You'll still hear very borrowed voices from those screenings "that really felt like a party" you didn't attend back from a drifted away September. Out of the usual Rimbaudic bells new New Yorkers will ring when afflicted with a slighter climate for five mostly full days further upstream but still close enough to bagel water behind the blue trail of the Bronx Ridge smiling over their Bed-Stuy beds ad infinitum to observe these "very strange" food spots ("I had what they call here a 'buddy burger'") on this one block along King (street) they'll fail prat-falling on as that'll be the gift they didn't bring from all those hours of drafted improv to humour a city that now thinks itself the copy when Metropolis leapt out from here instead of there. What Toronto barely knows at this point if every inside-out corner looks enough like the line for the bank or in the movies as this appropriated setting of assumptive experiences as I'll probably be behind a 15 foot tall Stranger Things kid on my way to watch what someone else will have to call a masterpiece too early like I seem to do every year like an idiot instead of acting out the causal forlorn narrative of festival dispatches easier to start writing evanescently from when Chris Pine's directorial debut surprisedly turns out to be dog ass. Especially if that was his take on The Big Lebowski and you've been the Chigurhian listener led here because of Chris Pine's very noticeable haircut in that one live action Gummi Bears film you maybe saw most of on a plane through seats twice heading towards separate but still static American Thanksgivings. The numbest kind of gambling for voluntary loan sharks placing bets on a very handsome and uneven chair shaking at the gate when the actual race underways as I'll just shrug out a similar looking fifty dollar ticket in another audience. Spotting an old woman sweeping the sidewalk in a deep blue dawn. The brush climbing through the window to the uphill ear of a man sleeping. Watching him wake up, put on a jumpsuit, fold and push his mattress into the corner. Everything apart of this equipment as an eroding sense of experience antiquates its own present when Koji Yakusho makes sure his Chaplin moustache has enough of a wing in the mirror before he leaves for work, gets into the company van with a can of coffee for breakfast (I wish they brought those bigger cans over here), puts on a cassette of The Animals’ first record as it’s kicked back along a perfect drop across a stack of buildings steady on the top rope of highways that weren’t there then like an unseen bird singing in private around a switched-on morning. Let alone to be undone by very worn clichés as I'll be rushing back towards another weekend having to remind myself this late night was still and always a good idea that didn't have to happen. The actual chance I'll take further out from any hotel or Airbnb with only the faintest notion I must be doing this all wrong if I'm not exactly ruined or in tatters or in some N64 Christmas ecstasy hearing how the poison dribbles attending a movie podcast crossing the street on a red.  

Antithetical to occasional music at best at one point in the past I can think back on to clarify really miserous symptoms if it all ended up with me lending out my ears to two stationed in Los Angeles and a local fella acting out a break working on this oil rig a block ahead from where I'm walking down I can't for the life of me make out but I'm pretty sure will be splitting a sliver of the bill for in accordance to all the little dinged corners on any T4. Everyone sounding nice enough at least when subsuming that aromantic sublimity of water cooler small talk rarely ever better than nocturnal tap sips if I'm having to rank everything at the wake of objects we'll still have a hard time throwing out as the 90's doesn't just fade but smears to mean a lot less through these traced over concessions uniformly in mourning all those days Reagan and Thatcher were sundowning for their own early onset bullshit of remembrances they can mostly hock from other clowns. Magazine editors pivoting to video to sit in the places they work able to truly believe in the same inconsistent girlfriend with an REM record on in the background somewhere released and waxed poetically around when they would've been maybe four or seven if it was Green or Document (Murmur seems too uppity) and I must've been less than an idea let alone omen for someone else to picture still. Fudging up a very curated mythology for the most Janus intentions to serve this "monoculture" a orange headed dork with bought expired thoughts surrounding hair metal came up with crying over cable television from 2012 and all these apparent populist absences they had to give up on early if they already knew Mudhoney were better than Nirvana (unless they didn't) and had to know was already bullshit if they could easily stereotype another country still ordering off the kids menu. All your best pals from science fiction playing washed up cool guys who just went over to get texhnolyzed at the Build-A-Bear before a Cheesecake Factory lunch at The Grove able to easily flood in these other memories without a fragrance and be unstuck in various tenses to make manifest their own waffling authority waiting and seeing for the conversation to come under contract for two episodes a week. Not really guessing what's in their hearts but maybe jealous of when all it took to write for Entertainment Weekly was knowing how to lock yourself in your own car on a hot day on a semi-regular basis. Weary pulling down the moon of everything a twelve year old could ever want without honest specifics and cooties while in mid bemoan now over the death of romantic comedies they might've just been too heterophobic for Spawn or Ben Reilly (which is the tell they’re full of shit) to actually take notice of in 1996 when a week ahead they'll record their tears getting word over the wire the Spider-man movie taking place in the DMV very suddenly didn't receive any Hollywood Award nominations even though it was "just as good as Drive My Car" (imagine saying that) and “what we really needed” in parallel or together with the COVID surge right before Christmas. Their own kind of Human Instrumentality Project Gwyneth Paltrow can already free base with echidna omelettes and Chernobyl bath water to amend this almanac back to when Owen Gleiberman kept getting a bonus after every in-office head injury he’d make sure was slept off. Investing a lot of realism in trivia so actual opinion-making can only really count down to a filibuster of what we can see but mostly guess around and still trip over in avoidance of what they’ll apparently have loved in the moment but never yap about in a form made to recommend something to someone (or at least make the opposite funny) well enough as they’ll go long and tranquil over the ABC Family exclusive that won Best Picture they’ll flag as uncool not even a year away from crying about it in marketable evidence thinking this’ll be the only movie about being a dad they can never physically buy to put along side the Cat Chaser steel book, The Paper steel book, or Silent Night Deadly Night 2 steel book in their replica Criterion Closet near the water heater right as it’ll start making new music. Movie-going accounted for as the Menendezian alibi (somehow nostalgic when the latest Batman provided so much actual leeway) for all those trinkets between peekaboos you can somehow parlay your kid’s college fund with when breaking the news to yourself again that a ghola of Pete Postlethwaite will be playing Paste-Pot Pete. In want of wanting to be rewound for when their parents ordered a Big Mac and got a VHS copy of Ghost or that cartoon about the termite who lived in Christopher Columbus’ globe that ended with a very lowly animated Ray of Light montage where the land just seems to steal from itself so they can be an out of focus witness like when they were kids imprinting heroism onto that one meathead from Rolling Stone or Hollywood Reporter or Variety (not Rob Sheffield) talking about Madonna on VH1 to now levee autobiographical reads of David Fincher genuinely negating the minutes in his twenties he was actually dating Post-Like a Prayer/Super Castlevania IV era Madonna to hypothesize his truer ideological fetishes by way of how he specifically uses windshield washer fluid as if that’s gold still stuck in the Yukon and not a provenly boring as fuck conversation to listen into again right around the time he’ll be the one settling on reimagining Manimal.

Cover letters at the ready to tell you what makes them really horny as I’m not exactly sure what to tell them if I can't remember what that episode of Friends did to get out of leather pants (and as tv recappers or lovers of the 90’s they won't have any clue either) if they also have to still give a shit about Luuke Skywalker and Harry Potter (but all those movies made a lot of money so where could they have been for that) for office work as childless adults ready to flow within the wall of their own atomic regrets that didn’t actually matter on the other side or upon the one time they'd be justifiable in disassociating if they’re really in the room observing all those Crimes of Grindelwald through glare at Christmas while their actual children must be watching Ninja Scrolls up in the nice attic having these generally wonderful lives surviving long enough to vaguely incubate that "like it or not Toilet Rock is here to stay" ethos while a future that's here is still full of much better losers. Their label mate who yelled at Maura Tierney on the set of NewsRadio from the 90's looking more peameal by the day after taking and endorsing FDA approved colon cleanse for horses over a little scary needle going into one of their arms they'll still have no idea what to do with on camera as a purveyor and held-back student of “comedy.” If not them than this patsy bringing in subscribers for something you don’t have to pay for to still get ICE recruitment ads carefully pretending to be a professional undecided voter hiding out from their own Polish nobility they must've got on open box they opened clearance and in the other hours on MTV Chuck Klosterman couldn’t catch Andrew Wilhelm Schulz also showing up in that'll eventually pay for a six million dollar operation to better hold onto their skull to look more like that one racist kid Steve Dillon drew without ever having to turn the page to suddenly admire their own head-on collision. If not them than Gavin Newsom. If not them than the actual monoculture that amounts to a pretty lazy imperial response to commonality seen from imaginary rafters to only accept these familiar splotches of a sports team already winning and losing within the same space in time as the hindsight answers for everything. Indiscernible attractions only appreciated and eventually valuable out of cowardice if someone could use all those credentials being a piss-baby for Pearl Jam ignoring most of the things Eddie was singing about in those maybe two and a quarter ok albums while never volunteering at the abortion clinic so they could get most of the table when eventually sweet talking another newly divorced Matt Foley dipshit without immediately wanting to do the Jeremy Spoken at the wedding you won’t really feel like dancing through a lot quicker than usual. The option that’ll hover over nicely when you’ll be too quiet pretty much as a better vow while still depending on the company of the most cornflake motherfuckers imaginable. Your itsy bitsy destiny to be their audience if you’re unable to switch a seat for a mark on the stage you wouldn't find if you just gave up on being too sober or weren't able to walk away from the sales pitch that you know will end in prison or be unbothered when this creep spoils what Steven Yuen says in Burning unawares ("I want you to write my story") months before your screening if you could only be polite inside and around these brisk quotes towards necessary strangers to escape to the bar for a pop and pass by an old white guy waiting out a hip hop music video recession in vain who just had to say you really look like Simply Red. 

Surrounded by these other fables reconstructing while I'll have too good of a memory going up against my own chances. The extra heads I pruned before pitching record reviews of Dear Science and Merriweather Post Pavilion (one having the actual better rep than the other I knew even then) for the university newspaper that might as well have been an alien beatboxing transcript from those big satellites in the desert instead of too on the nose credits for all the really cool people (like you) to envy ("oh that's really cool") I must've passed by going to a commuter school. That separate city that turned into an empty medicine cabinet at night more famous for making Kim Gordon really sad and spending money on constant evil instead of the cooler kind necessary to smelt the gold for a statue of Ringo Lam as I'll walk around where they had to be overhearing Jian Ghomeshi on a too big stage above a tiny lawn during someone else's frosh week mumbling and trailing off about how much fun we'll be having here poorly editing his own experiences to a "man! You know...when I was here I was..I was...I took a class" that'll be decoded as evidence soon enough as I could only hope back then I wouldn't suddenly float over that open manhole before I actually did. Gravity training in years that ended up being the sequel for when it was made perfectly clear as a kid that my presence must've really been unfortunate in concert with Greg Kinnear really blowing out the back of the box office. Not necessarily that much of a concern whether or not I'm like the Bee Girl or if I'll even get that ending as I'll still have to hear that song that apparently didn't explain the 90's well enough if I can reference it easily as the university experience I would supposedly love to have and get without trying and really lament later all the last seasons (or before everyone went to work at Magazine) of family sitcoms and teen dramas actually mythologized didn't happen to just me as I'd have to notice how automatic everything emptied after four. Really considerate to the life I guess I was suppose to be having physically outside of the school to enjoy college meeting all these people living in conflicted directions during these really sensational years of our lives by being beholden to an older New York motto up north about what doesn't happen if you fall down as I was waaay too close to being another Woody Allen apologist when so much of who I could actually be was already there. What I had to fight for early if being genuinely happy was really out of my hands if I was eight and an attention deficit disorder diagnosis according to the television we were watching in the 90's must've meant a terminal demonic possession I could've really enunciated better. The fortune I was told about out of frame. The work I did I'm not so sure how to be proud of or proved anyone else wrong. The lies that happened I'll still be very doubtful of in attendance to others living in wait for an incident while I'll be reading a comic book, clearly going out to watch movies, sleeping to suddenly seeing all the books and blu rays I own, could donate, sort, provide some amount of evidence before the dump that I must've won some sort of contest with this dumb name no one else was using. (Which actually did help me win at least...four records from WFMU fundraising marathons I actually feel very guilty about.) 

Not exactly privy to this monoculture feeling plenty inadequate on another lonely Arbor Day unable to fester opinions regarding the highway or acceptable loser politics much more worrisome than anything I'll ever imagine when I'll be too courteous listening to that on repeat. The bozo nightmare that has to take some toll for the tiny producers in our phones replicating popular AM radio with cameras on as a means to innocuously pawn sacrifice themselves for (oh I'll say it) white supremacy if these Gen X run offs have to mimic the howler monkey groans of J.D. Vance watching Garden State all the fucking time. Making the most of the same vague pastness as a kind of enchanted property but curated and operable from delightful blemishes to instead sound better or on par but not that dissimilar to the Vice President who had to drag the couch he really slept with on a bet to the prom just to break her heart in front of all her friends. The blogger who really won out by being the DJ Khalid for La-Z-boy even though that's all folklore in much the same way these other candidates will go on about these comics from “their youth” notably without the seed inside of them Lowenstein whispering Matches Malone or Xorn or Dan Jurgens at half-hourly intervals like genuine regrets of how long they've been this accurate when what really got them going sequentially was Jonathan Hickman (let's say Daniel Acuña drew it but they'll think it was Greg Land) not finishing the story arc where Sue and Reed opened their marriage up for the bar graph personifying their budget in the pages of Fantastic Four when they were still thirty seven and awaiting a movie citing that source along with The Night Porter and Breaking The Waves for what will end up being five hours sitting in 4DX seats with a Tuvix of the Russo Brothers romancing Marilyn Monroe as she returns to us without a family or a friend as the fan favourite Demogoblin only according to the wikipedia out from a performable hell we didn't know we could speedily riff towards while alive. Utterly confused by The Fabelmans in contrast to be commentators supposedly able to say they're "progressive" enough while having the same abject curiosity as an American Republican. Sharing the same aesthetical desires with Mitt Romney. Swimming in the same reservoir of Simpsons quotes as Ted Cruz. Whit Stillman always their biggest get they’ll dust off the old Nixon charm for to produce these otherwise Secret Honour recordings (right down to the typical den decor) no one worshipping that owl in the woods would find to spread a false gospel of better episodes with refunds that’ll still persuade you from competing in the illegal Lindy Hop circuit with Susan over all these really beautiful movie podcasts hosted by the mustard, ketchup, and honey garlic stains across three t-shirts giving Louis Malle another name with each mention just ahead of a hand a-sailing into that abandoned Burlington Coat Factory without working windows a ways away from your usual unsyncopated walk home between the only question of what to watch tonight. Providing content a little more nihilist than a Christian comedian but not by much as these better agnostics to being funny or nominally pleasant as both will let it slip eventually in a set how they'd really wish everyone else was dead from not so separate philosophies. Locking themselves away five miles down as a subterranean presence in ear drums able to be the only one to actually echo locate when someone else's brother is playing Dragon's Lair that Don Bluth must really love circular breasts. Uncovering four fifths of the way into Rover Dangerfield that other lives are unknowable. Missing that careerist pessimism more than former pets in observance to the All Dogs Go To Heaven rendition of A Christmas Carol while still feeling the need to get a permission slip from ladies really geographically desperate enough to mildly approve of them rubbing their covered shoulder before holstering the courage to get going on Neon Genesis Evangelion by watching Bullets Over Broadway thrice in the one week their shipment of Barbara Broadcast 7Ks they mastered on their own (only for the pursuit of context, doubling the pee filter with what they got around) went all sour and logy at the border. 

Contemporaries I could have a lot more in common with if all I ever did was watch movies when they can only act like impersonal broadcasters and worse bystanders making sure you can’t miss them a little on purpose. Françoises all the way from Ohio or Orangeville making sure a discussion about striking film prints from DCP will never suddenly become very fascinating for the people threatening interest in film preservation while still knocking too lightly on the door of this poem I keep stealing from believing they'd really survive to be like the old men coming out of "the hard-core movies" wishing they'd waited for later as "Their drawers are drying stiff” and as “the sky dies wide” yearning to see themselves in oily brass elevator paneling as Al Goldstein's Jimmy Olsen back at the office to catch all the new arcane slurs while honestly meant to be unpicked from the past of all these places where someone else would immediately find them on the wet roads and under the mercury lights if their ear and nose bleed medication cocktail hadn't been shaken before 1993. The totally badass logo for their podcast written out in spilled baking soda if their reaction to Salo sounds like The Melonville Calendar reporting how the school fire started in the principal's bathroom. Virtually pressin’ flesh from the dry meat and shredded bones of the worst conversation without hellos or short goodbyes as these prequelized Mrs. Columbo villains on social media always found out by hurting their own feelings or proving a liability at your get together whilst writing longer criticism clearly wistful for their own pushover apocalypse coupled to only cinema I know won't go their way if it’ll be like the other one pre-visioned by another boring asshole who hated rock music in the 70’s enough to pull a HOOMAGE to Elvis before leaving a mise-en-scene for their orphaned acolytes to block estranged children from trying to clean up. These various Milhouse variant covers flattening the effort it actually took to maybe figure out eventually there was a vast molecular difference between strolling towards Operation Dumbo Drop and a full house for a Powell and Pressburger retrospective (even when they’re the city fathers of other problems therein). Droopy Dogs performing William Gull wiener patrolling on a Tuesday night when it's more conservative in motion to not hop a streetcar for another screening at nine thirty against the other corner of this loose pentagram only being truly woebegone for their own loser feelings thinking back on their rightful survivor's guilt crossing a rubicon again into some readymade fossil's house to watch Kid A barely sync up with Nosferatu ("aw heck I sure do love rock music!") or Triumph of The Will ("oh wow I'm off that night") hoping this'll be third times the charm for a cordial murder they'll think probably should've happened or did if that’s them in the corner as I'll be crawling out of a better basement through similar years give or take a little to finally see The End of Evangelion in a fucking theatre. 

The DVD/VHS box I know they could always see at Blockbuster if they want to get weepy about the rewind race car or those nights supposedly sleeping on the Coney Island beach in those stiff drawers after stargazing about Stepmom or Sweet November thinking it's Joan Chen's Autumn in New York or Home Fries as it collides with Riding in The Car With Boys when Evangelion was immediately more popular than Pavement with the ocular proof of these any gender drivers in the aisles pulling woke Bickles on careerist nephews ready at the drop of a Mike Love baseball cap to defend the documentary wraparounds in Sweet and Lowdown as the icebreaker. A thirty year old dismissal I've had to hear off key from these dinks always going to be school tomorrow skeptical standing by to chant Bloody Henry at a punched away mirror to summon Henry Rollins (who they only know from Johnny Mnemonic or Heat or Jack Frost) to fight their own battles over what else they’re afraid to ask when ironically appreciating Woody the right way while I’ll be only helping them hit themselves better. Inheriting the windbag assumption of Ahhhime being incomprehensible and beyond the utility of film as film as a utility seems to eventually narrow down to actually mean post 9/11 Reese Witherspoon movies or American Imperialism melancholia with some your guess is as good as mine bizarro leftism breaking the 180 rule (mumbling with a lot of “oh I mean sure”) without making mention of military sign-offs if we’re really beyond Radio Days for a non-committal sensibility somehow less noxious to reel back at the world than Gundam Wing after homework (which helped my politics but enough about me) or Cardcaptor Sakura during summer weekdays before lunch. Absolvents of what they could still take for granted if the 90’s or more accurately 2003 is a locked out garden they’ll pat the shape of absent skeleton keys in their pockets for to remember how be those very paraphrasable dinguses needing the ok to register art at the most nervously agreed upon and graded like they’re still bombarded in a forgotten university tutorial dreamt without the acoustics of me waking up at eight twenty five on a Sunday morning to catch Dragon Ball’s first Canadian broadcast run end on a cliffhanger that I’ll find out later resolved with Oolong The Pig (uh based on Zhu Bajie from Journey to the West) interrupting the villains by wishing for a pair of panties over world domination. 

Out of average blinks already catching a glimpse of the future allowed to stay up on Saturday nights absolutely bewildered by Dragon Ball Z during that first go around. Unstuck to experience a little corner or barely an hour of the day I was born in accordance to JST without knowing it (until now) watching Piccolo take Gohan into a prehistoric wilderness to train. The third boy following an off colour Vegeta and Nappa along an invertebrate synecdoche of a bug planet before getting bored and blowing it up with one cherry tomato snowflake of light while standing on a freed ferris wheel up in the very distinction between night and the sky. Rushing home so I was always early for episodes of the Frieza Saga at five thirty and eight o’clock. Only dissimilar in terms of durability to a museum piece lacking that same amount of gameplay all the other kids were somehow able to theoretically handle a lot better (“Sasha was really struggling with Empire”) than I was when I’ll actually age gradually in the audience. Warnings lit from form doubling the effort of already unreal work from such a corruptive detail. Chalk and burning red pastels drumming out unnatural lines salting and cooking a landscape as a reflection milks completely within the calcium of a stare. What would be more feather-ton punishing in “duration” just by sitting down in a moving image theatre without the office or what else you could radio in under a grown up dunce cap than that little before noon Jeanne Dielman screening I really wished was longer walking up through the gothic comfort of a university I could’ve attended as it glowed in November after the bell. All from the mythology of a kid staying home to walk out and traverse a much easier science fiction. Scared flipping the channels back and forth looking at how the big nerves within bodies tighten in Macross Plus. New Dominion Tank Police just screaming at me under a bulb in the middle of an afternoon. With a friend to witness Night on the Galactic Railroad and this other movie with a Frankenstein commando who had Dracula Frank Castle hair and these yellow eyes wandering around an empty Middle Eastern city with a beautiful blonde woman in his mobile command unit he goes on a date with in already postcard memories randomly over a song I can still hear going “‘round round the merry-go-round oh ho ho!” What my brother thought was Hellsing when I told him about it before we found out ten episodes in that Alucard was actually Doctor Acula backwards. From the older kid we’ll always think of as a cousin’s computer room with the Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and Dragonball Z posters of villains I didn’t recognize other than Broly and Goku’s dad (who wasn’t his dad in Tree of Might) to watch Patlabor 2: The Movie already having the priors with what must’ve been the first episode of the tv series on the Toonami website before region locks and with Real Player installed to look out a window about the size of a credit card. Uncoordinatedly fated to still hear the giggles I got for saying Cowboy Bebop Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door was (and maybe still is) my favourite movie in high school as they’ll wheeze behind me during Belladonna of Sadness in a now nothing place deciding tomorrow or the week before the lease runs out if this is going to be a dispensary or novelty liquor store. Both pretty good on their own as it dawns on me a couple of times I must be this quick study in cartoons if I could really freeze the habit I didn’t have to figure out too hard going beyond and against the restrictions of typical broadcasting early as the desktop theatre went up and down the stairs while adopting the Grandmother parlance closing all the lights to screen the Texhnolyze episode where Ichise follows the one lotus down the sewer beneath an already underground city.

Apparently a form just too hyperactive to really keep track of all this storytelling for people only just a little older or around the same age or surprisingly younger (who already sound like Baba Booey) who should be in better frazzled solidarity with the most vocal weeb even if it’s just sharing gym equipment when they provide the same quality of poorly done cultural caulking for the archive as an age old Detective Conan review on My Anime List dot com does in harmony with their own hems during award season from any year. Always in search of a paternal context more systematically valuable than genuinely familial supposedly able to method act how it was very normal being six years old at the breakfast table and looking through the newspaper showtimes for The Big Chill and St. Elmo’s Fire at the local Nantucket Rep House as their parents behind a glass cube wall immediately regret not taking these distractions as replies to run that stake through the child they still don’t know they actually had’s “heart.” Envious of when they really were the wee lads they claimed to be in English papers or the bylines two weeks ago or on the mic on Thursday while still flunking the assignment with a medieval life span extension cheating themselves on time for the almost new movie (one of which had two release dates sans festival premieres) without ever having to go to the apartment of the family who currently have an older version rented so they can really never have to humour the idea of actually reading Wuthering Heights or Frankenstein while acting like they did when taking the word of the guest’s roommate who didn’t realize they were doing freelance research for Spotify outside of what else they’ve said in front of their own and other door knobs inanimate or otherwise to claim “the movie should've been more like the book.” Ample evidence their kids should never get the chance to hear (like The Grizzly Man tape but their podcasting parent would still be alive and in the room) funding their tuition and the license to act like British Dennis The Menace with impunity if doing your homework won’t matter in much the same way stop signs suddenly won’t work a week from now. The conversation around the conversation while I’m going through The Conversation with these salespeople over the phone never doing an evil thing while pretending to be dissimilar to what barely goes in the R and L sides of Tony Dokoupil’s head while he’s mentally checking off the cuts for his fourth go around at an already accomplished circumcision looking through attachments of old fashion pencil sharpeners on his unwoke work computer connected to the same internet friends of the pod’ll use to quadruple dip to compare the transfers of multiple Debbie Does Dallas box sets before going blind from a historical context. 

Through the darkness of future past unable to tell that kid sitting in the child psychologist office another school board just a city border over with his mom waiting for some tests and a refill of medication fretting he’ll always be a Jonah on any ship he’ll step on that he’ll still have to hear all these Edwardian-ass biographical readings from premium bozos. Pre-Northrop Frye William Blake radon levels of gossip analysis even from UofT alumni (not to sound like a Yalie but that’s your fella, fellas) who really want to fit in with people who think The Clown Prince of Crime is going to come out of the screen to get them when they expect it all for the guy who corrects the way to say “Corbet” while keeping “Brady” as if he’s both Rites of Spring all wrapped up into one. Finding out new algorithmic ways to be pretty condescending when a lot of so called arguments lead into “well movie about big so good” while absolutely dumbfounded when encountering Pre-Raphaelite-esque exchanges of Alfred Hitchcock or Brian De Palma flourishes (a lineage in art not about isolated points in time but how they move) only ravelled in cinema or the art form they are somehow interested in as unique to South Korea. Really too scared of Anime thinking it’s just a forty five year old fad and the last transgression before buying a lady some friggin’ ice cream as they settle for another Pixar movie about lamp posts who want to join the army while still living up to Corpo-Randian values to push their kid’s aim a lot lower. Doing the taxes for a not quite libertine arrangement where they’re still not allowed or given the shorter turn to play Mario while one of their primaries plays Panzer Dragoon Saga at someone else’s house (“Susan has a MiSTer”) without them while getting ready for a date to see End of Evangelion only understanding the “of” in the title full of what they won’t read up on or espouse an actual curiosity for (or actually use the podcast they’re on to TALK ABOUT or just listen to a podcast where the host know less than them about orange juice) because they deep down want to be handling themselves easier as the suckers in immortalized research and genuine peopled history. Back in time not thinking to pack Rosenbaum’s Placing Movies to when Mikey and Nicky was in theatres so they can still be the dumdum you’d find out was somehow breathing who didn’t get it or only talked about how it didn’t make any money if that’s all they could talk about now as careerist scholars waiting for someone else to do the actual work to sell another alternative history anyone else can have in the midst of Americana (and the off-shoots felt in Canada) upon this explanatory collapse right around when Ghost in The Shell Stand Alone Complex guessed it would happen. 

Young like they would’ve been on the Tuesdays or on the Wednesdays after school along with new comics to pick up the next volume I think came in about three month intervals. Discs with four sometimes five episodes normally costing a little less than a Criterion edition that never went on sale at the immediate markdown of twenty dollars with the added value of adapting Breathless better than the Austin Texan with the least interesting whims for the objects in front of his own camera. Of a pair written by a guy (Yoshiki Sakurai) studying economics in university as he split his other episode into this ironic inversion of movie-going. Paleo-realist science fiction in the point and click and say variety of both definitions still digressing from the one Post-War searching around for a little girl’s dog and finding an external hard drive brain in the bootleg bin containing the work and non work of the director sitting out in a lobby for all eternality. The Japanese master with the bucket hat that widens to be more than the Ozu or the first Kurosawa analogy the more you travel even within a minor latitude. His life the new antique that hums in the heaven of personal belongings unable to make the trip anywhere else but these grand new places sculpted out of the imaginary iron of what amounts to the same old bird cage encouraging all the same traps. The past getting ahead of itself reinterpreting the stumble. The intermissions in outer space the Dielmans already took felt from where you’ll be sitting. The easier nights most of us were too early to spend out alone in all these other ways when this culture was supposedly always occurring behind us we can all play pretend parents were in on with only better off-kilter exceptions (my mom and I watching The original Beguiled recently and her going “Clint’s a really hussy in this”) while now feeling these imaginary nudges at least week to week if not day by day even at home to better perpetuate honestly or through the most loserly scheme amounting most of the actual economy and culture. 

Apart of the accidents I am continuously trying to find the logic of unable to stop being that kid with the backpack in the breakable section of the breakable store. A benevolent consequence having all these happenstance influences I can’t exactly edit from the natural archive in much the same way a podcaster can creatively fill in their own blanks while on this wonted Scrooge McDuck trajectory if these really be the toughies and smarties on my way to make it square thrown out into the alley after The Tale of the Princess Kaguya in tears and with exhausted shoulders to just hear all the ugly siren squawks from absolute dingbats (and Mario Cantone on The View for some reason who should know better) moping around that it got a Hollywood Award nomination over The Lego Movie. Real lucky there is a vast marshalling McLuhan between me and their face as I’ll be very similar walking around after A Hidden Life, To The Ends of The Earth, and Drive My Car as that’ll abide a certain synthesis of taste that might not have the same snake oil market value as Kevin Feige with an arthouse hit on his hands. Able to notice without ever squinting they’re only really nerds based on what it says on a magically altered report card if they’re worried about box office like honest-to-god losers (even if that’s your job that’s your job?) as I’ll be carrying a really nice regret never asking Leos Carax about Hugo Pratt when I had the chance none of these Tad Difficiles would take. Living long enough to find out “If there's anything you want, anything at all. Come to me...I’ll be your Guardian Angel” comes from The Swimmer. The oldest one here in the college crowd for Jujutsu Kaisen 0 (pretty good stand-alone) as they’ll “oooooo” and “awww” over a smoother pairing for lewd and wholesome warm up sketches in their mind and on paper than just drafting Magneto and Detective Sipowicz playing a little Truth or Dere ringing around the carpal tunnels. Late to figure out anything is still possible about to blow a lid off these gal pal pyjama parties while they’re trying to figure out when this week and where they left off in Legend of The Galactic Heroes (with Laura secretly jumping ahead) behind drawn blinds and under shared blankets they’ll only concede had happened in parallel maid of honour speeches. However arrested like everything else as you’ll see how children can’t be that enthused by the new Star Wars when their dads will drag them all the way down to Chewbacca’s Funeral out of school in a longer summer to instead see the latest Dragon Ball film even if and when it’s silly that all I might’ve done was catch up to Piccolo. Coming back to this Atlantic City space opera as the work of an artist felt in a flood all at once back then ebbs to mean a greater deal as it’ll have to age even out of magic. Akira Toriyama given this retired autonomy found in recent Jaime Hernandez pages that went the other way starting out around the same time without either artist able to know it for the one to give up (or separating the impulse into another serial) the Channel Z scheduled lucidity and bleed in (where episodes of Dragonball probably swept up) when Maggie was only a mechanic. Both sustaining the gravity in gossip and errands much more cosmic than the shareheld urge of an immediate mythology as a Leopold Bloom cascading the modernist method I’m more than allowed to exaggerate wanders unripe waiting to pick up his adopted granddaughter from school even with incident on my day off. Running into this character that still means so much to me as we both find ourselves in all these places out of no other reason than what a kid wished would happen. What he still wanted to do missing the sunset climbing up to see the streets posed together in silhouettes and magenta ribbons of light fading out of shape in the sky. Nothing else really aglow but restaurant fire pits, the first hysteria of neon spelling out Toronto pizza, the open air Hooter’s you’ll see press badge chiming inside of as glasses on varnished tables and weak faces settle into the prank of eating food right when an unseen waitress meeting the eyes of another taking orders realizes they’ll always have to be nice to these bozos even when they’ll never tip. Across the closed off street from four or five security guards hired for a new top floor bar where the mascot on the little standee outside looks like he might be half-pineapple. Hyping themselves up as I’ll be standing behind them with a canned fruit punch waiting for them to stop blocking the door. Flinching in unison as they’ll see me there before I’m actually early for Perfect Days and a couple nights away from all these junior stock brokers gushing in their seats over the latest Richard Linklater Shoppers Drug Mart exclusive that unlike Goku will give me the wrong amount of body dysmorphia for my birthday.

-Sasha Makarewicz

(shout out to Robert Penn Warren. The poem I’m stealing from is “I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas: The Natural History of a Vision (1974)