My poem "A Long Time Afterward" is now online at Nightmare Magazine.
The author's note is most of the story, but I watched Desert Fury (1947) in November for Wendell Corey's yahrzeit and wrote the poem just about a week later. It still doesn't feel quite like a film that should actually exist in this timeline of Hollywood history as opposed to vivid wishful thinking, its queerness is so undisguised and its Technicolor so flamboyant, even its type scenes played so arrestingly off the beam that it barely seems to have acknowledged the existence of the Production Code or the reception of any audience beyond its own fetishes, outsider art even though its producer with his more than two decades in the studio system was the farthest thing from. One minute it looks like a travelogue, a pin-up the next, then a pulp cover. However it shifts shape, its presiding spirit remains Johnny Ryan, his electrically blue-eyed range of territorial or derisory deadpans an entirely different mask than they looked at first or even second glance. "I knew Eddie Bendix a long time before he met Angela and I'll know him a long time afterward. And I'll know him a long time after he leaves here." It is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and any way you can watch it, you should.
The author's note is most of the story, but I watched Desert Fury (1947) in November for Wendell Corey's yahrzeit and wrote the poem just about a week later. It still doesn't feel quite like a film that should actually exist in this timeline of Hollywood history as opposed to vivid wishful thinking, its queerness is so undisguised and its Technicolor so flamboyant, even its type scenes played so arrestingly off the beam that it barely seems to have acknowledged the existence of the Production Code or the reception of any audience beyond its own fetishes, outsider art even though its producer with his more than two decades in the studio system was the farthest thing from. One minute it looks like a travelogue, a pin-up the next, then a pulp cover. However it shifts shape, its presiding spirit remains Johnny Ryan, his electrically blue-eyed range of territorial or derisory deadpans an entirely different mask than they looked at first or even second glance. "I knew Eddie Bendix a long time before he met Angela and I'll know him a long time afterward. And I'll know him a long time after he leaves here." It is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and any way you can watch it, you should.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}