Dear Julie Brown:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8h5o9Swk10

~ Hakim

I Killed Myself Last Night

Yes, it's true: I killed myself last night. I’d put it off for months, hoping against hope that things would get better, hoping that my life would change and I’d stop getting the messages, the pleadings, the gentle threats, the chorus of doom that plagued me every day.

But it didn’t get better, and finally, in a desperate act of self-preservation, I just… killed myself. I went to the cupboard and took out the implement I’d put away so long ago, hoping I'd never have to use it again. I put it on the table and took out the stack of mail that had jeered at me from the top of the refrigerator for months. I took the sharp letter opener from the drawer and held it in my hand a long time, then sat down and began my final correspondence.

It all started innocently enough. I’d gotten an appeal from one nonprofit agency or another, and I thought, Well, why not? And I sent them a check – not a big check, hardly a donation at all really, especially when you consider how much they subsequently spent trying to get me to donate more money. It could have been any of them – the ACLU, the NRDC, the Nature Conservancy, the ASPCA, the Sierra Club, KQED, Amnesty International, The Hiking Club, et al – but we’ll never know which of them sold my name to the wicked slippery devils who propagate thousands of labels bearing our names, disseminating them to every dog&pony show and claptrap manufacturer in the western world (and a few in India & China too).

It could have been any of them that started the avalanche too, and I can’t remember which it was that started the whole painful ordeal, but I wrote that fateful – and last night I laughed grimly as I thought that it was, in the end, fatal – check. The check that would change my life, the check that finally would end my life. But all this suicide business was in the future then, and I was blissfully ignorant of the desperation that would finally drive me to take my own life, over and over and over again.

I opened each piece of mail, separating the ‘valuable gifts’ from the dross. Let me say this: I have enough return address labels to last me the rest of my life. Well, the rest of my life if I were to live to be 125 years old. Which I won’t. I made neat stacks, the intensity of my task matching my determination to end the pain, once and for all, to feel the release from this continuing punishment.

When the stacks were made – one deep pile of opened envelopes and pleading letters on the floor beside my chair, one stack of envelopes and receipt/vouchers bearing my name and address on the table before me – I picked up that deadly implement and prepared to redden it. Red, the color of lust and passion. Red, the color of warning and accusation. Red, the color of danger and peril. The color of blood.

It’s funny: when I had played this deadly game before, the color was purple. But this time, I knew it would be red, and splayed across the receipt/vouchers before me, the blood-red sign of my final defiance would spell out my doom. I picked up the implement and hit it on the pad twice, three times. Then I touched it to the first receipt/voucher.

‘DECEASED’ was proclaimed in ornate capitals, inside an ornamental border, quite deliberately intended to resemble a funerary card. I stamped the receipt/voucher, right over my name, signaling plainly to the nice caring folks at the Nature Conservancy that they should stop sending me pleas to save the whales, or the polar bears, or the artic fox, or the Canadian wolf. Because I was presumably beyond saving myself. Thump!

Oh, it’s not that I don’t care about those endangered species, or that I think that they deserve to starve to death or die in slow increments from the encroachment of ‘mankind’ (or, as e e cummings had it, “pity this busy monster, manunkind, not”). No, no, no. I completely support the work that all those agencies do, from building homes for the poor and feeding the homeless, to trying to close Guantanamo and freeing Chinese prisoners who build our cheap tools in slave-camps.

But I can’t stand the mail. I can’t stand the two-a-month (or three- or four-a-month) distress calls, each with a warning that is more dire than the last. I can’t stand the thought that I initially spent a meager ten bucks on some ‘good cause’ and they bought stamps with that money to hound me into giving more. In the old days, I’d even put a nickel stamp on them, to guarantee that they’d get the message that I was dead by having to pay the postage due.

And in this batch, almost a dozen dire pleas from the Nature Conservancy alone… what gives? I continued stamping: Thump! Well, when they receive them all at once, each bearing their shocking news in blood-red letters, maybe they’ll get the message – they’ll be sorry then, and they’ll wish I were still alive, that they’d treated me better. I’d show them, once and for all.

In some ways, these charities are worse than vampires – because vampires will at least finish off a victim once in a while. But charities will keep after you til you’re dead. And I knew that only too well… That’s why I was killing myself.

And so I ended it. I continued stamping the blood-red message on about seven dozen receipt/vouchers: Thump! Thump thump! ‘DECEASED’ over and over and over, each time thinking of my actual death and how I’d miss it because – well, that’s what death is, missing things. My arm grew tired from all the stamping, once on the pad and then swinging over to the receipt/voucher and then once more. Yet I felt nary a twinge about killing myself off, because I knew that I might live a better life, that I might actually have some quality in my life – or at least that short part of my life where I put the key in the mailbox and extracted the communications to me from the outside world.

Well, ok, I felt a twinge. One or two. Tiny ones. After all, these people were doing good work when they weren’t hounding me for money, sending me nickels glued to cards and ‘valuable gifts’ – all in hopes of triggering my guilt over my privileged status in the world. I sloughed off the guilt, but I did put aside the petitions and letters to my representatives in our democratic government, and I will (once resurrected in the morning, after a nice long sleep) put them into envelopes and send them off. But for now, I’m dead to the world – or at least to the world that wants something from me in the form of donations. And believe me, I intend to rest in peace.




© 2011 Hakim - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: use without profit allowed only with author’s express written permission. Please don't wake up my attorney. Please.

Frycook-assisted Suicide

So a while ago, I took Gina out to lunch and we agreed to go to Al’s Burger’s a greasy-spoon on San Pablo in Albany. I ordered a double burger, leaving off the cheese, since that is just too much of the wrong kind of food for me, but Gina has other ideas about what is and isn’t good for her.

She ordered two hotdogs-on-sticks (battered and deep-fried), plus an order of onion rings (also battered and deep-fried). And she topped it off with a large chocolate shake. Ok, so the girl is sitting there, all 350 pounds of her spilling over the edges of her chair, stuffing her face with (a lot of) fried foods that can’t help her in any way – it can’t help her weight, it can’t help her cholesterol, and it certainly can’t help her heart.

I thought, Jesus, I’m looking at a fry-cook-assisted suicide here. I’m sitting here, watching this person commit suicide, and it’s like those nuts who attack cops in hopes of being shot to death. They call that kind of death an ‘officer-assisted suicide’ and write it off on the cop’s record as an occupational hazard. And apparently no one is noticing that Gina is slowly committing suicide by artery-clogging weight gain.

I mentioned something about it – not exactly in those words, but that it seemed to be a bit of a dodgy meal. Gina blithely brushed me off, saying, “Hey, I don’t do this all that often.”

To which my mind responded, Well, not all that often, but it seems we were only here about a few weeks ago.

She went on to say, “Look, I came to a junk-food joint – I’m supposed to order a salad?”

And at that point, I realised that Gina just doesn’t care whether she lives or dies. And the next thought in my mind was I can’t watch this. I didn’t want to witness her killing herself this way – slowly, by degrees, by heaped-on calories and by ounces and by pounds. I didn’t want to then, and I don’t want to now.

I think that Gina isn’t being completely honest with herself – she has no scale, so she says that she’s losing weight ‘because my pants are loose.’ But she never looks any smaller than she has been before, and she often appears bigger. People – all of us, it seems, are stuck in ruts that we don’t know how to get out of, stuck in situations that we can’t find a way to change.

I know that it’s nearly impossible to change whole ways of life. I mean, it takes that triathlon super-hero gene to just take that 90-degree turn and stop a behavior. But I’ve seen people change by making one small shift, one little movement to the right or left, like a plane lining up on approach: “Five right. Five right.” And by small degrees coming into orientation with the runway. By shifting one small thing – even just an attitude – change can come. Big change. Significant change. And sometimes that attitude is the first thing to change; often it’s the only thing you can change.

Heaven knows I’m not on some high horse here – I have my own deals that need a shift, a small alteration, a change. And I like to think that what keeps me from failing completely is that I’m awake and aware and (I think) I don’t lie to myself. And I think that friends have some responsibility to each other to point out when one of them is acting foolishly or dangerously.

So one way to change is to actually alter some smaller behaviors – like saying, “No, I can’t eat there, because when I do that I have no control.” And that works for me… mostly. And ‘mostly’ is all I’m looking for, because ‘mostly’ means that I’ve reduced a situation from ‘a lot’ to ‘a lot less.’ And if I can do that enough, then pretty soon ‘a lot less’ will become ‘none.’

But Gina is different. She could try eating correctly, but the truth is that she doesn’t want to… and she doesn’t really want to lose any weight, no matter what her mouth might say to the contrary.

My big pal Ollie says that his weight is what keeps him safe, that he has 375 reasons to keep someone away from him and his broken heart… using his weight to keep people at a distance. And that weight also cues him to who may be prejudiced against fat people. Ok, so that’s Ollie. But he knows what he’s doing – he’s aware of his situation and how he’s handling it. And he’s not kidding himself about things. Like his true weight and how often he eats fat-filled artery-choking foods (and in fairness, his diet is pretty innocuous – he just eats more ‘healthy food’ than his friends do).

I like to think of myself as not bigoted. I stay vigilant for signs of prejudicial thinking. And I understand that there are people whose weight gain results from physical conditions beyond their control. I also know that ‘will power’ and ‘controlled intake’ are useless concepts to persons with thyroid or hormone problems. But I have trouble trusting people who once were slim and are now the morbidly obese. They’ve eaten their way into a corner, and even though it’s got to be a tough corner to escape, still I want to shout, Jesus, get a goddam grip – it doesn’t have to be this way.

Does that make me a jerk? I don’t know. Of course, me – I can’t even lose this little pot-belly I’ve acquired in my middle age, and god knows that I’ve had in my life (and still have) my own ‘excesses’ that could be corrected with enough true and active intent. But it seems I’m comfortable in those excesses (and their consequences) and so they don’t change because I’m habituated. So what the hell do I know?

Well, I know that I can’t watch a friend commit slow suicide. And I know I won’t be the person who’s always complaining about my friend’s behavior. And I won’t be party to fry-cook-assisted suicide.

So I won’t be taking Gina out to eat anymore.

© 2011 Hakim - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: use without profit allowed only with author’s express written permission. Please don't wake up my attorney. Please.

MY SCRAPBOOK

– for & after JG

I’m proud of my expensive scrapbook,

so I flaunt it to my friends.

It’s bigger than theirs

and looks like it doesn’t need repairs.

“How’s your scrapbook?” someone asks at a reading.

“Fine!” I chirp up,

jumping at the chance

to extol the many virtues of my scrapbook.

Pretty soon a circle gathers

and everyone’s discussing its size,

editorial control, the artwork, the sheer lettuce

it takes to put the damn thing out.

If someone stays in a corner

someone else might notice and ask about theirs:

they never want to talk about it.

So they join in, chirping you-don’t-says,

and isn’t-that-amazings and

what-about-the-functional-glitter?

By the time I get home

I’m exhausted from bringing up

the subject of my scrapbook.

I get home and there it is,

not much on humility or balance

or good artists without the money

to study scrapbookery with me.

It’s all sub-culture, all glitz-trimming

and illusory contours, not even bothering to cover

up the cliquey pandering of the maintenance quota lining.

Late at night

when no one’s looking,

I’m embarrassed and ashamed of the damn thing,

kick it across the room

and stub my toe,

then toss it into the fireplace.

Maybe even burn it.

But I’m unwilling to fix it, and

even though I use it to meet women,

I am a man who wakes up depressed, lonely,

frustrated, who tries to burn his scrapbook,

his expensive shiny scrapbook.

And I haven’t the courage to do even that.

Imagine burning one’s scrapbook.

The shame would haunt me the rest of my career.

So after a while I pull it out of the fireplace,

dust it off and put it on the mantle and go to bed,

hearing its weeping throughout the night,

the low short moan just before daybreak.

My expensive scrapbook.

This poem is part of an unpublished manuscript called SONGS & ECHOES ~ The Pastiche Poems. Pastiche poems are those written in the style of another poet.

© 1992 Hakim - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: use without profit allowed only with author’s express written permission. Please don't wake up my attorney. Please.

HOW LONG?

– for & after Tommy Swerdlow

How long can you wait

for the time to be right?

How long can you hide

in a silk mask of dreams

while the ticking tide of nightfall

bleeds the days out of your veins?

How long?

Street corners press your feet

and the women hurry by

evening cracks its knuckles

and you know you are alone.

How long?

The women swim around you

trailing several smells

and you wonder

if the brunet in spikeheels

knows the only question

or even the address

of a solid mental breakdown

as you walk in the neck of a cosmic disease.

You’re dizzy with the power

of this moving female mass:

actresses & secretaries

Cinderella’s sisters

streetful working girls

Athena on the rise

linguistics’ oldest teachers

and girls named for the moon.

Or those longthighed pinklipped schoolgirls

we hunt for absolution

going home to daddy

or a slice of cathode pie.

How long can you wait for her

to break through your looking mind

in a salient spark of flesh,

thrown down by lariat eyes

with a single twist around

your stumbled boyhood horns.

You hoped that she could change you –

but she’s late she is not coming

and now the street is empty

except for Van Gogh’s cab.

(One door is missing

and the driver’s always storming

about crowbars in the cornbelt.)

How long?

Until you waken sweating

with those dreams that fleck your skin?

Like the hot dried sweat of woman

and the tide of truth she holds,

this smell that nerves out something

from your Viennese valise,

some taste

remote & long forgotten

with a root deep in your past,

like the Hassidic revisionism

crashing in your skull.

But what you will become

can never be the things you were.

How long?

Til you see

that the only thing she’s hidden

is the orbit of her smile

in a breeze that drinks the leaves

of one morning’s gentlest tree.

And that’s how long.

© 2002 Hakim - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: use without profit allowed only with author’s express written permission. Please don't wake up my attorney. Please.

What makes European cinema so unique?

This question was recently posted in an online forum, and indicates a true desire to learn more about the current state of cinema in the world today. But perhaps the question is framed incorrectly, and that framing shows a certain ethno- or culture-centricity on the part of the questioner.

Certainly each culture’s films are unique, and in the US, people tend to view US films as the standard – and all other films produced in the varied cultures of the world as ‘everything else.’

This perspective is a good place to start, and the reason so many people ‘position’ their arguments with relation to ‘American’ (read: made in USA) films is that the factory that is Hollywood churns them out and markets them, and so many ‘smaller’ cultures take in these (from their perspective) ‘foreign’ films, accepting them too as some kind of attainable or at least desirable ‘normal’ and then growing up with the Americanisation of their native culture as a fact of life.

No one is saying “why are European films so much better than Nigerian films” because the answer is quite obvious (if you’ve seen many Nigerian films – and I don’t mean to pick on them, it’s just that almost all of them are a bit behind the curve on filmic techniques, or were when last I checked; but the Nigerian film story is a fascinating story of its own).

Over the last four decades, it is quite true that European films and US films have grown much more alike, and there are several reasons for this. One is the marketplace itself: as Europeans saw that they actually could get films shown in the US, they started looking at what ‘Americans’ watched and then kind of mimicked some of what they saw (La Femme Nikita, et al).

And on the flip side, American filmmakers (mostly producers, it is true, but some directors too) saw the great European films and bought the rights and remade them by setting them in the US, in the process altering the stories as needed to make them work in US cities with US characters. I mention producers and directors – the directors chose largely to tell their own stories (Soderberg & Traffic, for instance) while the producers were much more happy to just remake a ‘successful’ or interesting film (The Toy, My Father the Hero, Three Men & a Baby, Three Fugitives, Fathers Day, etc etc) for the money that such a film might make in the US.

It seems that people look for facile answers, and often to facile questions, which is no way to educate oneself. To say that ‘Americans’ (meaning US) will lose their jobs if the films fail is no argument of worth, since there are plenty of ‘Americans’ (meaning US) who turn out drek and lose their jobs, who turn out good films and still lose their jobs, and who turn out drek and keep their jobs.

Films are made for a variety of reasons, some of which are just to spend a little money keeping someone busy, to pay back a favor, to balance the terms of a contract (“Gee, Steven Soderberg, make Oceans 12 and we’ll give you the budget to make your art film”), to keep someone from being able to be available for a rival studios big film, etc etc.

And the fact that Hollywood is a very small town, a factory town, should not be lost in the shuffle. The market drives American films. The market. That is why they play it safe, that is why they remake drek, that is why they take old crap from the TV vault and make into the next hoped-for summer blockbuster, that is why they look at something and say, “Well, the original was a hit, so this will be a hit.” Many of my friends and I agree that if they were serious filmmakers, they would take a failed film from the 40s or 50s or 60s and remake it – and make it better. That is to say, they would take something that ‘could have been a contender’ and made it hit the mark.

Hollywood has always dealt in remakes – from the very first handful of movies, they were copying each other (and themselves), remaking things that were popular. One of the first films was a camera tied to the front of a train and sent down a mountain (France? Switzerland?). Then it was done in the US. Then somewhere else. One historical document is a film made from the front of a streetcar heading down Market Street just days before the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. Streams of cowboy movies, the war movies (when the film industry was used as a propaganda arm of the US government during WWI and WWII), then gangster movies, then more war movies.

In Hollywood in the first 20 years of the 1900s, they would remake the same film two or three times in a five-year period. Later, they remade the ‘Maltese Falcon’ story TWICE before they made The Maltese Falcon (what a relief that Walter Huston finally got it right). And the market is what is driving that impulse to remake movies. When you are trying to satisfy an audience, it is an extremely fine line between giving them something they are comfortable with (that is the first part of attraction – and a reason that stars are type-cast) and giving them novelty (if it’s stale or a cliché, they’ll stay away, right?). And the bean-counters are always fiscally conservative.

But be clear on one thing. No one, not in Hollywood or Bollywood or China or Europe or South America, ever goes to a moneyman and says, “I want to make a piece of crap.” And yet that kind of movie keeps getting made, doesn’t it?

No one in US says, “Those silly French, making art – let’s make drek and make a killing.”

No – what they say is this: “The major US demographic sector watching movies is 14 - 24 year old males, and those people want to see breasts, cars, exploding things, and preferably all together. If we make that and show it to them, they will buy lots and lots of popcorn and we will make our money back, and perhaps some extra money to cover that piece of crap that what’s-his-name made, trying to do art, the loony bastard.”

I think that this perspective is aptly called “a race to the bottom.”

In Europe and elsewhere, they say, “Kids will watch whatever they will watch, but we are actually educated and think real thoughts that make real sense (unlike in the US where they are told that they are thinking when they are actually repeating something they’ve heard or read in a magazine). And we have an audience to please that includes a lot of adults and women too, so let’s make this movie from the great script that Francois wrote. The kids can always watch that merde from the USA, non?”

I may be wrong, but that’s the way I’ve seen it play out...

© 2011 Hakim - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: use without profit allowed only with author’s express written permission. Please don't wake up my attorney. Please.

OF OPERA & STENDHAL

Strange as it sounds, I really believed I knew something about the human heart, as if a few romantic comeuppances... together with a taste for opera, sufficed to give me Stendhalian credentials. – James Merrill

Is it not

strange?

We stumble

through life, each thinking

mine the lone tragedy,

this pain like none other,

none ever felt quite this way before....

thinking her heart alone

the human heart.

How young the young ...

and my own romantic comeuppances.

A girl who loved me more than

anything,

but could not cross the space

to become the woman who knew how to love

the animal I was:

In her leaving

she took that terrible absence with her

trading another absence in its place.

"...si che non trouvo attia – ma non che trasu."

Or another girl, this one

torn from the light

and I put her in the ground,

her family staring: a pale young man

broken on

a casket covered with roses

and roses

and my life blanketed by

the petals of her memory,

her touch,

the whispers

crushed by our own confusion

and her lust for speed.

"...e una commedia, lo so,

ma questa angoscia eterna pare!"

My second wife I

ran over with the old green pickup,

her ragged screams drowned in

the engine's high whine

back and forth

the wheels crushing her fine ribcage

again

and again

– but

only in my fever dreams

tossing east to west

alone

night after night

after night.

"...al alba vincera."

My younger life so operatic…

characters arranged exactly,

their exits

their entrances timed with careful

precision

to the phrasing of this or that aria

I chose to sing.

"...mi destino in la palma de mi mano

la gitana lo leyo."

But

would a wife of mine ever ride

to the funeral with my mistress

holding in their laps

between them

my severed head?

© 2011 Hakim - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: use without profit allowed only with author’s express written permission. Please don't wake up my attorney. Please.