30 May 2011

Outside the frames

The danger about believing in art is believing only in art. It is fatal to forget that the way of art is to take a piece of life and show it to you for the first time, or in ways you have not yet seen it and therefore as if for the first time. Whether effecting comfort or disturbance, we wholly welcome the best of art's re/presentations. But outside the frames of a photograph, the length of the reel, beyond the bounds of a book, the happily ever after, even after the end, there is much life left to be endured.

The noises of your house-mates, the job you're not proud of and the little money it makes, the new diseases your body has to fight, the long hours, days and months of doing nothing and going nowhere. In art, these are masterfully used to point at somethings else, of importance; outside art, they are nothing but what they are.

Even in the most dystopian literature is the intention to care. Someone bothered to gather ugliness and arrange it in ways you can comprehend.

'Life is measured not by the number of breaths we take...', I believe that. And I believe that when we say 'nothing is happening', we mean life is happening.

26 May 2011

Response to an apology

What are you sorry for? I need to know what I am to forgive. Do you apologize for what you said because you weren't thinking rationally and those words—in careful re-consideration—now fail the test of truth, or because you said them when the polite deed is either to have lied or been quiet?

23 May 2011

Three responses

1.
I've read enough books and lived enough life to figure why adults constantly write fairy tales. Whatever satisfaction and beauty they encounter in reality, no affair will ever end their longing for perfection (term for things my way).

I wanted things a certain way with us though I can only change so much and I sadly cannot change you. But you allow me a conversation, an afternoon, a full course meal. You seek me and desire things done with and only with me. I learned to look at these not as consolations, but the precise machinery of our relationship. Being with you has its indescribable high; being with you, each day, is a burden.

So you walking away is no different from me needing to be alone to attend to matters I equally treasure.

2.
What made me capable of this kindness, you ask. To forgive a lack of care, not regretting confessing fondness unreciprocated, this tolerance of fleeting intimacy. Perhaps it is my knowledge of selfishness. When you say you need me, I understand how you need me to and that you need me to be.

How devastating it is to become a useless friend, worse an incompetent foe.

3.
Dear love, I can only assert magnificence towards it—chasing facts, to be lost in fact. Some frown on the coldness consequent of such passions, but nothing can be more flattering than being observed without intention to use what's seen to please or manipulate, what a thought that someone bothers to look at you with absolute, honest attention.

21 May 2011

Always a romantic case for the printed book

Not that I believe it'll ever be extinct, but—

Book:  Tales for a Rainy Night
Those curious, handwritten marginalia, those markers that have little to do with leading us to a specific page or passage in the book, but to revive a memory.

01 May 2011

Sit back, relax, watch a Shakespeare play

go from theatre to film and back into theatre.


King of the fairies, Oberon and his servant Puck, thanks to the latter’s carelessness, found themselves in the set of Max Reinhardt’s film adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1934. Them being the real characters from the Shakespeare comedy, the two were instantly cast as themselves and had no trouble easing into the movie star lifestyle.

The production was going well until the chief censor Will Hays paid the studio a visit and huffed about the film’s immoral script.

As in the original play, Oberon ordered Puck to fetch the flower called love-in-idleness, whose juice can make “man or woman madly dote upon the next live creature that it sees”. The plan was to use this flower to distract Hays from sabotaging the film. Yet as in the original play, Puck messed up, gave the flower to the wrong man and the rest, we could say, was a riot.

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