Brandon Downing
Dark
Faux Press
2005
_________________________________________________________________________
Reviewed by Brandon
Shimoda
Different movies
give different brightnesses. If it’s an optimistic
story, I usually end up with a bright screen; if it’s a sad story, it’s a dark
screen. Occult movie? Very dark.
- Hiroshi Sugimoto, photographer
Entering into a
movie theater - or a dark room where a television has been left on - there are
two valences that are immediately sensible: lightness and darkness. The
lightness comes from the screen, or rather from the projector hidden across the
room (or from a tube hidden inside of the television), sending tempered light
towards it, and illuminating the room off that surface. The light is
concentrated light dispersed: the screen is lit and cast into our eyes. In the
projection of images, we become light’s culmination.
The darkness,
however, is of the room itself, hushed, existing on the margins, in the
background, beneath our seats, to the sides of the screen, and behind it. And
yet, the room is full of light. When someone opens the door on their way to or
from the rest room, we turn, annoyed that someone has let the outside light
in. The darkness, we feel, is ours – the
margins are us.
Brandon Downing’s Dark
Brandon is of this lightness and this darkness. This begins, appropriately
enough, in the title: Dark Brandon refers
to the “dark,” obscure and destitute aspects of the poet-self, but also the
origins of "
In the creation,
you are a creature, a motif ...
Passive in the sight of a phantasm.
To thoughtlessness?
These poems enact
ways in which to specifically re-imagine images (on a depthless surface) as an
ongoing series of light effects cast into an accommodating darkness, by taking
movies off their screens and fixing them entirely onto the surface of the eye,
and subsequently the mind. Dark Brandon is
the "crazy as fuck" version of Cole Swensen's
Such Rich Hour, in that it enacts,
re-enacts, and suggests ways in which we, as readers and viewers, construct
perspective and provide the imaged and illuminated world with its requisite: an
audience to make it - to tell it - to
exist.
The presence and
importance of the viewer is apparent not only throughout the poems but because of them. The poems enact the
transference of an illuminated narrative onto the penetrant
gaze of a viewer - a single, dark brandon. There are many
instances of poems beginning as a movie might begin: with a sense of grounded
exposition. Take the opening lines of "Quiet Poems" Section 2:
In times, the
magnificent sights there will
face tripods,
Muscular themes,
effervescent treetops,
Constructed of
diesel fumes -
A pyroclastic flow.
These lines,
seeming to foretell the action scenes in Steven Spielberg's "War of the
Worlds" adaptation (or maybe succeeding Bernard Kowalski's "Night of
the Blood Beast"?), open up a poem "in time," setting the stage
for impending conflict. The lines that follow however sidetrack the opening
stanza:
"What did I
mean?" Mankind
Is a potato. He took
Orders from
What about The Beatles?
The "What did I mean?" is a voice talking over the developing
action, yet is a voice that develops the action. The sense of being distracted is important: narrative exposition, in
its roundedness, alerts the mind too easily towards reverie, thereby thwarting itself.
The mind makes too much sense of a thing and is reminded of a dozen other
things through that sense-making:
"I played
jazz."
"Press the number-pound (#) sign"
"Say that
again?"
"I was with
Slavic friends."
"An oval with
High-wire underpinnings?" "Yeah, both,
Asian with French." "S'up, gift
shop..."
The lack of an
explicit narrative in this pile-on of quotations functions doubly as a
reeled-out response to an expositional prompt, and as a move towards forcing a
sustained attention from the reader that an explicit narrative does not. It is
as if narrative itself thwarts its own potential, by being narrative at all.
The ease of ingesting so-called narrative may be - as Downing might be
suggesting – a myth. The materials that we are sustained by, that we ably
engage in are “motifs” and/or individual frames, both of which are repetitions
towards remembrance:
“Drive the kid over
the Black Hole.” “Portraits of a
Couple in gold owl eyes.” “Sepia zooms.” “Friend hairstyles.”
N
“Put it in the
truck himself.” “Yer crazy,
Vanilla.” (sighs)
“Hold my hand.” “I
whittle with that hand,
“
“Tommy!”
Single lines of
dialogue occasion the need to link them into a series and thereby construct a narrative.
Yet to do so from the material of single/individual frames is to remove the
self from the decisive frame and risk a kind of vaporization and suspension.
This is what happens, and it is the physically liminal
space of the theater that allows this suspension to occur.
N
Whereas Such Rich Hour takes the medium of the
illuminated manuscript as its model, Downing takes on the medium of film. As
says the back cover of the book - "POETRY / CINEMA STUDIES" - these
are poems that are in fact studies of cinema. A "study," loosely
defined. These are poems that are extended considerations, yet distractions
from their originary sources. "Forrest
Gump" begins, "His accent was bad, bad like the puke of / 15 Dr.
Peppers." You can almost smell the puke-Pepper mixture running down the
floor of the movie theater, getting closer to your feet, while Forrest Gump
plays on the screen. The florid opening of the movie itself is not what sticks,
but the smell that places the memory of the film into context. Cinema is a
subjective experience - what appears on the screen appears as a prompt for the
viewer to mentally and visually act upon. The light rifles the brain, and the
movie enters in. The end result is individual.
An example of this
can be found in another Tom Hanks vehicle that Downing studies: "Bachelor
Party" (1984, dir. Neal Israel). Without going into too much detail, I
want to point out a defining moment towards the end of the movie, wherein two
of the characters have chased each other into a theater in which a 3-D movie is
in progress. The two characters (played by Tom Hanks and Rob Prescott), start
fighting on the stage, with the screen at their backs. The audience,
thinking that the two individuals are 3-D effects, are mesmerized by how
hyperreal the action is. The defining moment comes
when Prescott (the villain) attempts to punch Hanks in the face and, when Hanks
ducks, punches the face of the lady sitting in the front row, 3-D glasses and
all. The fourth wall has been effectively punched out, and the bruise that no
doubt forms on the lady's face is the bruise of the movie itself, a mark of her
subjective relationship to the images on the screen.
Dark Brandon is a poetry of such bruises. Everywhere throughout the
collection is evidence of Downing getting socked in the face, taking these hits
into himself, making
extensive, if somewhat esoteric notes on intertextual
dialogue, atmospherics, and personal reverie, and reformulating the movies as
poems. The light transmitted from projector to screen to eye hits its
mark. The inclusion of a movie like
"Bachelor Party" also exemplifies the spirit of many of the poems, in
which a straightforward situation is waylaid by non sequiturs of the mind, by
the imposition of participation upon a proposition. Roger Ebert, in his
original Chicago Sun-Times
(1984)
review of the movie approximates much of what would come to pass 21 years later
in Dark
The idea during the party, I think, is to approximate the spirit
of one of those Jack Davis
drawings in Mad magazine, where dozens of people are running
around like crazy, and down in the corners you can see strange little figures
doing inexplicable things. Most of the gags depend on varieties of public
embarrassment and some of them are pretty funny, especially when the women
decide to have their revenge by visiting a male go-go bar.
N
Much of Dark Brandon is ridiculously wicked, and
wickedly funny. There is a trunkful of lines enviable
not only for their sheer temerity, but for their method of risking the failure of
poeticizing certain cast-off folk language. Imagine such lines, peeled away
from their context, shot through LCD displays over
It's time'a get sexualated.
"But this
water's alive, like, it's for NASA, bitch!"
Got a picture of him with Marilu Henner... you right.
Those kids love
those dudes, guess what?
My coke went flat,
it was the best
Laser tape
rainbows, fuck, I don't know, socks
Maybe no better
encapsulations of aestheticized speech: importing
such naturalisms
seemingly ill-fit for a poem by widening the allowance of what a
poem can be, and say. Call it: chaoticization. To
chaoticize language by keeping it all in, by allowing
it the Director's Cut.
N
I wonder: is there
a lack of morality within this widening of poetic potential, this chaoticization? Is Dark
Brandon the antipode of a presumed Light Brandon, a
As if intruding upon these questions: the face of George W. Bush (unnumbered
page 57), a man who represents the utilization of inaccurate, corrupt, loose
and appropriated speech. The picture itself is
full-page, leaving no margins (for dissent). The attendant poem,
"G.W.B," begins: "Again: / You warned
our culture of the approaching Rock. / It run off to
get questions ready for my black oracles" and goes on:
Really fast, I
jammed my finger into the eye
And popped it: I was the greatest actor now,
but
my house felt haunted. What?
Yeah, it was your
eye. Americans, your last one. It
Remembered your
reminiscences, you know, lights out,
Only the clean
teenagers stay up: I ain't kiddin',
Holmes.
Here, the eye is
"popped" - the instrument necessary to intuit the truth and/or lies
in mediated images. The eye is "your eye... your last one. It remembered
your reminiscences." The eye is the instrument through which
"reminiscences" are created to steal the power away from such
impositions. And yet, the eye has been popped, leaking like Dr. Pepper puke.
The movie is on the floor, and is being stomped. Sight and vision are
liabilities. Much easier to eliminate sight, co-opt it
with that of the President.
Something eerie
happens when you consider this image in relation to the graphic illustration on
page 31, a complex of industry and progress, with the
N
There are other,
less readily decipherable illustrations throughout, i.e
two unsettling caricatures of a woman and a man (the woman, for example,
resembling the hyperbolic lovechild between The Supremes and Condoleeza Rice). Some of the illustrations seem wildly
irrelative to the text, pointing neither towards nor away from the lines they flash beside. These images seem to reinforce the
basic disjunction between image and text, calling for the reader to deal with
them as additional elements and/or detritus emanating from the absent screens,
as well as reinforcing the very absence of any original cinematic images
themselves. In the place of a still from "The Proud and the Damned,"
for example, there is a triptych illustration of: 1) a stuffed man holding a
ball-peen hammer, 2) a pair of open, down-pointed scissors, with
"1968," "VII.," and "V"
accompanying, and 3) the same man holding a paintbrush and ascending a ladder.
The concatenation of hammer, cut, and paint recalls to mind Richard Serra's description of the process of editing/cutting his
film "Steelwork:"
the block is
introduced, it tracks down, it goes into the forge, people work on it, it’s
taken out of the forge, it goes back into the oven, they burn it, it comes back
into the forge, they work on it, they take it across to the other side, and
they flame it, and that’s the end.
Perhaps I'm making
too much of the included images in Dark
[...] there is this
burst of marks.
Made in
the inversive and frequently silhouetted.
A haunch
of objects that speculative minds paint.
Something of that
grace of spirits who reflect insults,
Communicating the
relationship of place-time to your
eternal
powers [...]
A possible answer
to this question comes in the form of a series of short poems, many of which
are titled, simply, "Poems" towards the end of the book. A poem like
this one:
"King Lear,
Age 17?"
"King Lear,
Age 15."
performs, for me,
the same function as a picture of a man and his paintbrush, in that it is ash
for/from a more specific preoccupation, as well as supplementary material that
serves to bolster the production of the more substantive poems and cool those
more substantive poems down. A full page of black precedes these "Poems,"
as if suggesting the moments in a film when the screen fades to black – a
slight reprieve granted before moving from one scene to the next. A poem like
this one:
Attack, after
attack
After attack, after
Attack
(reading
like an abbreviated John Taggart poem), and this one:
Eat
Or
Be
A
Ghost
Short
Eye
Lady
Bird
(echoing
the asceticism of a Robert Lax poem), seem as ephemeral as sketches – studies
of an idea, rather than their fruition. There is joy in reading these poems,
and I can read them within the structure of the book as respites, but I wonder
if they would have been more effective dispersed throughout the collection, or
else moved to a different one entirely. As it is, lumping of them together
calls attention to them as not just "studies" – or in Brenda
Hillman’s term, “derangements” – but scraps, frames cut from the original
negative and swept into a small pile on the cutting room floor.
N
In many ways, the
poems in Dark Brandon are very much
composed of light ("A large light-box reflection in / your irises"),
similar to Hiroshi Sugimoto's "Theater" series, long-exposure
photographs of cinema screens and movie theaters resulting in scenes of utter
whiteness. As Sugimoto stated it, 'The
simplest forms have authority, like a blank white light. And how do you
photograph that? You need a framework to make it visible. But this is not
simply white light; it is the result of too much information.' Many of the poems have this effect - of taking in all available light
and information and flooding the mind with it, past the point of frenzy and
chaos, to a dark, soft humming - the mind beyond all thought, destitute of subsumption by an anachronistic, fallible morality and
spirituality, while fashioning a new, juxtaposed order of sense from all
available footage. In the words of Brandon Downing, in the closing poem of the
collection:
5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5
5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5.