Alysse Aallyn

Tag: #WritersCommunity

  • The Crimes of Woody Allen – a film review by Alysse Aallyn

    THE CRIMES OF WOODY ALLEN

    This film, probably his last, is not the movie to rescue the 88 year old filmmaker but it certainly marks an advance in his artistic life. Throughout his career, Allen has leveraged an apparently traumatically low self-esteem, inviting us to laugh at the hoops society forces ordinarily inadequate people to jump through for admiration, employment, companionship & love.

    As he matured, he began implying that society itself is a crime and we are its victims (Shadow & Fog, Crimes & Misdemeanors, Hollywood Ending, Match Point, Broadway Danny Rose, Cassandra’s Dream, Interiors, Irrational Man, Scoop, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Bullets Over Broadway.)

    I’ve come to believe he’s our Marcel Proust – sharply attuned to the pathos and ambition of our social signaling and teasing us with scandalous gossip about how far some of us might be willing to take our desperate impostures. What will we do to get what we want and what might we do when challenged?

    Throughout his career, he has presented beautiful young women as the ultimate desirable acquisition of the good life; otherworldly angels whose psyches are completely closed to him, but whose bodies he hopes to subjugate.

    Coup de Chance offers one of these mysterious creatures as its protagonist, a beautiful gallery worker “rescued” from her life with a shiftless musician by a wealthy, jealous man terrified of losing her. Yet she is bored, bored, BORED by his dull existence of object acquisition and gourmet travel and secretly falls for a handsome, exciting young man with a head full of dreams.

    This film was banned from Cannes as a show of solidarity with the credible accusations of sexual impropriety by Allen’s daughter, whose story as an adult and a child, has never varied. The persona who comes across in Allen’s stories is inquisitive and clueless and needy enough to have done what he is accused of, yet most of us will never know the truth. Creator of his own worst fears, he triggered their realization. “Exposed”, discredited and cast out; still he is making films.

    Artists we can unreservedly admire as human beings are rare, Picasso and Tolstoy and Byron, for example, displayed outrageously cruel, downright illegal behavior for all to see. But it’s quite possible that the sinner’s story is always the more interesting one from the perspective of our own humdrum lives. Certainly no one knows crime as intimately as a criminal.

    Unlike the brilliant Match Point, the intensely immersive Cassandra’s Dream, the creepy Crimes & Misdemeanors and the tour de force Irrational Man, Coup de Chance’s plot is a mere story board, lacking the three-dimensional richness this collaborative art usually supplies, but it closes with Allen’s final gift to us, the end philosophy of his lifetime of restless questing. His last word? That each of us is a lucky miracle and that life itself is a miracle we must learn to revel in and appreciate.

  • Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

    Dreams & Imagination

    Children can’t differentiate between what’s real and what’s imaginary. Neither can artists, because Mind Power is the only game in town. Classic Comics put out wonderfully evocative, absorbing versions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventures – The Black Arrow, Kidnapped and Treasure Island. His stories have psychological questions about who’s worthy of trust and who’s a victimizer that affect me powerfully to this day.

    I wrote and illustrated a story – Poor Left Out Harry – that my parents noisily admired and showed to all their friends. Someone sent it to a publisher (we never got it back.) I was very surprised by this because I intended it as a joke and was much more psychologically involved in making up new worlds, copying Narnia, in a complex mapmaking game my sister and I invented called Scrambles & Rocks. But then, as now, Officianados want you to “write what you know”, and as third daughter, I was uncomfortably familiar with being left out of things. I learned if you want to write about what interests YOU, you’re going to have to Resist adult promotion.

    #Haiku: Re-Cognition

    Confront
    Contemptible
    Quotidian
    Skewed,
    Re-Ignite. You’re
    Welcome

  • Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

    Duality

    Have you ever both wanted something and not wanted it? Of course you have. It’s the human condition. We often choose something temporary, hoping to dodge the consequences. Or we tolerate something to get a certain outcome, and when we’re denied that, we feel cheated.

    My duality is the desire to reveal myself and also be private. I want both things at once – to be completely known and to be utterly unknown.

    I already have two superpowers (Art & Love) but if I could get a third (seems unlikely) I would choose Invisibility. I love eavesdropping on conversations.

    These aspects of myself have certainly frustrated incredulous friends, boyfriends, managers and agents.

    I was very uncomfortable in the theatre, speaking and acting other people’s words, but I think (though I never got the chance) that acting my own words would have felt even worse.

    I could never express to family and friends the enormous relief it was to dance – utterly silent – in the spotlight –to my own moods – which you couldn’t dignify as “choreography”. Being almost nude didn’t bother me at all but felt absolutely right, since clothes & costumes were an impediment to which the performer must be mindful.

    I became a Warrior trying to explain these anomalies to people. Welcome to duality – the other edge we walk.

    Centering

    Dance is holy expression

    A centering, before

    The explosion

    Tuning to ancient volcanos

    Pre-dating the planet

    Performing with magma

    Shooting like footlights

    Re-shaping everything

    Selfhood and sainthood

    Willingly abandoned.

  • Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

    The Shadow –

    Is there justice…or not? The Shadow says there isn’t. The Shadow passes over us, enervatingly, sapping our vitals, suggesting, “What’s the use?” If Jesus is right and “By their fruits you shall judge them” then the Shadow’s apparent desire is that we lose hope and focus and accomplish nothing.

    This is such a devastatingly undesirable outcome it is obvious that the Shadow is to be resisted with all our strength. Warriors reject The Shadow.

    But Jesus also says, “Resist not evil” because evil wants you to play with it. How resist non-forcefully?

    I would say through the exercise of our creative – i.e. positive – gifts. This is why I study evil, tease it, laugh at it, explicate it.

    The Gruesome Gourmet

    My mother loved corpses


    Folded in with the custard; she


    Smoked out the kitchen like a witch


    In Macbeth.


    Taylor’s Toxicology shared shelf with


    Julia Child; Mom often


    Talked Trotsky over


    Soft-boiled eggs. She


    Smeared more Mercurochrome


    Than was strictly necessary


    On juvenile cuts; dabbed with dilated pupils like


    An artist in mayhem or an MGM makeup man


    While Dad ate mute


    Pacifist chili from cans in his room


    Re-reading KonTiki.


    I became vegetarian.


    It’s true what they say about


    Becoming your past;


    When I hear “Lizzie Borden”


    I remember –


    I think of mutton for breakfast in


    Sticky red sauce.

  • Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

    Dormancy –

    Artists spend a lot of time trying to find and develop their unique voice. Purveyors of art want you to copy first – so they can compare it to something they already sell – and put a unique – but not TOO unique – touch on it later.

    These contrasting mandates send the artist down a lot of rabbit holes with no rabbits at the end.

    Before I discovered True Crime my own work annoyed me with its amorphousness. I could not figure out where my sense of doom was coming from. Everyone around me just assumed I was being fashionably angsty. You know! Modern megrims!

    But then I attended the Beth Carpenter trial for capital murder in New London, CT in 2002. The guilty were paraded before us – the hitman, the girlfriend, the coked-up lawyer, the hitman’s son. Frozen in the press gallery (my husband was covering it) our eyes boggled. American law gave the story shape – defense attorneys battled right in front of us with the prosecution bar. The jury, invisible on TV, sat before us dressed as if attending sporting event. Which this was – the outcome in question right up to the end.

    This was thrilling modern theatre – the view (the harbor was visible from the courthouse), the company (Press World), even the food was good – we tried a different restaurant every day (once the jury treated us to an Italian meal.)

    I became an addict of Court TV, segueing to the ID channel (where I appeared on Blood Relatives in 2014.) I began reading the true crime greats of which, it turns out, there are many. A novel I had been struggling with – Model Prisoner (which could have described me) was freed into becoming Woman Into Wolf. I based Find Courtney on 2 famous cases.

    LIZZIE BORDEN:
    “Not I But the Moon”…

    Not I but the moon

    Decrees each loss of blood

    You confided slyly, Besom-Breast!

    I’ll crochet a horsehair head for you and

    Lacework- stitch your flesh, my darling

    You and Scrimshaw Pate – He

    Who Must Know Better.

    Hot wax outlines a new broom’s sweep in

    Sacred dust: chorus of shoe-buttons popping like

    Potato-eyes. Oh, I shall dine on you

    My darlings, rolling you in

    Pig viands, I dredge your souls in

    Righteous lard. I am the sanctified enemy

    Of the paper cut people:

    My hymn shall rock

    The laughing house.

  • Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

    Synchronicity

    You could say I was a “success” at Circle in the Square, because I got the coveted ingénue part in the student production of Anouilh’s The Enchanted at The New Yorker Theatre. But I wasn’t happy. I thought I was as bad an actress as a dancer and it wasn’t gratifying because I wanted the story to be different. I wanted to be a writer! In fact, I felt I already WAS a writer. But I had absolutely nothing intelligent to say.

    How to get my inner development synchronized with my outer existence? In other words, develop a professional life. I did realize I needed a string of degrees – how coordinate that with my abhorrence of Higher Ed? Enroll at one of the Antioch College experimental schools – the one in Columbia, Md, for a degree in Creative Writing.

    Peacock Pavement: The Poet on her walk

    Femininity’s  Everests

    I climb them daily. Envy the crow’s

    wombless contentment

    As I stroll 

    among the old

    wrappers used

    condoms; joints rolled like French

    Letters used abused discarded.

    What the crow envies is my

    Zircon hair; a lunar map of freedom

    Battering-ram jaw 

    baroque nose, the

     Greek depths through which

    My eyes record their wanderings

    Outside the convent wall,

    The stalls, the chained-up lambs,

    The  leaf-clogged swimming pools.

    First act, second act, third act

    Epilogue. 

    Number days by seeking out

    Life’s taproot;

    Marking ages not my own;

    Investing in some future;

    All unknowing what anyone will make

    Of these

    Portentous Pleiades:

    disparate sisters

    Me, myself and I.

  • Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

    Education

    As soon as my education was my own to manage, I bollixed it up. My high school’s near total repudiation of Art left me seeking some kind of art school, but which? I was accepted at a School of the Arts in San Diego but depressed by the distance – a visit to my ex-boyfriend in Oregon and a visit to my handsy uncle in Hollywood had not endeared me to the West Coast. I auditioned at glitzy acting schools but had zero game and even less confidence so obviously THAT wasn’t going to work, so I started off modestly by interning at Southwark Theatre School (they gave me office work) and taking classes at the Philadelphia Academy of Dance. I was physically clumsy and slow and this was going to hold me back from any theatre career. I was very well developed in the left brain areas but my right brain appeared to be asleep. Although I was the worst in the class I did get better and I was amazed to be accepted by a prestigious theatre school in New York City. I got an apartment in New York city, signed up for classes at Martha Graham to prop up my confidence, and gave that a try.

    Act, Don’t Think

    Anxious about future

    I had no idea of living in the moment.

    Until was dancing

    The “present” wasn’t real.

    Releasing my

    Self

    Freed me from self-ness

    Becoming “eternal”

    In one second

    Was exactly

    The training I

    Required.

  • Secrets of the Self – becoming a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

    Rebirth –

    I’m convinced the main attraction of the evangelical religious movement is that it offers the opportunity to be “born again.” But I believe that option is always available to you without the necessity of signing up to be a cog in a “movement.”

    When I was twelve years old I read a James Bond novel in which he is washed up on a beach and needs to be nursed back into life without any of the previous appurtenances of his personality. I was very taken with this idea. Of course, it has literary antecedents in all the “castaway” and adventure stories of John Buchan and Robert Louis Stevenson. The question revolves around your essential self: do you have one? Or can even that be remodeled and rebuilt? This is the question warriors try to answer.

    Warriors pare their needs down. We keep ourselves ready for action. We are shapeshifters and time travelers – if that sounds attractive to you, keep listening.

    The first rebirth was rather brutal. At age 12, I was sent to live with my father’s sister and uncle and four boy cousins in Wayland, Massachusetts. Since these people didn’t believe anything my father believed I found this cross-training startling, and the more I behaved in my father’s image, the more I was punished. My uncle was enormously excited to have a pubescent girl in the household, snuck into my bathroom, groped and French-kissed me. I did my best to fend him off, while crushing on one of my cousins. In intervals, we exhibited social politeness. (I attended dancing class where white gloves were mandated for touching specimens of the opposite sex.) I also was taught to ski. Sort of. This hot-house atmosphere lasted only nine months.

    My parents simply refused to listen to, believe in, or pay attention to any of this. I realized I needed to become a different person –the person I truly was, underneath, the person without all this reflexive training and behavior. And the question was, who was that?

    The Kilning

    “Shame” means

    Should Have Already Mastered

    Everything. Excoriating

    That you couldn’t

    Eviscerating

    Failure on top of

    Guilt.

    Once fire retreats

    Examine the scorch marks.

    Yellow mud

    Fuses into azure glass

    Shining for

    Eternity.

  • Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

    Inspiration –

    The desire to participate in the world of art hit me early. As a young teen, I was fascinated by the internecine struggles of the Trojan War and the Wars of the Roses. History was a family story, history was a crime story. Books for children – the Narnia stories, for example, couldn’t match the explosive, desperate sweep of historical intrigue. I had a facility with English that allowed me to “opt out” of language drills – I read the encyclopedia instead, which was full of improbable information. I loved reading to the class, and the class loved to have me read to them.

    When I entered boarding school at age 14 I really began to write in earnest. But the faculty did not like what I wrote. Moby Dick and the writings of John Steinbeck were seriously offered to me as models. This was the first moment I chose the Warrior Path. I complained that we were not reading any female authors and in fact, made a resolve never to read male authors again (I broke it for the Russians, who were feminine enough for me – especially Turgenev.) I liked Colette, so I read Francoise Sagan. I modeled myself on them – they were literally anathema at my school to such an extent that I decided not to go to college and pursued acting school instead.

    That was a dumb decision literally no one helped me with but by that time I had discarded The Appropriate Path to such an extent I don’t know if anyone could have reasoned me out of it since Adult World seemed so desperately stupid to me. What I chose – I thought – was the world of inspiration where magic could be created, second by second.

    PLAYING HIDE & SEEK IN THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

    Life class is

    My game – you started it.

    Now I’m too obvious –

    Resembling

    This swollen storehouse where

    nothing is explained.

    We are all

    Open to interpretation.

    Outside the tiny window a single tree

    Flowers in its smug

    Delusion.

    This whiteness weights

    my soul. I long for the whick

    of teeth on lip; and bite

    the bended elbow where the blood 

    lies gathered. Take responsibility 

    For unfinished work.

    Unsignatured because

    It never finished school. 

    No blood here, lady


    You must have

     Imagined it – a

     Powder burn without 

    A bullet.

  • Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

    Intuition –

    Intuition is the Warrior’s most critical tool. It starts in childhood when adults say something that sounds “not quite right” to the child. Something about their facial expression and the way they hold their body suggests they’re hoping you won’t inquire further, meaning they have no evidence or rationality for what they’re proposing. Sounds like they don’t quite believe it themselves and they’re just passing it to you, like an infection. It’s an infection you don’t want to get.

    Sometimes you ask further, other times you snoop around for evidence on your own. You can usually catch the Grownups talking earnestly in what they think is privacy about what you will buy and what are the consequences if they fail to persuade you.

    Reading is a helpful source of information. You can always find evidence that completely contradicts any BS du Jour.

    And right then, you’ve become a Warrior, because you’ve realized you need to rely on yourself. Not them.

    Breaking Free

    In retrospect we
    Forgive ourselves
    Imperfect inspirations
    Unbecoming intuitions
    Seeing how high we flew;
    Unaltered
    Compared to many others
    Scraping by along the
    Substrate;
    Just a memory of cloud’s
    Enough
    To settle into sunset
    Pillowed into selfhood;
    “I heard
    I saw
    I
    Flew”