THAT I DON'T KNOW WHAT

henri matisse

I saw another French film last night. I mean made in France; and, it has that je ne sais quoi to identify it particularly French and no other. No other culture can even imitate it. I'm recalling a French film I saw a month or more ago that did not have je ne sais quoi about it. I thought it odd. It didn't feel right. The film was La Truite,1982. It had Isabelle Huppert, Jeanne Moreau, and a very respectable French cast. I looked to see who directed it. Joseph Losey. English. Of course it did not have je ne sais quoi. What a strange complexity, a French film made by an English mind. It would have worked had not the number one ingredient been missing. He made a good enough film in France, but it wasn't French. I've found that special something that cannot be named in French films I've seen over the years. It is so subtle that I tend only to think about it while watching a French film. It draws my attention a short time into a film. To see a French film without je ne sais quoi was mildly startling. It didn't compute. It was like a Japanese-made film of the life of Genghis Khan done in medieval Japanese dress and customs. It was done in full-dress kimonos and swords, on sleek stable-kept horses, talking in Japanese. It made a good film, but it was a hard one to take seriously. It was something like doing Shakespeare in suits and ties, speaking Russian. The film I saw last night that was French and no other, I've Loved You So Long, 2008. It is an odd-seeming title until you've seen the film. Then it's just right. Director was Philippe Claudel. I would guess that among French film lovers he is regarded with appreciation as a director. This film was brilliantly made, the story brilliantly written. I gave it five stars without hesitation. This was the only film netflix had available by Claudel. 

henri matisse

Kristin Scott Thomas portrayed her character, Juliette, getting out of prison after 20 years. She was in for murdering her 6 year old boy. We know there is a story behind it, that she was either falsely charged or something. One of the clues was early in the story when she told her sister that her husband testified against her. Later a social worker looked at the court transcripts and asked why she did not say anything in her own defense. She had to leave the room. The mystery of what happened is a thread running through the story. It is also a look at someone just out of 20 years in prison, and I doubt if French is better than American prison; a good place to be from, a long ways from. The story gave me a peephole view into the life of someone reentering a world hostile to her in particular, a criminal. It involved relationships in family, other people, employers, social workers. I can't help but feel it is criminal of our society to go on punishing people who have served their time. I thought the deal was, do your time and your record is clear. Not. Do your time, then live at the homeless bottom with a hateful attitude toward a society that only cares about you in a negative way, cares about seeing you suffer for being a criminal, an outsider. Juliette is beset with others uncomfortable in her presence. A time her sister referred to her time behind bars, "while you were away," she exploded that she was in prison. She was not away. She was in prison. She told sister to go ahead and say prison. That's what it was. Sister taught literature at a university. She had been struggling within to understand Juliette, whose spirit was so distant. In class one day, a student was talking about Dostoevsky on murder. She made the case that only someone who has murdered knows how it feels. She worked herself up into an emotional rant saying Dostoevsky did not know anything about it; he had never murdered anyone. She jumped and flew from the class, leaving the class bewildered, went to her office for the comfort of solitude and emotionally collapsed. 

henri matisse

I've seen quite a large number of films over the last eight years with netflix seeing three to four films a week, films from everywhere in the world. I dismiss Hollywood films, finding my appreciation in American films the independents. We have so many of them, who needs Hollywood? French is my preference of countries in the world of film making. I've seen really good films from everywhere, Poland, Hungary, Russia, Denmark, China, Japan, Mexico, Italy, and all the way around the globe. I've had a great film education by way of netflix. I've had peeps into other cultures, chances to see how people in different parts of the world think and do. I keep a big world atlas close to the movie watching chair. Wherever I am in the world with the movie, I look it up and get a sense of landscape on particular parts of the maps. I've seen films of people's lives in China, the country that was a mystery most of my life, enough films by now to have a slight familiarity with Chinese culture. I've read contemporary Chinese fiction and go to websites in Shanghai of galleries showing what artists in China are doing. Documentaries of Ai Weiwei. All the time watching these films I am looking at people in the backgrounds, people passing by, seeing how they dress, how they walk, how they talk. I think I've become a culture junkie. I see a documentary in Mongolia and my eyes scan the landscape the whole time, imagine it all the way around. Seeing a friend just back from a couple weeks in Shanghai, my first question, "How did it smell?" He said, "Like China." I knew what he meant. It's the scent in a Chinese grocery store that is particularly China. It is the smells I miss in a film. The visuals and the audio are there, but the smells are never there, only reacted to when strong, like the truck of rotten meat in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. I smelled it by association with how the actors were reacting. 

henri matisse

Danish director, Ole Bornedal's film, I Am Dina, took me deep into life in the fjords of Norway. Mix what I saw there with documentaries about the Vikings, I get a sense for why the Vikings were so formidable. They spent their lives rowing boats. Beats weight lifting; the effort gets you someplace. Instead of ten chin-ups, you do ten thousand. I feel tremendous empathy for France occupied by the boche, the war, the reconstruction. However, France had its time of conquering Europe. I forget that France has a dynamic history, forget because I don't know most of it. I am familiar with French landscape from mountains to the beach by film and by map. I don't like to watch French films one after the other. I like to sprinkle them among everything else. They have such a light freshness about them, like French cuisine, it's like an aesthetic oasis to visit La France  by way of story telling. It's the only access I have. Paul Eluard, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Claudel, Rimbaud, all have that je ne sais quoi in poetry. French poets I like the best from Europe, as I like Chinese poetry the best from Asia, that I'm aware of. I've had one experience of French cuisine in France. It was a French town near the border with Switzerland close to Geneva. Can't recall the name of the town or the restaurant. I was at a table of English-French speakers equally, the non-French speaking American. At one point, I said to the waitress, "Merci beau cul." The waitress cracked up, everybody at the table cracked up. I didn't get it. Turns out I said coup with a Southern accent, told the waitress she had a nice ass. I couldn't take it back. To take it back would have been to deny it, which could not be done. I let it stand. I learned how a cat feels when a human scares it, it jumps straight up and all the humans around break out laughing at the cat. I wanted to do like a cat, go to another room and curl up on a pillow. But it was good fun. This was la France, not America. The meal in the restaurant was so simple, so ideal, and provided my first experience of je ne sais quoi in French cuisine. 

henri matisse himself

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BABY DOLL AND THE BULLDOG

vada, 3

Went to Vada's house Sunday to see the race on tv. I had not seen her in four weeks, maybe five. They returned day before yesterday from a week at Myrtle Beach, Vada looking like the Coppertone girl. Crystal said Vada spoke to everybody on the beach. Crystal's attention drifted and she found Vada talking with some people nearby, eating a cookie they'd given her. Everyone told Crystal Vada was the cutest thing there ever was. I said, "She is. They recognized it." Vada is a spirited child; life energy beams from her laughing or crying and every emotion in between. She cried several times today, not getting her way. She's pushing the envelope, stepping over boundaries, asserting herself. I picked up Baby Doll and said I wanted to play with Baby Doll. Vada snatched Baby Doll away and said, No! Another time I said I wanted to play with Baby Doll. No! A little later, I told her again I wanted to play with Baby Doll. OK. Dadu and I bent over in our chairs cracking up. This child has a natural-born charm. When she misbehaves and is spoken to about it, she can charm you into getting over it. I don't mean to imply other babies are not so cute. This is the baby I know in this time of my life. I walked in the front door upon arrival. Vada was standing beside the coffee table, looked at me in puzzlement, staring like she didn't quite know what to do. At the moment I didn't get it, but see it now that my hair has grown out and my chin has a goat beard since she saw me last. She's only known me with short hair looking like a retired cop. She stared like she was stuck in place. Dadu said, Aren't you going to say Hi to TJ? Vada ran to me, I picked her up and we hugged. I told her I love her. She held the hug for a long time, relaxed into it and I held her until she wanted down. It was an endearing moment, one of many with my real live baby doll.    

 

vada examines baby doll's toes

 

 Jeff Gordon won the race straight up and smoked a few thousand dollars of Goodyear tire rubber spinning black circles on the track. He made a lot of noise arousing the crowd to ecstatic cheers as loud as his roaring pipes. We watched golf awhile. Justin is a golfer. He is studying while he watches the pros hit the ball. I'd brought Melvin with me. He lives nearby in Whitehead, his truck isn't working well at the moment, inside a week he'll have a replacement. I went by and picked him up on the way to see the race. Vada loves Melvin like she loves me. I said to her when I put her down, Melvin's here. She ran to him, he picked her up and held her for a long time. He is round and roly-poly. He's a big teddy bear that hugs her in turn. Melvin's wife, Ellen, works at a daycare place. Melvin said when he picks her up after work, he goes early, sits on the floor and plays with the kids. The kids love him. Melvin is free enough inside himself to adore kids and they adore him back. I saw his other daughter, Hailey, 13, same age as Beth, before we left the house. She was wearing a tshirt that said, LIVE YOUR LIFE. I thought: the gospel in a fortune cookie. Later, when I took Melvin home, his girl, Beth, came running out the door as soon as he stepped out of the car. She jumped on him, gave him a big hug. She'd been away with a Girl Scout adventure for a week at the coast and returned while he was gone. She's a charming girl with fire red hair. He calls her Pumpkin. Melvin is somebody who becomes more interesting for me the more I know him. I've seen along the way there are people who seem interesting at first, but as you know them they diminish down to nothing. Others, who sometimes don't give any appearance that something is going on inside besides tv, turn out to be more and more interesting as time goes by. Every time I'm around Melvin I learn something new about him that blows my mind. He comes on like somebody who is neither here nor there, doesn't seek attention, comfortable in the back seat.

 

vada's little mermaid sunglasses from the beach

Justin, Melvin and I go to the basement to smoke cigarettes, or outside on the porch, to keep the house free of cigarette smell. Crystal would prefer her house not smell of cigarette. We respect her. Crystal, who does wedding photography, had a shoot on Sunday, which she often does, leaving Vada with Dadu, her baby name for daddy. Vada would play with Baby Doll nearby, sit on the laps of each one of us, attracted to our circle of attention, us sitting in the mancave corner laughing at funny stories we'd take turns telling. In a time when Justin took Vada upstairs and was gone for a spell, Melvin and I talked. High school came up and he said he had a good time all through high school. He said, "I was the mascot," explaining why he had privileges in school. I asked what he meant by mascot. My first thought was something like the San Diego chicken. He said, "I lettered five years in cheerleading." That one really took me by surprise. The team was the Bulldogs. He dressed up in a bulldog costume as part of the cheering squad. I did not see it coming. I lit up, wanted to hear more. Melvin is short and stocky; it wouldn't take much to make him into a bulldog. He said the other kids, the teachers, administration, the jocks, all thought he was the coolest guy in school. He said, "I didn't have any enemies." He had privileges such as freedom to skip class if he didn't want to go. His name those five years was Bulldog. Even the teachers called him Bulldog. Everybody called him Bulldog. He said he had a Nissan station wagon with big speakers in the back seat area, "You could hear me comin." The car had a foot-wide stripe of primer paint along both sides. A friend painted "Bulldog" in the primer stripe on the fender. He said, "My car was Bulldog too." 

 

vada's tongue

 

Melvin wears tshirts in this time of his life announcing he's proud to be a redneck, keeps a calendar on the kitchen wall of the tv show Duck Dynasty. Middle class people like to look down on the Duck Dynasty characters as obnoxious pigs, but in the working class they're comedy, like Larry the Cable Guy, Rodney Carrington and the other blue collar comics, who are really funny when you understand the culture's humor they appeal to. Many times in our mancave retreats Justin has put on Rodney Carrington cds for us to bend over laughing at. Not many of my middle class (more or less educated) friends could sit through more than two of Carrington's stories. I can watch Duck Dynasty with Justin and Melvin and laugh like crazy. To one part of my mind they're upper middle class actors making a lot of money from a successful gig, celebrities in a society that honors only celebrities. It worked for them. The other part of my mind thinks they're hilarious in a redneck humor way. I applaud them. I don't share redneck political mind, but it doesn't stop me from allowing them their own minds. Their show is a present day I Love Lucy, but funnier. They're playing bulldog for the rednecks. Middle class tends to look down on rednecks, finding them disgusting. I have redneck creds to some degree, in that I appreciate the people, their lives, their culture, their humor, their absence of pretentions especially. It's the rarity of pretention in the working class that appeals to me in a big way, makes me prefer the company of the working class. Some of it is a bit beyond my reach, like there is a criminal element, as in every culture of people living in poverty or on the borderline. I'm not particularly attracted to the criminal aspect. It puts a lot of them in prison, makes them angry people who lose faith in the society they live in, making them all the angrier. Lots of anger issues in the working class. I feel it, I live it, I understand it. I appreciate them. I have learned to regard people I know who have been in prison with the highest respect. Few I know believe I respect them, because nobody else does. For that, I respect them all the more.

 

vada's defiance

 

 

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A GLITCH IN MY WORLD

all photos by vada, 2

I'm feeling neither here nor there. I feel connected to the blogathon, like I need to write for it, but am done with it, can't go on. I went into it open, giving it the chance to be what it is, to be a beneficial exercise if that's indeed what it is, but I didn't find anything. The thing was about mixing art up with business. It's not that simplistic. It didn't speak to me, didn't take ahold of my interest. Reading a new book, if it doesn't take ahold of me by page 50, I'm done. I'm all with what the blogathon group is doing, but it does not include me. My interests in this time of the life are more philosophical than studying how to be an artist entrepreneur. I'm not laying blame, pointing the finger or even suggesting it is something about the project I found objectionable. Not at all. It doesn't serve my interests any more than a workshop on how to take a gun apart and put it back together. I don't even want to know. I couldn't help but think my blog is my blog. It doesn't feel right making it essay answers to somebody else's questions. It felt something like an awkward vibration. I don't have a great deal of calendar time ahead. It's not like I have a checklist I am working on to complete before I croak. My attitude about the end is when it happens, nothing about this world matters. Two seconds after the spirit leaves the body it does not matter any more to me that a threatening letter came in the mail today from the tax office. The county is desperate too. Income has gone way down in the county since year 2000, businesses closed, less tax revenue coming in. The world of money is so objectionable to me it makes the blogathon emphasis on art business of no interest. The American emphasis on money sees everything in relation to money, takes the word value for price. I do tend to see this period of collective obsession with money an interesting time in our collective spiritual path.

 

vada

 

This time we're in appears a dead time in our "progression," but I'm not sure it's really a progression and I doubt it is a dead time. American history is a continuous string of wars and the country's only purpose has ever been money. We Americans have contributed a great deal to this time of rapid change. In a time of old calcified belief systems falling away from inability to function in light of the scientific method, money seems a neutral point to fix upon to facilitate shedding old belief systems that don't work anymore. When money is the one and only, peripheral stuff is nothing. The business ethic that it doesn't matter who is spending their money your way as long as they're spending it, clears the trail for whatever is coming next, the new that fills in where the old fell away. It makes me sad to see that the American obsession with money will ultimately come to nothing. An awful lot of people will be damaged. Money is not a loving god. I'm recalling an illustration Joseph Campbell made of modern man, who spends his life climbing the ladder of success and when he reaches the top, he finds it was the wrong ladder. I see television with a role similar to money's, to bring everything to neutral, flush all belief systems, one at a time, focus attention on the flickering screen and fleeting cash while everything changes around us, diverts our collective attention, pushes our reactive ignorance out of the way. It's a time of big change, evidently best got through unconsciously. Sleep through it. Dream it. Evidently democracy is a belief system that has to go, too. At least in the American form. The international corporations have crippled our democracy and our economy, perhaps irreversibly. To go on with democracy, it will have to take another form. But that's not my concern. It means I have to be more paranoid about government and law enforcement excesses. Don't give a cop an opportunity to shoot me; they shoot to kill now. It's legal now for them to break my door off its hinges, charge in here, empty their pistols on me sitting at the computer, and it be the wrong house. All they have to do is say, "He had a gun," and nobody questions it, procedure. It's a dangerous time for the poor people, white as well as black, the expendables.

vada

 

News today of someone I know, someone I like, a junkie attempted to OD a couple days ago, was sent to emergency room where they detoxed him and sent him home. Mother wouldn't have him in the house, let him fill a backpack with what he wanted and sent him on his way. There's nothing she can do. Largely because she's his enabler. He's looking at a trial coming up for selling pills he'd stolen from his mother to a cop, and his horizon has at least six years of prison. He's been acting like it's no big deal to such an extent I and a few others believed he ratted and got off. Now it turns out he's scared literally unto death. I feel a longing to extend myself to him, but can't do it. He has no resources, no job, no place to stay. He can't stay here and I don't have what it takes to deal with a junkie. Maybelle Carter was good with junkies, saw Johnny Cash through his junkie period, and I have a friend who is good with junkies, but I am not. I already know it, don't need to learn again. I have empathic feelings about what he's going through, but also know he is beyond any help I can give him. There is too much he doesn't get, and I don't need a giant baby to take care of. I had to talk to somebody like that years ago, who wanted to take up temporary residence, saying, "I hate everybody but you." I had to say, "Inside a very short time, less than two weeks, you will hate me like you hate  everybody else. Include me in that number now." I don't anticipate seeing this guy in the world much longer. He is terrified of prison. Plus, I've been around when he was given a straight-forward talk about what it's like in prison by somebody who had done a couple years. It scared the hell out of me, and he acted like, no problem dude. His direction all his life has been a downhill slide. He paid no attention in school. Had a job at Hardees until he was arrested, has been drifting downward the few years I've known him. He has no motivation to help himself, wants to be asleep all the time. I imagine he'll be successful next OD attempt. I can't help but see it inevitable, karma, like he didn't come into a body this time to stay. With no education, he can't live in this world. There is more to it than watching tv and listening to Wide Spread Panic in a stupor.

vada

It bothers me to see someone I know and like falling into a pit. I know how easy it is. All the time, all the way along in my life I have felt like it wouldn't take much to fall into homelessness and drop to the bottom. Let go of the will to get by and it's an easy drift downwards. In my own case, I have no motivation to do well in this world because I don't believe its belief system and don't want its rewards. The only interests I have that keep me going are aesthetic. And I have enough aesthetic interest to keep my interest going all the time. I'm more interested in aesthetic and philosophical concerns than making money. I'd rather live poor with a rich interior life than live in wealth with inner self in poverty. I never wanted to be somebody who works his way up a skyscraper and jumps off the roof. My heart is heavy this evening with concern I can do nothing about, the same as I can't cut firewood on somebody else's land without permission. I already know I can't help him, by knowing him and by knowing myself. My friends who know him agree prison may be what he needs, though I don't see him surviving prison if he survives the anxiety of the wait. I'm sad for him because he's as innocent as a three year old. I feel like it is a criminal society that makes a criminal of him. He's not a criminal. He's just somebody who can't take care of himself in this world. Whence his lifetime drift downward. He likes to talk peace and pacifism, but they're only clichés to him. I'm in full empathy with him, but dare not jump into his pit with him. He does not want to come out. Nor is he the charming baby he pretends to be. He's past thirty, has run out of excuses and justifications. He needs help, not prison, but our society doesn't help people like him. And I can't either. Perhaps this bothers me the most, that I am unable to help him. I learned long ago I am not capable of helping other people with mental/emotional issues. I dare attempt to do no more to "help" somebody than I can do metaphorically with my hands. I dare not play psychiatrist. I know that. I have to allow other people to make their own decisions. It's hard to care and it's hard not to care.

vada

 

 

 

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REDNECK REBEL OF AMERICA

vada

 

 

Happy to be alive in this body has been the case for some time now. It's new. I've always been worn out by the physical. For me, living in a body is like being a mechanic. Dirty hands all the time, pushing or pulling a wrench on a rusted bolt and it breaks, my knuckles hit a piece of steel that doesn't give, I cuss a streak. If I were to be a mechanic I'd be cussing all the time. I don't care to live my life cussing so much. Though it makes a good release, like a valve on a pressure cooker. I don't ever want to write off it's healing release. Cussing is only socially indelicate. I'm not at the coffee shop so I can cuss all I want. Among my friends I'm not required to suppress how I feel verbally. Those words express intensity of feeling. Among an awful lot of people I know, my favorite people, we talk freely and use those beautiful words for emphasis, for humor, for defining a feeling, and in my case I use a lot of those words to give a flourish of emphasis to a phrase or sentence. My grandfather I knew since a baby only used those words. Every phrase in every sentence had at least one of them. When he spoke it was music to this child's ears. Especially since the grownups didn't approve of it. Grandma and my mother were used to it, though still freaked out by it. Grandpa was my dearest friend in my life at that time, three and four. All of what political correctness calls "language" was Jim Brink's dialect of the English language.

 

I know a man now, just a few years older than me, who talks exactly like grandpa. A lot of people think he's vulgar and crude. He may be, but that's not a concern of mine. He is who he is and a man I respect for who he is and what he's been through. I don't respect him because he can kick my ass. That has nothing to do with respect. I could splatter his guts all over the wall behind him too, but I'm not going to do it. And he's not going to kick my ass. I don't even have any judgment for him. I know outlines of what he's been through and done, but it's not my business to call it good or bad according to the context of his circumstances. He treats me with respect, I treat him with respect. We're very different people, most different politically, which to me is of no consequence whatever. What he does behind closed doors I don't care. I don't want to know. This is something I've come into that I'm grateful for, is not wanting to know anything about anybody that the individual him/herself does not want to tell me themselves. Too many times I've heard bullshit stories about particular people and when I eventually become acquainted with that individual I really liked them and eventually found the initial stories I'd heard were created by imagination. If I really gave it thought, I could call up several examples, a great many.

The people with bad names I don't find particularly bad, except when they are. Then they're pathetic messes battered and raped throughout their childhood, who grow up angry to the bone, starting fights wherever they go, passing on everything that had been done to them. Stay away from them drunk and allow them their lives, there's no problem. I confess to knowing some rough people, made rough by getting beat on by all the boys and men in the extended family who were older. And he thrashes the kids younger than him. I've known enough of the people called mean and criminal to know they're people too. I cannot hold prison in somebody's past against them. When I find out somebody I know has been in prison, my respect skyrockets. I'm ashamed of my country's penal system and there is nothing I can do to change it. A no recourse corner. So I stay out of prison and regard my acquaintances and friends who have been through prison the respect they deserve. I don't make a show of it, but regard them with the same respect I regard anyone else. Once a sentence is completed, their "debt to society" is completed. One friend who did six months told me it is unimaginable how bad it is, and not much later killed himself unable to live with the shame. Another told me you go into prison thinking you know how to fight. First thing you learn is you don't. Judges and lawyers laugh about what people have to go through in prison. And they know better than anybody outside a prison what goes on inside. This confirms what I already know, our legal system is a crap shoot and certainly has nothing to do with ethics. It's not about justice at all. The word justice has become a joke in my lifetime.

In the way I grew up on a short leash I didn't have a chance to be one of the wild guys that wrecked cars and got hit over the head with beer bottles and treated their women like shit. I was not a tough guy or a cool guy or anything, not even a nerd. Just a pathetic kid counting down the days to liberation from parents, cussing all the time inside. Since it was pointed out to me about a year ago that I seem to like rowdy people, I've been looking at it. I do. I was never able to act out my own rowdiness. It got locked down. I admired the other guys at school, and guys I worked with on summer jobs, who did all kinds of crazy shit, stealing hubcaps, siphoning gas, driving heedlessly fast. It never took with me, because I did not have an option. I'm thinking that in this time of the life I'm liking knowing people I think of as brave, courageous, men and women who really would kill somebody for hurting one of their kids. The only thing I could say to a friend who told me he or she was on his way to do the deed would be, While making your decision include that prison is part of the package. If it's worth prison, do what you gotta do. Something I discovered in my first years in the mountains was that I am incredibly inhibited. The people who are rowdy and rough are also superb human beings who have a hard time dealing with the false our American society requires we live by. The inability to give in to the false for the sake of "for your benefit" creates a rebel mad at the world and everybody in it, like John Voight's character in Runaway Train. This is where I bond with the redneck rebels of America.

 

 

 

 

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