Theodore Collatos, “Broken” (2004)

This short art-school film was shot in a Chicago apartment in the late nineties, around the same time my ex boyfriend and I were breaking up in our own Chicago apartment. I vaguely remember hearing about it at the time because my ex boyfriend’s brother had the starring role. It was probably finished after we parted ways.

My ex sent it to me recently. He said he had found it when wasting time on the internet. The film was weird for me to watch on a number of levels. Besides the eerie sensation of looking back at a past I had almost but not quite been a part of, was the thought, Well, this is certainly not how any of my break-ups looked like.

Here, the relationship disintegrates beneath a moody blue wash to the strains of a discordant yet sensuous Shostakovich score. The pair in the film brood attractively and fight bloodlessly.

All that sullen dignity seems so Swedish to me. By which I mean capital-F foreign, rather than capital-M Midwestern. In my experience, break-ups were always ugly, ugly, ugly, at least in the moment of real root-ripping trauma; in regular life, pain is rarely pretty. Snot drips from the nose, the face contorts hideously, the throat emits cat-like notes of screeching, inarticulate noise.

When my high-school boyfriend broke it off the summer after we graduated, I cried so violently, so loudly, and for so long, that a neighbour I didn’t know — from across the street — knocked nervously on the door to ask if I was okay. I may be more expressive than most, but haven’t we all seen a scene or two?

More accurate to me is this meltdown from “Husbands and Wives,” one of Woody Allen’s angriest, bitterest pills. (I think even “Interiors” had more compassion for its characters.) Judy Davis plays a woman who has been happily, blithely separated from her husband until she discovers he’s moved on more quickly than she has. It’s a genius piece of acting — her character’s total unspooling all the more vicious in contrast to her brittle manner and her failed attempts to maintain a sense of composure. A glass of white wine is an impotent salve in the face of her rage, which is remarkably desperate as it comes streaming out through her tightly braided hair, her high-necked beige dress, her rigid posture.

Woody Allen, “Husbands and Wives” (1992)

Of course, if you really want to be horrified, just do a search for “couple fighting” on YouTube. The example below is so excruciating, I only feel justified in including the clip here because the footage — shot by a bystander on the streets of Las Vegas — is so poorly lit that you can’t clearly see the couple in question. Somehow the relative anonymity makes it all the more chilling. It’s barely over a minute and I find it nearly impossible to sit through the whole thing. Both parties seem equally contemptuous and contemptible.

The thing that disturbs me the most is the crowd that has formed around them, the people laughing in the background, the other asshole caught on film shoving a camera at them. And they are so far gone into the fight, they don’t care who hears them; they can’t, they’re unable to focus outside their dissolving, venomous universe-of-two.

Of course, maybe, as one of the comment posters suggests, it’s totally fake. In which case, hats off.

- Damian Rogers

The Sadies, The Beachland Ballroom, Cleveland, OH (March 1, 2008)

In college, I only danced when I was drunk, and my style could be best described with the phrase “clumsy, off-duty stripper” — all grinding, pelvic thrusts punctuated by an inevitable tripping over my own heels. I fell into people; I fell on the ground. Fortunately this is pretty acceptable behavior when you’re 17.

When I moved from Michigan to Chicago in the mid-nineties, I started going to see live music at small bars where no one danced, and I learned to stand in the international posture of aesthetic assessment — arms crossed, head barely nodding to beat — and I did my level best to achieve an aura of cool detachment, which I’d maintain until I (somehow, still) fell down.

Years later, I met my husband and I began to go see the band in which he plays drums, The Sadies, on an increasingly frequent basis. It’s been over ten years at this point, and the band’s style continues to evolve through various genres like garage, rockabilly, surf, bluegrass, and punk, with influences ranging from Clarence White to The Byrds to The Ramones to Lee Hazlewood to the 13th Floor Elevators, but from the beginning, the consistent emphasis has been on speed and musical proficiency rather than cultivated angst. I quickly learned to loosen my grip on my elbows, to stop thinking about the lyrics, to stop thinking at all. I started “dancing like an asshole,” as I would sheepishly concede the next day, my neck killing me from shaking my head like a maraca.

For a long time I was still drinking during these personal, off-stage performances, and this helped me set myself free — it didn’t hurt that the band’s audience was far less self-conscious and the atmosphere at their shows far more frenzied than what I’d been used to before.

When I quit drinking a few years ago, I was delighted to discover I still loved to, so to speak, fly my freak flag at the shows, even without any liquid lubrication. And I fall down a lot less, making moves like climbing onto a speaker cabinet to go-go dance with a girlfriend much safer.

Since I first heard about the United Society of Believers — or the Shakers, as they are commonly known — I have been curious about their obvious attachment to ecstasy despite the fact that they lived in celibate co-ed communities until they unsurprisingly petered out in the 20th century.

Sister Mildred Barker (1897-1990) singing “With A New Tongue” (from the 1974 film, “The Shakers” by Tom Davenport)

They were called Shakers because they shook their bodies in a wild — originally freeform and later structured — dance as part of their service. They were a millenarian group, believing that the end of the world was around the corner (isn’t it always?), and so they removed themselves from society — and from the reproductive cycle — as a means of embracing a spiritual regeneration.

The Sadies do a cover of the Mekons song “Memphis, Egypt,” a sardonic love song to rock and roll that challenges listeners to “destroy your safe and happy lives / before it is too late.” It’s rousing as hell and I go fucking bananas when they play it. I truly don’t care how insane I look, it’s too much fun to stop and worry about it.

The Mekons, “Memphis Egypt,” (1989)

I suspect that I seem less like a sex worker now and more like a Warner Brothers cartoon (I’m thinking of the Tasmanian Devil, but I feel like the Tex Avery–era Bugs might also dance like a lunatic given the chance.) I have long held that there is a direct link between the kind of communitarian, ecstatic experience of losing your shit at a rock show and the crazed mass worship practiced in the separatist religious movements that flourished in nineteenth-century North America.

The first time I went to see the Toronto band The Deadly Snakes, I felt like I had wandered into an old time revival tent. I mourned when they broke up.

Recently a friend who knew I was writing poems about the Shakers sent me a link to Dan Graham’s brilliant film, “Rock My Religion” (1984), as much a manifesto as it is a documentary that follows the thread that runs from anti-establishment religious groups like the Shakers and southern snake-handling sects straight through to Bo Diddley, Patti Smith, and Sonic Youth. The film is as unpredictable and charged with raw energy as its subject.

Watching it, I had that reaction that is a cousin to shame, a mix of excitement at the discovery and a nagging guilt that I didn’t already know the film intimately. Here it is in its entirety, thanks to Ubu Web (god bless Ubu Web, and yes, I just might mean that literally):

Dan Graham, “Rock My Religion,” (1984)

Rock is often dismissed at first blush (or spit) as juvenile nihilism, and it’s true that at its least interesting, the genre stagnates in a shallow pool of narcissism and empty showmanship. But at its most interesting, rock music produces a derangement of the senses that is the closest I’ve come to experiencing an act of authentic, modern-day shamanism.

Of course, there are other musical genres that claim to deliver the same sensation — electronic dance music, from disco to rave to jungle, is an obvious example — but there’s something in rock’s defiant individualism and its relationship with the lyric voice that resonates with me. And I love watching human beings create layered waves of sound live and in real time through a display of incredible physical skill; like dance, it’s the application of pure athleticism to art.

Here is one of the poems I wrote about the Shakers:

DREAM OF THE LAST SHAKER

We stream into the meetinghouse
through two doors

like twin cords
in the same braid.

I love the men,
all of them

lined up like
God’s long finger.

The sun attends everything
equally: the wood, the bend

of her white muslin sleeve,
the outstretched arm of the apocalypse.

Take hold of my shoulder.
Shake me awake.

I recently read this at a public event and a young guy approached me and shouted, “‘The outstretched arm of the apocalypse’? What the hell is that?” At the time, I brushed him off — who wants to explain their work at an afterparty? — but what I might have said is that I can relate to the desire to view The End of Everything You Know as if it were approaching you like an immaculate lover.

“Destroy your safe and happy lives” is a tongue-in-cheek command to wake up to the world that exists beneath our daily somnombulance. It’s not the destruction of the known that I believe in, it’s the possibilities that open up in its wake that excite me. Controlled chaos is not only liberating, it’s transcendent.

Rock on.

- Damian Rogers

I can isolate the exact moment I became conscious of how my memory is intimately tied to images. On my way home from elementary school one day, my eye fell upon a certain flowering hedge that lined one of the suburban yards. In a single beat, I experienced a complete recall of what I’d been thinking about the last time my attention had settled on this cluster of branches, several days or weeks before.

A memory of a memory is an especially slippery piece of road to navigate, and I can’t say now what those thoughts were that returned to me like a boomerang or a delayed echo — I think I had been trying to understand the behavior of a mean girl in class — but I do remember the deep pleasure of discovering a new skill that felt like a party trick. If I attached an idea or bit of dialogue to a picture, then maybe I could retrieve it at will.

As I write this, I realize how obviously connected it all is to what I love about poetry.

When I discovered YouTube a few years ago, I began to use it almost exclusively to search for two kinds of material: things I had heard about but had never seen and things I had seen a long time ago and wanted to confront again.

One of the more interesting lessons I have learned from watching clips from the second category is that the images in my mind often had broken free from their source and taken on lives of their own, lives that didn’t always resemble their original context very closely.

When I was in college, I took a film class in which we studied Jean Cocteau’s beautiful and dreamy “La Belle et La Bete.” My professor explained how, in an early scene, Cocteau had placed his actress on wheels in order to show Beauty moving effortlessly down the corridor that leads her into her new life with the Beast. The filmmaker’s innovative deception and its effect stayed with me, so much so, that it popped up in a poem I wrote more than a decade later.

One night, while staring absently at a small brass bell in my bedroom, the object began to look like a female figure to me, its tiny, ringed handle looking like an empty head on top of an armless, barely-there torso. The way the bell swept out in a fluid line to a broad base made me think first of a fertility fetish — those goddess dolls with shrunken, featureless heads and enormous, exaggerated hips — and then of the French artist’s Beauty, with her long, full skirt covering the wheels under her feet.

THE BRASS BELL

Cocteau’s Beauty glides
in silver-screen brilliance
down a river of light.

It’s a trick. Her ball gown
conceals roller-skates.
An off-camera push
and she floats along singing.

Her face a stretched canvas,
she’s an ancient fetish doll,
all tits and womb.

The way I remember it,
her voice is a brass bell ringing,

a voice high enough to change
the shape of the human body,
to fill the cupboards with apples.

Your bed vibrates with the secrets
you keep sealed inside your skin.

Recently I wanted to go back to that scene from “La Belle et La Bete” to check whether or not it held up to my memory of it. I managed to track down the appropriate sequence on YouTube and as I watch it here, again and again, it feels both familiar and alien (press on the HQ button if the image is distorted):

Jean Cocteau, “La Belle Et La Bete” (1946)

Is anything really the way we remember it? Of course not. Once we start associating images with ideas, we are haunted by the shadows they cast in our minds, and nothing, as we learn to see this way, is ever the same again.

- Damian Rogers