Someone declared it Star Wars Day, but that is not fair to the progenitors of that series of films and countless spinoffs. Imaging Captain Kirk engaged with a Klingon in a lightsaber battle, Mr. Spock standing by and commenting “illogical.”. And for that matter, why not imagine Gort looking down at Klaatu and saying, “No, I am your father.” On forty-second thought, let’s leave things as they are.
He says he has found
a treasure trove of home movies
8mm film in small metal cans,
the sprocket holes intact
for the most part, my childhood
I thought captured on 35mm slides
that I am too cheap to pay
to have digitized, my adoptive
parents ill at ease with a camera
assuming always back lighting
was preferable, and I admit
it was nice to be an angel
or at least so my perpetual
halo allows me to claim.
But we have no projector
and given his photographic
skills, his cinematographic ones
suggest a black and white
zombie film of embarrassment,
but I tell him thanks
and imagine several uses
for the circular metal cans.
You want to shout that they don’t make movies like they used to, romantic comedies without R ratings for gratuitous sex or language. We both know this is true, but the problem is not that they don’t make those movies, that is the symptom. The problem is that they don’t make audiences like they used to, ones that loved thoughtful romantic comedies, and filmmakers always stoop to the mass of audiences o matter how low they have to go, for that is where the money is.
In a world beset
by poverty and pandemic,
global warming and hunger,
there are a myriad
of questons urgently
requiring answers.
Among them
is not the question
of the proper way
to eat with a fork,
or more precisely
how to hold it
when bringing food
to the mouth
from the plate.
I was taught to hold
it like a pen, but
tilted so I looked
down on the tines
bent in concavity.
But in watching
too many European
films and TV shows,
it seems I should
look down on
the tines’ convexity.
This conundrum
is easily solved
by using only
a spoon.
It is a sad fact of life that Florida
has disqualified itself as a movie set
for a vast number of films
that will now go before the camera
on the streets of some Canadian city.
No one is making films about
drug runners coming ashore in
teal and pink with a soundtrack
by Jan Hammer, since the illicit
drug of the moment is likely to be
filming in the streets of Chinatown,
and the Port of Los Angeles and
a Wellcraft Scarab is no match
for an 11,000 TEU container ship.
And for horror and noir films
the simple fact is that even in
the dead of winter, the palms
will never look all that foreboding,
and fake snow melts all too quickly,
but we can hope that Beach Party
movies will make a grand return,
until then we just keep get along
here in the heart of Margaritaville.
Increasingly few can remember
the time when making a home movie
was an event unto itself,
when you didn’t strap the camera
to handlebars, helmet, dashboard or body,
but you hand-carried the damn thing
weighing a pound or two, you stuffed it
with film which you sent off to the lab
to have developed, hoping your story
would appear in the returning envelope.
You threaded the film onto the sprockets,
turned on the motor and lamp
and watched expectantly as images
always a bit under-or over-exposed
moved a bit jokingly across the screen.
There was nothing to upload, you knew
the image would fade over time, unless
the projector grew cranky or jammed
and you watched your memories
quite literally melt on the screen,
and the only numbers that mattered
weren’t megapixels and gigabytes but
millimeters, 8 for most, 16 for the wealthy.
I have lived many lives,
too many to count, and I
remember bits and pieces
of each, but not necessarily
to which life this bit
or that bit should attach.
It is why I run them
together, view them
as a singularity, easier
to cope even when I
know it is a nice delusion.
I do wonder, at the moment
of death if each life will
flash by in turn, countless
short films, or if the gods
will go along with my
delusion, or maybe just
say time’s up, lights off.
There was a time
once
when
your day
on any
tour
to Europe
or Asia
was
aim
frame
click
pray
and wait.
Now it’s
aimclicksavenext
repeated endlessly
until, once again home,
you have hundreds
of prayers unanswered.
an old writer and his words 