inspo/funny
Martin Amis,
Thomas Pynchon,
Charlie Kaufman,
Miranda July,
Helen DeWitt,
Elaine Dundy,
Lucia Berlin,
Iris Murdoch,
Shirley Hazzard
otherwise uncaptured moments of humor
[...] The earliest example: Heinrich Telemucher’s 1891 short feature Ich Habe Keine Augapfel, in which two eyeballs drop from a man’s face and roll around for a long while on the floor. The film is important for two reasons other than its significance to the timetable of the history of animation. Number one, it is the first film in which someone’s eyeballs fall out. And secondly, this device became a staple of both Romanian silent films and early Japanese talkies. Whereas Romanian cinema used the device as a metaphor for the 1918 union of Romania with Transylvania, Bukovina, and Bessarabia, the Japanese used it for straightforward comic purposes, often having the newly eyeless character exclaim, “Now I can see the way two balls on the ground see!” or “I look much taller from down here!” It eventually became so commonplace in Japanese cinema that one Japanese film critic quipped pithily, “All those eyeballs falling out is enough to make one wish one’s own eyeballs would fall out so one would no longer have to watch even one more movie in which someone’s eyeballs fall out.” Granted, it is pithier in Japanese, in which the entire sentiment is conveyed in kanji with just one character.
christ
I rose above his arrogance. I would not play his game. He told me he was a filmmaker of sorts. It is all I could do to not laugh in his unformed face. I do not mean to brag but I can detect an artist on sight. It is my version of gaydar (which I also have). Artdar. This is not based on physical appearance. Both a Sam Shepard and a Charles Bukowski are equally conspicuous to me. It is in the eyes, or, in those rare instances where they have no eyes, it is in their fingertips. This is the case with blind filmmaker Kertes Onegin, who astonishingly acts as his own cinematographer (he does employ a focus puller, but she is also blind). His technique of “feeling the scene” as the actors perform (his films are all in extreme close-up and include his hand in every shot) creates an intimacy unlike any I have ever before seen in any film, and it has made him a target of the #MeToo movement (blind edition). Onegin’s movie снова нашел (Found Again), which explores a rekindled romance between two pensioners separated for forty years, is arguably the most erotic film ever made. That the bodies making love are old and that there is a fifth hand delicately describing the contours of these bodies adds in exponential measure to the experience of the filmgoer. I conducted extensive interviews with Onegin for my monograph Onegin’s Feelies. During our conversations, he required we sit within touching distance and would caress my face throughout, sometimes sticking his fingers in my mouth “to see how wet.” I remember thinking, this is the most true conversation I’ve ever had and also the least true and also again the most true. I will admit there was even an erotic component to it, and although I am not a homosexual by inclination, I did submit to this eyeless genius, this typhlotic Rembrandt late one evening after too much retsina. I do not regret this, for how can one regret true communion? Ingo had none of this to offer. Not in his soft, soggy eyes, like old grapes, not in his pruny, sausage-shaped fingers, like old plums. You are no Onegin! I screamed in my head. You are not my dear, dear Kertes! as I waited for that inevitable question:
amazing
THE BUS HAS been double-booked. Greyhound offers four dollars off any domestic bus trip for passengers willing to take the following bus, which is at 5:30 P.M. next Thursday or Friday; they’re not certain. No takers, so they implement their “Emergency Lap Plan.” All passengers are weighed and assigned a lap buddy. Since I have lost 47 pounds in the hospital and weigh in at 94 pounds soaking wet (they don’t explain why they needed to hose us down), I am paired with a tracksuited man named Levy who is 336 pounds. He shakes my hand and tells me to call him Grabby, that everyone calls him Grabby.
“Where’d you get such a nickname?” I ask, forced casual-like.
He hesitates for a moment, then tells me that when he was a little boy, he’d always grab an extra cookie from the cookie jar. I do not believe that explanation for a minute, but I am not staying at the bus station until next Thursday or Friday.
It’s not too bad, in truth. Levy has a soft, warm, comfortable lap and keeps his hands mostly to himself. We engage in a brief, awkward conversation in which we try to find common ground:
Like a party favor, a thought pops into my head: My daughter coming home from school. She is, what, twelve or eleven. I don’t know. She wants to be with me, and I’m working, watching Talfan’s Dysgu i gi Bach Gachu backward. It is one of the most significant films in all of Welsh cinema, and that is saying something. There are those who believe there is no important Cinema of Wales, but they are, as always, dead wrong. Dyfodwg, Powys, Iwan, Gwilym, Gruffudd, Fardd, Gwilym (no relation), Cadwaladr, Clymneb, Dylfedmed, Prydudd, Gwilym (no relation), and Clydarfrg to name just a few essential directors. And I have been waiting all day for the chance to watch Talfan’s masterwork in reverse. My daughter at eleven is barely competent in Gymraeg so will most likely not understand even a word of it backward. I know she will be bored. And then I will feel responsible for her boredom, which will not allow me to properly enjoy the film. I tell her Daddy has to work, which makes me so terribly guilty, especially when I see the look in her eyes, hopeless, unloved, abandoned. This is not the case, of course. It is simply that I need to do my work. A child of eleven cannot understand how, as an adult, one’s very identity hinges on one’s work, how one would likely dissolve into a fog of nothingness without it. I need to ignore her so I can continue to exist for her. She stares out the window at the rainy day. Esme…
unbelievable
In my first class, I almost got into a fistfight with Warren Beatty over the ranking of Godard’s Weekend. It was at that point the only film I’d ever seen and, therefore, I put it at number one. Beatty put it at seven because he didn’t understand it. He insisted the film was a critique of fascism, which is about as insightful as saying that Network is a critique of Peter Finch. I told him as much. A shoving match ensued. Beatty is a big man, but his muscles felt oddly gelatinous. I thought maybe he had some sort of condition and I should be gentle with him. However, my passion won out, and I knocked him out with an elbow to his jaw, which left an indentation as if his face had been made out of wet clay. It was an indentation that remained for a week, eventually popping back out during class with a sort of sucking sound. I expected to be expelled at the very least and likely jailed, but when Beatty came to, he seemed a somewhat changed man, at least in regard to Weekend. He said his evaluation of the film had been shallow and admitted he had never really watched it all the way through. And then a miraculous thing happened: He looked me in the eye and said, “Teach me.” And I did.
We went to the cinema and watched Weekend together. I explained what Godard was doing and why. Beatty was an eager student. He admitted he had spent so much time womanizing that his movie-viewing skills had suffered. I said, “Let’s remedy that.” We became close (he will deny we ever met, due to a falling out we had over a young Diane Keaton, but we were very close, even sharing an apartment for three semesters). Cimino was a tougher nut to crack, although we did vacation in Aruba over one spring break and had a grand time. So began my education in film. After all, is not teaching the best way to learn?
AND SO IT goes. He lies and lies and lies about the film for well over an hour. Clearly, he has not seen it. He has made up a film that is by definition antithetical to Ingo’s concept, antithetical to Ingo’s artistic mission. I have been thrust into a waking nightmare, but I hold my tongue until the question-and-answer period. After a series of softball questions and inane answers, after my constantly raised hand is ignored again and again and again, the yarmulked doppelgänger finally calls on me.
“Yes, you, the clown in the fourth row.”
“Which one of us is the clown here?” I say cuttingly.
“You are,” he says, clearly confused by my question.
amazing
It is exceedingly dark though. I have the flashlight on my new iPhone, but it produces an odd, diffuse, almost useless light. When I was a young man, flashlights did their jobs and illuminated the dark, not just small-print menus in dimly lit restaurants. It was a different and heady time. I point the phone toward the floor to use what little light it gives to avoid tripping over anything fecal, not to mention rats. The rats are the thing I dislike most about my sewer forays, as I’ve come to call them. There are rumors of rats down here as big as German shepherds, the people not the dogs. I learned this from what I consider a reliable source, a sewer worker who had appeared in the Frederick Wiseman documentary Effluence (1978). I had interviewed him for a monograph I was writing entitled Pipe Dreams about sewers in dreams in film. It was the first sewer-centric film study since Mark Kermode’s 1993 essay on the C.H.U.D. series, which I believe was entitled I, Mark Kermode, Am an Asshole. I cannot be certain though; several of his essays have been similarly titled.
oh my god
CALCIUM CALCULATES. HIS chalkboard filled with mathematical scribbles and chemical equations, he ponders. He paces. He stares out a still-standing window frame at his ruined town. He plays his burnt violin. Unearthly music. Modern Phrygian mode, I’m guessing. He goes back to the board. He practices rock climbing on what remains of his interior climbing wall. It doesn’t seem like he would need the hand and foot holds, since he is an ant and I presume has arolia. Perhaps his various hand and foot mutations have rid him of those. He is, in any event, quite skilled. I was, for several years, an avid recreational climber and quite good at it. I had been told by my internist that my body type is well-suited to climbing, so I took it up, and in a very short time, I was teaching my teachers. If it weren’t for an unfortunate and frankly inexplicable fall to the bottom of a sixty-foot sinkhole at the base of Mount Bald, I would still be at it. I wasn’t seriously injured, but I spent four days down there before my outfitter realized I had not returned my equipment. It was a traumatic experience and put me off climbing. That I had to eat three of my toes to survive contributed mightily to my subsequent aversion to this sport. I cannot say why I felt compelled to eat the first of my toes within fifteen minutes of the fall. I attribute it to an irrationality that often accompanies panic.
crying
[...] Some months ago I touched the side of a man’s face. A man I’ve never touched in any way at all. It’s not at all warranted or appropriate for me to touch this particular man, we aren’t friends, our relationship is professional. We were talking about his origins, where his parents came from and so on, he said something about his features. I happen to like his mouth a great deal, it’s very beautiful. I didn’t say that, but my hand went to his face, there it was on the side of his face, turning his face slightly away from me so that it was now in profile, ‘You’ve a lovely profile,’ I said, something like that, I can’t remember exactly, and just as quickly my hand was no longer on his face, but it had been. It had been on his face and that’s a strange thing to know, and I’d be surprised if I ever forgot that. I don’t regret it. I don’t regret things like that. I might do the following day, and for a few days after that, that’s to say I’ll likely feel absolutely mortified and green about the gills, but then time passes soon enough and so too does my nausea and mortification. In the end I don’t care too much about getting carried away and making a fool of myself. The alternative is to die of boredom, the alternative is to be genial and pass the time, the alternative is to take a spoon to my brain and scoop it out, the alternative is to drink too much and become taciturn and twisted, the alternative is to not show up at all, and I’ve done all those things and getting carried away and making a fool of myself from time to time is, in the end, so much easier to bear.
Odor what? Turns out Conkling is a freelance professional Nose, having been born with a sense of smell far more calibrated than the rest of us normals enjoy. He’s been known to follow an intriguing sillage for dozens of city blocks before finding the source is a dentist’s wife from Valley Stream. He believes in a dedicated circle of hell for anybody who shows up at dinner or for that matter enters an elevator wearing an inappropriate scent. Dogs he hasn’t met formally come up to him with inquiring looks. “A negotiable talent, sometimes a curse.”
the dogs line killed me