Mr. Butterchips gets ready for the election in the latest from Alex Schumacher.
FILM / Exorcism By Proxy / Steve Mitchell
“We exorcise our demons, not by confronting them, but by confronting others. . . . Roger Ebert was unconsciously prescient when he wrote, in his review of Billy Jack: ‘Is our only hope that the good fascists defeat the bad fascists?’” Steve Mitchell reflects on his personal history with Billy Jack and explores what it means to exorcise our demons in America today.
FILM / Captain Canada's Movie Rodeo / September 2020 / Gabriel Ricard
Gabriel Ricard discusses how much he loves the Alamo Drafthouse and its streaming service in his latest Captain Canada’s Movie Rodeo.
Decades of sawdust
hid in the crevices
of the wall joists, the gaps
between the floorboards
that the broom could
not touch.
It was ten miles to the next town. This was my regular migration north and I was familiar with the alley behind Burton Diner. If there were no rides I would arrive in the dead of night so I could fish through the dumpster without interference. Veteran’s Park of Sawyer offered a smattering of trees, beneath which I could sleep incognito until dawn.
Duncan surveyed the Brown Brothers’ Butchers and its weathered, white stone walls. Its roof seemed askew, like bursting from the inside. With pills, he imagined. He thought of the medicine that might fill a butcher shop. Warfarin, maybe. Lasix. Cherry flavored Rolaids.
Still, Viv enjoyed the fashion show around her. One person walked by in rhinestone gold shoes with soles thicker than the longest Ken Follet book she’d ever read; she wondered if it was hard to keep your balance in those things.
Downtown
near ash end motel
where leopard coat fishnet dreams
draw within gray men
But the more I entered his life, the more elements of that story shifted — no, it wasn’t a whole year. No, it hadn’t really been nerve damage. Sitting with his mother in the living room, I had wanted to ask her how she reacted to hearing the news, what it was like getting him healthy again, but something held me back. A feeling that she might not know what I was talking about —
Our eyes met, and I believed this was going to be the moment. As I moved to kiss her, I saw four guys on bicycles speeding towards us. The collective charge of bikes with their rattling frames, squealing chains, and grinding pedals got my attention first, as they jumped the street curb onto the sidewalk.
The episode centers on Frank’s former military school dedicating a new library in his honor after a sizable donation from a lobbying group Frank works with. The night before the dedication Frank is surprised by the arrival of three old choir mates from his days as a cadet at the academy. Frank spends the rest of the night gallivanting with his choral comrades and for the first time we see Frank truly happy.
I don’t know why my first thought when someone died was about something I did. I don’t know how to handle death. Maybe trying to find meaning and comfort in associating things that seem unrelated, but personally resonate, makes sense. Maybe that’s all I’m doing now.
A line of ants crossed the northwestern edge of her square at exactly 10:46am, and Alex worked herself into an anxiety wondering whether or not she should write it down. In the end, she decided that she’d better. They appeared to have found a bag of potato chips, and were carrying the pieces home, pieces of all sizes, still oily enough to catch the sun, which meant they were likely only recently lost.
What you have to understand is that I love my father. I really do. And I think that in his own way, he loves me, even if I’ve always been a disappointment to him when compared to my older brother, which isn’t the end of the world. Is it unfortunate? Yes, it most certainly is, but whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not, most parents play favorites.
the wholesome talk of the men at the mill,
playing on the television in our Providence
apartment, the fear I felt when Mary went blind,
first fitted for glasses, before her quick decline.
stiff Levi’s, stiff Tony Lama boots, downshifting
his new Ford Bronco, spitting dust across
the open ranchland of her heart,
The seaside village in which they had chosen to spend their vacation was replete with what, for lack of a better word, they had been referring to as “jigglers”: little machines taking the form of this or that mode of transportation – a race car, a propeller airplane such as that in which they had arrived, a two-humped (or, for that matter, one- humped) camel –
on repeat, a song just out of memory’s grasp. It
could be from
twenty years ago, or the tomorrow that is
twenty years from whatever now is.
They freeze up as would predators in thanatosis, dead in their tracks, dead but not really. We want to tell them: Wait, you mindless landed expansionists and extractivists, the Adivasis whose forests you've set ablaze are coming for your heads.
When you were five,
you watched from the backseat
as the warning signal bar came down
over the hood of your mom’s car.