The Occasional Annals of Idleness and Augury. No. 3. October 4, 2022. [No. 1] [No. 2]
City-hued doves sleep in the rain outside my window. They perch on a dead tree so dead it looks like it was planted that way, all strung up with dead vines. Outside it rains and rains and rains. I sit here, listening to Kurt Wagner sing: Across the interstate the world is like another world.
Rain drips across the window as if across the music and into random, rainy memories of road. For instance: the slick highway by the graveyard where they buried my grandfather in the rain, years ago. And the shaved-ice shop, closed for good, that sat in ruins on the other side. The soldier who played “Taps” wore glasses so fogged and dripping with weather it was as if he’d worn them so as not to see. Day is done / Gone the sun. So as to see nothing but rain.
Rain, like idle thought, a confluence: all loose things swept together. The mourning doves keep quiet, heads bowed into their soft-feathered bodies.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
on the screen
In Last Year at Marienbad (1961), a man and a woman at a European resort struggle to remember an earlier encounter that may or may not have happened; that may or may not have been pleasant, traumatic, violent. The camera creeps along ornate halls to the troubled voiceover of an unnamed man—“je m’avance, une fois de plus, le long de ces couloirs”—and the unrelenting blares of organ music. Alain Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay (published as a “ciné-roman”) is a stiflingly abstract enactment of the messiness of recollection. Director Alain Resnais’s great achievement is in rendering it cinematically rather than relying on its literariness: ruptures in memory take form as slippages in audio sync, surreal stillnesses, scenes that split along reverse shots, pans that reveal sudden shifts in location. The film, ponderous as its organ music, deadens after a while. The desired effect, no doubt, but there is a ceiling on how interesting nameless characters doing thought exercises among the European bourgeoisie can be. Particularly when it lacks Buñuel’s teeth. Still an excellent instance of craft, it also has one of my new favorite moments in cinema: a breathtakingly silent scene of a waiter slowly picking up the pieces of a broken glass.
from my incoming texts
“Like why did I send u phallus flower”
“I’m staring at an edible on my desk and the stubhub prices on my lappy”
“I can hear dance yrself clean playing faintly from the bathroom of this house party in Williamsburg”
“He is just furthering my belief that I would like to be a dog”
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