short book review from brian mcvey, aka “prolific” / “the aztext” (burlington hip-hopper and novel-reader)

partial review of the novel “rehabilitation”:
or,
“this is not me blowin’ smoke…” by brian mcvey- producer, performer, member of “the aztext”:

*

let me start by saying, to put this into writing will not do it justice.

i absolutely am LOVING your book. honestly bro, the first 80ish pages, where Jack is walking the streets of Burlington and in his head a lot… i couldn’t put the book down. to hear his take on local establishments (city market, UVM, etc) was unreal. i am going to re-read and highlight my fave lines… but one that stuck out like crazy was when he was commenting on having to re-learn how to socialize without booze. i wish i could remember the exact line, but, yowzahs!

the descriptions, flashbacks and just overall use of language have me in complete disbelief that I KNOW YOU.

more review to come when i’m finished.. but honestly, i can’t stop talking about it. you should be SO FLIPPIN’ PROUD OF YOURSELF.

it says it’s your second novel… what was the first? when will there be a third?

jude throws knuckles

“I’m not jokin’,” said the brown-haired kindergarten boy.

My son, removing his snow clothes, looked over. “You’re not jokin’ about what, Porter?”

The boy blinked. “…I’m not jokin’,” he said again.

Moral: kids repeat what they hear.

*

Later that same week, I pulled up into the parent’s queue and sat idling, waiting for the kids to be released. I hadn’t quite made it up to the little corral where they contain the buggers until each parent opens the car door and sucks them up, when one of the teacher’s aides came walking up to me in the car, toting my son, Jude, by the hand.

I got out of the car.

“What’s up?”

“Jude struck another boy today,” she said. Her cheeks were apple-red. It was cold, but she was also flustered, I could tell. “He hit him once and left a red mark on his cheek. Then he hit him again and left a scratch.”

I looked at my boy’s fingernails. “I’ll have to trim those,” I said.

“Please, for us.” She said.

For us, I thought. What an odd phrasing. Then I asked, “Who was the little boy?”

“I can’t tell you that,” she said, “but, Jude knows.”

So, I apologized profusely and promised we would have a long talk about it, my son and I.  All the while though, I was thinking, she can’t tell me who the other boy is? Double odd.

But that’s the way things are today. Everybody is protected by some law or act or another. There’s no one-room schoolhouse anymore. It’s a compound of little potential lawsuits running around.

As we drove away I asked, “Jude, who was it?” He was remorseful, crying a little. No jury would convict him. “Porter,” he said.

“Why? Why did you hit him?”

“Because I was reading a book and he came over.”

Oh, makes sense, I thought. “But why did you hit him?”

“Because I hit him with my hand, with my fingernail.”

“No, Jude, that’s not why, that’s how. What made you mad?”

“Because I was reading.”

“What else?”

“I don’t know.”

“Jude, you don’t just hit someone because you are reading. If so, the subways of New York would be a constant brawl. Did you want to read by yourself?”

“Yeah. I wanted to be alone.”

Ah, I thought. Let the healing begin.

Moral of the story: Interrogate your children like they are a prisoner of war.

*

That was Friday. It was MLK weekend, so school resumed on Tuesday. I didn’t make a huge fuss over the event during the weekend break. I figure too much attention brought to a negative thing only makes a kid think, wow, look at all the special attention I’m getting when I do something bad. But, I didn’t ignore it, either. Here and there we’d talked about it, as part of normal conversation. Then I sprung it on him Tuesday morning when we got into the classroom that we were going to apologize to little Porter (who is, incidentally, about half a foot taller and at least fifteen pounds heavier than my son.)

“Jude, can you tell Porter you’re sorry?”

Porter, I saw, didn’t have a visible mark on him. Both young men were amenable to to the concilliatory exchange. Jude said, “I’m sorry I hit you, Porter.”

Porter was sort of half-smiling, looking around, probably thinking of red balloons and plastic toy horses. He said, “Thank you, Jude.”

And it was done.

Moral of the story: kids are quick to forgive.

three short rightings

you drive through town, and you pass by the bar. it’s been over a year since you’ve had a drink.

outside the bar, you glimpse men standing and smoking. you imagine it: the dirty, wet snow at your feet, the potential skirmish in the air, the cheesy pate of smokermen skin, and the smell of liquor and fried wires beneath the flesh.

the clack of billiard balls inside. the guitar chords coming from the jukebox. it’s warm inside there, warm in your stomach as you pull in the shot of SoCo and drink your next full-bodied beer. you laugh easy, you swap stories, you play pool, you drink until your heart’s content.

but outside, right there on that slushy sidewalk is where it lays. in the yellowed eyes, in the crisp crackle of coats in the cold, the cigarettes held to whitened lips, the smell of blue smoke and the flat shush of traffic going by on the street. always something looming, always something possible, all very important things to discuss; and then the dips into silence, like riding through a valley in the night, the cold whistling in your ears.

*

have to be careful now. i can feel the end in your kiss. can see the snake beneath the garden’s undergrowth. my cup runneth over; don’t want the well to run dry. made a home; not ready to fold up the tent. so much more life to live. so much that will have to be given back. that’s what’s left. to give back and to give back. i mince no thought that i bear it as a duty, and as a plea for life.

further strength, greater endruance. the course remains the same.

*

i want to scrub the sky of all the clouds. i want to chuck everything and start anew. i want to see the burning bits of paper float like large ash. i want to hear the crackle and gunshot of snapping wood. i want to scour myself until my skin is red, and tear my hair back with a horse brush.

i want to rake the trees clean with my finger nails. to comb all the bracken from the forest. so all that is left is dirt, fine and even-grained; a silt that covers all.

*

yeah, i wrote a movie review. i, too, have succumbed: avatar

saw avatar last weekend.  since i’m a very important person, i have to put in my two cents about it.  *sigh*…everybody’s an expert…

so.  the glaring disparity of the film was that the goegousness and revolutionariness of the scope was totally undermatched with the derivative, ho-hum story.  we’ve seen “dances with wolves”, “pocahontas”, “braveheart:, etc.  nothing new was under the alien sun.

i was wrong to have thought that james cameron had based the film on source material – a video game.  maybe, like cameron dreamt of the world of ‘pandora’ fifteen years ago, i dreamt of the video game “avatar.”

so, cameron is fully accountable for any dislikes.  and, then again, that’s exactly what he was: accountable to his audience, and to the studio which financed a nearly half billion dollar film.  you can’t risk alienating any significant portion of your potential audience by following a story that branches off from the main trunk of Hero Goes Native and Saves the World.  you just can’t. 

what would have been interesting would’ve been to follow a thread about the root system of the forest, and how it so mimicked the mapping of a human brain, or computers.  that incredible synergy – that entropy whereby all becomes sameness – it’s fascinating.  forest = computer = human brain.  it’s all the same.  and i don’t mean just story-wise, i mean, in reality.  i believe it is.  all roads lead to Rome.

any, i was underwhelmed by avatar.  that’s just how it shakes out of the tree; the first hour was highly engaging and i got that sense, sort of otherworldly (no pun intended), with the 3D and the breadth and beauty of the world.  there were moments when i was lost in it, rotoscoped right out of this universe.  but after the first hour, as the film fell into the inevitable formulaic trappings, i grew bored.  things started to heat-up and blow-up and i started to yawn.  people ran around frantically on screen uttering cheesy, pat lines and my knee started to bounce and i wished i could go have a cigarette and was looking at my watch. 

it came ’round again for a moment after the first big war, as the now-refugee blue cat people regrouped and our hero prepared to tame the dragon-beast, unite the clans, and save the planet – there were a few moments in there that i actually paid attention to, because they were fresh.  but it collapsed again into the usual ruckus, and rally cries rang out and the score crashed and choired (and sounded JUST like another score or two i’d heard before.)

speaking of which, the sound the horses made (with the extra legs, hmmm), was the same sound used for the velociraptors in ‘jurassic park’, when they call each other, a kind of french-horn chuffing that made sense for the bird-like dinosaurs, but not for the six-legged horses.  the marrying of iridescent aquatic life with dinosaur-ish forest creatures was neat-ish, and the land-of-the-lost giant mushrooms and plants and this and that was kinda cool.  the best moment came at night, with the forest lit up and the two beautiful cat people under the spell of the sensuousness of it all – i wanted to stay and live in there with them, even if the giant panther-dinosaur with the predator face and t-rex growl (a la jurassic park) was out prowling around. 

the thing is, despite all of this smarmy criticism of mine, the images and the feelings associated with the world of the film remained with me after i saw it, and into that night, and even followed me into the next morning.  despite the generic story, some of the silliness of the forest animals and their sounds, and missed opportunities, there was something so sensual and ancient about the blue cat people that it stained me.  and sustained me.  it’s just that when you have something so elevated in scope and technology, you wish – and even expect – that the story would match it.  you want to take this incredible world and explore it – not just touch on a few things before going for the usual thrills.  and while that may be what you want, it’s not reality.  reality is that a film of this size costs more than money.  what it costs is the canvassing respect for each potential member of the audience, and then particularly for those most likely to feel that ‘avatar’ was the best movie they’d ever seen:  the 13 year-olds.  and, not coincidentally, i don’t think, those same 13 year-olds are not as apt to find the story derivative, as they likely haven’t seen very many of the films it so smacks of.   not like an old fart like me has.

the new year (an analysis of the human condition)

we break bread over the fire.  old women, leathered and quilted, keep the story.  the stealth cat shoulders keep the rhythm, the hyacinth keep the time.  the hope waves are a gunnery, they pulse and lap, they are the war of love.  stalking higher than the pygmies in the drypaper bush, beige, is the giant spindle of Hammerman, his skin sepulchral, baked in the sun, his lower lip pooched-out, the medicine man bone in his nose.  the cat bones in his belt pouch.  the crouched cats in the lower stalks, where they are sienna.

we move the deck chairs on the titanic for better feng shui.  we tinkle glass and bauble, and wink in the diamond’s brittle sun.  the real royal sunstar cracks the mortar and fires the engines and caresses with a loving touch.  nothing lives inside, but man.  to live outside is ecstasy.  to live inside is enstasy.  there are a hundred synonyms for heaven, and one word for hell.  unless it is gehenna, which precedes the devil.  unless it is the dark, which precedes the light.

so there was always a place.

and still the hope waves crash in the turquoise and azure spray against the biting, happy rocks.  the chintzy, formica grin of the rocks, eating the ocean.  there it is; relentless.  and that sun rises again, touching each different face, painting each different place, and beats back the night with its ribbon-hot fingers, and beats back speculation with its puffed chest, and envelops all suspicion with its unassailable power.

and we beat the old, rotted porch with leather; like the old women story-keepers, now the men belt out their blues.  “ain’t no sunshine today, the clouds ain’t gone away, but it’s up there on high, my big bright blue sky.”

and charlie, the man with the wide grin as full as the flatbush cemetery, he says, “bruddah, it hep ta sing.”

and they cackle into the night, and their laugh rolls like clouds into the distance, over wet, fecund places where the Hammerman rattles his bones.

the apple and the tree

It’s funny how individual and different we like to think we are, and we are so much our parents’ children.  Both genetically and as a result of our upbringing.

For instance, I know a girl whose father and mother split up.  The father wanted to preach love and live in a fig tree.  The mother wanted to live in Marin County and have money and go to parties.  So the girl, their daughter, likes to have money and go to parties and worked hard to disassociate from the world of her father she felt was “embarrassing.”  At the same time (see: Harville Hendrix for more on this) we are often attracted to those persons who resemble our parent – particularly the one most responsible for not meeting some of our childhood needs.  We are attracted to that person and harbor the idea that this person will in fact meet that or those particular needs; they will be different.  For instance, this girl, she dated me, a guy who at the time looked like he would be cool and making money and perhaps live in Marin County but was, really, just a guy preaching love, living in a fig tree.

Another woman has a father who displays the Darwin fish on his car (in response to the Jesus fish.)  I have never seen how religion and evolution ought to be mutually exclusive, but some people have to have it black or white.  Anyway, she follows in those footsteps: her parents don’t subscribe to Christianity; she doesn’t subscribe to Christianity.

A third woman – her parents are atheists.  At some point, however, she went to a Catholic school, and was confirmed.  Her grandmother was very devout.  So, on the exterior, she is atheist.  Interiorly, she grapples with reconciling the love and appreciation she has for her departed grandmother, and her intellectual disparity with that; God probably does not exist.  Her constant poking fun at Jesus and religion, endless sarcasm and attention brought to it are indicative of this internal wrestling.

I find that people, who are, in themselves, not at peace with how they feel about religion, about God, are the ones most vociferous about it.  And this goes both ways.  The non-believer who takes shots at the believers, and tries to belittle them, as well as the believer who tries to convert the nons and convince them of their wrong.  Both of these ends, to me, show people not at rest with their “stance” on the whole thing.

But that’s off-point.  What’s going on this whole time is that the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree, in most cases.  In behavior and belief we mirror or parents in many ways, or we go to opposite ends to try and be something very different.  Either way, our actions are conducted by this basic paradigm set up in our upbringing.  It’s not a perfect theory, as of course there are exceptions.  But, by and large, people who grew up as children where both parents remained together tend to believe in marriage and family, while children of broken homes tend to struggle more with trust in relationships.  And if religion was an integral part of the upbringing, and was enjoyable and positive, it is typically continued to be entertained in the adult life.  And so on.

Where my own story fits in is that my parents divorced, and my mother raised me for a time before finding someone else.  I too “divorced” the other parent of my child, and have found a relationship elsewhere.  While the sexes are reversed, the scenario is essentially the same.  Growing up, my stepfather was a non-believer and my mother a devout believer, so I seem to have both of these aspects as well.  And then, in the middle is my biological father, a sort of Buddhist, and so from both genes, perhaps, and what exposure to him I had in my formative years, I also have this kind of sensibility.  I have not, as it were, fallen very far.

three conversations

jude:  dava, did you have a bad dream?

dava:  uh-huh.

jude:  was it a nightmare, or a skeleton?

dava:  no, it wasn’t a nightmare.  it was just unpleasant.

jude:  oh.  was it a skeleton?  that was saying ’stupid’ and ‘dumb’ and kicking and being mean?  (he sneezes twice.)

dava: god bless you.

jude:  thank you.

*

jude:  what’s that?  (pointing at phone screen)

dava:  that’s an icon.

jude:  what’s an icon?

dava:  a symbol.

jude:  what’s a symbol?

dava:  …so, that takes you to your home screen…

jude:  what’s a home screen?

*

daddy: boy, it’s really winter out here today.

jude:  it sure is.

daddy:  it’s cold out.

jude:  …what do you mean, ‘holed out’?

daddy:  (shivering)  context, jude.  …context.

*

it’s a little preachy, maybe, but felt good to write. happy holidays!

Some real deep shit, yo:

When you don’t have a lot of real shit going on, you tend to create drama.  When you have a good bit of real shit going on, you want to be at peace, you seek things that are calm.

Some people seem to spend their time convincing themselves that they are not happy.  They actually build towards this goal, and identify themselves with tragedy and difficulty.

“Real shit (going on)” can be defined in many different ways, but essentially it means that which takes you out of yourself.  If you have too much time on your hands, you tend to focus on yourself.  There is a sort of black hole in each of us, in the same way there are stars in each of us.  The star radiates out for illumination, there for others to navigate by, and is one among many.  The back hole is an inward concentration of energy, and is an isolated entity.   (We can draw our clues from the universe, as each facet is representational of all else.)

It’s not your fault that you have tragedy.  Your responsibility begins with how you deal with that tragedy.  In some cultures and languages, tragedy is synonymous with opportunity.  It is change, something with no positive or negative value assigned; just change.  These are the joints, the scrimmages that keep prying us out of static routine and render us malleable so that we may continue to grow and be shaped, and shape ourselves.  We can be shaping ourselves to be someone associated with tragedy.  We may use our challenges as a yolk for others – to draw attention, sympathy, or to be calling for help.  Of course we don’t consciously feel we are doing this.

Suffering is relative.  No one person’s suffering is any greater or lesser than anyone else’s.  We may think that the guy who lost a cool million in the stock market is not suffering as much as a child sick with AIDS in a poor African country.  But we can never know the whole truth.  How things appear to us on the surface is rarely, if ever, indicative of the hidden truths.  We tend to observe symptoms in one another, if we are keen, but symptoms and their causes are a complex relationship.  It is just not easy to know what is really going on with someone.  We should not assume anyone is better off than anyone else.  This only creates an idea of our own “standing” and is just more focus on ourselves, and what we think we don’t have.

There is a tendency in each of us to avoid suffering, and there is a conjunctive tendency to fear that change will be difficult, and bring about suffering.  So many of us ride the fence, and procrastinate, and keep the “real shit” at bay.  We don’t commit, and spend our time pondering options.  The more options we ponder, the more outfits we try on, often the harder it is to commit to any one of them.  And we live in a world of countless options, so it is not easy.  But so long as we ride the fence and procrastinate, we can’t really be living, we can’t have any “real shit,” going on, and so we create drama to occupy us.  Of course, again, we don’t think we are doing this, and will likely deny it up and down.  “I don’t like drama,” we’ll say, but there we are, creating it.  Social drama.  Personal drama.  One or the other or both.

We may take great issue with something happening far away.  We may go out and socialize and get into all sorts of issues with friends and romances, spending all kinds of time on these relationships.  We’ll put ourselves in an in-group and talk about the wrongness of the out-group.  We’ll look for things to identify with – a cause, a sports team, an ideology.  We’ll rally for and champion our cause and beat at its antithesis.  We’ll concern ourselves with all sorts of things happening in the world, and with other people, and we may believe that this is living outside of our self.  But this far-reach, and these dramas with friends and lovers, they perpetuate the kind of distracted, far-sightedness that keeps us from doing the most important work of all – and that is with what is right in front of us.

Where we are needed is where we are.  What we should be doing is what is right in front of our eyes.  This is where the real shit is, with the people in our lives, in our community.  From our place of solitude (getting to know our self with honesty, contemplating meaning, and getting down to the simple things, the simple tasks, and doing them with practiced gratitude), we become ready for these things that naturally present themselves to us, not what we go out and pick and choose, or stir up, or feed into based on our need to declare our self and who we are to others.

From a place of solitude and honesty, we will do well to pick up the ropes that lay at our feet, to help others with burden for a time, to see in the people nearest us the good of our service, and love.

aaron hobson

in some ways, photog aaron hobson’s foray into video reminds me of those ridiculously cool late 90s music videos from mark romanek and chris cunningham.  it’s not so much storytelling as it is exposition and performance.

in other ways, i see hobson’s psyche easily bleeding through.  it’s neither paean to his past lifestyle, or simple cobbling together of demons, but a kind of easy tapestry that works in conjunction with the most appealing of recent styles – the slick, the sleekly profane, and the unadorned.  and welding these things together is hobson’s energy.

i worked with him on one of his camera tests, the one he calls “schizo,” a loose idea he juggled in his head as we jaunted from one location to another on a recent sleeting morning. a cigarette dangling from his lips, and still smelling like the night before, aaron cut his teeth on his new camera with characteristic aplomb, giving himself to the ideas, chucking what didn’t hit in the moment, running with what did.

a big part of aaron’s magic, to me, lies with what he does in post.  this part of his process i am not privy to, and have only a cursory knowledge of.  there’s a lot of data crunching going on  – this i know.  but what i find with his finished products is a simple truth, and one, i would wager, that is about as important an element as there is – aaron knows exactly what he wants as he builds to each work’s end, and achieves it with the kind of natural impulse only given to true artists.

…as one friend put it, “creepy and sexy and cool.”

http://www.youtube.com/user/cinemascapist

rehabilitation – short testimonial – wham bam

“Hi Tim , thanks for sending your book , I did recieve it . It will take me some time to read the whole thing though I like what I’ve read so far . I like your descriptive drama mixed with humour , IE – Vermont , the green mountain , brown river state . BTW , did you spend time in Burlington ?  Are you familiar with famous mystery novelist James Ellroy / The Black Dahlia /LA Confidential ? I had known him in 1988 when he was just starting out , and he was a recovering alcoholic . Your writing reminds me of his ” wham blam slam ” style that made him very popular . Keep up the good work ! -Mike-”