Some Glimpses in No particular Order

London:





We left London early, by car with yellow gray windows that perfectly suited the windy, rainy city, lightening and rolling past. The roundness of London streets gave me the feeling of viewing all through a wide-angle lens -the gleaming dark cabs; the endless march of people on their way to work, grim faced under umbrellas - a sad parade for a sure. Broad chestnut leaves spun up and over the car, the pedestrians, clinging to building and billboards before wind snagged and gone. This image, especially tinted by filtered glass, gave me that pure tourist pleasure when the predetermined image of a destination matched exactly what the eye receives, - living cinema I suppose, but totally satisfactory. Sad as it may be London’s bloody, ghostly history, and its pop history is dearer to my imagination at the moment that the city's vast historical importance. We spent a blustery eve in White Chapel. Outside the windows of the bustling curry house, I kept picturing Long Liz and her ill fated sisters shivering at the cold and rain but more so at thoughts of the Ripper...



Sheffield

We’d been told that Sheffeild was very grim and industrial – we expected sulfur belching factories and beggers in half fingered gloves belching consumptive blood. Instead it was a nice town, on it’s way to being post industrial - the consequences of which went unseen by those of us in the film festival bubble. My liver however is seriously a dirty ol’ town now, and my ass is just recovering from an attempt at rollerskating. Here though we moved among the big powers of the Doc world, and I felt more than a bit Daisy Miller, or a character from Christina Stead’s sharp social novels about travelers learning their way in the hard edge world where business, idealism, and drink meet. The antidote, of course, came from seeing old friends (strange now to have pals that meet everywhere, regardless of country), general drinking madness, and dancing to sweet rock steady at the Brit-doc bar. Of course, the head and lung cold known as the Sheffeild Lurgy (sp?) is my new travel companion…








Florence:

Florence was a constant negotiation with iconic faces, bodies and monuments to both God and Commerce. In that sense I suppose, the spirit of the Renaissance is alive here. For an American, history comes down hard on the senses here - above, around, everywhere, waking to cathedral bells and viewing lushly sensual statues and high, ornate towers from every window and terrace. The streets however are pure contemporary consumer temples where floodlit clothes seems to have transcended the need of bodies to wear them and the grossly enlarged faces of models cast hard judgments on those passing by. Backlit lips, larger than my torso, should have given me the fear of being eaten fairy tale style, except that their monstrous pouts were completely self satisfied and devoid of any exterior appetite. Luckily there were of saints and angels, here and there in crevices and above doorways, to smile down and reassure that a life of transcendent consumption – all the golden goods of heaven await… Our guides to all of this, festival folk and a few new friends (all leftist thinkers) seemed caught between the warmest hospitality and gusto for sensual life and the darkness that hung over them at the political and even moral state of the their country. More than one bitter toast was raised before plunging into the best of meals.







Leipzig:

Leipzig was a funny place – Not the grim post GDR city I expected but another consumer capital. A lovely town actually that kept pre cold war essence and plunged straight into capitalist slickness. It would have been a predominately sober, intellectual festival experience except that luck brought us the Finns- Sami and Jukka, who made the wonderful Living Room of the Nation, and whose mix of dada absurdity and optimistic loopiness turned every day into a delight of deliberate cultural misunderstanding (and occasional nudity). We left on Halloween night, feeling homesick for all the American blood, guts, and monsters of the holiday till the weary faced bartender at the train station turned to me and said, “Hey American – HALLOWEEN!” and raised her hands into claws and made a werewolf face that broke into a broad smile.










My suitcase, my little travel house, bounced in the back of the cab. We hit the airport with passports and sleeping pills in hand. The U.S. Is waiting...

Lisbon

(photo by Mike)


I'm missing Lisbon already - the winding, tile crusted streets, the gentle light, constant music, cafes with strong coffee and the constant threat of pickpockets. This is a city with both grandeur and grit. In a shady bar I watched a transvestite prostitute for whom any eye contact meant business. Two muscled handsome asked me to take their picture - muscled puffed - necks and faces red. I thought they were macho soccer fans, and they were, except that their legs were twined round each other. There was a hair in my whiskey, a fight over cigarettes at the dispenser, and a woman mopping vomit off the dance floor -forcing lively moves on the listless couple dancing there... In the theaters we saw Africans braving the film grain sand and heat of the Sahara to reach new lives, (Mirages) we saw a Romanian couple in their 8O's gently allowing death, tempered by long love, to enter their lives (Constantine and Elena) and we saw my family loved by strangers. Evenings were spent on a terrace, eating drinking and learning how much great cinema has been denied US viewing because of the cold war scholarship. On our last night we danced to Lisbon pop, ESG and the Clash with filmmakers and festivals volunteers - all I remember is hair and hips and eyes circling round, Cinta's hand in mine, Joana’s sly smile, Marta's boots... A woman's scooped neck linen blouse with golden spangles shaking, a boy's tight ass in white, wine stained jeans, moving across the dance floor. Winning the prize here meant something more than film credentials; it meant we touched the woman and men here who gave us such living glimpse of the place.















PS. Mike has a great selection of photos here!
http://www.octobercountryfilm.com/stills/doclisboa2009/album/index.html

Jet (lag) Set

I’ve just come from Switzerland where ordering and categorizing are sources of national pride, still it's taken a week to get the chronology of the trip aligned. my brain has been this spinning globe, shedding the grid the marks it as it turns - longitude, latitude, time zones, borders all a muddle. NYC - hot, fire escape Brooklyn days; nights in 50's, hysterical America with Nick Ray... In Philly we talked with a former prisoner about the experiments done to him, horror stories from the maze of the prison, but he’s full of generous talk and love… In the Mutter museum, the pathological specimens float quietly, strangely calm, like sea horses or horse crabs, in their thick fluid… Outside NYC, photographing the beach and an abandoned military base, we think we’ve gotten poison Ivy and wait for the rash, we plunge into the curling waves in our underwear…Across the same ocean, in Locarno, a thunderstorm drenches the narrow streets, cobble stones flash, sitting in the light of the largest movie screen in Europe, people under umbrellas watch a couple fucking out their last days on earth… The boys on scooters crowd the rotunda, preening and pouting. The girls do the same till 1 am, then they scream and cry in Italian.





































By daylight the clipped lines of the buildings – old and new – sit in contrast to the rugged curves of the Alps. To my mind there is a tension between line and curve everywhere here. The older Swiss don’t seem to mind but the younger ones do. On the shore of the lake, I talk boyfriends, lust, loyalty with a lovely boy. He trembles when he responds. I ask if it’s hard to talk about being gay. “No,” he says, “It’s hard to talk about feelings here.” He stands by the edge of the path. A sprinkler spins toward him, spraying water within a half inch of his shoulder but leaving him dry. “So fucking Swiss.” He laughs. The dark lake behind him is so quiet I think it has, Swiss and sensible, gone to sleep. I get in at 5 AM and lay staring at the metal dinning room table thinking that a ghost here would not be a flowing, ephemeral thing but the line of the table’s edge, a hand rail, a street sign, that suddenly take on ominous intelligence.










Back in NYC the lines of the city are age worn and chewed. The buildings seem warped with humidity. Damp skin. Damp hair, lots of it. A fan cools our naked bodies on a damp bed. It's a good thing in the end, all this humidity - It keeps the trip something physical. There's no forgetting the body to the flow of images. Sleepy at the end of a midnight party. Last night. My travel is almost over. There’s a see – saw in my mind. There’s a globe. There’s a hula hoop spinning round a tight waist on on the dance floor...

LA/DC/NYC

between the passive, sterile environment of planes and airports, there is one large city of concrete, greasy steel, and elegant line; of static images and the mobile living and all shades in between (films -so many films); rain on battered brick;warm nights of skin and sweat and sheet and hair; dancing till 5 am, crying with a friend coping with cancer; Irma Thomas wailing through the night streets where the girls' dresses are brighter than the neon signs above them. Above it all, the moon, growing full and fat to remind me how little it all is....

Car Wash

The excitement begins with the soap smell and the sudden wet, grinding, surround sound. Water rushes over the glass. In the back seat you are in a spaceship hitting warp-drive, a submarine caught in the Bermuda Triangle or in the belly of a deep sea beast... then it winds down and it's just Sunday, on the way to church. The last hope of adventure fades as you stand on the hot asphalt watching your dad drying the windshield and your mom vacuum the seats in their fancy clothes.

UPSTATE UPDATE

OUT W/DAD AND CHRIS





HOME




DANEAL, MOM, ABEL










(c-section wound and tape)


HOME

Portland Spring

I spent the afternoon watching petals playing confetti tricks, tumbling, teasing and chasing each other. To match Portland's exuberant spring I read Whitman. To temper Whitman's exuberance, I read Jack Spicer's ode to him. They've stayed on my shoulders, angel and devils both while the spring sends me happily restless, horny, and picture hungry all over the place.




I raised the camera hoping to catch the petals as they fell through the shadows of tree limbs. They fell, touched the sidewalk, then a wind moved down the street lifting them back up, high into the air. I felt an impossible reversal of time was happening. Maybe because it was my goal to freeze time, it seemed completely plausible for that instant that each petal would find the blossom it had fallen from.








Downtown at night. A Ferris Wheel stood by the river like a giant, heavy web. I could picture the spider that wove it –60's Japanese, all giggling rubber and shinning plastic eyes.I wanted to get close but police cars rolled along the street,shining spot lights into the empty fairgrounds.




I met friends and followed them into a dance club. A disco ball sent light shards into the air – a metallic inversion of the blossoms in the wind that afternoon. I watched the petals of light sail out from the spinning mirrors to coat and slide across the vain, lovely, dancing bodies.




In a velvety bar a young country band yodelled out tepid imitations. In another two old men stared at leather porn on an old TV. There are flowers on every table. In the neon and cathode light, they could have been real. One of the old men gave me a whiskey creased grin. "Hello, It's been ages..." he said, "Yes it has," I said, "since I've never met you before. " He smiled and turned back to the sling pounding on the screen. He looked at me once more, quickly, slyly. Both of us understood that neither would look again. I snapped a shot of the flowers –their fakery revealed by the flash. Spicer's poem whispered to me "the cocksuckers, Walt Whitman, were counting on you."