E
In the movie Enemy of the State Gene Hackman plays Edward "Brill" Lyle, a deeply paranoid former NSA spook who stumbles into the main plot, featuring Will Smith enmeshed in an elaborate electronic-surveilled chase. At one point the characters repair to Brill's secure hideout. There, in a slow panning shot, the camera rests for a second on a photo of a much younger Gene Hackman, and we are to take it as a much younger picture of a much younger Edward "Brill" Lyle. In the picture the young Hackman/Brill is wearing my glasses. The glasses add depth of time to the picture, of course, and a kind of innocence. The glasses make the character in the picture innocuous, a middleclass father of a certain era, a salary man, a civil servant functionary. The photo in the movie is actually another movie's movie still. The movie is The Conversation, in which Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a paranoid eavesdropping spook who overhears and misinterprets conversations he is paid to record. The photo that one movie placed into this other movie is, first, an injoke. And I was thrilled to spot it. But it also creates the reality of this particular illusion created by the films. Both films worry the reality of reality and how sense is made sense of by collecting and interpreting the residue of action or its purposeful construction out of abstraction. Clues are left behind by accident and design to confuse or make clear. I see I see. A caul is a portion of the amnion, the birth sack, that covers the head of the baby at birth. In The Conversation Caul covers his head with the covers of a bed so as not to see the consequences of his action. He sees too much. He doesn't see enough. He sees nothing at all. But it's just a movie, an art form based on a trick of the eye, all those still shots racing by fast enough to move. When I watch movies I watch out for characters wearing my glasses. "Nice glasses," I say to the person next to me. I think I wanted my glasses to be my glasses after watching so many movies in which my glasses appeared. I was attracted to those glasses. The frames were empathic conduits. They sparkled and winked. They were caught in space halfway through time. I pictured myself in those glasses, imagined myself transformed by their simple adoption. The picture in the picture, the one where Gene Hackman playing Harry Caul is wearing my glasses (nice glasses!), focuses on the eyes. The glasses are used to focus the eyes, the eye, the Eye, and the I.
E
I return to the optical shop-the one who said he would never see me again after selling me my Ronsirs-to have new lenses made for my frames. My eyes have gotten worse. When I arrive, I discover the office, a small glass box building, is closed. Staring in the many windows, I see the rooms completely empty. I am reflected in the big plate glass windows, my hands cupping my eyes and my glasses in an attempt to knock down the glare. It does not appear the company has moved to a new location. There is no sign left behind directing me to a new address. When I got my glasses here several years ago, the optician showed me several other frames, had me try on many pairs. I was there at the moment the global eyeglass style was shifting once again. In this transition, there were twice as many options as usual. Frame size was shrinking fast with small-shaped lenses. The newer frames were more playful with the way they beveled color into the plastic edges, sandwiching layers of color in the frame. But there were still many examples of the previous style with their huge lenses in a simple plane geometry of shapes-circle, oval, square. And there were odd combinations of plastic, the double bridge piece of the massive aviator frames or the migration of the temple pieces to hinge on the bottom corners of the lenses, the temple pieces themselves distorted and twisted. Some looked like bolts of lightning, a series of waves crashing on the ear, or the spiraling meander of smoke. In the end, I had him look up my glasses. He knew exactly what I meant and cut into the huge catalog to the SHURON offerings. "These never change," he said. Except for the "OPTICAL" signage there is nothing left. The building is a shell. It seems to stare back at me. I turn to go back to my car. I can drive with correction. I blink and blink in the bright sun. My eyes have gotten worse. My glasses are like new.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Moon Winx
An Essay on the X
It is the Moon Winx Lodge. That x does a lot of work. There is the x that visually represents a cartoon wink. The eyes are x'ed out in death or drunkenness, the unconscious x that mimics the XXX labeling the jug of moonshine. At night when the kinetic neon of the sign blinks and winks, what flutters on and off is an X of braided tubes. The man in the moon x's out for a moment, then snaps awake again. And why that knowing wink? The X of the unknown or, more precisely, the X of the not wanting to know, the hidden, the disguised, the censored. x'ed out. It is the X of sex, of course, the ultimate rating. The excesses of sex. Or the string of drunken kisses. XXX. The cheesy lodge is a testimonial for itself: The Notell Motel. X marks this spot. It now is X-rated. Winx is a kind of poem. It multiplies its meanings. X times X. It's the cross-hatching of a switch, a toggle. It is the map of the crossroads. One does both in bed. Sleep. Sex. Sleep. Sex. This double cross. These eyes closing in sleep and closing in pleasure. These I's leaning in toward each other, crossed and crossing. X-tasy. X-scape. X-tra marital. "Get it?" the sign says, "Get it?" The sign winxs, and you do, you do get it.
An Essay on Astronomy
One can watch the moon rise above this moon. And people do, parked in the empty Moon Winx Lodge parking lot, arrayed in a drive-in movie semicircle of cars, the pattern shadowing the crescent of the crescent moon floating a few feet above them. People come to just watch this moonlight of the moon sign. This moon lights up at dusk, begins to wink, the stuttering spark, the rippled strobing of the inert gases in the tubes. The road runs east and west here, a transcribed latitude the Moon Winx moon intersects and the real moon traces in its courses. If one's lucky the other moon rises above the pines in the distance and then the buildings next door. The moon rises over the shoulder of, balances on the edge of, the blinking simulacrum of the moon. The sign becomes a kind of instrument-a sextant, an astrolabe, or the simple arc of a protractor and plumb line. One closes one eye and takes aim at the phenomena of this asphalted heaven. One shoots the moon as it moves through the night above Tuscaloosa. The moon is in transit across the moon. The sign's single eye eyes the moon's track, tracking the moon. Its cratered eye peeled and rolling up into its blinking lid. The moons are eye to eye. And the two o's of the "Moon" seem to ogle the rising moon. The real moon turns white like some kind of fluorescent bulb itself. "Oh!" the o says and "Oh!" again the other o echoes. This is glacial fireworks. One "oohs" and "ahs" as the moon inserts itself above the moon. Oh, strange cell division! Then, one can do it all again. Orbit the sign and set up station on its far side. There, watch the moon set below the arching outline of the moon, watch the lozenge of the moon slip behind the moon, swallowed then by the open mouth of the moon, a moon within the moon.
An Essay on the Neighborhood of Neon
The Moon Winx Lodge is in a neighborhood of neon on the east side of Tuscaloosa. The "Flora Signs" sign, exfoliating ever expanding petals of neon filigree, tops the hill above the Moon Winx. I imagine that company has something to do with this precinct of light twinkling along the street. The Bel Aire Motel's sign, a sapphire waterfall, is within sight of the Moon Winx. A block or two farther west, leading farther into Tuscaloosa, is Leland Center, whose asymmetrical cacophony of neonencrusted signage disappeared in a recent beautification effort of the Alberta City suburb. The light sparked and flashed but the sign itself, the underlying skeleton, cantilevered and jointed, was framed with contrasting shapes, organic and industrial. Nearby a Mason's lodge in a loft is identified with a second story-hanging pendant of neon, the proprietary compass of the order outlined in pulsing green. A tattoo parlor is tattooed with a blood red statement, "Tattoo," rendered in a corduroy effect of letter within letter, a vibration, tiered in a way that recedes inward or, if you look at it the other way, back outwards. And off in the distance on the other side of the parking lot is the Leland Bowling Lanes, faced with its three-story wobbling pin and planet-sized bowling ball, pockmarked with finger holes and outfitted with rings of neon in concentric circles, a target, that, at night, lights up the illusion of depth and distance as the ball rolls away in ever-shrinking halos until, suddenly, it reappears, massive black and back, the big bang, at the starting point, a warp of time, a crazed loop looping. A new arrival is a Sonic drive-in, one of the chain of identical boxes, the building and awnings clad in endless wirings of light, an architectural "quotation" quoting the past that is still present all around it here. It sits there, self-consciously, I think. It is all neon and all about neon. Neon for neon's sake. Its tubes are not bent to animate or to make a gesture toward the gestures of objects we are meant to desire. Nothing appears or disappears, the old urban hypnosis. Not that. The Sonic is transparently illuminated. Sometimes the tubes of light are just tubes of light.