And like every "right and wrong side of the tracks" story, such as The Outsiders, Far and Away, or Rebel with a Cause, there has to be a bad boy to make Deborah Foreman's female protagonist Julie's world catch on fire. And for the valley girl Julie, it was a punk, unwilling to don an Izod shirt or Members Only jacket.
& i am just another circular
song a conch of an echo
of another step
beyond – timeless language
Why do I need this fictionalized version of Greg? By keeping him on a pedestal, I can deny my anger toward him. For years, I’ve viewed him and his lifestyle through rose-tinted glasses while being seriously, albeit subconsciously, angry at him.
He wins Best Actor. The bar goes crazy. But we want
the big one. We want Best Picture. It means everything.
It means history.
FILM / Captain Canada's Movie Rodeo / March 2022 / Gabriel Ricard
Drunk Monkeys celebrates Gabriel Ricard and the 10th anniversary of his column, Captain Canada’s Movie Rodeo!
The title of this issue comes from my favorite song on The Who's Tommy album, "See Me, Feel Me/ Listening To You." This is on the movie soundtrack, not the actual Tommy album. I'm really enamored by this song, and I listen to it pretty much constantly.
In the study, sunshine was everywhere: falling onto the arms of a leather rollaway chair; cascading onto a desk choking on a thick layer of debris—stacks of manila envelopes, three fountain pens, and an open notebook, its sheets gently fluttering in the breeze from the open window. On every page it was written: It was over before it even began.
We might conclude that truth in the confines of a subjective personal memoir is always going to be bit misrepresentative. Fiction, then, can just as likely be based on an actual event. But why is it that memoir is more often passed off as fiction, and not vice versa?
She wore her hair short after her stay
at the Bethel Treatment Refuge to dry out
I remember thinking even as a child
she’d never be as beautiful that way
They had coffee mugs and fridge magnets
skull caps with slogans --
We are stronger together and
No place for hate
& inside Emily is yawning
with her phone in her hand,
beneath a blanket, in front
of the fire, looking up if we can
afford to join an indoor pool.
I will fake
my own death if I have to, will stare
at the ceiling and pretend
I can live there, watching us.
Just watching us.
In the third act, my great great Grandmother
didn’t need a gun. She rode off with the horses
and water supply after he dismounted to piss.
They ask you and you share a little about the ghetto, no father, mother with two jobs, being a latchkey kid, gang wars. They are quiet, then excited. They say, “Oh my God, what a childhood, yet here you are.” They say that they could never have accomplished what you did: master’s degree, house in a beautiful neighborhood, public admiration for your work in domestic violence, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful children.
Fern is outside at the edge of one of these days, watching the last of the daylight turn pink and disappear from a park bench, when Lucia calls.
“I can’t figure out why I feel like this and I can’t shake myself out of it.” Lucia says at the other end of the line, panic constricting at her throat, thinning her words.
“You don’t have to,” Fern says. “It’s okay.” And it is.
We learned to open our throats,
your lung’s breath whispering:
Feel me here. Your head moved to my touch
until a knock on the door made us stop.
We met each other halfway. Then I was told to turn around, having a key necklace placed around my neck, and given instructions just in case things went sour. Minutes later we left. Typically, music boomed when we drove. It would spark sing-alongs and more questions about what I had been up.
I also lost out on meeting fascinating people who would board at makeshift bus stops, gas stations, or stand at roadsides. Them all predominately regular folk, the forgotten, and ill-defined. People who moved invisibly about, rubbing off on each other, with looks and dialects, in their quest for a better horizon, or somewhere familiar.
After six years of each snow-covered morning and
your grumpy greeting,
there are only two things you must have become.
And so I search, waiting for your legs to emerge