Words Seem Out Of Place

She wants there to be more of her. More space taken by her body, More decibels conquered by her voice, More time by her wakefulness, More equations by her addition. She wants more, I want less. Her blade is rusty, musty, sweaty and vain. I like it clean and sharp and dark-bright. She traffics in surplus, I bare my essentials. Her world is elastic but brittle. Mine is bony but moonlit. Hers flows, she ebbs. Mine ebbs, I flow. She dies in life, I live in death. —Zoe Lund, “Opium Wars”

I've recently been thinking about the films of Abel Ferrera again, for the first time in quite a while. Ferrera's films, especially Bad Lieutenant , King of New York , The Funeral , and Ms. 45 , were important to me when I was in college and throughout my twenties. Part of the attraction was clearly because his films were left of center, about characters living on the edge (of both society and a nervous breakdown), and above all else they had a realism that I craved in my movies back then. I still do, but as with most things as I age, that burning desire to see films about tortured people living tortured existences fades some. It's also partly because I immersed myself in that kind of cinema for a good long stretch back then, and I may have had my fill for a lifetime. That said, I still remember what made those films so transformative, and I can access that same feeling when I view them again all these years later. I'm hoping to write more at length about Ferrera and...