away the cigarettes on wet pavement we are sure will turn the fire down, for though in the back of our heads we know the flooded gasoline from innocuous cars is traveling like the black blood you brought home for your veins, and any minute now the chemical mixture and the planets aligning will turn science into legend and this whole joint goes boom, sending you into a fit of real pain you wished you could live over and over again, instead of crowding space with pictures of famous movie stars heads pasted onto your friends bodies, feeble reminders of the crazed way you'd want to remember them. Yet nothing happens, the gasoline forks on either side of the cigarette, still burning into ozone and drowning leaves stained like sin, and it just goes smoking until the rubber tires screech over it to give an automated 'fuck you' from someone's beautiful Honda Element.

Script

the camera clicks // now i possess you // but the photo itself // it possesses who?

...

colonial children play in the sun, a pedantic kind of dance on merry ash where the blacktops burn and dry away the tears, where a grimaced cry looks like a joyful smile, and the heat it gets so bad not because of the burns the burns are only physical but the children cry oh they cry, but it dries their tears and they aimlessly chase each other in high noon blindness, they throw stones and sticks like primitive weapons, playing a game they don't yet know the name of, but if you could recall your childhood games there was never really a winner was there, just a loser, the first one to bleed and fall and cry and end the game, not in this land though, no everyone's a winner because the sun dries your tears with mercurial fetish, a cold mother for a band of bastard orphans who don't know left from right, why if you saw them you'd ask why they're running in circles. 

But they're smarter than the rest, they've started their pathways on quickly, the parents only run bigger and bigger circles, and they stay inside where the sun still blasts through the shallow glue that binds the cracks that breaks the backs that tightens the slack like the whip they felt a hundred times before a brain shaped like a brand its a far better score than the iron some say when you raise your hands they run away, youre God we're Not, look at how bullets stop, before they hit you a divinity if there ever was one, now I believe in miracles, and Christ and I'll pray and pray til they take my sons and daughters away and my kingdom turns to ash on which the children will play, so small it becomes that they create a new game, where they run around it in circles, sometimes tripping over it because of the high noon blindness, and the first one to bleed is always the loser.

General Grant

Come with smiles, come with gold,
they stow their guns in darknened fold,
delighting children with tales untold,
like men of God, like the Gods of old

'I will not harm I come for peace',
the flesh is human and gripped at ease,
to sleep, to sleep, the guarded trees,
but before you lie, they dig your knees

night by night the shadows run,
grow long by night, short by sun,
a tusk, a tail, a useless one,
dig the earth, until it turns to crumbs

and sing this song for piety of favor,
'no food greater than the fruits of labor'

no food greater than the fruits of labor.

one fell dead.

sing again.

no food greater than the fruits of labor.

two crosses for Christ.

no food greater than the fruits of labor.

and again, like you mean it this time.

and with an eye bent at so slight an angle,
the straight-lined sticks begin to mangle,
the flags of Kings begin to dance,
to crack through air, to plummet and lance,

down on your back, splitting your spine,
collapsing your lungs, coughing the mine
you reach for words to grab to scream
to kill to bleed to wake to dream
one by one, brothers hung low,
one less soul in the choir show
no food greater than the fruits of labor
no food greater than the fruits of labor.

split the Earth with protest, show them for sinners,
they feed open mouths with muskets for dinner,
yet they said, oh they said, with smiles with grins!
for love, for Jove! for Christ! for King!

keep working, oh vigilant one, till one day you fall,
on the ground with leaves like lives winter stalls.


for the best fruit indeed it comes from the soul.

so dig, so dig, this time for heart,
but its gone, its gone, twas a hole from the start
with lies they bought it, with smiles they sold,
for they came with nothing, but left with gold.

Afternoon

they bang together like blues, the black-rimmed glasses they brought back from the 50s, the way they sit red and gray when it was just black and white, leave it to beaver white families stuck in perfection while the world around them went to hell and good boys and girls died in color, it was color that was red and gray, not much different from these blues bangers, hipsters with their cigarettes hanging off their lips like Godard's ghost, lisping away from every puff they waste, the smoke calling all the addicts in the city, their lungs rasping across graffiti-streaked walls, walls of poverty, and you just want to throw the fucking coffee pot against in slow-motion, because you run in circles every day, oh they told you you could be something great, but somewhere between your last button on the red and gray button-up and the fitting of black-rimmed glasses in a color world from the 60s, you realize that you're stuck in the gap of two generations, maybe even three, climbing back up on mid-week alcohol binges and amphetamine uses, but no you're no Kerouac, because your life is dull dull dull, brought from the suburbs and its all the same old story, just a satellite image, maybe they drop they bomb maybe they don't, but if they do you'd better hide under a desk like good little schoolchildren.  And the bomb will destroy every black-and-white but actually white family with the pearl necklaces and state of the art vacuum cleaners and cats that rip the perfect white carpets with the furor of their tiger brethren, and the world will be left in a globe of smoke, just smoke that chokes your vision like it does your lungs, and then they take that suck in, forget to inhale, and toss the damn thing on the streets of New York.

Fuckin' waste of a cigarette if you ask me.

Terra Firma

Real revolutionaries plant their flags upside down and their guns right side up

***

rebel,

take a swim in the barren sands

with just your feet bandaged against sun and solace

facing winds like these that turn nations into dust,

rebel,

your flag planted long ago,

it grew trees in the desert,

and you suddenly feel weightless,

because below the dunes lie the graves of warriors before,

kings and peasants, gold and rubble,

stick and stones that turned into whips and bullets

rebel,

should you ever lose your way,

remember that you are always in the desert,

and the horizon will match your every turn,

then it will ask why you fire in the sky,

when you stand againstwinds like these that turn nations into dust

Home in the Sky, House in the Dirt

this is the poetry of war,
steeped in blood, hidden in the cracks of bones,
the bombs will drop,
and i will put my winter coat on and look to the sky,
wait for eclipse, my guns planted beneath my body,
the bombs they will drop,
in perfect unison they cover the sun,
and the night will love me blind,
so i cannot see, black nor white,
only speak,
the poetry of war

Traffic

They said he was born with his head high, his head high. He didn't believe in God yet, couldn't, so he had to be looking up at something, maybe the ceiling, but whatever it was, it was above his parent's heads, above the trudgy, boxy camcorder that would record his eye whites, as if he were being possessed, but he was just born with his head high, his head high.

Some days in later age he would roll his head around on the fancy armrest of his favorite recliner, staring up at the ceiling fan, remembering how as a child he would put his hands up to it ever so slowly, wondering if they would chop them off. His parents would walk in the room and look at him, and he was still looking above them, at that ceiling fan, not sure whether he should put his hands in. He would lean back and breath out fumes of aged scotch like a car exhaust, this time his head stuck and sickly, like he wanted to vomit. He wanted to stick his head in that fan, his head in that fan with his head high, his head high.

Some days in early age he would stop playing with his friends, and would just stand still and visor his eyes and look up, but his head couldn't go so high because the sun was too bright, it was that time of the afternoon when it was directly overhead. And he would look down, and the kids were looking at him too, thinking him crazy for looking over their heads.

Some days in middle age he would look down at that piece of paper, kind of crumbled when he tore it out in euphoric delight, ready to scribble the white spaces black. Dream that he would write enough pages to reach the ceiling, then he could look up at that first page, his head held high, his head held high. 

So those days that are now the present, he sits and waits until the ceiling fan slows when you stare it down, almost to a crawl, as if your eyes have stopped it by will. And every rotation draws the momentum away, a train dragging along to a stop, his eyes circling faster than the fan.  And he lets the scotch run out like a car exhaust, and he wants to vomit, and stick his head in that fan, his head high, his head high. Like the day he was born.

Elephant Bones

Why are all the famous martial arts stars I worshipped as a child big, fat douchebags?

I think that as children we are subconciously drawn into a perverse obsession with jerks in nice costumes.  It all begins with the obligatory family trip to Disney World, where you meet ever-grinning, jolly ol' Mickey Mouse.  You smell something odd when he comes to hug you.  It smells rank and alcoholic, but you're so innocent and naive and at peace with the world that you decide...'it must be the smell of love. Mickey loves me'!  You walk away coughing on the gentle breeze of pot, aftershave, and tobacco , but your heart is so full that this minor discomfort must be nothing short of overwhelming joy.

And from that timeless experience (that our parents keep the picture of just in case we forget), we learn to love characters more than the people inside the machinery.  Or is that just me?

Chuck Norris seems to spend more time fighting gay rights and suing the people that made him relevant again than being the 'productive valuable American' archetype he professes.

Jackie Chan apparently doesn't think that the Chinese people should able to have freedom in watching films because they will become corrupted and sinful.  Like, sinful enough to watch movies featuring strippers and motorcycle gangs?

And Steven Seagal.  After the world realized Chuck Norris was a goateed bigot (and probable recreational seal clubber), they moved on to liberal-activist-come-destroyer-of-faces Steven Seagal.  Though the man looks like he's about to crap himself everytime he stares down a bad guy, at least he's on our side.  If we ever need a one man strikeforce to take down the evil oil conglomerates, at least we have Steve.

"I'm gonna fuck your day up.  Right after I punish your toilet."

The Conservatives have Norris and Chan.  The Liberals have Seagal.  

Honorable Mention: Tony Jaa.  This man takes animal rights activism to a whole new level.

This is partisan politics at its best.   

I Should Coco, Because All My Friends Are Dead

A question about webspace. Is it so large and infinitessimal that any mark we leave, whether it be blog, or shadow, or awkward social networking post will never get erased? I mean, here is this blog, sitting in the depths of the internet since 2007, the two and half years between posts long enough to to raise an army of adolescent kids discovering the horrors of Saturday morning cartoons. And it's still here!

So it's come to this. I, author, manipulating and guilting myself to start writing. We've all had that moment, or for the more awkwardly-prone of us, moments, where our dream scenario runs all too perfectly. Kiss and make up, get that job, write 8 hours everyday until you get discovered and carried to Hollywood via throne carried by underlings. Then reality. The reality never leaps on to you, never jumps and you and slaps you in the face, telling you what an idiot you are for thinking things would be easier. It sort of creeps up on you...very slowly and awkwardly. The morning of the interview, you might accidentally brush your teeth with shampoo. A small symptom of epic failure. But who ever sees it coming?  

Something smells off. The receptionist looks at you a little funny. And before you know it, you're stuttering and listing off your greatest weaknesses like it was your pastor asking you.  

For those of us lucky enough to be sane in America (the number is dwindling), these are mere moments. We learn to chide ourselves for being too optimistic, but at the same time, know better than to jump out the nearest three-story window when we accidentally brush our teeth with shampoo. Those are just moments. Unless you go to art school. In which case, it turns into a lifetime. Of 'moments'.

The thing is, it's not a....bad life per se. Minimum wage jobs and all the cheap booze a half broke person can buy. Mmm! You wake up, give yourself an extra hour to start working. You start working, give yourself an extra two to catch up on your favorite television program. Get drunk, give yourself an extra day to recuperate. And then the avalanche. Hours into days. Days into months. Months into years. Before you know it, you've become so old that the "mailbox" you place your screenplay in is really just a cleverly disguised trashcan your significant other created to spare you the embarassment. And you didn't even know the difference! Ah, the life of an artist!

It's scary, it's sad, it's insecure. And that's why it attracts the craziest of us. A good chunk of this country is depressed, and a good chunk more are gluttons for punishment. There are too-good-to-be-true moments where all you need to do is hit pause in your mind, let things crawl a bit, and keep everything in a beautiful equilibrium. But no. Not for the artists. Maybe its being so used to being in a constant state of despair. Happiness is strange, and elicits a near-paranoia. Why am I happy? Is someone plotting to kill me? Is there some sort of evil conspiracy going on to make life happy for the next 50 years and then kill me of old age?

The constant tension is that the days don't go any slower when you're looking to work in entertainment. Every day, your friends bring home ten times more money than you, and logically they're ten times closer to a comfortable life. Meanwhile, you try to convince yourself that a bottle of liquor will release the brilliant artist hiding inside you....and then you puke the little bastard out four hours later.

To say I'm lost would a bit cliche, because its not that I don't know where I am. I just refuse to accept that as the truth. It's a weigh station, right? Byways, highways, and surface roads full of traffic.  

And like a true artist, I'm taking up valuable webspace to write inane thoughts. 

And like a true artist, I'm writing the end before the end should be written.

Gotta love those fake artists. You know, the successful ones.