All right.
[LAUGHTER]
I've got three pieces for you.
Can you hear OK?
I tested this out, but you can't really be sure.
It's also the first time I've actually read in a mask.
So I'll do the best I can.
"A Blue Ring Seen Through Water."
"I watch Predator every night to help me sleep.
It doesn't work so I repeat.
To say I'm still watching the film closely
isn't exact enough.
I mean, I watch the movie frame by frame
so slowly it's no longer a movie, but film.
Happy illusion of the form.
The frame's illusion that we perceive as motion.
It's totally kick ass, of course, at full speed,
but seen as slowly as this, it opens differently.
It ain't just guns and fun.
One by one through 24 frames per second, it's often tedium.
Action film gone ambient.
As a result, I find beauty leaking around a tree
in an establishing shot.
Then pyro light explodes in lines telling us
something about physics.
Cause and effect, and the only thing that matters
is how it looks.
Something happens and keeps on happening and won't
stop until I do, or the movie ends, or I
realize what it is I'm watching and assert control.
Unexpected shots abound, inaccessible to all
but the most obsessive viewer.
The wipe that clears the screen between bits of the Predator's
POV looks like an ellipse of blue light seen
through dark green water.
It's an opening you might use to speak to an oracle,
or an open eye, a wishing well seen from underneath down
in it looking out.
But the more I look at it, the more
I see a reflection of a body in the center
of the shot, something in there staring right back at me.
And I wonder what portal I may have opened accidentally
by calling the wrong god's name.
Is that me in Predator?
Or better, what of me is not in Predator?
I could spend a life down here.
For you it takes three hundredths of a second."