July 2025 - Big Bang Poetry

Holiday weekend was a staycation birthday celebration for my friend Melo. We were all going to go away to cabins up north, but due to all the instabilities in the country, we switched our plans to a weekend of local things, including a group walk on the Bosque, game night, bowling, breakfast out and a trip to an Albuquerque art museum. We had downtime in the evenings which for me entailed a night of watching 1970s YouTube videos of the Dutch show TopPop and the next night watching the movie Deadstream.

Interestingly, in almost everything we did, poetry popped up.

Game night

I have a few Deadbolt Mystery Society games, (a company which seems to be drastically downsizing now, sadly), which some of my friends like and so the six of us spent an afternoon playing “The Cleansing of Killian House.” These murder mystery games are group efforts to solve mysteries with puzzles. Some puzzles lead you right into the final answer, puzzle by puzzle, and some force you to use logic to eliminate innocent suspects until the final one is revealed.

I’m actually terrible at puzzles (and board games), but I love the doo-dads of the game, the way the story is assembled with little narrative scraps; and I can organize and facilitate the process for others who are have better minds for puzzles. Rarely am I helpful. I did solve the puzzle depicted in the picture above (which is why I took a picture of it, being a momentous occasion and all).

This game’s theme was ghost hunting and the “guest host” of the game was Nick Geoff from Ghost Adventures among other TV shows. I once really enjoyed the show Ghost Hunters but then decided all these shows, despite the evolution of their ghost-detecting technology, never did really unearth much.

For example, the green cards above depict a technology that was much ballyhooed when it came out, the SLS camera, which could apparently capture ghost folk in stick figure form. This was actually made ridiculous on one show that was investigating a western ghost-town dance hall and the SLS camera allegedly captured a stick figure who appeared to be doing a boot slapping dance. I found that pretty funny. Anyway, after a false start with this puzzle I figured out that the stick ghosts were actually pointing to directions of push-able bricks in a secret door of a brick wall. It’s complicated but the point is we got there.

During the game we had to explore six rooms of a mansion (six envelopes with cards, paper and toy objects in them) and one room was the Library which made us solve a book-spine word puzzle and the story introduced us to the Library’s hired book collector who collected antique books and was invited to the house to validate an original copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane and Other Poems but then he got murdered.

Movie Night

On Saturday night after an afternoon of bowling, Monsieur Big Bang said he wanted to watch a comedy horror. This was surprising. When I met him back in 2005 we had to sort out one very important issue: he hated the horror genre and I loved it. Fast forward to today and he (and his family) are doing the ghost hunting, watching all the ghost-hunting shows and M.B.B. spent one season obsessing over Italian Giallo films.

But back then he loved to pick apart the horror movies I made him go see. And there are things to pick apart in those movies to be sure. But the latest generations of horror filmmakers are doing some great things, including people M.B.B. knows like Jason Blum and people M.B.B. admires, like Jordan Peele (Get Out was a property of both). But there are other smaller auteurs who are making low-budget horror films for the streaming channel Shudder, which I don’t even watch and I’m not even really into anymore. (I haven’t even seen the Chaz Bono TV shows and movies yet.)

I just happen onto some of these good things in passing. I tend to like to see how a moviemaker can stretch the genre (which is what I like in westerns, too). A genre is like a poetry form, a sonnet or a villanelle. It has rules and structure. How can the form work to tell a story about racism or the sexes or culture itself? How does horror comment on our collective fears?

If you’re looking for just funny scares, Shawn of the Dead is probably the best. And I don’t feel the Scream movies hold up but Scary Move 2 does. (I’ve seen it many, many times just for Chris Elliot and David Cross.) Get Out is a great example of a modern story about subversive racism, as was the classic Night of the Living Dead before it.

Josh Ruben’s Scare Me was billed as comedy-horror and it was humorous but it’s wallop was very serious and two-fold, (1) being an engaging horror movie with a limited set and mostly based on dialogue, and (2) having an unlikeable female lead character that challenges everyone’s (including women’s) internalized sexism. The lead male was a fragile and bitter failed writer and I heard myself shouting at the screen at one point, “Oh no! Don’t offend his ego! He’ll kill you!” And then “Did I just say that?” That the filmmaker was a male writer and director asking his (male and female) audience to rethink whether a female character (or a real-life woman) is required to be inherently sympathetic and nurturing just because she’s a woman…well, that’s pretty amazing. It shows the problem in story form. And your response to it tells you more about you than could be found in a typical horror film.

Deadstream was written, produced, directed and edited by married people: Vanessa and Joseph Winter. The husband is also the lead and the soundtrack composer (used to comedic effect) and this movie is laugh-out-loud funny. But it also happens to be a commentary on influencer culture, the dare-devil male monster (Shawn) and the affronted-female monster, which in this case was a “social outcast” poet from the 1800s named Mildred Platt. The poet’s father built her the now-haunted house our influencer/dare devil protagonist is spending the night in to win back followers after a disgraceful downfall involving a racist incident. The poet’s tragic life as a failed poet and nearly-wife of a handsome publisher leads to her suicide and our influencer will now try to antagonize her.

To make the monster a poet was brilliant and probably not new. We’d have to watch all the old horror movies and I’m sure we’d dig up some dead poets who were upset about something. Poets are seen as somewhat “off” even in real time. I mean living poets are so obscure and rarely-read, they are quintessential anti-influencers.

Our protagonist, Shawn, is very unlikeable (and yet kind of likeable in a strange way), and he pisses off the poet-ghost who then tries to kill him. Meta comments running down his livestream occasionally are very funny easter eggs (but you have to pause the movie to see them), not to mention easter eggs in the writings on the walls of the fabulous set.

Soon Shawn finds a secret door which leads to a chest which has a secret compartment which has stashed in it Platt’s handwritten book of poems. Shawn is very disrespectful and dismissive (as he naturally would be) and he reads a bit of the book:

“Maybe this is the secret of the house,” he says (which is what any other hidden book in a haunted house movie would mean).

“The dianthus are blooming.
The birds are cooing.
Your visage is in the sunlit canopies.”

“Never mind,” Shawn interjects, “These are just poems. They don’t even rhyme!”

The poet responds (eventually) with the fury of the artist scorned. Shawn soon discovers that as the poet kills people who have lived in the house, they also become ghosts in the house and he meets them as the night progresses. During the climax of the movie, Shawn has an epiphany. He’s hiding in his car and he sees something he understands in Platt’s handwritten book, a phrase about pond water that had been repeated in the notes of a previous ghost-hunter.

“She’s forcing them to read her poetry!” Shawn exclaims. “What a freaking weirdo!” Shawn understands Platt suddenly. “She’s like me. She wants an audience. She kept trying to get me to read her poems. She’s building a following.”

Shawn goes back in the house and confronts the poet with, “I understand why you do what you do?” And he commiserates that they both, each in their own way, tend to go too far from time to time. To lure her out of hiding, Shawn reads her poems aloud as he walks through the hallways with a spear-cam (the cam jokes alone…):

“Echo my heart.
Echo my soul.
Bring my voice….”
(and he is interrupted by a noise in the house.)
“Black birds roam.
Their voices moan.”

“I mean, some of these are pretty good,” Shawn says and then whispers to the camera, “Not.”

(He deserves to die, this one.)

I had to have the ending explained to me but I was very impressed once I understood it. Many horror movies of late have ended on defeat for the protagonist. Deadstream’s ending even challenges our ideas of that in a very satisfying way that is also a commentary on having a following of any kind. The movie is a commentary about fandom, thirst and fame at all costs and a spoof of the most recent ghost hunting tv-show genre. And like the best of comedic horror, it’s very funny but also pretty scary. A very smart script.

Trip to the Art Museum

We all went to the Albuquerque Museum on free first-Sunday to see a show called “Light, Space, and the Shape of Time” which was a collection of pieces that use light as a material. One in our group happened to be the granddaughter of artist Florence Pierce of the Transcendentalist Painting Group and one of Pierce’s later pieces was in the show.

My friend Mikaela also does a good deal of family work tracking all the shows her grandmother is in so I was able to ask her about the lighting of the show and how difficult it is to light Pierce’s pieces in other shows.

There was also a sign-sculpture at the front of the exhibit that used sentences about the body. You could only read them at a certain angle due to the light.