"The Manjerasaurus"

Glory be!!! My five-year-old nephew/foster son has discovered a new dinosaur! He even got close enough to draw it, in spite of its somewhat four-dimensional choppers.

In Sir Joey's own words ("Sir," because we expect he'll be knighted any day now):

"This is a Manjerasaurus. It's the Most Powerfullest Dinosaur in the whole wide World. It has teeth all over it and it can kill all the other dinosaurs in the whole wide world, even sharks. It can kill everything, and that's all."

Not one to rest on his laurels, Sir Joey proceeded to draw pumpkins. Some of them had enough teeth to build a barrier reef.

To wit:

Untitled poem, from a class...

Ugh... ;-)

Everywhere I work
has concrete floors
made with sand and lime
spun through metal chambers and
loaded indoors.

This site, too
run by silicon fixers,
where we bake the brains
and wheel on trays
dot-com tickers

We wear blue smocks with
frequency probes
clipped to pockets;
A chip cook's stethoscope.
Green monitor in tow,

that's me, the token white
in a sea of Asian bakers,
hauling boards formatted
by Mexicans, of course.
Born chip tray makers.

There's beet-faced Winh
and James, the kid.
Eddie hits on a
minimum wage momma;
Heads back quick

At six dollars per, Winh runs
On bug-free macros
soddering chips for twelve hours
then drives cabs at night
back in Frisco.

We watch slave laborers snap
Motorolas and AMDs in place
Seated by tongue, rows of dark
hair, older moms, mostly
Olive digits ablaze

At noon Arabs emerge
From back offices in white, all men.
Boss nods at two Mexicans
and reconfigures the boys.
They wash his Benz

Covered in suds, we see them
from our kitchen window
Their Spanish curses drowned
By the blue ovens' hum
Through the roof it flows

Inside these machines, they say
silicon ages like wine
We test for proper waves
on our monitor screens.
eject when ripe

One day Winh disappears
Undetected, until Ahmet
queries, and suddenly
Alarms sound from ovens weary
That flesh forgets

An application failed amid whirring fans
and is sprawled on the concrete floor.
Ahmet checks for a pulse while I
submit to the cur it's
time to abort

Review: The Bridge

A year or so ago I read a story in the papers about a local filmmaker capturing people on camera as they jumped to their deaths off the Golden Gate Bridge. My first reaction to the idea of filmed suicides was, I admit, morbid fascination. I hoped it would be in theaters.

It would. "The Bridge" opened this past weekend, and I saw it.

Wow.

Director Eric Steel trained his cameras on the bridge for an entire year and caught 23 of the 24 leapers, including a few more who tried and were stopped. Sometimes, while watching the film, you couldn't tell if the person you saw would turn out to be an innocent sightseer or a jumper. It felt creepy, and real. It is real.

You see people on the bridge, mulling things over. You hear family members and friends talk about how hurt their loved one was over this life disappointment, or that turn of events. The survivors' voices carry their own burdens: Pain, guilt, rationalization, anger.

The parents of Philip Manicow, 22, almost seem at ease with their son's fate. Similarly, mother and sister of Lisa Smith, 44, sort of saw it coming. They reassure each other she's in a better place now, or at least free from pain.

A female friend of 52-year-old Daniel Rubenstein walks a tightrope of self-blame and excuse. When she discloses Rubenstein asked to stay at her house the night before he jumped, and that she turned him down, you sense there's more that's not being said. Friends of Gene Sprague, a 34-year-old unemployed computer gamer whose jump is easily the film's most chilling moment, are simply pissed. But he, too, repeatedly telegraphed the blow, and they ignored the signs.

Meanwhile, throughout the film, you're watching people jump. Whether captured in a closeup or seen as a distant, tiny splash in a wide-angle shot, each demise is equally creepy.

I was glad I didn't see the movie alone. After some deep breathing and a couple awkward jokes to lighten our mood, my friend and I talked aout what we'd seen over Thai food. We both really liked it, but had to think about why.

I was amazed that it was the only theatrical film I could think of that dealt specifically with the subject of suicide. It seems that while Americans are more aware than ever to the prevalence of mental illness, suicide -- unlike depression, bipolarism, post-traumatic stress disorder, etc. -- was still extremely taboo. My friend and I also liked how there weren't too many psychologists and therapists in the film. Although some "expert" voices may have been interesting, maybe even helpful to the viewer, their exclusion made the stories of the dead more visceral, unfettered.

Still, I was curious: The friends and family on screen weren't entirely blind to the loved ones' pain -- Sprague, for example, apparently joked for years about killing himself -- but you can't help asking: What could they have done? What should they have done? And what would I do?

I don't know. And I don't think this movie offers anything that helps answer these questions. It did get me to think about those things, think immensely about them, in fact. Every person has this incredible power to negate their existence. It's such a tremendous, terrible weapon.

My friend and I disagree on whether there should be a suicide barrier on the bridge. It's an active debate that wasn't mentioned in the movie. But Steel, the director, has gone on record to say he hopes "The Bridge" results in a barrier.

My friend didn't think some sort of safety net on the bridge would stop people from killing themselves because there's always other means. I had to agree. But it seems to me the Golden Gate is just too easy. More people kill themselves there than anywhere else in the country. It's too accessible, too cheap, and provides a false sense that jumping into water is clean and painless, when it's clearly neither. A barrier might cause some people to turn back from suicide, because the other alternatives are harder or messier, and that could increase their chances to find help.

My main argument, however, is a purely selfish one, I don't want to be walking across the bridge with my kids some day and have them watch someone die. They don't need those nightmares, and I can't afford the therapy.

Anyway, when I came home I immediately hit the Web, eager to learn more about the movie and the people who jumped. In doing so, I came across some reviews that I found sort of surprising.

Some said it was not a good movie, that it feeded on our spectator culture, that it was irresponsible and that Steel, the director, sat by while people hurled themselves to their deaths when he could have stopped them. It turns out the director apparently didn't tell friends and family members he interviewed that the dead would actually be seen jumping to their death in the movie. And he also apparently fibbed while getting a state parks permit to film the bridge.

So I thought about those things. I'm sure a lot of people -- young people, mainly -- will watch this movie just to see people die (although the actual death part isn't really seen; its under water, and apparently very nasty and painful). Twenty years ago, I would have been in this group. However, given the void in material tackling the issue of suicide and the power of film in general, I think I can forgive "The Bridge" for being imperfect.

Suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge aren't private tragedies, they're happening right in front of you and me. The film uses these spectacles to its advantage. It pierces through the veil we've placed on suicide and delivers something more than an after-school special for adults. It dares us to do more by showing what is.

There really isn't anything brilliant about this movie. But in its simple, arresting and haunting way, "The Bridge" turns a doorknob to a room we've kept shut too long.

Random story beginning...

Jessica and Lily sank into beanbags in the den with squeezable yogurt and Disney Channel. Gran napped upstairs, and Mark Graber curled up on the living room sofa with the Browns game on very low. The lullaby of announcers and cheering fans brushed like tiny waves off the wood paneled walls. Only the occassional seagull of the referee's whistle made it to the kitchen, where the oldest Graber child quietly did her homework. Her long, brown hair pulled back into a single ponytail -- a style she wore only in the solitude of a Sunday afternoon -- Sara's face was one of tidy angles: The lean nose bridge, cheekbones pushed out by as if by inner thumbs and the crisp arc of her left temple resembled the dots of an uneven constellation. It was the result of massive reconstructive surgery, necessitated by a cruel and shadowy incident that took place last summer and of which no one spoke...

Katsushika Hokusai

I was looking for a image to post for my profile and, as usual, hated every picture I found of me. So I went for something that was vaguely obscure yet meshed with this site's "dead" motiff: ghosts.

I googled .gov sites -- figuring that if my taxes helped pay for it, I was free to use it -- and this nifty thing caught my eye. The thing's creator is dead, too, so he's not likely to sue me if my understanding of Web copyright issues proves retarded.

Actually, "Ghost emerging from well" is part of the Library of Congress' "Floating World of Ukiyo-e: Shadows, Dreams, and Substance" exhibit. An art form originating in Edo, Japan, Ukiyo-e translates to "pictures of the floating, or sorrowful, world."

The artist is Katsushika Hokusai, who also did porno, cathouse ads and a bunch of work of Mt. Fuji.

A rowboat

You're young, maybe five or six years old, and sitting under a tilted rowboat with two older boys. The boat belongs to your neighbors, the Fishers, and it's leaning against the side of the Fishers' brown two-story, which is next to yours in your particular suburb.

(The Fishers are an older couple. In their basement, Mrs. Fisher has one of those old fat-burning machines with the jiggly strap. She shows you how it works. You need to lean back. Mr. Fisher eats orange shebert and once offers to let you lick his spoon. It's weird but you lick it anyway.)

Underneath that boat, your bony ass is planted on a bed of dead pine needles the shade of copper. The boy on your left is one year older than you. His older brother is on your right. They start calling the boat a clubhouse. The boy on your left talks about how you don't have to ever go home again, because this is your home. We'll stay here forever, he's saying to you. They'll never find us.

You stare ahead at the bottom of the metal boat that is the wall of your clubhouse and begin to cry.

The boy on your left seizes on this and tells you, yep, you'll live here until you die. And if you try to leave, we'll kill you.

You cry harder. You imagine what it's like to die. All that nothingness.

Shut up you little shit, the older boy says. He reaches across you with an arm that smells like cigarettes and backhands his brother in the face, so hard that the back of his head conks the stucco part of the Fishers' home, almost like a bell. His lips furl and he starts to cry. He runs, leaving you with the older boy.

It's OK, the older boy tells you, you can leave if you want to. He's looking straight ahead, too.

You want to leave but you don't. He turns to you. Nothing you know of makes you stay. But somehow, you're feeling more and more trapped.

You cry louder and harder. Your stomach sinks with each sob. Its beyond anything you ever felt before. It's as if, right at that exact moment, the world ran out of air.

You never remember coming out.