Louise Brooks in a publicity still for The Canary Murder Case (1929, dir. Malcolm St. Clair) (via)
(Park Chan-Wook, 2003)
If one rainy night you find yourself
leaving a phone booth, and you meet a man
with a lavender umbrella, resist
your desire to follow him, to seek
shelter from the night in his solace.
Later, don’t fall victim to the Hypnotist’s
narcotic of clarity, which proves
a curare for the heart; her salve
is merely a bandage, under which memories
pulse. Resist the taste for something still
alive for your first meal; resist the craving
for the touch of a hand from your past.
We live some memories,
and some memories are planted. There’s
only so much space for the truth
and the fabrications to spread out
in one’s mind. When there’s no more
space, we grow desperate. You’ll ask
if practicing love for years in your mind,
prepares you for the moment,
if practicing to defend one’s life
is the same as living? You’ll
hole up, captive, in a hotel room
for fifteen years and learn to find
a man within you, which will prove
a painful introduction to the trance
into which you were born. Better
to stay under the spell of your guilt,
than to forget; you’ve already released
your pain onto the world; don’t believe
there’s some joy in forgetting.
There’s no joy in the struggle to forget.
And what appears as an endless verdant field,
only spreads across a building’s rooftop;
your peaceful sleep could be a fetal position,
which secures you in a suitcase in this field.
A bell rings, and you fall out of this luggage
like clothes you no longer fit. Now what to do?
You remember when you were the man
who fit those clothes, but you’ve forgotten this
world. Even forgotten scenes from your life,
leave shadows of the memory,
haunting your spirit
until, within a moment’s glance,
strangers passing you on the street,
observe history in your eyes. Experience
lingers through acts of forgetting,
small acts of love or trauma
falling from the same place. Whether
memory comes in the form of a stone
or a grain of sand, they both sink in water.
A tongue—even if it were, say, sworn
to secrecy; or if it were cut from one’s mouth;
yes, even without a mouth to envelop
its truth—the tongue continues to confess.
“At this time, many Iranians all over the world are watching us and I imagine them to be very happy. They are happy not just because of an important award or a film or a filmmaker–but because at a time when talk of war, intimidation and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country, Iran, is spoken here through her glorious culture, a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics. I proudly offer this award to the people of my country, a people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment.” - Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, whose film “A Separation,” won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film this year.
(Source: youtube.com)
Pina - Trailer (by HopscotchFilmsEnt)
I finally watched Pina tonight, after missing the very small release it got here last year. A beautiful film, a danced language of joy and light and dirt and water and trees and sorrow. There is a piece in which a female dancer wearing a bright pink dress dives through the arms of a male dancer, like a fish, her dress a tail. I gasped.
Writing on my own is not fun for me. With Life Aquatic, Noah (Baumbach) and I would meet every day at a restaurant before lunch and we’d stay six or seven hours till dinner. We’d make each other laugh. That’s how we got it done….I am surprised because I always think of myself as someone who tries to do a lot of stuff and who is lazy. So I am happy to learn I can actually get things done.
everyday sunshine is one of my favourite songs of all time
I can’t wait for this doco
Click through for the trailer for this film. I must see it.
Coiled spring, analogous tension &
pressure, pre-enormous neighborhood,
cauldron of nuclear power: we were
drinking gin & tonics from the planet’s
jaw when the news came. Roses are red,
violets are blue jeans; cupcakes are
cop-food, death is a dinosaur (extinct &
et cetera) whispering the future is an
old friend shouting “don’t be afraid.”
Dear degeneracy, dearer street map
of Texas, dearest thrust-to-rocket ratio
from which God puts cock to abyss:
Modernity, my fucker, is the natural
language of structure. Our goodwill
gets complicated when we break Hell
in unsimple shapes. Fourth of July,
fifth of July, sixth of stellar
lighthouses surrounding space,
seventh: one is always coming upon
some American city whispering
I am some American city & I am
the desire to be within it when
the sun fries. We dance under the
asterisks, dip our toes in the ink.
The odds the stars will write our
sentence remain incredibly low.
SWD
It doesn’t give you what you desire – it tells you how to desire.
At the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in NOLA, the original Desire streetcar plate - behind glass - the kind of overt symbolism of which Tom would be proud!
