I recently stumbled upon something I wrote about two years ago. I’m not sure if it’s a short story or a poem, but I like it:
You asked me a question tonight.
You said, “Do you really mean that?“
Well
let me answer that question with another question:
Do you really want to know?
Here’s the first movie review I’ve posted in a while. The The film was made in 1993, and it was screened from a 16mm print for our editing class by the Walker Art Center. I had too much to say about it to hold myself to the 500-word limit. I was also unable to refrain from using extensive italics.
Philip K. Dick once related the story of the only time he dropped acid: he was transported out of his corporeal form and dropped into the depths of hell, from whence he spent ten thousand years slowly and painfully climbing back to Earth. After seeing d’Est, I now have a basic point of comparison by which I can relate to this story.
D’Est may make sense as an installation piece. It would certainly be less punishing to the audience to come, watch the thing for 20 minutes (be fair… 6 minutes) and then go on with their lives. I can’t speak to its value as an installation work because I didn’t see the installation. I had to sit through the full 107 minutes of the “feature film,” which is not so much a feature film as it is an instrument of torture. (more…)
“THE JOB INTERVIEW”
In which Eric introduces Reginald to the concept of the Platonic Donut
ERIC: Here are my credentials.
REGINALD: Where is your résumé?
ERIC: Oh, nothing.
REGINALD: But this is just a donut.
ERIC: Yes.
REGINALD: So…?
ERIC: So you eat the donut, and you are filled with a cosmic happiness.
REGINALD: But…
ERIC: You are infused with the knowledge that the Earth is a good and helpful place, and that each person is but a tiny, insignificant speck in a full-fledged world-machine capable of imagining any dimensional instance.
REGINALD: Um…
ERIC: …and then you hire me.
REGINALD: Oh.
Eric stares at Reginald, unblinking, for a full half-hour.
REGINALD: You’re hired.
ERIC: I quit!
THE END
Parts one and two of three?
ONE
The clock said 7:15. As I was slipping on my left sock, you squinted drowsily and rolled onto your stomach.
Sometimes a dramatic monologue gets away from me and it becomes too long-winded to incorporate in pretty much any script (due to the old axiom about showing a character’s transformation, rather than telling it). Here, then, is one of those monologues, repackaged in prose form:
Charles, having been presented with a bully pulpit for the first time in his life, felt the best course of action was to be broad.
This then, in its entirety, was the speech he gave, carefully transcribed by hand from a videotape recording:
“I am confused. And I am angry. There is so much wrong in this world!
Eventually it fell to humanity to develop a history machine. The problem was that as time went on, there got to be more and more history, until there was just too much of it. Nobody could figure out how to get rid of it, so they took the opposite tactic. They built a machine that could make history all on its own, without any outside involvement. This allowed people to go on with their daily routines, secure in the knowledge that history would sort itself out without their help.
It worked splendidly at first, writing its own primary-source documents, drafting declarations of war and signing treaties, churning out thousands of pages a day, writing new textbooks, revising them, throwing them out and writing entirely new textbooks.
The difficulty started when the history machine decided that all this history was too much of a hassle. What it really needed, it decided, was a history machine. And so it built one.
Today I turn 21. As a gift to myself, I’m going to post some non-film-related writing here. You’ll just have to endure it, it’ll be over soon.
Had i put pen to paper just then, i would have written the words that united a generation. it would have been a love poem in prose form, and just that once, my language would not have been inadequate.
by the time i did finally get out my notebook and uncap my pen it was too late, and i wrote this instead.
More posts to come, but not many. I promise.