Emotion Porn

This is the last post from Cold Lake. With the spring semester over, I left Duluth to spend the summer in Minneapolis. The reading continues at Deer Spirit.

...melodramatic weepie is the genre that seems to endlessly repeat our melancholic sense of the loss of origins -- impossibly hoping to return to an earlier state which is perhaps most fundamentally represented by the body of the mother.

-Linda Williams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess" (1991)

Outrun My Gun

Robert's got a quick hand
He'll look around the room
He won't tell you his plan
He's got a rolled cigarette hanging out his mouth 
He's a cowboy kid
Yeah, he found a six-shooter gun
In his dad's closet hidden in a box of fun things
And I don't even know what
But he's coming for you, yeah, he's coming for you

All the other kids with the pumped up kicks 
You'd better run, better run, outrun my gun
All the other kids with the pumped up kicks 
You'd better run, better run, faster than my bullet
All the other kids with the pumped up kicks 
You'd better run, better run, outrun my gun
All the other kids with the pumped up kicks 
You'd better run, better run, faster than my bullet

Daddy works a long day
He be coming home late, yeah, he's coming home late
And he's bringing me a surprise
Because dinner's in the kitchen and it's packed in ice
I've waited for a long time
Yeah, the slight of my hand is now a quick pull trigger
I reason with my cigarette
And say your hair's on fire
You must have lost your wits, yeah.