An Errand of Hip and Chin

I'm proud to show a  quick look at the forthcoming Tropic Pictures film "An Errand of Hip and Chin."
It's an art film. It's a Hula Hoop movie. It's . . . not easily categorized.  But I bet you find it interesting!

Here is the link:
"Errand of Hip and Chin"

And here are a few film stills.

Technotopian Dreams

My article about Antione Catala's "Emobot (Teacher)" at The Dallas Museum of Art has been published by Glasstire.

Excerpt:

What Emobot (Teacher) teaches,  I suspect, is a lesson about the inhibiting forces of social authority and the insolence of the individual. It is an intelligent and ambitious line of thinking. The emobot seems to describe the shortfall of the digital world to house or even understand our emotions, and Catala seems to be having fun with this shortfall. 

Find the full article here:  "Creepy Emotions"

The Poem within the Film, Pt. 5

Day five of the Five Day Poetry Challenge. Today, a poem you can watch! "The Border Between Human Heel and Serpent's Fang" appears in the Tropic Pictures film "A Well-proved Helpmate."

The link below carries you to the scene in the film where actor Mayo Purnell tells the audience a strange and haunting story, which is the narrative poem.

Link:
Clip from the film "A Well-proved Helpmate"

And here is he text:

BORDER BETWEEN HUMAN HEEL AND SERPENT'S FANG

Every little talk of philosophy

will go astray

with the appearance of a snake.

Even Bacchants

leave off ructions and capers

when slither takes the room.

Cannibalism in snakes

serves the mythic mind two images:

i.

The devouring cycle.

ii.

A careful hunter sighting prey

from an ingenious blind

has her concentration thunderstruck

by a visiting snake.

And a facile tap of her machete

puts its head spinning yonder—

a stone rolled away from a tomb

as out slips one devoured,

a reclaimed snake wriggling and taking over,

fangs beading in the sunlight.

And one time

I saw a bird pick a snake from the grass like a ribbon.

For lack of anything but an act of faith,

the snake struck the raptor and fell loose:

small in the distance—dark, twisting, alive —

falling through the blue . . . Then I lost it in the pines.

The Poem within the Film, Pt. 4

Day four of the Five Day Poetry Challenge. This poem, "Resisting Rapture" will appear in the forthcoming Tropic Pictures film "Satan is Real."

RESISTING RAPTURE

A headstone rises modestly to firmament,
and I remember—or rather invent—
my grandfather as a youth
in striped jersey and football trousers
breaking through empty meadow,
purple tops of field grass exploding
at the points of his knees.
And the stone on the ground, I suppose,
speaks of past traditions, emulated virtues,
exhorts the living to remember their own end.
The space between the etched dates—
wide fissure in the brain—
I work a lazy calculation but never make the sum.
Blackbirds flick from a lone cedar,
my young haunt underneath,
to-ing and fro-ing, awaiting the ball
he'd punted to tumble through the boughs.
Birds scatter and re-form—jots of a professor
toward an elusive proof.
Is eternity one long, empty afternoon
sharing youth with my grandfather?
Maybe the symbol is not the stone
but the grass seed. Cataclysm without names
etched in—anonymous way back
into the parenthesis of the soil.
themselves now faraway burrs in the white summer sky.
Or its the sum-shaped absence left by the blackbirds,

The Poem within the Film, Pt. 3

Day three of the Five Day Poetry Challenge. This poem, "Ruins at the Well," appears in the Tropic Pictures short film "Other Wounds."

RUINS AT THE WELL

I skip school and go down to the old well,
hatching a scheme against the ancient washing machine— 
a kind you had to crank by hand
and rollers up on top—how long
it'd take to kick and beat it out of the ground
and drag it to the well.
I am the anti-Archeologist.
Discoveries fall away. Crumbled stairs,
square nails, strange pieces of tile—
let them echo down the walls of the well.

Rome is far. Almost unthinkable.
The ikons, the sophisticates
in European cinema magazines,
they are far. And I am here. This well. 
One hand is bleeding.
An old brick has splashed, now sinking— 
deep calling to deep.
And the stone I raised in my hand to chase it, 
I stack now on top of another stone.
Let some traveler come by and find them. 

The Poem within the Film, Pt. 2

Day two of the five day poetry challenge. Today's poem appears in the short film "Other Wounds." This film has shown at Anthology Film Archives in the U.S., at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival in Scotland, and will show later this year at Proyector International Videoart Festival in Spain.

OTHER MUSIC

Walking in a dry meadow
I found an amputated wing—lyrical and strange,
like a harp whose song is closed to the earth. 

I thought I might take it to Cherubim City,
work for cheap on the back streets,
in the hot houses, build my chops and a reputation.
For a choir I trapped three quail in a basket,
but in the morning I found a snake there by itself,
belly thick as a human heart.

Did I squash the snake with a tree limb?—somehow, no.

Once you've wrapped your delicate hand
around a quail, you know the intoxicating struggle
of its hope. There's something fierce
in what the snake knows about this
and something brilliant for the Cherubim—
how exquisite the song of wings,
perfected in the chamber of a snake.

The Poem within the Film, Pt. 1

In a belated answer to the five day poetry challenge, I begin this series titled "Poetry within the Film."  I'll be sharing some of the original poems that appear in my movies. In this instance, here is the poem that gives a forthcoming movie its name, "A Spiral Way." A portion of the poem is used within the film, spoken by the character you see below, who is played by Cameron McElyea.

I hope you enjoy the poem. For more details about the movies, please check in with TropicPictures.com and the Facebook page

A Spiral Way, film still

A Spiral Way, film still

A SPIRAL WAY

Something there is that does not show,

but has its sign in the thunder

and in quieter symbols like morning light;

whatever it is in its farness,

converts a feeling it is near.

And how are we perceived

by this alien on the roof,

or thing from myth we thought never lived?

Are we judged? Made sport of? 

Lost things to be found . . . even loved?

"What of us?" My aunt Cecilia used to say,

when she dropped dishes or mashed her hand.

She'd have a glass of whisky when she cooked,

and un-sticking portions that got burned to the pan:

"What of us? . . .What of us? . . ."

It was her best friend, Rose,

that died on the side of a dirt road.

This is an awful story. But please look.

She left two young children in the car

when she got out to pick dewberries—

they grow wild in the thick brambles

along rows of barbed wire fence,

and a favorite treat for snakes.

Rose, not seeing one, got bit in the forehead.

I wonder about the corruption of venom,

if Rose was thinking a thought that

blistered and broke like a degraded bit of film

that decays in the projector,

melting a scene into grainy white light.

It was my cousin, Calvin, and I that found them. 

I was fourteen, he was seventeen. 

First we saw the children—sweaty, bewildered, 

crying in the car. Then Rose. Sloppy summer clothes.

Somehow, she had one shoe on and one shoe off, beside her.

Cecilia made the meal that followed the service.

She burned her knuckles on the roast.

Bit her tongue, bad, cutting onions.

Sip of whisky, "What of us?"

Sip of whisky, "What of us?"

But I don't mean this a dark, regional tale,

like something you'd find on Sundance Channel.

What I want to get to, is awe.

Black sheep Camille is Rose's oldest daughter.

She'd been up in Detroit, stripping bare

for her artist boyfriend. And him showing

abstract images of her, bare, for the

speculation of the world. 

She was devastated throughout the service—of course!

Later, exhaustion sort of perked her up.

She invited me out to the back yard, 

so that she could smoke and talk about her new mode. 

The boyfriend had switched media to video. 

"We're applying sentience to complex data. . .

The continuous present, there on tape. Life is the only 

thing of value.  Problem-solving, intelligence—

the point of these is to get more life. Nothing else .  . .

Nobody dies like a Humanist. We die like animals."

When good country people talk about God,

we're reflecting on moments in everyday life, when

something broke into our thinking and turned it upside down.

God-talk is a way of whistling past the things that shake us up,

and a way of clearing space for the present moment. 

After the reception, most everyone was day drunk.

Voices and thoughts were thick.

"What of us?" "What of us?"
Hymns were not invented for wild love to pour out.

Hymns were invented so that the singer could get a hold of himself.

It was a quarter-mile driveway at dusk, and Calvin

coming off the road like a shadow, holding something aloft.

I watched every step of his approach.

What he held was a dead snake. Not the snake, but a snake.

One he kicked out of the brambles and killed with a stick. 

     

He showed it to us, and Camille wept.

He showed it to us. A man spat in the dirt.

He showed it to us. The children cried out.

He showed it to us. Dogs snarled and came forward.

He showed it to us. And the thing was a villain no more.