The World (2004)

Buzz cut burnt man, headphones wrapping ears, proud to be an American flag T, bikes--half deflated tires--by on sidewalk.

If L.A. presents an imitation of the world, and the world seeks to imitate L.A., does the world seek not an imitation of life but an imitation of death?

When Khrushchev blew his top on being banned from Disneyland, when he proclaimed "We will bury you," he merely mimed Angeleno America's imagineered reality of street life burial.

Mouchette (1967)

Espérez plus d'espérance
Trois jours leur dit Colomb
En montrant le Ciel immense
Le fond de l'horizon
Trois jours et je vous donne un monde
A vous qui n'avez plus d'espoir
Sur l'immensité profonde
Ses yeux s'ouvraient pour le voir.

Ariel (1988)

Once you decide you will be with each other forever it's quite simple:

You will have enough bullets to shoot the thugs that get in your way. And when the time comes, your dying comrade will find the little button that raises the roof on your 1965 Eldorado convertible, sheltering you from the elements.

Irene in Time (2009)

For people wondering why I hate L.A., and most of all the West Side...

the exclusive images of an oxygen masked head on a stretcher at a UCLA hospital, the mechanically explosive popularity of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, paparazzi masses climbing for astral affection...

feeding me Lucky Stars on an early seventies September Saturday morning, how I lived for summer's end, the new cartoon season beginning...

Stop! the love you save may be your own!
Darling, take it slow
Or some day you'll be all alone.
You'd better stop the love you save may be your own!
Darling, look both ways before you cross me
You're headed for the danger zone.

The Misfits (1961)

On a warm day in the summer of '79 a skinny 14 year old boy sits in a folding chair on a Wisconsin beach. A small pebble hits his shoulder. A few minutes later comes another, and another. The pebbles become larger, become rocks. They hit arms, legs, back, head.

Boys and girls giggle behind him. Stubbornly, he refuses to face them. Every child knows that the victor never caves. The tears are felt, but they don't arrive.

Cocktail dress, wedding gown, handkerchief, dishrag--whatever you need me to be.

And the ulceretic grinding, rope severing foal neck--the prescription will dull the dust stirring spectacle, extending the capacity to love till death.

Bus Stop (1956)

Ah, the 1950s, when men were men and women were cattle. For the ranch hand, the female body displaces real desire, bestial love--washing down raw beef with milk from a jug. Only secondarily does brutality toward the feminine satisfy:

"So what we got now is Brokeback Mountain! Everything's built on that! That's all we got, boy, fuckin' all. So I hope you know that, even if you don't never know the rest! You count the damn few times we have been together in nearly twenty years and you measure the short fucking leash you keep me on - and then you ask me about Mexico and tell me you'll kill me for needing somethin' I don't hardly never get. You have no idea how bad it gets! I'm not you... I can't make it on a coupla high-altitude fucks once or twice a year! You are too much for me Ennis, you sonofawhoreson bitch! I wish I knew how to quit you."

24 city (2008)

After dumping the idea of Zinc, which had moved to West 3rd and doubled their cover to ten,
after paying a dollar at the Cake Shop and having ears blasted out, deciding to leave before bands began playing,
after dodging endless row of Lower East Side hipster cigarette smoke along Houston,
after searching loudly and finally finding pigeon people on Pilgrim Hill,
after eating matzo ball soup at Sable's on 2nd ave,
after rushing through NYPL Webster branch basement bookstore,
after eating organic tricolor beet salad in Tribeca Cafe,
before seeing Elliot Sharp through Eric Mingus shout "USA out of NYC" at 92YTribeca,
before doing yoga in Penn Station,
before skipping through the Puerto Rican Day Parade,
before entering an argument about wealth creation with a Dow Jones Financial columnist sitting down in the final room of the Francis Bacon exhibit at the Met,
before performing Jonathan Richman in the Times Square subway station,
while meditating in front of the Hudson, just north of Battery Park City, I overhear this conversation:
"What a beautiful Husky."
"Thanks."
"Doesn't he get hot during the summer?"
"Oh we're not here. We go to Colorado. He loves it there."