reinstrumentalize your organs

In Spanish, when we skip letters or words, we say we eat them. The use of the organs originally intended for us to eat and breathe is twisted into language, producing an imaginary rearrangement to create a machine for signs under the close vigilance of our (saint) patron, our master the signifier. If this has been done, we can consciously change the uses to which are bodies are put. Contraceptives and language; drugs: the closed circuit of veins opened up as a vehicle for the alien. Our mouths in our sex, our fingers in our throats, language and all these uses have the power of retroaction... of being able to rectify, a rebellion against the definitive and definition.
We have been doing this together, we have been artificially virtuous and creepy at it: the human shield versus the human castle. The discovery that our given set of rules can be recombined ad infinitum... this is worth remembering. And that we can do it for yet different and better purposes, that we can do it so much better.
In Spanish, when we skip letters or words, we say we eat them. You cannot eat and talk at the same time, son. It is not only ineffective but it also will eventually kill you. Because of that, a choice has to be made between abstract production and nourishing consumption, both of which enlarge us and annihilate us with the excess they produce. The drama of the writer in simultaneous levels: if you write, you cannot eat. If you write you can't read. Writing is against body nourishment, writing will starve you. And mind that the ink for writing is always one's own blood (we write either love letters or death threats) which one day will run out, uneventfully. But what is this business of eating letters? If you skip eating, you speak; if you skip language, you eat. If you skip something in language, you eat it. What a beautiful idea, to turn words into food, to bring them to the surface in order to swallow them and not to say them. Is this the art practiced by the laconic and the lapidary, can this be actually done?

Sentimentalism is self-annihilation (not in a good way)

After watching “Small Town Gay Bar” it has never been more clear to me that the biggest failure through which a documentary can doom itself is deciding its message to the world before shooting it (not that documentaries need to be fashioned according to a message, but that’s a different story.) Even as commendable and necessary as its purpose is (the spread of recognition and respect for gay individuals and their hard attempts to build communities in the rural South,) “Small Town Gay Bar” is so determined to dignify the people it portrays that it ends up silencing them. The emphasis on how normal their lives are as hardworking citizens, god-believer Americans and monogamous lovers leaves out the very differences it is attempting to celebrate. If you live in an environment in which you are harassed every day of your life you are not normal nor you should be; the self-conviction of one’s normality only asserts the conditions in which exclusion and violence take place, it perpetuates an identification with the oppressor and simplifies the social significance of homosexuality in order to appropriate it.

Every interviewed is shown as saintly devoid of resentment, never harboring bad feelings or resentment for the forces that inflict them pain and fear. “If you don’t like me, I don’t care.” The christian remains a martyr, the logic of lynching is internalized by turning the other cheek. There is this moment when, at last, a drag-queen raises her middle finger addressed to the ones that tell her everyday that she is going to hell. It is a good-humored middle finger though, softened by laughter. In a way, it still is “I don’t care.” The documentary wouldn’t allow a middle finger otherwise; it would never show its characters being angry or hurt, not to mention ambivalent. That would open cracks in the early memorial that is being built for them and would ruin the funereal sentimentality culminated in the inspiring music that starts more than 20 minutes before the end and shows the interviewees silently posing, mourned for while still alive. A tragedy flattened by its foreshadowing, why does the drag-queen always has to get killed in narratives?

There were moments when the shots were cut in the middle of people’s sentences. That is perhaps what I found most deeply terrifying. Why were the cut? Maybe they said something considered inappropriate by the director, something that contradicted the overdignified stoic aura that the documentary had created for them even before shooting them. Hard attempts at dignification are suspicious. Everyone is always already worthy, just let the camera show in what unseen, unnoticed ways they are.

Documentary filmmakers: your task is to set the conditions for the appearance of a moment when you have to step back and let the camera do its work… that is when a documentary is born.