When she left, sure the sun was shining, sure the boxman in his truck had forgotten to brake at that dangerous intersection, sure the clouds had cleared two months ago over my mother’s house which made her think there was an explosion and the astronauts’ urine tank had cracked. Yes, I’d heard rumors, rumors that […]
(Scene I) He bought his wife a computer (Scene II) and took her to dinner, an expensive dinner that smelled of butter, wine, and capers. She ate slowly. He poured the wine. Outside, the moon burned like an eyeball observing winter’s January. A wasp or a bee circled among the ceiling lights. Two waiters got […]
The road ahead does indeed look like more than a bowl of morning cereal or something dead and furry you saw the other day on the shoulder or a red kite jerking against a cool blue sky. It isn’t the curves, the crazy angles of the cable wires, those few drops that run up the […]
This morning I saw yellow in the bushes at the skirt of the house, an elimination of reds and blues, a distortion of green. It was a shallow color, speedy, and hours later I determined that it had been a coyote digging for mice or ground hogs or moles. In the desert, I remember greens, […]
The cinematic form is a wonder. With this form an artist can make several events or activities appear to be happening at the same time. Let’s examine this notion. Simultaneity is a perceived fact of every day life. We can prove this by considering single events in space and time, such as the action of […]
At a particular conference–there were so many for the Professor–he asked this question of two men, one young, the other older, standing at the bar. He asked them: “Where are your thoughts?” The older man attributed the question to too much drink. But as he observed the Professor closely, he noticed the contents of his […]
“I really liked the movie,” the man said. “I liked that it was about trees,” the woman said. “But it wasn’t about trees,” he said. “It was about the end of the world.” “It was about trees,” she said. “It wasn’t about trees. That’s like saying the day is about sun when everyone knows that […]
When I was a child I imagined the distance between the roof of my house to the very place where the world curved out of view, which had to be imagined because the neighborhood houses squared out forever. I don’t remember the first time I climbed the roof. It was a means of rising above […]
The woman with the red hat checked her phone. A text message read: “I got your message.” She walked into the shadows. She reached high for color. She drew a branch down, plucked an orange then another orange and then another orange and put them into her purse, one by one. I got your message. […]
One day, a filmmaker read about how a particular Somali had become a captain and how, somewhere in the world, a group of soldiers took ownership of land they knew only from magazines. He shook the paper. He thought for a moment: is anything in here real? The sun streamed into the room, like snow, […]
When I watch a green dot and am asked to listen for 45 seconds, I have 45 seconds of silence. In that silence I imagine traveling forward or away. And in that silence come a deck of characters: Wally, Geronimo, someone named Jean, who had just leapt out of a plane. I also think of […]
Two by two remains an equation you could never solve “How much of life is quantifiable?” he asked, as a superstore sign (it must have been several tons in weight) bent at the neck and fell on him, like a great flyswatter. “Now this’s something,” said the unit commander. “This morning over coffee I never […]
The line “this point in space” in John Timmon’s short film titled Perspective #2 reminds me of another by Robert Frost. It goes: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (1). I don’t know why, but let’s trace the logic anyway. This is the first line of Frost’s famous poem, Mending Wall. What’s interesting […]
“I’m glad they put the trees here. They hold off the wind. Get me a beer.” “She said she waited almost an hour.” “I think we should leave.” “When she finally went to the door for the last time, he was gone.” “Did she see anything, a car, a truck, something red or tan?” “The […]
Let’s imagine a scene. This scene could easily be re-imagined as a poem, a painting, a photograph, it could be puzzle piece in a larger framework, such as an epic, a novel, or a long film. The weather is unsettled. At random intervals the wind grabs at the trees and lets them go, leaving heavy […]
