Composed on Friday the 13th of March, 2020
By Bob Boldt
[Preamble: If a poem requires explanation, then it is a failure. Of course, even “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” still remains opaque to many (if not most) readers. I had hoped that, if the reader were unable to draw any connection between the images in the poem below, they might at least be entertained by its juxtaposition of images and my take on appearance and reality and how the effigy of a woman’s torso can house a scorpion. I will say, though, that the “Marienbad” reference is to the 1961 film Last Year in Marienbad by Alain Resnais.
Midsommar: The worst movie ever?
By Jonathan Price
We live in a movie desert. Those of us not fortunate enough to live in LA or New York or some other hub of creative movie theater distribution encounter a summer full of sequels or remakes, no longer just the second or third, but now the fourth or perhaps the tenth. Or we can learn the sordid details about nearhistorical events with which we are mostly familiar. Or we can see the fantastic monsters created by CGI, or their mighty and clever semihuman superantagonists, who use wit and special weapons and skills to defeat them. Into this theater desert enters a film with an “o” and an “ar” in its spelling of midsummer, and I’m hooked by my attraction to foreign films, and to the memories of great Swedish movies.
A meditation in five acts
By Bob Boldt
“My God, what have we done?”
–Bob Lewis, the Enola Gay co-pilot
Act One: Video selections from Alain Resnais’ 1959 film, Hiroshima Mon Amour (French), with music by Giovanni Fusco and George Delerue
