During my teenage years my mother was married to an abusive dullard who was a butcher by trade. He chopped up dead animal carcass in a butcher shop not far from the high school I attended. My mother consistently refused to drive me to school because according to her “It’s your responsibility to get yourself to school”. She was contemptuous of my haughty goal to be the first person in my immediate family to graduate from high school.
During my final year of school circumstances had become such, (due to their sudden decision to buy a new house far from my school), that if I was to continue attending that school I had the choice of.....
- Getting up at 4.30am to get ready. Then spend a stressful 2-3 hours chasing public transportation schedules and scrambling to make bus and train connections in order to get to school on time.
- Getting up at 4.30am to get ready and hopefully catch a ride with my butcher stepfather (who repeatedly attempted to sexually assault me) only to arrive at the same destination although in less than half the time, but with an extra 2 hours to kill before school started.
At first I went with Option A. It meant navigating a seedy landscape of creepy bus drivers, flashers in raincoats and public masturbators hellbent on ejaculating onto my perfectly flicked and lacquered 1986 hairdo. The logistics of this terrain were stressful and the minefield was frightening. These “Enthusiasts of the Scopophilactic Arts” seemed to be everywhere. Their favorite beats were the semi deserted public bus and train stations I had to frequent. And their peak trolling times during those winter months seemed to be between the hours of 5-7am.
Pre-dawn fog creates excellent lurking conditions for sexual predators. A solitary sleepy schoolgirl laded with a cumbersome schoolbag full of unread textbooks makes for easy prey.
It was still early and well before the first school bell of the day was due to ring out when I walked onto the schoolyard and approached the art room. Surprisingly the room's door was unlocked. I put my school bag down on a nearby table and removed my heavy green coat so I could inspect it for any secondary cum. I didn't see any. “His aim was commendable”, I supposed silently to myself.
The paint trough in the art room was deep and fashioned from some kind of industrial metal. Its single spout was positioned high above the center of the sink and the solitary tap was marked with a delicate blue 'C'. As I turned the tap on I reached up and forward onto my tiptoes to shift my weight and hoist myself up and over the ledge of the receptacle so I could reach my head under the faucet and meet its ice cold content. As I washed the man’s semen out of my hair I stared into the drain watching the strangeness disappear deep down into the black hole. I wrung out my soaked shoulder length hair, collected my bag and coat and headed straight to the girl's toilets to dry my hair with the one automated hand dryer. It took a long time and midway through I became bored so I took out the drawing compass from my pencil case and started to poke and scratched away at my inner left wrist to pass the time and feel something more exciting.
I decided then to choose the hostile company of the sexual predator I was familiar with over the ones I did not what to know any better. And whose hands, at least, I could observe for the time I had to spend with him.
This Option B meant riding shotgun with a reluctant chauffeur. I had to be sitting there at the kitchen table at approximately 5.30am, coat on, school bag in lap ready to head out the door when my stepfather nonchalantly lumbered down the hallway jiggling his keys. He didn’t call out for me or ask if I was ready to go. I simply had to be in earshot of his jangling keys because that was the sign he was leaving. If I was in the bathroom or accidentally fell back asleep while waiting I simply missed my ride.
His truck was drafty and he rarely spoke to me for the duration of these frigid trips. He did allow me to tune the truck radio to the station I liked (3RRR) but only because he got a power kick out of abruptly turning it off if some “poofter music” (either ‘The Smiths’ or ‘The Cure’) happened to mince its way across the airwaves and intrude onto “his radio”. The truck was a grubby white F100 and had blue racing stripes that ran the length of the cab and long bed. This ride had been christened ‘Pisser’s Puller’. Its name was painted on each side of the vehicle towards the back end of the truck either side of the clunky tailgate that had to be slammed violently at least twice in order for the latch to catch securely. The truck’s matching toy was a souped up inboard speedboat called ‘Pisser’. Riding in the truck as it pulled the boat behind it and onwards to yet another summer holiday at Lake Eildon, I would stare out my passenger window and pretend I was a performance artist participating in a moving portrait of a dysfunctional family. Like we were really together on family vacation, ironically.
Those additional 2 hours I had to kill hanging around the gory pit stop I spent painting the shop's daily specials on butchers' paper. They'd then attached my artwork to the sandwich board located directly out front of the shop. I would paint 'Pork Chops $2.99 kg', 'Sausages .99 kg', 'T-bone $3.99 kg'. Those hours spent hanging around that butcher’s shop before they were open to the public meant I literally watched how sausage was made.
Cinesausage can make boring films seem interesting and great films even more admirable.
‘The Canyons’ and ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ belong to this first group and ‘Heaven’s Gate’ and ‘Russian Ark’ belong to the second group.
In 2001 Alexander Sokurov made ‘Russian Ark’. It’s the most extraordinary example of cinesausage EVER! A story told in one single consecutive 87 minute take. It’s so remarkable a production that there was a film documenting it’s creation as it unfolded. A documentary that is just as compelling as the film it’s documenting ended up being. I cannot describe my awe for this piece of art properly so I’ll instead encourage you to watch both the documentary ‘In One Breath’ and then the film ‘Russian Ark’ in that order.
And so concludes my 'The Canyons' review.
And so concludes my 'The Canyons' review.
