Film Dada [da]

Alphabet City // Heath Ison

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AT 19, THEY GAVE HIM THE STREETS. TONIGHT, THEY’RE GOING TO TAKE
THEM BACK…

…BUT NOT WITHOUT LOSING A FEW LIMBS.

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Johnny drove his 1983 Pontiac Trans Am, painted white with spattered streaks of blood cascading in all directions, as he cruised down the neon-saturated, post-midnight streets of Alphabet City. The digital speedometer displayed 70 mph in luminescent red.

Johnny be good. Johnny be good.

Injected with an overdose of paroxysmal exploitation, god-have-mercy on their body parts, exiting a grindhouse machination ground down to defiled filaments of meat, all while under the influence of drifting love and pearlescent eyes. Johnny forgot to kiss his girlfriend goodbye before he left in the late evening. He didn’t feel like it, wasn’t in the mood. He left her and his infant daughter a little past midnight.

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“Johnny … … … … … … …my boy… … … … … … … …”

“… … … … … … … … …”

“You know what you have to fuckin’ do.”

“… … … … … … … … … …yeah.”

“… … … … … … …Ack! Ack! Ack! Brrrr!… …*sniff *sniff… … …ok then, Johnny. In that case… … …I suggest you get goin’.”

I thought I was Vincent. I thought that was my name. But I have no fucking clue who Vincent is either.

On the other side of the line, the Mob Boss hung up his phone and lit a cigar. Johnny also disconnected, put down his DynaTAC cell phone, and continued driving to complete his assigned task.



Shifting into fallen octane—you can’t kick Alphabet City. Discussing souls, heat on request, chasing time on the marauder’s wolves. Clutches of time/space in the neon-bleeding skyline and midnight heart in which a city masticates raw meat. Newborn rain of burning rackets and impoverished screens loading/crashing. The synthetic night runs the neighborhood.

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Lost Highway // David Roden

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Centre lines buzz out of the dark. A black futurity drips from highway to screen, into world, slick black on vinyl. Your words vomit on a phone, infect the intercom through a wet grain delay, mentioning some scan at a hospital. We won’t meet when things happen. Invoke the stats, watch late sun dapple concrete through trees. Drink in the solitude of the animal you claim to be. I challenge her to admit something. But there is nothing here to read and she looks back, contesting my gaze in that illegible dress.

Funny how secrets travel. You told me you will write me when conditions permit. I can’t admit how detached we always were or consent to what has happened. I made you a card from Malta: the one with skulls over a funerary urn in St John’s Co-Cathedral; a little death’s head grubbing St Ubaldesca’s arm as she converts water to wine in that restoration of Preti. But it went astray like the unanswered email concerning my father. I hesitate to mention it or cite the freedom your absence will afford. Grey tumours sprout all over your X-rays. Docile fasciae live authentically. You look damn good cumming over my wife’s photographs. You look rosy. There’s energy and declamatory fire, here.

You say I am deranged about you leaving, daring me to challenge your misprision. I do not, and what would be the point? Such Things of the Spirit are merely here to vampirize. But you get my desire for pre-emption and controlled, healthy, internalising.

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The Amityville Horror // Ben Faulkner

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My hotel room is red and dark but kind of nice. The lights sometimes dim going out without my noticing, just this kind of slip-sliding around, following the TV glow. I was sent here. My friend. He told me he would give my mom money. She’s having a hard time with all that’s going on. (I picture her and hope she is well but it’s best we not talk.) This is Amityville, New York, a great place, different now, much smaller but also much safer, more “focused,” someone called it too, which I didn’t really get.  

The mirror on the other side of the wall is dark. I don’t look like much of anything at all. I think I wrote it but the girl I was dating then may have. I just don’t remember, which I guess is fine, is maybe to be expected when you travel a lot, which I feel like I’ve been doing even if I can’t quite remember the places. I paid extra for two TVs. I have to have them both on. Try to cut through the noise. How long have I been here for? I ask him when he calls.  

“After he kills his family and himself, a part of him stays in the basement, where he hears, every few years, a few gunshots, or sees someone enter, terrified, then leave. He listens for a long time, and he hears the voices of other families, another Ronnie,” in some sense they are another Ronnie,” someone seems to say, a voice, as in another version of himself, and though they may not be named Ronnie, and though he knows they are not him –– one may be a high school student, may have blond hair, or may be a Led Zeppelin fan club member, or may have been molested by his father –– or maybe are named Ronnie, or probably are named Ronnie, he knows that they are different and will experience different things. Like Dungeons and Dragons characters, born of dice rolls––randomness––but rigidly held to some gameboard, which like life cannot be reversed through, but that one has to move forward upon, barrelling toward a bad conclusion, death & loss, a true losing, but within a hard sequence, a series of events that are fixed, and between forced events, little playable movies that function like checkpoints, like a series of baseball pitching machines, organized into a straight line, feeding the ball forward, thump thump thump of slow sliding, being *popped* forward ushering them toward a conclusion, the hard ending. He stays like this awhile, listening, until the thing that he is –– he imagines himself as resembling a little black smear on a hardwood floor, or a black spill in the carpet. Stiff & hard, or a black swirl, a mound like self-snuggling rope, or shit, black shit, raising with a point out of the gully of a toilet bowl –– dissolves, or evaporates, or vanishes (probably sinks) down, down, down toward ever less clarity & feeling, an inevitable sequence that glides trackwise, toward an end and exit, experienced as nothing (first ending his relationship to the world, and then himself) & whatever insensate trace flattens like march snow, and he is gone.”  

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Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle // Ami J. Sanghvi

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c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h (lovely::wreckwreckwreck)
by Ami J. Sanghvi

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c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h run<3! cheetah sprint<3! LOVING/LY/
JOYOUS/LY c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h chaos mascot darling thing c h e
e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h stoner slut stoner slut c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h
e e t a h c h e e t a h maul marks blood shed c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h
stoner king stoner king c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h dumb fuck dumb fuck
c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h paraglider(?!) paracrier c h e e t a h c h e e t a
h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h bold wreck nervous wreck (lovely::wreckwreckwreck) c h e e t a h
car wrecked life wrecked (lovely::wreckwreckwreck) c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e
e t a h beautiful himbo-himbo wrecks c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h.
psychedelic cheetah glee/free wreckage into something great c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a
h c h e e t a h cops suck cops suck c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h early morning fast food c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h bias-murder-confrontation- time c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h elevator makeout scene c h e e t a h c he e t a h c h e e t a h c h e e t a h
–

slice another human being

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Ami (they/them) is an Indian-American author, artist, designer, and boxer with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the California Institute of the Arts. They are the Co-Founder of Gutslut Press, as well as the author of Confessions of a Baby Vamp: Letters to John Milton (Gutslut Press ’21), Lipstick[less] Mania: A Ritual For No One (Bottlecap Press ‘22), Into Oblivion (Sweat-Drenched Press ’22), x( )-id </3 (Trickhouse Press ’22), and In Residuum (Kith Books ’23), among others. Their work can be found in numerous places, including Peach Magazine, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, and Inverted Syntax. Link: linktr.ee/hotwraithbones Twitter/IG: @HotWraithBones

The Boxer’s Omen // Elytron Frass

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Boxer’s Omen: A Recitation
by Elytron Frass

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FIRST BARDO

It’s Summer in Wood Rat Year. Sai ya sat is abrew. In Hong Kong International Airport, a black sorcerer runs for the terminal, coveting the needed natal data to cast his deadly spell. Category III flickers over the entire screen. He checks his six. He’s been tracked by an orange robed xian. The xian flashes him blind with Suraya mudra. Now he’s boiling to burst and sickly expressing a nuclear hue, best described as glowstick green. He oozes and falls—a humanoid simplex of spiritual herpes. A widow-witch exits his now-lifeless mouth—his jaws stretch apart, wider than a Thai elephant’s birth canal. The xian flashes Apana Vayu mudra. The widow-witch falls. White hair and fingernails for days. A small bat exits her mouth. The xian collects it. Cosmic lingam drips fetid tears for the bat’s punctured chest as the xian holds it over his sme-ba, hammering his meteoric iron phurba into the vermin’s doomed heart. This galvanic incident triggers the pettiest supernatural war of attrition; the incunabula of it all.

SECOND BARDO

A Spirit of Halloween warehouse moonlights as an illegitimate Petsmart in which an evil wu mourns for the death of his former black magic student. A low poly hologram of the murdered bat’s skeleton pays him a visit. He bobs in the bargain bin for a corpulent rat. With his teeth, he eviscerates it and proceeds to hawk entrails and blood mist onto the skeletal representation. The bat fails to exact his revenge on the xian. He drains Listerine from a venomous snake’s tooth. He pulls out a skull from a bowl of nam pla and intestines. He arrives in the night at a golden pagoda. Within it he clings to the ceiling. From up in his crush velvet spell bag, he shakes out six furry windup arachnids. Tarantulas, made in Taiwan, swarm the xian and prick him to death through the eyelids. It has been prophesized that a glorious fighter would later avenge him. 

THIRD BARDO

Time is distended for ominous boxing. Two Muay Thai combatants jump kick the bruise-blood clean out from each other’s moist, cauliflowering features. Chan Hung watches from behind the white ropes of the ring as his brother rocks a formidable rival to rest. Lactic acid begins to release when his foot jab lands a pyrrhic victory. Chan Hung’s brother stands with his arms raised. The sore loser, stirring behind him, winds up the sneak-attack roundhouse that will soon sever the champion’s c-spine. Chan Hung vows revenge from the bleachers. An old monk appears in the flicker and smoke of a budget effect. He implores Chan Hung to seek higher levels of vengeance, but for the Buddhists and not for himself. Chan Hung walks in liminal of two distinct tiers of requital: in the realm of the psychical senses, he trains to extinguish the wu for the Buddhists; in the realm of immediate flesh, he trains to defeat his paralyzed brother’s sworn kickboxing rival. Occult oaths are emulsified in their celluloid representations: a psychedelic frenzy of colorized ritual witchcraft and violence.   

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A Nightmare On Elm Street 2 // Oli Johns

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Only one bad thing about sleep they say

it closely resembles rococo worlds the boiler room

no tannoy skin flaking off hours

Goya cam

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[Daddy can’t help you now]

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Grrr.

Let me in, Jesse

 You’ve got the body I’ve got the brains

you’ve got

the body young vacant taut body you’ve got it J that body MY future body ripe body soft skinned teen golem body untouched by other martyred caretaker men uncut unpossessed let me in J cos I’ve got the brains glove urge tongue and you the body that fucking body track + field body arms legs hands dick nine inch ten with low pubes kind ruler Ron in shower semi-hard boy you’ve got the-

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[Hey, Grady, do you remember your dreams?

Only the wet ones.]

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Yank back Schrader town pack up the guards

We need mirrors.

Shame.

Church cinema.

Seek contact and never achieve glove in the mail balls in the biscuit tin.

To glow that way is insane.

Retrograde.

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Baise-Moi // Maddison Stoff

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Last time I watched Baise Moi, I remembered being struck by how much of the rape I had forgotten. There’s an irony to that. I can’t remember the first time I was sexually assaulted either. In fact, I was unaware of how many of those experiences I’d already had the first time that I watched the movie too.

I had a thing for banned films when I was younger. Part of it was pure teen rebellion: my parents were relatively strict about enforcing age ratings for media on me as a child, causing me to have a harder time relating to my peers. I grew to resent censorship because of that, and when I came of age, I used the internet to watch as many movies as I could that my government had claimed were not appropriate for distribution in Australia.

The other reason I did it was because it was impossible for me to feel a lot about movies back then. My autism, and my (then unknown,) gender dysphoria made it difficult for me to see myself in almost any character, and for that reason I struggled to relate to them. But for some reason, when I watched Baise Moi, I saw myself in both of the protagonists. They are women practically defined by anger: they exist as weapons levelled at the patriarchy, whose violence eventually finds them once the movie ends.

I didn’t know that people like me could be women then, which made it even weirder. I never would have guessed that my affinity was for them coming from the anger I’d been cultivating about that. I didn’t even have the confidence to talk about my love of it for many years. I was so worried about that love being misconstrued, and therefore violated. But without knowing the reason why that caused me anger, there was nothing I could do.

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