gletschergenossen

Rewatching John Carpenter's Starman (1984) in full for the first time in decades reminded me of the odd, small cycle in American science fiction of its decade with their almost folkloric exploration of passing for human—learning what it is to be human, which is never required to mean replicating it perfectly. Jeff Bridges as the Starman retains his slight, birdlike glitches of movement and artifically accurate cadences to the last. His eidetic mimicry of television fills in for the cultural tics and expectations he has not yet worked out the rules of, but whose pattern he can reproduce well enough for normal social weirdness. It took me well into adulthood to understand the humor of the scene in Splash (1984) in which Madison is initially upset by a shootout in an episode of Bonanza because that extra-diegetic awareness of acting which a slightly nonplussed Allen explains to her was exactly how I learned to separate my own emotional reactions from fictional images that similarly disturbed me. The Brother from Another Planet (1984) and The Hidden (1987) would be the other titles that come to mind; I may be overlooking others, but the superficial appearance of Earth-humanity is a necessary criterion. Of course they are immigration stories, too, or so many of our heroes wouldn't have an inimical government on their tails. Madison and the Brother even make their respective landfalls at Ellis Island. I would love to be able to interpret this strain as a rebuttal to the paranoia of so much of the previous generation's science fiction where the federal government, fueled by the Cold War and the Red and Lavender Scares, was fully justified in blowing the aliens away, but I might need a larger sample set. I can at least track that the nonhuman characters under discussion are just trying to get on with their own lives, whose cosmically personal stakes are love or freedom or knowledge. "I make maps," the Starman explains himself. They feel more like Zenna Henderson's People stories than even something like The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). I saw three of them as a small child. It was a useful additional reinforcement of the different ways to be a person.

The rain actually washed a solid twenty degrees off the heat, leaving an unobjectionably haze-whitened summer through which one may walk without courting a flashover event. The bush of lavender that overhangs the sidewalk up the block was thick with honeybees and bumblebees. They hummed around my shoulders and hands as I moved with the camera. I thanked them for their time and close-ups. No one stung me.



Thanks to a pre-Fourth article on shape note, I have discovered Tim Eriksen and Peter Irvine's Absence and her sister (2026), whose release I had missed earlier this spring. It is the haunted banger one would expect from two-thirds of a band who cautioned a folk-punk generation not to stick knives in babies' heads.

Anyway, two hundred and fifty years later I oversaw the making of the strawberry ice cream and after dinner a terrific crack of rain fell out of the sky. Earlier in the afternoon and the heat, my niece and the twins came in from swimming for the second day in a row. a_reasonable_man showed up with a box of peaches. spatch took a picture of me dressed for the occasion, i.e. the future.

Once again my week begins with phone calls, phone calls, and more phone calls, but I am disproportionately entertained by this recent interview with Matthew Rhys:

To me, when I read "Widow's Bay," I was, like, This is Wales. Like, sixty-five per cent of the country is coastline. An enormous amount of the population live in small coastal towns. My mother was from there—we lived in one for a while. She's from a seafaring family, where you throw a stone and there's a myth or a legend [. . .] Oh, God, well, as kids we were raised with these ancient tales called the Mabinogion. And there's four branches of the Mabinogi, and they're wildly dense myths about different parts of Wales. There was a princess who turned into flowers, and you know, the only way her husband could be killed was if he had one foot on a trough and the other on a goat, and he was killed by a special silver spear.

I understood that reference.

It is also funny to me because I have been recommending the show on the strength of its regional specificity about which I had not thought I had particular feelings, except that the familiarity of the geography, the material culture, the accents, and the attitudes whose reality encloses the shadow-stretches of the comedy-horror startled me past its engagement with a history of New England weird fiction and horror that scratches deeper than Stephen King. I am much more used to finding my formative coasts by analogy in other stories, not for the process to run the other way. On sort of the same level, I remain amazed that what feels like an idiosyncratically local show despite its backing by Apple seems to have taken the American TV-streaming public by storm. Yesterday I sent spatch an article on the revival of fishing in Boston Harbor:

"Mike Delzingo, a well-known guide who has been fishing in the harbor for 34 years, said people are surprised when he gives a talk and refers to Boston Harbor as a world-class fishing destination. 'People think about Block Island and Cape Cod and Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, but the fishing in the harbor is phenomenal.'"

and was thus obliged to append, "Fuck Cape Cod!"

Otherwise I feel my priorities may be gauged by the fact that I dreamed that I was eligible for the shingles vaccine.

I think it's wonderful that Mel Brooks is a hundred years old. I watched a 1967 clip of the 2000-Year-Old Man for the occasion, but the majority of his currency in my household's dialect is realistically more like "Did you try to bullshit last week?" "Everything below the waist is kaput!" "That's our Hitler!" "And I'm still hysterical!" Long may his work rise below vulgarity.

I began my day by cleaning the bedroom, the bathroom, and the kitchen and dispatching the contents of the recycling and the trash because there was a distressing smell of cold rot in the air when I woke up and I am dearly hoping it is not an inhabitant of either the walls or the central air. My mother has been medically recommended to eat more sardines, so I walked to Berman's in the afternoon and collected her three tins of the lightly fancy kind with preserved lemon from Fishwife. I had missed the news of the identification of John Pumphrey as part of the Camden Burials Project, but then I just heard about the monument for Absalom and Hannah Cook Boston. The splinteringly angular, female-led post-punk that WHRS played as I was driving home turns out to have been Duchess Says' "Melon" (2008). Phoebe Bridgers' "Lost Boys" (2026) has also crossed my radar. I just saw that Cape Verde is going to the knockout stage to face Argentina. Hestia drank goat's milk from my cupped hands and followed me throughout the apartment afterward, emotionally blackmailing me with huge golden eyes for the contents of my mug.

Anyone looking for queer, carnivalesque, kabbalistically infused New York Dante has come to the right place in Myra Paci's Transeltown (1992). It opens with terza rima and closes under rhododendrons and in between the cleaning of a fish is a sexual invitation, fingers glistening deep in the cut. Its selva oscura is Midtown at the mouth of the Port Authority, established in a silver mist as austere as modernism until it blows off in the triple-X Technicolor of Times Square. Its pilgrim mooches to work in a rainbow beanie and permanently plugged Walkman, a Yoo-hoo-fueled office drone played by the still-student writer-director-editor herself with the quizzically pointed face and terminal taste in sweater vests of many a fine Jewish dyke. The intertitles take over for Virgil, steering the 19-minute film through the circles of Hell's Kitchen with translations as emphatically intoned as slam poetry: Through me one goes into the suffering city. Through me one goes into eternal pain. Through me one goes among the lost. Abandon all hope, you who enter. It is otherwise functionally a silent film, its scant dialogue post-synched and in any case rarely in English. The title card blooms like a hot-hearted eye. It feels explosively transformative and not normal yet.

Gender abounds, mutably. Boi-ish Pootie leans in to the slick cavity of the proffered fish and runs late to work with its stickiness on their shoes like the whiff of an assignation: when next seen, the round-chinned fish-gutter will have traded her butcher's apron and seaman's watch cap for a shtreimel, a wunder-rebbe dovening over the smoke-scaled text of a carp. The Chartreuse-sipping housewife amusing herself with the View-Master through which Pootie observes an arterial, peristaltic ejaculation like a carnal NDE previously collared them under the come-hither neon of the Circus Cinema to push a graphic stack of porn in the five o'clock shadow and overcoat of a dirty mac brigadier. Sharing a deli sandwich with a violently dumped stranger rebounds into a chivalric seduction by a goddess in a sculptural ruck of draperies. The climax to this gauntlet of erotically off-kilter encounters, each charged with a flicker of transfiguration, is the discovery of the comedy's Beatrice: naked, blue-lipped and open-eyed beneath the wheels of a construction site on Eighth Avenue. Cellophane-wrapped like a bouquet, hauled home like a trash-picked couch by a transfixed Pootie, she could be just another beautiful rictus except for the unfinished plaster vacancy between her thighs, the androgyny of angels. Tenderly fed, combed and caressed, lain over like Lilith in the violet hours of the night, with her dissolution into the sort of sexual white gunk that has dripped suggestively through even the sterile monochrome sections of the film she precipitates its naïf of a pilgrim into an urgent, ecstatic fumble toward transcendence which just happens to be found in the catacombs of a porn emporium. Ladies Welcome, the frosted doors of Show World Center cut to the famous lines of Canto III. Its tableaux are Greenaway on a shoestring, a banquet of peppermint-striped candles and Christmas glass, a dentist's chair strung with fairy lights, an orbital sander throwing off bloodied mylar sparks. Its wielder looks like a glam and imperious Hephaistos in her welding helmet and gold lamé, the leather and studs of her tool belt blushing a wicked light. The fusion of anatomies and astronomies in the flame-fringed, endometrial sigil behind her could come from some alchemical sex tape. Paradise is not stasis. In the gardens of suburbia where it is commonly supposed that heteronormativity reigns as supreme as a middle-aged husband obliviously washing his car, the shape-changing cycle of desire starts anew.

None of this phantasmagoria is schematic. It feels as personal a vision as the painterly slides of Pootie ministering to their blonde catalyst—allegorically credited as Coitella, in the same way that other players are revealed to have been Voluptas or Postcard Man—as the light in their barely furnished room ebbs from acceptably sunset shades of goldenrod to apricot to a flagrant, black-light fuchsine and then spectrally lavender-blue. The viewer half knows how to read it, half tags along with the entranced protagonist to the grotesque and wonderful end. Freeze-frames and blow-ups cut the action as non-naturalistically as the switches in film stock shared by co-DPs Giselle Chamma and Tim Naylor. The sound design by Paci and Carter Burwell fills peep-show groans and birdsong between conga and temir komuz. Its double cast of Burwell, Adrienne Weiss, Natalia Neszuu, Dina Emerson flick back and forth across selves like a heartbeat of pupils, a bobble of schmutz. It's such a stickily palpable film, in even the dry exploration of fingers across the architecture of a body, fluidity is implicit. I found it on the Criterion Channel in their seasonal collection of LGBTQ+ Shorts, but it exists at large on the internet thanks to the archive of Miranda July's Joanie 4 Jackie. Its street shots could be city symphony, but it couldn't be bothered less with vérité when the truth of theater is right there. This hope brought to you by my welcome backers at Patreon.