Joshua Mattson - A Short Film About Disappointment

The workshop fructified my stupidity, already abundant. During the remaining sessions, I hid in the projectionist’s room at the Conspicuous. It is has been automated for decades. Mold, an earring. I threw out the rotting pinups and poetry drafts left by degenerate projectionists. I stared at blank canvases I brought along, thinking Bellono’s thoughts.

A mind free of the corruptions of secularity. The night sky was unknown. The eye of god lay behind its lens. How would Bellono subordinate light for his purposes? Neither literature nor orchestral music had been invented. The chains of verse were unforged. The bickering, aspersions, and assassinations of local politics passed for entertainment. Maybe sex, but it was hard for me to imagine sex being pleasurable before bathing was widespread. The rational was trying to wiggle out from under the muffling curtain of spiritual authority. The rational was getting clubbed and burned for its efforts.

Cod’s last words:

Without my canvases, I might’ve been happy but I wouldn’t have been joyous.

My favorite heist film is Le Vol . It is almost a century old. See it Friday, at one, three, five, or seven. The Runaway Seven is programming crime films through the end of next week. The French film crime best, the Spanish childhood, the Italians courtship, the Swedes extinction, and German cinema is undistinguished. Maybe they can have deviancy.

Leon and Birgitte covet the high-test chocolate produced at the Guillory factory, in the banlieue of Levallois. There is a Guillory billboard outside their flop window. Every morning a taunt. Guillory’s cacao beans come from Conejo, a village on the Venezuelan coast. The beans are farmed by a cooperative that Guillory pays an exorbitant wage with the condition that they sell all their beans to him. The terroir of the bean is exceptional. Inferior beans are destroyed by Guillory himself. He smashes them into dust with a small hammer, then uses a small brush to whisk them into a small trash can. Under guard, the beans are shipped to the factory. A single bar is traditionally priced to the cost of an hour with the capital’s best masseuse and a magnum of Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque. Because Leon and Birgitte can’t afford a single bar, they decide to steal it all. A buyer in Morocco, the Speck, is willing to buy the shipment for eighty-eight euros a pound. The price is an insult, but few people can fence a ton of stolen chocolate.

Birgitte’s cousin in Marseilles has a boat for the crossing. They commandeer a semi. The owner gets his leg crushed under the tire. American crime films support the myth of the well-meaning outlaw, whereas the crooks in European films don’t give a shit. Blame existentialism.

The Guillory factory is guarded by two sooty drunks and two adorable Bordeaux mastiffs. Leon and Birgitte’s curricula vitae, as relevant to the heist, is selling dirty postcards, breaking into a museum of locomotives for kicks, shoplifting puppies, and dashing on a chow mein tab on New Year’s Eve.

A hunk of drugged hamburger sedates the mastiffs. Remi and Henri, the guards, get sozzled on a case of Gaston Chiquet that Leon borrowed from his grand-mére ’s cellar and left gift wrapped outside the gate. They wander off for chiens chauds . Birgitte backs the semi onto the loading dock. They load it with Guillory’s finest.

Leon torches the factory to drive up the price of their chocolate bars. Sirens, gunfire, the road. They sleep at a truck stop. On the radio the next morning is news of the crime. Perps unknown, armed. They pull over to try one. It’s an uncomfortably warm September day. When they rip the case open, they find the chocolate inside has melted into delicious, profound, unsalable glop.

The perverts who slash paintings from museum frames, the clumsy jewel thieves, the vault drillers who hit the water main, the bunglers who drop sculpture when skulking from the Vatican during Easter Mass, understand this frustration. It is not the destruction of the object which stings, it is the refutation of one’s organizational genius. Leon disappears at the port. Birgitte repents by apprenticing herself to Monsieur Guillory.

Vespasian, commander of the legions of Egypt and Judaea, who took control after Nero’s suicide. Valerian, the first Roman emperor taken as prisoner of war. Claudius; Domitian, who was assassinated and his name condemned to oblivion; Marcus Aurelius. The Pan-African chiefs of staff. Diocletian, who grew sick of the impertinence of the Romans and retired. The Shadow Presidents. Henri, count of Chambord. Edward III, who started the Hundred Years’ War over his claim to the French throne, who had to overthrow his mother’s lover at age seventeen, and who ruled England for fifty years. Henri Arleagen. Charlemagne was not entitled to all of Western Europe. Henry VI, who went insane, came to his senses on Christmas Day, and started the Wars of the Roses. The Stuarts and the Jacobites. Hippolytus of Rome, Celestine II, Clement VIII.

I’m not sure what the purpose of recalling this is. To delight and console myself. A memory is a small fantasy that grows in the repetition. Facts cannot be established. The circumstances of Isabel taking Osvald as a sexual partner is a horror vacui I must fill with conjectures. My complicity in my assassination ought to be mentioned as a preparatory measure, an exfoliation, before forgiveness is available. Saying the words is not the same as forgiving. Flapping one’s arms does not produce flight.

A glacé quip and a pinch on the ass would have stopped their flirtation, but I did not act because, theatergoer, I was curious to see what might happen.

The idea climbed the winzes of Isabel’s unconscious for diversion, as prefatory revenge, as punishment, as attraction. What was the sign given Osvald, what was the nature of the permission, I’ll never know, I know. I can’t not. I have to.

I left them alone to see a matinee. She was to show him her design portfolio. It was The Bayou Dread , early Poccora, and I didn’t want to see it, but the miasma in our apartment made me uneasy. Corrupt summer. The dregs of pollution on one’s body. Women with armpit stains on the bus, men waiting in parking lots. The Bayou Dread sulked after devouring each victim. The prospect of being eaten left them cross, but none could escape their torpor long enough to run away. They grumbled as this limb, then that one, then their head disappeared into its maw.

What was the sign?

Returning from the movies without haste, I found a wine bag on the landing in our back stairwell. A viognier , emptied, poking out from behind a fire door. It was not hidden. The distinction is important. Details matter when one’s conscience is under review. By leaving the bag, Osvald could claim he fired a shot across the bow rather than jabbed an ice pick in the dark. I was given an opportunity to intervene but did not. Isabel was not a drinker due to the stimulants. Things giggled from her control.

A ripe piece of fruit has fallen from the tree. If he doesn’t take it, the ants will. He will starve. Keep it light, with white. How clumsy to bring a warm bag. Chilling would indicate premeditation. Osvald left it behind the stairwell door as a challenge. The wine bag was his idea of being sporting.

I padded upstairs to gore the lock with my key. Not even an odor. Maybe Osvald ran out the front entrance. Unravished Isabel varnishes my lips with her blushing tongue, wondering if she has my attention now. She’s tipsy.