Inland Empire at IFC Center a while back

Repeated, extended movements through empty, darkened domestic corridors, a repeating image in Lynch's films, one which always feels to me like the perspective of a frightened child wandering through their parents house at night.

Swapping identities, sexual anxiety, temporal rearrangements, fear of poverty, doorways that, when you go through them, change the story radically, fairytale irreversibility, and the anxiety around the irrevocability of human action period, approached across the fault lines of a disturbed, radically subjective consciousness expanded into a sprawling imaginative environment.

The film was shot using a $2000 consumer digital video camera -- that is, it was created on a punk rock/poetry budget. The reduced production costs, and associated ease, flexibly and speed gave Lynch the ability to work with a freedom of pacing and conception I haven't seen in some time. Some of the technical disadvantages of the digital media are turned to advantages. One of the weirdest scenes in the film uses high contrast profile shot against a bright lamp and the chunky black digital distortion effect along the edges of the character's face calls attention to the media and the film's artificiality at the same time that it intensifies the feeling of otherworldliness and absorptive power of the scene. Not an easy move.

Bob Perelman, BPC, 3.24.07

Interested in the balances Perelman strikes with the material from Iflife- which I immediately bought at the end of the reading. His poetry is more cynical than it appears on it's surface and it does way more with this cynicism (realism?) than most poets can manage. It's balanced with humor and likeability, neither of which he is afraid of and neither of which he over-commits to. It was quite refreshing.

"the cordially hated present"

"late breaking faces"

"frisking around the heels of power"

"no utopia is a good utopia"

"getting poetry from the news"

"true north's over"

"someone has to translate the sacred language of the clouds"

"telneting into the skull"

cloud shadow on ocean surface

Underwater, sounds seem to come from all directions at once.

On the way to work this morning I saw a toaster abandoned on the sidewalk, its cord in my path like the tail of a dying pet.

How about dispensing with the rosters? Or is there an up-side I'm not seeing?

The Totalists have resurrected the medieval insight that music is the medium that can translate numbers into feeling.

--Kyle Gann

See you in SF:

Katie and I will be reading in the Small Press Traffic series on Friday, March 16th.

-----
Drew Gardner and Katie Degentesh
Small Press Traffic
Literary Arts Center at CCA
1111 -- 8th Street, SF, 7:30

... you may say that I take liberties, and you are right, but I will have done my good deed for the day if I can make you see that the whole point is YOU SHOULD BE TAKING LIBERTIES TOO. Nothing is inscribed so deep in earth a little eyewash won't uproot it, that's the whole point of the so-called "new wave" -- to REINVENT YOURSELF AND EVERYTHING AROUND YOU CONSTANTLY, especially since all of it is already the other thing already.

-Lester Bangs