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nightfall

"go away," was what he said. he said it to his shadow. "it's nothing personal," he said, "i just want my freedom back."

shadow was hurt by all that. but he wasn’t surprised. he thought of the scene in peter pan where peter tries to put his shadow back on with a bar of soap. that was a bad look for both of them and shadow knew it. he knew he didn't want that kind of thing happening to him. but it did make him wonder what he was supposed to want.

for a little while he stood there on the sidewalk like someone had drawn him on with chalk. he felt like he could be a crime scene if he tried hard enough (he couldn't). little by little shadow began to stir and, stretching his arms and legs in inches at a time, remembered what it felt like to move himself that way. he remembered what it felt like to animate himself. on the lateral plane he jumped for joy: he moved north and then south across the face of this earth. shadow slid across concrete and then he slid across grass. then he slid across concrete again to get to the other side. he slipped underneath a doorway and ordered a martini, and then he slipped right back out without paying his tab. he'd just do it this one time. no one had to know.

shadow went downtown where he tried to get on the train. it turned out he couldn't do it—he had to mind the gap. outside he expanded onto the side of a great building instead, full of apartment units whose windows he smushed his face flat against. shadow looked around at what all was in there: cups of pencils, cups of water, cups of ink-black coffee and blood red wine. there were dog beds and there were carpet runners. there was a television that had bunny ears on it. someone had left a plate of cinnamon rolls on a dining room table, and a little boy just sat there looking at the plate. shadow admired his discipline as he fell back to the ground.

"kid's got chutzpah," was what he wanted to say. in this story shadow was voiceless.

when night overtook the world shadow breathed it in deeply. he went down an alley which was where he disappeared. he had no stomach, so he didn't worry about eating anything, but he was getting tired and he would have to sleep soon. in the darkness he lost all form and became a part of his surroundings. he belonged to the night: he was silent, he was still. very soon, shadow knew, the morning would arrive, and when that happened he would do as he pleased again. he nodded off and he wondered what it was that he would do. he wondered what he would please, and he wondered who he would tell.

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The Parlor

It was a whiskey night. Brad had dragged Chris from the mud somewhere up north, bought us each six or seven rounds of rye, and finally convinced me to ride along with the two of them to the Parlor, a gambling room hidden somewhere in a strip mall behind the carnicería, beyond the sports bars, far past the reach of the gentlemen’s clubs. In the time it had taken him, it’d gotten late, the sun had gone down behind the overpass, first in minutes, then in hours, then finally in what had turned out to be a whole night.

The glow of the hot red neon gave everything the glimmer of immediacy as we pulled into the parking lot. Each moment was anchored to our every move, every trap that could ever out there had already been snared, wound tight like a clock. There were bars on all the windows in the strip mall, from the bail bond office to the discount electronics store, maybe even back again. I couldn’t tell from the truck. I opened the rear passenger door, made sure it gave some of my weight back to me, and swung it into the parking space adjacent to us. I climbed out of the Toyota and got my bearings, tried to see things once instead of two or three times, but it didn’t matter all that much—there was nothing worth seeing here anyway, no sign above the door, only the bright red lights that seemed to turn everything into a roll of the dice.

We opened the glass door and walked into the room clumsily, drunk, stinking of liquor. Everyone inside was glued to their own old and flickering CRV television screens—from front to back the place was adorned with simulations of slot machines and black jack tables. Each person in front of them—old, tattooed, drinking out of McDonald’s cups they’d brought from home—seemed to have just wrangled themselves out of some kind of mechanical womb, was plugged into artifice, immersed in a different world. Call girls walked up and down the aisles, as though they could lure in the mechanical hustlers, but they knew they were on standby until after the games, whenever the old boys were ready. They were tall, thin, dressed head-to-toe in outdated clothes, looked like they could’ve been my mother’s age.

“Who’s he?” A big man on my left asked, suddenly stepping out from behind a counter, taking hold of my the collar.

“Oh, this is Sam,” Chris said nervously, brought both hands up and out in front of him. “He’s good people.”

I tried to peer into the guy’s face, but sometime over the course of the night I’d come to accept that the haze was all I could really trust for a little while, til I got past it, everything behind it just some dream that had been distorted, mutilated, given to me in chunks, cracks in between them big enough for the details to slip right through. The silhouette horribly refracted across my field of vision, like a Hydra conjured up from the depths of the booze, the cocaine, the exhaustion. He moved his arm in a winding motion of some kind, spinning it backwards at the shoulder, signaling, grabbing for something. I balked a little, but my strength had been squandered in the earlier hours of the evening, when I still had a glass to bring up to my face.

“Really, man,” he told the guy with what seemed half like acceptance, half like some perverse kind of responsibility. The tone in his voice had changed from sincere to rote and monotonous, and he turned on a heel, walked over to a screen, threw his day’s earnings from splitting logs onto the table. He picked through a handful of the rest of the debris from inside his pocket—lighters, a necklace, a couple of loose cigarettes—and picked up a small pair of earphones to wrap around his head.

I turned over to look at him, head nodding from the booze, but lost him somewhere in the dark, until two more bouncers, each smaller than the first, grabbed me under either shoulder. Brad watched the whole production with a dull grin as they kicked my feet out from under me, hoisted me up by both arms, high into the dim, spinning room.

“Kid’s no good,” Juan said, fired up a Black and Mild right there. Whatever he was getting to, whatever point he was trying to make, it was working. These weren’t the kinds of guys you wanted to see once they stepped out, into the daylight. He took a quick puff from the cigarillo and let it out into the world as a cloud that looked like a treetop, high above the counter, the slot machines, the people. “Get him out.”

The guys threw me onto the sidewalk lining the strip mall, right back in the red neon of suspension, and I fell hard on my front, crumpled my body from the pain. Brad held the door open for them to walk back in, then came out and stood beside me on the ground.

“Why do you think they did that?” he asked, grin draped from both ears.

“I don’t know,” I said. I really didn’t, but I didn’t care, either. “Just get me home.” He grabbed me by the shoulder and lifted me into the front seat of his truck, producing a beer can from somewhere behind me. I heard a metallic crack, and he handed it over through the open truck window, slowly disappeared back into the Parlor.

I measured the beer in long and heavy sips, each making its own whirling sound in my stomach, kneading itself into the liquor, what food I’d scarfed down that morning. I fumbled through Brad’s cupholder and found a nearly full pack of Camels, fired one up, blew smoke in heavy pillows that hanged outside the window in the humid, thick air.

Brad came out after what had seemed like an eternity, but was probably only half that, if I was being honest, with one of the show girls, taller than both of us.

“Chris is going down with the ship,” he slurred over his shoulder, let out a laugh, then started the long drive home through the auto body shops and the payday stores that lined the long stretch of road between here and home, past a couple of Pizza Huts, handfuls of whiskey bars that had been closed now for hours. My head nodded the whole way home, door to door, part from the booze, part because I couldn’t tell if I wanted to lay down or throw up. Brad rolled up to the curb at the house where I counted out the first seven hundred dollars of rent all those months ago, when I’d first made it to Texas, had never hidden in the bushes drunk and with a broken hand. 

I looked over at Brad, but I could tell he was going to be keeping the car running. Heaving a deep sigh, I put one foot onto the ground, then another, and wandered into the back yard, tripped once, twice. I finally managed to pull myself up the stairs of the tiny home and onto the living room carpet, dragged a blanket off the couch and over my sweaty body. The sun was coming up, and the truck disappeared down the road.

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0:46 interview with paul schatzkin, local photographer

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video film i made

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television

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marx art: bertolt brecht’s epic theater

bertolt brecht was a revolutionary theater practitioner and the father of the “epic theater”. deeply political and grounded in brecht’s early involvement with marxism, the premise of epic was that an audience shouldn’t “hang up their brains with their hats in the cloakroom”, and should instead ask questions about how the characters ought to have acted. 

brecht sometimes referred to his theater as “non-aristotelian”, but nonetheless agreed with aristotle that pleasure is “the noblest function we have found for the theater”; this simple appreciation of beauty is how we enjoy aristophanes or shakespeare. but he also felt that, in a world characterized by industry’s assertion of man over nature, “our whole way of appreciation” was out of date. our relationship with the world was different now, and this shift in power was reflected in politics, society, and economics, the realms in which decisions about industry are ultimately made. 

to serve his political purpose, brecht constructed narratives that were so digestible that they seemed absurd, staged plays in distracting settings, and built direct references to pieces into their scripts by mentioning musical numbers and creating plays within plays. 

all of this contributed to the verfremdungseffekt, a word brecht invented that is often referred to as the “distancing” effect. brecht implemented the effect to prompt the audience to look at the play like they might look at a watch for the first time: rather than simply seeing the hour, they should see the metal gears, the leather strap, the marble of the face, and how each of these pieces contributes to the ability of the wearer to read the time. this is what brecht meant when he said that the epic could “practically be cut up with a scissors”. 

because he was a radical, in 1933 brecht fled germany. he eventually set up shop in the united states, where he later began to refer to his style as the “dialectical theater”. over time, epic has contributed to many movements in the theater, served as inspiration to bob dylan, and foreshadowed the rise of postmodern art. 

see:  “a short organum for the theater” (1948) “theater for learning” (1929)

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for arthur schopenhauer, the fundamental law of architecture is that "no load may be without sufficient support, and no support without a suitable load". the Ideas expressed through architecture are then "gravity, rigidity, and cohesion", and not "merely regular form, proportion, and symmetry", as the second class, where it's present in architecture, is only found there as a reflection of the first. architecture, like the other forms of art, expresses the essence of existence itself, my experience of which is grounded in certain conditions (e.g. gravity), and is consequently the means through which i come to identify phenomena (e.g. form). a prime example of this is when i look at a support column: through my experience of having a body acted upon by natural physics, i can "feel" how the load of a weight is distributed onto a column, and i will appreciate a column that is bowed out and tapered in appropriate points as required by physical laws. conversely, straight columns feel off-putting, because they are uncannily similar to my bodily experience, and yet differ infinitely. similarly, schopenhauer says that "a glaring example of load without support is presented to the eye by the balconies that stick out," because "we do not see what carries them; they appear suspended, and disturb the mind." architecture for schopenhauer is the lowest form of the arts, but also the one most similar to music, the highest form. but whereas music occurs in time alone, architecture is absolutely confined to space, into infinity, never to move, only to 'be'.

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poignant | lake markham

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thing i wrote about brian eno

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room service | lake markham photography