#film excerpt

[lovelyyoungmen]

Tenderness

a scene from the film "Juste un peu de réconfort" by Armand Lameloise with Arthur Moncla and Rémi Bresson

[funeral]

The development of Lynch's body of work is informed by a realist's optimism that there is an exit from the linguistic labyrinth and that this exit is richly available to us [...] His use of language—and of cinematic vocabulary—suggests that, once we understand that we ourselves have created cultural forms and that they only have the meaning we give them, we are free to understand the forces in the universe that are truly larger than we are and how they connect us to a greater reality.

Martha Nochimson, The Passion of David Lynch

[fairydrowning]

Born to be a protagonist in a ghibli movie, forced to be irl.

[katabay]

PAGLUIB

way back in like. march?? I took a stab at writing some kind of kabitserye type of story but it was a mess: it kept veering off into murder mystery drama territory because I was reading a lot of murder mystery novels around then and it Wasn't Good because I hadn't tried writing mysteries, let alone murder mysteries, before lmao

I did write a handful of short mystery stories since then, so next year I might take a stab at this idea again now that I'm no longer jumping head first into a genre pool I don't know how to swim in :)

[kevindavidday]

writing perfect court is insane for several reasons but i think what's made me pause and reevaluate everything is the dynamic between nathaniel and riko, if they had grown up together. the hostility is definitely still there, the competitiveness, the anger issues, fire and fuel, but all that's expected.

it's the way these two care and how they show it that is quite literally undoing my work right now. care about each other is too much of stretch, but the one intersection in their lives isn't even their families, it's kevin day. they both are abysmally attached to him, and neither of them know how to show love in stereotypically normal ways so poor kevin is stuck in the middle of their dick measuring competition. he's older than them but he's not allowed to be better than riko, and he's not allowed to be aggressive the way nathaniel is. kevin struggles to understand their easy acceptance of violence because he didn't grow up as a moriyama or a wesninski. his legacy is free of blood, but nathaniel and riko? they're born to it, their earliest memories are of people dying some of which they had to experience and witness together.

that brings me to the absolutely gut wrenching realization that nathaniel would've still tried to convince riko that he was nothing more than a cast off and it would do them better to be allies. he would've tried to convince him that they have a common enemy (tetsuji moriyama) who has been using them since the beginning of their lives, that their worth has been reduced to mere investments, that nathanielnbelieves in the perfect court but not if riko keeps playing into the delusion that he's part of a family that cast him aside. kengo would die and nathaniel would tell him 'i told you. i warned you they didn't care, king. you did not listen' and riko, instead of being moved by the reasoning words of a boy who has grown with him and seen him change from a hopeful child to a tyrant king, will lash out because how dare you say i told you so?

and nathaniel would be hurt in the process of it, nathaniel would have to, at a certain point, give up all hope in riko moriyama's humanity because the other boy truly believes nathaniel and jean are property. he does not see them as human, and nathaniel's hatred for him will grow to the point that it consumes him. over and above it will be his hatred for tetsuji moriyama, because despite everything, nathaniel had wanted to be the best. he'd wanted their perfect court to be a reality and it was the master's cruel ways and ridiculous teachings that had turned riko away from himself and consequently the rest of them. he would fight riko but blame tetsuji, because tetsuji forced his hand.

"Put a bird in a cage and call it a nest - cripple it, torture it, hide it from the sky. And then you expect it to take flight when pushed. Put like that, it's obvious the bird will fall." Nathaniel paused . "All the things you've done to us, to me, to Kevin, to your own nephew. Your success was always bound to failure, and I'll say it because no one else ever has, Tetsuji Moriyama, you are the stupidest fucking man alive."

[tendermimi]

Euripides, Herakles (tr. Anne Carson) / Tom à la ferme, dir. Xavier Dolan

[thismustbeso]

Kirei? The Terror of Beauty (2004), Katsuya Matsumura / I Will Tell this Story to the Sun Until You Remember that You are the Sun, Erin Slaughter / Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), dir. Steve Miner

[universe-friday]

‼️NEW UNIVERSE FRIDAY EPISODE OUT NOW‼️

It's time to deal with some sinkholes!! And a mysterious figure... Hm...

Listen now on Spotify here!

(Also on Apple Podcasts and YouTube!)

[harukokittie]

I think at some base level my molecules instinctively recognized yours, as you stood across from me at the noisy karaoke bar, cigarette hanging off your lips. The lights flashed purple, blue and green. Super novas bursting across your features, that smile, the one that makes me forget to breathe already touching the ends of your mouth. The world around us has stopped it’s progress forward to let us mingle once more as old friends. Atoms bouncing from one another in Recognition. Touched as celestial dust once and now as earth bound flesh. I think I knew then that the stars had whispered your name to me every night since the very moment I’d learned I could listen. Here lay the proof… when I reached towards you, hands like kids gloves reaching shoulders in embrace. I saw eternity.

[la-cocotte-de-paris]

Returning to Paris, I had to pay. With rage in my heart and often tears in my eyes (the makeup artist Chakatouny lamented each morning my poor appearance, and couldn't make me look any better), I made one film — just one — to guarantee the freedom of a person I loved. I was ugly, terrible; everything in me refused to be. I still remember the look of my [screen] partner Raymond Rouleau (who knew Igor and the causes of my breakdown) studying me and trying in vain to give me a little encouragement!

— Edwige Feuillère reflecting on the making of Mam'zelle Bonaparte (1942) and aiding the escape of her fiancé (named here as Igor) from Nazi-occupied France

(From Les Feux de la mémoire by Edwige Feuillère, 1977. Translated by me. ♡)

[micahdotgov]

hot. who said that

[orchard-bliss]

Then what in the hours of your life is love? It’s here, and gone, and it gives its name to everything.

Dancing At The Blue Iguana, (2000).

[funeral]

At his most direct, Lynch explained that, when he is directing, ninety percent of the time he doesn’t know, intellectually, what he is doing. However, there is nothing uncertain in him about the powerful rightness of his artistic choices. His insistence on letting things happen to him while he works is part of his faith that film is a place where reality enters when something other than willfully applied reason does the talking.

Martha Nochimson, The Passion of David Lynch

[prevailinghatred]

“I AM GALVATRON!!!”

FUCKING PUNCHES YOU IN THE DICK.

[doubledaybooks]

Read an excerpt from THE NICKEL BOYS by Colson Whitehead

Elwood received the best gift of his life on Christmas Day 1962, even if the ideas it put it in his head were his undoing. Martin Luther King At Zion Hill was the only album he owned and it never left the turntable. His grandmother Hattie had a few gospel records, which she only played when the world discovered a new mean way to work on her, and Elwood wasn’t allowed to listen to the Motown groups or popular songs like that on account of their licentious nature. The rest of his presents that year were clothes – a new red sweater, socks – and he certainly wore those out, but nothing endured such good and constant use as the record. Every scratch and pop it gathered over the months was a mark of his enlightenment, tracking each time he entered into a new understanding of the Reverend’s words. The crackle of truth.

They didn’t have a TV set but Dr. King’s speeches were such a vivid chronicle -- containing all that the Negro had been and all that he would be -- that the record was almost as good as television. Maybe even better, grander, like the towering screen at the Davis Drive-In, which he’d been to twice. Elwood saw it all: Africans persecuted by the white sin of slavery, Negroes humiliated and kept low by segregation, and that luminous image to come, when all those places closed to his race were opened.

The speeches had been recorded all over, Detroit and Charlotte and Montgomery, connecting Elwood to the rights struggle across the country. One speech even made him feel like a member of the King family. Every kid had heard of Fun Town, been there or envied someone who had. In the third cut on Side A, Dr. King spoke of how his daughter longed to visit the amusement park on Stewart Ave in Atlanta. Yolanda begged her parents whenever she spotted the big sign from the expressway or the commercials came on TV. Dr. King had to tell her in his low, sad rumble about the segregation system that kept colored boys and girls on the other side of the fence. Explain the misguided thinking of some whites -- not all whites, but enough whites – that gave it force and meaning. He counseled his daughter to resist the lure of hatred and bitterness and assured her that “Even though you can’t go to Fun Town, you are as good as anyone who gets to go to Fun Town.”

That was Elwood -- good as anyone. A hundred miles south of Atlanta, in Tallahassee. Sometimes he saw a Fun Town commercial while visiting his cousins in Georgia. Lurching rides and happy music, chipper white kids lining up for the Wild Mouse Roller Coaster, Dick’s Mini Golf. Strap into the Atomic Rocket for a Trip to the Moon. A perfect report card guaranteed free admission, the commercials said, if your teacher stamped a red mark on it. Elwood got all A’s and kept his stack of evidence for the day they opened Fun Town to all God’s children, as Dr. King promised. “I’ll get in free every day for a month, easy,” he told his grandmother, lying on the front room rug and tracing a threadbare patch with his thumb.

Excerpted from The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. Copyright © 2019 by Colson Whitehead. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

[contremineur]

LOUISE: If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things? IAN: Maybe I’d say what I feel more often. I… I don’t know.

from Arrival (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2016)