a small boat
one with the river
needs no boatman

i am walking, made of sand
wind blows and sand shifts
sand enters from all directions
and leaves
no grain stays for long
my shape shifts

walking in the wind
made of sand, yet
i am.

Growing up, I would listen to recordings of Tchaikovsky’s magnificent Swan Lake several times a week for years. One of my favourite books was an obscure tattered second-hand edition I’d picked up of “The Dancing Star“, a biography of Anna Pavlova, the ballerina who created the role of The Dying Swan. So I had to see this film. I had pretty high expectations, and Black Swan - with a stunning performance by Natalie Portman and brilliant, macabre direction by Darren Aronofsky - exceeded them.

The film starts with an efficiently executed survey of the cliches of ballet: Nina (Portman), the young New York ballerina, lives with her mother, and lives out her mother’s dreams as she gets selected in an audition for the lead role in a new staging of Swan Lake. Her mother was once a ballerina too, but then she had Nina instead. In penance, Nina must live as her “sweet girl” in a pink room full of stuffed toys and breakfast on grapefruit. Ballerina toes bleed in gruesome close-up; the artistic director, suitably arrogant and French (Vincent Cassel as Thomas Leroy), gropes and kisses Nina. Beth (Winona Ryder), the previous star, now apparently too old, has been retired and is jealous.

Swan Lake, the ballet, has a plot as superficial or deep as you want it to be, like many works of classical ballet and opera. Princess Odette is cursed by an evil sorcerer and turned into the White Swan; she can be freed from this curse by true love, on cue arrives Prince Siegfried. Several distractions later, as the prince is about to declare his love and free Odette from the curse, he is seduced by an impostor, the sorcerer’s daughter, Odile: the Black Swan. The White Swan appears, but it’s now too late; cursed forever to remain a swan, she drowns herself. The prince, deceived and despairing, joins her.

The film eschews the ballet’s character names, preferring the colours that fill its visual palette (along with blood-red). This makes sense, as the new production requires Nina to play the role of both White and Black Swans. This frigid, pure, virginal, “sweet girl” does the White Swan justice. Thomas thinks she is technically perfect (a concept illustrated in this clip by the Bolshoi); but Nina needs more sensuality and seduction to play the Black Swan. “Homework assignment: touch yourself” Thomas advises, and the groping, in this light, could be seen as pedagogical.

The Black Swan is not merely passionate, she is Evil; less seductress than succubus. As we realize this, the plot of the film seems to merge with Swan Lake itself, turning brilliantly insane. In what one might call involuntary method acting on steroids, Nina sees the spirit of the Black Swan all around her, in the form of Beth, her own mother, and Lily. Played by Mila Kunis, Lily is Nina’s alternate, a sensual, seductive (and to Nina’s eyes, Evil) ballerina visiting from San Francisco. Nina’s visions, which we are invited to share and find bewitching, irresistible, seep through the film in drops of blood and black feather barbs, as she tries or is compelled by some unknown force (”the only person standing in your way is you”, says Thomas) to live out her dream role. By the third act of the ballet’s opening night, Nina emerges as the Black Swan in a thrilling performance to a roaring audience: her transformation is complete.

She has become a true dancer; she is able to morph into the White Swan for the final act without much difficulty. But the ballet and the film come to a close in a shattering climax that the viewer knows, by now, is inevitable. It is the only ending that can render this performance of life and art, in Nina’s words, “perfect”.

it’s always the little things
that count

little unimportant things
a particular smile,
the convenience of
soundless communication,
trusting blindly.

little unimportant things
your fingertips want to do,
just out of habit.

but your hand is missing.

shards of glass
glisten, the colours
glow, sparkle

ragged edges bleed shinily
is it the colour stain, pain? or
glinting sunlit joy?

more beauty, shattered, stained
more than a dull blank clear sheet,
of glass unharmed. unarmed. framed.

happiness from sorrow
beauty from pain
life from death
are people too, like window-panes?

an old one. but i live my life by this.

a single drop
reflected in the water below
a point of imagined truth

coalesces
tentative, tense, then tumescent
yet still unreal until

it bursts upon the world in a moment of fleeting beauty

and is gone
to the wonderment
of the eternal seas.

11 february 1996

spring and sea
spark and cinder
droplet and splash
sapling dead tree

every line has
a beginning
and an end

except those
some magical nights
that circle.

the full moon.

I stepped off the pavement, walked backwards a few paces looking up, and, from the middle of the street, brought my hands to my mouth to make a megaphone, and shouted toward the top stories of the block: “Teresa!”
My shadow took fright at the moon and huddled at my feet.

How can you not fall in love with a story that begins like that? The Man Who Shouted Teresa by Italo Calvino is one of my favourite pieces of writing, by one of my favourite authors. It is very short, and very pretty, and he wrote it when he was 20 years old.

The simple premise - a man shouts Teresa repeatedly under a window, people join in, and eventually he confesses that he doesn’t know who lives there but they keep shouting anyway - lends itself to the making of a short film. So I was not entirely unsurprised, but charmed nevertheless, that a number of people had actually made such short films. I wasn’t looking. Serendipity. Here is what I found: four video shorts and one pretty creative interactive flash animation. The names are mine - naturally, they’re all called “Teresa” or something similar.

1. boston by gohfish, is set in Boston, in black&white, and most artistically captures the spirit of the story - although the American rather than Italian pronunciation of Teresa is somewhat jarring.
2. italian dub by keepyourdayjob, produced “over a six hour stretch, while drinking beers out of the trunk of [a] car” was shot on Super 16. Nice, but the attempt to make “a total Fellini rip-off” falls a little flat with the Italian dubbed voices and rather dramatic “acting”.
3. kids can read by brian smith is heartening, featuring a bunch of what look like high-school kids outside a suburban low-rise, acting like, well, enthusiastic high-school kids. Who read Calvino, apparently. This is quite true to the story, I think - Calvino was 20, and 20-year-old Italians do behave like schoolboys…
4. Just when I thought I couldn’t find anything more, I came across this: korean, by korusinc. It’s not actually in Korean, though it has a Korean title and appears to feature at least a couple of rather young Korean (or Korean-American?) children. They look barely old enough to read Dr Seuss, let alone Calvino.
5. Finally, the interactive animation by Timothy Moraitis is probably the best way to read the story, if you haven’t gone and bought the book yet. Click somewhere on the screen, and along with some stick figures moving about, the next few sentences appear. Very nice, and couldn’t be done with a much longer story.

All in all, this left me feeling happier about the future of civilisation. One puzzle remains, though: all these videos were American. Perhaps Italian kids read, or make video shorts, but not both?

you whine, you always
need attention
you cry and throw up
exceptions
you never say what’s wrong

you wake me, howling
every two hours,
all night
just to burp. sigpipe.
network error.

frustrating.
and exhilerating.

codebabies.
look, so cute
just like daddy.

am i like
your secret vice
you only admit to
when drunk?

when sober you pretend i
don’t exist you
try to wean yourself off me you
pretend the ache of withdrawal
is indigestion

but you should know,
your stomach
is in fact
some inches below