tammytoes

i hereby declare that Pavement is the official soundtrack for Thursdays.

and that is all.

but haven’t had time for the wrap-up. words are a premium lately. but there’s always a few around for movies. so some films and dvds, in the past weekish:

1408: film students should watch the first 2/3 of this movie for a primer in how to set mood and tone and scare the beejuzus out of an audience with subtle effects and atmosphere – then watch the last 1/3 of the movie for a tutorial on how to blow all of that with hokey twists and bad writing. bleah.

notes on a scandal: judy dench as single white female? um, weird…

dark water: good lord, it’s terrible. it’s the soggiest film i’ve ever seen.

daywatch: probably deserves more than a few words, actually. in short, i guess, i loved it. but much like nightwatch, it’s potentially migraine-inducing: rat-a-tat-tat special effects, narratives that pop in and out without warning, a mythology that only really seems to care about its own logic… but it’s wonderful! it’s taken about 45 minutes for me to find a point of entry into each of these films so far – the combination of style, the fantasy universe that’s at hand and the fact that the whole thing is russian (the culture and language divide feels vast) makes my brain scream when i start watching. but then, once i let the film overwhelm me, i’m completely glued. can’t take my eyes off the screen. loved it, loved it, loved it. even with its obvious shortcomings.

severance: it could be a strange little british comedy-of-manners gem masquerading as a slasher film. or maybe it’s just another self-referential piece of horror garbage. or maybe both. my guess is both. it’s darn funny and clever in some moments, and tense in a few others. but it wants to have its cake and eat it, too. in my mind, it can’t work like that: you can’t make a film that scoffs meanly at its characters and makes light of killing, but then invests us so thoroughly in the terror of the victims and then undermine even all of that with cheap ironic jokes (well, i guess you can, and then you’d be eli roth and the film would be ‘cabin fever’ and then i would feel kinda bad about how much i loved you). okay, so maybe i’ll settle on this: severance is an okay film made by a bunch of sarcastic sassypants.

haven’t seen the sequel to hostel yet, but i’ll get there.

i’m learning to love my failure as much as my success.

all the major-minor disasters, the lost loves, the yeses that should have been nos (and vice versas) the missed adventures, the too-costly adventures, the risks i’d wish i’d taken, the risks that should have been passed on.

i think: i want to be more than the sum of what i’ve done. i want to include all the things i should have done, didn’t do, and completely fucked up. and why not? they define me as much as the things i got right. they are the negative space i move through, the space that creates the boundary that is me, living and flesh. it’s time to love these failures – and not because i’ve learned something from them, not even because i’ve grown as a result of them – simply because they’re mine.

i reckon the real trick is this: not to love the failure too much. not to become smitten with the mistakes, to believe in the density of disaster. i’ve lived with and loved too many people who carried on long romances with their failures, who set themselves up for unsuccess time and time again because of this love affair. embraced their mistakes as an irrefutable truth about themselves.

but i’ve lived my life like i can undo my mistakes with more successes, better choices, greater adventures. it’s unnerving, a happy to-do melancholia that attempts to erase a good bit of my time.

if we were to know each other, all really know each other, we would have clarity: we’re all a bunch of fuck-ups. and we deserve to love each other the more for it.

this move i make in a few months, it has a very cinematic, great-success-or-failure quality to it. as if there lies amazing success or sure ruin ahead. but the truth of the matter is really that it’s just another move, another beginning, composed of ordinary achievements, mistakes, awesomeness and heartaches – simply subjected to the scale of excitement.

i expect that i’m going to tear up new york city. and completely screw up a whole lot, too. but my real hope is that i find real happiness in both.

there really is no sleep ’til brooklyn.

I sat with the new collection of poems by Eavan Boland the other day.
This one, in particular.

Atlantis, A Lost Sonnet
- Eavan Boland

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city – arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals – had all
one fine day gone under?

I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city -

white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best tradition of

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.