skate or die

how horrible the world is today.  how weird, surreal, unpredictable.  each day is a fresh shitshow of unfathomable proportions.  i don't want to escape this world.  but i want to leave. 

even so, i've rediscovered skateboarding, not by my own folly by skating - i've always been uncoordinated oaf, i'd kill myself - but by watching skating videos on youtube. 

i don't know what got me on to the kick.  i've long loved the art of skateboarding.  young punks in my day often were skaters too.  often skating segued into making music.  often it was the other way around.

but when i was a wee lad constantly falling on my ass at pools, ramps & the street i thought that skating is an art like any other creative discipline. 

i think i'm right too.  i shared a video with a few friends, including my brother from another mother, & fellow lover of skateboarding, jonathan hayes, of a neo-hippie originally from NZ, richie jackson, who sports a mustache that dali would envy & dresses like he just took the stage of the fillmore circa 1967.  hayes responded in kind by mailing me a copy of the august issue of thrasher magazine. 

what astonishes me is the pure aesthetic bliss of jackson's street skating.  skating is a discipline of totality.  like jackson who takes the whole urban & surban landscape & structures into the art.

it occured to me, not for the first time, that poetry is like skateboarding.  language is the board.  how we use it to create art in our environments is totality in the regard of the writer.

of course, i'm a poet so i admit to a conceit that any art or discipline i admire can be made an analogue to poetry.  but i'm not the first to think so. 

my beloved thom gunn published his poem 'skateboard' in his book the man with night sweats [1992;fsg].  gunn was a slow reviser to his poems.  often he published them long after initial composition.  i suspect 'skateboard' was written in the early to mid 1980s. 

gunn is witness to the artist 'Tow Head' skating a San Francisco street. 

                          Emblem.  Emblem of fashion.
                          Wearing dirty white
                          in dishevelment as delicate
                          as the falling draperies
                          on a dandyish
                          Renaissance saint.

curious too how gunn emphasize the dress of the skater because the skater's physic is in total with his art.  skateboarding is a physical practice, as it is an internal discipline.

'Tow Head' is a dandy much like gunn was an anti-dandy in his own physic.  the poet as skateboarder as artist. 

                         Tow Head on Skateboard
                         perfecting himself:
                         emblem extraordinary
                         of the ordinary.

perhaps i too see myself in these lines.  beauty is how you find it even as you construct it.  the gift of language is like the wood, metal & polyurethane of the skateboard.  both most work in its own gravity & must fight against the customs of the tribe.  fortunately for both skateboarding & poetry that tribe is exploded to include many peoples & genders [binary & non-binary].  both have still a way to go.  but like gunn writes, for those who undertake the discipline of art [skateboarding, poetry, painting, music etc etc] shall 'perfect[...]: emblem extraordinary / of the ordinary.'   

& let me amend the title of this little piece in honor of the great poet wh auden who said in his poem 'september 1, 1939', written after the nazis invaded poland which was the beginning of an earlier version of the end of the world, 'we must love each other or die.'  auden thought that is a false sentiment.  not because of the lack of love in the world, especially at the start of one of the most brutal horrors world civilization would suffer but because we die anyway.  auden revised the line, sometimes printed, 'we must love each other and die'.  we must do the former even when we have no choice in the matter to die. 

skate & die
                       

yes, it is the end of the world as we know it

dive bars are rarely dive bars now
but i am watching clips of barflly [1987]
written by charles bukowski
& i remember the bars
on 12th st before they were
converted to lofts
& i remember a sign
writ on cardboard
posted to the door that asked patrons
please park your shopping carts outside

love & peace are the power

i watched wild rebels today

a cheap biker film made on the lam
in jupiter fl by william grefe
produced in 15 days in 1965
& cost about 2 bucks to make
among the news of stormtroopers
in portland or throwing tear gas
& flashbangs at the wall of moms
who crossed arms against the soldiers
& then i took out the trash at 10 pm
please don't think ill of me
couldn't help myself as i took a deep
breath of the soft summer night
a cooling breeze picking up
& looked for the neowise comet
in the nw sky but i live in the city
& the neighbors' house blocked
that part of the sky
& i found the year of the production
of grefe's biker flick based on the date
wednesday july 14
displayed in the bank where the gang's
moll was sent to rob
as i read about the stormtroopers
on my phone
& used it to scan the sky
for the comet that
won't be back for another
6800 years

new electronic chapbook

i have a new electronic chapbook comprised of poems/antipoems & published on this blog in response to these mad months of covid-19 & racial injustice.  find these texts are little nothings composed by a sentient being in the sharpened teeth of our new world.


9 bows to mi hermano jonathan hayes who edited, did the lay-out & published the chap.

email me at rlope67atgmaildotcom if you want a copy.  please be real obvious in the subject line of the email & reference the title BLACK SPRING/BLACK SUMMER.

or you can request a copy by commenting to this note below.

peace & love mi brothers, sisters & non-binaries in the art & in life.

i was telling anna how much i loved streaming platforms
                           good, she said, now you can get rid of your dvds
horrors! i said, i still have a working dvd player
                          i love too, i said, the combustible detritus of life 

a document from the old world
proof of some of the changes to our world.  a video store?  a book that is a catalog?  seriously, i shared this training video with a few younger friends & i asked them to be alert to the moment when the trainee goes to a catalog to look up the film Casino Royale [1967].  even i expected her to turn to a computer rather than a book!  one friend told me that the whole video is an artifact of the old world.  aye, t'is.  we've changed by a lot.  but. . .what have we changed into!?  i suspect that my grandchildren, nick's kids, will look upon this training video, & the culture of vhs/dvd rentals, as we do looking at film of turn of the 20th century horse-drawn buggy delivery-men for ice & milk.    

cannibal [2013]

what's up with movies about cannibals?  from spain?  jess franco tried his hand at making two cannibal films in 1980.  the finished movies are horrible.  we shouldn't expect anything less from the great spanish exploitation filmmaker who would make a short pic about ants crossing a log.  but now i turn on the TV to the channel that specializes in spanish language movies & the above title is on.

from the start of the quarantine, & my working from home, i have discovered i receive many spanish language channels.  several are from central america, i.e. costa rica, el salvador, honduras, guatemala, a couple are from venezuela & peru, & more than a few come from mexico, etc etc., & this channel, Viendo Movies, that broadcast films from all over the spanish speaking world.  my spanish has improved by daily tuning in.  now i can understand every 29th word of spanish rather than every 30th palabra.

it helps too looking up the meaning of words.  that's where my phone comes in as well as the pause button on the TV.  i won't pass an 8th grade spanish exam but i can make my way thru the plot of a movie.

with some success.

i've seen this movie before.  it's about a mild-mannered tailor in spain who is a secret serial killer and cannibal.  it stars antonio de la torre as carlos.  carlos can't help himself with his taste for human flesh.  he is so mild-mannered as to be invisible.  yet he is not the standard deviate.  he falls in love with his next potential victim, nina, played by the very lovely romanian actor olimpia melinte.  a romance develops.  before nina discovers carlos' secret appetite.

this movie is a far cry from the late '70s/early '80s european cannibal vomitorium films where each director tried to outgross each other.  instead, filmmaker manuel martin cuenca, crafted a moody, melancholy piece with great finesse.  the lighting, editing, photography & direction make for a sensual experience that is more about the inner-life of its characters than the cheap gags of rotgut horror.

but as for my attraction to cannibal films?  i'd rather not dive into that morass.  rather, i am happy that a few brave storytellers created works that explore this dark topic.  these filmmakers have given me a subject i can sink my teeth into.

in the beginning

was the word, sd the dude holding the bible

was the poem, sd the dude who lectured on wordsworth

was the seed, sd the farmer plowing her fields

was the gatherer, sd the woman with hands dirty from forage

was the picture, sd the  painter in the cave 40000 years ago

 the red thread

did ikkyu follow the girls
back to the brothel

& write poems
about zazen

& mori
buzzed on sake?

hey poet

you say you've seen everything
that this world can give you
but when you least expect it
beauty will take her bow
& shoot you thru the heart
& rip you a new asshole

what the fuck
for eileen tabios & jean vengua
 
whenever i hate our species
an ordinary thing happens
a poem
a movie
a song
the expressions from my wife & son
that fill me
with gratitude
to be alive
aqui y ahora
& that poetry is not
just an expression
of the inner life
but  a new way of living
in the thick of the shit

fiftysomething

happens slowly

slowly

slowy

& all of a sudden

cannibal [1980]

frank o'hara claimed that movies are better than poetry.  there are exceptions of course.  but there is no doubt that cinema has influenced poetry since the dawn of the moving image of the late 19th C.  but surely o'hara didn't mean the films of jess franco when he told the mothers of america to let their children go to the movies.

not for nothing but i do have a yen for franco's blitzkreiged visions.  many of his movies - the late spaniard was prolific as hell - are unwatchable even for the hardcore masochist of movies, like me.  according to authors cathal tohill & pete tombs in their study of european expliotation filmmakers, immoral tales: european sex & horror movies, 1956 - 1984 [st. martin's griffin; 1995], franco was such an obsessive of the art & craft of movies he would be happy to simply film the traffic outside of his window.

so any & every genre of movie-making was grist for the filmmaker's mill.  in the late 1970s - early 1980s european exploitation directors were outdoing each other in the sick-out, grossest shit they thought of.  thus was the invention of the horror movie sub-genre of the cannibal vomitorium.  it's just what you think it sound like.  a group of hapless suckers wander into the amazon jungles, run afoul of the locals, & get eaten alive for their troubles.

jesus franco couldn't resist the urge himself & dived head first into making a few of these films.  this one under discussion is the first movie of two cannibal films franco would make.  it's a hard slog to watch.  not because of graphic violence.  but because it is so fucking slow, tedious & awful.

italian film stalwart al cliver stars as the father of a young daughter & husband of a scientist.  they are steaming down the amazon to do some research.  they are attacked by a tribe of cannibals that eat the mother, take the arm of cliver & kidnap their young girl.  cliver escapes with his life minus the arm.  some years later he organizes a team to rescue his daughter from the cannibals.

but the girl grows into a young woman & becomes the tribe's queen.  she is even betrothed to a warrior.  here's the thing.  the tribe of cannibals are the silliest group of fakers you could ever see onscreen.  their make-up is laughable.  they are european actors in extremis to the eyeballs & good sense of the viewer.  it's fucking embarrassing & offensive.

the other thing: franco's muse & life partner, lina romay, is also in this flick.  she is a force of nature in most of her movies.  there is really no one in world cinema quite like romay.  & yet, franco gives her very little to do.  i don't even remember the name of her character.  character development?  you gotta be shitting me!  plot?  now you're asking for too much.

but franco tries to deliver on the cannibal part.  when it is time to munch on some human flesh franco slows the action to a trickle, goes in for extreme close-up, & stretches the sound out to a series of low echoes.  like a porno movie if the director spent her life studying the movies of bergman & godard.

gawd it was hard to sit thru.  i endured it.  i had to.  as much as i loathed this movie i still admire the cinema & wacked out visions of jess franco.  but cannibal vomitorium movies was not, in the words of austin powers: international man of mystery, franco's bag. 
 

it's the 4th of july

this year, this terrible year, i don't want to celebrate.  i wasn't feeling it.  the pandemic raging, the economy collapsing, our politics venal.  i want to sleep & not wake until after the election.  i want to sleep & not wake until after the new year.  i want.  . .i don't know what i want except what falls under the rubric of peace, justice, & lovingkindness.  those three things are in short supply, at least in the circles where our elites live & practice their lives.  still, one must go on.  & we promised my mother-in-law that we would have a socially distant bbq.  we wore our masks.  we sat outside.  we visited sitting well over 2 meters apart.  it was a lovely visit.  my ennui lifted.  it was time to ignite a few fireworks.  per usual, the neighborhood was alight in smoke & explosions.  but this year, everyone wore masks.  even the teenagers on skateboards roaming the streets.  families did practice social distancing.  a teen rode by on an electric bike all sleek & silent.  i said aloud that i feel i am in a sci fi movie with strange electric vehicles & everyone wearing masks.  i grew happy in the strangeness.  perhaps it's the smell of cordite in the air.  i love fireworks. i have since i was a very wee lad.  the concussions & the streets swept in smoke elevated me.  this year is like no other i have lived in.  i drove home with this song by the great punk band x looped in my brainpan.  'hey baby, it's the 4th of july'. 

look into the night sky
fish flop
into the deep blue

she came in thru the bathroom window

what to make of
a midnight piss

a look thru the
bathroom window

& see the moon
& jupiter

& saturn
in a single line of sight

& to know un-
equivocally

that these bodies
will be there

in formation
to the sun & the earth

whether i was a witness
or no

surrealism v. realism

can one win over the other? 
when just repeating the headline news
could make paul eluard

drop dead

in creative exhaustion

oh boy

i read the news today

a deadly pandemic out of control

an economic collapse

systemic racism that many have protested in the streets

& the headline has the nerve to ask

what's next?

lemme tell you

every night around midnight

i have a beer or two

then go outside

look toward alpha centauri

raise my thumb as every ordinary hitchhiker has done

hoping that the next earth shattering event

is a visit by aliens

& hoping against hope they take

me as passenger