Focal Points

Posted on November 19, 2024 by John Biscello

Deep focus in film, as in the depth of a shot, creating dimensional layers. What about deep focus when one points the camera towards the interior? Not just the surface level of interest or engagement, or the foreground, but a focus that comprises various layers. For example: You, in the present moment, are screaming at someone, who has tripped one of your triggers. There is a close-up on your face, beet-red, mouth contorting as you scream, and the middle-ground shot is that of two cars, a red car cutting off a blue car, and you are the driver of the blue car, this near-accident occurred earlier that morning, and in the distant background we a small child, stamping his feet, shaking his fists, and rage-weeping. How to shoot a deep focus of the interior life? How one incident is connected to another, a protean collage, a complex scale of moods and emotions, a trigger-sensitive interplay. Deep focus capturing past, present and future in a single dynamic shot.

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Theme for a High School Dance

Posted on November 18, 2024 by John Biscello

There is a rumor that Laura Palmer is going to be at the dance. While you don’t know her personally, all you can think about is the exquisite mystique of her televised corpse, and how her voice, on a karmic loop, kept repeating—So you wanna fuck the prom queen? The idea that Laura Palmer might breeze into the school auditorium, and perhaps stand only ten feet away from where you are standing, you holding a plastic cup filled with cherry punch, dressed in a suit that was your brother’s, god rest his soul … Laura, can I get you a glass of punch? (Good, in your head, you didn’t stammer or stutter when propositioning Laura). You suddenly realize that cherry punch is leaking from a hole in the bottom of the cup, and onto your new shoes, as you tip the cup horizontally, which, unfortunately, spills the entirety of your cherry punch onto the tiled floor. The cherry punch now pooling around your black shoes reminds you of cartoon blood, and you remain transfixed by this grotesque effect, until out of  the corner of your eye, you spot a platinum-haired girl in a white ruffled blouse and tight-fitting blue denim jeans, walking backward through the doorway. She seems to be rewinding at a spasmodic, off-kilter-pace, in your direction. You cannot understand the words coming out of her mouth, as they sound like chunky globules being gargled, and are being spoken forward, away from you, with the girl continuing to rewind, and you, locked in a pause, awaiting her arrival. When she reaches you and wheels around, as if she were wearing roller skates, it is the smile that is hardest to bear, and how its yearbook majesty and rigged incandescence forces you to look down at the mess you’ve made, and please, god, tell me why anyone would serve cartoon blood at a high school dance?

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Distances

Posted on November 18, 2024 by John Biscello

In the catacombs of grief, she wandered. She wandered, without thirst, without hunger, without want. This frightened her. Had she lost her basic humanity? Why had she created such elaborate labyrinths in which to wander? Try saying that ten times fast, she said to herself. Good. At least her sense of humor was intact. She had possessed a need, or rather been possessed by a need for labyrinths, and wandering in them with no regard for time, since she was a child. And she had no interest in getting lost in someone else’s labyrinth. If I get lost in any labyrinth, I want it to be of my own making. She had gotten good at it: the labyrinth-making. Yet down here, in the catacombs of grief, which she thinks is below the labyrinth—but could she be sure? Maybe the catacombs were flanking the labyrinth (which would make them irregular catacombs, but still, when it came to her…). Maybe they were outside the labyrinth entirely. Orientation in the labyrinths is damned near impossible. She held fast to her inner compass. Which registered directional coordinates through mood and feeling, through intuitive forecast. Here, in the catacombs of grief, it was cold. No wind. Just pure cold, like being in a deep freezer. There was also the wailing. Who or what produced the wailing, she had no idea. But it made her heart weep. She cried and cried within, and it was there, the within that is within, where she saw and then became the woman using words, voiced, written, stitched together to form a raft, upon which she cascaded along the River Grief, which had been produced by the woman weeping her hidden heartbreak—the tall woman in the shadows crying secret tears for the wailing whatevers—the small woman tethered to the raft gliding downriver—they were both her, being watched over by the other woman, who may not even be a woman, a mysterious genderless figure, an enigma destined to witness, take notes. The whole thing, at times, was completely overwhelming. Could she crack? Would she crack? She thought of Humpty Dumpty, that poor existential sap. He fell, he cracked, and couldn’t be mended. The lesson there: not all get mended. Humpty became so much yesterday so quickly. And, God, with his Hoover vac, sucked up the shattered remnants of Humpty and that was that. She looked ahead. In the distance … there was distance. To look out into the distance, and see only more distance … there was only so much a wandering heart can take.

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Without Proper Guidance

Posted on November 17, 2024 by John Biscello

They had me in a corner and ganged up on me. A team of guidance counselors wearing black turtlenecks, black Dickies, black wingtips, wristwatches, and spotlessly clean spectacles. Their voices harmonized in a harsh baritone chorus: Biscello (ohhhh…ohhhhh…sounded the echo)—what about your future? Have given any thought to your future? What are you planning for the future? I was cornered. There was about a dozen of them, and their unform blackness affected a menacing air. Normally, when they had me in this position (they got me like this every so often), I’d smile sheepishly or issue a smart-alecky answer, and wait for them to go away, but this time I heard myself saying, as if reading perfectly rehearsed lines from an inner-script: The future, my guidance-counseling friends, is not some down-the-road place, not a designated X on the timeline—the future is inside of us, ripening and growing. As for me, I’ve been building my future, word by word, sentence by sentence, story by story—my future exists in these words, these writings. I’m not waiting on the future, I’m building it. It exists, now, and will continue to grow and come into its own.

I felt relieved and satisfied, but not in a smug or self-righteous way. I just felt good that I had announced the future to the guidance counselors, or rather the future had announced itself through my voice. I figured after my clear and confident proclamation, the guidance counselors would disappear, but they didn’t. They looked at each other—mystified, puzzled—then huddled together as if coming up with an alternate plan. The huddle broke up, and again the baritone chorus, this time with more snarl and bite—We, the guidance counselors, are charging you with the crimes of solipsism, egomania—bordering on megalomania—heightened delusionality, fraud, and self-negligence. I was taken aback. Based on what evidence, I asked. One of the guidance counselors took out a tiny black tape recorder and played back the speech I had made about the future. When it was done, he clicked off the recorder. The counselor said—I believe those words will serve as enough evidence to render a guilty verdict.

This dream was not turning out the way I had expected. My mind raced. Should I beg for mercy? Plead ignorance or insanity? Tell them I had Peter Pan syndrome and demand to be charged as a minor?

Guidance counselor chorus—Would you like to say anything before we take you in?

My anxiety suddenly passed and I felt supremely serene. I spoke quietly, but with confidence—Counselors, the future has announced itself. You, like everyone else, like everything, will be written, therefore part of the future. Whether you condemn me and send me away for a long, long time, or break out into cheer and applaud my words and deeds, you will be written. What you do with me is your choice. What I do with me is mine.

I’d like to say that’s when I woke up, but I know the dream continued on without me. One of these days I’ll return to that dream, already in progress, and see what’s become of us all.

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Reel

Posted on November 17, 2024 by John Biscello

It’s like watching a movie. In which you deeply and passionately relate to the main character, who has been wronged. You feel angry, vindictive, vengeful. You want to lash out at the antagonist who has wronged him. Then you pull back and realize: This is only a movie. I am watching a movie, and as much as I relate to the main character, as invested as I feel in his plight and ordeal, I am not him. He is not me. He doesn’t exist, not really. He is a character on a screen and you are … what are you, exactly? Good question. After you leave the theater, and forget about the man you related to who was wronged, you ponder the question—Who or what am I? From an imagined distance, you feel as if you are being watched, perhaps even dreamed through. You suddenly become very afraid of the imitation you might encounter, when turning the corner.

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He Who Gets Slapped

Posted on November 15, 2024 by John Biscello

In this unaired episode of Happy Days, titled “The Other Cheek,” Arthur Fonzarelli, Fonzi, the Fonz, slaps Richie Cunningham hard across the face. Void of context, we don’t know why. Richie’s jaw drops. He is in complete shock. He holds his hand against his crimsoned cheek. Richie careens out of time, out of character. He tells Arthur Fonzarelli, the Fonz, Fonzi, that he’s made a big mistake, a very big mistake, and he would be very sorry—did he know who he just slapped? You just slapped someone who was a child star—remember Mayberry, motherfucker?—and I’m gonna go on to become a major director who makes lots of films, Backdraft and Born on the Fourth of July and Apollo 13, all kinds of films, I’m gonna be the shit, and you, what are you gonna be be doing, Fonz?

When Richie—stationed somewhere between the character, Richie Cunningham, and Ron Howard, the actor playing Richie Cunningham—is done with his rant, the rest of his face has joined his cheek in turning crimson. Henry Winkler, a.k.a, the Fonz, Arthur Fonzarelli, Fonzi, is baffled, and looks around as if trying to pick up on a gag. Was he on Candid Camera? Yet everyone on set looks as baffled as he does, an awkward quiet clotting the air. One of the camera-men coughs. Ron Howard/Richie Cunningham storms off the set, muttering hotly under his breath. The Fonz, still not sure what to do, defaults to his signature move—thumbs jacked up and out, like a jazzy hitchhiker, as he mouthgrooves—Ayyyy! The live studio audience applauds. Or it canned applause? It is hard to tell the difference.

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Honeymoon Killer

Posted on November 15, 2024 by John Biscello

Ralph Kramden sweats and sweats, eyeballs bulging in their sockets. Plagued by the accursed notion that he has become a whale, no, a rhinoceros, no, an inoculated hippo that shows up to birthday parties uninvited. This visual grotesquerie, reflected back to him in the spotless glass of the teapot that his wife, Alice, had brought home, is something he cannot bear. He begins pacing back and forth, back and forth, chewing up clipped mileage in his grubby shoebox of an apartment, wanting to yell, curse, stomp, holler, blame someone or something for this condition which apparently has become him, and he it. It’s murder to know oneself in this way, and not be able shake it off, absolute murder, and the cold beetles of sweat rolling down his back and neck and jowls are making everything infinitely worse. He has been confronted by the purest form of disgust, and if his life were a show, of which he had directorial control, he’d yell CUT, and peel off this suit of blubber he was wearing and allow the sane thin man within to breathe, while rejoicing in the fact that Ralph Kramden, the sweat-slicked hippo of a hothead, was only a person meant to amuse, ha-ha, laugh everyone, laugh, it’s just a fat suit designed for your entertainment—I am not him, he is not me—yet this fictional reverie was betrayed when Ralph caught a flickering glimmer of himself, his true self, in that goddamned glass teapot (where had Alice gotten it? and more importantly, where was she?). Desperate for air, and solace, Ralph opens the window and calls up to his neighbor and best friend, Ed Norton … Norton, hey, Norton!! It is only when speaking this name aloud that revelation hits hard, as if the window had suddenly slammed shut on his head, an aspiring guillotine: Alice wasn’t coming back. There was no more Alice. No more Norton, either. No more Trixie, Norton’s wife. All of them were gone. The schtick which Ralph’s life had become had run it course. He had been left alone, with unbearable reflections, and no one to raise his voice against.

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Dust in the Wind

Posted on November 13, 2024 by John Biscello

A musician named Sam introduced me to Ask the Dust when I was in my early twenties. It was exactly the book I needed at the time. Sam had heard me read at the Vault, a house-based, performance space in Queens, and afterwards asked me if I had read John Fante. I told him I hadn’t, and didn’t know who Fante was. Sam’s face lit up. I got something for you, he said. That something was given to me when Sam and I met at his house to do some spoken word and music recording. He gifted me a copy of the Black Sparrow edition of Ask the Dust and told me it would change my life. I read it in a couple of nights and was blown away. The romantic solipsist in me fell deeply into the echoes and correspondences of mine and Arturo Bandini’s life (Bandini being Fante’s alter-ego): the Italian-American background, growing up in a household of chaos and addiction, the burning need to escape from home, the outsized literary ambitions. It was the classic sense of lesser-than desperately seeking more-than in order to feel important, validated, confirmed, seen, heard. Ask the Dust, in its hardboiled innate lyricism (thinly concealing wounds and inflammable sensitivities), its flinty phlegmatic timbre, and seismically registered mood swings, lodged itself in my heart and became one of my mini-bibles and crooked valentines.

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Scarecrow

Posted on November 13, 2024 by John Biscello

You got to ask yourself: Do you want to fuck Judy Garland? Or do you want to become her? I wasn’t prepared for this line of questioning. I was eleven at the time. Or twelve. I think, eleven. My mother’s boyfriend had asked me this. My mother’s boyfriend was an idiot. I had considered him an idiot even before he had asked me this question, which really was directed at me more as an ultimatum, but once he asked me this, his status as an idiot was firmly cemented. Of course, I didn’t tell him this. He was bigger than me. And had tattoos. There was a snarly sneer, or sneery snarl—choose your poison—behind his words when he spoke them. Do you want to fuck Judy Garland? Or become her? I knew which option he wanted me to choose.

I was watching The Wizard of Oz for the umpteenth time when he asked me. I looked at the screen. Dorothy Gale, a.k.a., Judy Garland, had just met the Scarecrow who was locked into his stumble-bumble routine. My mother’s boyfriend also stared at the screen. What did he see? A young pigtailed girl in a blue dress that he was pining to fuck, or had pined to fuck over the course of many years and viewings? I felt as if I were in the company of a serial rapist. And my mother was dating this guy?

Think about what I asked, he spoke clinically, then left the living room to give me the proper time and space to digest his inquiry. I felt as if I had been abducted and then dropped off blindfolded at a crossroads. Which way to go? Do I fuck Judy Garland? Do I become her? There seemed to be only two choices, and whichever one I chose was going to become a central part of my fate, my coming of age. Or, I thought, you could stand at the crossroads, muted and blindfolded, and choose no path at all. Just stay exactly where you are, become as the Scarecrow impaled on a post. That too was a choice, a third one.

I had always marveled at the transition from black-and-white Kansas to color-saturated Oz. It seemed the stuff of miracles. In my estimation and desire Oz was heaven. I’d go there someday. Into that world of cinematic color which existed nowhere else. Oz was heaven. My mother’s boyfriend advocated for the serial raping of Dorothy. A house would fall on him someday. Karma’s a bitch that way.

Years later, I would run into my mother’s now ex-boyfriend at a pet shop. I was there to buy a goldfish for my daughter. I don’t know why he was there. Perhaps to buy a gerbil. It seemed a likely story. Anyway, he was standing on line in front of me. He was older. Grayer. Paunchier. I observed the lion tattoo on his forearm. It had faded some. I didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t want him to see me. I tapped him on the shoulder, to this day I don’t know why, and spoke his name—Frank—which had suddenly come back to me.

He turned around. He immediately recognized me. He said my name, as if it were the title of a video game, then stuck out his hand, which I shook. We talked briefly, casual chit-chat, none if it memorable. What I do remember about that encounter: right before I was leaving, after having paid for the goldfish, I said—You know what, Frank, I married Dorothy. And divorced her. Or she divorced me.

Dorothy, he said with mounting confusion. Who’s Dorothy?

You know … Dorothy, I said, then clumsily exited the shop like a scarecrow who was just learning how to use his legs after a long coma in a field of silent wheat.

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The Trial

Posted on November 12, 2024 by John Biscello

Enlightened, perhaps. God-engorged hormones, maybe. Regardless of why, Joan, you were the rebel prototype long before James Dean zipped up a red jacket, or Marlon Brando mumbled and curled his upperlip into a stylized totem. Before Louise Brooks and Josephine Baker and Mae West scorched bits of screen and earth and tore hearts to shreds with flickering edges. You, Joan, were the world’s most famous cross-dressing heretic, the It-girl of alleged sorcery, a rebel very much aligned with a cause, coursing a waxwork future and belated sainthood. It began in your father’s garden, age thirteen, when you first heard the voices and saw the visions. St. Michael, St. Katherine, and St. Margaret, a stunning trinity that brought tears to your eyes. But they hadn’t come to serve as spiritual eye-candy, or to bring you otherworldly comfort. They were delegates, delivering a message direct from the Man Upstairs, a command, which, to any less mystic, might have fallen on deaf ears, a task that would have registered as preposterous or impossible, but not for you, Joan: faith was your stock-in-trade. You listened, you absorbed, an illiterate peasant girl being told that it was her duty and obligation to help lead France to victory over the English, to fulfill a destiny that had been part of France’s prophetic pipeline for generations: A virgin will come, a miracle-worker, and she will restore France to its former glory. You would have been happy to stay at home spinning wool with your mother, tending to the animals, gazing dreamily at clouds, passing your time as a humble girl quietly in love with God, but you knew it would be bad form, downright impious, to argue against a trinity of saints that had taken the time to visit you and you alone. Not to mention, when God gets in your head, like a luminous migraine or a marvelous tumor, what can you do except abide? The rest is history. Or myth. Legend. Pages from a tattered scripture in a gilded dustbin. There were the victories over England, the coronation of Charles VII (at which you waved your iconic banner), the capture and imprisonment. If there had been tabloids, you, Joan, would have been splashed daily across the headlines:

France’s Favorite Maid to be Tried for Heresy

Joan, the Teenage Witch, Refuses to Admit Allegiance to the Devil

Of course, as God’s cheeky, chosen daughter, you had no intention of going gently into that good night. Several times, you tried to bust out of the big-house, often falling from great heights. When the Inquisitors grilled and viciously quizzed you, with the hopes of railroading you into an incriminating confession, you shrewdly sidestepped and evaded all their tactics, case in point:

Inquisitor: Are you in God’s grace?

Joan: If I am not, may God put me there, and if I am, may God keep me there.

You had the bastards squirming, Joan, eating their own blasphemous piles of steaming shit. But, as it went, they rode a gross miscarriage of justice all the way to the stake, to that fateful day, May 30th, 1431, when they burned you, not once, not twice, but three times, before scattering your ashes into the Seine. You were nineteen. Twenty-four years away from being acquitted at your retrial, four-hundred and seventy-eight years away from beatification, and four-hundred and eighty-nine years away from official sainthood. Which just goes to show that history may be written by the winners, but the rewrites belong to a much higher and more mysterious order.

(Artwork: “Joan of Arc, by Jules Bastien-Lepage)

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