James Pate - The Fassbinder Diaries

The hips approach the mirror and draw back and approach and draw back.

Imperial Tangos #4

One dancer realized she could only have been born. Her idea making the dance ugly ugly.

The others waiting in the corner for the lights to flicker out begin vomiting an almond light of their own. They had arranged it so that the scene is truly and utterly fucked.

The dancing itself is partially asleep as if the orchestration surrounding it had forgotten to misplace its ugly ugly.

The elevator remains on the beach, its mouth ajar and releasing pink mist. The sand on the beach heavy as clay. The sand around the elevator is pink, but it is unclear if it is pink because of the sunset, or because of the pink film lights, or because the sand is really a hillside of pink sugar. The ballroom is empty except for the last extraction.

Imperial Tangos #5

The black wall and a white wall and a carpet of sand between them, a film being made without actors or trees or guns or eyes or headlines, I wanted to be the gravedigger with the blackened smile, you wanted to be a window staring out on to prison yard, a window splattered with cheap cosmetics, we had some things going for us, a mouth twisted by a red thumbprint, part of the snarl flattened, a bared chest covered with goose bumps, a single pale nipple white in the light, a dab of paint with its snout sniffing, shifting. The director an assembly of snouts twitching.

The black wall and the beach and the pad of flesh scratching at the air.

Imperial Tangos #6

So many arms alone in the air. So many thighs blinking in the light. So many hands drying in the weeds. So many necks waiting in the heat. So much hair alone in the basement. So many eyes staring at the wall. The ugly ugly thoughts strewn along the beach. The parade of extractions with their roots dripping. The sunlight piercing through the pink mist like useless noise. The elevator door with its jaw broken and askew. The road of sand leading from the door and through the door and away and toward.

Gods of the Plague #1

And Mieze says yes, she remembers that scene from the Fassbinder film, the one with the gangster with the fatalistic 70s mustache, and his long black leather coat, and his head of prison light, and his thoughts in black-and-white film colors, and the woman who will one day claim to be Maria Braun beautiful in the mirror in the room behind the stage, and the two of them flipping through a porn magazine given to her by the woman from the east who sells secrets.

And Mieze picks up the cold turkey leg while wearing black gloves. The meat is cold and greasy and the room around the meat is clean and cold.

And later that night Mieze says yes, that’s right, she had said previously the woman from the east was her favorite character, though she by the end is another victim, and the shock of it is that it’s hard to imagine a beautiful woman selling so many secrets could ever be gotten rid of by such a simple fact as a bullet.

And Mieze closes one curtain after another and dresses for work, her night shift at the hospital, or was it the nursing home, and the meat on the table with her teeth marks, and the glass on the table with her lip marks.

Gods of the Plague #2

And Mieze says she was on this hike with a friend of hers, this guy named Tommy, who was really into German film, and who was always making these elaborate and contradictory and paradoxical arguments about why Herzog was better than Fassbinder, except for early Fassbinder, who, he claimed, no one could touch, no one could outdo, like the scene from Gods of the Plague where the male criminal is killed in a botched holdup and the female characters stand around his grave like Furies that have been momentarily appeased. And Mieze says she would remind Tommy about how the last thing you remember from the film is the woman who will one day become Maria Braun standing in the cemetery in her beautiful slightly sleazy coat looking into the distance as if looking into the future characters she will one day play. And Mieze says one day while talking about these things, among others, they were hiking through the woods in northwestern Tennessee, and it started to rain, so they ran under a rock near a creek, and as they were sitting there watching the lightning and listening to the thunder they started kissing each other though they had never kissed in the past, it was like they had wandered into another film, had moved from being in a lightweight teenage drama into a soft porn film with multiple scenes in the woods, and soon he was inside of her and her legs were wrapped around his hips, he did not wear a condom and she had not asked him to wear one, though looking back, Mieze says, she doesn’t know why, and can only attribute his not wearing a condom and her not asking him to wear one to a stupid youthful belief in spontaneity, though he did pull out when he came, Mieze says, and afterwards they held each other and listened to the rain pour through the tree branches above them, and then they slowly and gingerly, Mieze says, pulled their underwear and jeans back up and without a word about what had happened started to discuss the prequel to Fassbinder’s Gods of the Plague, a film Mieze thought was entitled Love is Colder than Death, though she might have been wrong, and maybe the title was different, maybe love was colder than something else entirely, and Mieze and Tommy both admitted it was a film neither of them had seen, though they intended to in the near or distant future.

Dream of the Varying Pork Cloud

She wept over the dream that sounded like cars crashing in the sky.

He felt troubled by the dream where faces melted towards mouths that never closed.

She wore black in the salt dream.

He wore pink to the pork dream.

She walked through the dream located on a beach with extinct sand.

He screamed in a dream that ended without him.

She called her dreams obscene names.

He could tell his dreams apart from the way they breathed in his hands.

Mice were a problem of the spirit, rats a problem of the mind.

Tigers presented their meat foliage and panthers their shadow foliage.

Secrets of the Hollywood Hills #1

I met Franz in Memphis in late December at a café. It had white tables and white ceiling fans. It had blue walls. It had bright windows. It had a crimson sofa. It had another crimson sofa.

I met Franz in late December. He on the crimson sofa. Myself on a white chair. And a nearby blue wall. A bright window nearby. He had just gotten in from Los Angeles. Sometimes in Los Angeles he had no place of his own and slept on other people’s couches. Sometimes, especially after working on a film, he had quite a bit of money. But he made a point of spending it before he could save it.

The crimson sofa with overstuffed and threadbare armrests and with feet carved to look like talons holding balls. The blue walls bare. The ceiling fans spinning. A warm December day.

He told me he was helping out on this low-budget film in Tucson back around Halloween, he told me it was a great city but they were filming in this cramped little apartment in a bad neighborhood, meth dealers were always on the corner trying to look like they were just hanging out, sometimes helicopters circled at night, when you came in from a party say around two or so you prayed you wouldn’t get shot or held up, but the desert he said, the desert.

Secrets of the Hollywood Hills #2

Franz told me that afternoon at the cafe that he would talk to Mieze on his cell phone every night around this time in his life, this time in Tucson he was currently telling me about, he said they’d start speaking to one another in very civil tones but then it was like some cloud would pass over either him or her and one of them would say something cruel and unforgivable, and then the other person would say something cruel and unforgivable just to keep things balanced, and an argument would ensue, lots of insults and yelling, very personal and private insults and plenty of ugly hoarse yelling, but then right before hanging up they would apologize or at least smooth things over enough so that it’d be clear they would talk again the next night, him under the desert sky, and her under whatever the sky looked like in Baltimore, where she had moved in with her aunt and was working on a novel, a story that would tell us about the childhood of Norman Bates, a story from the mother’s point of view.