Category: Literature

Film critics

My neighbour calls his dog “sea salt”. Bullshit. Utter Bullshit. As if calling a dog with a “poetic” name was a thing. He is one of the growing herd of ever more common gigantic posers. All of them big fat egos with an empty and ignorant little self. They nauseate me. They are sad and disgusting. And the worst of all is they are all going to watch our film. Rob, Marla, … God help us all.
We filmed it using a home camera. The result was utterly disgusting. Rob’s face was there smiling, his legs spread over the floor in front of his chair. There was something luminous and ethereal about the room that this piece of crappy shitty camera couldn’t get. And I told Rob. I told him That was the best asset of our shit movie. And he just laughed and said, quiet Marco. And I kept quiet of course while inside something was boiling and shouting Fuck it and fuck you. Things Rob didn’t hear of course.
Our film looks like a family video. It is a family video. My god! What a shame. What an utter and complete shame! And yes, I can see all those pompous bastards loving it, praising it for being so raw and intimate and many other idiotic reasons they will repeat ad nauseam while eating salmon and drinking champagne and glorifying our poverty. Our Fucking poverty! And I am tired. Tired as fuck!
Alright, alright. I told Rob it won’t work. It just won’t work. Not with me. This is shit. Caca. Mierda. And it infuriates me. It just makes me fume how it is they will be holding a vegetarian caviar cracker or some other crazy engender of a dish on one hand while grabbing our balls and our future with the other.
For fuck’s sake!

A poet on the train

I exist. The lights go by and we sit there looking at the dark windows move as the landscape changes in front of us. Yes. The train moves and with it we move forward. Where? Where are we going. Where? I shout without shouting, just writing on a piece of blank paper.
Fuck! She whispers a thing or two and I don’t understand. I nod. Yes. She accommodates in her seat and looks away. Someone reads a magazine, or another of those crappy newspapers that they give away for free. The images start pouring into my mind, as the black outside moves in front of the window. They wait in line to enter the club in front of an NYC venue. She has a delicious pussy. Shaved (almost) with a few hairs and her lips taste like something I can’t define. Her lips taste like her lips I guess. Sounds lame but it is true. Yes. Yes. I write and cross out the few things I say. I write and keep quiet. Quiet, very quiet and listening and from the window to my right that quiet picture comes looking at me from a soup and a calm of darkness. And he, a man I’ve never seen, looks at me from far away. Very far. Very far away as if trying to recall a story, trying to recognize me.
Someone else looks at us from the back and the infinite chain of glances multiplies ad infinitum on the dark and moving glass.
Yes. Quiet. Yes. Quiet. Something pulses inside me. Something undefinable and obscure. I write in feverish calligraphy the word.
Passion. And I stop. I look at it, and it looks back at me with its monstrous eyes and shouts at me tainted with a disgusting laughter.
Fuck you Passion. I cross it out until its shouts vanish. Fuck you Passion. Fuck you.
The scratch of the pen on the paper makes such a loud noise it hurts my ears, it hurts my hand, and my hand muscles and I turn and she is looking with a lost glance in front of her. I can’t take it. I can’t stand it anymore. The scratching. It hurts my ears. It does. I keep writing, and the noise keeps growing, growing growing, and she looks in front of her, and I try to see where is she looking at, and there is a homeless man that carries a big black plastic bag, and a map of colourful metro lines pasted behind him and the nape of an old fat woman sleeping in front of us.
So I feel it. Puuum! The break comes and my inside loosens. The noise collapses and the page stands in front of me, white, plain, and silent.

Public Reading

They like it that way. The members of the crowd listen attentively to the voice that speaks in a modulated tone in front of them. The voice says one thing, then the next, and one head bows in a slight gesture, another one flashes a smile and one more looks up to the ceiling and traces a circle through the room until her eyes look down to the floor. The voice talks and talks. And then another one takes over and keeps talking and talking. Their stories form a confused soup inside my head. They have the same feel, the same flavor, they give us the same intricate glimpse into the lives of the decadent breed that inhabits the narrative edges of the urban landscape.
 
There isn’t silence in that world. Silence is dead and in its place there is a continuum of action that keeps moving somewhere, somewhere, and is trying to construct an image of our humanity by focusing on the urban and the decadent.
 
It suffers from the fundamental weakness of being predictable in its unpredictability. It tries to address big questions and big themes by merely throwing nihilism at them, making use of the archetypal character of this world, one that in some unconscious level is extremely self aware of her mortality but isn’t scared about it.
 
The works then reduce to the mere action of constructing a big negation. As the crowd listens, the voices read stories that necessarily fall on the the expected unexpected themes of their tradition: the never ending questioning of sexual taboos and a duel with mortality led by a heroic character that just doesn’t give a fuck. And so I wonder why do they all sound the same. Why do they keep imitating each other? The right theme is there. “There isn’t much more to the human experience than death” Unfortunately the vehicle isn’t new. Fifty years ago similar words written on a single roll of paper in a methamphetamine ecstasy would’ve broken something, would’ve brought to life the big question mark that they are trying to raise, but their encasing is becoming old, and the feverish excitement of that trip is slowly fading away. Their question marks have become a timid self referential affirmation. Their voices are one. They write what is expected from them. They say what they are supposed to say.