on a lost weekend
in late febuary
i followed you into
a field overgrown with
brambles and prickers
they stuck into the denim
of my jeans
as teeth to skin
getting caught
underneath the fabric
i walked further
trying to evade the
stretching growth
i just wanted to reach the
electric tower
where you stood
in the cold air
Hot Nick was more like a nickname attached to him for ironic purposes rather then real ones. His moniker should have been Sleazy Nick, Dirty Nick, or I’ll give you that coke for free if you let me do a line off your ass Nick. He was pretty good for that. I had known Nick through a friend of mine who never left town. She was more of a parasite than a friend. We drove up there on a bone chilling December evening because she wanted to get high. It was the week before Christmas if memory serves correctly. But look, my memory is pretty fucked at the moment. Everything is interwoven with itself.
He told me that night that he loved me and that he couldn’t imagine being without me. All I could stare at was the half empty wine glass in front off me and slowly blink. I stared through the glass at the picture created backwards from the liquid. It was distorted and round.
Vern, hey, are you listening? I am sure that at that moment my face became twisted. It was in response to him referring to me as Vern. He knew that I hated that. My mother’s voice always popped into my head. It was echoing in my head when it came to the next part. I felt as if half of the dinner would come up. The chocolate cake had been too rich, and the wine put me in a haze*. It was in a flash of a magic trick and some kind of foil flame (look that up). His slight of hand produced a box from nowhere. By this time I was choking on something. It was hallucinogenic. The room had become what I pictured in the glass and the sound was turned down and then flooded with water.
I want you to know…
And then there it was. He had revealed the contents of which I pretended to look at with close scrutiny. It was a beautiful setting. He must have spent some money that I didn’t know he had. Later I was to find out that it was his dead mothers’. It didn’t take long for his frustration to grow.
I sat there silent and I wasn’t even sure if I could have closed my mouth.
Excuse me. I have to go to the ladies room. I stumbled from my chair as best as I could. The alcohol was more then I could handle right now. That’s what I had to keep telling myself anyway. I felt like I was having an allergic reaction. I half expected to see hives on my inner thighs when I let myself into the bathroom.
I took a short break from writing the book last night and started to fool around with a poem. This is it so far:
my mouth collapses
when he sits next to me
i feel along
my bottom row
of teeth with my tongue
i blink out
at tree tops
and icicles
tapping my fingers
on my elbows
i look down
at the dirty tiled floor
his laugh
slips out of his mouth sideways
it seems to crash
onto the table
disturbing the creamers
and coffee
i wish you
wouldn’t be so wreckless
with it
I have been staying up very late and I came across an interesting radio show. It’s on 92.3 in New York City. It’s pretty funny. It’s perfect for the insomniacs out there. They have instant feed back that you can type. it’s kind of addictive. Oh yeah, it’s Jake and Jackie. You can even listen to it if you don’t live in NYC or tristate area (it’s online here)
I went out with some friends last night. It was Valentines day and so there were couples all over the place. the worst part were the coupless couples. by this i mean that there was at least one upset girl in the bar that i was at while waiting for my friends. she was crying. the guy had ditched her to go to atlantic city. i am glad that Valentine’s Day doesn’t really depress me. if i’m not with someone i just go out with my friends and have a good time. it is just another day of they week. albeit a day of the week with tacky pink and red heart shaped decorations everywhere.
And then we went dancing. At least i was dancing and trying to coax other people to dance. Anna had mentioned before that she wanted to go sledding. By the time i was too drunk to care we were off to Pat’s house (which is an immaculate mansion with heads of animals everywhere). He had a whole closet of snow suits and boots and goggles and hats and gloves. We got all suited up and hit the giant hill in the back of his house. i say hit because the snow had been glazed over during the last several nights. very hard. good for sledding. not as good for wiping out while sledding. when you are drunk you feel no pain. we decided it would be a cool idea if we all went down together. by together i mean we held on to eachother’s sleds. and down we went. Pat rolled over me near the end. Anna said she looked up and it was just like a mass of body parts. i have a black eye and my face is pretty bruised. Kyle’s face looks like somone dragged him across a carpet. I think everyone was bleeding. it was a good fucking time.
suited up and ready to go
snow bunnies? anna and i
the after effects
The Salt felt like it was coating my skin and i wasn’t breathing just air. It was heavily laced with salt. My hair was transformed into tiny whips that stung my face and left a salty residue. My eyes burned as the molecules assaulted my cornea. Sand felt like tiny razors cutting into my skin and the salt would continue to penetrate my body.
every time it snows i like to rewatch The Thing. I once wrote a paper on it so i am going to repost for your pleasure. it’s not that great of a paper because i was told to focus on form and there are so many other things that you could write about this film. it was also a spite paper. i hated this teacher and she hated me and she thought horror was a stupid genre. so i wrote this in tribute and as a rebuttal for the whole class experience. i mean she made us watch Easy Rider for christ’s sake! but for now here it is:
Whenever I talk to someone about film and I mention that horror is my favorite genre many people are taken aback. They instantly associate horror as not being a valid part of film. There may be many films in the genre that are poorly done visions of torture and death and it may be hard to look past these films. There are, however, other horror films that are visions of the director and everyone else involved with the film. These films are successful in portraying horror as it should be and not of what it’s usually thought of. That is why I have always been drawn to the work of John Carpenter. His films are entirely a product of his vision. He writes, directs, and composes most of the music for his films. Among his films is one of the best works in the genre, The Thing. Made in 1982, this film is an artfully made masterpiece that is driven by Carpenter’s vision, his cast, dialogue, and music.
The Thing is about an isolated team of men who are in Antarctica. They are most likely in a military base that was set up to be a research facility. In the beginning of the film there is a shot of a spaceship crashing to earth. We are to assume that this was millions of years previous. Then the film cuts to a helicopter chasing and shooting at a dog. This helicopter flies into the camp that the film takes place in. They land and proceed to blow themselves up before destroying the dog. The dog is actually alien. The team can not tell this because that is how the Thing operates. It takes the shape of the species that it wants to assume and makes others around it believe that they are with their own kind.
The Thing is about trusting yourself, and the struggle to find trust in others while not falling prey to paranoia. The dialogue heavily supports this theme in its form. The characters in the film are often saying that no one trusts anyone. An example of this is when the main character, R.J. MacReady, is alone in a room by himself. He is talking into a recorder so that if someone finds their destroyed campsite they can discover what happened there. During this monologue MacReady says, “Nobody trusts anybody and we’re all very tried, nothing else I can do—just wait”. He has resigned himself to the fact that none trusts one another. When they are doing a test to see who has become a Thing MacReady also says that he is going to show them what already he knows is true. That means he trusts in himself to know that he is not the Thing. Many fights erupt as paranoia sets in. As one of the strongest characters in the film MacReady is always the one to break up the fights and try to establish lines of communication for the rest of the men involved. He trusts himself and is trying to establish trust with the other characters. One of the men infected with the Thing is Blair. MacReady and Blair have a conversation while Blair is locked in a supply shed. During this dialogue Blair says that he doesn’t know who to trust. As the Thing he is trying to implant distrust in MacReady.
Another way that Carpenter exposes the way the other men and the trust levels that they have in each other is by having several scenes in which the camera tracks along the room during a reaction to what another has said. There is a scene is which they have brought the Thing back from the other camp site to study it. It is grotesque and each character’s reaction is shown through this tracking movement. It is like sitting around a poker table and trying to evaluate what the other player’s hand is. This happens in another scene in which they have to burn one of their fellow researchers because he has turned into the Thing. The reactionary shot is similar in the way that the camera tracks around them exposing how they feel about the current situation. Using this shot makes us feel as if we are transposed into the film; Carpenter has successfully put us there. We are loosing faith and trust in ourselves because the others around us are too.
A large aspect of most film, horror especially, is the score. Using a score to manipulate viewers feeling during a horror film is essential to the genre. But does the score of The Thing reflect the theme of the film, or is it just a clever tool in producing tension in the viewer?
I think that since score is a common device used in most horror films then it definitely can be argued that perhaps the score of this film reflects the overall theme. It is not as easily uncovered as camera movement and dialogue. What the score effectively does in this film is not to displace trust within the characters but into the viewer. The score is like a separate actor on its own. It leads the viewer into believing certain things will happen within in the film. It is like Blair locked in the shed having a conversation with MacReady, yet instead it is having a conversation with us.
The beginning of the film is a prime example of this phenomenon. The music is ominous, but we don’t know why. It is following the dog and is foreboding. The dog ends up in a room with one of the men, who is only seen though his shadow. The music abruptly ends as does the scene. This is playing on the conventions of score to tell a story. The viewer trusts that something bad is happening because the music sounds like it is. Instead of relying on our own instincts to know that the dog may be the Thing, we trust the music to tell that to us.
In The Thing theme and form work together. The dialogue lends itself to the central theme by using trust as an issue amongst the characters in the film. Camera movement, tracking in particular, is used to follow the characters reactions to thoughts and feelings within the film. This displays the role that trust plays in people around us. The score makes us loose trust in ourselves. We trust the score to tell us a story instead of using our own thoughts to piece it together.
This may be only one interpretation of The Thing. The fact that it can be dissected like this proves it to be a complicated and layered film. I urge anyone who thinks of the horror genre and immediately dismisses it as something invalid and macabre to dig deeper into this genre. The Thing is not the only film that can be discussed in this forum, but it is a shining example amongst many and has withstood the tests of time.
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