[Depicting the Diversity of Chaos]

The Most Diverse Film Which Offers Capacity

Who in the writing or reading community is not familiar with the American novelist Bret Easton Ellis. While [American Psycho], starred by Christian Bale may be named his most noted and well-known mainstream success, it is his cinematic collage [The Rules of Attraction] which offers many perspectives over many different circumstances, all orbiting a campus life which holds all of the various lives colliding and merely brushing one another, if only for mere seconds.

While the films dedicates plenty of scenes and various views and point-of-views of the hand full of central characters with a soundtrack represented by a funky, dark, hip and alternative, it too is a representation of the film itself, which pulls the viewer into first moments of gut aching humor then suddenly shifts you into a life ending, returns you back to idle college confusion and sexuality, more short spurts of humor and finally capture you in a waylay, stepping into a snare trap Easton-Ellis composes so cunningly, to not feel what may be felt by one who suffers something they’ve dedicated so much to continues to unravel, comes apart and nothing, not a single thing, can be conjured or concocted to prevent the disintegration.

If there is to be a chosen main character, it can be said to be either Sean or Laura, who have links between them long before they met. 

Sean, perhaps to build additional income, begins to peddle drugs around the campus, but he is not a drug dealer with clout or season, everyone owes him and refuses to pay him, leaving him in debt and facing sure physical harm from his supplier, Rupert, a coke-headed former military unpredictable and uncontrollable spastic exacerbated by his heavy coke use.

If one has the gift to being very observant or rewinds or watches this film enough, throughout every scene where the screen of a switched on television is displayed, you’ll notice they are all muted. This is classic Easton-Ellis, developing something trapped and near hidden inside a scene to give the scene a whole existence, refusing to offer anything in small doses.

University is indivisible with experimentation, a place almost always depicted as the very place, the perfect atmosphere, diverse and vast, in which students are able and are obliged to step outside of the many various sorts of insularity they may have become of age in, a time to discover the other side of the moon and to even perhaps ask such questions as to why the darkside of that dead thing never wishes to look down into such a vibrant planet swarming with life forms represented by hundreds of thousands of both discovered and waiting to be discovered species. University is the very epitome where the world at large which exist is to be represented and presented to all those familiar and unfamiliar, where the Christian learns of Islam and the followers of Judaism discovers something relatable in Buddism.

If Easton-Ellis aimed to find an atmosphere in which to build diversity, then tear it down to its bare essential, he does so in [The Rules of Attraction] in the mood of Ayn Rand, proclaiming our sameness beneath the flesh and more than willing to skin all of mankind alive to prove such a notion so long ignored.

Sean the terrible drug dealer, Laura the naive virgin still struck with a clingy romance, Paul, the gay metrosexual who pursues a crush who could care less for his adoration and/or his existence, Laura’s roommate Lorna, who squeezes Laura dry of her personal preferences only to beat her to the punch and exploit those pursuits for herself, sex being the tool she’s able to effectively utilize, as Laura’s inexperience and a naivety, so apparent when she’s reeling over Victor, a rich kid who’d fuck any and everything in motion, one of those things in motion,  her roommate Lorna, who sleeps with Victor upon his arrival, even gives Laura a wave as she jumps in Victor’s bed, wearing naughy lingerie. 

What else adds to the timing and intrigue of [The Rules of Attraction] is while drama, death, humor, love and the futile and idle mesh together in no particular chronological manner, heartbreak trickle down through the focal characters, giving us the only sense of order in a film composed and filmed to depict the reality of chaos alive on possibly every campus in the US. Sean loses the interest of Laura, in turn reveals to Paul he doesn’t care for him in the way he wants, and Laura, who idolize and nurture an infatuation to a point so grandiose, its almost insufferable to witness that very admired man to not remember her whatsoever, then dismisses her to sleep with her roommate, the “friend” who was well aware of her feelings for Victor.

Career film critics and viewers both may come to ask, “What was Easton-Ellis after?” “What statement was he attempting to make with and throughout the collage of scenes?”

by Dontrell Lovet't

The answer lies in the perspective of the viewer and because while some personalities hold optimism, others harbor pessimism, and others bring to the table ambivalence and absolute indifference. [The Rules of Attraction] was an abstract masterpiece placed in the hands of those whose curiosity wouldn’t allow them rest nor respite, the fatigued needing some distraction, some source of entertainment worthy of more than an hour, stories broken into fragments, difficult to follow, leading more and more of cinematic wanderings beyond the few minutes the average person attention span is said to last before it expires and lead to an entire surrender, blind to what is the most pretentious and most apparent established in the very first scene and maintained throughout the last; chaos was the aim, inciting it, then depicting the aftermath, exacerbate the line separating art from the counter-revolutionary

A Film Which Influences

One of the Most Influential Films in My Life

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Stemming from the story originally written by the great American writer Mark Twain and revised by another great American novelist, F. Scott Fitzerald, directed by the world renown filmographer David Fincher, the depiction of a child born old and ages down immediately brings to the profound and curious mind the question of what life would become or can become and or if our perspective of the old and young as we know it would differ from our current one which may or may not be influenced by modern society’s current and seemingly fixed standards.

Benjamin, who was born old on the day World War I was ended with the signing of the Armistice. Immediately, upon seeing the result of a strenuous birth which would eventually cost his mother, Caroline, her life, his father Thomas Button, stricken with the grief of watching his wife gradually fade away, then shortly after becoming stunned by the vision of what he believes to be a malformed newborn infant, seizes him wrapped in a swaddle, runs to the river with the intentions of discarding him, only to be interrupted by a police officer, causing him to flee away into the night until he comes upon a home for the elderly in the advancement of their dizzy years.

Being found by a caretaker who believes herself to be barren, Queenie, Benjamin is soon taken in by her as she and the consulting doctors believes that if he is to die, he shouldn’t die alone and if death is to come to the newly orphaned infant, what better place would there be than a home where death is known to be a frequent visitor.

Benjamin, day to day, defies death, and no only defies it, become stronger day to day, his ailments, those which resemble that of advanced agedness, slowly subsides. It is at the scene in church, when Benjamin is willed to walk by a firebreathing pastor, that the viewer then gathers the conclusions of his condition causing him to age down rather up, as well all do every second.

It is in the house of the elderly overseen by the only mother he knows, Queenie, Benjamin develops his first understanding and respect for the aged, the stories they would tell rich enough to begin an endless wonder, a wonder soon to become in the film the very thing to lead him to wonder beyond the house he has grown down and been cared for when he encounters Ota Benga, a character based on the true story of a Pygmy who was captured near the turn of the 20th century, placed inside of a cage for whites to view as a unique exotic species at the human zoo displayed during the World Fair in 1904, which was also billed as “The Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” a event which attracted some of the wealthiest and most influential figures in the world between its 8 months of exhibiting.

It is seldom to encounter films which utilizes true events inside the fictitious/created tales. [The Curious Case of Benjamin Button] along with another blockbuster hit classic [Forrest Gump] stands as the few select films known by most around the world by very title.

Though Benjamin falls in love with the only woman he would ever love, Daisy, when she was a younger teen, having taken work aboard a tugboat became his first great opportunity to know more about the world outside of New Orleans, a opportunity not lost to him or a second thought.

The restorative nature of travel places inside of us the obligation to lose ourselves to once again find ourselves, open our eyes to things we never truly seen in its full remarkable presence, entertain thoughts beyond any thoughts arises so quickly we suffer moments of doldrum while trapped under the amazing weight, a weight shown strange and mysterious to us because it holds nothing in common with burdens capable of straddling us permanently if left unchallenged. It is in one of his longer stays in a quiet and sparsely populated Russian city blanketed by the presence of snow day to day, Benjamin meets the wife of a British spy, Elizabeth, who in her peculiar formalities, possess a seduction seen almost exclusively amongst middle-age women. While spite may be taken towards Benjamin’s engaging in cuckholding ELizabeth’s husband, one cannot ignore the fact that we can never know what lessons we will encounter that will teach us essentials of human existence, of human happiness. The brief affair between Benjamin and the upper-class Elizabeth brings discomfort to Daisy, who is pursuing her dreams as a dancer in New York, but with a depth of perception, one could determine Benjamin’s confession of love for another woman to Daisy wasn’t reciprocated with betrayal nor hate, rather soon seen as the unexpected twist and toss of life, where one can wind up far from where they ever desired to be, yet find themselves face to face with a greater desire long discarded, surrendered so long before as a fantasy only fantasist living in the dreamworld would only mistakenly entertain.

Benjamin’s return from sea, after suffering the loss of his beloved Captain and close friend, Captain Mike, Daisy visits New Orleans not so long after. True one can see the electricity alternating between them but their lives and maturity are far vast. Daisy was a premadonna ballerina wallowing in the arrogance of being wanted by nearly all who laid eyes on her, viewing sex as many ballerinas come to, as a mere tool to enhance the line of their body and empower them with the confidence a woman usually carries, well-aware of her power and a confidence like that of youth, capable of weakening and conquering almost all men.

During their dinner, their difference becomes more stark, as Daisy speaks of a bigger world in a much bigger atmosphere and Benjamin, happy to remain silent, appreciates all the beauty she has become the epitome of. They are both in love but it is only Benjamin whose life experience has made him much more mature to admit it, reinforced by the experienced of knowing the feeling of love and having have felt it. After dinner, Benjamin unintentionally embarrasses and disappoints Daisy when he refuses her advances, believing if he was to sleep with her then, at that moment in her life, he could fall victim to her perspective of lovemaking being only a mere tool of seduction and not a gift given from one partner to another.

This opinion I reiterate when Benjamin is seen seeing other women, all of whom provided a temporary comfort and loose and artificial surrogates for the woman her truly wants to be with, the one still living the life of a woman enjoying and wanting, at that time in her life, the attention of a large audience, not a single man. Daisy, I believe, fights her love for Benjamin, possibly terrified that to love him would mean to relinquish the dream she had been living, translating Benjamin’s request for her to return to New Orleans to end her career, though she was lying in a hospital bed in Paris after being hit by a car, with at least at hint of her dancing again professionally would never happen.

Daisy would eventually come to accept the ending of her career, returning to New Orleans, giving in to the feelings she felt all her life for him, joining him on long sojourns to the lakehouse left to him upon the death of his father. Benjamin and Daisy return from their lake vacation to find that Benjamin’s adopted mother, Queenie, died in her sleep, a terrible and tremendous loss, his only fortune being Daisy who was there for him while they both grieved for a woman they loved who gave them both the love of a mother.

A very intriguing twist then comes, Benjamin sales most of his inheritance, primarily the lakehouse and he and Daisy downsize to a small and homely duplex and begins to lead a simple and happy life, still aging in different directions, Daisy’s which would take her to an elderly infirm age and Benjamin’s which would take him into pubescent and into childhood. This fact only becomes troublesome when Daisy becomes pregnant and Benjamin worries about how held end up, a burden to Daisy, a father incapable of being a father, and against all of Daisy’s reassurances and his own pull to stay and love her, he sells all his estates and starts accounts to keep Daisy and his daughter, Caroline, who he named after the mother who died bringing him into the world, a woman he eventually comes to believe, had she survived, he would have never been orphaned. On her deathbed, her last wish was that her husband, Benjamin’s father, takes care and protects him, which he does in an initial distant manner.

Believing Daisy to be asleep one night, Benjamin attempts to quietly slip out the door but his departure is discovered and more than likely anticipated by Daisy, who just stares and is stun in hurt and despair, as Benjamin gets on his motorcycle and rides away, sure that his leaving before his daughter was old enough to remember him, would prove a bit more sacrificial and while he is unable to cause hurt to Daisy by leaving her, he spares Caroline such pain.

Caroline, now an adult, reading the journal of Benjamin, discovers that he was her father all along, and suffers a sharp bout of hurt for her mother’s concealing the paternity for so long. But she has to know her father, has to know how the story edges towards its end and in what manner, discovering all of the postmarks Benjamin wrote to her from the many countries he traveled to during every holiday, giving her a joy that even though he left, he was always there and would wish to be there in spirit, something made insurmountably impossible by his progressing condition, which ages him down to a young boy suffering from dementia.

Benjamin’s very endeavor to prevent Daisy from having to care for him becomes so. An old lady herself, she moves into the very home Benjamin and she grew up in, Benjamin alongside her, where he dies in her arms as an infant.

If one can take anything from [The Curious Case of Benjamin Button], it’s the perspective of life being much more spatial than most would believe, extreme and mysteries possibilities, how even the bizarre and hideous paths can open up to something so substantial, it can continue to nourish a dream and develop even the vigor to give life an infusion, a jolt of belief, the first some may ever encountered in the entirety of their lives.

Dontrell Lovet’t

[Suffer the Little Children] on Apolo Torre's [Girl on Side the Building]

by Dontrell Lovet't






            Street art can be defined as everyday reminders and representative of the beauty we can easily lose in melancholia during our everyday monotony. Perhaps the most fulfilling of mention, too, one of the most hideous of street art able to be found the world over, is Apolo Torres’s [Girl Reaching Above the City].

            There are skyscrapers, a sea-set in the sky above the city, an adorable child on the tip of her toes, extending herself, a backpack on her back representing growth in intellect and education. At the base of her feet, there is a snack she’s unaware of, winding around her legs and a Pit-Viper impishly looking up at her. We cannot assume but we can establish what snakes have always represented since biblical times and how childhood, that moment where the future generations grows, learns and blooms, are ensconced in potential victimhood, surrounded by a jungle of predators seeking to prey upon their naivety.

            Apolo Torres’s depiction, which can be found alongside an apartment building housing families, is a necessary image, a frightening image, the sort one has no desire to see yet find themselves unable to turn away when the event unfolds. If ever there are any visions the masses should take in, it is the art, representing life, representing danger, representing a will for longevity in the form of caution.

[In Utero] a byline

An infant begins to first dream in utero, before it reaches the 38th week of full term, followed by the trauma of birth. It can be said that that initial dream remains embedded within the fetus, as it is born and becomes an infant, infant to toddler, toddler into the schematic age.

As they grow within the realm of victimhood, that jungle that surrounded childhood, this dream is nurtured with creativity, with concrete ideas. It is in this childhood, that the dream splinters the artist, sets them apart from other children. They are then removed from themselves, observe the interpersonal behavior of adults, become precocious and the child is then inane in comparison.

The succession of images are finite in the dream, some clear, some distorted, lost in a deeper chasm than the soul can ever burrow. Few moments of a reoccurring, haunting dream can be melancholic, treacherous, where in the day one seems to be at peace with the world, an unsettling shift of axis. The dream, if anything, is the reminder to not become complacent but to always remain in motion, always live myopic, that the loiter is the deadliest form of night terror.

[Sleepless Nights] on the Art of Marzena Lavrilleux

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [Hand-Rolled, Post-Coital]

At its most precious limits, art has lost its way and found it within a new identity, an inane idea. If art stands in its current place, it may find itself in peril of decapitation; altercation is not enough, it must change, and not just change, evolve- its need is in the interest of being led to its forbearance and way from the guillotine, away from dismemberment.

This altercation is held in the hands of Orleans-based painter Marzena Lavrilleux. French-polish in descendancy, now alive in the aura of what once was the childhood home of Edgar De Gas, there is nothing, nor anyone who exists juxtaposed to her, for art is not a dream she has once dreamt, it is the dream she has moved into, sporadically re-emerged from as a conundrum ineffable, incapable of being fully comprehended.

If she has found anything that has scattered from the trauma of birth, she has found herself in the world, herself lightly upon the earth as the moon directly above her head has made a strenuous endeavor to lift from her a restless spirit.  And as a meteor that collects its gravity in the rays of the sun, Lavrilleux finds momentum in the methodology of existence, that is, in the world of her art.

Note the painting [Eclipse], an unbelievable depth in a chasm of surreal, an encounter of an abandoned town and its macabre ending, a setting where each and all things can be set free, return at will, if it may desire. One is reminded of poverty-stricken villages, browns, blacks and golds that assimilate in the sky as a loom on the floating horizon. What is removed from the haunting image, is resurrected in [Elephant]. A marvel, a marriage of depth to birth, then a plummet to an abortive sea of distortion, a molar pregnancy in a cadging womb demanding life in a most brilliant, grandiloquent plead. The angels can deny not, the demons can ignore not the angels frazzle to bedazzle, beloved and beget. It is, as in [District] is as nothing I've seen, deep abstraction, abstractive dimensions, seemingly unafraid to unleash its color upon the eye. It's color is its prayer, an finite expression to live- not in human interest but in its own.

Lavrilleux gesture is the gesture of seduction, the same, it can be the gesture of miscarriage, a sensory of failure as the brain. Her gesture must empty itself onto the earth if it is to become a criterion of this earth, the haplessness, the bliss, the fertilized, the calcified fetus. Let her gesture be what it is, what it may, enraged in the image of itself, the dew that depends on winter to imprint its moldlessness upon the pane. If there is a darker, most desolate corner of Lavrilleux, in her art, it flickers at a phase as to allow only one view before the arrival of again, a lighter gesture.

 In [Fashion Victim] there is a consistent them of tragedy, the vanity that is both bold and unforgiving, an unbecoming of women who've used up there inertia of life in time, bodies broken, battered, severed in the glamourous beauty of the doctrine they lived by. One thinks hastily of Gia Carangi, of Archana Pandey, Ruslana Korshunova, Hayley Kohle, Daul Kim, names of women who walked till the runway gave way, dropping them into an abyss. It is only in this painting that Lavrilleux allows us to live in victimhood, bygone victimhood, illegitimate nostalgia, overwhelming portraitures of what remains is only names. The sporadic flicker is now at its most solid state of being, alienated, the body of misery builds its own mausoleum, retracing its own steps time over for centuries.

   In this hideous reconciliation with the human miasma, we are beckon to rest in our misadventures with [Sleepless Nights.] The intervening distance, the equidistance from bliss to the plunge into our own dark corner is aided with the grey shades, trees hidden in a different shade of grey, a touch of infantile brown solidified as a vacancy. This vacancy rests in a vacuum, where body and space intermingled in a vortex of misgivings. This is a modern reminder of the fall of the altercation, a change at its most malevolent, most unvarying.

[Woman of the Earth] a prose

If woman is not on this earth, then it will be no more and every woman after, will be lost, find herself afloat, aghast, marooned and never find herself, even that woman who has left the earth.

In the body's space, time is inalienable, even frightening; her eyes will open to desolation, see nothing and feel joy, joy to have come into a new age, build a tower identical to Babel and see the vastness of the emptied world. It is then she'll begin her descent from the tower, open her womb to repopulate the earth with the asexual fissures negated by the push/pull of gravity, allow her hand to move in great gesture, in great length without broken sequence. She will dance in a motion unbroken by the interruption. The distance between herself and ignorance will never exist.

And in this new land, she will exit by desire, a virtuous will be  and not become, falter and fix herself only on self-titillation and orgasmic birth. The tale then would be never-ending, the gesture finite, the loins regenerated.

In her singularity, a single constant will persevere, only a single, and in that constant, with her eyes to the new world, she stands, high and tall, in a terrain invented by her mind, a landscape not of abstract but of nowhere. Time passes alongside her, the flare of life subsides in that life and if not, it is because she has become unwilling to risk her life.

In the beginning of nothing, there is too a mind apart from this new world, given only over to the presence, the future may never come to pass but it isn't a thought that occupies her, only fruitful reproduction of the likeness of her, created in her image, from her rib, her flesh, her mind, her heart. She is privy not to the limits which the mythical man has succumb to, she concerns herself not  with his past, nor consorts with time in the sense that it is her deity..

The only limit she may find is the limitations of self- with discomfort, discombobulation, comes again the earth anew. With each phenomena, there comes void, a break in time, in space, where the will of things may arrive timely, fashionably lethal and if the world is to end, it ends because it has in her.

There is then immobility, a reckoning of what is and an ignorance of what is not until it in itself occurs naturally from the kernel of the earth itself. She may wander of the spring and wander onto the equator, lose the northern lights and great northern brights and come into the southern hemisphere and as she roams, the world inside of her begins to renew itself in lapse and cycle.

She finds the end of the earth but there is no leap into darkness; light is much too alluring for her, more than coexistence that bolts the door to the new world she is bound to discover.

But she moves against gravity, in alacrity- to be, she must seek what she knows is something that is unknown to her and in that process, she finds the fever to be, finds that she is the epicenter of the process of becoming, that she exists.

Her portrait painted, masterpiece before there was perspective- she is born as a woman and births woman. There lives no period of the infantile for she was set on the earth already upright and all beneath her feet on unbroken realm of latitudes stretching deep into the oasis, deep into the abysmal space.

The sojourn, however fruitful, is fruitless, in paradox of her body that sees vision inasmuch limit has and cannot be reached. Only within her can she meet such limits and if she does, she'll walk till she is again anew. Death comes not. The end comes not.

Within the womb is she , inside of her womb, the woman, in amniotic stroke, moves with purpose through a stagnant Lethe, quieted for her very endeavor.

Understand that she is the world, the earth anew, the world in her womb creates a depth that lives, there and as apart of her, knows no limits.

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]

[The Predominance of Art] a byline

It is not necessary for someone to have to know all of the world to despise it. All the entirety of the world can never be fully known by a single individual; it is with academics, travel, empirical research, all fiber-optically connected and thus the world seems to come into focus. The focus is but a caricature; one has to see every space of the world in time space to fully and truly know it- anything less, distaste or love for the world is all distortion predicated on a fragile strand of knowledge.

The world I know is the one inside of me and the one I wish to embrace. Along every shore of Madison lives the fossil of my footsteps, where Otis Redding once plunged to his death, swept away only by immense pressure of carbon. Only from a crisp and deep breeze that seems to dissect my bare skin is my presence reassured; I too am here.

The origin of the world is the origin of the individual, and lost upon the world which is split wide by the individual, is individuation. Becoming, I make of the world a smaller place, by shrinking it, it will someday be fully in my hands, as clay to mold, "the thinker" of Rodin. The ghost is given to uncertainty and an uncertain world, the haunt to the dream that never comes when I am asleep but only when I am awake, my eyes open, rational. Love is temporary derangement; I am always in love.

Of this love, of this infatuation, that is not of bodily form, is the only, for the love in human form has come long ago and gone long before and art, that decay that will dissect the cerebral formation of logic, bares itself down in haven to never again be removed.

Art is a constant; it lives when all else dies, it remains when everyone has left, it reciprocates when it knows it has complete devotion as a jealous god. Prayer is knowledge, prayer is lyrical formation, linguistic variation, self-expression, artistic absorption, and when all is said and one, art gives you a legacy of a thousand years and a death of a thousand occurrences.

Locking oneself up away from the world doesn't mean its cruelties have subsided, just that it has created another guise to hurt you. By forcing one into silence, into seclusion, it builds the walls that one believes they have chosen to hide in, it beats on the walls in the nights as a demonic presence and soon, it creates the doppelganger outside of the mirror and the omen that is insanity cradles you until that final sleep is about. Emily Dickinson accomplished nothing from seclusion, only the lost days that Walden found. His seclusion was bliss, Dickinson's despair, Chagall's prayer, St. Vincent Millay's seduction. One can only delay their deterioration by refusing to "go quietly into that good night," with seclusion comes defeat, with the artist, seclusion brings one to be twice defeated inasmuch art, there lives no triumph of the individual over art, for the individual is a byproduct of art as sulfites from fermentation.

If there is anything of self that is lost, it is only lost because it has been given up freely, without the battle to possess. The celebrity who hires the ghost writer to produce art in silence cheapens art, the ghost writer, by becoming and accepting the fate of the "ghost," cheapens themselves, the plagiaristic possess no genius nor is possessed by it and therefore must heist art, the singer whose songs are written in their stead is only a marionette on strings being pulled, toggled and turned to a virtue to be forgotten upon their fading. Art is only obtainable by suffering, not by pure fantasy or ideal, not by networking or collaboration, but by the broken body in the dungeon with only a spec of light invading the darkness. That single being of light causes the mock-artist to scream for others to aid them up; the artist writes of its being in poetry, in prose, in essay, in pamplistic novellas, paint its caricature on the walls. That light is what the artist has to hold on to, more would only expose wounds long before they are ready to be exposed to the thin air, to the awaiting pathogens.

Something awaits to be released in the aura of creativity, a story held from humanity far too long. A story is told behind "Saturn" devouring his child, Eiffel's rise over Paris and the Seine, the Golden Gate and its tomb of fallen steelmasters, the improvisation that iconolized Isadora Duncan and Miles Davis, the longings in the songs of Edith Piaf, the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Les Saisons of Pyotr Tchaikovsky. The story is the appalling spectre, the allure of this spectre where one takes upon themselves at the tomb of the fallen before them. The decadence of the artist is the likeness of the decay of their person; the two can only coexists so long before one is led to the plunge of death. Because art is timeless, limitless, finite, its immortalization is predominant as opposed to the human body that eventually, even at the lifelong absence of putrefaction, meets the Hayflick Limit.

I submit that for every Picasso that has lived, so has there been a Fante, for every Hemingway, a Kerouac, for every Fontaine, a Segarre, for every Frost, a Celan, for every Portman there is a Huppert, every Formiga, a Sedgewick. Art advertised only brings more fame, more fortune but art in itself is, it is dispassionate, one study no more suffered than another. The art thief is the only one seems to be getting out of his obsession what he has put it, by stealing art and laundering it through the black market, he makes it accessible to anyone with the currency or inclination to purchase it. By doing so, and only by this, art truly gains value, recognition, mysterious allure. By leaving its mainstream, visual accessibility from the curators aegis, it becomes bygone and in art, more often then not, posthumous recognition follows.

In the pertinence of the absentee father and the derelict mother, the artist is then an artist, for discordancy may hold importance but it must, in the  face of the embrace of new ideal, be relinquished without caution. The only descendants of the artist is art itself, the dominant gene that imbues the self-destructive mechanism. This self-destruction is measured only by the activity of the artist. Publish or perish, produce or be reduced; the moment the unknown artist sits idle, they are forgotten, the moment they naively choose to separate themselves from art, they descend into madness and narcissism.

Take the 1904 Opera version of [Madama Butterfly] by Giacomo Puccini that saw the tragic suicide of the heroine "butterfly" at her own hands for the love of a man, Pinkerton. From the beginning, butterfly, a 15 year old Japanese bride married by a lonely American Naval officer newly arrived in Japan, was a convenience until a proper American wife was found. In Japan at that time, a woman could be divorced if she was left-handed so it is not beyond any man's deceit to concoct reasoning for separation. Upon converting to Christianity and marrying Pinkerton, she is disowned by her family. After their wedding, Pinkerton departs for a length of three years. Everyone close to butterfly attempts to convince her that Pinkerton was never again to return, but because of her love, her devotion to him, she continues to wait, still sure of his eventual arrival. His return means more to her than just a wife awaiting a husband but of a mother awaiting the father of her child. Butterfly had become pregnant after their first night together and gave birth to a son while Pinkerton had been away. Butterfly awakes in an impossible position; Pinkerton has returned with his new American wife, Kate, who has agreed to raise the child. Butterfly agrees to give up her child if Pinkerton is to come and see her himself. Recognizing her ancestral gods in prayer, she puts the American flag into the hands of her son, blindfolds him and commits suicide. When Pinkerton runs in, he knows that he is much too late.

[Madama Butterfly] ends tragically, but only in the tragic predisposition. To me, the act of self-murder was the act of beauty, as Juliet for Romeo, as Abelard sacrifice for Heloise. Puccini's contribution was a magnanimous contribution to human glee. By recreating the tale of the greatest sacrifice for love, one's own life, there is a greatness engirdled in the marvel, and at time, tragic coexistence when love is a weak bond creating a carbon copy. Art by the production of Puccini is the sacrifice for love, in the harmonious chord of life, ended by the sword of that same volition to exist but not live.

Art creates the individual, decays the individual, else art decays.

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]

[The Film & its Double II]

 Mainstream film today can be said to have hit an impasse; that is, the cheap, careless, profit-hungry recreations overwhelmed with special effects and graphics as opposed to the depth of story and creation. A film loses its soul when an artless suit ahead of a studio company has the ability to alter a story line and thus spit in the face of art. A solid mainstream film is a far and between phenomena to encounter nowadays but in independent film, much is underrated and that much makes all the difference between a film and an imitation of it.

  To "speak" a language is to use it, but to "speak" cinematographic language is to a certain extent to invent it. This invention, as something viable, something effectively and vitally mechanically fixed, because ineffectual if tampered with, a liability bound to backfire and injure its user. It seems the art critic is the only species of humans aware of most of this, printing reviews that seemingly go unread, spouting monologues to closed ears in awe of diluted tales in which are not privy to the originals. It has be theorized that sequels endanger originals but it is only in modern film, where the sequels are forfeited their origin in place of blood, gore and predictable outrage and disaster, that originals are truly endangered of poor rewrites. It is not the filmmaker who must remain true to a promising tale but the audience must become more keen to demand that that very tale is given wholly, not just breadcrumbs swept to the floor.

An example of how the tale losses its purpose can be seen in the Grimm's tales; where Cinderella is seen as a beauty becoming, Snow White a woman waking to her dream, and Hansel and Gretel beating the odds through a dark, perilous and enchanted forest; Cinderella's sisters had their feet cut off to feet properly into set-sized shoes, Snow White was raped in her sleep by her royal lover and Hansel and Gretel were held captive by blind cannibals. In dilution we find treason, a mutiny, a lie served on a hot platter with cheap wine that gives us momentary thrills and blinding, regrettable headaches the morning after.

There most respectable thing about Rotten Tomatoes is their ranking of audience approval, giving voice to not only the film critic but the people, the consumers, the many who are pulled up by film trailers of upcoming major films, planning their lives around it. It is then recognized that if life is about seeking a happiness with the likeness of the womb, or effectively a "paper womb," they deserve to walk into a theatre and be pulled from reality, into art, return to reality with a greater idea of their life.

A film is meant to bring one closer to oneself, even in spite of self

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]

[Almost Blue] on Chet Baker's Opioid Sonata

 It’s the stroke of midnight, during a stroke of madness; I’m thinking of Chet Baker’s unashamed, unabashed, undeniable free fall into self-destruction, his very own, designed, composed, directed by the rise of his birth, fall of his physical ability, theatrics thoroughly thinned as so even the undeniably flawed may come as they are, feel no intent at attrition, attribute meager prayer, leave as they came; if only to be reassured by a fanciful deity they’ve no belief in, that those very flaws they possess will ensure natural selection would defy its very own process of elimination principle, just to spare the fool.

            Take the lighter to the base of the spoon, wait for the sizzle of the tar, draw in the cc’s needed after the ever-rising tolerance, slip the tourniquet over the brachial, expose the bulging channels in the antecubital space, brace ready, hold fast for the pinch of the needle’s near microscopic puncture, wait for the flash of blood, the indication, now the thumb commences to press the contents, the centuries-old known to man, inside, seconds lapse, just but a few, until euphoria breaks the silence with its impish liege of serotonin and dopamine, the tip of the lagging unfiltered Lucky Strike, weakly held between the lips is lit, trumpet is clasped in clammy palm; Chet Baker is again born.

            An Opioid Sonata is the continuation by an alternative means made a way of life refusing to be lived by any other means. And if by some means, some miraculous occurrence, as the chance of genetics within the human species should arise, Baker’s Sonata rises to that very occasion. Nothing can be mistaken; sadness is no longer a near but distant cousin to melancholia; bliss is estranged, rather shunned, from blessedness. Then and only then, is the canvas for one to paint their own destiny a possibility because all that holds the individual hostage, are those self-impositions that render themselves uncompromising when they’ve overheard the pillow-talk in the late nights, when the orgasm has been weakened to be conquered by the timeless spasm where electrical currents can no longer detect the static of dwindling of neurons.

Dontrell Lovet't

[On the Transcendence of Sex] a byline

Once, there was a vacancy in my life filled by a woman named Stasia. One could say, with all conviction, that I loved her. Not in the sense of romantic notion "love" but lustful, sophist love, an all consuming passion. Stastia found me in the worst moments of my life, or I may have found her, I'm not sure of the sequence of incident- nevertheless, she was the flower that any man could ever dream, the flower between her legs that all men desired. In the most humane manner, her matter was one of complete instability, as an alkaline, dodgy she was and her untrusting nature took into me all the mystery I've ever wanted to seek anywhere in this world.

Stastia came one night in arousing pleasure and was unable to cum the next from ennui of what she distasted as ordinary. All methodology to please her was asymmetric, bizarre, even to me, but it was that creativity needed to satisfy her that I aspired to. It was habitual that Stastia fell for dishonest men, it is why she loved the artist; she believed us all to be partial, fickle, willing to debase in the sacrifice of art. A muse to my poem, she became my art in language, my art in the night, lying beneath me, her legs spread wide and the other thrown over one of my legs as I thrusted deep into her deep tunnel that held a stricture to cause me the convulsion within me to become uncontrollable. The hysteria of her womb somehow infected me as a venereal ailment, a possession of a demon who lived once for the orgasm and died for it, wished to be resurrected from the dead to suffer, if only once more, the paroxysmal spasm that was the price of that very prior life. The French kiss, venturing centuries from point of origin, found its way to her mouth, to my phallus, Kate Chopin, Anais Nin, both played the ancestresses to the stroke her palm made on a moist shaft created by her saliva.

There were others lovers, perhaps many others in Stastia's life, but she embraced in coitus as if her first time, the only time, her last, she gave everything for the transcendence that sex should be set upon. One could never enjoy the anticipation of her arrival which was always a mystery, but she showed, demanded all accumulation of desire with her insatiable appetite, feasted as an Epicurean beast until she left a skeleton of me, until all matter of lust had been released from me into her mouth. She was nourished on sperm and with the engagment, it may have been all she wanted to be fed. Napoleon, when exiled on the island of St. Helena, in his last dying days, refused all food, all water, and only wished to devour Vin de Constance. Stastia's Vin de Constance, her sweet elixir, her maidera, was sperm itself.

I've only broken the hearts of women who've seen it coming; but Stastia had long broken her own heart in an endeavor to access that ultimate transcendence brought on by coitus. Stastia, as Chagall, sought to destroy the material world and rebuild, reconstruct it from the inside out with the technique of sex and the psychic itself. She brought new fervor to my bed every time I laid her upon it to resign myself from my formal studies to informally study the nature of her. Sex of the old was of no interest to her; the Pygmalion in her wouldn't allow it to take form in her- it was all of complexity, of raw effortful eroticism that lived, as love can't, permanently, somewhere in the flush button.

Stastia was Chagall to me in the most feminime, the essentialist that advanced through sexual revolution, the robber of the sky, the beauty forsaken in dithyramb to conjure all pleasure to fall from some lustful deity in that same sky she braved when cumming, when in afterglow, when the refractory subsided and she again would succumb to the tatters of new desire. Transcendence is an interloper ideal, not defined by definite definition, it is a borrowing of ideal, scrapped-book philosophy, science. Nature itself cannot exist if not biodiversed, if not supernaturally injected. Someone must first fall to prove that they can stand. Stastia stood in a way where she needed sex to be as Monet needed trees, Chagall needed his bella. The body is a mechanism that can never be manipulated quite right, so in sex, transcendence must be the aim which spring forward into what is sensual. If the female autoerotic titillates herself magnificently, she will be burdened with repeat self-performance, to continue her art of hypoxyphilia, subconsciously she knows that whatever magic poured into her blood as an opiate, that drug can be much more potent and that potency is the central theme in which becomes her focal, an irrevocable conundrum that she must solve if she is to ever again cum to cumulus.

Subject to premonitions, Stastia shook the Euclidean, causing shockwaves in the celestial sphere, paled her double in the parellel universe, changed her structure as often a protozoa, restless, relentless. She was the Venus in fur that Leopold von Sacher Masoch spoke of, that "all women are cruel in love," and if that love is cruel, then her temperament should mirror it. A better love comes from pain as a better life is sought after one has slept at the foot of the ladder.

One must suffer in order to attain the full measure of art;  Stastia was that artist, the artist of form, interwoven physiological matrix, a decadent art that pushes one more outside of the present world, a way to subsist in the bland of habitual. If the archetype of the promiscuous is that of the whore, then in transcendence, beneath the whore the ordinary world exists, echo again silenced by for her continuum, the anomaly that makes of all men of good intentions, beast, upon their defeat to shamelessness.

Art is measuring the sky, climbing up as far as gravity would allow and climbing higher. In 1971 a man strung a wire between the towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral. For three hours, he walked and juggled along that high strung wire. This feat was repeated again between the world trade towers of New York City, between the northern pylons of the Harbour Bridge in Sydney, across the Great Falls of Paterson, New Jersey, between the spires of the cathedral in Laon, France and the Superdome in New Orleans, nine months after a forty foot fall from an inclined wire that saw him break several ribs, collapse a long, shatter a hip and decimate his pancreas. His name was Phillippe Petit.

In his own effort, Petit sought to measure the tolerance of gravity's leniency, never making a penny, nor garnering fame, all in the sake of art. It is perhaps incomprehensible to many why a man would risk his life for art; art exacts its price. Stastia's tight rope she walked was sex itself, on an incline. She placed her body on the line to live in suspended gravity to reach that transcendence that haunted her from the moment her libido first bloomed. And though Petit died without a legacy to show he ever existed, Stastia's leacy was the ghost in the eyes of all men she seduced, in my eyes.

Women of my life resemble artist as sex resembles art in its most exquisite human motion. However, in art, the female form is only a caricature, it is ever-evolving and cannot be truly or fully captured in its fullness or identical likeness. It is a portrait that can never be, a transitory beauty that makes of the endeavor to capture it, brilliant beauty.

The naked body is the truth beneath layers of many others. It relies on nothing to be told, relies on nothing to be echoed and in its independence, its own individuality, then there is utter dedication to the art of body gesture, of quintessential motion. Art is a gradual and slow growth, then a sudden, tremendous upsurge and one finds a fate that births the next. Stastia's virtue was the door to the fate she surpassed with every instance she suffered orgasmic death and death, that single moment, was the fulcrum fire she danced around to, being pulled centripetal with every flushed convulsion of her body.

Dontrell Lovet't

[Nabokov's Synesthesia] an opinion on Vladimir Nabokov's [Lolita]

 Amongst the list of the Modern Library 100 Greatest novels is Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 controversial novel [Lolita.] The narrator, Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged literature professor becomes obsessed with the daughter of a woman he is renting a room from, 12 year old Dolores Haze. Set in 1947, while Humbert is working on a novel, he gradually is pulled into what he believes is no ordinary child due to her temerity and incendiary flirtatiousness. Many aware of Nabokov's remarkable works, have found pure obscenity in the subject matter of [Lolita] but there are many facts overlooked.

1: The character Humbert Humbert came of age in Europe and his creator, Nabokov, in Russia. The eras circa 1920's well into the 1960's children weren't considered merely children, but aware of life and life's facts. It was not uncommon for an older man to court a young girl or an older woman to court a young boy. Both the author and the character in his image were victims of their times, not aggressors.

2: Though Delores Haze "Lo," as Humbert Humbert endeared her, was 12 years old, the courting or sexual entanglement with her doesn't make Humbert a pedophile but more so an Ephebophile, or in latin, "a lover of adolescents."

3: In the opening of [Lolita] Humbert Humbert describes his upbringing and speaks of his first love, Annabelle. At 14, they fell in love and 4 months after, Annabelle died of Typhus. Humbert expressed that if  he had not fallen in love with Annabelle, he wouldn't have fallen in love with "Lo." Humbert even married once he became an adult but still sought out women who appeared young. This behavior may seem predatory to readers of today but with vision, we can translate the lingering, longing and yearning for his "paper womb" or a love equivalent to his most content time of his life. In theory, the day Annabelle died, so did Humbert and his aging and growth were all stunted; he as a man still trapped in a great adolescent love, forever destined to burn for it.

4: After he met and deceptively courted "Lo," during and even after he lost her, Humbert never sought out any other adolescents. Pedophiles tend to fall out of obsession with their victims when they grow older; Humbert wasn't affected in the least of her aging. He yearned for her and continued to love her, even took revenge against the man who stole her away from him during a cross-country roadtrip, Claire Cleary, the true pedophile, who recruited kids and filmed them during sexual acts.

If the reader of [Lolita] can identify with the facts of the life of Humpert Humpert and the times, they can take the time to read the most popular yet underrated novel due to "obscenity."

[Art & Outrage] Art, Menace & the Modules of Madness

Art reproduces as the cell, as our cells, becomes immortal by our own mortal hands; we envy its lack of date of expiration.

It is possible in this hatred, we lash out, displace rage upon the world inasmuch art cannot be murdered; we aspire to create a legacy and as certain mothers do certain offspring, despise their very becoming from their bodies and loves the prior or preceding without question nor restraint.

Haunted since the first dream in utero, the artist begets not art but madness in various, vicarious sorts, adorned in battle dress to march out against the dream that has long made them a pariah, caused the wedge between them and the norm, exterminated the falsities the human condition is likely to attach as a parasite. This condition of the human race beckons them one direction but they stray to the opposite, advises a move and they loiter, signals self-preservation and death descends in a torrential fault. Art is inherent in the artist, it is not a choice; to attempt to abandon it, is but an unheard scream for help in a desolate world, an introduction to mortal misery and weakness; to give up their disposition is to become human and thus possessing human fragility, human simplicity.

The implements of self-impalement are but few effective, as one summoning by intonations the angel of eternal sleep. Film is the one true line in which to view the plausibility at the future, of a future, and what can become of it. What cannot become of it, whose to say, we can only speak of the then and now and not with confidence the latter and later. A leap of faith is determined only once the erroneous, one-sided ignorance of this world is relinquished and all avenues subject to the abject are considered, given a diverse spectacle, grown and nurtured at its distances.

One work of art is not the entirety of the artist, it is a fracture of the fragmented dream migrated in all direction. We don't know if Rimbaud was the figure literature has made his memory to be, nor do we know if Kafka ever intended to share with the world his journals and letters; what we do know is that the world desired their ghosts.

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]

[A Second-time Rendezvous] on Christer Stromholm's [Nana]

Who was she? Where'd she come from? At which point did she notice Stromholm and his camera? One can look at the photograph of [Nana] taken in Paris during the 1950's and draw blanks to numerous questions. All that we know, is that Stromholm spotted her, his unquestionable depth of eye, at which time she spotted him and what followed was a photograph of [Nana] captured for all time.

Stromholm was lenient, ubiquitous, a hair-triggered snapper who rarely missed any vision worth pursuing, which again, we are brought full circle to the question as to who she was and why it is that Stromholm felt the need to circle around twice, an act rarely committed due to his very disposition, to revisit this woman?

Were they lovers? Mutual admirers? Him the artist driven and pulled by the compulsive, creative urge and she the whore whose only virtue was a whore's existence? Did she, in this slaggish existence, demand money of Stromholm or allowed him to titillate himself while she enjoyed the beloved intrigue of being notice?

All questions, no solid answers; but what we do have, is [Nana]'s and Stromholm's rendezvous, in black and white record........

[Toulouse-Lautrec's Regular] Ladies & Gentleman, Suzanne Valadon

            There is no certainty many can draw from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s portrait of Suzanne Valadon, alone, propped in ennui, at a table, a bottle of wine at both her leisure and sole company.

Is she a regular? In what Paris haunt does she meet the inebriate state she’s bound to meet? And if not that very state of intoxication, is she planning to meet another to replace that intoxication with momentary flames?

            So much can be drawn from a portrait, particularly one of a woman who mothered the great Montmartre artist Maurice Utrillo, at beck and call to Lautrec, to Jean Renoir, to Edgar Degas, all of which could have been the possible father of Maurice, who’d developed an abuse of his own for alcohol by the age of 10, presumably, at the very moment Lautrec’s brush made congress with canvas, could have been in the depth of his many wanderlusting fits, walking the streets of Paris, in utter displace of a boy of his age.

            But during that very portrait, Valadon has no interest in Maurice’s whereabouts, nor her own; she’s unkempt, she has shredded the beauty the myth of Art History has passed down to us as heirlooms; and where myth makes immortal, witnessing a vision in abstract depth reminds us that before immortality was conceived, flesh and blood, trial and tribulation, bludgeoning at the spearhead of blunt objects, strangulation by garrote, has all left their mark as to remind us, no one reaches a timeless time without their time in timeless torture.

-Dontrell Lovet't

[Attraction & Electricity]

  We all want that one love....the look across the room, capturing each other's eyes, not out of possession or sexual response alone, but a secret dimension only shared by two individuals attracted by a certain unique electricity.

 The flow of atoms stops, become suspended, inanimate, and suddenly explode but you both are motionless, speechless, drowning out whatever obsequious conversation being that holds you under siege. Of course you don't want to be rude but at that point it's no longer under your control. Your body then starts to burn as a phosphorous bulb, becomes unstable as sodium out of kerosene, You are hoping, begging that they break eye contact and at the same time, you're hoping that time can stop, just for that moment, and that moment could last forever, that that moment could be the story of you.


  Everything now is black and white, the room is still, even if you've been drinking, your lucidity is as though you've been drinking a Hemingway Cocktail, a death in the afternoon.....and that sums up your night, that time, that moment, that very single moment of death is a sweet one. Somehow you know, those long nights of watching Netflix alone will soon come to an end, writing blogs for the lonely hearts club, eating scrambled eggs, posting on Facebook hoping someone has the bad taste to text you back. Now someone will post statuses and innuendos about you, text you back, cuddle with you as you fall asleep watching documentaries on Netflix.

  Despite the intuition, despite the obvious burning like a roman candle a lit in your viscera, your legs don't agree with you and you're hoping that if you stand there, remain in full view, motionless, the urge shared between you two isn't as powerful as to cause them too to remain still. Humans crave affection, connection, it's innate, involuntary, a dimension like a sinkhole that refuses to release you, those boats against the tide that Fitzgerald spoke of and eventually, your arms gets tired, your body fatigued and who'll be there to save you from that inevitable sink?

.......they come over, that slow stroll that seems an eternity.

"I'm glad you are here tonight."

Dontrell Lovet't