Mini Pack: A Film Review by Lina Krishnan + Poetry by Sydney Vogl & Howie Good

1

MICRO-FILM REVIEW: “SELFIE”

by Lina Krishnan In a world that doesn't want me, I go on singing

Any adolescent, in any society, could show this gamine spirit, but Italian teens Alessandro Antonelli and Pietro Orlando are trying to navigate their dreams and self-worth through their Naples neighbourhood of Rione Traiano, a trip that gets harder after police mistakenly shoot their dear friend Davide Bifolco, thinking him a Camorra [mafia] gang member. It makes you remember, somehow, the lives of the teenage protagonists of the Neapolitan Novels, who also try to make something of themselves despite the suffocating grip of the street they live on.

Agostino Ferrente’s 2019 documentary, Selfie, is shot on iPhones given to his subjects. After a while, filming themselves becomes second skin. Pietro - would be hairdresser, shy, charming, vulnerable, dealing with weight pressures. Ale - thoroughly enjoying the filming and a cheeky, cheerful barista - yet realistic in a way that Pietro is not. When they visit a rich neighbourhood, Pietro asks wistfully, “Do you think we can ever come and live here?” Ale takes a deep breath and answers, “Impossible”.

Together and alone, they capture the flavours of their friendship on mobile camera. Talking of girls, dreams, worries, haircuts, mums being away, and much such. The result is wonderful, honest, lyrical cinema that traverses death, and a lot of life, in Naples.

Life imitates art imitates life.

2

CALIFORNIA IS GOING TO HELL

by Sydney Vogl

in October 2020, 45 tweeted “CALIFORNIA IS GOING TO HELL”

the first time I walked into a queer bar & dusted my sin to the floor: bless the hell that glitters & swells with sequins & collarbone. bless the pink bone they throw us, bless the beast it feeds in an unmarked warehouse press into a hundred strangers & imagine a hundred futures, rupture between moon-choked pupils & the approval of my father, I’m no longer looking for earthquakes, only a place to curl between Tuesdays, rolling dough & sugar in my palms. bless the sweat echoing across shoulder blades, the blood we shed on the way. & my body? bless it too, wrapping around a girl’s waist, a dawn of gluttony after years of scarcity. if this is hell, it’s the hell I’ve prayed for. counted quarters off a restaurant table for. folded my bones into a car, pointed north & drowned 400 miles behind me for.

3

THE ELEMENTS OF A CRIME

by Howie Good

Red Rosa She lost a shoe as the militiamen dragged her from the Hotel Eden to the waiting car. Lieutenant Vogel, the commander of the unit, shouted insults (“Whore!”) and spat at her. She was bleeding from a blow to the head with a rifle butt. They would take her to the hospital, but only after they were sure she was already dead. The sky that covers everyone like a black umbrella can’t protect anyone. & The Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects The faded label on the year-old bottle of painkillers warned that alcohol would intensify the effect, and so I washed the pills down with vodka. Within an hour, I thought I saw shock troops in the street, rubble everywhere, a trolley car burning. I saw a group of refugees as well, desperately working the oars of an unwieldy rowboat while bullets splashed around them and the waterbirds tiresomely complained. Even in the dark, I could still see with my eye that didn't have blood in it.

& Sleepwalking Toward the Apocalypse I used to sleepwalk as a kid. One night I sleepwalked into my parents’ room while they were lying in bed watching TV. “Here,” I said, “take the knife. I killed him.” Then I sleepwalked back across the hall to my own bed. The next morning at breakfast my parents were laughing when they told me what happened, but I felt uneasy – strange and uneasy. I couldn’t have said why then. Now I know it was because there are doors that need a sign that explains how to open them.

4

CONTRIBUTOR BIOS Howie Good Howie Good's latest poetry collection, Gun Metal Sky, was released recently in February from Thirty West Publishing.

Sydney Vogl Sydney Vogl is a Queer, SF based poet who received a B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz and am completing my MFA at the University of San Francisco. In 2020, Sydney was chosen as the poetry fellow for the Martha's Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing. Sydney’s work, which was nominated for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net 2020, has been published in Entropy, Zenith, Hobart, and I-70 Review. Sydney currently serves as a poetry editor for The San Franciscan Magazine and works as an educator to Bay Area Youth.

Lina Krishnan Lina Krishnan is a poet and artist based in Pondicherry. Her recent work featured in a UK Arts Council project on pandemic poetry in 2020. She enjoys cinema of all kinds and has a special affinity for early Indian cinema and for the French New Wave, especially the films of François Truffaut.