The Underground (or Alice tours the underground)
In his Factory, he went from pop artist to pop icon and revealed the commercial as queer.
Artists’ works – whether still or moving – were shown in cellars, were underground.
On canvas and celluloid, light and shadow create the subject disoriented.
Don’t be confused by Sleep, it is about duration through variation, not repetition.
For the Cagean disciple knows repetition is really difference.
When you accept this, then the infiniteness of sound and image can flame.
From trailer park Texas to “magical trickster,” Jack Smith’s vision was aflame.
He loved Montez and Hollywood but saw through the transparency to the queer.
Society called him pornographic, but he embraced the difference.
If Warhol was the Queen of Hearts, then Smith was the Cheshire Cat of the Underground.
Reediting films during projection, no two viewings could be repetition.
In life and on screen his orientation was disorientation.
Extreme close-ups, tangled limbs, whispered “Ali Baba’s” make me disoriented.
Smith’s creatures – mythical, orgiastic, androgynous – were then and are now flaming.
Does superimposition of found Hollywood sound over Dionysian rape count as repetition?
Repetition as reappropriation to revel in and reveal the beauty and the volatility of the queer.
It’s no wonder Flaming Creatures were banned from the “cultured” and relegated underground.
For who in proper society, once aroused by the taboo, would willingly announce its difference?
A decade before came the Mad Hatter, the forerunner who reviled and celebrated difference.
Less through tangled and upside down visuals, but through dreamlike narrative he disoriented.
Cinematic priest of the occult, his films were spiritual ceremonies raised from below the ground.
With fireworks and fags, sparklers and sailors, Anger’s first film, in vision and theme, flamed.
The hidden was made transparent, the forbidden was shown, the abnormal was queered.
Myth and Hollywood, beloved and parodied, he implemented for followers to later repeat…
…including himself, to create new myth, rising from the old, new yet repeated.
Scorpio rose as creatures flamed heralding something to come that was different.
Motorcycles and leather, Brando and Dean, icons of rebellion would become icons of queerness.
And the flash of chrome displaced, the leathered and studded body parts now disorient
the way we view Hollywood. The way we view myth is now up in flames.
And no matter how hard we try, once risen it becomes harder to relegate underground.
Poet, filmmaker, philosopher, critic. Jonas Mekas was the mayor of the Underground.
Documenting the lived life of friends and family, illustrating the variation of repetition.
He constructed the cosmos of a circus, by making sparkling body parts flare and flame.
A through line exists from Mekas to Warhol (and Anger and Smith) making him not so different.
For the routine of the avant-garde artist, regardless of orientation, is revealed to be disorienting.
And the topsy-turvy nature of life may more accurately be described, in its own right, as queer.
But this Alice flames like ur-Deren, a tourist in the underground…
Not quite queer enough, trying to express their vision in my poetry, yet doomed to repeat
a Mayan conclusion in a different way… And yet, enjoying the ride through the DisOrient.
EXPLANATION: This is still a work in progress...but I always find it fun to take very structured forms of poetry, in this case a sestina, and see what I can do with it...or if I can do it at all. (Please note that the formatting is a bit off due to the framing of the blog. Each of the six stanzas is supposed to be 6 lines and the final tercet only three...the individual lines don't run over in my original word doc. Sorry about that!) This was actually a class assignment for my History of Experimental cinema course...we were told to be creative...
Artists’ works – whether still or moving – were shown in cellars, were underground.
On canvas and celluloid, light and shadow create the subject disoriented.
Don’t be confused by Sleep, it is about duration through variation, not repetition.
For the Cagean disciple knows repetition is really difference.
When you accept this, then the infiniteness of sound and image can flame.
From trailer park Texas to “magical trickster,” Jack Smith’s vision was aflame.
He loved Montez and Hollywood but saw through the transparency to the queer.
Society called him pornographic, but he embraced the difference.
If Warhol was the Queen of Hearts, then Smith was the Cheshire Cat of the Underground.
Reediting films during projection, no two viewings could be repetition.
In life and on screen his orientation was disorientation.
Extreme close-ups, tangled limbs, whispered “Ali Baba’s” make me disoriented.
Smith’s creatures – mythical, orgiastic, androgynous – were then and are now flaming.
Does superimposition of found Hollywood sound over Dionysian rape count as repetition?
Repetition as reappropriation to revel in and reveal the beauty and the volatility of the queer.
It’s no wonder Flaming Creatures were banned from the “cultured” and relegated underground.
For who in proper society, once aroused by the taboo, would willingly announce its difference?
A decade before came the Mad Hatter, the forerunner who reviled and celebrated difference.
Less through tangled and upside down visuals, but through dreamlike narrative he disoriented.
Cinematic priest of the occult, his films were spiritual ceremonies raised from below the ground.
With fireworks and fags, sparklers and sailors, Anger’s first film, in vision and theme, flamed.
The hidden was made transparent, the forbidden was shown, the abnormal was queered.
Myth and Hollywood, beloved and parodied, he implemented for followers to later repeat…
…including himself, to create new myth, rising from the old, new yet repeated.
Scorpio rose as creatures flamed heralding something to come that was different.
Motorcycles and leather, Brando and Dean, icons of rebellion would become icons of queerness.
And the flash of chrome displaced, the leathered and studded body parts now disorient
the way we view Hollywood. The way we view myth is now up in flames.
And no matter how hard we try, once risen it becomes harder to relegate underground.
Poet, filmmaker, philosopher, critic. Jonas Mekas was the mayor of the Underground.
Documenting the lived life of friends and family, illustrating the variation of repetition.
He constructed the cosmos of a circus, by making sparkling body parts flare and flame.
A through line exists from Mekas to Warhol (and Anger and Smith) making him not so different.
For the routine of the avant-garde artist, regardless of orientation, is revealed to be disorienting.
And the topsy-turvy nature of life may more accurately be described, in its own right, as queer.
But this Alice flames like ur-Deren, a tourist in the underground…
Not quite queer enough, trying to express their vision in my poetry, yet doomed to repeat
a Mayan conclusion in a different way… And yet, enjoying the ride through the DisOrient.
EXPLANATION: This is still a work in progress...but I always find it fun to take very structured forms of poetry, in this case a sestina, and see what I can do with it...or if I can do it at all. (Please note that the formatting is a bit off due to the framing of the blog. Each of the six stanzas is supposed to be 6 lines and the final tercet only three...the individual lines don't run over in my original word doc. Sorry about that!) This was actually a class assignment for my History of Experimental cinema course...we were told to be creative...
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