Tuesday, January 23

Two for Tuesday

 NOT ME

Heat grows decadence
radioactive with accusation 

My house is wood, but old
not rainforest, you see

I have a car
but my neighbor has three

I've sheets thousand-threaded
but not even new

My phone a year old
I'm holier than you!

A train that hates track
A steak-high brain, but alack

Burn the wick
I smell guilt.



BREACH

To hell with your justice!
You talk like it's water, 
at least YOU can swim in it
But it's not water, it's an oil
and its slippery bits grip
my shoulders, pulling me down
taking bites, everything
will be fine
just breathe,
don't
wor

Friday, December 1

12/6/23



STOP MOTION

Laying biweekly pay periods
on top of each other,
we can see a computer's rendition
of the average human face:
An immortal blur.

Sometimes I stick, brains
an ungatherable goo.
I blink once and it's bedtime,
twice and I'm twenty,
more and I'm worn.
So I must flip my pages fast
to get any sense of self.

Forever is a necklace:
a constellation of single things
always having been.
Instead spin the Zoetrope, 
let the legs of the horse flow 
under it like water.
Really animate, and feel the wind
in your fingers.

Wednesday, October 5

Gator on deck!

My grandmother told me that she used to tell stories about Herbie the alligator to my father and aunts. Before she passed away this month. I drew a book about Herbie based on a plot she described.


























Monday, January 3

Gut reaction

I was amused in a bad way by The Matrix: Resurrections. It made me laugh, and then wince at the idea of laughing at it. It abuses the ideas of the previous movies. Sometimes it does classy visual work. But it's purposefully derivative. At one point in the movie, no joke, a bunch of Warner Bros. business execs are discussing how to differentiate The Matrix 4: The Videogame from The Matrix 1. None of them really get it. This is the funny part. It's almost charming. But then the sad thing. At first you think they're joking, but ha ha, the movie really does know itself, so don't worry, nudge nudge, wink wink. But sometime later, I realized they really didn't get what makes The Matrix a cool idea. Because all it does is copy. Innovation was my favorite thing about the original matrix movie(s?), particularly the first one, but this one is all about monetizing innovation by creating high fidelity copies. Granted, the fidelity is high, but you can just FEEL the toner running lower every time they do a "Matrix" thing, seemingly for the lack of a real idea about how to advance the story. At some point, you realize you're sitting in front of a coin-op photocopy machine.

One particular moment in the movie made me shake my head more than others. It's nearly at the end. There's a downpour of bullet casings from a minigun-mounted helicopter falling by the camera, like rain. It's a beautiful moving image, and we've seen it before. From the first movie. It's. The. Exact. Same. Shot. And it's used as one of the final, climactic elements of Resurrections. When this shot is done, what we get is a shot of Neo and Trinity hanging awkwardly in mid-air. It's not interesting, it's just weird. That's what this movie really is. A bunch of matrix ideas hanging awkwardly in mid-air, for no greater reason than to look cool. This movie has the kung-fu, the clothes, the guns, the cars, the bullet time, the apocalyptic robo-future, and the star-crossed lovers. But it doesn't have the soul. It doesn't have what we all loved the first one(s?) for. It's just a corpse with electricity running through it. A heartless machine!