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I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me.
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
After reading the synopsis for The Bell Jar a couple days ago, I was none too inclined to read anything by Sylvia Plath. But then a group presented this and The Thin People as part of their poet project in English today. I hate the class (my teacher is a FAT COW) but the poem is amazing. And the group's analysis may have just been a bunch of bs but it was really GOOD, convincing bs. Angst really is conducive to good writing.
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| I made it home early, only to get
stalled in the driveway--swaying
at the wheel like a blind pianist caught in a tune
meant for more than two hands playing.
The words were easy, crooned
by a young girl dying to feel alive, to discover
a pain majestic enough
to live by. I turned the air conditioning off,
leaned back to float on a film of sweat,
and listened to her sentiment:
Baby, where did our love go?--a lament
I greedily took in
without a clue who my lover
might be, or where to start looking.
-Rita Dove
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| DEFINITIONS OF POETRY by Carl Sandburg
1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.
2. Poetry is an art practised with the terribly plastic material of human language.
3. Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, ‘Listen!’ and ‘Did you see it?’ ‘Did you hear it? What was it?’
4. Poetry is the tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.
5. Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.
6. Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension.
7. Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.
8. Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.
9. Poetry is an echo asking a shadow dancer to be a partner.
10. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air.
11. Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.
12. Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.
13. Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.
14. Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration.
15. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.
16. Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.
17. Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.
18. Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.
19. Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.
20. Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.
21. Poetry is a sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.
22. Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a mock of a laugh at losing it.
23. Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.
24. Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.
25. Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.
26. Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night.
27. Poetry is a statement of a series of equations, with numbers and symbols changing like the changes of mirrors, pools, skies, the only never-changing sign being the sign of infinity.
28. Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.
29. Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, ‘Oh!’ and another, ‘How?’
30. Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.
31. Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.
32. Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.
33. Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.
34. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
35. Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters.
36. Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
37. Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.
38. Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.
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| YYYYAAAAYYYY OMFG YAY!!! MY DAD JUST BOUGHT THE TICKET!! AND I AM GOING TO CHICAGO IN 8 DAYYYYSSSSS!!! AAAAAHHHHHH!!!!
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| CHRISTIAN BALE IS COVERBOY FOR THIS MONTH'S ISSUE OF GQ!!!!! AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH
okay so my daaarling friend is at barnes&noble or someplace and she sees cb's beautiful face on the shelf i suppose and wonderful, splendiferous friend that she is, knowing that i'm...just...MADLY in love with christian bale, she buys the issue for me. XDDD
ACH, HE'S SO BRILLIANT AND BEAUTIFUL AND ELOQUENT!!
here are some of the things he had to say in his interview with nate penn (whoever that is...)
For twenty years, from "Empire of the Sun" to "Batman Begins" to his new film, the intense and physically grueling "Rescue Dawn," Christian Bale has been fanatic about his privacy.
Now he speaks about his terror of feeling "numb beyond belief," the childhood that made him a "turbulence addict," and the weirdness (just ask his wife) of his life being taken over by his very dark characters.
More than any other actor around, Christian Bale is at home inside masks. The unnerving thing is that except for the one in 2005's Batman Begins, they all have a peculiar resemblance to Christian Bale's face. On-screen, that nerveless pan -- the Hirschfeld-caricature cheekbones, the crucified lips, the mirthlessly merry eyes -- doesn't look lived in so much as hidden behind.
[...]
Unlike a lot of child stars, you've made a seamless transition to adult roles -- and you've never gotten into any trouble with the law. But did growing up in the film business leave any kind of mark on you, do you think?
Quite frequently, I've been talking to somebody, telling a story, and then I realize halfway through, This didn't happen. It can be anything. After a few years, you can't differentiate between the clarity of something you've played and a real event. I find that funny. I have some friends who find it very sad and disturbing. Have you ever seen a movie called Ponette? If you want to see child acting -- I mean, it's disturbing how good it is. You have to worry about how they're treating that young girl to elicit that performance from her, but it's so good. There's something just a little wrong about working professionally at that young an age. I appreciated it very much because it was a difficult time for my family, and I was able to help support them, and it actually was something of a salvation for us. But in a perfect world, I wouldn't have started doing this at that age.
[...]
You've said that one reason you might have avoided the fates of other child stars of your era is that your first role was a character role, so you didn't have to endure people rejecting you because you'd outgrown your cuteness. I wondered if you think living in Britain might have played a role, too. In America your classmates would have celebrated you, but it doesn't seem like that happened to you in Britain.
Well, I can't remember what I said that was true and what wasn't true. When you're doing these long days of press junkets, you kind of want to entertain yourself, and sometimes I've let other people guide the conversation. So they might say something like, "Oh, so you were bullied at school." And I'm like, "Huh?" But I don't say that. I go, "Yeah, yeah, it was really terrible." Because you want to entertain yourself. I'm not a politician or something, so it doesn't matter if I'm telling tales now and then. And there's no maliciousness behind it; it's purely that on that particular day, I was just bored with telling the real story.
[haha, like robert pattinson (the guy who played cedric diggory in HP, for those of you who don't know) talked about in his interview! he said he was good at sports and good at swimming... do all actors do that then? sounds like fun.]
Sissy Spacek once told me that she feels her performance in Badlands, her first featured role, represents the pinnacle of her career, precisely because she didn't know anything about acting at the time. Is there a little bit of that for you with Empire of the Sun?
You can't really compete with a first-timer. If you get a first-timer who is just really right there with the character, I don't care who you are or how lauded an actor you are, you can't compete with that. So what does that mean? I shouldn't have ever done another performance and left it at that? No, I'm addicted, you know? But I recognize the nature of it. I do think that you ruin yourself. You're making it harder for yourself with each and every movie that you do.
Over the years, you haven't talked much about your personal history, but you have said that your father moved you from place to place throughout your childhood so that you'd never have a sense of what class you came from.
I appreciated my father for doing that, because I saw that he needed more. He needed a lot more than came from just getting a job where he could get a bit of money and hope for a holiday once a year; that just wasn't him. My dad wasn't educated, but he was a very smart man -- a real idealist and dreamer, in a very fierce way. He was part priest and part pirate, you know? And he also despised the whole class system. And he was brilliant at keeping the family afloat. There were times when we were sitting in trucks without a house, looking around, and we'd see somebody moving into our house while we sat there. It didn't matter a damn to me back then. It was fun. He would go out and come back with a place for us to live. We'd be there for a little while, and he'd make it into an adventure: "Oh, we're gonna move!" As a kid, I didn't realize that we were moving because people were banging down the door. My dad would say, "Eh! How about we go? Want to go here? Let's go tonight. Right, we're off. Great, great." A lot of people would look at it and say it's not the way to bring up a kid, but I tell you, I loved it so much. He was obviously under a lot of pressure, stress and stuff, but he never really showed it to us. He made us feel like, "This is life. Life is about changes and not knowing what's gonna happen and just keep getting out there." We always had people staying with us who didn't have any place of their own at the time, and he'd get them on their feet. Same with animals. It was a menagerie. Even when we were living in a third-floor one-bedroom apartment in a dingy part of Reading, we still had these animals that we would help and find a place for. It was just important to him.
While you were making American Psycho, your agents paid your mortgage. Do you have a sense of financial stability now?
Shit, I've found myself getting paid, and getting paid well -- it's unbelievable. I never thought that was gonna happen. Not long before I did Batman, I didn't work for a year and half. I was looking for things, just nothing was coming my way. But that's my experience from life. Nothing stays really constant and calm. Maybe it does for some people; it doesn't for me. Maybe I bring it on myself. I'm not sure. I have to admit I'm a little bit of a turbulence addict, because of growing up with it so much. What makes me more nervous than anything is knowing exactly what's gonna happen. Being with people who are all very polite and have planned lives and do things on schedule and life is going just perfectly for them -- man, I can't deal with that. I have my periods when I do worry about stability, though, especially as a father. There's something about being prepared to kill to stop any kind of tears coming across your kid's face.
What did not working for eighteen months do to your state of mind?
I've gone through periods of depression during lengthy hiatuses. Everybody wants a sense of purpose, and when your mind's set on doing one thing and it's not happening, you just feel useless.
That hiatus ended with The Machinist, for which you lost sixty pounds to play Trevor Reznik, a guy who literally hasn't slept in a year. What drove you to transform yourself this way? Did you need the movie to sort of answer for all your pent-up creative needs?
Absolutely. Very much. I understand I didn't need to go that far and it wouldn't have made a huge difference to the movie, but it was important to me. It was something I just came to myself, realizing that this man was being literally consumed by guilt. And I wanted to show that. I'm very proud. It's an odd thing to be proud of. But I was a moron with The Machinist and with the transformation to get to Batman, my next movie. I gained one hundred pounds for that role. I actually got way too big; it was a little excessive. I didn't fit the suit. But I'd do it again! Because it was kind of a personal victory. There was something else going on there. I wasn't doing it just for the movie. Sometimes you want to torture yourself a little bit and know that you can come out on the other side. There's just such a satisfaction in doing one thing well in a hard-core fashion.
You've said that you essentially subsisted on cigarettes and whiskey.
Certainly there's no secret to how to starve. To start with, you just eat less than before, and then eventually you eat pretty much nothing. You can't do anything, either, because your body's too weak for it. It became, actually, enjoyable to kind of push everything out of the way and say, "Nothing else matters now. This is all I'm doing." It's a very memorable time in my life because of that. That kind of clarity is a wonderful thing. It did change a number of things for me about the way I see my life, but exactly what those things are I'd rather not go into. I'd be sounding like some half-assed philosopher.
You get times of your life, as I'm sure you know, when you can spend a couple of months and you look back and you don't know what you did. You were busy the whole damn time. You were doing stuff all the time. But it was maintenance. You don't remember maintenance, really. So you've got to try to have these other moments when you really can look back and see that you achieved something very clear. Those are the kind of peaks that you want to reach just to stop yourself from being a numb, boring asshole like unfortunately it's so easy to be.
What has drawn you to work with so many female directors with strong feminist sensibilities -- Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion, Lisa Cholodenko, Mary Harron?
It takes someone like yourself to point out these patterns. And maybe it's only you that notices them. You're just asking me that because of who my stepmother is! [Bale's late father married Gloria Steinem, whom he'd met at an abortion-rights benefit in 1999.] I've never thought of it that way, though I do find it intriguing to make people question things.
You've divulged very little about your personal life over the past twenty years. You've said you believe you need to preserve a certain mystery about yourself or people won't accept you in a variety of roles.
That sounds very pretentious. It's just that I find people more interesting the less I know about them. Any musicians that I've always liked, any actors, any writers, directors, artists -- if I get concrete ideas about who those people are, then it limits their work for me a little bit. I first felt this when I was younger, this discomfort that people suddenly knew things about me when I knew nothing about them. Which is not something that you're accustomed to before you're in the public eye. I didn't like that. There's also, just, well, who bloody cares what I think about? Personally, I often find reading about actors talking about acting -- I just want to fucking bang my head against the wall. It can very easily become a job in which you're constantly involved in some kind of a circle jerk. Everybody's patting each other on the back, and it's all just a bunch of crap, anyway.
What movies do you love?
To watch?
Yeah.
I feel like I don't really want to tell you about the movies I like. I just don't want to. [laughs]
Because you want to be diplomatic to other actors, or because it's too revealing?
A bit of both, actually.
Is it strictly an accident of casting that you almost never play the cool guy who gets the girl? Do you ever think to yourself, Man, why don't I ever get the Alessandro Nivola role in Laurel Canyon -- the rock-star babe magnet? Does that matter to you?
In Laurel Canyon, I actually was more interested in the character I ended up playing. When I met Lisa [Cholodenko, the director], she just looked at me and she went, "You're kind of perfect for [he does some air-guitar noodling] that one." I said, "Yeah, but this one intrigues me." In terms of the romantic kind of lead, I just never enjoy those movies very much. I will never say never, but I will say never to doing the more typical romantic comedies. You know, unless I'm getting audited and I'm on the street and I desperately need some dough and that's the only thing that I'm getting. In that case, I wouldn't say never. Maybe they'll come to interest me more as I get older. I doubt it, but maybe. Romantic comedies tend to be, for me, an oxymoron.
The stories that came out of the Thailand shoot for Rescue Dawn suggest that it was a tumultuous set, that Werner Herzog, who likes to flirt with death and disaster, was up to his old tricks. Is that part of what drew you to work with him?
Werner wrote the script, but he hadn't read it for two years and didn't read it during the movie. I would be doing something, and he would go, "That is fantastic. I love it. I love it. Keep doing that. Wherever it came from, keep doing it." And I'd say, "It's in the script. I'm just doing what's in the script." Or he'd say, "Why are you so into doing this one thing?" And usually the answer was, "Well, you wrote it, Werner." And he would go, "Oh God, Christian, you gotta stop reading that damn script." So he was absolutely open: "Surprise me. Don't surprise me. Whatever you want." I'd work with him again in a shot. I wouldn't always say it was enjoyable, but I'm not really looking to find things enjoyable. I want to get something memorable out of the whole experience, and I'm disappointed beyond belief when that doesn't happen. I've learned through acting that the best times in life are when you're feeling raw. So even painful moments you can look at and ultimately find enjoyable, within limits. That's why I think I keep coming back to it. Also, I'm a thrill junkie. There were days during the shoot when I was hanging off the rails of the chopper, just as hanging out. We would chop off part of a tree with the blades as we'd take off. And I would sail around the jungle, hanging on. I haven't done it for many years, but I remember sometimes when I was younger, I'd stick a pin in my arm. Sometimes you just feel numb beyond belief. You want new things to come into your life. Werner's kind of like that pin. Werner will just jab you. But I like that. What does Werner call it? "Ecstatic truth." I think he's essentially talking about things like peak experiences in life. If you do it right, you can have those many times in this job.
Your movie The Prestige is very much about the cost that striving for perfection exacts on an artist's personal life. Has acting exacted a cost on yours?
Of course, but I don't want to sound like a whiny actor. I will say that I can't expect my daughter to understand if I've isolated myself during a movie, so I won't do that anymore. I still will with other people, but not with her. So in no way am I ever gonna have her being confused about me, my presence or absence or whatever. That has to change. And I've been able to do that.
You've made nearly thirty movies and still --
I'm kind of eternally an up-and-coming actor. Empire of the Sun was twenty years ago. I'm still up-and-coming! I kinda like that, I have to say, because it feels like you can still reinvent yourself whenever you wish. There's not a burden of anybody expecting a damn thing out of me. I often encounter people who aren't quite able to figure out where they've seen me. Recently, I've been driving a pickup, and when I got out of it the other day, this one guy said, "Did you work in my garden last week?" I like getting that. To this day, I still get, with every movie I make, "This is the one that's gonna do it for you." And now I'm like, Whatever it is that these things are gonna do for me, it's never really happened. But I'm happy doing what I'm doing. Maybe "it" will happen one day and I'll suddenly clue in to what it is that everybody's talking about.
[end]
ahh...! he's so utterly PERFECT and charming and lovely and welsh... TO MY SOOOUL HE DOTH SPAKE!
but i'm terrified to place him on any higher a pedestal. eep.
if the life don't seem to suit ya, how 'bout a change of scene?
far from the lousy headlines and the deadlines in between...
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