Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko (Black Cat) 1968. Cat ghosts. Melancholia. Feudal Japan. Female vengeance. A deal with the lord of darkness allowing 7 more days with your true love in exchange for eternal hellfire. These are indeed a few of my favorite things:
Just took Joni to the Museum of the Moving Image to see The Muppet Movie (1979). Wow. James Coburn as the “el Sleezo” cafe owner, Steve Martin as surly waiter, Richard Pryor selling balloons to Gonzo: “Why not take both?” Rainbows, hippies, Fozzy, “drag city,” self-referential pomo narrative, Piggy/Frog love. Jim Henson = connoisseur of abandonment extraordinaire.
It strikes twice all the time.
“The Lightning Field (1977), by the American sculptor Walter De Maria, is a work of Land Art situated in a remote area of the high desert of western New Mexico. It is comprised of 400 polished stainless steel poles installed in a grid array measuring one mile by one kilometer. The poles — two inches in diameter and averaging 20 feet and 7½ inches in height — are spaced 220 feet apart and have solid pointed tips that define a horizontal plane. A sculpture to be walked in as well as viewed, The Lightning Field is intended to be experienced over an extended period of time. A full experience of The Lightning Field does not depend upon the occurrence of lightning, and visitors are encouraged to spend as much time as possible in the field, especially during sunset and sunrise.”
Public telephone booths in the Ghostbusters library at 42nd St. Gorgeous, vacant remnants of a time before the easy cruelty of text messaging. i’m sure there were just as many other ways for empty language to be tossed around back when these things were still necessary, but it’s comforting to imagine otherwise. If you had to stand in line, jangling sweaty quarters while you polished your proposals and refusals, if capriciousness was just harder, by default you would keep more for yourself?
“There’s a way not to be broken that takes brokenness to find it.” This is a line from the poem “Cinco de Mayo” in Naomi Shihab Nye’s most recent collection of poetry, Transfer (BOA Editions, 2011). Certainly sculpture takes this concept as a maxim? A short list of favorites:
Louise Bourgeois
“Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and the keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people’s heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silverfish, rust and dry-rot, and men with matches.” Fahrenheit 451
Sold at parties, mostly for and by women. Designed to save time and to extend the shelf life of food, but also a historically important opportunity for women to get out of the home, share time with each other, and achieve financial independence. At the heart of the project are the little plastic gems. Plastic and mass-produced, yes, but carefully designed with precious specificity. This one will save your carrot sticks, this one your watermelon. Lunchboxes, picnic and camping sets, popsicle molds, butter dishes–all with a boob-shaped button to be firmly pressed, no, burped. Like a baby.
Considering what we now know about BPA, there is a sad likelihood that, unbeknownst to their gleeful proponents, these pretty little things slowly, quietly detonated contaminants that may have contributed to reproductive disorders and increased possibilities of cancer and diabetes. The line between keeping and rot, evidently, is impossibly fine. 
Certainly the man who created the artful disappearing act deserves a place on this page:
“Harry Houdini began his professional career at age 17 doing magic shows before civic groups in music halls, at sideshows, and at New York City’s Coney Island amusement park, where he sometimes performed 20 shows each day. For a time he worked with his brother Theo as ‘The Houdini Brothers’. This changed when Harry met Beatrice Raymond, a teenaged singer and dancer who was also attempting a career in show business. Harry and Bess married in 1894 and Bess joined the act as Harry’s new partner. Harry and Bess remained devoted companions for the rest of his life. Harry gave her the credit for his success, and developed the habit of writing her a love note every day. Harry did magic, Bess sang and danced, and together they performed a trick called ‘Metamorphosis’, in which they switched places in a locked trunk.”
*Title taken from Barry Hannah’s Geronimo Rex, page 26.
i’m only halfway through this, and would love it even if i didn’t have a child, but the empathy the Flame Alphabet has for the shock of the absolute difficulty of parenting is unlike anything i’ve ever read. Parenthood becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of having any belief concretely verified in any attempt at faith or love in or of something or someone. In my reading thus far, i would almost be convinced that language is evil, if not for the fact that it is the medium for Marcus’s tale–a tricky meta-challenge (negative allegory) to the dismissal it receives from the narrative.
Excerpts:
“They must be approached separately, assigned their own coordinates. Curiosity about how others worshipped, even others in your family, even Esther, was not genuine curiosity; it was jealousy, weakness. Burke called it a ploy against our own relationship to uncertainty. You can know nothing of another’s worship, even when they try to tell you. To desire that information is to fear a limitation to your own devotion” (42).
“The speech cautions making the rounds, for instance, against I statements, against certain rhetoric deemed to be more toxic, attack sentences, that sort of thing, were probably not LeBov’s cautions. Even if it was possible, said Murphy, that an ultra-restricted language, operating according to a new grammar, might finally be our way out of this” (63).
“This crisis is different. It will be met with muteness. There’s no time for a last word. The last word’s already been had, and it wasn’t by us. Civilization’s first epidemic to defy a public exchange of language…. You can’t exactly describe a poison with more of itself, write about how poisonous writing is. And pretty soon the causes won’t really seem to matter. The whole fucking idea of cause” (67).
See what i mean?
noVacancy 
