Shia Muslims,
many of them
(if not all)
are mourning your passing
as you were revered
for bridging religious divides,
like a bridge over
a big river
or maybe
a chasm.

You wanted unity
in the Arab world which
is a nice thing to
try to achieve and even
didn’t hate America
that much. You
even liked Obama
but doubted his
ability
to bring peace
to the Middle East.

Apparently, you
sought to differentiate
between
resistance movements, like
Hamas, Hezbollah
and terrorism – although my
spellchecker doesn’t recognize
Hezbollah or Hamas, either.
Just like America.

My friend Peter
who does yoga
hadn’t heard of you,
so I
sent him a link
to Wikipedia.

Everyone who lives in Maple Corner is a high profile person due to the small size of the village.  Which is really one of the great things about living and growing up in a village that is made up of dirt roads, 2 stop signs, a general store, a pond where children learn to swim in the summer and adults meet to go kayaking or canoeing.   Everyone knows each other.  Or at the very least is acquainted with one another.

Yesterday, Jamie Cherrington died.  She was a wonderful woman who lived just about a quarter mile from where I am crying right now.  Jamie was a friend to my mother, so the news of her sudden and untimely death traveled to us rather quickly.  Jamie had this amazing white dog with blue eyes that she walked for long distances every day – even in the dead of winter when the wind was howling and the temperature was hovering below zero, Jamie would be out on the snow and ice-covered roads with Whitney.  I have to believe that Whitney is going to miss Jamie as much as her beloved husband, Davis and her children.

Today is Sunday, the day after Jamie died, and by now I am sure that all of Maple Corner knows of her death.  The phone at our house has been ringing frequently with calls from neighbors.  My mother made a pot of homemade baked beans for Davis and the children yesterday.  I am thinking that I should buy a nice big bone for Whitney.

I have lived here, in Maple Corner, Calais, VT for the better part of my life.  I grew up here and aside from a couple of stints away at college, some time in Colorado, and some time in Boston, I have lived here – in this house – with my parents.   I have watched the young children that I used to babysit for extra cash in high school become adults and move on to big cities like New York City and get married, etc.  It is somewhat odd to be my age and live in this small town with my parents.  This is not exactly the place that single 31 year olds come to build a career or meet the love of their life. But this is a place where no one has to lock their doors at night, where one can always count on a neighbor, where parents feel safe raising their children.  It is an isolated place, but that is one of Calais’ attributes.  There has never been a Jehovah’s Witness knocking on our door in the 31 years I have lived here.

This is a place where if one of us dies, everyone notices.  Everyone grieves, even if they were not close with the deceased.  The village grieves when one of us dies.  Just as the village celebrates when a baby is born.  That is what makes Maple Corner, Calais, VT so special.  I am sure that there are a million small towns and villages around the country and world that are similar, but I have never been to one like Maple Corner.  There are generations of families who live here, and people from out-of-state who have moved here for the scenery, the safety, and the privacy.  There are also people who have moved here to feel a sense of belonging to a community, I am sure.  Almost everyone who lives here is known for something.

There’s Artie and Nancy, who own The Maple Corner Store, which has become a sort of gathering place for many.  Everyone in Maple Corner gets mail there, as we don’t have home mail delivery service.  There is Louis Franco, who is a musician, and plays his music at every event held at The Maple Corner Community Center.   My father, who is probably known to many as the village idiot (sorry dad, I couldn’t help myself) with his wacky ways and tendency to play his nose flute for groups of children who look at him like he is an alien, is actually a writer, poet, (although he hates being labeled a “poet”) and performer.  And the list could go on and on……….

And there was Jamie Cherrington.  Wife, Mother, Daughter, Friend, and owner of Whitney, who will be greatly missed by many – definitely by all of us who live in Maple Corner, Calais, Vermont.

Yes. Michael Jackson has died. He is dead.

It’s strange typing “Michael Jackson has died”. Not that I was ever a huge fan, but it wasn’t a sentence I figured I’d be writing about now. I guess I imagined it predicated with “Michael Jackson Is Bankrupt”, “Michael Jackson Guilty”, “Michael Jackson Torches Neverland Ranch After 12 Hour Killing Spree In Local Mall”, “Michael Jackson Is Innocent”, “Michael Jackson Disintegrates Live On Larry King” – only then it would be “Michael Jackson Is Dead“.

Of course, it would, will and could still be followed with “Michael Jackson: The Horrific Truth”, “Michael Jackson: Collection Of Little Boy Shoes Number In The Thousands”, “Michael Jackson: Number One Again On iTunes”, “Zac Efron To Play Michael Jackson In Bio-pic”, “Efron Wins Oscar For ‘A Malady Runs Through It: The Michael Jackson Story’”, “Shares Soar In Michael Jackson Impersonators Stock” and hopefully “Cheney In Chains: Former VP Sentenced To Life While Michael Jackson Is Still Dead”.

Well. It’s Friday and Michael Jackson is dead. If you’ve got something you’d like to say about him, his death or life – leave something in the comments, or drop something longer and more vibrant to mail (at) wordsmoker (dot) com and I’ll post it up.

They told you they would send the Tall One. They have no belief system. This is why they sent me.

I sense some hostility towards me and that is okay. I am alright with that.

Please, sit in these wonderful chairs I have made for you. They combine the native skills of Tunisian warriors with the wistful desire that burrows deep within all but a few of you. Please, have a seat.

This will not take long.

Have some wine. I procured it myself. And when I say procured, I mean I slaughtered half a village to bring it to you. So, please have some. No need for a cup. Use your palms. See, you hold them outward, like this. You make a cup with your hand. A cup! This is not something I was taught, mind you. But I teach it to you now because you must listen to me.

I have traveled much too far for deaf ears. No, the wine will not make you hear any better. It will make you understand. Understand what is coming next. This will be tomorrow, to be exact. And, let me tell you, you are in for quite a surprise. Doll yourself up, I say. Put on a record. Cobble a new pair of shoes. No, today is not the celebration. After tomorrow, you will no longer need celebrations.

Relax.

Feel the wine take over your soul. Thousands died so you can drink. And listen. And sit and wonder at what will soon come over the horizon. But first, you must do something for me. You must make a pact with me. I cannot even explain the pact, as you are too simple-minded to grasp its complexity.

You need to trust me.

You see, I brought you wine. I have relaxed you. I have killed for your gain. I have killed my children so I could make this journey. Do not ask questions. Please, trust me. Have some wine. There you go. Use your hands. Put your hands together.

There is nothing to worry about.

I wanted to nestle along with the characters in this sunlit meniscus between periods of productive, progressive existence, to drift jellyfish-like in a nourishing bath formed of my own almost-formed tears wept for the ongoing and inevitable, yet still not quite yet completed, passing of the present into the past. And so, with the melancholy of the current passing year reminding us of the distance between us and our respective halcyon youths, what better time to wallow with me in the delicate excesses of an abstracted, idealized aestheticization of a youth none of us had, yet would like to believe we all share?  Summer Vacation 1999 is not an incredibly well-executed film, or a hidden

gem by an unrecognized genius. Its director, Kaneko Shûsuke, has a filmography studded with B-grade erotica and monster movies both preceding and following it, and the performances by the four principals (who are the only people to appear in any part of the film, even as extras) may well consist entirely of their first, unrehearsed takes. But in this case, the limitations of the acting and production values work in the film’s favor, making it seem delicate and hermitically sealed, as if the extreme naïveté of the characters has been mapped onto all aspects of the filmmaking process. This is a film that works in a different register than conventional verisimilitude, and remains, perhaps by accident, one of the most effective translations into film of the kind of Japanese girls’ manga it is based on, despite the recent upsurge in such adaptations in recent years (such as the lavish but stultifyingly Nana). Summer Vacation 1999 was released in 1989 and set ten years in the future, a time that is itself being remembered by an unseen narrator from some

unspecified time after that (2009?). The manga it’s based on, Hagio Moto’s Thomas’s Heart, sets the action in a turn-of-the-century boy’s school in Germany, but the film’s setting is more abstracted and ambiguous. The school the boys inhabit during their fateful summer vacation is constructed in a way would read as typical of a European boarding school, except it also, for that very reason, resembles the elite boys’ schools constructed in Japan during the interwar period that consciously imitated such European institutions. Further confusing things is the understated but inescapable reminders that the film, unlike the manga, is apparently set ten years in the future and is therefore technically science fiction, despite the overwhelming tone of nostalgia evoked by the voice-over narration and the ostentatiously old-fashioned uniforms (complete with sock garters!) the characters wear even as they’re on “vacation” under no apparent adult supervision whatsoever. The technology of the school is a mannered, proto-steampunk mix of the obsolete (hurricane lanterns, grandfather clocks) and the futuristic (the strangely insectile computers the students are apparently compelled to type at for a few hours a day, the impractical modular kitchen implement that cracks and scrambles eggs for their breakfast); the result is a softly articulated but pervasive sense of temporal dislocation that amplifies the general uncanniness generated by the plot’s obsession with death, rebirth, and haunting.

Side note: "Kaoru" was also the name for Genji's reincarnated form in the last part of the classical text "The Tale of Genji"

The film tells the story of three children who have no families and end up spending the summer together all alone at the secluded campus of their school. A fourth is shown jumping, apparently to his death, from a cliff into a nearby lake at the beginning of the movie; we learn later that this is a consequence of an unrequited love for one of the other boys. Soon there unexpectedly arrives a transfer student, played by the same actor, whom everyone suspects to be the reincarnation of the boy who jumped into the water. The climax of the movie occurs during a heartfelt struggle between the boy who spurned the suicidal boy and the boy who is suspected of being the suicidal boy come back to life. The struggle takes place atop the precipice from which the initial fatal jump took place, and ends with one boy declaring his love for the transfer student, and the transfer student confirming that he, as everyone suspected, was indeed the other boy come back to life. They end up tumbling into the drink together, and the boy who already died once dies again, while the other boy

I have nightmares in which my boyfriend says this to me in Clay Aiken's voice

manages to live. The film ends with a new transfer student arriving – and he looks just like the boy who’s now died twice! I feel justified “spoiling” the plot like this because the pleasures of the movie are facilitated by the plot but not dependent on its revelation – indeed, most of the movie is fairly plotless, instead contenting itself to moon about like the characters themselves through their idyllic world of exquisite yearning. The film’s tone mixes utter falseness and absolute sincerity in a way that’s hard to describe but is immediately recognizable. This mixture is present in the kind of girls’ manga it’s based on as well; Hagio’s comic is remembered as one of the first works of “shônen-ai ” or “boy-love” comics written by and for women portraying tortured, homosexual, and generally chaste love affairs between young boys. Hagio reportedly toyed with setting her story in an all-girls’ school before switching it to all boys, a detail that dovetails nicely with Kaneko’s directorial decision to cast girls to play Hagio’s lovelorn heroes. Either way, the cross-gendering contributes to an aesthetic that depends on the audience enjoying the process of being aware of the patent falseness of the masquerade and choosing to see through it anyway. Indeed, the

Hijinx!

awkwardness of these girls unconvincingly playing boys couples with the mannered, stiff quality of their overall performances in a way that somehow underlines the purity of the film’s aesthetics through a process of distillation through abstraction. Similarly, the ambiguous nature of the setting and time period work not to introduce complexity into the system but instead condense their most salient parts into a dream language of familiar signifiers presented at an uncanny remove, which also echoes the plotline’s obsession with a peculiar understanding of how death, rebirth, and childhood might work together as concepts. In one of the only “special effects” to occur in the film, the boy who came back from the dead kisses the boy who once spurned him and then they roll along the precipice together, the reborn boy’s voice echoing unnaturally in the soundtrack as he states the film’s basic thesis as a kind of seduction:

Let’s die together. Childhood is the best time there is, after all. Let’s die together, get reborn together, as children. And still as children, we’ll die again, become reborn again, over and over. However many times.

And indeed, this is the mesmerizing pleasure of the film as a whole, and of a sizable chunk of Japanese popular culture products as well – a play with gender that is just a part of a play with temporality itself, a celebration of a deconstruction that depends on the rigidity of what it deconstructs for its potency as fantasy. If gender roles weren’t so unyieldingly constructed, if childhood wasn’t so over-fetishized and over-regulated, if national timelines of progress and competition didn’t define the world with such insistence, these fantasies that systematically violate each of these imperatives wouldn’t hold such peculiar power. But the world is like that, and not just in Japan, and the wish persists for time to move instead in expanding circles, concentric and interdependent, disappearing at the edges only to appear again from the center, new again, so pure, so young: reborn, different always, yet still the same. Previous ‘Big in Japan’ columns: Column 3: Celebrate Christmas the Japanese Way, With Sex and Cake Column 2: What We Talk About When We Talk About Tentacle Porn Column 1: Fuck You / Do Me

“Fluffbucket”, spokeskitten for the Pro Cat Investment Board (PCIB), told our reporter that the doddering old senator from Arizona that he could “Go fuck himself and the dog he rode in on”, after yesterday’s riots in Central Florida which resulted in 12 fatalities and yet another attempt by government to crack down on the funding sources of “Al-Kitteda”.

“This old prick is so in the pockets of Big-Dog that anything he says on this subject has to be met with a hiss, maybe pee in his stinky old-man slippers when he’s not looking, that kind of thing. We’ve got nothing to do with Al-Kitteda, no matter what Drudge says. Until he backs down, there will be no more playing with balls of wool” said Fluffbucket at a packed and surprisingly fishy press conference this morning.

A dog was unavailable to comment.