Lightning finds a vein. Password sends a nude.
Unending angel of a terrified stomach. Tadpole, eye’s daydream.
Lili Taylor in Bright Angel, 1990, directed by Michael Fields ~ A performance so present as to author time. It gets ahead of you, but comes back at the right moments. . Donald Elise Watkins in Emergency, 2022, directed by Carey Williams ~ A vividly internal performance- sad, funny, long lived-in, rented. Two reaction shots in particular left me with that trinity of witness made holy by anger, intimacy, and indictment. . Anthony LaPaglia Judy Davis in Nitram, 2021, directed by Justin Kurzel ~ Caleb Landry Jones, of course, is killer in this...but it's LaPaglia and Davis who give it its distant intimacy, its weak-as-a-twig horizon. . Clifton Collins, Jr. Molly Parker Moises Arias in Jockey, 2021, directed by Clint Bentley ~ I don't really have words for what each of these people do in this film except to say there are silences here in each that erase history not to rewrite it but to write it as remembered the first time. . Sean Harris in The Stranger, 2022, directed by Thomas M Wright ~ Evil gets amnesia again and again, and Harris changes passwords enough to create new and terrifying permissions. . Anna Gunn Janeane Garofalo in The Apology, 2022, directed by Alison Locke ~ Gunn is all eyesight and abyss, weariness and void. Holds the center gently with an outer, flown-in, brutality. And Garofalo, damn. When she shows up in the final third, her comic timing is a fury that lightens nothing. . Andrea Riseborough Allison Janney in To Leslie, 2022, directed by Michael Morris ~ Riseborough is an anxious predictor of the past, dancing for both stoplight and spotlight, and gives a performance that has a few steps on creation. Must mention here her other films as well, that I saw this year, Here Before and Nancy. Riseborough is so fucking good. And Janney does work here that she's made a transient home of before, but gets to go deeper than usual and gives place a spot to remember. . Kelli Garner in What Josiah Saw, 2022, directed by Vincent Grashaw ~ All the performances here - Nick Stahl, Scott Haze, Jake Weber, Robert Patrick- deserve strong and correct words, but from the moment Garner's Mary puts the path in her path with the body language of anti-destination, the movie makes a scenic witness of its periphery and goes about vicariously burning itself beside the salvage of Garner's nervously resigned vision. . Alison Pill Sarah Gadon Mare Winningham in All My Puny Sorrows, 2021, directed by Michael McGowan ~ Alison Pill and Sarah Gadon glow wounded in performances that separately heal, and Mare Winningham keeps detail as something some god has locally misplaced. I was glad for how Pill baptized the submerged, and for how Gadon let others believe they’d invented the headlight. . Amanda Seyfried in A Mouthful of Air, 2021, directed by Amy Koppelman ~ Seyfried claims so many new moments in this that it's hard to say if she belongs to it or it belongs to her but the whole thing is a given possession. . Aisha Dee in Sissy, 2022, directed by Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes ~ Dee gives an otherworldly un-mirrored performance that is both exodus and revelation, and moves the end times back into the middle where belief must re-earn its brutal beginnings. . Thandiwe Newton in God's Country, 2022, directed by Julian Higgins ~ Newton is radar and blip, and never fails to locate the strayings of her lived-in living out. . Mia Goth in Pearl, 2022, directed by Ti West ~ Goth levels heaven and brings up the hell with a performance in so much local pain that what lands becomes less alien the more it invades. There is one scene so held by Goth that it makes of the eye a eulogy for every unmourned keyhole. . Anna Diop in Nanny, 2022, directed by Nikyatu Jusu ~ In a film both timeworn and newly doomed, Diop gives a fictile performance of spiritual and physical fluidity. . Rebecca Hall Grace Kaufman in Resurrection, 2022, directed by Andrew Semans ~ A possessed and wholly overtaken showing from Rebecca Hall. And Grace Kaufman moves the happening from under the accident with a waiting lonely enough to cradle the hurting young and uncarried old. .
extra i know but we’re not ok
Have privately self published a new collection titled apartures Pocketbook style, 125 pages, January 2023 collection is pay what you want can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com) or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2 or CashApp: $BartonSmock
Cannibal on the moon, ghost at the piano. The rain gone missing.
Have privately self published a new collection titled apartures Pocketbook style, 125 pages, January 2023 collection is pay what you want can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com) or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2 or CashApp: $BartonSmock
Eye factory, fog, touch machine. Paintbrush, bicycle. Reading lice as less. A dog with nine lives. Movie deer. God pretending to make a forgetful sister for me to live above. The far stomach. An unset mousetrap. The noiseless ear of baby sticklegs. Face tattoos of empty handguns. Your red doll’s hospital bed. Comb as come.
Sleep, death, leapfrog. Two infants swallowing a blip from the same radar. A few pianos made of frostbite. Reading moan as moon. Then moon as moan. A circle writing a poem for god. Hipbone, jawbone. Teeth brushed over a bowl that remembers nothing.
I wrote about death. Say that. Say also that I thought breaking my arm would keep me from getting erections. Say I was nonviolent. Say groundhog say shovel. Say I had no weapon. Say some lived because I rented a movie and others because I waited for it to rewind. Say I was there but my wrist was late. Pick a wrist, but be shy. Not like you would a child.
kingsoftrain 