Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 12 (9 page)

An Inside Job: Dream Comics
by Hob, #1: Nice little package—that's meant as a compliment. Lovely cover gets the reader in the right mood for the eight dream comix inside. Four one-page one-liner tales are drawn in a soft pencil-shaded style while the other four stories are in simple and clear pen-and-ink. The dreams have a wry and sadly familiar mixture of embarrassment (nudity! fights! loneliness!) and logic. $2, 3.25x6, 28pp, Graphesthesia, PO Box 420596, San Francisco, CA 94142-0596

The Whizzbanger GT Zine Distributors,
#6: 22 pages of good listings of distros, libraries, archives, zine stores, reviewers, and reviews followed by 12 pages of ads. The abrupt split between ads and information is more formal than in most zines. Solid resource, frequently updated. Nov. 2002, 8.5x11, $4, 22, 12pp. PO Box 5591, Portland, OR 97228 Also:
Aftermath,
$4, 8.5x11, 26pp. On the event (and reactions to same) of Sept. 11th, 2001. Also:
Flashpoint,
#3, $3, 8.5x11, 38pp. “Documenting the fact AIDs does not exist.” As it says on the back, “Desperate times call for desperate zines."

Recommended (as usual):
The Urban Pantheist, A Reader's GT the Underground Press, Xerography Debt, Leeking Ink,
and many more. Sorry, Dear Readers. We wanted to run more reviews and nonfiction. In fact, we wanted a whole lot more in here. But we didn't because there are mailing-weight issues. And nice-margin issues. What's the use of having great fiction if it's in six-point type? Maybe we'll spring another ish on the world sooner than November.

We'd like
LCRW
to be perfectbound, with a beautiful four-color 10pt CIS laminated cover with interiors of cream or natural-colored recycled paper. So this being the case, why not? Three easy reasons: high print costs, changing our distribution patterns, and therefore raising the cover price. So, for now, we're sticking to the shoddy look and will continue to publish top of the line fiction &c. You can't tell a zine by its cover? We hope.

Art Credits: front cover adapted from “Tomi After Bath” by Hashiguchi Goyo. Back cover adapted from Crocodile Woodcut from the
Hortus Sanitatis,
1536.

Printed with grace and style by eXpress.Media Corp, 1419 Donelson Pike, Nashville, TN 37217.

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William Smith

Don't Look Now

Dir: Nicolas Roeg

Note: The Film Column often contains spoilers.

Don't Look Now
is a ghost story haunted by color and geometry.

In the opening sequence married couple Laura (Julie Christie) and John (Donald Sutherland) are spending a contented afternoon reading and studying slides of a Venetian church. Their children are playing outside in the idyllic English countryside. The scene cuts between interior and exterior, creating parallels between the children's games and their parent's banter. Laura is researching her daughter Christine's question about the curve of the earth and a flat frozen pond—cut to Christine throwing a ball into the water. Laura fans her fingers in front of her mouth—cut to her daughter performing the same gesture in miniature. These parallels, and others, establish the family's bond without the need to show them interacting.

When John looks at a particular slide this comfortable scene turns malevolent. The slide shows a church interior: seated at a pew is a small child in a red plastic raincoat—the identical raincoat that his daughter is wearing, splashing in the puddles outside. This figure isn't supposed to be there. John moves to the light table to get a better look, but knocks over a glass of water, smearing the color dye of the slide in a long read swath. He tries to soak up the water but suddenly stops, runs outside, and finds that his daughter has disappeared into the reedy, black stream that runs across the yard.

Several months later in Venice. John has escaped into his work restoring the church documented in the slides and Laura is recovering from a severe nervous breakdown.

Venice is, as ever, visually stunning, but the city is pervaded by an air of sinister fakery. The church isn't as old as it is supposed to be and John's choice is to “restore the fake or watch it sink into the sea.” A pair of elderly sisters, one of them blind, have an “accidental” meeting with Laura and claim to have had a vision of the couple's dead daughter standing between them laughing. And John is repeatedly “by chance” drawn to crime scenes where police are pulling murdered girls from the canals. Venice seems half-sunk in the same puddle that claimed their daughter.

With the help of the sisters, Laura hopes to communicate with Christine. John is sure his wife is being conned and though he manages to trace the sisters to their hotel, he is drawn to a different path when he sees a red raincoat disappearing around a corner. It seems John is gifted with “the sight” as well.

Like many of Nicolas Roeg's films,
Don't Look Now
is a puzzle box. The viewer is asked to see through two competing “visions” but the film offers no cues telling us when we have left reality. (And if we have, whose unreality are we seeing?) Secondary characters are introduced as benevolent but are later shown, in seemingly non sequitur scenes, acting threatening and bizarre. The viewer is never sure if these flashes provide insight or if they are a visualization of the protagonist's paranoia.

The color red is a constant, taunting presence. It invokes the couple's dead daughter but it also provides the only spark to lead the characters and the viewer through this world of canals and forgotten alleys.

The title of the film, taken directly from the novel by Daphne Du Maurier, expresses how suddenly our world can be destroyed: Don't look now, but your child is dead. It hints at the overlapping kinds of sight (and blindness) that link these characters and it is also a reference to the magician's misdirection that Roeg is a master of.
Don't Look Now
is a complicated and satisfying ghost story, but it is also only the only horror film I can think of whose deepest chills come from the possibility of misreading of a symbol.

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Lena DeTar

My mom lives on a satellite—the last place dark enough for astronomy these days.

"Low gravity is good for old bones,” she says, smiling at Cyril and Jaine, and does a backflip. The kids want to meet her. How
cool
is it to have a grandma who can do backflips, they say. Vid-chat is expensive enough. A trip above the stratosphere on my professor's salary would turn my bank account into vacuum.

My mom told Jaine that she waves to us every time she flies over Geneva. A pinprick light in rocky earth, picked out of billions.

Cyril's class did a unit on cardiovascular tissue. In pairs, the students grew worms with glowing arteries and hearts, ribbed with jelly-fish protein, throbbing green with every beat.

Of course, after that, the worm came home. Now, only I occasionally remember it is sitting in a Tupperware by the microwave, and every once in a while throw some aged-past-recognition
fromage
or moldy
pan
into its home. Any manna will do.

Sometimes I pull it out, hold it in my hands and watch it move.

What would have been internal, invisible, secret, had been mined by light. By waves. Which, when you look at them right, resemble wiggles of forgotten worms.

Karl lives underground, studying blackness. Tiny fish in caves without eyes. Karl has a hard time when he visits, unused to the ozone-depleted sun over our faire city, our faire continent.

He has to wear special buggy glasses when he goes out to the shops, so the kids call him Uncle Frosch. He laughs. He loves the kids, like he loves the fish.

He tells them what you don't use, he says, what you have and don't use, only becomes a selectable burden after a while. That for so many years, hundreds, thousands, eyes were so neglected that blindness became an advantage.

I have introduced Cyril and Jaine to solargraphs. They are enchanted by the feel of film, which crinkles when you bend it and keeps tiny, oily fingerprints like mysterious tracks of history.

So different than clean, clear computer sims is this photographic paper, dotted with keys and coins and toy cars. No take-backs. No enhancements. Real.

And each new piece, of course, is magneted in turn to the fridge, or posted on my office door at work. My students often comment. Testaments to photon, to sun, burning everything away but bright shadow.

I took the kids to see the stars, climbing into the Alps with silent wheels. Radio off. The scattered cloud cover reflected orange mercury, halogens, bright fluorescents. The brightest stars could not penetrate the night-lively city's reflected glow.

Only a jet, flying low, twinkled.

You see, light is family; undefined by sums or motion. Yes, one. Yes, many. Yes, all. But not always.

Darkness is life; loving and dying. Defined by absence. By opposition.

We in this enlightened age do not always see life in our equations. Nor do we notice that three times ten to the eighth meters per second squared is also the speed of darkness disappearing.

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Jennifer Rachel Baumer

The lean coyote, prowler of the night,

Slips to his rocky fastness,

Jack-rabbits noiselessly shuttle among the sage-brush,

And from the castellated cliffs,

Rock-ravens launch their proud black sails upon the day.

—Charles Erskine Scott Wood

The little store hovers at the edge of the city and it's meant to be a convenience store. The last owners called it Bain's Market and the signs stay up even after the new owners come in and turn on the lights and start filling the shelves, but they do not look like Bains. There is a sharpness to their features and they are clearly family, fathers and sons, children running like dreams under their feet. The women are dark eyed and curious, poking through the boxes as if scavenging for treasure. The family is black haired with loud, quick voices and they fill the shelves with the usual quick-check items: chips and fat-laden, sugary boxed things, stale bread, untrustworthy tuna. The coolers sport slightly melted or concrete frozen ice cream and cold beer and soda pop, and behind the counter the family guards cigarettes and overpriced off-brand liquor. Look closer and the shelves sport sparklers, illegal in the hot, dry desert state; small shiny silver and gold baubles to hang in the garden or in the home; silver bells to catch the sage wind where it blows; incense that smells like the mountains at night.

The family settles easily into the store. Vibrant voices, quick movements. The children play in the alley out back and the youngest son tends the counter most often, a quick smile for the customers. Sukie stops in daily for a soda and to breathe the desert air and feel the family open around her as she browses through the aisles to check for the day's treasures. It's a neighborhood store, but not many of the neighbors browse it. They run in for gasoline from the pumps, or the dated tuna, or for a bag of sugar they forgot at the grocery last night and the cake cannot be finished without it.

Sukie shops. She buys the bells and the incense and the round shiny baubles and she tries to make them a part of her life. When she gets to the counter the younger son always teases her, asking if she got lost in the aisles or if she's found everything or if she would like a job. He doesn't ask her about the camera she wears around her neck, too afraid to leave it in the car. Sukie would like to photograph the family but she has never thought of a good way to ask. At night she goes home and sleeps in her solitary bed and dreams of a family. Her photos watch over her and in the morning she wakes to the raucous calls of the crows flying over the little store and the dry desert summer air.

I've always believed in magic and this place is as close to magic as any I've ever seen. American west, desert, stretches around me, almost horizonless but I'm locked into my own valley of scrub. Megan would say I'm crazy for being here, alone and unarmed, but I have my camera and that's enough. Anyway, there's no harm here. It's only thirty minutes outside the city. This place has been in my heart for years, but Megan only told me about it last week. I can hardly believe I'm here. The wind whistles through walls of the old mine, creeps up behind me and rattles stones at my feet. There are crows overhead in the endless summer sky and I can see all of it without looking through the lens first. I want to shoot roll after roll here.

But not quite yet.

It is an abandoned place, alive with people in the last century, asleep but sentient now. Cold moons and hot suns have lit it. It lies southeast of the city on a lonely plateau, dropped behind foothills, inaccessible to most. From time to time the county tries to shut it down and make it off limits, but nobody ever listens.

Everyone can come here. Bikers, lovers, loners, dealers, hookers, taggers, artists like Megan who use larger canvasses than the rest of us. American Flats stands from an earlier time, upthrust fingers of crumbling rock and deadly rebar rise two stories into the air, window openings still apparent, rebar rung ladders scaling exterior walls. Through a maze of foundation, arsenic pools lay, green water like the kelly green of spring willows, and even water-skaters avoid the stagnant pools. An abandoned mine and ore processing plant, it predates its visitors, spans over a century. Home once to miners, it is home now to mice, to coiled desert diamond rattlesnakes, to quick cottontails and the ever-present crows in the sweeping deep blue Nevada sky. It is home to muses.

Crumbling stone stretches skyward as Greek columns, Roman statues. There are expanses of wall and foundation and on every surface, artists leave their work.

There's plenty of the commonplace here: Mouse loves Michael. John loves Karen. There's strangely little of the vulgar: a lack of interest in who blows whom or who's the easiest. There are quotes from rock stars and renaissance poets.

And there is art.