This Face Cannot Lie

If you could wear your emotions on your face, the proportion of your shoulders to your waist, the pitch of your voice, and the range of your exhalations, would you feel more confident in being honest?

Stepping onto the ice with your neutral face, slightly furrowed brows, stale eyes, and an equal sign for a mouth doesn’t embue comfort as much as it does apprehension and possibly subservience.

But if your good morning could shine through your visage, would your opponent be confused?  Prematurely reassured, mistaking your joy for excessive whimsy and lack of focus?

Taking the puck towards the net, you suddenly can’t remember if you locked a door or left enough food for your pet, and that beam of light evaporates and ripples into eye sockets bigger than golf balls.

For a minute or two, your skates cross back and forth like cutting paper — you’re unstoppable.  Except the rink doesn’t have ice, and your pads have fallen off, and the helmet you strapped tightly around your head has become chalk.

Does worry grow stronger or does it shift into the fodder for architectural nightmares and groans in the pitch-black closets into nowhere?

— yiqi 16 May 2024 9:31 pm

This prose poem was inspired by a “what-if” exercise I’ve done where I imagine my emotional states becoming visible on my face, especially the one that firmly conveys, “go away” or “I’m not here.”

Original pic cred: Fabien TWB (fabienfeub), unsplash

Prey Ferrari

A double-feature of Prey (Dan Trachtenberg, 2022) and Ferrari (Michael Mann, 2023) might impress you as odd, but that’s what I did today, and I had a great time.  Yes, they are both on home video now.

I adore Predator as a character and had so much fun watching Dan Trachtenberg’s well-envisioned prequel to the intellectual property.  The DVD comes with audio in English, Spanish, French, and Commanche.  I opted to watch it with spoken Commanche and whatever the default subtitles were such that the spoken French came with French subtitles — which was great because I could practice more French reading comprehension.  There will be a re-watch within the next forty-eight hours.

I went in to Ferrari without knowing anything about the man, Enzo Ferrari, beyond what was mentioned, depicted in James Mangold’s Ford vs. Ferrari (2019).  As a fan of Michael Mann’s artistic choices, I decided to get the DVD because I knew it would be compelling.  I was right.  Halfway through the film, I started thinking that it was my favorite biopic, but I couldn’t figure out why until the last several minutes.  Adam Driver, who plays the title character, articulates it for me in one of the making-of featurettes: Michael Mann is interested in the internal life of the subject.  That’s why it doesn’t feel like a “Great Man” mode of storytelling.  In contrast, it gives me the impression that we’re going to sit with this man, sorta be in his shadow as he experiences events unfold and remembers moments of his past.

Mann remarks in another part of that special feature, “For me the director of photography is a casting process.  I wanted a particular kind of active lighting that’s apparent in Caravaggio‘s paintings, where the light seems to enter very dramatically; and it’s almost as if accidentally, the light is hitting a part of a leg, a hand, slice of light hits a face.”

Who’s the cinematographer on Ferrari?  Erik Messerschmidt.

If you actually know a thing or two about Enzo Ferrari, enjoy biopics in general, or want to see how the film handles the Mille Miglia, and something tragic that happened, get it on home video.  There are several making-of featurettes.

~!~

In other news, I am more than half-way through House of Leaves and am liking it a lot — including Johnny Truant’s tangents.  Did I read every single word in all the footnotes and some of the secondary text?  Nope, but I skimmed.

Pic creds: Amazon

When You Get a Chance to Balk

It was the first game of the season
the beginning of sleepless nights
and endless mornings.

He ate too much cereal
and chewed up
too many strips
of beef jerky
or handfuls
of crunchy mushrooms.

He wanted his aim perfect
and as true as he could manage
if his memories were reliable
as more than what probably happened
on any given midday.

His lunch was late that day too,
his uniform clung
to his sinewy torso
like an exhausted flag
across a barricade.

He panted,
he cursed,
he spat out the disappointment
of a bad first impression.

His prize,
his kill
didn’t break eye contact,
fell right down
without a whimper
without a snort.

But later proved to be
unfit to eat
or stuffed
or transformed into
wall decor.

— yiqi 15 January 2024 12:31 am

~!~

The first line of this poem came to me when I was listening to Florence and the Machine’s song “Grace.”  The rest of the stanzas came to me while listening to “The End of Love.”

Assume the fighting stance

It can’t be a coincidence that the DVD cover of Polite Society (Nida Manzoor, 2023) recalls the marketing art of Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973).

 

Polite Society is a ridiculously entertaining time that requires the viewer to accept that lots of people know martial arts (except for when they don’t).  Assuming the martial arts fighting stance is akin to proclaiming, “I challenge you to a duel.”

The trailer is a good summary of what you can expect from the film and doesn’t give away everything.

Pics creds: IMDB, YT screengrabs

Symptom Speeds

Francine, the border collie, rolled around in the shade beneath the canopy of the red maple tree at the edge of Samson’s property.  She held a grimy, neon yellow tennis ball in her mouth and tried to remember what the blue, squishier ball smelled like.  Samson used to swap out the toys for fetch.  Some days it was tennis balls, other days, it was the blue balls.  They felt like a blanket-breeze to Francine, and she missed them.

Samson sat on the back of the lawnmower and watched his dog relaxing under the red maple tree, brushing aside a pang of envy.  When was the last time he could play without a care?  Keeping Francine stimulated so she didn’t chew through his pile of plaid hand towels wasn’t what he would call worry-free recess.  It was work.  It was fun, but it was still work.  His best friend assured him that it was normal to wish he could swap places with his dog for a day, if only to know what it really felt like to live primarily on instinct without any regard for etiquette or the number of times he’d have to wash his hands because he touched a muddy pitchfork or to clean Francine’s paws.

Samson didn’t think it was normal, though, to look at the furry companion he had since he was an obnoxious fifteen-year-old with bitterness.  Francine had been nothing but a great pet.  Quick to excitment, of course, but she was a fast learner.  It only took a couple of weeks for him to train her how to open giant bags of potato chips without making a mess.  Samson wasn’t sure why he felt the need to teach her how to do that since he didn’t even like potato chips that much, but it was such a random trick, that he thought it as good as any task he could teach a dog.

Francine pranced down the hill towards the lawnmower after she’d had her fill of staring at the sky and shimmying up, down, and around the earth.  She observed her human friend, head slightly tilted to one side, and one ear flopped down to better assess the energetic tone of the moment.  She sensed a weak but unmistakable membrane of sandpapery grayness.  Her friend was not his usual self.  He smelled like an old dish rag soaked in apple cider vinegar overnight instead of his typical aroma of donut and bacon.  Francine put her nose on the top of Samson’s left shoe and gazed up at him.  She was concerned; she needed to know what was wrong with her friend that would make him smell so bad.

Samson leaned forward and looked down at Francine.  His right hand reached down to scratch the back of her ears and didn’t get too many repetitions in before she started licking his hand.  She stopped just about as soon as she started.  Her mouth hung open, her tongue lolled out, and she panted before sneezing.  Samson smelled his right hand and then his left, and made the same face that Francine did.  What was that smell?  It was like the sweetness of decay and feet…feet sprayed with movie theatre popcorn mist.  He returned his eyes to Francine, who continued watching him.  Neither of them knew what to do, so they stayed still until they heard the foxes that lived in the forest; they were screaming.

Original pic cred: Alex Bello, unsplash