B R U T A L by Gabriel Finotti

BRUTAL

ENVIRONMENTS

BRUTAL FILMS LEAVE TRACES IN US ISSUE 001 - ENVIRONMENT

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF CATHERINE MÉTAYER

CONTRIBUTORS JEANETTE FARRELL NEAL FOX DAVID FOULKES SILENE KASSUDA AARON MICHAEL KERNER ADAM LIEBENDORFER THOMAS PETHER CHRISTOPHER REY PÉREZ ROSALINE SHAHNAVAZ STEPHANIE VON REISWITZ JEREMY YOUNG NATHANIEL WHITCOMB

ART DIRECTOR & DESIGNER GABRIEL FINOTTI CREATIVE DIRECTOR NAZANIN SHAHNAVAZ PROJECT MANAGER OMID BAGHERLI CONTRIBUTING EDITORS SAYURI ARAI JOHN AYOOLU FALOLA OMID BAGHERLI YAXUAN LI MASOVAIDA SALEMO MORGAN PRODUCTION MANAGER SAYURI ARAI PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS JOHN AYOOLU FALOLA YAXUAN LI

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“Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.” Marshall McLuhan B R U TA L

is a new quarterly art journal. For our first edition, we decided to take a leap into art house film, we wanted to see where it would take us and hopefully for many issues to come. We intend to communicate how films inspire us in our lives in ways that leave the cinema behind. We wish to address fearless films; the sincere and the untamed. The ones that spark boundless ideas and emotions and leave us with raw and brutal sensations. And in response, we present films in countless ways, by taking them for a journey across art forms with collage, poetry, fiction, essay and photography. At the center of these mediums collapsing, filmmaking stands not only as a thread between man and nature, but as nature itself. Our 001 issue is collection of works on E N V I RO N M E N T S inspired by film. Environments as containers for meaning, feelings, memory, actions and at times surreal visions. Some are pure constructions, others are galvanized by filmmakers such as Hiroshi Teshigahara, Chris Cunningham, Jacques Tati, Chiara Ambrosio, Luis Buñuel, David Lynch and Alejandro González Iñárritu. We immersed ourselves in the beauty of a bonfire while time elapses, in the fear of ocean creatures, in war tensions and ornamented jails, in the oppression and love during a quicksand and in traffic soundscapes. We hope that you will feel as captured as we were by these atmospheres, these artworks and these films. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Our first precious readers. You make pigs fly in flocks. This belongs to you. CATHERINE MÉTAYER | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ***

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is concurrently releasing a digital app supplement 001.

The concept behind the Brutal App is to bridge the gap between print and digital media. It is designed to supplement the journal by introducing extra built-in content to the printed page. The Brutal App is designed to integrate platforms so that they exist as one. We want it to demonstrate our insight into cutting edge technology without disregarding our appreciation for print and how the two can function as one form. The journal also includes an interactive booklet that transforms into an audiovisual 3D pop-up book when you hover the app over its pages. We invite the reader to explore our surreal inky-digital phantasmagorical world. Simply download the free app and watch the journal come to life as print metamorphoses into new and enchanting digital forms. NAZANIN SHANAVAZ | CREATIVE DIRECTOR 5

BRUTAL FILMS LEAVE TRACES IN US ISSUE 001 - ENVIRONMENT

1 2 3 4 X

BODY THE TALE OF BEEZLE BOB BY ADAM LIEBENDORFER | 12 A CONVERSATION WITH CHIARA AMBROSIO BY CATHERINE MÉTAYER | 20 RUBBER JOHNNY A FILM BY CHRIS CUNNINGHAM | 32 EL ORO EFÍMERO DE LA GUERRA BY MASOVAIDA SALEMO MORGAN | 40

ATMOSPHERE LOS OLVIDADOS BY CHRISTOPHER REY PÉREZ | 52 HORROR HOTEL BY STEPHANIE VON REISWITZ | 62 INNER CHANTS & RHYTHMIC PULSE BY JEREMY YOUNG | 66 THE THIN HOUSE BY THOMAS PETHER | 72 PROJECTIONS: ALEJANDRO GONZÁLEZ IÑÁRRITU’S 11’09”01 BY AARON MICHAEL KERNER | 76 BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO A FILM BY PETER STRICKLAND | 82

NATURE

NAUTICAL BOOKLET MARITIME SERIES BY DAVID FOLKES | 00 MOTHER KNOWS BEST BY JOHN AYOOKY FALOLA| 00

“Try to imagine all life as you know it stopp your body exploding at the speed of light.” —

Our bodies carry us through our experience discover the world and those around us. All which we can worship or debase. In films, we and we get a glimpse of ourselves and the li physical selves that cerebral and transcend between the inner condition and the tactile ex discover reality. In this chapter, we introduce n of the human body, in all its forms, inside and

ping instantaneously and every molecule in — Egon, Ghostbusters

es—they are the channel through which we l exploration manifests through this conduit, e see bodies—active or dead, veiled or bare— ives of others. It is within the confines of our dent transformations take place. This synergy xternal forces that govern comfort is where we narratives with themes related to experiences d out.

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Beezle Bob is going to get lost if he doesn’t keep up with us. It’s funny the way he moves. I would’ve guessed he would be faster. Ronnie says he’s fine, but Claire says he looks hurt and I think I agree with her. Last we saw him, his leg was caught in a log, but he didn’t seem to mind. Just kept dragging it down the creek. And the sounds he makes. So freaking gross. He’s so far away you can’t hear him now, but you don’t need to be close to Beezle Bob to know he isn’t talking about anything.

by ADAM LIEBENDORFER

Beezle Bob is actually Jeremy—so says Ronnie. Ronnie is 12 and he bunked in the Elkhorn Cabin last year and Jeremy was the counselor there and Ronnie said he and some of his bunkmates had “bona fide” thoughts that they could prove that Jeremy dresses up as Beezle Bob for the Algonkin Flumerock Ceremony. Says Jeremy put another counselor in charge of his cabin the night of the ceremony last year and didn’t come back till “really friggin late” that night. Like midnight. Jeremy is from Wyoming, but he came to Pennsylvania where Felicity Acres and Lake Roosevelt and Wyandot Rock are so he could study something about birds in college. We’ve been walking for four days toward where the sun comes up in the morning. Ronnie says that’s east. He and I sat down and agreed that we would go to Lucille’s house because Lucille says her dad won’t make us go to school if we stay there and don’t want to. I love my Mom and Dad, but maybe they can visit us at Lucille’s house when we get there. Lucille says it’s a long ways away because she had to take a plane to go to camp, but our counselors told us to pack a week’s worth of food for the ceremony so we shouldn’t need to go beavertrapping, I don’t think. Ronnie agrees. I’m afraid to tell the others but by my guesstimation we’re crossing into the Yukon area here pretty soon. Where there are grizzly bears. I wonder if Beezle Bob is scared. We know Beezle Bob is closeby because we can smell him. It’s nasty. I live in Cattails, the cabins down by the waterfront, and one time on the second week of camp, we started smelling something really nasty outside the cabin. My best friend, Ethan, threw up an ice cream sandwich he got at the trading post one night because it was so bad. It got worse and worse and after a while our counselor found a dead fish had washed up in the bushes and “took care of it.” That’s what Beezle Bob smells like. 13

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“Of course he smells like that,” Ronnie told us on the fifth day walking, all smart. “Beezle Bob is The Ghoul of Poconos.” After dinner the night of the Flumerock ceremony, they told us the legend of Beezle Bob. Scott bunked with me and he remembers stories real quick so he likes to tell it back to us to break up our march to Lucille’s house:

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“Back in the wars against the French Indians, there was a brigade-er general named Bartholomew Robertson. He led all of his men into battle and the Indians killed them all right quick in a cunning ambush. Only thing is, Brigadeer General Robertson didn’t go with his men. To this day, he’ll tell you he was up the mountain at where Elkhorn Cabin is today, scoping out how to break through the lines the French Indians had set up. “But even the Indians would tell you—if, of course, they were alive to recount this story—that that was a lie. Brigade-er General Robertson knew his men were surrounded by Indians and those Indians weren’t going to take prisoners and knew he was leading his men to be ambushed, so he sent the order to march and tried to escape. “And he did, for a couple days, but these Indians were smart and knew they killed a battalion of men that didn’t have a leader, so they kept looking for Brigade-er General Robertson. After weeks of searching, they did find him, but by then he wasn’t a man anymore. No amount arrows or tomahawks could fall old Brigade-er General Robertson. He had died of guilt for killing his men, but his body continued to haunt the mountain. They ran away and many moons later, a French Indian messenger visited the Indian village on what’s now Lake Roosevelt, and found everyone in the village dead. But not just any normal dead. They didn’t have any marks on them; they all looked healthy. They were all scared to death, save one boy who was found starving in a cave up near Wyandot Rock. In the cave he drew a picture of ‘The Ghoul,” and it was man with a long beard and coal-black skin and a red coat.” Scott likes to pause at this part: “The mess hall today sits on the old Indian village.” 14

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We think “Brigadier General Bartholomew Robertson” is a mouthful so everyone at camp just calls him Beezle Bob— even the counselors—and Ronnie says he’s supposed to be dead for “a coon’s age” and that’s why Jeremy carries around a dead fish. For effect, he says, all smart. After they told us the legend, we went back to pack our rucksacks for a weeklong hiking trip to mark the end of our summer at Felicity. Before we left, the counselors made sure we packed enough food and our hiking boots fit. It took us two nights to get to Wyandot Rock and we were going to spend a couple nights out there and reflect on camp and come back. Ronnie and I were up ahead with Jeremy when he fell down. He asked us if any of the other counselors saw him, and we told him no because it was just the three of us way out front. He said that was good and to keep that bit a little secret because the night before he had gone into town, “and sometimes when you go into town you don’t feel very good the next morning.” Ronnie laughed real hard when he said this. I felt bad. We decided to sit down for a while and wait for the others. I put on some bug repellant, but Jeremy scolded me for how I was using it. “No, man. Hey,” he said. “You don’t need to douse yourself in it. Just a quick strip across your chest and down. Yeah, like that. Like a cross.”

THE TALE OF BEEZLE BOB

We kept going till we arrived at Wyandot Rock. A few of us had blisters—real bad ones, nasty—and they had to go back down the mountain. Ronnie was acting bossy when we were pitching tents and trying to tell everyone how to do it, but his tent was facing the wrong way. Jeremy walked by and didn’t even have to look at it closely. He told Ronnie to redo it, but when he did, he kept complaining that he was missing a stake. I took my time to make sure my tent was buckled down and right, but when Jeremy came by to inspect my tent, he said it looked alright but I was missing a stake. “Good job,” he said to Ronnie, “All you had to do was turn yours around. Good to see you found your stake.” Such a freaking liar. That first night was the night we escaped. While he was inspecting our tents, Jeremy fell down again. When he stood up, he looked pale, but kind of dark too. Ronnie tried to get me to laugh but I still felt bad. Counselor Leader Tim looked mad and told him to rest in his tent for a while. We went out and explored the caves around Wyandot Rock. No one could find the cave with the drawing of Beezle Bob, but one girl who was getting a Band-Aid for a blister saw Counselor Leader Tim go into Jeremy’s tent and start shouting at him. But Jeremy shouted back and said he needed to go back down the mountain and that he was really sick. She said she saw Counselor Leader Tim call the ranger to come up on his ATV and pick up Jeremy. Then he called over all the counselors and they talked about the ceremony that night without Jeremy. She said she swore to them she wouldn’t say anything else to us. I think Beezle Bob got her so I guess that’s just as good. That night went by really fast. They took us to The Ceremonial Pyre, where they had a really big fire—probably the biggest I’ve ever seen. Two or three times my height. And super loud. Then Counselor Leader Tim dressed up as an Indian started telling us about the legend of the log flume and how the logs let the Indians in the Poconos to trade with the settlers. I was getting sleepy because it was late and the legend wasn’t as fun to listen to as the story about Beezle Bob. And I had to fart, but I held it in, waiting to see if Beezle Bob was coming in, because they said the pyre was for his ghouly spirit. 15

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And he did. Jeremy appeared behind the fire holding an arm. Some girls screamed, but Ethan elbowed me and giggled and said, “What a fake prop.” The Indian was really scared when he saw Beezle Bob, so scared he forgot it was supposed to act that it was Beezle Bob and not Jeremy. “Jeremy? What’s going on, buddy? Jeremy?” Claire asked out loud if Beezle Bob could inherit bodies. But Jeremy kept walking real slowly at the Indian and tried to hug him. Ethan got real excited and began bouncing where he was sitting. Counselor Leader Tim, not an Indian anymore, kept pushing Jeremy back and hollered for some of the other counselors, but he fell on a rock and couldn’t stand. He screamed at us and told us to run into the woods and get help. Beezle Bob started biting him.

says Sam J. from Elkhorn had a crush on her and he told her the reason they wear pants is because they never cleared the briers and the poison ivy from the trail that goes to the cabin. That way they don’t get intruders. It would be nice to have some older, stronger boys with us, but the Elkhorn boys have already gone through their Algonkin Flumerock Ceremony and escaped from Beezle Bob. I wonder if any of them ran away from school like we are now. Ronnie bunked in Elkhorn last year but this year he’s back down the mountain in my bunk, Cattails. He says it’s stupid to be down with all the “little kids,” says the waterfront is gay and misses Elkhorn because it was an easy walk to the shooting range. He still wears pants even though there are no briers around Cattails. My best friend, Ethan, told me one time at the latrine that he heard some counselors talking about Ronnie and that he has a theory why Ronnie is back down the mountain. He was going to tell me after the Flumerock ceremony, but, remember, he got lost in the woods when we escaped and Beezle Bob caught him. Didn’t tell me much, but said it had something to do with Sam D. getting hurt really bad and having to go home early. I’m the oldest boy in our group after Ronnie.

A lot of us started yelling and some girls started crying. I ran and got my rucksack over the other side of the hill and packed up my tent real quick and hollered for people to follow me. A few other campers were packing too, so me and Ethan helped them and we made a big group and ran into the woods with our flashlights. We saw Scott and the girls Claire, Lucille and Jessica trying to pack Claire’s tent, but Beezle Bob was coming up from the ceremony area now. About a click away from Wyandot Rock, Ethan said he forgot his food so he said to keep going and he would run and see our flashlights and catch up. We heard Ethan scream and he was out of the ceremony. Beezle Bob must be scary up close.

Come to think of it, the counselors were saying a lot of kids went home early this year, especially last week. I remember Viviana’s mother hollering and screaming and wanting to take all of us home the night before the Flumerock ceremony.

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The next morning, the girls wanted to go back because the ceremony was over, but Ronnie didn’t think so. He said the ceremony was to see who could stay away from Beezle Bob for a full week, so we would keep going until the week was over and then come back. But around the third day, we talked about not having to go to school. So now we’re going to Lucille’s.

I liked Viviana. She bunked near us in Frederick Hollow. Our parents introduced us to each other. Her dad was an ambulance driver and her mom was a police officer. Her mom is very pretty, so I recognized her outside the mess hall one night. She must have undone the gate, because she’d driven all the way up from the parking lot and parked in the middle of the parade grounds. She looked really mad and kept screaming at Camp Director Ted. Kept on saying we all needed to leave camp and go to the city where it was safe from sick people.

And that’s how we wound up somewhere here in the Yukon halfway between Pennsylvania and San Francisco. The girls Claire, Lucille and Jessica say if Beezle Bob has to follow us, they’d rather smell him than have to see him. They’re all worried about going back to school, but Ronnie says running away from school suits him because he says school is gay. I don’t know what that means because I don’t know what school has to do with Uncle Jack and Uncle Ben, but there must be something. But Ronnie says lots of things are gay, maybe because he’s older and in middle school and knows more stuff and even bigger words. But gay isn’t it a big word, I don’t think. I don’t know. If I had to guesstimate, I’d say “gay” has a lot of meanings. Just like when Uncle Jack says “damn” when he bumps his head working on his car and “damn” when Mom makes his favorite casserole when he visits and “damn” when I tell him all the state capitals. Must be a freaking lot of meanings, the way Ronnie uses it. Or maybe it is a big word and I’ll learn it next year in middle school like Ronnie did.

Camp Director Ted looked stern and asked why is that. She got angry at him and asked if they’ve seen what’s been going on in the news. I don’t know why she would ask that because we’re not allowed to have TVs in camp, not even the camp directors. Jeremy was out there talking to her too and he came back in and whispered something to Viviana and she got up and left. We waved at each other and she sniffled a little bit. She looked scared, but I would be scared too if my Mom was shouting at Cap Director Ted like that. Officer Ramirez told Viviana to wait in the car and asked if anyone at camp was sick or had to go to the hospital recently because her husband was a paramedic and knew what “the symptoms” were. Camp Director Ted asked her what symptoms, and that’s when Officer Ramirez really started screaming. She kept shouting that everyone was sick and that sooner or later, they were going to come to camp and make everyone sick. She said we were all effed and she should pack as many of us in her car and that Camp Director Ted and all the counselors were idiots.

I wonder if we should share some food with Beezle Bob. Ronnie says he’s making due, but I’m not sure. He didn’t bring a rucksack like we did. Before dinner every night in the mess hall, all the cabins have a greeting call they shout to report in for grub. I heard the counselor in charge of Elkhorn say that the boys up in Elkhorn didn’t have a greeting call—they had a battle cry because they were the oldest, toughest boys at Felicity Acres and only a year or two away from bunking across Lake Roosevelt at Camp Phoenix. Elkhorn Cabin is a full click off Elkhorn Trail and they say on the right day you can see Lake Ontario and maybe even a sliver of Canada from up there. Some of the Elkhorn Boys are smaller than me, but everyone knows who they are because they all wear dark green pants like grown ups. Lucille

Camp Director Ted kept trying to calm her down and telling her he’d have to see some papers before he could let her do that, and reminded her that as an officer of the law, she should know better than most people that we can’t just send someone’s kids away without a mountain of paperwork. He asked her where Mr. Ramirez was and she said in the city, where it was safe. She said eff it and walked toward the mess hall. When Camp Director Ted stepped in her way and she bopped him the nose. A couple counselors helped Camp Director Ted and Jeremy rolled down the blinds to all the windows and turned up the 16

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volume for the evening camp programming. They played The Chicken Dance really loud.

team because he was going to be a Navy SEAL when he grew up so he knew how to run quietly through the grass and I was gay and everyone that’s gay is loud and annoying and would make perfect decoys. I pushed him when he said that and he stood there for a second and walked away.

I couldn’t understand much else of what Officer Ramirez was shouting, but it sounded like what she’d been shouting about all along. Then I heard her car turn on and before she and Viviana left, she shouted, “What law? What law?”

Only problem was, we couldn’t find Beezle Bob anywhere. We hadn’t smelled him for a couple days and couldn’t hear him rambling or dragging that log with him. Jessica said he may have turned back, but even if he did we could still catch up to him if he was still dragging that log on his leg.

### We’d been marching to San Francisco for two weeks, and Beezle Bob smelled a lot worse. Claire said Beezle Bob just wanted to be part of our troop and that he probably wasn’t part of the ceremony. Ronnie told her to shut up and there was no way we were going to allow Beezle Bob into our caravan. Said Beezle Bob is going to bring us back to camp. But Claire told him that Beezle Bob has to be right hungry by now and he’s probably looking to go somewhere with a lot of nice people like we are. And plus, she says, if he was from camp, he would be hollering at us. And plus too, she says, if he wanted us to come back to camp, he would’ve caught up to us already. Ronnie got really mad and called her a b-word and said he wasn’t going back to the academy any more and went up to punch her. Scott and I were about to tackle him, but Jessica hit him in the kahunas. Ronnie kept swearing and started crying and all that, so we told him he deserved it because he violated Camp Rules 3 and 7: “Respect the bodies of others like they are your own,” and “When unsure, be considerate.”

We split up into our teams and backtracked in pairs. We said we would eyeball a city block between us so we would have better chances at spotting Beezle Bob before he spotted us. Scott came up with a whistle for when we were supposed to meet up and talk. Scott and Jessica were in the middle, because Ronnie said since they were going to go first, they might see him and not whistle for us to meet up. Just as we were about ready to set up camp, Claire and Lucille whistled and said they smelled him and it looked like he was spending the night in a little cave at the bottom of a big grassy hill. So we set up camp near the top of the hill but on the other side of it so he couldn’t see our campfire. The next morning we gave Scott and Jessica an extra oatmeal packet because they were doing the work that day. The four of us that weren’t going laid down in the grass at the top of the hill to keep a lookout for Scott and Jessica. We agreed that we’d use the whistle Scott taught us to tell them to come back if they needed to. From where we were on top of the hill, we could hear some noise in there and it looked a little darker down there for some reason. Ronnie said I was stupid for saying as much, because it’s a cave and caves are dark. We watched them climb down the hill. Scott jogged to the left side of the cave opening and Jessica snuck over to the right side. But then Scott started acting funny and smacking himself. And Jessica started walking really slow. We watched Scott hop a couple times trying to get up his nerves and then he motioned over to Jessica and she gave him a thumbs up. He started hollering and all that and ran toward the cave, but Jessica took steps and started screaming and running back to the hill. Scott was running out of the cave almost before he ran into it. He looked real scared. So did Jessica. She was about halfway back and started walking and crying and coughing. Scott caught up to her, but Beezle Bob wasn’t following him. She hugged him and kept crying and he carried her up the hill even though she wasn’t even hurt. They came back all swollen, covered head to toe in bug bites. Scott said it looked like Beezle Bob fell down there and the horseflies were thick.

By a quick guesstimation of the air and rainfall and the sun, I think we made it through the Yukon safe and sound. Didn’t even see one bear. I’ve been keeping tabs on this privately to myself so I don’t scare the girls, but it’s gotten a lot buggier and muggier and I’m starting to think we might be passing into the Everglades. I hope we’re only going around the outside of it. One thing is it’s got alligators, but I also don’t think going through the Everglades is going to get us to Lucille’s house. A couple days after Ronnie wanted to hit Claire, we started smelling Beezle Bob less and less. That night Lucille ran out of her last meal packet and even though we all told her we would share and we were almost there anyways, she got really mad and sad and started crying and even said the F word. Claire said we needed to find Beezle Bob and find out what he did for food and try to steal some from him while he was asleep. Ronnie, he said that idea was gay, but Claire told him he’s been the one saying all this time that Beezle Bob has been fine without food all this time, so he should have tons. Ronnie said what if Beezle Bob caught us, and I agreed with him for once. But Claire said that’s why we don’t do it all together. We leave all our food back at camp and do it in teams, so if someone gets caught the rest of us can use the food. Seemed clever to me, but only if Beezle Bob had enough food for whoever he caught, too.

“What a bunch of effing girls,” Ronnie said, except he didn’t say “effing.” “I guess it’s you and me, Nate. We have to go down there.” I turned to Scott and pointed at the cave and said, “Down there?” and he shook his head yes. That sure smelled right, even up on top of the hill. I didn’t say anything and we walked down the hill to the mouth of the cave. Flies were buzzing around so thick I could hardly see and they were biting us. Ronnie was yelling but I could hardly hear because the flies were so loud bouncing off the walls of the mouth of the cave and all that. All I heard was the last part: “…I said come ON, faggot.” The smell was so bad I threw up like Ethan did when he smelled the dead fish at Cattails. I was so mad at Ronnie for being such a freaking idiot I thought

So we divided into teams of a decoy and a burglar. The first team to try it was Scott and Jessica, because Scott said he’s the fastest kid at his school and won’t get caught and Jessica is the shortest, so she won’t be seen. Then Ronnie said he and I were a 17

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Out here, there’s a lot of stuff we’re unsure about. To be safe, we started picking berries so we wouldn’t run out of food. Scott’s been catching and cooking his own crayfish for fun. Every time he does, he puts a couple of them on his plate and hands them to the girls and says all French, “Lobstair anyone?” The girl’s scream surefire every time but I’m not sure if I would have any crayfish myself. We still don’t think we’ll need beavertraps, but I’ve been carrying one I’ve been working on around, just so if we do need one I’ll know how to make them.

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about punching him in the face when we were back in the camp.

but she was worried people would find us and take us back to camp, so we came up with a plan. Our plan was if we saw a car, we would jump into the woods. But we only had to do that once when a camper drove by. They were driving by so fast, they probably saw us, but they were going so fast I don’t think they cared either.

Then we heard the log dragging around the cave and Beezle Bob making those sounds. Except now the sounds were a lot raspier and Beezle Bob was coughing a lot, which proved my guesstimation that he wasn’t ok. I made a note to bring that up to everyone after I punched Ronnie. I flicked on my flashlight and saw Beezle Bob. Just the outline of him. It was a shallow cave and he was in the back, but I saw he was dragging the log toward us, trying to hug us like he hugged Counselor Leader Tim. “This is it, Nate! This is it!” Ronnie yelled at me. “You’ve got to distract him. I see something in the back, behind him. Distract him. Distract him NOW, faggot! Now!”

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But I wasn’t so sure. The cave was narrow and shallow and dark. It’s not like there was much room to run around and have Beezle Bob chase me. I told Ronnie no and he punched me in the stomach, so I punched him in the face and he grabbed me by the shirt and started hitting me off the side of the cave. I started seeing stars and all that, but I looked over and Beezle Bob was in the sunlight now.

We walked along the road for a long time—maybe a day and a half—but I think it just seemed like a long time because walking on a road is so boring compared to walking in the woods. We found a road sign that said “Welcome to Scranton, Population: 76,089.” Lucille frowned at the sign for a long time and said we should set up camp there for the night. I said that was fine, but we should set up camp. That night she told us her cousin lived outside Anaheim, California, in Scranton. But she said she had thought it was called Stanton, but then that she must have just remembered it wrong. It was going to be easy, she says. First we find the city park, then she’ll remember how to walk to her cousin’s house. Claire wrinkled her nose like she didn’t like that idea, and I didn’t like it either. How do we know her aunt and uncle weren’t going to make us go to school, I asked her. She told me not to be stupid. Of course they were going to take us to her parents where there’s no school. I told her I wasn’t stupid. I just thought we should be careful because we haven’t seen anyone since we found Beezle Bob and after seeing Beezle Bob, I decided I’m going to be cautious with everyone.

He was still dragging that dumb log, but it was all dirty and rotted away so much that if he gave it a good stomp he could have probably freed himself. But that wasn’t the nastiest part. Beezle Bob was covered with flies so bad you couldn’t see him at all, like he was wearing a suit made of flypaper and a freaking lot more flies flew and orbited around him like fleas, trying to find a place to stick to him. Except all the flies avoided a strip across his chest and another down his stomach, like the cross Jeremy showed us when he showed us how to use bug spray when we were hiking to Wyandot Rock. On the cross where there weren’t any flies, there was a Felicity Acres uniform and up in the top right corner of the cross I saw Jeremy’s name badge. He was coughing because flies were going down his mouth and he had to cough them out. It was nasty. I couldn’t see the fish he was carrying, but it smelled so bad I couldn’t breathe. He probably was bringing a couple of them with him.

“My cousin isn’t a ghoul!” she yelled at me. “Ok! Shut the freak up!” I hollered back. “We’ll go see your stupid cousin.” I felt horrible about yelling at Lucille, and I couldn’t sleep so I went over and knocked on her tent and apologized when she let me in. Except I couldn’t stop crying, and neither could she. I apologized for being a girl, then I apologized for putting girls down. She hugged me and wrapped her blanket around me and gave me a peck on the cheek and that’s how we fell asleep.

I tried saying Ronnie’s name to tell him about Beezle Bob, but all I could was mouth it because Ronnie was knocking the wind out of me. Such a freaking idiot. When he stopped and looked at me, I pointed at Beezle Bob, who was only a dozen or so paces away from us. Ronnie looked and screamed and all that and he dragged me over to push me into Beezle Bob to distract him, but I held onto his shirt too and tripped on a rock and flipped Ronnie over me right into Beezle Bob.

Lucille liked walking next to me a lot the next day and sometimes we held hands, and that’s how we were walking when we found a car on the side of the road. It was a Ford Escape, just like my mom’s, but this car was blue. There was a dead deer on top that Scott said looked mighty tasty. A bell was ringing inside because the driver’s door was open and there were keys still in it. We looked around for who it might belong to and didn’t find anyone, so I asked Lucille if we could use it to go to her cousin’s house.

I ran out of the cave and didn’t even bother to look for any food Beezle Bob might have had. Ronnie brought a lot of food anyway and now it was ours. Sometimes I wonder if Ronnie is still going to go back to school, but I don’t freaking care.

She looked up and down the road a long time, like she did when she looked at the sign that said Scranton. Finally she said, “Well, I’ve never gotten home from Felicity Acres in a car. We always used a plane. But I don’t see why you can’t do it.”

### The next day, we found a road.

We put all our stuff into the Escape and Scott nominated himself to drive. Claire and Jessica didn’t want to drive, and Lucille wanted to sit shotgun and play navigator because she knew where we were going. The girls all looked at me and then Scott said, “I promise I won’t swerve or drive crazy.” I think that’s what the girls were looking at me for. “And plus,” he said, “I’m the tallest and I’ve drove a four-wheeler before.” I said ok, only because he made a good case.

Jessica was leading the way, but she wasn’t looking and tripped in the drainage ditch on the side of the road. We ran up and me and Scott helped her get up with her rucksack. Scott got really excited and started running around and said it was going to be a cinch now, because you can get anywhere you want to go on a road. But Claire didn’t like the idea of walking on the road. So we set up camp in the woods next to the road and me and her came up with a plan for how to use the road. I said bushwhacking took a lot longer than walking down the road,

We got in and Scott got really excited and turned up the music and inspected all the instruments, just so he was sure what he 18

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was looking at. Jessica put her hand over her ears and got really mad and turned down the music herself. Scott got mad because he said he was the driver so he could pick the music. I told him Jessica was right and I was going to remind him about Camp Rule 7, but a man started walking to the car and hollering and all that. Then he shot his gun into the air and we heard a boom. Scott punched it.

THE TALE OF BEEZLE BOB

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A WALK THROUGH WOODA

b y C AT H E R I N E M Ă&#x2030; TAY E R

On Entering and the Naming of Places | The Sunken Room | The Hut of Echoes | The Tangled Tree Trained in fine arts and photography, Chiara is also the recipient of a fellowship in visual anthropology at Goldsmiths University, where she will soon premiere her first featuTre length, La Frequenza Fantasma (The Ghost Frequency), shot near her native village in the South of Italy. Chiara also curates the Light and Shadow Salon in London, a monthly night of celebration of the moving image. I met Chiara recently on a snowy morning over coffee and croissants, at one of her favourite local venues, Cafe OTO in Dalston. The conversation was delightful. 21

A WALK THROUGH WOODA

Chiara Ambrosio is a London-based filmmaker with a fondness for the poetry of the everyday and an enticing artistic vision. This past year, she received the Annual Wooda Arts Award, a six-week residency/pilgrimage at Wooda Farm, two miles from the coast of North Cornwall. She came out of it with 4 short films through which she investigates the traces left from the passing of time, of people, of natural occurrences. Each of them is composed of surrealist visions and ephemeral encounters with nature edited over a lush soundscape created by Bird Radio.

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A WALK THROUGH WOODA

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Tell me about your experience at the Wooda Farm. This residency marked a complete shift in my practice. I had just worked 6 months on a big commissioned piece and I wanted time to explore ritual within my work and practice as a narrative device for the work. Rather than coming up with a story and shooting it and imposing formal boundaries, I tried allowing the work to find its own form, which is exactly what happened. The films came out despite my better judgement somehow. I suppose what pushed me towards this is to see how the act of looking elicits something that is already there. You are not imposing anything, just teasing it out through your own set of eyes. You know when you walk in a field and you engage with a particular feeling or layer of emotional sediment, how do you then allow that to show in the work without it being a manipulation, without it being an imposition. I wanted to work with those levels. What did you have in mind before you arriving there?

You had constraints that you had to live with. Yes. Already there was a sense of ritual just from waking up very early and going to bed quite early, which is unusual for me because I am very undisciplined and erratic. But what happened is that having that frame that contained me meant that I didn’t have any concern about what I was going to create. I was half an hour from the sea, so my walk everyday would take me to the beach and back. I would take my camera, my sound recorder and a notebook with me. For a week or so I didn’t even gather anything. I was just allowing myself to explore an encounter. That’s actually what you were looking for. An encounter. Yes. I was looking for a spontaneous engagement with the environment. And naturally, through the repetition of the route everyday I started to structure my

It was a journey of exploration. I did feel like an explorer. It was very anthropological, but without people. For me the spaces were people. They had so much history and time was so present in them that all I felt like doing was to scratch and see what was underneath. Is revealing the poetry of nature and the everyday something that you do consistently in your work? And do you have that same approach when you work back here in London? Yes! I think that I discovered what I am really trying to do through all of my work with this project. My experience of the everyday is something that I am very concerned with. But interestingly, I am yet to work on a project that is set in London. Immediately after Wooda, I came back to London and finished my first feature film, which is about a village in the South of Italy. And my approach to the film changed a lot. What I discovered through Wooda is that it is about trying to rest on the small details, on the pieces that make your experience of life particularly memorable. Life itself is quite a mystifying and mystical experience. What I find interesting about your films is how you look so closely to objects or elements of nature that you come to reveal from them something surreal and mesmerizing. What are you trying to communicate through them? 25

I was reading about objects as symbols and objects as what they are, and I am interested in how time affects your experience of something. In my animations, objects become symbols. If there is a clock, it is a symbol of time passing. But working from nature and working from reality I find particularly interesting because I use things for what they are. What I am trying to do is to suggest that with time, you can understand the implications of that encounter. So whether it’s a rock in the land, how it got there, how it was made smooth by its travelling, etc. Or whether it’s a cup, there are particular things about the position of something, how things are laid together or the way they rest or if they’ve been interacted with recently or whether it’s been there for centuries. I believe in what thoughts something very simple can spark. What I am doing in a way is try to play with time to alter your perception of space, like zooming in to a very small detail and allowing time to elapse over the detail. It could affect your own understanding and your own memory of that thing. How those objects trigger parts of you that rely on different times, memories and experiences... Yes, but I suppose I am interested in the practice of actually engaging with the environment. I am a big fan of surrealist literature and surrealism was based on particular enchanted encounters with everyday life. What they were interested in were these ruptures in the fabric of time and space that would alter completely your perception of something. We are engaging a relationship with our environment that is very personal. William Blake used to call them visions. He saw auras walking together with everyday life, with people. I supposed that’s what I am concerned with, not in a mystical way, but in the poetry that is inherent in our existence. In traces and experiences that we leave behind, not as a nostalgic thing but as an actual sediment. When we get up and leave this table with the cups in a particular position, they are almost like stories being written about a particular moment in time that has elapsed. Also I am interested in rituals and I’ve been reading a lot about primitive cosmogony, that’s one of my personal obsessions. I studied ethnography and anthropology in university in Italy. I think that it’s something that stuck with me. I am curious about what people refer to as trivial from the quotidian, gestures you can transpose to another level of meaning. We are all concerned with making meaning in our lives. We

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I tried to go with an empty mind. I went with one rule. I wanted to establish a route and walk it everyday. I wanted the practice to develop from this physical work. So I literally arrived there with the idea of discovering the land and for that to be the origin of the work. There was a very strict discipline anyway because I arrived early February and it was very cold. There was no heating so I had to light my own fire; I had to work according to the times of day.

experience through how the space was revealing itself to me. I would walk in one specific direction and the earth would change. It would go from hard to very muddy, to crunchy leaves or tall grass. And that started creating the natural steps of my journey. I would cross thresholds that would sort of alter my perception of space. The space itself felt like different rooms and I felt like stepping from a room to another. I actually had a second rule! It was to keep an archive of my experiences. I would take photographs and make sketches. I would go back to the studio and draw and write a lot. I had decided to forget about generating material. I was just gathering things, like a butterfly catcher! I gathered instants and moments, whether it was a photograph or a piece of sound. That’s the beginning of it. And then, I became more conscious of how to translate my ideas into something intelligible. Through gathering this archive, I started write stories and to add my own layer of experience to the place. The first film is called On Naming and Entering of Places.

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have our little neuroses, our patterns, our needs, our relationships, and all of these create a story. We are engaged with writing a story in a very basic way. But from this, I think that you can transcend and piece together a story that is a lot more universal. It’s about the experience of life and memory and how we tie ourselves to the past and the future. It is also to make sense of the fact that we live in a very mysterious condition. We don’t know where we come from and where we are going. I am preoccupied, for example, with my history, and I am always thinking of my life as a thread that is sewn between me and god knows where, but I do feel this tension of being connected to things

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It is a beautiful image. To access that state, I always feel that there is an anchor in reality, in material, that you can lift up and try to understand from another perspective. And with Wooda, I did it consciously. For example, in The Sunken Room, after my walk, I had these bits of writing. It was like a moment of birth and it was a lot about observing the light changing and the space transform. That was very much structured as a ritual. I was trying to replicate, in a way, an experience of birth and of things coming to life. And that’s why I used animation in a very subtle way just to show what I experienced of standing in a place for 6 hours, which is how a leaf quivers, and as it quivers, the rhythm changes. The whole thing, when you watch documentaries about nature growing in time lapse, it’s so alive. When you are standing in the middle of a space like that, you feel it. I am very curious to hear more about your animation techniques. I am thinking, for example, of the stones that come out of the soil in The Sunken Room... The Sunken Room was done mainly with stop-motion animation and some footage speeded up at times and reverse shots, like for the candle enlighting for example or pushing a stone in the mud and then reversing it. That in itself was planned. But for the first film, On Naming and Entering of Places, featuring bonfires, someone there just lit up a bonfire. I have an obsession with bonfires and I followed my instinct. These films were the most instinctive that I have ever done and in that sense they are also quite exposed. This was a very significant moment in Wooda because they actually burn off a layer of skin that the land sheds. I shot the whole thing and I wasn’t planning on using it, but the structure of the films came retrospectively. Some things were planned, some things were encountered, and then reflected upon.

About bonfires, the first thing that comes to my mind is their smell. But you filmed them so closely and intuitively that you communicated their smell. I am tempted to trace a parallel with this Norwegian olfactory artist, Sissel Tolaas, who works with “sensory memory”. During the Memory Marathon event at the Serpentine gallery this fall, she created a perfume of the tent that we were sitting in that, when passed around, would trigger so many images, even when inside that very room. I feel that you share that talent of rendering senses. And what you did with your films is a bit of that but in reverse, to translate the smell of nature through looking. I am very interested to hear that because I have a very specific way of remembering things. Since I was a child, I remember films through smell. Every film is attached to the smells that were in the room. It is one of the strongest parts of my memory. I remember Hook from when I was 8 years old and the smell of the cinema. And sounds are really important to me too. I think my filmmaking has been affected a lot by working with sound artists. I’ve always scripted sound before I would think of film, which is very strange. What I am trying to do I suppose is to invert the hierarchy of senses. I am interested in film but not necessarily in the vision dominating narratively. I am interested in accessing through the eyes the whole experience of that moment. And smell is such an ephemeral and subliminal thing. And sound is also that way. I am curious in revealing the things that you’re not even aware you perceive through time. Like with the bonfire, there was a trust with that experience. And with the camera I can do something that cannot be done with pictures, which is to leave the camera to roll and wait. You are creating footage. Yes and then you experience it again. You rediscover things with a little bit of perspective. It is your eye that is looking but at the same time, you are able to understand what is the point of contact between you and that experience. In that line of thought, I often refer to two people. One of them is Charles Simić. He is an American writer of Serbian descent. He’s very much about the capturing of moments. He wrote a book about Joseph Cornell called DimeStore Alchemy. And another one that had a huge influence in the Wooda project is Yiannis Ritsos. He was a wonderful Greek poet. He wrote a book while he was in 26

exile called Monochords, in which he wrote one line a day during that period. He was exiled because he was a free poet and therefore enemy of the state. And they are absolutely beautiful moments of being. They are not formal like haiku, they are very free and evocative of a particular ephemeral experience but the resonance that they have is so wide. You can understand his experience but it also throws you into a whole journey yourself. And in many ways, A Walk Through Wooda is close to poetry as a form. Would you like to tell me more about people who have strongly influenced you as a filmmaker in any given practice? Ritsos is definitely one of those people. The bravery of his work is incredible. Tarkovsky is also someone I am really inspired by for his sense of time, especially in his memoir film The Mirror. It’s the boyhood of the author somehow. In many ways it’s a subliminal film with a very loose narrative structure. It deals a lot with subtle changes in an environment. Some things you are aware of, some things that affect you in a way that will reveal itself later. They are very much about the experience of watching, and about, as a viewer, transcending specific states. He only made seven films and then he died at a young age. He was in exile as well in Italy. He was banished from Russia and could never see his son again. There was always this tension and division between him and his home. This almost mythical idea of home. He also wrote a beautiful book called Sculpting in Time. All of his work has to do with time as a medium to alter your perception. So I think that in so many levels he affected me consciously and unconsciously. I watch his films and about 15 minutes in, I am struggling to stay focused and then a shift occurs and I am absolutely alert and lucid. It’s almost like hypnosis. And then, David Lynch is another huge influence on me in the sense of accessing the subconscious. I’ve been following him since I was very little. I love his attention to sound and the way the most absurd stories are rooted in simple things, such as how the opening of a box can throw you into a completely different universe. All of these thresholds are a way of transitioning from one layer of perception to another. He’s a massive presence. And I suppose another one is Jan Švankmajer, the Czech animator. I lived in Prague for 6 months and that is another experience I think that transformed me in many ways. Eastern literature is born out of places like Prague where you

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experience the city on one level, and when the light changes, it’s transformed and you don’t know your way through it anymore. It’s this idea of space as a mysterious shifting dynamic world. It is because the city itself has had so many transitions historically. Again, I go back to sediment. Prague was the city of Alchemy, so Emperor Rudolph brought all the Alchemists from Europe to live in Prague to explore how to transform black matter into gold. This was a very intense moment of life there. Then you had this huge Jewish presence and all the stories of the golem are born there in a locked room in Prague. Then you had a lot of repression and the idea that all of the artists had to hide underground. There is a real sense of layering and of time settling over so many powerful and traumatic events. And the city itself has its own way of vibrating and reacting to this passing of time. I don’t believe that anything ever disperses. I believe that things accumulate. I think that Prague is one of those places where you can actually see it in the streets. You can see it on the walls that nothing is erased. And that was one of Švankmajer’s biggest influences as an animator. He works with found objects a lot and he always says that he is not manipulating but releasing what is already inherent in the object. I use that as my guiding statement. It’s about trusting your experience. I am blown away by the coherence of your vision as a filmmaker. This was fantastic. Thank you.

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CHIARA AMBROS IO

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FRAME WORKS: FILM IS IMAGINATION MADE VISIBLE. by CHIARA AMBROSIO The moving image is a museum of ephemera, a sacred home for dream incarnate, an archive of impalpable yet strongly sensual matter, out of which feelings, thoughts, and stories are moulded. What is created by the encounter of time and space within the frame is larger than the sum of its parts; it transcends the limits of each of our senses and streams past our consciousness until it reaches the fertile fields of the subconscious, where it sets its roots and begins to grow in mysterious ways; a growth that continues long after the image has faded and the story is forgotten. The space where the moving image comes to life and speaks is a temple to the imagination, the charmed world on the other side of the looking glass, where reality is represented in a heightened form, hyperâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;real and hyperâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;imagined at once. There, all minute acts of quotidian poetry become an audible language, each motion of the soul a clear gesture that spells out new meaning and a profound reflection on our human condition on this side of the frame.

The frame is a space for the quietly subversive and radical thoughts, the whispered acts of intransigence, dictated by the imagination, that exist between words and avoid censorship by the strength of their modesty. The moving image operates according to the only true commodity that exists, time: perpetual time, circular time, eternally returning and thus acquiring presence and an undeniable voice through its persistence. What is committed to the frame cannot be denied; what has been dreamed cannot be taken back, it stands proud against any form of effacement and often communicates covertly, from sense to sense, eluding the intellect and challenging all forms of perception, presenting documents and imaginings as siblings of a same mother. The moving image is an orchestra of magnified sounds and whispers, a parade of phantasms and shadows passing before our eyes as real as the wind on our faces; it is a playground for the imagination, where reality is liberated and collides with dreaming frame by frame. With the power of vision it treads across time and space, it alters the boundaries that have been erected around us until they are no more and all that is left is an undisturbed, quivering garden, where the stories we share glow pure and white amidst truth, magic and daring, the happy custodians of our most sacred journeys. As a visual artist working within the moving image I stand in defense of this charmed space, I join the ranks of the constant gardeners, of whom there are many and devoted, sifting the weeds from the blooms, shielding the garden from adverse winds, partaking of the heady scent and bright colors of its flowers and the song of the life that it attracts and perpetrates. 31

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Everything that is lost in the vertiginous speed and blind advance of life finds, within the frame, the time and space to linger, to resonate and make itself manifest in all its complexity. Boundaries are challenged and reality yields to the ebullient, clamoring tide of dream.

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RUBBER JOHNNY – WARP FILMS directed by Chris Cunningham produced by Sally Oldfield, John Payne, Grant Branton written by Chris Cunningham starring Chris Cunningham, Elvis the dog, Percy Rutterford music by Aphex Twin distributed by Warp Films release date June 20, 2005 running time 6 min language English

INTRO Rubber Johnny is a six-minute experimental short film and music video directed by Chris Cunningham in 2005, using music composed by Aphex Twin. The name Rubber Johnny is drawn from a British slang for “condom” as well as a description of the main character, which explains the title sequence. The DVD comes with an art book, containing stills from the film, as well as conceptual drawings, photographs and more.

CONTENT The film, entirely presented in infrared vision, starts with an out-of-focus closeup of Johnny (played by Cunningham), babbling incomprehensibly while being interviewed by an unseen man. At one point Johnny mumbles the word “ma-ma” twice, after which the man asks if he wants his mother to come in. This causes Johnny to start breathing erratically and then freak out, so the man gives Johnny a sedative injection to calm him down.

BACKGROUND The concept for Rubber Johnny came from Cunningham’s imagining a raver morphing as he danced. The idea evolved to the present film, in which Johnny is an isolated deformed (possibly hydrocephalic) teenager kept on a wheelchair and locked in a dark basement with his Chihuahua. The film was originally intended to be a 30-second TV commercial for the Aphex Twin album drukqs, using the track “afx237 v7”. However, Cunningham grew to like the concept more and more and decided to expand the concept into a greater length (the original commercial remains in the film in an altered form.) The film was shot partially in infrared night vision on digital video. The film’s music is “afx237 v7 (w19rhbasement remix)”, a remix made by Cunningham; the credits music is “gwarek2”, also from drukqs.

The video cuts to a fluorescent light turning on, then a mouse crawling over a press-sticker credits list, followed by the title, “Rubber Johnny”, which is shown written on a condom, on a backwards-playing scene of it being pulled off a penis. Johnny is first seen leaning backward in his wheelchair with his oversized head hanging over the back of it. Johnny mutters a distorted “Aphex”. This begins the Aphex Twin track, a skippy electronic rhythm, which Johnny begins to follow while his dog watches. His dancing involves him performing balancing tricks with his wheelchair, and deflecting light beams with his hands as he dances. After a minute or so, the music stops, a door opens and he is interrupted by someone who appears to be his father. During this, Johnny is

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out of his delusion and is shown sitting upright in the wheelchair, turning to look. His father is heard yelling at him indistinctly, a slap to Johnny’s face is implied, and the man slams the door. RUBBER JOHN N Y – WARP FILMS

After he leaves, Johnny is seen inhaling a large line of white powder. After this, the video becomes even more erratic and delusional. At the beginning there’s a period in which the music comes to a standstill, and Johnny is first heard screaming in the dark and then hiding behind a door, avoiding the white light beams, while his dog watches. Then the music goes into a trippier version of the one in the first passage of the video. Nearing the end of the video, it’s seen as if it was filmed from behind a glass, with Johnny’s face seen repeatedly getting smashed into it, and each time chunks of his face are seen articulating the vocals in the song. After this, he is interrupted a second time by his yelling father, after which the video ends with Johnny, once again, reclining back in his wheelchair and babbling at his Chihuahua. The credits roll over a night scene of a train passing in the distance.

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RUBBER JOHN N Y – WARP FILMS

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RUBBER JOHN N Y – WARP FILMS

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RUBBER JOHN N Y – WARP FILMS

EL ORO EFÍMERO DE LA GUERRA

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by MASOVAIDA SALEMO MORGAN

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When summer broke on the backs of children, it seemed a house of leaves moments before the wind. We made new memories so we could drop them through the cracks as senior year became a series of holidays and celebrations to avoid. All along the platform, flags as far as you could see. I walked down and I read the brass plates with the names.

Those American boys’ bodies floating in the sea— we just sat around and cried.

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You lived the perfect life. We could give you bright, white lights, but this guy will knock your head off.

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Back home in Sacramento, garbage litters the living room. The papers all say Johnny’s truant, and that his mother’s reportedly ruined. Broken bodies rolled in the surf as the English Channel continued to give up its dead.

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Valuable food like this will not go to waste in the ocean. In just a few hours, a hagfish can eat several times its own weight in dead flesh. Love curled up and died on this floor, and tonight, a range of deep-sea scavengers will feast. They wait for rare bonanzas such as this one to fall from above, but some energy also returns from the deep. What don’t you know? What haven’t you seen? What picture has not already been taken? Monstrosities become mundane when you stand too close.

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Johnny’s having a hard time with the bodies, I can read it all over his face. At first, I don’t understand what the problem is. But then I realise it’s his first time. They had their funerals before they ever left; I think it’s better if we die in silence. We set up the radio outside of the tent, never knew when we’d lose someone we loved.

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Bring back the lost world of the Vikings, eighteen tenths of a finger snap was a lifetime finished between the space of two frames, the dark line where the eye persists in seeing something that was never there to begin with.

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Dear dear dearest only love of mine Johnny, I dwell at the end of some interminable corridor, hoping love still conquers death, or at the very minimum, fear. Yo soy una extraña en esta lugar sin ti. As unguarded thoughts returned over breakfast, days folded endlessly into more days. When we finally began unloading, it was quiet— a constant re-angling of thoughts.

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The silence was difficult to get used to, her letters were his anchor to sanity. The ruminations are mine; let the world be yours, the map keeps changing, it’s impossible to keep up.

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On the side of route 636, a tabby, smear of red, head completely gone. Cursed by the cancer of ages, the knots of rain, not reason— Instant gratification has us in a stranglehold. No. Aspirin won’t help. If you ever take the moral high ground and end up confined within four walls you may find:

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that loneliness is not a function of solitude and concentrating intently on anything is very hard work and logical validity is not a guarantee of truth and you do not have to like a person to learn from him/her/it.

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Though life seems it will continue, it’s no easy march. This present calamity of conscience is the realisation of the promise of God. A baby born with a hideoust birthmark is helped by the kindness of others. As long as the people could see the ark, they knew He was among them.

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On the 7th day, the host made six courses around the wall and stopped where we redeem gold-plated tickets to heaven. You are the wonderful presence the years ahead will teach the world to cherish. It’s a great night for some cool sounds and you’d be so nice, like paradise, to come home to.

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Almost every woman we see on the streets stops and kisses our cheeks. This is the most beautiful of customs. Well entrenched, we are winning the war. The good guys are gonna come outta here. As bad as losing your faith in humanity seems, losing your faith in happy endings is much worse. EL ORO EFĂ?MERO DE LA GUERRA

Note 1: An atmosphere is a layer of gases tha mass, and that is held in place by the gravit a place, situation, or work of art. Atmospher

Note 2: A mental state is a kind of hypothe thinking and feeling, consisting of a con propositional attitudes. An altered state of mind, is any condition which is significantly state.

Note 3: Escapism is mental diversion by m escape from the perceived unpleasant or ban distraction and relief from unpleasant real in fantasy.

Note 4: The loss of planetary atmospheric escape. Individual molecules in the high tail o at a level in the atmosphere where the mean and leave the atmosphere. Films sell escapi

at may surround a material body of sufficient ty of the body. The pervading tone or mood of re is an emotional state.

etical state or process that corresponds to nglomerate of mental representations and f consciousness also called altered state of y different from a normal waking beta wave

means of entertainment or recreation, as an nal aspects of daily life. The tendency to seek lities, by seeking entertainment or engaging

gases to outer space is called atmospheric of the distribution may reach escape velocity, n free path is comparable to the scale height, ism, not atmosphere.

LO OLVID

OS DADOS by CRISTOPHER REY PÉREZ

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Oji to s t h rowing a pla nk a t Jai bo Me tc h e s i t t i ng on t h e blind man’s lap Mi l k o n Me t ch e’s sk in Oji to s w h i l e h e’s wa t ch ing T he k n i f e w it h t h e silver h andle how i t’s stolen T he t r a n s l a t ion sa ying g h erki ns A l o n g t h e l i ne a nd a bove t h e walls A mm a n g a t e T he d o n k e y so frig h t ened Jai bo i n ove r a lls Pe d ro’s m o t h er LOS OLV IDADOS

To b a c c o a n d old t ex t iles v irgins T he d o n k e y a ler t ing Met ch e Pe d ro w h o must push ca rousels T he ro ma n a qued uct s by ch ance connecting the camps T he b oy Oj it os t h e d ea d m a n’s tooth W h o mi s s e s h is g enera l t h e bli nd fakir Jai bo r ui n i n g t h e d r um sk in To uc h i n g Met ch e T he d o n k e y wh en it ca rries Pedro Pe d ro’s m o t h er sor t ing pint o beans A n d t h e c h i ld ren lea v ing h er wi th Jai bo Jai bo e l o l v i d a d o not Ja ibo the forgotten

PÓNGASE Chango. Where’s JAIBO? Insof PIGEON under the bed. Is that why I left a

far Bu単uel thinks death is curative. The tied and GOT lost? In Jenin? Jaibo was THERE.

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chi hu a h ua s on h i n d legs m ake a t r i c k for th e c h i l dre n s f i h a c u mb i a cowboy s t h e settlement I fly away from Ja i b o m i xe d up ji l te d m ad at th e t e t r a g ra m m a t on but t hen the pi geon put her to sleep d i d th e c h i h ua h ua s noti c e at al l ? 58

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Ojitos: Lásti ma Metche: ‫لا‬ Ojitos: Singing Metche: Our song Lasso: EY EL ASHES Metche: My skin Ojitos: Trees

Knesset: Ñ M’s Skin: Yanni (‫) ي ان ى‬ Ojitos: You mean Throat Roses: Sabes

LOS OLV IDADOS

Bougai nvillea s : Welter

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EGG on th e FACE a RO C K i s an EGG the FACE n ow FAC E L E S S w he n e ve r I’m C H A R RO my FACE like OJITO S LOS OLV IDADOS

N ARG I L A TAC O S e ve r y MOMENT t h e CAM E R A EGG on t h e WAL L be s i de CHÉ the LE AT H E R I s me l l t h e L E AT H ER N OT E B O O K a LENSE i ns i d e t h e PI MP L E af te r t h e T E AR GAS J E NI N J AIB O 61

HORROR HOTEL illustrations by Stephanie von Reiswitz

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HORROR HOTEL

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INNER CHANTS & RHYTHMIC PULSE

by Jeremy Young

IN N ER CHAN TS & RHYTHMIC PULS E

Trafic (Jacques Tati, 1971) Let’s just sum up what happens in this film. Jacques Tati’s stalwartly slapstick protagonist, Monsieur Hulot (in his final on-screen appearance, actually), has but one duty, which is to transport his newly designed concept camper-vehicle to the Amsterdam auto show. It’s not a difficult task, it’s getting from point A to point B. Hulot sets out on the open road and ends up just going in circles. As his route is hit constantly with setbacks, breakdowns and diversions, his fierce efforts to move forward seem fruitless. Throughout the film, as an audience we find ourselves routing for him to just “get there!”, at all costs. Traffic is a plague that tortures our basic human irnstincts. It eats us up inside. Yet in a way, Tati’s Trafic reveals that this ceaseless pushing forward, despite all obstacles, is essentially our nature. We’re hard-wired for it. 67

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Humans find a way to keep trotting. This is T H E function of the human body.

Tati’s sound design echoes the paradox. Pushing us away while dragging us closer is a disorderly sonic mess of industrial noise, cacophonic foley and hard-bop Buddy Rich-style jazz. We hear fingers rubbing against a tympani mimicking petrol sloshing around a jug, we also hear garbage can lids and bike wheels being struck accompanying the metallic mangling of automobiles in an accident. In one of the film’s most iconic visual passages, a Volkswagen Beetle is made to look and sound human when, as it veers off the road, its hood bounces up and down like the mouth of someone aching in pain. Naturally, we hear a male voice aching in pain. The sound design is overtly amplified so loudly that we could not possibly let the film slip by without taking notice of it. All of this disorienting noise continuously reminds us of (or, invites us to take part in) the

When something is damaged inside our bodies, a bruised muscle, scarred bone, an alien virus, the circulatory system continues pumping blood to the extremities, keeping us moving. It is fitting that the word “congestion” (both in English and French) can be used to describe a circumstance of bodily as well as on-road stuffiness. Similarly, “circulation” in French is used to describe the smooth flow of traffic. Congestion and circulation are opposites, yet tied together in the exact same experience, which is the sheer paradox that Tati plays with throughout the film. As much as we all hate sitting in traffic, in general, we need that entropy along the journey to motivate the energy.

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vexing distractions of real-world traffic. Periodic insertions of hightempo drum solos, trills and breaks are the rhythmic pulses which, acting purely as filmic device, serve to snap us out of our disgruntled malaise.

technology as an extension of our legs, our automobile is surely the beating heart that sits at the centre of our circulatory system.

Traffic is a white noise atmosphere. Cars humming in a drone, idling in a smoky, ethereal pitter patter. Sticking my head out the window I can tune into a blurry crosssection of four radio stations at once. On a cold, dry day it can be possible to clearly hear several more since radio waves tend to get stuck in moist air molecules. Like us. We awake from a droopy slumber when the cars begin to move and as those rhythms pick up again our soundscape changes. Engines crescendo and pulsate, tyres revolve, gears lock and unlock like some Throbbing Gristle-type mechanical loop. If McLuhan envisioned transportation

IN N ER CHAN TS & RHYTHMIC PULS E

Every sound that a car produces while moving along a road can be internalized as corresponding to a familiar function in our bodies. Advancing through the network of streets and motorways is likened to the flow of blood through veins and arteries. As fluids and fuels travel inside our vehicle to deliver energy and lubricant to various parts of our automobile, an interior chanting is traced along the contours of our digestive system, mapping the avenues that lead towards and away from the brain and heart. Heat is produced and fanned off a vehicle in the same way our sweat glands are responsible for moderating the conditions of our heart rate. Cars overheat. We overheat.

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The frame of our vehicle feels like it offers the protection of a ribcage. Even the way we talk about cars reflects how we really see them. So many American idioms include words that personify the driving experience: “Hugging the road”; “a hit and run”; “gas-guzzling”; “carpool”; “autobody”; and men’s tendency to refer to sports cars as female. This sociolinguistic phenomenon has been covered quite extensively by culture writers, and it’s evident that Tati picked up on this as he plays with visualised interpretations of people’s personalities as represented by their behaviour inside and around their vehicles. In his highway accident scene, drivers begin exiting their smashed cars all at once to comically stretch our their muscles, almost as a way of transferring the inflicted damages from their cars onto their bodies, and exercising them back into shape.

Trafic also presents us with one of cinema’s most bizarre montages, involving nine passing drivers picking their noses as they pull up to a stop. Yes, people are that comfortable in the inner space of their cars. It’s our private zone for acting out our personal habits and eccentricities, singing aloud to music, yelling at the other drivers on the road (but really only to ourselves). Getting from point A to point B, it seems, is not a completely straightforward experience, but a moving site for engaging in activity. Traffic scares us because we are naturally connected to the productive rhythms of progressing forward. When we’re behind the wheel we are tuned to the vehicle’s pulse. It is our own. And then the rhythms die out, we are left idling, alone on a highway in Belgium, listening to Flemish talk radio.

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IN N ER CHAN TS & RHYTHMIC PULS E

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THE THIN ATMOS PHERE

by THOMAS PETHER I see it all. There are pictures, scenes, burnt into my retinas. Phantom after-images of places I’ve never even been. There is a hushed forest, caught in the deathly still after heavy rain; a blank desert, the white sand compacted and cracked from centuries of wind and pressure, and, once, a great city rising from a black sea, the buildings stained an astral green by algae. But it had been the same thing for months. A skeletal black and white landscape: thin trees like tangled bones, drifts of snow banked up against the black sky. No stars, no sun, no moon. Images of it hung before my eyes, satellite photographs from a distant planet. It was October. The sky was a dull orange and ghosts walked the wet pavements. Coal grew damp in cellars, and smoke rose from bonfires to mix with the smell of leaf mould. The blank sky crushed terraced

houses strung together like sausages and the sun hung low over squat rooftops, barely there behind sheets of cloud, a face pressed against frosted glass. Fat brown pumpkins lined the stoops of houses and the wind groped at voices, pulling at them, turning conversations into wordless animal arguments. Someone had piled leaves deep against the sides of the road, creating secret, rotting worlds.

though I didn’t really notice it. I slept in the same bed I did as a child. At night my feet were exposed, suspended over a cliff edge. In the pale light of the moon, there was an abyss below me. I was a student of magical literature, a Seer, ever since I was nineteen and noticed a young girl on a country lane, drawing lightning from the sky and collecting it in a crude clay pot. She was pale and insubstantial, as if shrouded in cobwebs, and flickered like a hologram. I could see ragged trees pointing at the sky behind her. Through her, even. After that the curtain dropped and I saw. I stared at the dead, noted their behaviour, learned to read them and charted their movements. Mostly they drifted, like empty boats. They never looked back at me. They didn’t care.

My room was small and cold and at the top of the house. My house, I suppose, since my mother died. It was an attic room and darkness piled up and collected in the rafters. Sunlight died before it reached the corners of the room, and pools of shadow appeared on the carpet at random. There were dead bluebottles strewn across the windowsill. They had been there since the summer and were now translucent husks, as fragile as blown glass. The room was painted the same colours as a hospital ward, and there was the faint smell of damp,

I couldn’t hold down a job, so I had to rent out one of my downstairs rooms. I could have sold the house, but I’d lived there all my life. I didn’t 72

know who was in the room downstairs, but his rent was on time every month, so I didn’t really care. I can’t even remember him moving in. It’s almost as if he just seeped up through the floorboards one day. It’s as if the house provided him. He was welcome to the downstairs anyway, that was always my mother’s place. The wallpaper was a murky green and seemed to melt into the black wooden floor. There was a crucifixion painting over the fireplace. It was a bit Graham Sutherland, all elbows and ribs and pink, gaping flesh. The damp was much worse down there, and the floor sounded hollow in places, though I had no idea what was underneath. I didn’t have a cellar. The lodger’s room was small, in between the lounge and the kitchen, so the window didn’t have an outside view and instead looked straight into the living room. That must have been depressing. I didn’t spend much time downstairs.

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He had these grubby net curtains hanging in front of the window. I didn’t like the fact that he could see out but I couldn’t see in. I could sometimes just make him out through the curtain, dark and tall and thin, standing motionless in the corner of the room: a shadow with nothing casting it. Still, he always paid. And he was quiet, at first. Everything was okay. The lodger had magazines delivered to the house. They arrived in brown paper envelopes, but I was curious so I opened them. The Inter Faith Observer, The Journal Of Esoteric Psychology, The Erotic Review. Stuff like that. Nothing weird. I sometimes heard him tearing the pages out when I walked past his room. Maybe he stuck them on his wall or something. One time there was a postcard from an aunt of his. It showed a parched, martian landscape with slumped hills in the distance and what appeared to be three moons strung up

in the purple sky. On the back were some scrawled greetings, an unnecessary amount of kisses, and what looked like a bloody hand print. I shoved it under his door and forgot about it.

thin, like a fraying veil thrown over a corpse. I found the first note on a Monday morning. It was pinned to my bedroom door, just under the peephole. alas! there’s no milk, it read in tiny letters half-obscured by a greasy thumbprint. In the top right hand corner of the note he had scrawled a tiny eye inside a triangle inside a circle inside a ring of letters and strange symbols. Later, there would be embarrassing poems, the looping handwriting halfobscured by coffee stains, spilled food and ink smudges and strange, childish sketches of smiling clouds and brightly coloured dinosaurs.

The damp in his room must have been awful. There was a big patch of it above his door and it began to spread slowly. His life seemed to be following the spreading damp, out into the hallway and the rest of the ground floor. One night I found an apple core, brown and puckered, on top of a pile of books in the kitchen. The Property Law Handbook was on top of the pile. It looked well read, with scraps of paper marking every few pages. The others had strange titles. The Lesser Key Of Solomon The King, its cover black and glossy. The Necronomicon, small and worn and leather, like a bible. I picked up The Mysteries Of The Wyrm and flicked through the pages. It was full of bad poetry, moody photographs and strident articles about how reality was

I tore the note to pieces and went downstairs. The kitchen was a mess. The table was angled oddly, half against the wall, as if someone had used it to climb out of the open window. Or to climb in. There was a smashed coffee jar on the floor, the contents scattered in interesting patterns, and a chipped mug lay on the 73

sideboard, the handle broken. Dirty dishes were stacked by the sink in brown, crusted towers. I filled the sink with water, feeling like a guest in my own home. I stared out of the window as I washed up. I could see my garden: a field of burnt grass penned in by the neighbouring houses and a high redbrick wall. Little chipped statues sat in rows and patterns, pulled into the ground by ivy and weeds. I’d arranged them carefully over the years and they looked like marble crop circles from above. Dented wind chimes hung from the crooked trees, along with tattered bits of ribbon and strange charms made of feathers and bits of driftwood, bleached white as bone. The wind changed, suddenly, and the chimes clattered. Grey rain slapped at the glass. I felt the linoleum floor lurch below me and my vision blurred. I squinted against the fierce glare of snow and looked out of the window. My little

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garden had been replaced by a vast plane of ice. A fragile barrier between black sky and black sea. Ghostly mountains rose in the distance and the air felt thick around me, as if I was underwater. I stared at the grey sky. There was a hole where the moon should have been.

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Something stirred below the ice, and the great white shelf heaved beyond the glass, as

if it were breathing. The ice cracked, and dark water began to seep up like tar. It ran under the door and began to lap at my bare toes. The scene flickered twice and then clicked off, as if at the end of a slide show. My garden fell back into view. There was a new note pinned to one of the kitchen cupboards. One of his poems.

He holds a storm in the folds of his coat. The rose coloured sea licks at a concrete shore, and at his toes. Seeping through to the bone. We stand very still under the remains of the day. “Daddy’s grave just went below the line,” he says, the words peeling from his throat like rotting wallpaper. Dead faces billow and bloom, in the murk. Tumourous fish. Streets swell and drift with the rhythm of the tide and shrunken heads rub grimacing faces to the glass, staining it yellow. Water seeps into earth and dry brick, a pointless irrigation. Terrible, I thought, tearing the paper up and re-arranging the words until they formed a better poem. Then I shoved the pieces under his door, along with a note asking him not to leave the window open at night. As my fingers fumbled under his door the merest idea of a hand brushed mine and I drew back quickly. I heard a thump from the other side of the door and a strange slithering sound. He was dragging something heavy across the floor.

I had a client that afternoon, a small, papery man with an ill-fitting face. We sat at a rickety card table in the living room and the man’s eyes kept flitting toward the lodger’s window. There were smeared handprints all over the glass. He told me that he’d started hearing voices a few weeks ago. They were stopping him sleeping and were making things hard for him at work. I prodded at his tea leaves, trying to force them into a meaningful shape, and

said that I wasn’t his damn psychiatrist. I did my best to look ethereal as I read his palm and decided it would be lucky if he lived out the week, though instead of telling him this, I said that he was going to find love, if he went out and looked for it. “And when you do, you must pin your heart to her door,” I said. He looked vaguely pleased. “Metaphorically, of course,” I added. You can’t be too careful. 74

The session ended and I told him it was time to cross my hand with silver. He wrote me a cheque instead. It bounced across the table towards me. Hours later, and I was under the ice. Crudely sculpted rocks rose around me like miniature cities. Green light filtered through the ice, staining the water. Huge, slate coloured crabs scuttled over the ocean floor like something out of Lovecraft, eyes milky and blind, spidery legs caressing the black rock obscenely.

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I was dead. I couldn’t feel the cold. My eyes were open but there was no saltwater sting. I was just drifting through the black water behind death, an empty boat. I could feel something stroking my neck and collarbone, and tugging gently at my hand, like a child. A ravine gaped before me, a scar on the ocean floor. It yawned, black but definitely not empty. There was something there, just beyond the light— —I woke up. For a second, something loomed over me. Then there were quick, shuffling footsteps and laboured breathing. Loud, then quiet, then gone. My bedroom door slammed shut.

There was a note pinned to my bedroom door: “I’m here on the stair!” called the first drop of blood, it read. I made my way down the stairs. There were odd, rune-like symbols scratched into the bannister. I didn’t recognise many of them. There was something wrong downstairs: deep scratches in the floor, made by some animal. Three floorboards had been wrenched up and thrown against the wall in the hallway. I could smell rotten, stagnant water and looked down into the hole he had made in the floor, expecting to see foundations of wood and concrete, dead spiders and dust and maybe the odd mouse skeleton. Instead there was just shifting darkness and, far below, a vast black pool, its surface oily and completely smooth. There were things underneath,

my ears straining against a low buzzing sound. I could almost hear voices, faint and conspiratorial. Something laughed, then stopped suddenly, as if stifled by a hand. There was something else, cutting through the faint white noise. A voice, deep and cracked with age. It rose and fell with a sing-song rhythm, the words dancing just out of reach.

There was something behind me, but I didn’t turn around. I could almost feel hands on my back, long and thin and not quite solid; ready to push me into the water. Just for fun.

I raised my hand to knock. There was a hushing sound, and another strangled laugh, much closer this time. He must have had his mouth pressed against the door. As I turned to leave, I heard the door handle turn.

But nothing happened. Something ran up the stairs behind me. Miles above, I heard a door slam shut. There were muddy footsteps leading away from the ragged lip of the hole. I replaced the floorboards carefully. My face was burning. I could smell my sweat, even through the fog of decay and dead water. I turned, and the wall to my right was choked with yellow post-it notes. “I’m here in the kitchen, warming myself!” called the second drop of blood. “Out in the garden, behind the trees” “Under the floorboards, pining for you” My head rang with the cloying, paper voices. I followed the trail of mud and leaves to my bedroom. The footprints stopped outside the door. There was a new poster, pinned to the door. It was printed on decaying yellow parchment: I invoke Thee, the Terrible and Invisible God: Who dwellest in the Void Place of the Spirit. I pressed my eye to the peep hole, imagining him doing the same, barely an inch of wood between us. Almost eyeball to eyeball. He would have to stoop to look through.

The damp had spread into the upstairs corridors. I noticed this as I descended the stairs again. Black water had begun to seep up from between the floorboards. The house pulsed. There was a massive pressure in my ears, as if I were fathoms deep, being crushed under miles of water. My whole body was being compressed, tighter and tighter. The door to the lodger’s room was ajar. I looked inside. It was a thin room, much higher than it was wide, like a prison cell. There was a sagging mattress under the smeared window, and a battered typewriter in the far corner. That was all. I guessed he had already moved the rest of his things into my room. I could see the remains of my dinner and my abandoned tarot cards through the window. And my chair, and my books, ghostly behind the net curtain. My things. I’d miss them. He’d written things on the wall. The words entwined strangely with the faded roses on the wallpaper. It had begun to peel away in places, revealing the yellowing plaster beneath. I staggered outside and almost tripped over my suitcase, placed neatly on the front step. I slammed the door closed and leaned against it. The pressure began to lift, slowly, by degrees. The world stopped moving. I picked up my suitcase and descended

A thin thread of yellow moonlight seeped under the door and bisected the corridor. I held my breath, 75

the stairs onto the street. There was a small sign in the downstairs window, written on yellowing parchment. ROOM FOR RENT, said the spidery writing. I sighed, and let the early morning air wash over me. I looked up and saw my face pressed against the window of the attic room. It looked pale and mask-like and there was something black and sickly peering out from behind the eyes. I caught my own reflection for a second, in the window of a passing car. Tall and hunched and thin, a walking shadow. It began to snow. An icy wasteland hovered behind my eyes. I walked away.

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Moonlight stained the floor like spilled milk and I could see bare, muddy footprints on my carpet, creeping towards the bed. There were none leading away, even though I had heard him run. The room was a mess. Books had been thrown from my shelves and my clothes lay strewn all over the floor like dead birds. Two of my favourite shirts were missing.

writhing and squirming, but causing no ripples on the surface of the water. I looked deeper and saw the imprints of ghostly planets, revolving slowly at insane distances. One of the planets was alive with orange fire. The other was a milky white, like an eye filmed with cataracts.

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Projections: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 11’09”01 by AARON MICHAEL KERNER

[i] González Iñárritu’s film was originally included in a collection of short films entitled September 11th (produced by Alain Brigand, 2002). This collection includes 11 films by 11 filmmakers from 11 countries, on the subject of that infamous day: September 11, 2001. 2 Film director Michael Moore’s effort to capture the emotion of that horrific day, Fahrenheit 9/11, adopts González Iñárritu’s strategy by using a black screen coupled with a similar audio design in the film’s opening moments. Moore also uses some of the same audio, and eventually opens onto a montage of images from that day, set to Arvo Pärt’s highly evocative Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten. 77

PROJECTION S : ALEJAN DRO GON ZÁLEZ IÑ ÁRRITU’S 11’09 ” 01

Alejandro González Iñárritu: Born in Mexico City in 1963, Alejandro González Iñárritu developed his filmmaking skills largely through practical experience, making television commercials and working as a DJ on Mexico City’s most popular radio station. His films have won numerous awards including the UNESCO Award in the 2002 Venice Film Festival for 11’09”01 that is shown in Reconstructing Memories (an exhibition curated by Aaron Kerner, 2006). His highly acclaimed film Amores Perros, 2000, garnered many accolades including: Best Director of the Year, London Critics Circle Film Awards, 2002; Film Not in the English Language Award, British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards, 2002; Best Foreign Language Film, Boston Society of Film Critics Awards, 2001; thirteen Silver Ariel Awards, Mexican Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences, 2001; Critics Week Grand Prize Best Film Award and Young Critics Award for Best Feature, Cannes Film Festival, 2000; and Best Director Award and Tokyo Grand Prix, Tokyo International Film Festival, 2000

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‫ينا أم يعمينا؟‬

DOES GOD’S L US OR BL 78

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LIGHT GUIDE LIND US?

PROJECTION S : ALEJAN DRO GON ZÁLEZ IÑ ÁRRITU’S 11’09 ” 01

‫هل نور الله يهدي‬

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The kinetic energy of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s feature films — Amores perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), and Babel (2006) — is very much evident in his short film 11’09”01.[i] However, in 11’09”01 the dynamics of the audio/visual design and narrative arrangement that we associate with his feature films are largely handed over to us. González Iñárritu’s short film plays in our mind, colliding with our personal recollections of that horrifying day. And yet, 11’09”01 stands out for its relative sparseness. For the most part, the screen remains black, punctuated by split-second images from that horrific day: people jumping/falling from the upper levels of the World Trade Center. These images are so terribly poignant that there is no need for them to remain on the screen for any more than a fleeting moment. Moreover, there is hardly any need for visual representations as the images are undoubtedly emblazoned in our minds. To prolong the images would, in a sense, be redundant. The black screen eventually dissolves into a blinding white. Despite the minimalist visual design, the film is rich and highly emotive. The black screen is far from limiting. Quite the opposite, it is ever expansive and expanding—maybe even sublime. It offers a meditative space on which we can project our own experiences, filling up that deep and complex abyss. The black screen has antecedents in the Rothko Chapel (Houston, Texas) where Rothko’s black monochrome canvases line the octagonal chapel. The paintings in the Rothko Chapel, like González Iñárritu’s black screen, do not dictate but offer a space for individual and private introspection. The sound design of González Iñárritu’s film further advances a comparison with the paintings in the Rothko Chapel. The soundtrack seems to evoke the sacred. The voices that inhabit the black space recall a choir, an invocation, and the Muslim call to prayer. The abstracted incantation, the voices of Babel, and the mingling of Spanish, English, and Arabic are blended, at once expressing a universal human experience of finding cathartic value in harmony, rhythm, and sacred incantation. But there is also a vocalized chorus of mutual distrust, anxiety, and misunderstanding, emphasized by the text that concludes the piece, first appearing in Arabic, and then in English: “Does God’s light guide us, or blind us?” González Iñárritu, rather than show us images from that horrific day, creates an auditory collage: English and Spanish-language news reports and phone messages left by loved ones from one of the hijacked planes and from the World Trade Center before the towers collapsed. The soundtrack builds to a crescendo of chaos and the noise of the World Trade Center collapsing. On top of this deafening climax, González Iñárritu juxtaposes an invocation 80

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to Allah against a vehement male voice, “We should hit every country that harbors terrorists, and not only the terrorist camps. I want their fathers to be hit. I want their mothers to be hit. I want their children to be hit. I want the world to be afraid of us again.” The last phrase alternates repeatedly with the invocation to Allah and the cacophony of the World Trade Center collapsing.

González Iñárritu’s film redresses the imbalance in the representations of 9/11. In his film, nothing dictates to us, nothing tells us how to identify with that horrific day; but, for most of us, it still conjures up an array of raw emotions. Although seemingly paradoxical, the use of the word “limiting”—if that is even the right term—to define the visual composition encourages identification. The black screen is liberating precisely because it encourages us to reflect on our own experiences. It is here, before González Iñárritu’s black screen, that we are allowed to reconstruct our own memories. 81

PROJECTION S : ALEJAN DRO GON ZÁLEZ IÑ ÁRRITU’S 11’09 ” 01

The darkness of the black screen allows personal identification with that infamous day. There is no “tyranny of the image” here. No doubt, most people saw those horrific images as they were broadcast live across the globe. In the minutes, weeks, and months following, we saw the images over and over again. In the various documentaries that followed, architects and structural engineers poured over, dissected, scientifically scrutinized, and fastidiously explained how each of the World Trade Center towers collapsed. Likewise, politicians and historians pontificated on the origins of the September 11th terrorist attack. (But, somehow they never truly addressed that core question that almost immediately surfaced: Why do they hate us so much?) While these scientific and political responses certainly served a purpose, something was lost in those documentary representations of 9/11, in their logical and methodical pursuit of answers. The complexity of human emotions and individual experience was largely ignored in the interest of “objective” discovery. But surely, in recent memory, there is no other day in history that provokes such a strong emotional charge. Thus, why deny it?2

BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO

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ATMOS PHERE

distributor ARTIFICIAL EYE certificate 15 release date 31ST DECEMBER 2012 running time 92 MIN director PETER STRICKLAND stars TOBY JONES, TONIA SOTIROPOULOU, COSIMO FUSCO

It’s 1976 and timid, Dorking-based sound engineer, Gilderoy, has been transplanted to Italy’s run-down Berberian Sound Studio to work on “The Equestrian Vortex”, the latest lowbudget horror movie by notorious exploitation maestro Giancarlo Santini. Gilderoy’s task is a seemingly simple one: to create, record and mix the sounds of bloodcurdling screams, limbs being severed and the insertion of red hot pokers into human orifices, mostly using a variety of everyday household items such as old vegetables and a hammer. But Gilderoy is totally unprepared for the graphically grotesque images on show, the effect they have on him and for the unusual working practices of his employers. As he becomes more deeply involved in his work, the line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred and, very subtly, Gilderoy’s life begins to imitate art in a nightmare scenario from which he may never escape. 84

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BERBERIAN S OUN D STUDIO

ATMOS PHERE

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BERBERIAN S OUN D STUDIO

Never a tree until reason emerged.

From the cosmic to the subatomic, the choreography; stars and snails alike carry only reason for their presence within this gr

Insert humanity: The greatest conundrum to puerile to think that human comprehension c existence and conscious. Yet, with our innovat that we are slowly unlocking the secrets to the even long after our quest for universal omnis that “There is everything in the world that yo and it is this invisible world that you don’t se between the natural and the humans ...” Yet, is an equal and positive reaction. As we wreak our surroundings wreak nature upon us. Unp the human capability of fallible reasoning. In loses, or who cares? What is the ultimate d bomb?

This may all seem a bit psycho-babble bullshi whether it be returning to a sense of natural steam ahead towards our ultimate human goa is this struggle seen and scrutinised than thro visual arts. In this section of BRUTAL, we turn nature that documents both our isolation and is. And as you meander through the pages an final reflection: never a thought until reason

delicate dance of life plays in perpetual out innate functions that to them form the reat universe.

rhythm and order. To some, it may seem quite could ever decipher the greatest questions of tions and technologies, we applaud the notion e ways in which nature has been, is, and will be, science has failed us. Artist, Mariko Mori says ou see but there is a world that you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see, ee... I think that is where we can find harmony the saying goes that for every reaction, there k humanity on our natural surroundings, so do predictable, we tend to say, as if to give nature n the end, is it all a question of who wins, who difference between a meteor and a megaton

it, and yet, nature defines our every movement, l order (whatever that means) or chugging full al (whatever that is). Perhaps nowhere greater ough a window of words and a vantage point of n our eyes towards a cinematographic study of interconnectedness to that which intrinsically nd process the meaning of it all, consider this emerged.

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N ATURE

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

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The English have a great hunger for desolate places.

...were two miles of lighting in the streets...

I fear they hunger for Arabia.

...when London was a village.

Then you must deny it to them.

Yes, you were great.

You are an Englishman. Are you not loyal to England?

Nine centuries ago. Time to be great again, my lord.

To England and to other things.

Which is why my father made this war upon the Turks.

To England and Arabia both?

My father, Mr. Lawrence, not the English.

And is that possible?

But my father is old...

I think you are another of these desert-Ioving English.

...and I...

...I long for the vanished gardens of Cordoba.

...Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the desert.

However, before the gardens must come the fighting.

To be great again, it seems that we need the English...

We love water and green trees. There is nothing in the desert. And no man needs nothing.

...or...

Or?

Or is it that you think we are something you can play with.. .

What no man can provide, Mr. Lawrence. We need a miracle.

...because we are a little people, a silly people... ...greedy, barbarous and cruel?

Aqaba.

From the land.

Or do you know, lieutenant, in the Arab city of Cordoba...

You are mad.

To come to Aqaba by land we should 93

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Doughty, Stanhope...

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have to cross the Nefud Desert. That’s right.

With good reason. It cannot be approached from the landward side.

Certainly the Turks don’t dream of it.

The Nefud cannot be crossed. I’ll cross it if you will.

Aqaba’s over there.

It’s only a matter of going.

You? It takes more than a compass, Englishman.

You are mad.

The Nefud is the worst place God created.

And where are you going, lieutenant?

I can’t answer for the place. Only for myself.

With of my men.

Fifty men?

To work your miracle.

Blasphemy is a bad beginning for such a journey.

Fifty? Against Aqaba? N ATURE

If men came out of the Nefud...

Who told you? Ali did.

...they would be men other men might join.

Why not you?

The Howeitat are there, I hear.

You are falling back from Yenbo, sir?

The Howeitat are brigands. They’ll sell themselves to anyone.

Yes, I must.

But I will spare these to you.

Good fighters, though. Good...

Did Ali break confidence to tell me?

Yes. There are guns at Aqaba.

Sherif Ali owes you his allegiance, my lord.

They face the sea, Sherif Ali, and cannot be turned around.

Yet you did not tell Colonel Brighton. No.

From the landward side, there are no guns at Aqaba.

Since you do know... 94

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...we can claim to arrive in the name of Feisal of Mecca.

They sound very suitable. You can ride with the baggage.

Yes, Lieutenant Lawrence, you may claim it.

These are not servants. These are worshippers.

But in whose name do you ride?

One shilling, every week?

Sherif, I caught them. They have tracked us.

That is fair.

They were here. I caught them.

Each? No.

Why are you here? Boy!

All right.

They will be lucky for you. Allah favours the compassionate.

You have been tracking us.

There is the railway.

You were told to stay.

And that is the desert.

From here until the other side, no water but what we carry.

Our camel strayed. We followed her.

For the camels, no water at all.

She led us here to be Lord Lawrence’s servants.

If the camels die...

It is the will of Allah.

...we die.

Blasphemy.

And in days they will start to die.

No, Lawrence, these are not servants. There’s no time to waste, then, These are outcasts, parentis there? less. I was thinking. Be warned. They are not suitable. You were drifting. 95

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This is true, Lawrence. They do wish it.

Don’t do that.

That is too much.

To serve Lord Lawrence, sherif.

No, sherif.

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Yes. It will not happen again.

No, but we’re off the anvil.

Be warned, you were drifting.

Thank God for that anyway. Yes, thank Him.

It will not happen again.

Lawrence, I do not think you know how you have tempted Him.

That water is wasted. From now on, we must travel by night...

I know.

God willing.

A few hours each day.

When do we reach the wells?

Why don’t we start now?

God willing, midday.

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No. We will rest now.

Fine.

Then we’ve done it.

Thank Him, Lawrence.

I’ll wake you.

Thank Him.

Do we rest here? There is no rest now short of water. The other side of that. And how much of that is there? I’m not sure.

But however much, it must be crossed before tomorrow’s sun gets up. This is the sun’s anvil. Have we done it?

We’ve done it.

...and rest while it is too hot to travel.

Three hours.

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SUN NO O 98

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NA ONNA 99

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THE WOMAN IN THE DUNES 1964 (EXCERPT) by Kobo Abé

But he returned to reality at once. Supposing this room could not be used. Where in heaven’s name did she intend to sleep? He could hear her coming and going beyond the board wall. The hands of his wrist watch pointed to 8:02. What could there be to do, he wondered, at such an hour? He stepped down to the earthen floor in search of water. A red metallic film floated on the thimbleful of liquid remaining in the bottom of the water far. But even that was better than enduring the sand in his mouth. When he had washed his face in the water and wiped the back of his neck, he felt considerably better. A chilly draft was blowing along the dirt floor. Probably it was more bearable outside. He squeezed through the sliding door, which, stuck in the sand, no longer moved, and went out. The breeze blowing down from the road had indeed become much cooler. The sound of what seemed to be the motor of a three-wheeled pickup truck came to him on the wind. And when he strained his ears he could hear a number of people. Moreover—was it his imagination?—he sensed greater animation than during

the day. Or was it the sound of the sea? The sky was heavy with stars. The woman turned when she saw the lamplight. Skillfully handling the shovel, she was scooping sand into a big kerosene can. Beyond her, the wall of black sand soared precipitously up and seemed to be bending inward on them. It must have been up there that he had walked during the day in his search for insects. When two kerosene cans were full, the woman carried them, one in each hand, over to where he was. As she passed him she raised her eyes. “Sand,” she said in a nasal voice. She emptied the sand from the kerosene cans near the path in the back where the rope ladder hung. Then she wiped away the sweat with the end of a towel. The place was already piled high with the sand she had hauled over.

“I’m clearing away the sand.” “You’ll never finish, no matter how long you work at it.” The next time she passed, she poked him in the side with the end of a free finger. He almost let the lamp fall as he started up in surprise. Should he keep holding the lamp as he was, or should he put it on the ground and return the tickling? He hesitated, caught off guard by the unexpected choice he faced. He decided to keep the lamp in his hand, and with his face set in a grin, which he himself did not know the meaning of, he awkwardly

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This house was already half dead. Its insides were half eaten away by tentacles of ceaselessly flowing sand. Sand, which didn’t even have a form of its own—other than the mean 1/8-mm. diameter. Yet not a single thing could stand against this shapeless, destructive power. The very fact that it had no form was doubtless the highest manifestation of its strength, was it not?

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and stiffly approached the woman, who had begun to shovel again. As he drew near, her shadow filled the whole surface of the sand wall.

use a shovel. And there would be something curious about holding back. With his heel he made a hollow in the sand, in which he placed the lamp so that it would not fall.

“You shouldn’t do that, you know,” “I suppose it’s all right to dig any she said in a low, breathless voice, her place, isn’t it?” back still toward him. “I have six cans “Well … not just any place.” to go until the lift basket comes.” His expression hardened. It was unpleasant to have feelings that he had been at pains to check aroused to no purpose. Yet, in spite of himself, something not to be denied was welling up in his veins. The sand which clung to his skin was seeping into his veins and, from the inside, undermining his resistance.

“Well, shall I give you a hand?”

“Then what about over here?” “Yes, but try to dig right down from the cliff wall.” “Is this the time for clearing away the sand at all the houses?”

“Yes. The sand is easier to work with “Oh, that’s alright. It wouldn’t be right at night because it’s damp. When to have you do anything on the very the sand is dry,” she said, looking first day.” up toward the sky, “you never know “On the first day? Don’t worry about when or where it will come crashing such things. I’ll only be here tonight down.” anyway.” He peered up, and indeed a brow of sand, like drifted snow, bulged out from the lip of the cliff.

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“Is that so?”

“But that’s dangerous, isn’t it?” “I don’t lead a life of leisure, you know. Hand me the other shovel. Come on.” “It’s really quite safe,” she said in a laughing tone, different from “Excuse me, but your shovel is over her usual voice. “Look! The mist’s there.” beginning to come in.” Indeed, under the eaves near the entrance a shovel and two kerosene cans with handles were lined up to the side. When they had said “for the other one,” it was most certainly these things that had been tossed down from the road above. The preparations were too good, and he had the feeling that they had guessed in advance what he would do. But how could they? He had not known himself. Anyway, he thought apprehensively, they had a pretty low opinion of him. The shaft of the shovel was made of a bumpy wood and had a dark sheen from handling. He had already lost his desire to lend a hand.

“Mist?” As she spoke, the expanse of stars rapidly grew patchy and began to fade. A tangled filmy cloud swirled around fitfully where the wall of sand met the sky.

“You see, it’s because the sand soaks up a lot of fog. When salty sand is full of fog, it gets hard like starch.” “I can’t believe it!”

“Oh! The lift basket is already at the “Oh, yes, it’s true. When the tide neighbors’!” along the beach goes down, even big She spoke animatedly, seeming not to have noticed tanks can drive over the sand with no his hesitation. Her voice was cheerful and contained a trouble.” note of confidence that had not been there before. The human sounds that had been audible for some time were suddenly near at hand. A series of short, rhythmic shouts was repeated several times, followed by a period of low, continuous muttering interspersed with suppressed laughter, and then the shouts again. The rhythm of the work suddenly made him feel buoyant. In such a simple world it was probably quite normal to let a night’s guest

“Amazing!” “It’s quite true. So that part that sticks out there gets bigger every night On days when the wind comes from a bad direction, the sand comes

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down like today, on the umbrella. In starting up. the afternoon, when it’s good and dry, “Well now, shall we take a rest?” it comes crashing down all at once. And it’s the end if it falls in the wrong “Oh, no. When they finish with one place … where the pillars are weak.” round, they come right back again with the basket.” Her topics of conversation were restricted. Yet once she entered her own sphere she suddenly took on a new animation. This might also be the way to her heart. He was not particularly interested in what she had to say, but her words had a warmth in them that made him think of the body concealed beneath the coarse work trousers.

Then, with all his strength, he repeatedly thrust the dented cutting edge of his shovel into the sand at his feet.

**** When he had finished carrying the kerosene cans over the second time, he heard the sound of voices, and on the road above a hand lamp flickered.

“Oh, let it go. The rest can wait until tomorrow and … ” He arose unconcerned and began walking toward the earthen floor, but she showed no signs of coming along with him.

“You can’t do things that way! We’ve got to work at least once all around the house.” “What do you mean, ‘all around’?”

“Well, we can’t let the house be smashed, can we? The sand comes “It’s the lift basket. I’ve already down from all sides.” finished over here. Give me some help “But it’ll take until morning to do over there, will you?” For the first time, he that.” grasped the meaning of the sandbags that lay buried at the The woman spoke rather sharply.

“Those fellows are amazing!”

As though challenged, she turned abruptly and hurried off. She apparently intended to return to the base of the cliff and continue her work. Quite like the behavior of the beetle, he thought. Now that he understood this, he certainly wouldn’t be taken in again.

“I’m dumbfounded! Is it like this every night?”

His tone was friendly as he wiped away the sweat with his shirt sleeve. The young men, who uttered not a word of ridicule at his helping with the sand, appeared to devote themselves energetically to their work. He felt well disposed toward them.

“The sand never stops. The baskets and the three-wheeler keep going the whole night through.”

“Yes. In our village, we really follow the motto ‘Love Your Home.’”

sand never stopped falling. The man was completely at a loss. He was bewildered, rather as if he had casually stepped on the tail of a snake that he had thought to be small but had turned out to be surprisingly large; by the time he had realized this, its head was already threatening him from behind.

“What sort of love is that?”

“1 suppose they do.” And indeed they did. The

“It’s the love you have for where you live.” “But this means you exist only for the purpose of clearing away the sand, “Great!” doesn’t it?” He laughed, and she laughed with him. But she did not seem to understand the reason for her laughter herself.

From afar came the sound of a three-wheeled truck

“Yes, but we just can’t sneak away at night, you know.”

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top of the ladder: by running the ropes around them, the baskets could be raised and lowered. Four men managed each basket, and there were two or three groups in all. For the most part, they appeared to be young men who worked briskly and efficiently. By the time the basket of one group was full, the next group was already waiting to take over. In six hauls, the sand which had been piled up was completely leveled off.

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He was more and more upset. He had no intention of becoming involved in such a life.

“Yes, you can. It would be simple, wouldn’t it? You can do anything if you want to.” “No, that wouldn’t be right at all.” She

spoke casually, breathing in rhythm with her shoveling.

“The village keeps going because we never let up clearing away the sand like this. If we stopped, in ten days the village would be completely buried. Next it will be the neighbor’s turn in back. See, there.” “Very praiseworthy, I’m sure. And do the basket gangs work so hard for the same reason?” “Well, they do get some pay from the town.”

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“If they have that much money, why don’t they build a more permanent hedge of trees against the sand?” “It seems to be much cheaper to do it this way … when you figure the costs.” “This way? Is this really a way?”

Suddenly a feeling of anger welled up in him. He was angry at the things that bound the woman … and at the woman who let herself be bound. “Why must you

cling so to such a village? I really don’t understand. This sand is not a trifling matter. You’re greatly mistaken if you think you can set yourself up against it with such methods. It’s preposterous! Absurd! I give up. I really give up. I have absolutely no sympathy for you.”

Tossing the shovel on the kerosene cans which had been left out, he abruptly returned to the room, ignoring the expression on the woman’s face. He spent a sleepless night, turning and tossing. He pricked up his ears, sensing the woman’s presence. He felt somewhat guilty. Taking such a stand in front of her was actually an expression of jealousy at what bound her; and was it not also a desire that she should put aside her work and come secretly to his bed? Actually, his strong feelings were apparently not simply anger at female stupidity. There was something more unfathomable. His mattress was getting damper and damper, and the sand more and

more clammy to his skin. It was all too unreasonable, too eerie. There was no need to blame himself for having thrown the shovel aside and come in. He did not have to take that much responsibility. Besides, the obligations he had to assume were already more than enough. In fact, his involvement with sand and his insect collecting were, after all, simply ways to escape, however temporarily, from his obligations and the inactivity of his life. No matter how he tried, he could not sleep. The sound of the woman’s movements continued without interruption. Again and again the sound of the basket drew near, and then receded. If things went on this way, he would be in no condition for tomorrow’s work. The next day he would get up at daybreak, he decided, and put the day to good use. The more he tried to sleep, the more wide awake he became. His eyes began to smart; his tears and his blinking seemed to be ineffective against the ceaselessly falling sand. He spread out a towel and wrapped it over his head. It was difficult to breathe, but it was better this way. He tried thinking of something else. When he closed his eyes, a number of long lines, flowing like sighs, came floating toward him. They were ripples of sand moving over the dunes. The dunes were probably burned onto his retina because he had been gazing steadily at them for some twelve hours. The same sand currents had swallowed up and destroyed flourishing cities and great empires. They called it the “sabulation” of the Roman Empire, if he remembered rightly. And the village of something or other, which Omar Khayyam wrote of, with its tailors and butchers, its bazaars and roadways, entwined like the strands of a fish net. How many years of strife and petitioning had been necessary to change just one strand? The cities of antiquity, whose immobility no one doubted … Yet, after all, they too were unable to resist the law of the flowing 1/8-mm. sands. Sand … Things with form were empty when placed beside sand. The only certain factor was its movement; sand was the antithesis of all form. However, beyond the thin wall of boards, the woman continued shoveling as usual. What in heaven’s name could she hope to accomplish with her frail arms? It was like trying to build a house in the sea by brushing the water aside. You floated a ship on water in accordance with the properties of water. With that thought, he was suddenly released from the compulsive feeling of oppression that, in some strange manner, the sound of the woman’s shoveling exerted on him. If a ship floated on water, then it would also float on sand. If they could get free from the concept of stationary houses, they wouldn’t have to waste energy fighting the sands. A ship—a house—which flowed along, borne up by the sand … shapeless towns and cities. Sand, of course, was not a liquid. There was no reason,

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therefore, to expect it to be buoyant. If one were to toss something on it with a lesser specific gravity, say a cork stopper, and leave it there, even the cork would sink. A boat that would float on sand would have to possess much different qualities. It could be a house shaped like a barrel, for example, which would pitch and toss. Even if it heaved over a little, it would shed whatever sand had fallen on it and rise at once to the surface. Of course, people would not be able to endure the instability of a house that kept revolving all the time. There would have to be a double-barrel arrangement on an axis, so that the bottom of the inner barrel would always have a fixed point of gravity. The inner one would remain steady; only the outer one would turn. A house which would move like the pendulum of a great clock … a cradle house … a desert ship … Villages and towns in constant movement composed of groupings of these ships … Without being aware of it, he dropped off to sleep.

****

Quickly he jumped up. The sand that had accumulated on his face, head, and chest fell away with a rustling sound. Around his nose and lips, sand was encrusted and hardened by perspiration. He scraped it off with the back of his hand and cautiously blinked his eyes. Tears welled up uncontrollably under his gritty, feverish eyelids. But the tears alone were not enough to wash away the sand that had become lodged in the moist corners of his eyes. He started toward the container on the earthen floor for a little water. Suddenly, he heard the breathing of the sleeping woman on the other side of the sunken hearth and looked over. He swallowed his breath, quite forgetting the aching of his eyelids. She was stark naked. She seemed to float like a blurred shadow before his tearfilled eyes. She lay face-up on the matting, her whole body, except her head, exposed to view; she had placed her left hand lightly over her lower abdomen, which was smooth and full. The parts that one usually covered were completely bare, while the face, which anybody would show, was concealed under a towel. No doubt the towel was to protect her nose, mouth, and eyes from the sand, but the contrast seemed to make the naked body stand out even more. The whole surface of her body was covered with a coat of fine sand, which hid the details and brought out the

Fortunately the water jar had recently been replenished and was brimming full. When he had rinsed his mouth and washed his face he felt better. Never before had he been so keenly aware of the marvel of water. Water was an inorganic substance like sand, a simple, transparent, inorganic substance that adapted to the body more readily than any living thing. As he let the water trickle slowly down his throat, he imagined stone-eating animals. Again he turned and looked toward the woman. But he had no desire to go any closer. A sand-covered woman was perhaps attractive to look at, but hardly to touch. With daylight, the exasperation and excitement of the preceding night seemed pure fantasy. Of course, the whole thing would be good material for conversation. The man again looked around, as if to fix what had already become a memory, and hurriedly began to get ready. His shirt and trousers were loaded with sand. However, there was no sense worrying about such things. It was more difficult to shake all the sand from the fibers of his clothes than to get the dandruff off his head. His shoes, too, were buried in the sand. He wondered if he should say something to the woman before he left. But, on the other hand, it would only embarrass her to be awakened. Anyway, what should he do about paying her for the night’s lodging? Perhaps it would be better to stop on the way back through the village and give the old man from the cooperative the money— the one who had brought him here the day before. Stealthily he went out. The sun was boiling mercury, poised at the edge of the sand cliff. Little by little it was beginning to heat the bottom of the hole. He hastily turned his eyes away from the intense glare. In the next instant he had already forgotten it. He simply stared at the facade of the sand wall. It was unbelievable! The rope ladder had vanished from the place it had been the night before. The marker bags, half buried by the sand, were perfectly visible. There was no mistake, he remembered the spot. He wondered: had the ladder alone been swallowed up by the sand? He rushed to the wall and sank his arms into the sand, groping for it. The sand gave way, unresisting, and ran down. However, he wasn’t trying to find a needle in a haystack; if he did not succeed with the first try, he never would, no matter how much he searched. Stifling his rising apprehension, he looked again in blank amazement at the abruptness of the slope.

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He was awakened by a cock’s crow, like the creaking of a rusty swing. It was a restless, hangnail awakening. He had the feeling that it was barely dawn, but the hands of his wrist watch had already turned to 11:16. So the color of the sunbeams was actually that of noon. It was gloomy here because he was at the bottom of a hole and the sun had not yet reached that far.

feminine lines; she seemed a statue gilded with sand. Suddenly a viscid saliva rose from under his tongue. But he could not possibly swallow it. Were he to swallow, the sand that had lodged between his lips and teeth would spread through his mouth. He turned toward the earthen floor and spat. Yet no matter how much he ejected he could not get rid of the gritty taste. No matter how he emptied his mouth the sand was still there. More sand seemed to issue constantly from between his teeth.

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Wasn’t there some spot where it could be scaled? he wondered. He circled the house two or three times, looking. If he climbed up on the roof of the house, the distance to the rim of the hole would be shortest on the north side, toward the sea, but it would still be over thirty feet. And, what was more, the wall there was steeper than anywhere else. The massive brow of sand which hung down seemed exceedingly dangerous. The west wall seemed to be a comparatively gentle incline, having a curved surface like the inside of a cone. At an optimistic estimate it was probably around fifty or even forty-five degrees. Cautiously, he took a probing step. With each step forward, he slid back a half step. Even so, it looked as though he could make it with a very great effort.

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Things went as he had expected for the first five or six steps. And then his feet began to sink into the sand. Before he knew whether he was making progress or not, he was buried up to his knees and seemed to have lost all power of movement. Then he attempted frantically to scramble up on all fours. The burning sand scorched his palms. Sweat poured from his whole body. Sand and sweat blinded him. Soon he had cramps in his legs and was unable to move them at all. He stopped struggling and caught his breath, assuming he had already covered a considerable distance, but when he opened his eyes, squinting, he was amazed to find that he had come not even five yards. What exactly had he accomplished by all this effort? he wondered. Moreover, the incline he had climbed seemed to be far steeper than when he had looked at it from below. And above where he stood, it looked even worse. Although he had wanted to climb up, he seemed to have spent all his energy simply burrowing into the sand wall. The brow of sand just above his face blocked his path. In desperation he tried to struggle on a little further, but the instant he reached out for the sand over his head, his footing gave way. He was spewed out from the sand and flung to the bottom of the hole. His left shoulder made a sound like the splitting of chopsticks. But he did not notice any pain. For some time, fine sand rustled gently down the face of the cliff as if to ease the hurt he had received; then it stopped. Anyway, his injury was an exceedingly small one. It was still too soon to be frightened. He stifled a desire to scream and slowly crept back to the hut. The woman was still sleeping in the same position. He called her, gently at first and then in a louder and louder voice. Instead of answering, she turned over as though annoyed.

been encased in sand, it was gruesomely raw. The strange whiteness of her face the night before in the lamplight must surely have been produced by a powder. Now the white stuff had rubbed away, leaving bald patches that gave the impression of a cheap cutlet not cooked in batter. With surprise he realized that the white stuff was perhaps real wheat flour. Finally she half opened her eyes, seeming to be dazzled by the light. Seizing her shoulders and shaking her, the man spoke rapidly and imploringly.

“Say, the ladder’s gone! Where’s the best place to climb out of here, for heaven’s sake? You can’t get out of a place like this without a ladder.” She gathered up the towel with a nervous gesture, and with unexpected energy slapped her face with it two or three times and then, completely turning her back to him, crouched with her knees doubled beneath her and her face to the floor. Was it a bashful movement? This was hardly the place. The man let out a shout as if a dam had given way.

“This is no joking matter! I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t get that ladder out. I’m in a hurry! Where in God’s name did you hide it? I’ve had enough of your pranks. Give it here. At once!” But she did not answer. She remained in the same position, simply shaking her head left and right. He stiffened. His vision blurred, his breathing faltered and almost stopped; he abruptly realized the pointlessness of his questioning. The ladder was of rope. A rope ladder couldn’t stand up by itself. Even if he got his hands on it, there was no possibility of setting it up from below— which meant that the woman had not taken it down, but someone else had taken it away from the road above. His unshaven face, smudged with sand, suddenly looked miserable. The woman’s actions and her silence took on an unexpected and terrible meaning. He refused to believe it, yet in his heart he knew his worst fears had come true. The ladder had probably been removed with her knowledge, and doubtless with her full consent. Unmistakably, she was an accomplice. Of course her posture had nothing to do with embarrassment; it was the posture of a sacrificial victim, of a criminal willing to accept any punishment. He had been lured by the beetle into a desert from which there was no escape—like some famished mouse.

The sand ran from her body, revealing her bare arms and shoulders, the nakedness of her flanks and loins. But there were more important things to think of. Going to her, he tore the towel from her head. Her face was covered with blotches, and, compared with her body, which had 106

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THE MEMORY OF A LANDSCAPE by JEANETTE FARRELL 137

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THIS IS THE MEMORY OF A LANDSCAPE; THIS LANDSCAPE IS GONE.

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So utters the inimitably brave and pioneering James Balog as he reviews footage of the decaying icecaps in Iceland captured for the film Chasing Ice. Presenting the overlap of science of and art currently en vogue in recent art practices where previously there was trepedation née suspicion on behalf of both parties—Balog in spectacular fashion captures the effects of climate change and delivers a beautiful, visual plea; the disappearance of the world’s ice continents caught on time-lapse film. The collision of these two fields of science and art pioneered most notably by Joseph Beuys in the 1970 s can be seen to reduce the benefit of geography as metaphor so amply used thus far and instead allows for a new level of understanding within both fields of knowledge. Both have the ability to provide transformative world views as shown to great effect in Balog’s documentary. The presentation of explanation is an art form in itself, with scientists often calling upon visual language like ‘beautiful’ and ‘elegant’ to describe their theories, providing a new meaning for both words. In particular in Chasing Ice as the world’s icecaps are continually reclaimed by the sea, the changes in the earth’s structure are seen to be paradoxical, both beautiful and catastrophic, at once. If experience is compounded of feeling and thought, Chasing Ice in the presentation of the epic demise of these great glaciers evokes intense reactions from both. It galvanises the complexity and the mystery of the natural world, delivered through a faith in the poetry of the image and the solid fact of the natural sciences. The manner in which both fields explore the elements of potential and uncertainty is captured so fantastically in these images.

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According to Naum Gabo, both the scientist and the artist are “prompted by the same creative urge to find a perceptible image of the hidden forces in nature of which they are both aware”. To my mind, one of the greatest examples of this drive is the geographer, mapmaker and artist, Tim Robinson. Robinson, a successful abstract painter in the 1960 s, along with a career teaching at Cambridge escaped his academic and creative life in London upon discovering a physically unmapped territory in the west coast of Ireland. The eerie landscape of Connemara, a vast and almost barren valley carved from ice, had captured both the logical and the imaginative within the scientist who fused this intrigue within one extra-ordinary endeavour: to walk the complete landmass of the region of Connemara to create a hand drawn map. Like many whom had gone before him, from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Robert McFarlane, this part of the world at the very edge of Europe, with its ‘last pool of darkness’ has in fact bewitched many the great mind—and for Robinson, getting to know this land forged in erosive limestone has been a life-long commitment to both myth and the natural sciences. An English speaker in a largely Gaelic speaking region, Robinson, in an effort to really deconstruct the landscape, learned the language—a process of both demythologizing and discovery. He now speaks in a manner that almost mirrors his experience of life in the region; it is a soft Yorkshire accent with vowels strengthened and deepened by the tough physical reality of life on the North Atlantic coastline. Travelling everyday by boat from the Aran Islands off the tip of Galway, inland, Robinson walked the landmass of Connemara drawing with a pen on paper, in sunshine and in rain, the inlets and peninsula, to create the first accurate maps of the region. Within them, Robinson discovered the origin of place names buried deep within the oral history of the region which would have been lost irretrievably without him. These are important names and these are important histories forged between the people and their land. This collision between the scientific and the artist found in the mind of the one man has preserved, as James Belong in Chasing Ice claims, ‘ the memory of a landscape’.

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To me, both men demonstrate a similar commitment to the ‘beauty’ of nature bound both to the term’s qualification in science and in art, capturing with an intense elegance the tumult of a changing environment.

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;Can the maker repair what he makes?â&#x20AC;? - Ba

From the myth of the Tower of Babel onwards, together have been struck down by difficult we design and construct for our needs start t had envisioned. Or they may reveal to us dark never before vocalised. A wish to contain oth

Throughout this chapter we explore archetyp metropolis, the industrial- where close proxim isolated from a shared humanity. These are si ourselves frustrate the freedom of those forc

In what ways can we come to terms with creat structures take on a malevolent life of their alien to us. Through fragmented structures that do not conform to our understanding of w creation more broadly- explores new forms of in on themselves.

atty, Blade Runner

, constructions designed to bring a civilisation ty, difference and diversity. The environments to behave in a manner different to the way we ker elements of the human condition that were ers, isolate them away from our sight.

pical built environments- the institution, the mity to others can paradoxically make one more ituations where the environment designed for ced into the space.

tions that have grown beyond our control? The own and develop a nature that is profoundly and monstrous representations of sentience what is ‘natural’, ‘felt’ or ‘real’; film- and artistic f expression that turns the built environments

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WHATEVER WORKS: THE ERASERHEAD SOUNDTRACK text by OMID BAGHERLI images by SILENE KASUDA, PHILIP CERVI, COLIN J CLARKE, EDWARD DOWSETT, J.P. EVERETT, DAVID FARRENY, CAROLINE POCHOY and VACLAV SKYVAL

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In late August 2012, the young music record label Sacred Bones ran a small Deluxe reissue run of the original sound track to David Lynch’s 1977 cult film Eraserhead. The deluxe issue included a 16-page booklet, three 11” x 11” prints, and a limited-edition Peter Ivers 7-inch, featuring “In Heaven” on the A-side and “Pete’s Boogie” as a B-side. Given the film and Lynch’s iconic status amongst alternative and online culture, its release caused a buzz of approval amongst online music sites, blogs and forums and the 1500 copies sold out with considerable ease. The reissue was always going to be a safe bet as a business venture for Sacred Bones, but is there an aspect to this release that makes it feel timely or specifically appropriate right now?

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The film is sumptuously described by the label as ‘a narrative made up of two intertwined veins: one of bleak and beautiful pictures elegantly painted in gray and black; and one of blankets of sublime, enveloping noise and static, the tinkering of Fats Waller organ rolls echoing in the background.’ As far as the label is concerned, then, the sound comprises half of the film’s art. In fact, Lynch himself has voiced a similar viewpoint as well. It was made by Lynch and sound designer Alan Splet whilst shooting the film’s visuals and its development extended a year into the film’s editing and production, which itself was delayed indefinitely due to funding issues. As the director’s first feature length film, it certainly sets a tone that is carried out in later works and it is easy to hear a few trademark touches in the soundtrack which appear in later in Lynch’s iconic works and serves as an interesting retrospective listen. Most noticeable is Eraserhead’s use of the song ‘In Heaven’ as a counterweight of beauty and escape against what is mainly indefinable, ominous noise. A female voices cooes her refrain ‘In heaven, everything is fine. You’ve got yours, and I’ve got mine’ over a church organ’s chords, mildly crumpled much like the crackle of a well worn-worn vinyl record. Its repetition throughout the film is positively transcendental and presents a glimmer of hope that seems both unfounded but also dependant on the strange and absurd living environment of the characters. This hypnotic motif is also employed in Blue Velvet, and in the lullaby charm of Angelo Badalamenti’s pop ambient compositions in Twin Peaks. The re-release is actually a faithful replication of all the sounds contained in the film, and not just its music. It walks a fine line between a conventional soundtrack (one word- generally to be considered the film’s musical score) and the audio shadow that the film casts upon the viewer. The notion of diegetic sound (the sound the viewer attributes to what the characters on screen cause and experience in their reality) and non-diegetic sound (aspects such as ‘pit music’ and narration, exclusive to the viewer) is more or less ignored by the film. The sound track makes little effort to distinguish a separate reality between the viewer and the onscreen characters. Hums, drones, clinks of Lynch’s world contribute to what has often been described by critics as a ‘post-apocalyptic industrial landscape’ (whatever that may mean). Curiously, this landscape is suggested more by the sound and never really witnessed by the eye. The viewer follows Henry without visual portrayals

of the desolate landscape. Instead, we are treated to depictions of cramped and decrepit living spaces, and surreal imagery of outer space and volcano worlds, detached from the narrative of Henry. Instead, the manufacturing ghost-world outside intrudes upon scenes by constant noise. Where is that vacuum sound coming from? Is it just the wind blowing outside? Or does it represent a darker palette of emotions felt by Henry that reflects the barren wastelands of his life and prospects? The factory is a monster outside, a wolf puffing at the door, its presence so frightening that the characters dare not look out and accept their situation. In this way, it is easy to understand why Lynch and Sacred Bones both postulate that the sound is doing half of the work of the film. The presence of the sinister hisses pass somewhere between diegetic sound, background ambience, and the film’s music. It creates an intense environment where the repressed Henry is bewildered in a constant, slow grinding manner. When asked by his mother-inlaw where he works, Henry tentatively responds that he is ‘on vacation’. The reply is ignored and it is taken for granted that Henry is a factory worker and Henry resumes his day-to-day living. It is all work and no play. Confusion and bewilderment rule the day and the problems of industry seep through. Henry is one of many that labour in the factory, but there is no indication for what purpose the workforce or the factory runs for, it has just always been this way. By refusing to allocate between ‘heard’ sound and a ‘felt’ sound (that may express the feelings of the characters) Eraserhead presents a new type of reality that is so fragmented and distorted by its constant exposure to industry and manufactured production that the human experience has become repressed, desensitised, absurd and surreal. It is a realism that refuses to fold into traditional narrative forms and denies a coherent reading from the viewer. But the question remains whether there is an audience willing to sit and listen to soundtrack removed from its visual cues. Throughout the course of Eraserhead it becomes abundantly clear that this is a creative work that does not strive to make sense and so it seems perfectly legitimate to divorce the soundtrack from the film in this context. Confusion is a strategy that fans of alternative culture in the 21st century are all too familiar withembracing noise and static as a form of non-compliance to conventional attitudes up to the point it has developed into a 150

recognisable aesthetic in itself. There are large communities of music lovers who appreciate the beauty of found sounds. There are sound artists who either, such as in the work of the Caretaker and Grouper, find the process of recording and experimentation as important as melody to the atmosphere of their music, or other experimenters who believe that noise is capable of producing a profound enough emotion or thought that melody or harmony is not required at all. This is why a small label like Sacred Bones, who otherwise releases contemporary punk and experimental rock records, can produce a deluxe vinyl package- a real collector’s item- of noise and generate a profit. There is now an established culture, with sub-groups, communities and histories that will treasure this release as a piece of the canon. After many years of toiling and clinking away in the background, The Eraserhead soundtrack has found its home.

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Disney Massacre by NEAL FOX

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Proximity Warning by MASOVAIDA SALEMO MORGAN

‘So, Miranda, why do you think you need to be here?’

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‘It was Dr. Lewis’s idea.’ ‘You don’t think you need help?’ Randi looked up from her cuticles and over to her mother, who sat in the mauve leather chair next to her, focused intently on the framed photo of the little girl on the intake counselor’s desk.

had no desire to be present for. ‘Miranda, please, don’t make this harder than it already is.’ ‘Mom, your wailing is the only thing that’s making this hard. Can we get through this so she can leave?’ ‘Mrs. Martinez, can you tell me a little more about what happened before you decided to come here?’ asked the counselor.

‘I guess being here could help . . . Dr. Lewis said that if I came, I wouldn’t have to worry about work or school . . . or her,’ she replied, her gaze still locked on her mother.

‘Yes—I stopped by Miranda’s apartment yesterday and the door was unlocked. I had been calling all morning and got no answer. She wasn’t at school or at work—’

‘No, she needs to be here because she almost took her own life,’ said Hiroko, looking up from the photograph as her chin began to tremble. ‘No mother should have to find her baby like that,’ she said with a gulp. ‘She’s all I have left, and she tried to leave me. She needs help.’

‘Typical, you would hunt me down for not picking up the phone. Maybe I just didn’t feel like hearing your shit, mother.’

‘Of course, she makes it about her. If being here means I don’t have to listen to her squawk about my shit, which has nothing to do with her, then yeah—I definitely need to be here.’ Randi was still in a stupor from the four Vicodin she took before they left Chapel Hill. A six-hour car ride with her mother was something she

‘Miranda, please . . . I let myself in and called out her name several times. She didn’t say anything, but her keys and her purse were on the table. I had a bad feeling all morning . . . I went into the bedroom and she wasn’t there. She wouldn’t answer when I called. Then I went into the bathroom and found her in the tub. She was just laying there, water up to her nostrils. I didn’t think she was breathing—I panicked and ran over and shook her. Then she opened her eyes.’ ‘I was taking a bath.’ 158

‘No, she was so drugged up,’ said Hiroko. One by one, tears cascaded down her smooth, flushed cheeks. ‘She won’t stop with these pills and the drinking and smoking. I think she’s an addict.’ ‘What do you think about what your mother just said, Miranda?’ asked the counselor. ‘I think I’m sick of what she thinks. I’m sick of everything, really. School sucks, work sucks, she sucks, I really just don’t see the point in any of it.’ ‘Miranda, would you say you’re suicidal?’ ‘Well, I mean, it’s not like I want to die. I didn’t want to kill myself, really. But I just don’t see the point of living. I don’t know, I don’t know what I’m doing here.’ ‘You don’t know why you’re here— here at The Ridgewood Institute?’ ‘No, here, as in here, in the world. I can’t find a reason for my existence. It’s like there aren’t any clear-cut instructions on what the hell it is I’m supposed to be doing.’ ‘She was supposed to get an education, and get a job and get married, all the things normal people do,’ said Hiroko. ‘But instead she takes drugs, runs about town with these people who only care about themselves. She can’t keep

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friends or boyfriends. She was so full of promise. Her father and I, we wanted so much for her. We came to America to raise her and give her the very best. But since he died, she’s just been—’ ‘J esus fuckin’ Christ, mother! This is why I’m like this—all of your silly expectations and the way you think shit’s supposed to be. No wonder I want to fucking kill myself.’ ‘I just don’t know what to do with her anymore. I’m all alone and she needs help so badly.’ Hiroko buckled over onto the mahogany desk and wept. The counselor handed her the blue striped tissue box from the corner of the desk. Randi retreated to her cuticles. ***

Once she was let in through two sets of locked double-glass doors, Randi scanned the room for a place to sit. Her head still felt light from the pills, but her skin felt like it was filled with bricks. She sank into one of the cushioned chairs in the middle of the main lounge. Behind her was a large, open-aired nurse’s station with a split-level floor at the front of it, which contained more chairs and benches. Randi gazed around at the people in the ward. ‘I picked a busy day to lose it,’ she thought. There were all kinds of people all over the place, some around her age, but several of them were older. They buzzed around, hyped by something she couldn’t grasp. Their conversations were crashing into one another, and all Randi could make out was white noise. She closed her eyes and let her head fall slowly onto the back of the chair. The messy bun her long, thick black hair had been tied into was starting to come loose around her face. She opened her eyes and her gaze drifted to the high vaulted ceiling, where she counted 4 dark

‘I can guess your age, approximately. Weight, too.’

Randi peeled herself out of the easy chair and tromped in the direction of the doors. Her dirty wool boots dragged along the carpet. The stretched-out, faded black yoga pants and holey pink t-shirt she wore were not enough to keep her warm in the late November weather. She stopped at the nurse’s station.

‘Um, alright.’

‘Um, where can I find my things?

‘You’re about 21. Maybe 22. Am I right?’

‘What’s your name?’

‘I bet I can guess exactly how old you are.’ ‘Huh?’

‘Yeah, 22. Just turned, last week.’ ‘See, I knew. And you weigh about 119.’ ‘Yeah, uh, wow. Good eye,’ she replied as he sauntered away. Randi shifted her weight in the chair, sliding her right leg underneath her and pulling the left into her chest to rest her chin on. The man was dead on about her weight. She barely noticed over the last year that 30 pounds slid off her 5’9” frame, and was surprised that she could hold herself all balled up in the chair like that without a limb flailing. She always felt awkward about her height. It seemed a fluke that she would end up so tall. She hovered over her tiny Japanese mother, and from what she could remember, her father was only about 5’8”, perhaps average for a Chilean man. The pills were beginning to wear off. Randi could feel the edge creeping back and as she glanced around the room, her eyes widened at all the activity going on around her. She had managed to keep her high going for a couple of days, but now reality was beginning to sink in. Her throat dried up when she realized where she was. Even though she couldn’t stand her mother, she longed to see her again. Visiting hours weren’t until Wednesday and it was only Monday. ‘Maybe I’ll just sleep until then,’ she thought. Along the left side of the nurse’s station was a hallway that ended at a set of glass doors. Near the doors hung a bell, which was being rung by a young nurse. ‘Smoke breeaaakk,’ she shrieked. Seemingly all at once, patients rose from their seats and charged like a band of disobedient horses to the doors in chatter. 159

‘Miranda Martinez. Everyone calls me Randi.’ The nurse shuffled through files on the counter. ‘Alright, Randi. You’re in room 25. Go down the hall right here, towards the patio. 25 is on the right. If they’ve finished searching your bags, your things should already be in there.’ ‘Searching my bags? What for?’ ‘There are certain things you can’t have here, for safety reasons.’ Randi found the room and saw that her green gym bag and black tote were nowhere to be found. Instead, there were 4 brown paper sacks that contained her belongings. She dumped the bags out onto the bed. The laces had been removed from her black Converse sneakers. The drawstrings from her hoodie and pajama pants had been cut out. She packed several long beaded necklaces and all of them were gone, as was her curling iron. The razor she packed was missing from her makeup bag. ‘What the fuck kind of Interrupted bullshit is this?’

Girl,

She grabbed her peacoat from the pile on the bed slid it on as she walked out the door, checking the pocket for her soft-pack of Parliament Lights. When she got to the end of the hallway, she pushed the door to the patio open and was greeted by a cloud of smoke. Randi had to make an effort to keep her balance as she maneuvered her way through the other patients, who had arranged themselves in several huddles. Some sat on the built-in benches that lined the deck while others stood around.

PROXIMITY WARN IN G

Relieved of her mother’s presence, Randi felt her shoulders relax a little. The intake counselor said that a bed had become available in “Cottage C,” the adult mental and detox ward. The Ridgewood Institute campus covered several acres in North Atlanta, so two guards and a nurse escorted her from intake to Cottage C by golf cart.

wooden beams before she felt a man cruise by her on the left.

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She attempted to stay standing, but after taking a look around, Randi felt her knees starting to give. She made her way to the end of the deck and sat on the long bench. She pulled the pack of Parliaments out of her coat pocket, flipped it over and knocked it against the palm of her hand to shake a few loose. She held the pack up to her mouth and pulled one from it with her lips.

shoes.

Vines of wisteria were entangled in the lattice that covered the deck. When she looked up through it, the stars were barely visible from the bright city lights only 15 miles away. Conversations were inair collisions around her, but she grasped to follow bits and pieces.

‘Anything that gets the job done, eh? Haha,’ Betsey chuckled.

‘Derek, my husband, he’s just so fucking fantastic. I mean, how many times have I been back here? I mean, time and time again. And can you believe he’s still with me?’

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‘You got a good man, honey. Don’t you let that one get away.’ ‘I know, I love him like, sooo much. He’s too good to me, you know? And I just keep fucking up.’ Randi’s left eyebrow involuntarily shifted upward. Hearing about other people’s relationships always made her cringe. What Hiroko told the intake counselor was true—Randi had never been able to keep a boyfriend for more than a couple of months. Even though she was only 22, she was still the only one of everyone she knew who had never sustained anything long-term. ‘Smoke break’s over, bring it in, folks,’ called the nurse. Randi dropped her burning cigarette between the deck’s planks as she rose. Patients filed in through the door and dispersed to different rooms. Randi went back to hers. She saw a plump woman in her mid-thirties sitting on the bed against the wall. Her blonde hair hung in greasy chunks around her pockmarked face, and she had deep brown circles under her blue, bloodshot eyes. She was dressed in a purple sweat suit and wore Reebok high tops that were probably white to begin with, but were now a dingy grey. The first thing Randi usually noticed about anyone was their

‘Hey, I’m Betsey, your roommate. Just got here a few minutes ago,’ the woman said, with a Georgia twang. ‘Hi. I’m Randi. Today’s my first day, too.’ ‘What you in for?’ ‘Uh, well . . . ’

‘Hah. Yeah. That, and I kind of hate myself and want to die,’ Randi replied with a half-smile. She collected the pile of clothes off the mattress and shoved them into the built-in drawers at the bottom of the bed. ‘You suicidal?’ Betsey asked. ‘I’ve been asked that a lot today. You know, I don’t know . . . I guess, maybe. That’s what they’ve been saying. How about you?’ ‘Oh, you know, crack, mostly. Lately, anyway.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘You ever tried it?’

‘I’m going to get someone for you, ok?’ Randi crossed the hall to the nurse’s station. ‘Um, excuse me . . . my roommate isn’t doing so well, I think she needs help.’ ‘Alright, just hang on here, we’ll let you know when you can go back in.’ Randi walked down the stairs onto the split-level floor in front of the nurse’s station and curled up in one of the easy chairs. She looked up along the wall on the main floor and saw that each of the chairs that were there before were reclined into little beds. Each one was occupied with a sleeping patient. ‘Randi, you can go back to your room now,’ the nurse called from the station. Randi headed back to the room to find Betsey sleeping soundly. She climbed back onto the hard rubber mattress and drifted back to sleep. ‘Miranda, wake up please.’ Randi rolled over and opened her eyes to find two large men hovering over her bed. ‘Wake up, come with us, please.’

‘Yeah. Well, good luck, I guess.’

She slid off the bed and her feet landed in her woolen boots. ‘This way,’ said one of the men. As she followed him out the door, the other man picked up the cheap mattress from the bed and dragged it out the door behind him.

‘Yeah. I’m gon’ try’n get some sleep.’

‘Where am I going?’ Randi asked.

‘Goodnight. Nice meeting you.’

The man with the mattress dragged it across the hall and dropped it alongside the base of the nurse’s station. ‘You’re on a suicide watch,’ the other man said.

‘Nah.’ ‘Well, I pray you don’t. That shit really is the devil.’

‘You too.’ *** Randi was startled awake by the sound of dry heaving. She rolled over and saw a trembling mass under a white blanket in the bed next to hers, a mess of blonde hair pouring out of the top. ‘Oh gosh, Betsey, are you alright?’ Randi hopped out of her bed and inched towards Betsey’s, scared of what she might see. She had never seen anybody detox before. ‘Do you want me to get someone?’ Betsey rolled from her side to her back. She didn’t respond. Her eyeballs rolled into the back of her head. 160

A nurse with a nametag that said Susan came out from behind the counter. ‘Hi, you must be Miranda,’ she said. ‘Um, yeah. You can call me Randi.’ ‘Alright. Randi, you’re going to sleep right here tonight.’ ‘What for?’ ‘You’re on what we call a suicide watch.’ ‘What the hell does that mean?’ ‘Well,

during

your

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assessment there were some indications that you had intended or attempted to harm yourself. That means that while you’re here, we’ve got to keep a close watch on you, that’s all. All the beds in the common area are full, so we’ll just put yours here.’ Randi knelt down and slid onto the mattress. ‘Can I at least get an extra pillow?’ she asked. ‘Sure.’ Susan left to retrieve a pillow, but by the time she returned, Randi was facedown and sound asleep. *** ‘Miranda, time to get up. Vitals.’ Randi opened one eye and saw a figure hovering over her. ‘What?’ ‘Vitals. Rise and shine, girl. Come on down here with me.’

‘I’m Michael. I’m just going to check your blood pressure and your temperature.’ Michael had bleached blonde hair and wore hazel contact lenses, both of which popped against his bright, brown skin. He wore diamond studs in each ear and had a ring through the cartilage on the right one. His Dior sweater indicated impeccable taste, particularly for a mental hospital nurse’s assistant. ‘Alright, Michael. Any clue when I’ll get outta here?’ ‘You just got here, didn’t you?’ ‘Last night.’ ‘Hah. Girl, you ain’t goin’ anywhere anytime soon. Except breakfast. We take everyone down to the cafeteria at 8.’ ‘What time is it now?’ ‘6.’ ‘So what do I do until then?’ ‘Sit.

Sleep.

Shower.

You

got

‘Hah.’ The morning smoke break bell rang as Michael ripped the blood pressure cuff off Randi’s arm. ‘See you later, girl. Don’t worry, you’ll be outta here in no time. I seen cases way worse than yours.’ Randi walked past the nurse’s station on the way to the patio and grabbed the blanket off her mattress and wrapped it around her shoulders. She stopped in her room, where Betsey was still sleeping, and grabbed her cigarettes off the nightstand. As she walked out the door of the room, she nearly collided into a guy on his way to the patio. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. He stopped and turned to look at her. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Uh, yeah, hi. Sorry about that.’ ‘Uh, yeah.’ Randi rolled her eyes and walked past him toward the patio door. ‘Great, everyone here is crazy and rude,’ she thought. She pushed the door open and was again greeted by a gust of cigarette smoke that lingered in the cool, damp, Georgia morning air. She walked to the end of the deck to where she sat last night. This time, her balance was a little steadier. She flipped her pack over, shook it, and pulled out a smoke with her lips. When she looked up, the guy she almost ran into in the hallway was standing in front of her. He pulled out a tarnished brass Zippo lighter, flipped open the lid, and struck it. ‘Thanks,’ Randi said while she steadied his large hand with hers and stuck the end of her cigarette into the flame. He didn’t respond— he just stared at her. Randi looked down at his feet. He wore beat up brown boat shoes with burgundy argyle socks. Her eyes drifted up past his wrinkled khakis and his grey fleece pullover. She was usually hesitant to look into strangers’ eyes, but she looked into his. They were light brown and had 161

a slight drug-induced glassiness about them; still, she sensed a hint of softness and depth in them. ‘Who are you?’ ‘Peter.’ ‘I’m Randi.’ ‘Why are you here?’ ‘I love pills and I hate myself. You?’ ‘Sometimes I hear voices.’ ‘Who’s talking?’ ‘This old man.’ ‘Does he have anything good to say?’ ‘Not usually,’ Peter said as he sat on the bench to the right of her. ‘He’s more annoying than anything else. Remember when you were a kid, how sometimes someone would copy you? Repeat everything you said? That’s kinda what happens.’ ‘Wow.’ ‘Not really. I’ve been here before. They adjust my meds then he usually leaves. I think maybe he just naps for a while.’ ‘Haha. Does he tell you his name?’ ‘Excuse me, you two,’ the nurse interrupted from the door. ‘Proximity warning, y’all gotta separate.’ Randi pulled a drag from her Parliament as she rolled her eyes. ‘What?’ ‘Guys with guys and girls with girls. No one-on-one. That’s the rule. Plus, smoke break’s over.’ The two stood and flicked their cigarettes away. His hit the wall, hers slipped through the planks. ‘Later on,’ he said, looking down at her. ‘Yeah, catch you later.’ She looked back up at him. He stood about 6’3”, and she found it refreshing to have to look up to someone for a change. Before she walked away, she glanced into his eyes again. They were still glassy, but now seemed warmer and wider than they did before.

PROXIMITY WARN IN G

She rolled off the mattress and climbed to her feet. She fell asleep before taking off her boots and the holey pink t-shirt had gotten tucked into her bra while she slept. Her pants legs were pushed up around her knees. She fumbled to straighten her clothes as she followed the vitals guy to the center of the room.

unlimited options in this place, baby.’

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:: 1 I TOO HOPE TO HAVE LIVED NO.1 :: 2UNSTABLE PACK :: 3 IN THE WEST :: 4 NO EXISTENCE DEPENDS :: 5 SPECIAL MAN SPECIAL WOMAN NO.4 :: 6 BROKEN DREAM

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THE CRISIS OF INFINITE JAILS: SURVIVING CARANDIRU ETC. text by CHRISTOPHER REY PÉREZ illustrations by SILENE KASUDA

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Perhaps more important than defining what is a jail or what it means to be jailed, we must decide what to do in one. The deciding is itself a form of survival that breaks from the Sisyphean immobility of trying to understand our confinement.

The Martinican poet Édouard Glissant writes, “(...) when identity is determined by a root, the emigrant is condemned to being split and flattened,” and maybe this idea extends to how we develop a relationship to freedom. In the film Carandiru, several characters progress a narrative that takes on ethical consciousness primarily from the memories of these characters who had lives outside jail. But because their memories drive their relational decisions concerning freedom and confinement, it doesn’t mean they live in those memories.

When I called the NGO Addameer to request information about one of my students the IDF jailed, I found out he had been deported. As a Palestinian with a U.S. passport, he didn’t have the right I.D. that gives him the freedom to remain jailed in his homeland. I think back on that handkerchief and realize it’s lost and probably among other objects. There is making and there is what’s made. The making is very much like deciding.

I imagine a line with two polar ends: one marked “love” and the other “fear.” Somewhere on this line is the root that gives shape to our jails though the articulation of this line into points flattens what we say, do, think, and believe.

In the same essay, Glissant writes, “Root identity is founded in the distant past in a vision, a myth of the creation of the world,” and maybe this relates to the object. The object is a memory with a weight, and its value is ethical while relating to it, making and re-making it, is ontological.

When I was a child, one of my uncles sent me gifts from jail. I once received a handkerchief he had painted. On it there’s a man, a woman, a red convertible and a brick wall, and at the time, I didn’t understand this was part of his memory.

When I sleep, I can be much more of myself. Even without dreaming, the simplicity and rest of sleep is enough to let me move away from the line. My memories become water and I float over them.

I remember fracturing my fist after punching a parked car. Surviving along the line of fear and love requires hibernating until the brief moment the emigrant wakes to wander. In fact, I make most of my decisions while sleeping.

I remember a bus blowing up by my apartment. This was during Operation Pillar of Defense, when I began to look at bags differently. Each time I passed Shaul Hamelech Street, my heart beat faster and this was a result of fear but also a form of surviving.

And no two jails are alike. I wonder what it’s like to be incarcerated by the state. Overcrowded Carandiru housed over 8,000 inmates. In 1992, the Polícia Militar do Estado de São Paulo killed 111 prisoners. This is known as the Carandiru massacre.

There are many objects in jail. Jail has more objects than people.

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05 02 11

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TH E CRIS IS OF IN FIN ITE JAILS : S URV IV IN G CARAN DIRU E TC.

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01 A JAIL MAP Take this. Take this, my friend. Take this map. Take this jail. Take each line and curve and object. Cartography is a type of sugar.

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03 A PIPE MADE OUT OF A METAL STRAW AND AN OLIVE SEED Look at it as if looking at sculpture. The smoke tastes like brine. You bite your inner cheek. A song: RHYTHM OF THE NIGHT (Corona). CLAIR DE LUNE (Debussy). FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (Giorgio Moroder). Then a poem: 69 FRANGO ASSADO É? (DJ Thiago).

02 A KNIFE MADE OUT OF WINDOW METALS To cut, to stab, to slice, to open. The way windows should open. Like when Highness opens his story. Without his knife, he can’t even enter his name.

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04 A BIBLE WITH A GUN WITHIN IT An Uzi, no. But a Beretta 635, maybe. And upon removing each page, a subtle result forms much like the one that formed in the scriptoriums. The monk remembers words then paper, pen, hand, arm, heart, space.

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05 A BLOND WIG, HIGH HEELS, A SKIRT AND A BRA Naturally, you put on the wig. Now no one sees you. So if you put on the skirt, high heels, and bra will you fit through the tunnel? Only if the skirt is made of linen and the bra, cotton. The high heels make real the chase.

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07 A TATTOO MACHINE MADE OUT OF A BIC PEN AND A VENTILATOR MOTOR The Satanic Sect writes, MEU DEUS A BEATING HEART. The kitchen, LOVE IS IN MY VISITOR. All of this permanent with the secret in the motor. Whenever you switch wards, you underline, SCRIPTURE LAUGHING BIRDS.

09 A MINI ALTAR WITH A FAKE BOTTOM TO CARRY DRUGS There are many questions to ask. Like which drugs and which god? Macunaíma would choose Vei. You pick LSD. Drops on wafer. That way, after the hymns, there’s always something to eat.

06 A BARBELL MADE OUT OF CONCRETE The utility’s in the blurred repetition of flesh to concrete, body to environment. Eventually, the movement becomes its own architecture. This is how Dagger finds religion. He’s imprisoned.

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10 A CELLPHONE INSIDE BREAD When Jesus and his disciples parted bread, they expanded the scope of their fraternity but phones are used to explode things too. It’s this form of communication that’s called terrorism. It implicates the development of an enemy even if an enemy will never touch someone else’s food.

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08 CARDS MADE OUT OF CIGARETTE PACKS When the cigarettes are gone, two types of survivors form. Those who enjoy games and those who enjoy creating the conditions for games.

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11 A GRENADE MADE OUT OF STYROFOAM This is much better than the domino knife, the paper airplanes and all the trompe l’oeil of year one. Appearance proves banal and so violence turns to the real. Then the possibilities for freedom come. You’re on stage. You will have to risk the grenade but that’s okay.

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13 RED CANDLES Green is for Amazonas and avocados and angels. Blue is for memory and the P.C.C. and drag. Yellow is for anemia. Green yellow for bludgeons and tests. Grey the baseball cap outside Carandiru you wear in the dream from which Deusdete wakes you. Red for second helpings and forgiveness. For conquest. For fantasy and the anabasis of love.

12 A BIG ROPE Christmas day and everyone’s let onto the soccer field. Rita Cadillac wears a high cut thong. It’s summer in São Paulo. Now’s the time to use the rope.

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14 A SKULL is not useful at all. In fact, wrap it in sackcloth and leave it in ward 6. A skull smells like caterpillars. A skull doesn’t orgasm. It doesn’t even have eyes, ears or a brain. A skull has holes.

FILM LIST

BODY 28 DAYS LATER. DANNY BOYLE (2002). A WALK THROUGH WOODA. CHIARA AMBROSIO (2012). GHOSTBUSTERS. IVAN REITMAN (1984). RUBBER JOHNNY. CHRIS CUNNINGHAM (2005). THE MIRROR. ANDREI TARKOVSKY (1975). THE THIN RED LINE. TERRENCE MALICK (1998).

ATMOSPHERE 11’09’’01. ALEJANDRO GONZÁLEZ IÑÁRRITU (2002). A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE. JOHN CASSAVETES (1974). BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO. PETER STRICKLAND (2012). LOS OLVIDADOS. LUIS BUÑUEL (1950). TRAFIC. JACQUES TATI (1971).

NATURE CHASING ICE. JEFF ORLOWSKI (2012). LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. DAVID LEAN (1962). RED DESERT. MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI (1964). THE BIG BLUE. LUC BESSON (1988). THE DARK SIDE OF THE LENS. MICKEY SMITH (2010). THE ICE STORM. ANG LEE (1997). THE WOMAN IN THE DUNES. HIROSHI TESHIGAHARA (1964). WAY OF THE OCEAN. MATT KLEINER (2011).

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BLOODY MEMORIES, VBS (2009) CARANDIRU, HECTOR BABENCO (2003) EL TOPO. ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY (1970). ERASERHEAD. DAVID LYNCH (1977). GIRL, INTERRUPTED. JAMES MANGOLD (1999). HOLY SPIRITS: MOTION COLLAGES. NATHANIEL WHITCOMB (2010).

NAUTICAL BOOKLET SCIENCE IS FICTION: 23 FILMS BY JEAN PAINLEVÉ. JEAN PAINLEVÉ (2009). THE BEACH. DANNY BOYLE (2000). THE KNIFE IN THE WATER. ROMAN POLANSKI (1962). THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU. WES ANDERSON (2004). THE SILENT WORLD. JEAN-JACQUES COUSTEAU & LOUIS MALLE (1956).

CREDITS ALL OF

BRUTAL ISSUE 001’S CONTENT IS PUBLISHED WITH PERMISSION.

NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED IN WHOLE OR PART WITHOUT PERMISSION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. OUR INTERVIEWEES, COLLABORATORS AND CONTRIBUTORS ARE CITED IN THEIR RELEVANT FEATURES. THE ADDITIONAL CREDITS ARE AS FOLLOW

BODY

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P. 20 - 31 A WALK THROUGH WOODA SKETCHES: THE MAP, THE HOUSE OF LUCK, THE SUNKEN ROOM, THE TANGLED TREE, THE ORCHARD MAN. STILLS FROM A WALK THROUGH WOODA © 2012 CHIARA AMBROSIO ALL USED WITH THE PERMISSION OF CHIARA AMBROSIO

P. 146 - 151 COLLAGES’ CONTRIBUTIONS: BRUTAL6. EDWARD DOWSETT (2008) INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPES. VACLAV SKYVAL (2011 SKYSCRAPERS. J.P. EVERETT (2011) INDUSTRIAL FRAGMENTS. PHILIP CERVI (1993) INDUSTRIAL ABSTRACTS. COLIN J CLARKE (2011) WHITE STUDY. SILENE KASSUDA, MIXED MEDIA (2013 BLUE STUDY. SILENE KASSUDA, MIXED MEDIA (2013 ABANDONED STRUCTURES. VACLAV SKYVAL (2011) III.2010. DAVID FARRENY (2010) INDUSTRIAL. CAROLINE POCHOY (2011)

ATMOSPHERE P. 52 - 65 STILLS FROM LOS OLVIDADOS, BY LUIS BUÑUEL (1950) PICTURES: THE AFTERMATH IN PALESTINE © 2002 LARRY TOWELL P. 82 - 87 BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO © 2012 PETER STRICKLAND COURTESY WARP FILMS

NATURE P. 92 - 97 LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (DIALOGUE EXCERPT) © 1962 DAVID LEAN P. 98 - 107 THE WOMAN IN THE DUNES BY KOBO ABÉ (ENGLISH TRANSLATION,1964) EXCERPT PUBLISHED WITH PERMISSION OF RANDOM HOUSE INC ILLUSTRATIONS FROM ABHANDLUNGEN VON INSECTEN (1760-1770) BY JACOB CHRISTIAN SCHÄFFER. © OPEN SOURCE BIBLI ODYSSEY P. 116 - 135 STILLS FROM THE DARK SIDE OF THE LENS © 2010 MICKEY SMITH P. 136 - 141 PHOTOS OF EXTREME ICE SURVEY © 2007 JAMES BALOG COURTESY OF JAMES BALOG

P. 156 - 157 DISNEY MASSACRE © 2012 NEAL FOX COURTESY OF NEALFOX P. 162 - 173 I TOO HOPE TO HAVE LIVED UNSTABLE PACK IN THE WEST NO EXISTENCE DEPENDS SPECIAL MAN SPECIAL WOMAN BROKEN DREAM © 2013 NATHANIEL WHITCOMB COURTESY OF NATHANIEL WHITCOMB

NAUTICAL BOOKLET IMAGES THE CEPHALOPODA PART I: OEGOPSIDA PART II: MYOPSIDA, OCTOPODA ATLAS (1910) BY CARL CHUN. © OPEN SOURCE BIBLI ODYSSEY QUOTES AMAZING GRACE BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC ETERNAL FATHER, STRONG TO SAVE NEARER, MY GOD, TO THEE © CYBER HYMNAL