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June 18, 2024 / barton smock

Ethan Hawke letter 5, 061824

Letter 061824 machines made from abduction

Dear Ethan Hawke

The television is a monthless calendar. In the mirror, I am the only mirror to taste the blood of a ghost. I want you to know that time is safe with me. An angel’s eye fills with fog. These bodies aren’t doing anything.
June 17, 2024 / barton smock

Ethan Hawke letter 4, 061724

Letter 061724 when insomnia leaves listening to us

Dear Ethan Hawke

Last year, I was quiet for seven months. Movies came to me as bruises from the moon. My children hid and their hiding was a kindness. All sight was plain. I wore slippers and my heels set small fires. Pain sang to the stone that god gave a stomach a song so short that a butterfly became an angel’s erection. I wanted to laugh, but everything was funny. Many of the guns didn’t go off. I don’t think I will tell you about the guns. Our disappearance is occupied. And code for something else.
June 17, 2024 / barton smock

( words toward I Saw The TV Glow, etc, & Jane Schoenbrun

The body finds itself in a body. How unfair. How brief. My god, this movie. As in, Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw The TV Glow. As in, melancholy plays the long game. Schoenbrun is a giving artist, but knows no charity goes unpunished, nor stays self-harmed, nor arrives outer-healed. Brigette Lundy-Paine gives a searching, locatable performance, and Justice Smith carries everything- the physical, the spiritual, the voice, and the voice changed. Both are prayers of unanswerable theater. I lost something to this, and it lost it back.

We’re All Going To The World’s Fair has to it an unworried precision that had me thinking I might have forgotten to shut down, in another life, an electric toothbrush. If any pulse is taken, it’s the pulse of separation and director Jane Schoenbrun is songbook tender and secretly protective enough to hum the art of this film into the disconnected wrists of those whose online has no off. Schoenbrun and lead Anna Cobb make of knowing a current terror and no sky here falls that hasn’t been dropped. Cobb, with deadpan abstraction, gives a performance worth of sleep’s eternal jump-scare and works with the film outside of the film to put an end to vice-versa that we might more blankly keep those who are constantly notified away from those who appear by looking at the vanished.
June 16, 2024 / barton smock

Ethan Hawke letter 3, 061624

Letter 061624 climate sameness

Dear Ethan Hawke

Palestine has entered my dreams. I see car accidents before they happen but can’t tell my children. I kill a grasshopper with another grasshopper then keep the second alive. I kill a rabbit. I’d never kill a rabbit. But it was in my house. If there are babies, amen, I sleep a little in my sleep. In my death. It’s hot here. It’s cold. Palestine is not a dream. We keep touching it. Our hands go online twice and the holy spirit tortures a photograph. It is cruel to dream after never once imagining. After being, for a whole life, human.
June 15, 2024 / barton smock

assassination machine

a human
skull
in an american
lake

waits
for the moon
June 15, 2024 / barton smock

words toward Aase Berg’s ‘With Deer’, translated by Johannes Göransson (Black Ocean, 2012)

With Deer
By Aase Berg
Translated by Johannes Göransson
Black Ocean, 2012

These holes keep appearing. In my shirt, in the ground. A hole can be almost anything glowing with shame. Aase Berg’s With Deer is dangerous. Especially on Saturdays. Saturdays aren’t real. Johannes Göransson’s translation of With Deer is an excitement. Excitement as tower, as ruin, but also excitement as satellite. It is thrilled to have enemies, is what I mean. No matter, no matter. The lookout’s grief blips through radar after radar. Radar, before. What a bronzing of sin. I carry a snake in an insect’s dream. I look like hell in the place where my intestines meet. Inside joke, outside sorrow. I don’t know where else it happens, this inventory of squirrel loneliness, this ghost reverb of haunted autopsies. These are landmark injuries. Go there, go here, as wax figure, as mannequin. Let burial go. And throb in some groundstruck ache.

~

reflection by Barton Smock
June 15, 2024 / barton smock

Ethan Hawke letter 2, 061524

Letter 061524 words toward god and sleep and Aase Berg

Dear Ethan Hawke

I said this yesterday but I’m a fan omfg of remaining. Think A Midnight Clear. I don’t know what happened to Keith Gordon. Don’t tell me, and I promise I won’t AI that shit. I like to think he is okay. I did not see Mother Night and still regret it. Regret doesn’t go away, so again I’ve said something I didn’t mean. Don’t. Fuck I can’t write. Does everyone know? I said this yesterday but it keeps us awake that god can’t sleep. I think god saw the face of an insect and then made insects. Then made The Woman In The Fifth. I don’t know if you remember what I said about us only getting one simulation. And that was only yesterday.
June 14, 2024 / barton smock

recent words toward films (Sometimes I Think About Dying, You’ll Never Find Me, A Perfect Day For Caribou, Where The Devil Roams)

Rachel Lambert's Sometimes I Think About Dying has a spellbroken elegance to it that sounds like the world around it overheard itself and retreated with the design but not with the details. I was afraid, in the viewing, that I'd intrude. Daisy Ridley does precious much with darkness, and makes it not a delicacy but thing asking to be opened correctly. Lovely, slow, awake, and harsh.

Sound touches light and hell goes nowhere. Sight creates a signature eye for the soul to roll around in. Indianna Bell’s and Josiah Allen’s You'll Never Find Me places a dual duel in the middle of a very small nowhere and lets terror speak its mouth. We’ll know when they know and we’ll all watch separation punish the detached with isolation and illusion. Brendan Rock and Jordan Cowan vibrate, glow, and go swimmingly dark. This whole endeavor hums, quiets, and leaves one left.

Jeff Rutherford's A Perfect Day for Caribou is a blink-and-you'll-see-it film of fast vision and punk fragility and knows that a short story is a long story slowed down. With a ramshackle restraint, it ghosts itself into finding what goes missing when not unleashed. No punches pulled, these are tired people, their cigarettes like little casts for little broken arms. Charlie Plummer, Jeb Berrier, and Dana Millican leave their roles often to walk them just out of view and then walk them back to sit awhile as if movement is the only angel that can touch the earth. Lovely, loved, film.

Where the Devil Roams, written and directed by Toby Poser, John Adams, and Zelda Adams, suffers beautifully from self-diagnosis and subsequently from phantom dream syndrome to irreversibly give us the nightmare we'll never have. It's a fucking gift. Jaggedly creative, its kitchen sink is real whether or not the blood washed there is.
June 14, 2024 / barton smock

Ethan Hawke letter 1, 061424

Letter 061424 words toward my daughter getting married

Dear Ethan Hawke

A song played that made me forget a song was playing. I made my daughter laugh a couple times in a place that knew itself into beauty. There is always a church. A church near a church. I don’t really pray bc I pray all the time. My healthy sons sat with my sick son. I don’t mean to say it that way. Say, I say, to saying. It all felt very young. Very elsewhere. Elsewhere, the worlds of more. Beside me, my wife looked perfectly alone. I mean to say it that way. Alone in her own perfection. My sick son is not sick unless you account for healing. It was such a great day. It gave way, and gained. I hate the world, and days end. We only get one simulation. Run out of sadness.
June 13, 2024 / barton smock

words toward Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi’s ‘Cadaver Of Red Roses’ (O, Miami, 2024)


Cadaver Of Red Roses
Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi
O, Miami (2024)

In the elegantly wrestled verse of Cadaver of Red Roses, poet Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi takes actual place and actual thing as a gift and re-gifts them as a fair and brutal math, a hungry and clawed-at grammar, a headlining and interrupted voice. Its anger illuminates hallucinations that are ever-present, and its peace reverses ritual might its purple prayer leave a mark looked for by a bruise. It says yes, and so what, and it sings home using the notes of the seriously remote. So sing, so look. Keep pace. Its portals have softspots for the void.

~

reflection by Barton Smock