Poems. Stories. Philosophical discourse. Film critique. Whether working manual labor or in a cubicle, we are still the proletariat, and these are our campfire stories and porch songs for a digital age.
Outside is the day
and words have power inside of my house. The evil of the word and work of the
darkness, cannot encapsulate the light.
I am afraid of evil, while living in the blessings of that that is good.
We all have choices to be evil or to follow after good.
Just walking along the railroad track with my two year old
boy. Pine blown air and words made of “Joy.” Joy has more meanings then one,
and my child teaches me about pine cones that he steps on counting from “two”
to nine, our time on this earth is numbered limited, blind. I pick him up, piggybacking to be blinded at
once by sunlight over the Clearwater River. This is to be driven ether into
insanity or out of it by sunlit diamonds. Billions of diamonds on this September
day, waiting for fall colors in sleeping summer trees. Fall into me my son, before you fall, running
as you are fast on uneven railroad tracks with toddler joy happy to step on to
pine cones. I feel joy and death –both –joined –alone. The opposites of sin and righteousness;
and of course the river had something to say to me when my little boy and I sat
on the edge of the rock looking out into hard water swift, already into the Pacific
within its mind, fast, cold swift.
Death right before my child and myself if we
fall. Icy swift water leaves nothing of sunshine memory when it the Dworshak dam chained North fork it is unchanged from a dam bottom spillway to reconnect once
more with sunlight. My arms around my son, holding him tight. Keeping him from
harm. Not to surrender to the void makes a strange calm. But the knowledge of
what is before us makes a tree of the fruit of knowledge evil song fear that I
sung away with a listening ear to Righteousness. I don’t know righteousness, but
I know it when I hear it. The spirit of God himself spoke to me though the
death diamond water, and said “choose ye this day, whom ye shall serve.”
I believe that I could like myself in October if only I
could play a silver dagger fiddle. I don’t have nothing to do today but to cut
wood on a Monday? And without saw gas I’m treading hours. Gray day this day
outside has me gray. I don’t know what to say except that I want my saddle out
of the barn and dusted off and placed on the back of a spotted horse that knows
the bottom of this canyon. I’m in a
canyon. Drivin by myself into a black rock place of basalt battlefields. I blow
my trumpet to, - Death? and only laugh when his army prances onto the soggy
rain bitterbrush field.
Grim Reaper blues. I don’t mind so much but I never
used my blue sky day to learn to play my fiddle, that scroll necked fiddle that
still looks up at me with expectation
and dread that I will never coax
he song within it that It wants to
write with me. I don’t see, but blackly I agree that I’m just imagining the
fiddles release from silence. Rather that Lord Jim fiddle only knows that it
will picked up by a player and sung to after I’m gone, with or without MY song.
I didn’t see nothin’, but The Snake
River is black where It aint blue and salmon die with spawning done and nothing
left to do, but let me be a Steelhead on a second round to the sea, with the essence
of life I agree, let my seed and song and memory be white hot without winter, until
the dead flowers bloom and the sky for all intents and purpose becomes a corral
for eternity. My skies are fenced just like the earth and like a long drive
cowpuncher of the golden aspen days, let fences disappear like the buffalo did
and let the buffalo come back in their place. I put on a Ghost shirt against
the rain of this day, and Deaths regiment, and dance in a circle the long and scenic
route back to my pickup truck. My hands want to be capable of work and not just
wasted time. My mind, a stranger ever since it left my heart, reaches for a
flint arrow, and missing that takes up a Bible and opens it to a verse of round
rebuke. I sing this like the Crows did at Little Big Horn to the riders of
death who watch me and sit slumped and stupid silent upon, their night horses,
and are leading-333- what’s that- a spotted horse for me to ride? Hell I just
meant to Montana from Hells canyon , or maybe Nevada, just cuz its bin awhile,
but how do I know that those riders aint headin for a peaceful valley of
smoking lodges and buffalo meat hanging from a rack with the laughter of all my
friends guarding it? My spine tells me that I better fight, and I aim my Bible
like a drunk with an empty bottle instead of strait like a gabardine
gunfighter, and then I spit. He and his cronies are just ridin’ by today, leaving
my with the gray sky day, and the black river that’s only a state line Oregon
solution in a black coffee way. Maybe I ought to quit wasting time.
I'm torn when it comes to re-makes, reboots, sequels, prequels, "side"quels and spin-offs. True, most of these movies are shameless cash grabs that don't even take quality into account. In Hollywood it has become truth that if a movie makes X amount of dollars, a sequel is pretty much guaranteed. Since films cost so much to make, studios really like working with a known property. It still won't guarantee box office success, but at least they can head into a project knowing that there is an audience for it. Of all the above options, sequels are perhaps the least distasteful--plenty of bad sequels are made, to be sure, but if you like movie #1, there is at least some chance future installments have something to offer you. Reboots seem the worst. If you aren't familiar with the fairly new term, a reboot is a remake, but a remake of a film that exists within recent memory. It happens often with foreign movies, as a good concept is white-washed with familiar, English-speaking faces, but has begun creeping into our own films. "Spiderman 3" fail to meet expectations? Start over with a younger Spidey. Christopher Nolan finished with "Batman?" That's fine, Batman begins, again. Along with the recent trend of stretching novels into two or even three film epics, it screams "give me your money, talking meat-vessels."
So right in the middle you have your traditional remakes. Are they, at least, justified? Certainly, you can make a case that the older the film the more forgivable it is to remake it. While I am fine with the argument that a well-rounded and critical movie watcher should take the time to seek out films in black and white or with subtitles, it falls short in two regards. First, not all of these movies are readily available. Secondly, the bulk of the film-going audience doesn't meet those criteria.
On the other end of the camera, who is to say that a director shouldn't get to explore somebody else's world. To step away from film, Gregory Macguire's take on Oz ("Wicked" and its sequels) is vastly different than Baum's original vision. Just because he began with a setting and some characters that he changed drastically, does that make him unoriginal? Most remakes aren't shot-for-shot, and I think the conversation surrounding a remake's worth has to start with the director. Does he/she have anything new to say?
Even if we agree that some remakes have merit, though, it becomes a bit dicier when the film is held up as a classic. While I enjoyed both movies quite a bit, the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" remake was held to a different standard than the remake of "The Hills Have Eyes." A director attempting to remake "Lady Hawke" would receive less pressure than somebody trying to re-do "Back to the Future."
What all this boils down to is that they are remaking "Evil Dead." While it doesn't have anywhere near the stature of Michael J. Fox's time travel fantasy, it is certainly a horror classic. When I heard that they were going to make a new one, I recoiled. I'm not even one of the biggest "Evil Dead" disciples (Having started with "Army of Darkness" and working backwards,) but even I knew that was sacrilege. Even when the original director agreed to produce the remake it wasn't on my list of interesting films. Even when the star of the original films gave this movie his stamp of approval, I didn't really care. When the early response to the trailer came back from Comic-Con (or some-such other con, who even can keep track these days) I was still hesitant.
Today that trailer became widely available. As I sat in front of my computer waiting for Youtube to load, I was still ambivalent and leaning towards disinterested. A minute and twenty seconds later? I CAN'T WAIT. "Evil Dead" has one advantage that other horror films from that era didn't, I guess. It was funny, and intentionally so. So when the directors chose to go headfirst into horror horror, real, R-rated, brutal horror,l it quickly became apparent that while the particulars--teens, woods, cabin, Necronomicon--were the same, they had something new to say. Definitely going to be keeping an eye on this one.
There is nothing left for me here. I typed the words and stared at them. They could have just as easily been the opening statement of a suicide note. Maybe they would have been, if I was a slightly different me. Truth was, at that moment I already felt dead enough. My girlfriend--I was all set to promote her to fiancee', but it turned out she had other plans. Intentionally or accidentally, perhaps some vague subliminal merging of the two, it doesn't really matter; either way I ended up with a text message that showed her doing things she had always claimed were too kinky with a man she always said was too arrogant for respect. My boss. Somewhere between eight and ten drinks later I walked in the rain to the restaurant where I worked and challenged him to a fight in the middle of dinner service. The theme from "Rocky" was blaring in my head, and I had spent most of my walk envisioning some sort of triumphant revenge. Hell, even if I'd won I would have probably regretted it. It's hypothetical, though, because I didn't win. I got my ass handed to me. I'm not typically the sort of person to give in to emotion in that way, and if I'd approached my betrayal from my standard rational perspective, one glaring fact would have stood out. I'm a terrible fighter. In the fourth grade I got my lunch money stolen by second graders, and in the fifteen years since not a whole lot had changed. I should have gotten my revenge by icing his front step in the winter, or pissing in his convertible. Not through physical aggression. I was already soundly beaten when a waiter ran up and held my hands behind my back. He told the cops he was just trying to break things up, and none of the witnesses contradicted him, although typically when you are trying to break up a fight you grab the person standing and not the one who has fallen to his knees. It was while in the midst of being grappled that my boss kicked me in the face with a steel-toed boot. My jaw would be wired shut for most of the next month.
So what was the total damage of my one bad night? Newly single, after putting a two-hundred dollar down payment on a ring. Unemployed and very ineligible for unemployment benefits. Charged with public intoxication and assault. Nearly six grand in medical bills. These are the big things that happened, of course. There was still the fallout to deal with. Reno may be the biggest little city, but it seems more little than big when you aren't a tourist, and especially in the digital age word of my humiliation traveled quickly. Sharon and I had been dating four years, enough time that just about all of our friends were mutual. A few diplomatic souls still invited both of us to parties, or neither, but mostly they called her. She was the pretty one, the funny one, the one that lit up a room. I was the one who could tell you that the guy from "Scrubs" got his start in a Woody Allen movie, that "Psycho" was the first film to show a flushing toilet, and that Bruce Springsteen wrote "Blinded by the Light." So my social life ended. My professional one as well. The incident at the steakhouse had pretty much turned my resume to shit. I sat at home and watched cable until the cable was cut. One mistake. One bad day. Now all of my belongings--well, all of those that would fit--were piled into a rental car. I'd seen on the news a week before that one of my high school classmates was going to represent the country in the winter Olympics. I was headed back to Boise to live with my parents. I looked back down at my phone, my hand shaky as I finished the message. I guess I have you to thank for that. Go fuck yourself. It was immature and I knew it, but it didn't matter. My thumb hovered over the send button. If had really typed out the text because I felt the need to hurl an insult, that would have been one thing, but as I fought back tears in the parking lot outside of what had been our apartment together I knew--and knew that she would know--they were just camouflage. What I was trying to say was I'm leaving, ask me to stay, or wish me well, or just FUCKING think about me at all, ok, bye, and I didn't want to say those things. I hit the end key and put my phone in my pocket. Going home to live with the folks. Yeah, great. It's not one of those things that's very good for the ego, but at least it was forward momentum, and that's more than I could have said about the last couple of months. I got into the car and headed north.
