ask me how

forgetting something


Try this—close / your eyes. No, wait, when—if—we see each other / again the first thing we should do is close our eyes—no, / first we should tie our hands to something / solid—bedpost, doorknob— otherwise they (wild birds) / might startle us / awake. Are we forgetting something? What about that / warehouse, the one beside the airport, that room / of black boxes, a man in each box? I hear / if you bring this one into the light he will not stop / crying, if you show this one a photo of his son / his eyes go dead. Turn up / the heat, turn up the song. First thing we should do / if we see each other again is to make / a cage of our bodies—inside we can place / whatever still shines.


--- nick flynn

Very happy that yes, The Rumpus did publish my little essay on Gregory Orr. You can read it here.

Dreamy Sunday; after swimming, late lunch in a dimly lit Thai place with one of my oldest friends. I remember when he came out to me. We were 14 or 15, and he took me slowly by the wrist out of our friend's old mansion to stand in the dusk on the gravel driveway. I'd already known, of course, so it wasn't the information was the revelation, it was how much he trusted me.

Went to see Tree of Life last night. This is the summer of movies alone. Very needed. Writing a lot about movies these days. Tonight I'm watching A Prophet, directed by Jacques Audiard. Audiard has directed two beautiful movies in the past ten years, Read My Lips, and The Beat That My Heart Skipped -- I think I'm going to see the latter again soon, as I saw it in the theatre in Boston when it came out in 2005. I think Audiard is fascinated by brutality and beauty, how they can live so tightly knit together. He's a terrifically sensitive director.

Here are 9 poems Terrance Hayes thinks you should read, and he's right.

My fortune cookie today said "Necessity is the mother of risk."

go ahead

via the lovely becca.





netflix is bringing me jules et jim tomorrow.

I have been living inside this poem by Robert Duncan for a year

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow


as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.



(I have been sick on & off for two weeks. IV antibiotics, fearful nights, hundreds of dollars. I am sitting in my apartment again, feeling sick. I was sick at this time last year, for what felt like months. I don't say this to ask for well wishes. I think I need a medicine man. I need a spirit journey to search into the cause of my continual sickness, why my body so easily breaks down. I need to go into the desert and howl.

In the middle of all this sickness, I saw the best movie that I've seen in a long time, Biutiful. I can't stop thinking about it.

at the lowest aperture / of winter

* Lykke Li's forthcoming Wounded Rhymes. as if knowing when to follow was just another way to lead.

* song of winter, Sharon Van Etten's Love More.

* wanting to see Wings of Desire again.

* I stepped on a wasp on the beach. 24 hrs later, it's astonishingly painful. Last time I stepped on a wasp I was six or seven and it left something like a scar, a tiny red star with a dozen fingers.

* Tomorrow, Texas.

I'm Gonna Learn How To Fly

Why somebody would decide to remake the 1980 film "Fame" in 2009 is not illogical -- American culture is currently obsessed with the idea of "making it," whether you're a cook, a singer, a clothing designer, or even someone with no perceivable talent other than the insane drive to appear on a reality TV show, we've got a place for you on national television, a way to make your name "known" in America's Next Top Whatever. So, deciding to remake "Fame," a movie about high school kids in an intensely competitive New York City performing arts school... it's not a hugely difficult sell to the studios. But really, dear director, whoever you are, did you have to make it so cardboard, so G-rated, so bereft of flesh & urgency? Did you have to cast only the lead kids who'd look good on posters, the ones with... well, talent, but for the most part, boring, boring, boring ass talent? Did you have to - OH MY GOSH - so deeply insult the insanely and uniquely talented Bebe Newirth by casting her as a dance teacher who never appears dancing? Pardon me while I puke all over my tap shoes / comfort Bob Fosse while he turns in his grave. Did you, dear director, have to cut almost every interesting and weighty plot line? Do you think there's not BUCKETS of grit in 2009 for you to deal with? What the hell are you doing? Do you think you don't have any responsibility to the world we live in? How can you make a movie about the theater and teenagers and New York while wholly ignoring all of the issues - teen pregnancy, homosexuality, poverty, addiction, abuse - which the 1980's movie frankly and lovingly embraced? (Poverty and violence, while alluded to, are kept way off screen -- in the 2009 version, we see nice apartments, parents who are, at worst, busy but present. In the 1980's version, we see the squalor. We get exactly why these kids are so desperate to break out of their circumstances. ) Dear director, aren't there dozens more issues now clear in light that was somewhat murky (or did not exist) in the early 80's - New York post-9/11, AIDS, eating disorders, our culture of hyper-spectacle, mental illnesses, etc etc- couldn't you have chosen to embrace something... I don't know, important? And instead, your only big cultural update was to give the whole thing a little hip-hop flava, and get a few kids involved with the TV business. What the fuck, dear director. Shame on you. P.S. The new songs pretty much sucked too.

Here's the 1980's real deal:


Forgive the outrage, chickadees. "Fame" has been my favorite movie since, oh, I don't know, age 15. Seeing it helped me to live in that dreamlife as long as it made sense to. Anyway, yes, apologies, the tiny room in my heart where musical theater still lives & breathes got all irritated & I had to let it speak.

I noticed a dark room, I noticed a dream

The documentary is called Dream of Life. Tait & I went to see it at the Harris Theater downtown when we got back together, before we broke up, what feels like yesterday, what feels like a million years ago. I haven't stopped thinking about the movie since, not really.

Uh oh... I have been called go to work, suddenly. Chickadees, life is very confusing. But the following is clear.

to howl

Where the Wild Things Are is the best movie I saw in 2009. It's incredibly cathartic - I get choked up just thinking about the sense of longing that permeates the movie. As practically my sole employment has been with children for the past three years, there's a whole other level to my involvement with the film - I have allowed myself to be pretty vulnerable to the kids I babysit. I'm able to be hurt by them. I respect them. I've learned their limits, their resilience; I've seen them take terrible falls & rise unscathed, I've seen splinters reduce them to weeping. I've let them eat too much or too little, I've made them go to bed, I've let them stay up late. I've read them books. They've hit me with books. We have run together to an urban field with nothing to play with but imagination. We've collected rocks. We've collected potato bugs. We have drawn monsters in chalk through alleyways. We have sung at the top of our lungs. They have told me to leave. They have told their mothers to leave. They have kissed me suddenly on the mouth. I don't know how I started taking care of children, or why they like me, or if I'll ever have any of my own. Okay, okay, but hey, as my ex-boyfriend recently wrote to me, "enough with these dramatics!" Who cares if I have kids or not! This movie is great and so is the soundtrack! Oh, and p.s., I like how you destroy stuff.