29 March 2008

24 March 2008

Suturist

Anouk Aimée in Jacques Demy's Lola.


Beautifully photographed in natural light by All-Time Suturist Raoul Coutard.


21 March 2008

These Modern Things

When you dream of her strong shoulders every night for a week.

When you say for years that she will end up with a soldier she can cheat on when he's away.

When you check her facebook that says she is "enjoying her boyfriend being home before his deployment."

When you finish ten minutes worth of maniacal cackling, your throat sawed sore, bitter.

When you see someone, skinny, not unlike yourself, sliding into her prefabricated house, the chintz print curtains either ironic or not ironic.

When you unironically fuck her.

When you skip side saddle out the screen door (this is the way the ladies ride) as she smokes in the sheets.

20 March 2008

New York Street Under Construction at the Studios

Condors shoot up in the air commanded by men with hammers and paint brushes.  The siren of one condor beeps as it repositions against an unfinished brownstone exterior.  A few laborers dump contents of a concrete mixer into a cart and wheel it over.  A man approaches the site.  He has a black visor on backwards and upside down and wears a t-shirt with Don't like my attitude? Take a number written on the back.  His grey Dickies shorts hang low past his knees and it's hard to tell if the full tool belt he's wearing is holding up the shorts or only pulling them down further.  
"Ey Jack," he yells.  "Thought you were an actor."

Jack has his foot on a pile of 2"x8"s stacked off to the side.  He's leaning on his perched up leg, a burning cigarette on the corner of his mouth.  He eases up straight, his black t-shirt tucked in a pair of faded black jeans.  He's got on red suede Fila's, shoes that look like they could be used for bowling.  He flicks the cigarette away.  

"I was," Jack yells back, "but I quit doing the porn.  Only sell the toys now."  Jack grins and the man with the black visor laughs.  A few other workers within earshot look over their shoulders and share in the laughter over the sound of hammers and drills.  

They shake hands and exchange a few words before they part.  The man heads down the New York Street with his tape measurer and checks a door detail on one of the brownstones.  Jack turns to the mess of fiber skins laid out on the pavement, and begins to separate the stone skins from the brick skins, the sun slanting down on his shoulders.  

15 March 2008

Ashbery Is an All-Time Suturist


"The backward weave / of the waves congratulates him."

from A Worldly Country, his latest publication in 50 years of (proto)suturist writing.

13 March 2008

Esterillos

Pink hibiscus in your hair. Your hair down and luster brown like the polished wood paneling the walls and covering the counter of this bar. Loose white straps of your tank top peeled away by breeze. Black strings of your bikini sweeping around your bare shoulders, tied around behind your neck. Your seashell earring lingering silver shine. The fine line of your profiled face traced in shade. A crescent of your amber iris.

I take this photo of you when you're not looking.

A quiet kiss.

White water touches shore and slips away. Palm trees bend down and tickle red stucco walls with their leaves. Grains of sand blow and skip across faded asphalt on the lone road that leaves this beach.  

Saul Leiter: Photographer



12 March 2008

Still Not a Suturist

this is also gutter trash steven:


and this will be garbage too:


even if "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is a perfect description your head, spielberg.

11 March 2008

Not a Suturist

Steven Spielberg.

The girl in the red coat scene from Schindler's List is the tackiest thing I have ever watched.

Guy Bourdin (1928-1991): Photographer





10 March 2008

Suturist


Runaway Blvd. by Crash

09 March 2008

Fashion District

Long Alleys.
Pushing through air greased by frying food, stained by old urine fouling up sidewalk.
Inside-out dirty socks left to rot.
Man with giant diseased feet in custom made sandals jingling a super-size cup of change, waiting for more.
Stroller wheels bumping shoe heels.
Trays of bracelets fake and shining like gold and silver.
Zapatos!  Zapatos!
Largee tees, three for ten three for ten!
Cotton Candy.  Cotton Candy.
Ice cream carts pacing, attached bells dangling and ringing, acting as the singing voice of soundless ice cream owners trying to make sales.
Mommy Mommy!  Why do you have to do that!
Mariachi music fast-forwarded blasting out of storefronts.
Headless mannequins with bodies that would make some plastic surgeons proud.
And clothes, faded clothes hooked and forgotten on barbed wire, the only items here not for sale.  

Afternoon

The way an afternoon peaks in sun streaks
then loses its way in the clouds


an ending or a wearing down


*

I’m scared of having my fortune told


Later today a woman

will look straight out two eyes around a straight nose
.

This will remind me of you

08 March 2008

Suturist


“His infatuation with Kaya was like a wound.”

Further Seagrove

Seagrove Park, brine in the wood sign, live oaks alive on the cliffs. I like to sit now snapping the fat child fingers of iceplant, so heavy and damp on the inside.

Just here she would turn over and over on the grass, wanting to be touched by an exact quantity of light. She arranged me for shade. She would read and I would watch her read. Like I imagined things when we had children—how could I ever read when they were out playing in the ocean. Sand in the creases around my eyes with the green in them given to the children mixed with grey, stirred with light.


I cut out the veins in all the leaves I’ve torn down from trees whose names I don’t know. I sit still believing in their vasculature even though it flows away.


The ocean today. A beautiful god. Huge puzzle pieces of navy and sea-green distinct all the way out to horizon. No ripples but glitter. I think an east coaster would have to admit the Pacific is just better.


Undertow
—if she only would have left me Seagrove.

07 March 2008

Aviation Blvd., 1:32 PM

He drives an old Chevy Impala, deep-sea blue. She sits next to him, her hair hidden under a multi-colored scarf.  All you can see from the back window are her gold hoop earrings, dulling and brightening in and out of shade, as the car slips under early afternoon shadows from telephone poles, buildings, and the occasional tree. She's eating sunflower seeds from a bag, the kind that you chew and spit.

"Want some?"

"Okay," he says easing the Chevy straight at 50 with one arm steering in his white muscle shirt, jeans dirtied and boots muddied from the construction site.  She's still got her apron on, stained smeared and greased with reds yellows and browns from cooking in the kitchen. They're off work early today. She got fired and he quit. She pinches a couple seeds from the bag, reaches across and touches his mouth, slipping them in. Down her window goes, and she spits some of her shells out. He spits his in an empty water bottle.

"Beautiful day," she says.  

"Yeah," he says, stopping over the white line at a red light. The left turn lane's open and the light turns green. "Wanna check the beach?"

"Sure baby," she says, touching his arm with the back of her hand.

He pulls into the open left lane, the sun rolling on the car from fender to hood to roof to tail and off.  He does a wide turn through the light as it turns yellow and heads west towards the ocean.

06 March 2008

Electric Suturist Park


While you would like to stroll through this park, green next to the beach, and speak f about the young girl trailing the kite, her father’s indifference, her mother’s worry. The plot of their lives. You would show your compassion, your effortless coherence of plot, your comfortable turns of phrase. You’re hardbound.

The Electric Suturist sinks under the ground, travels through the valley of a grass blade, rushes past the pink-trimmed seven year old, climbs up the wind-fluid twist of wire, and sways down to the world from the kite. The Electric Suturist texturizes things. The Electric Suturist feels and makes you feel the salt-wood Seagrove Park sign, the sea bordering rope on the piling highlighted as human hair. Her hair. His hair. Mermaid hair? The endlessness of metaphor.

At any given moment there is enough in the park: people, color, and movement to sustain the Electric Suturist for the duration of his writing life. Total sensory immersion will save the day indefinitely. Any back-story can be indicated in the huff (or is it the thrash?) of waves, the whistle (or caress) or wind. Is that cloud the shape of divorce or a Richter portrait? Is today’s embrace (or punishment) from the sun wholly new or an empty repetition of hours? The Electric Suturist presents you with the hypnotist twitch of the kite string over and over, as yarn or garrote.

Why ever leave this park (this park that is the same as your house, the pod of your car or any place that can hold light)? Any place where you (and the Electric Suturists) step is perfectly color-blown by all these things.

*

Additional park-like thought: Blow-Up bringing into play tight white pants, negatives, Vanessa Redgrave, sex: all very interesting things. But the important is the proto-Electric Suturist photographer changing his life around an obscure image in the bushes. His careless photo of it is blown up over and over in the most important sequence in the film. Unwinding the electric truth from the ever-larger foliage is all that matters.

And on to someone even larger scale. The most important event in Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman’s career was the discovery of the zip (the thin strip that breaks up his most significant paintings). I have co-opted the zip as a central part of Electric Suturist creation. You take a field in stark color, you add a zip, you have a work of art both ruptured (electrified) and healed (sutured) by a vertical line. The zip is a bolt in two senses: as something that holds the painting down and as something that streaks it, like lightning.

Electric Suturist.

Golden Girl


She's driving to court, her wet hair tied up tight, shiny and streaked with strands of gold. She only needs to check herself once in the rearview mirror. The early morning sun bursts a soft golden light as she passes a slow moving white truck and switches lanes. She shuttles down PCH in her gold chrome Jaguar.

There is a wound. The Electric Suturist does not follow the girl in the Jaguar as the standard narrator would do, but instead puts the car in reverse.

She's on her way to court.
She has a son.
She has a home three blocks from the beach, a one story modern colonial with a lone palm tree planted and swaying in the front.  
The garage can fit two cars, but at night only one returns.
The house is big enough for three, but only two stay.
She lives with her son alone.
She tucks her son in alone.
She sleeps alone.
She ties her wet hair tight in the mornings.
She has golden complexion golden hair and a golden car and drives only in golden light.
Early morning and before night.


Suturist



Suturist