Essay from Tony Nightwalker LeTigre

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Old Town Tony & the Second-Hand Smoke Shop

By Tony Nightwalker LeTigre

A friend asked where I’m going to go now that I’m houseless again in winter.

(Winter hasn’t officially started yet, but in reality it started December 8th. That’s the morning I woke up cold in the unheated Rat House from icy winds. You know what’s amazing? December 8th is also the exact I remember noting last year as the day the weather turned shitty!)

What am I going to do? I’m going to do what I’ve been doing for five & a half years now: find a new place to stay, for as long as it lasts. In the meantime, I’ve got a rainproofed tent to sleep in. It needs to be rainproof, otherwise last night I would’ve got soaked. I’m not sure if this mummy bag is filled with down, but if so, it might lose its insulating ability if it gets wet. Keeping it dry has been a challenge.

But it’s not the first time I’ve faced this challenge. I made it through last week & I wasn’t even in a tent, I was straight up sleeping in the open air, & if you live in Portland, you know what last week was like. It was rough. It sucks when things close when you’re houseless, ’cause then you don’t have anywhere to go to warm up even during the day. You’re basically confined to your sleeping bag.

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Poetry from J.J. Campbell

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an unforgiving ocean of doubt
 
a tender note left
for your lonely
eyes
only to be swept
away by the wind
like most of your
dreams
lost in an
unforgiving
ocean of
doubt
struggling to
find something
or someone that
is real
empty another
bottle and pretend
that is the lord at
the bottom of it
when was the last
time something
other than cash
brought you what
you needed

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Jaylan Salah interviews director Selim Mourad (This Little Father Obsession)

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Selim Mourad was one of the friendliest faces I’ve encountered during the 38th edition of the Cairo International Film Festival. His energy, oozing with excitement and awe at the city –Cairo, the capital of Egypt- didn’t mirror the heavy subject matter which he chose for his first long documentary This Little Father Obsession which translated –impressively- into a different Arabic title The Austrian Emperor. The Arabic title was derived from a scene where the father comments on the son not having kids –because of his homosexuality- with a casualness that could be implying more than it intended; that he was not the Austrian Emperor, so why should anybody care whether he had children.

Mourad made a personal film that documented a transitional stage in his life, as well as his family’s. He was just coming out to his family when they had to sell the ancient family home for money to survive. So there was an act of creation and another of destruction; where did a 28-year-old gay Lebanese man find his footing?

“I hate labels. I can’t be saying that I am making a “gay” movie. It is a film where the director happens to be gay. My family history is the main plotline through which my sexual identity happens to contribute to the course of action.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3nrnB5Uvqk

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Jaylan Salah interviews film director Giovanna Ribes about her new film The Family: Dementia

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The Family: Dementia Review

A Valencian Family Drama that Defies Storytelling in Color

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It was a pleasure during the 38th edition of Cairo International Film Festival to get a chance to sit down with Valencian director Giovanna Ribes to talk about her film The Family: Dementia. This powerful drama paints the deterioration of a man’s memory and behavior against the backdrop of familial tension. One of the greater aspects of the film is how Ribes allowed her male characters to show vulnerability as opposed to their female counterparts, who have more composed actions. Three generations of men come to interact in a well-planned narrative with a scratchy, rough style influenced by neo-realism that contains artistic, magical realist interjections.

The grandfather Roger –played brilliantly by Pep Cortés- suffers from dementia. He ages amongst family members who struggle to accept him as he is while his memory slips away. The most sympathetic –and adorably clueless- is the grandson Roger and he is the only one who succeeds in taking the old man for who he is. Ribes takes us into the heart of a real family. Her narrative is inspired by reality. To her, art has no impact if it is not personal. Ribes’ drive to become a director didn’t turn out to be as easy as I thought. In my eyes, it would be really easy for her to become an artist. Her sensitivity shone through her clever eyes and her compassionate gestures. Through her words, the process was gradual:

“I belonged to a family of circus performers and bullfighters. They were artists in that sense. Growing up, I was tired of the discussions and the arguments which their lifestyle generated. I just wanted to be normal.”

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Poetry from Vijay Nair

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Water War

Mom died in a battle; at last

Occurred at a remote aquifers

A battle field, since long;

For a crock of water

A battle aided; none munitions

Threw it into the potable,

That made Croaky noises;

A bucket tied with a coir rope

Milk run after Mexican breakfast none;

Marched miles across all deserted;

Sandals no foot under sore mustered

Neck in crick head on pot mosh

Folks pooled a pond around

Flowed from; pot in no Hydrus

Village an armada in dropped chaos;

Verbose a multitude conquered with

A rift no among them harvested;

A rift in solid waterless reaped

Mesopotamia an uncivilized cradle         

Our Tigris and Euphrates 

Gone with the wind all rocks rolled;

Cloud of water vaporized: weird

Waste land all asexual parasites

Arid nowhere holy hydrosphere

Erosion everywhere an ergative water

Erupted war ergo world again third

His conch in all oceans above decibel;

Hegemony he a Hawk ruled the roost

When in east heard chanting:

Gage cha yamune chaiva

Godhavary Saraswathy

Narmadhe Sindhu Kavery

Jalesmin sannidhim kuru:

                                                                                                         Written By

                                                                                                       Vijay P Nair

                                               Water scarcity leads us a third world war soon……

Poetry from J.K. Durick

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Men My Age
Men my age sit in bars with their golfing buddies,
order single malt scotch by name like an old friend,
the connoisseurs they have become; men my age
get their pictures in papers, in alumni magazines,
getting or giving, their due, or just the right amount;
men my age remember retiring, watch their portfolios,
speak of money and past deals with a reverence they
reserve for sacred things, like those; men my age don’t
talk about women much anymore, their wives and/or
their girlfriends are grandparents, like them, and rarely
recall all the names and dates; men my age drive trophy
cars and vacation in warmer places in the winter, around
here only in the summer; men my age like to be asked for
their opinion about politics and current events, like to be
asked as if the listeners expect wisdom from all those years,
love to compare the present to the old days when things
were as they should be and people knew their proper
places and behaved themselves; men my age like to imply
that they did things in the past, knew this guy and that,
knew who did what to whom, but don’t like to talk about it
now; men my age admit their age when pressed, when that
detail adds to their stake in a conversation; men my age
rarely write poems anymore, remember writing them once,
but can’t for the life of them remember why.
J. K. Durick is a writing teacher at the Community College of Vermont and an online writing tutor. His recent poems have appeared in Social Justice Poetry, Tuck Magazine, Stanzaic Stylings, Synchronized Chaos, and Autumn Sky Poetry.

Essay from Donal Mahoney

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Long Before ISIS

 
Thirty years ago, long before ISIS started executing Kurds, Muslims and Christians, I hired a Pakistani Muslim as an art director in Chicago. I was an Irish Catholic editor putting out a small national magazine. I hired him because his work samples were good and he had worked for the United States embassy in Pakistan for more than a decade. The embassy facilitated his emigration to America. It didn’t hurt that he had seven children and I had five. I too knew the misery of being out of work with a family.
 
Different as we were, Mohammed and I were also much alike. Deadlines and details were important to both of us. Other than the two of us, the staff was female. It helped on occasion to have another man around the office.

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