we're not broken

Goes Far If You Want It

March 12th, 2010

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How much longer can you play with fire before you turn into a liar?

Before he comes back out, he drinks Anis at the bar and looks at the other people waiting for the train to Madrid. It’s this hesitation in “Hills Like White Elephants”, which foreshadows the American’s abandonment of the girl to continue his carefree life.

‘And we could have all this,’ she said. ‘And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said we could have everything.’

‘We can have everything.’

‘No, we can’t.’

‘We can have the whole world.’

‘No, we can’t.’

‘We can go everywhere.’

‘No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.’

‘It’s ours.’

‘No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.’

‘But they haven’t taken it away.’

‘We’ll wait and see.’

The world is no longer theirs as she stares at the hills across the valleys that were long and white, a world they’re separated from. Been a fool for weeks. They both have, based on their unconcern for the “white elephant”, the welfare of the baby never to be born. But it could still be theirs – the child, the whole world, all of this. Goes far if you want it.

The American returns to the girl and asks her if she feels better. “I feel fine”, the girl says twice. The story ends with their resistance to family life and the landscape around them is barren. She continues to stare across the hills on the dry side of the valley, while the American looks at the girl and at the table.

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Just Looking Out For The Day

March 9th, 2010

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I would also like to find a sun-spot where I can sit and feel the warmth of the sun. I love a ground that smells naturally burnt. I’d like for small pebbles to engrave themselves on my feet and the palm of my hands.

In Ode on Melancholy, Keats gives advice on how to cope with sadness and in On Melancholy Hill, Damon Albarn invites those that can’t get what they want to a “day of another dream”. In the first, there are poisonous berries, death-moths and sad owls. On Melancholy Hill, there’s a plastic tree, a submarine and a manatee.

I like the idea of a sun-spot as my mistress on a hot summer day, when you can “emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, / And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes”. Only a couple more months until then, just looking out for the day.

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Green Blanket

March 8th, 2010

It’s a nature aquarium, Takashi Amano inspired. The driftwood stretches out of the tank, wrapped in dark-green moss. It’s like the hill I met during my visit to California. All its soft and rough textures and shades of green. And the leaves and petals of coastal flora, its sunset and sunrise colors that seem to only exist in that climate.

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Milky Mints

February 2nd, 2010

At a marketplace, the butchers hang their provisions on hooks. Children play hide and seek and lose themselves amidst the conveyor lines that smell like a frozen lake.

At the corner of the road, on the right side the local florist sits on his stand – a medium-sized table covered by a pale pink and white checkered sheet. He buys a cigarette from a young boy who sells them. Give me a box of matches. The boy reaches for the large box of long matches in his back pocket. Thank you. Goodbye. Underneath his table, spilled flowers lay all along his feet; his resistance to fortune.

The bakery down the road is also a post office. A box colored like cornflowers sits at the top of shelf. It’s the last of the Milky Mints and over the counter, a sad-eyed cat lies on the floor beside a thick can of sardines now used to house cherry tomatoes. I want to send a letter. Give me some postage stamps. Thank you. Goodbye.

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The Making of a Video

January 28th, 2010

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The video begins with a tracking shot of dense trees with shades of tropical and forest green. There is a road sign, fifteen miles-per-hour, and maybe the slow speed is something that allows us to connect to the roads that have been rained on earlier.

There are cut-ins of lists and the holding onto them. B Sides. He meditates with the written notes on a chair, surrounded by wood frame windows and the quiet-moving, morning sun. It’s a mid shot without any movement, except for the wild flowers outside the edge of the window.

The camera tilts from a middle of waves to a single wave that crashes along the shore, then back to the room where the camera pans to show him, who before was still, now moving and raising his toes up from the floor.

There is a second tracking shot that is slower than the first. A narrow gap between the dense trees reveals a foggy lake with its misty, mossy gray evening setting in. The room is now dim and the members take a break from individual recordings. A pile of books sit on top the lists and the morning’s notes.

After a busy night, morning comes against the wood frames and a new, blank page is set. The camera is blinded by reflections from tiny dust which show up as little, red hexagons.

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The Shore

January 27th, 2010

[wpaudio url="http://www.werenotbroken.com/wp-content/uploads/mp3s/BasiaBulat_TheShore.mp3" text="Basia Bulat - The Shore"]

A line from the book I was reading, on page 60 asked, “Could he remember them all?” I imagined passengers as sea creatures.

There was a sombre fisherwoman with black coral skin. She is far away from where she wants to be. He stands beside her with fists closed like large rocks. All the seats are taken. Hands reach up for train bars. Fingers lift, stretch and rotate like anemone. She motions the daily happenings by waving her hands like fins. A woman coils a long, magenta scarf around her neck and she looks like a psychedelic goby.

I thought about the sombre woman and also of these two other women that slept so peacefully. It must be the thought of going home. Outside the sky was a shadowy blue. You had to sing it in your mind and walk to its beat.

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We Live Half In The Daytime

January 22nd, 2010

(click on thumbnails)

LORD of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written ambassage
To witness duty, not to show my wit;

I recently added Shakespeare’s Sonnets to my collection and 26 was love at first sound. The soft combination of vowel and consonant sound in the word, ‘vassalage’ resonates still. The word is so full that it spills onto the next line, subjected to the idea of ‘duty’ and where the poet himself firmly joins the words as if they’re ‘strongly knit’.

By the time you get to the next line, ‘To thee I send this written ambassage’, one is ambushed again with sound. ‘Ambassage’, which can both mean a message or an overture, suggests the poet’s duty to not only show the written word but also their sound composition.

Fredrik Wenzel takes The xx song “VCR” and knits it with the fictive realities of two teenagers. The song starts, “you used to have all the answers and you, you still have them too”. It’s inner discourse; the kind of things you’d think only to yourself or confess to a friend.

And we, we live half in the day time
And we, we live half at night

The light flickers on and off. The image of light recurs again and again. Paint on walls crack creating long-lined crevices. He lights a fire and she writes the words on the wall. The chandelier shakes and the wallpaper is torn. It’s a desolate tunnel or empty rooms. They fill it with echoes of angst, ruminations and of course, love.

But you, you just know, you just do

There are things we can’t understand and friendship is about mutual understanding. The girl peers through as if she can see past everything. And when Oliver sings, “When I find myself by the sea” the teenage boy stares bewilderingly at a wall. He sings, When I go out to the pier, I’m gonna dive and have no fear as if to say “I’m not scared to tell you anything”. She illuminates him with a lamp until they’re wrapped up in color.

The trains arrive with a force and the people that watch this for the first time are frightened. They run away because they think they’re about to be hit by the moving pictures. They are met by real life people on-screen, who stare into the camera. The people watching can’t tell reality from unreality. There is no real focus. It is one shot. The train halts and the people come and go.

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Countdown (Sick For The Big Sun)

January 12th, 2010

[wpaudio url="http://www.werenotbroken.com/wp-content/uploads/mp3s/Phoenix_Countdown_IvanBeckRemix.mp3" text="Phoenix - Countdown (Ivan Beck Remix)"]

Yesterday, I rode the train and walked along powdery paths listening to “Countdown” by Phoenix. The song is a remix version. I also remembered this old post, where I attached the song to a photo by canovix. Then I thought about the green and black patterned sweater I kept seeing at the thrift store. So that’s what it reminds me of.

Countdown unless you’re juvenile let’s go

Well, isn’t it a contradiction? The young consciously countdown for a race, dismissal from the last day of school or a dance tied to that ideal first kiss. The taste of bubblegum. But the juvenile is excluded. The countdown are for those who are not juvenile; for those who unconsciously countdown for an event, an end, a deadline.

God bless your miss somewhere

I love this line. It is hamartia, the missing the mark and the approving of it because we are or at least we still assume we are juvenile whenever we make an error. The juvenile that’s both True and everlasting and Cruel and everlasting; the juvenile time we all want to last.

My worthy Lord, I pray you wonder not
To see your woodman shoot so oft awry,
Nor that he stands amazed like a sot,
And lets the harmless deer (unhurt go by).
-George Gascoigne, “Gascoigne’s Woodmanship”

The remix version wraps the song in the sound of an organ; sometimes a liturgical instrument. Ask forgiveness you know somewhere. The somewhere I like to tie to the big sun. The big sun which is sometimes tied to god, freedom, the everlasting or fertility. Call it God, Helios or Hyperion and his solar steeds.

Come – let us hither drive
And facrifice to the Immortal Pow’rs
The beft of all the oxen of the Sun,
Refolving thus – that foon as we fhall reach
Our native Ithaca, we will erect
To bright Hyperion an illuftrious fane,
Which with magnificent and num’rous gifts
We will enrich.

It is a countdown for all ages; for those who saw the slopes of time spin backwards and stop. The counting backwards for the somewhere that arrives, moves past and is gone.

True and everlasting, It didn’t last that long…
We’re the lonesome, we’re the lonesome yell
True and everlasting, It didn’t last that long…

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Goes Far If You Want It

Just Looking Out For The Day

Green Blanket

Milky Mints

The Making of a Video

The Shore

We Live Half In The Daytime

Countdown (Sick For The Big Sun)

We’re Not Broken

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