5d2a2m

‘Psycho-tragic-sexualis Americana’

Sometimes the horror is all subconscious and relentless, and sometimes the processes of the universe are rendered as gnarled train wrecks…with a chorus of ever present inanimate playthings.

Some special films are so brutal they’re beautiful; I can’t wait to relay my love of this art to my therapist.

To translate is to transform. From a physical plane of complacency and a mental field of day-to-day frustration to the odd nightmare of freedom from normalcy; this path is at once finitely narrow and infinitely mutated into shards of myriad echoes and reflections.

*

I’ve just fallen head over heels for a ghost.

Integrity and love as parallel hyles of a stitched truism; as ‘all’ clichés are truisms, but o so undeniably fucking cute.

There’s a brilliance to the factual followed through past the liminal and seeded among heights of absurdity only to rain down as a purity in the form of a chuckle, laugh, sigh, grin. Awkwardness knows no enemies and on a certain plane of human knowledge — with a consenting and willing audience popped as a cherry — we’re all goddamn friends…really.

Poetry necessitates a frenzied slowness, a curve of light and echo captured only by an obtuse angled physics of truth and trust in the process of said capture. Oftentimes a beauty lies in failure of self-recognition; and the distillation of this process can be the product.

The sheep don’t exist in this slice of space and time. Bo is the embodiment of ignorant innocence which is itself a representation of the pangs associated with a severe repression of reality’s perception; Rufus is the subconscious growl of that pang. Death dreams by sleeping, and as every character sleeps at least one dreams of the desired, existent only in the scape of sleep, sheep.

*

Rudeness preying on neurodivergent innocence resulting in just desserts and further insanity is a catharsis that predates language…god’s cyclic self-flagellation/orgasm.

If sadness is an internalized anger, that anger is not at the actions of one’s past self but at the forces of societal madness pushing and pulling like gravity at every consequential fiber of one’s being. In the mind of the sad-afflicted, the labyrinth of emotion can be absurd and the mise-en-scène of the every day as projected onto a grander reality manifests as pro-fucking-found (I know this all too well; I live it). Some special films make my brain and heart ache simultaneously with equal percolations of awe; willed to a magical and knowing ‘ill.’

The bark, grunt, squeal of a pig can be an expressive explosion of a yearning for human flesh…a desire, a need, for the pig itself to not only feed but be as one with human shame, guilt rooted in a process of overcoming the far-too-hidden faith in the pig’s very essence and to become itself a rightful deity, not immortal per se, but worshipped with an intention of fear, respect.

And not ‘all’ gods have daddy issues ~ some just eat, shit, and birth out.

*

Another word for ‘judgement’ is circus.

Seashells as stilled nature, shivered to life from the throat…the resultant image + noise being an energy beyond something natural and sexual. 

I dare one to watch this and not smile in spite of oneself out of the sheer pleasure of discomfort.

Counting up, toward the light.

A Pythagorean complication strung along the skin of youthful autonomy from clinical conceptions of the modern and contemporary. Youth holds the key to the power of perception. Only youth can save us from ourselves.

Female spectatorship of self; to apprehend logic is a blossoming, projecting: inward. The troubled chaos of tooling as juxtaposed to the purity of being. To give birth is a naturally gory artistic process gifted/burdened to the fairer few (o so blatantly fucking bloody). All wiring is connectivity, some wires more tangible than others. Collaged image + text in scapes of the all-too-good-goddamn-real. 

I could lose myself in this 25 minute film for hours.

Nothing can any longer be simple.

                           *

Prose and image…equational. Occasioned historical. Spectator to machined spectacle. Wired into youthful fragility Is the power of youth; youth lost to fact, youth confused to matter. The tragic sensing of youthful intuition.

A film is not a film until the referent is selved.

Internalized disposition to the shape of nature; human as para-natural, eyesight and dance are reprieves. A tension suffuses with stillness; to gaze is to capture with a haunt of violence.

                                        *

I found out here that the dead sit down with the living and eat at the same table, and make love together in the same bed.
                                   
                                        *

Some special films embody a twisted ontology of tenderness that only they alone could achieve; an enduring maturity of handling the innate immature material that when boiled down to an essence equates to the universally communal hallucination that is human consciousness.

I could ‘feel’ Usher’s feeble madness via Howard Vernon’s performance…I just may get a tattoo of his face on my skin.

Melancholia and stillness as rendered in a quiet echo of light; maturity with remorse. Of control and manipulation, I know of nothing that can be said that this work does not say in so few words and in such somber images. My heart palpitates with the complication of being human, a manifestation of a process only achieved with a certain art.

‘Orson’ ~ possibly the name of my future pet cat (which, yes, will be fat).

Some special films can capture an individualized subset of a grander zeitgeist in the most hilariously and absurdly sincere way imaginable. I haven’t laughed so genuinely in an extraordinarily long time.

God bless America.

Love implies a need of forgiveness, for love is the act of stealing innocence…innocence of one’s self and the innocence of the loved; the guilt of this thievery is in and of itself a trauma manifest as a nightmare resulting in tragic cessation.

*

Every once in a blue goddamn moon there’s a special film in which the only nude scene is that of a dead man with large, flaccid penis. I have so much respect for this movie.

An endearing endurance; overtly cute and cutely absurd — melodramatic like a tongue slurping schnapps into the jowls of a post-pastoral-ironic Western Euro timelessness.

The family that works together eats together at balancing the poles of power. And all that ends well can sometimes be all well.

*

Saw this 8+ hour epic in its entirety at an all-day screening in segments, would have liked it far much less as seen streaming…communal catharsis for hemorrhaging hearts.

If the narrator is reliable the intensity of his disgust is palpable…and every viewer is a little loyal dachshund ambivalent to the crime.

A film without mystery is an implication.

If the reality is allusive so then too is the madness; cliche is doubled down into art — the ante being life.

*

Jefferey,

Yes, shit goddamn you’re now a man.

Welcome.

Joseph

It’s the macrocosmic twisting limbs of the human community which exemplify a sense of the immortality of the immediacy of connections lost. 

The war is perpetually ‘post-.’

*

I’ve been to two screenings of this film in three days; my love has only grown.

Frustration is the seed of bedevilment, and white is the most insidious color of lie one can tell oneself; yes, the wound widens into a hole of black of which all but further frustration is ceaselessly disappeared. And, no, know that the many accidental morals embodied as an ignorant stoicism, visually, allude to a metastasizing motif: ‘to suffer’ has forever been, and always will be, not quite enough. A lonely fear breeds selfish want from life as the implication of death, as though the collective unconsciousness of all who’d rather not (can’t) be themselves (all of humanity) expands to the proportionally infinite. 

Sometimes the sun is soft, other times it’s indifferent, always though — especially in darkness — its presence is felt.

To eat of oneself implies an ontology of psychic displacement manifested as a self-punned ‘taste’ for obsession.

Someone ed out in the theater where I saw this tonight. The film was temporarily stopped. He was okay. He and his group of friends left. No one was embarrassed, and the film started back up. I’ve never experienced anything like this at a screening, but I can only assume it was the film’s purity in its distillation of sadness that got the better of that poor guy.

All sex is traumatic and love is the philosophy of murder. 

I have a deep empathy for the lovers of this earth; it takes a vulnerable selfishness to be so selfless — to care so goddamn much.

To be compelled to snuff a baby bird mid chirp because it’s so beautiful (because you want to fuck your mother’s corpse) won’t put you in jail, but the scale here is expanded, the scope is dilated, and the warming madness is always terminal.

Kill on sweetly sweet killers, in some films it’s all one can do.

Prescience as a ballet of yearning; snow is silence, night is cold and long, Venice is simply a human heart, and the winter in which we dwell portends just another summer.


*

I rarely tear up in a movie theater, but this film oozes into the psyche a substance one can tangibly feel, even the next day, the next year, and through the coming decades. Some special films are of the ‘stick and stay’ nature. I originally saw this when I was maybe 14 on IFC or Sundance, I never forgot it; and my bet on a rewatch was absolutely a sure thing. It paid off in pang.

Youthful innocence coupled with innate curiosity is the most nightmarishly destructive force in the human domain.

With our heads, off, the story tells itself.

At the risk of creation, life always will be — and forever has been — impregnated with a need to destroy.

Most know this story from another film, it’s told time and again for good reason; holding much.

The controlling procedural of love thickens atmosphere into an obtusely harmonized stylistic elegance while oozing Avant-jazzy character sympathy; specifically from the drunk, the beautiful escaped convict, and…

Morpho,

Any love is a love for life; for love implies freedom, the ‘want’ of it. Your brain has forever been twisted and tortured in these microcosmological allegories of legitimate allegations. Parricide doesn’t come easy, one must be pushed. I know this to be true on the plane of reality known as emotion.

My deepest empathies, you monster.

~ j.

The disturbingly allusive domesticity of the ultra-privileged expands to grandeur the universal truisms that cohere to those themes and games that equate to ‘communal disorder’ (always including, but never limited to: money, taboo sex, murder) trickling down and pooling among the mass.

Some special films are beautiful, masterful, and witty; further, some are beautifully-masterfully-witty…quintessential of and in themselves.

Much to say, but I’ll keep it simple…

Verities of vérité innocence and objectified perversion. Through an uncomfortable and all-too-believable gagging of sexually raw and commodified confusion, the train of youth streams on and on and on. Yes, some stories of the moral type can be told with the brilliance of an intimate tenderness, and rarer still they can render viewer’s hearts as vessels holding a peaceful type of nostalgia (but not before horrifically corkscrewing said heart up into the throat).

I watched this movie by accident, I had intended to see something classically European but walked into the wrong screening and didn’t realize my mistake until it was too late (I knew the anime trailers were odd); it was serendipitous, I’ve rarely felt so emotionally warmed after experiencing a rollercoaster of discomfort. I ‘needed’ just such a film on just such a night as this.

I’m hesitant to write ‘anything’ on this emotionally shattering brilliance, but I feel I must…

A mythopoetic definition of “hometown” (a ‘space’ from which there is never not an absolute zero chance of returning) necessitates a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual migration (macro/micro) through which one undergoes a molecular disintegration and simultaneous reformation of the processes of thought, connection, consciousness, and perception bonded with infinitely congealing ‘forces’ made manifest into a tangible reality — for good, ill, or kaleidoscopic gray — as though a young woman’s migration through the woods to her grandmother’s place is slightly loosened as she hums a tune (say, Italian Serenade by a syphilitic Hugo Wolf) that’s presciently stuck in her bubbling brain.

*

Some films are fucking magical, and from all films one can always learn. Magically, I just learned a new word on this achingly tranquil night in South Philly (as translated into an English subtitle from the Italian): “Moonsickness.” And, no, there is no moon in tonight’s sky as I softly smoke a cigarette on the front steps of my building and silently box these words out on my glowingly-signified late-capitalist phone…ever awed, still, stilled.

Wallpaper is a tool of disfiguration for the purpose of aestheticism: an implied indifference to practical matters. An impractical matter is an invisibly open wound the advice for how to staunch is always unsolicited, for no one can know the wound, which morphs into the mold of each and every individual perspective and perception, yet, you know ‘you,’ and knowing is just the frustrating tip of the iceberg that is the actualization of healing. All you can do is grow around and up and around, outward from the wound, doing your best to not let it define or inform — existing not in the hopelessness (itself a wound) embodied in the victimization (another wound) of the victimized (yes, wound); and, the Sisyphean wallpapering of the psyche shall continue on until senility or death.

There may be ‘cold’ in that comfort; however, don’t goddamn ever take the following for granted: you’re not Klaus Kinski’s daughter.

Sometimes people get married to escape pain. Sometimes people get married to further pain. Sometimes people get married for the private insurance benefits needed to alleviate pain.

Sometimes the marriage of pain and self is forced, the pain being a formula followed insidiously thoroughly into a orgiastic cliché reminiscent of a compulsory inversion of human connection caused by a tangible feeling of dissociation made manifest via deeply ingrained trauma and/or the original sin of a complexly simplistic chemical imbalance and misfiring synapses in certain regions of the brain.

Sometimes this pain looks, sounds, and feels blasé. Sometimes a movie can piss you off so bad it hurts.

The mediation between person and person — soul and place and time — is not ‘broken’ English but ‘found’ English, ultimately to be lost to interpretations along diverging dirt roads of individuality; idioms sacrifice nothing, but indulge in the tragically abundant hunger of America’s fables…as though the scum reaches heaven amid the boiling.

*

Some special films are ‘pretty as a picture.’

A twisting therapeutic aching of the pain of trauma births a belonging of psychosis inherited through generations and preformed via a staging of said pain; staged in courts, staged in police statements and tape, staged in insurance s, staged in an endlessness of an infinitely pronged disease. To spread this pain around for others to quantify and qualify is itself a subconscious act of selfless lovingness, a deep pinking empathy.

In your space and your time do enjoy that act of tenderly licking clean your hateful fetus, for this time always dances on the fulcrum of the last.

I’d like here to speak briefly of my ignorance on two separate but equal subjects: film and god.

I always have, and continue to do so, bristle at the notion that things happen for a reason; the universe is, in the most rudimentary form, chaos. Yet, film plots plod on with a connective tissue of causality, for example: when the prostitute leaves the city for the country as the husband has, the two find each other fucking each other — it all seems so goddamn inevitable. Further, when the brat brother meets the arc-less simple brother the former is eventually matured, mentally wizened to a happy fault (the ‘fault’ being ‘happiness’).

Yet, paradoxically, it’s the ‘cause’ of this problematic Dogme 95 film that disproves, to me, the existence of a divinity (the tangent of fate can in of itself be codified as secular, but this I’ll save for a more distant reflection). An intentional film made with constraints, rather, any film made with constraints, is still a film, and further, all films are made with constraints. And it’s in the constraints where often one finds fuel for failure; it’s in failure where one finds beauty, art, love. If this is true (and it is true for me) then god is necessarily a failure, which negates all things ‘god.’ Also, if god is the producer/writer/director/cinematographer/editor/sound designer/actor(s)/key grip…,god then must also be its own audience, which would make the makings of god themselves gods for gods to feed off of only to defecate equally defecating gods which then cyclically and incestuously feed and breed via more and more piles of feces, again, negating and diluting all that is ‘godly’ and perverting the implied hierarchical lineage of all things ‘pure’ and ‘true.’

*

My point is: convention constraints can sadly overlap with artistic, as though the experiment necessitates furthering an experiment; ultimately resulting in an equation of shallowness, as with my above sophomoric logic as well as Dogme 95’s well intentioned grave of an argument.

“You’re not human.”

Hyper-visual, sonically equalized, the ego embodies voicelessness in its serenade of self to the tune of a universal (brilliantly, archetypically, clichéd) trauma; electro-a-popping and dancing sexy for a wanting wont of the sanity of reality, or, for a narrative of redemption from the being of a production of a product. O! let us now all sing our own songs and weep of that magic putrefaction only found in L.A., let’s now dance our (tiny) tongues with a wanton shamelessness of all the implications of an implicit shame.

*

Motif: Jenna Ortega and a gasoline can.

Motif: The Weekend’s masculinity as seen through the saline streaming of humanized tears.

Motif: drugs and booze won’t kill the dream of your night job’s demands.

Motif: there’s a definite willingness of today’s youth for obsessive mental contortions gloriously strained by marketing campaigns.

Motif: as though one must listen to oneself for one to unlearn self; and, at some point, one must inevitably come to a tangible disgust of one’s own characterized vocal representations.

Motif: inside jokes are at this moment in history for the kids of the moment; and, a cinema vis-a-vis audience, I’m very grateful to here type, on 5/16/2025, ‘exists.’

Motif: to feed the femme fatale (emotionally, bodily, spiritually) that feeds the void of your id is to rest on your laurels with a knowing ill ease; sharing this as legacy is true to a tragically contemporaneous-extreme form of monetized and commercialized therapy.

Motif: it takes a certain self-stylized pain to ease the embarrassment of fame.

Motif: aesthetic violence divides space and time into a discernible grace of forgiving logic.

Motif: piles of money are hilarious in the hands of the more artsy music video-ists (and for Christ’s fucking sake please keep this a one-off).

*

This is the first film I’ve seen with a photosensitivity warning, and I’ll go on record here and now as saying: this will become both ‘cult’ and ‘classic’ (at least to the cult of myself, and perhaps to all those hopelessly spunky and star-punked Weekend-ites too).

Unsettlement settles deep in the brain like a worm or virus or tumor. History is pluralistic in that its tentacles cycle sans consent their slimy suction cups up the infinite hues of the rectums of the forever vanquished; ‘all of us.’ 

I must enjoy movies at this exact moment, because the reality is that I’m inescapably history’s bitch.

What would Heidegger, Husserl, Hegel say? (Hint: they’re all dead, but, were they living, their English might be a modicum better than every character in this film.)

If I could force our current dear leader to view into his eye holes just one movie featuring, prominently, dead Nazi’s in drag, it’d unequivocally be The Damned.

*the below is written by a man who knows very goddamn well the 1990s and small Midwest towns*

Back when history died. Everyone forgot. Death seeped from every crevice and everyone got used to it and everyone forgot. Everyone forgot about death as everyone became immortal. Immortality reigned until immortality got old and then again everyone forgot. 

Forgetting the act of forgetting in a state of forgot. 

Insert here something about ritual and tradition being the simple preservation of memory borne out of a perverted sense of mortality. Insert here a blossoming of youth and eternal radiance that makes sense only in the light of the suffering and the sick. For to be sick and to suffer, alone, as sociopathic or psychopathic, is to purely love one’s self for the sake of one’s self — a fallacy some fall on like a chainsaw, some wear like face paint, some wield with bank notes, and some with their libido’s.

*

My point is: many of us older white guys do genuinely enjoy pre-2000s rap.

So I’m 5 months clean and sober as of last Saturday. What brought me to rehab last December was a seizure in a crack house (not my first substance-related seizure; had probably 9 or 10 since graduating grad school during the pandemic). My cousin, 47, who bought me my first bottle of vodka when I was 14, died a few weeks ago of liver failure. During his funeral I kept wanting to text him about his funeral; we weren’t close towards his later life (I really had no idea he was so sick) but we were extremely close for a very long time, probably 2005ish until roughly just slightly after whatever year the Cubs won the World Series (he called me in tears that night and said “I love you”).

He’s gone. Forever. Not only do I continually have small, seemingly insignificant memories of him followed by an immediate thought of ‘death’, I also think: that could’ve fucking been me…that fucking could be me.

This is my first serious attempt at sobriety, and these past few weeks have been rough.

Also, my lawyerless divorce (no money, no kids, amicable) is finally wrapping up after right around 1.5 years. And, I’m aching for a partner. A woman who loves film and is understanding of my trauma and substance use disorder. I know I’ll meet someone here in my new home of Philadelphia (been here since January) in likely the near future. I already had one girlfriend for a few weeks, but she kept drinking tequila to a blackout every night and had a hefty cocaine habit — I really shouldn’t be around any of that, even if the sex is fun, even if it means going to movies alone.

But, honestly, I’m 40. I just restarted my life in a very serious way. I’m not yet looking for another wife nor am I just looking for a hookup. Something wise, sound, healthy; that’s what I ‘need’ in a relationship.

I feel I’ve grown so much since getting clean and sober last December, but, as they say, the more I grow the more I see the need for more growth, and, this growth won’t end, ever, and I’m okay with that. 

Yet I pine for someone to grow outward and upward and old with…and me with them.

Thanks for letting me share.

Exquisite paranoia fractaled, Oedipal reality causation; everyone: ‘fearful’…the quietus of a sinister giggling.

To be trapped is a lust paid for by some in high sums. Those ‘some’ know a knowing our 8.75ish characters know all too goddamn well. And, maybe it’s not quite simply a sign of the times; for the signage is ancient and visibly bruising, busting definitively a ‘cap’ in ‘capitalism.’

*

Overheard in theater at ‘The End’: “California traffic…!!!”

“This is so meta, what we’re doing.”
                

Faux-punk interpretations; an interspersing of time and space, an extrapolation-ing. 

My jealousy (as a non-resentment, or, pang) at the implicit freedom of life as influenced and influencing artistic processes and erroneously casual sex, cringing all-too-cathartically at the much discussed discussion at a triggering of a potentiality.

*

Youthful invocations of the complexities within ultra-‘tragic’-contemporary notions of truth, love, art; blissfully ignorant confusion touched by a digitized Zeitgeist-architectural-lingering of an implied on & on & on & on & on & on…

*

As your earth / is of oysters: / write poems / — fuck & creep & fuck — / make movies / — creep & justify & creep — / in that order / exactly.

Probably not the most awkward film I’ve seen all week, but certainly the longest.

*

A) there’s an inherent funniness to ‘fellowship.’
B) all things ‘sex’ are graceless.
C) during my undergrad days I sometimes drank my lunches in the South Loop at that Buddy Guy’s Legends location where that final ending is filmed…it was ‘stupid’ expensive.

An exquisiteness exists within the brutality of reality; greed underscores and dissects as an opposition to the more behavioral sinnings.

*

Exactitude of style — a failed history of cyclic innocence.

Finitude rides on in a southerly direction.

Beyond the fore of a blur is the force of a pain lost to innocence. An ache of trauma; circumstantial. 

Give to the ogre of love a warmth mirrored in memory, drenched in the ciclycality of micro histories. An aesthetics of ‘after-the-fact.’

Here I feel no embarrassment. Here the sad is factually ironic. The tune of shame is loud in bitter pop; under-blown.

‘You didn’t take your pills again. Why?’  
                        *
‘But cartoons are for kids!’
                        *                 
‘Or is this just a nightmare?’
                        *
                        
A birthless yarn of beatific longing spooled achingly tight.

In the tension between ‘psycho’ and ‘sexual’ lies a brightly monstrous paranoiac piety in autumnal fevered hues. Of fate, there’s no glory; the chase of a sacrificial kiss, a wounding of hallucination. 

Stand tall, glow, and transgress.

Lost in a creeping of baby blues, know now that the structures refuse. 

Trust ‘only’ in perversion, and allow the detectives to detect.

A tragic of logic.

Secrets slime down a generational hybridity into a saintly aftermath of the aftermath’s bubbling, sizzling, melting, screaming of faith into the finalization of a spark of desperate mechanical novelty.

Trust here is the chemicalized key, as is the problematic problem of evil, an alteration of connection; accented and dimmed, dammed, deadened with a stunning and amphibious vitality.

*

An ‘Anthony’ stubbornly dwells in all the basements of childhood.

Grief-driven ‘schizohumatech-poises’. 

There’s no escaping the trauma of love, for it’s all, really, in the head.

In the black and the white of it all lies a class of struggles, a dichotomy of luck; that infant post-ism gamble. Greed is a mainstay, and it’s fitting that that’s how it quite simply is, a state of being never being beyond the scraps of scrapes in a centrality of scapes (spatially, temporally). 

A tacky tacked-on biblicallity one can easily look past; the humor being as uneasy as filling a cavity with a dusting of ice.

Addiction, again; again, ‘love.’

*

I’d read the novel, but I feel I needn’t.