"It's like I can feel myself leaving my body. It's like it's making me someone else."
when I was 13, I wrote a short story explicitly about suicide for class (we were told to use "imagery words" to convey the story rather than dialogue), and it was paraded in front of my multi-grade english class by my teacher to be gawked at and even mocked. "weird girl" suddenly wasn't enough to saddle me with; no, now I was an attraction…
"What happened upstairs?"
I have an intense, deep-seated fear of that moment when a VHS tape reaches its end and shuts off. as a kid, I could hear the tape rewinding, but was met with either static or a blank blue screen. and, in that emptiness, my mind tried to fill in the blanks--thought it saw and heard things that weren't there, or anxiously expected something to suddenly appear without warning. the same would happen with my closet, with dark…
"Heterosexuality sucks, even as a board game."
both a perfect snapshot of life in a specific place and time, and also timeless in its vignette-style presentation. essential 90s gay nihilism cinema--matter-of-fact, funny, and heartbreaking. made me miss the 90s in the most simplistic of ways, heartbreak and all. can't wait to see more of Araki's work!
very cool to see this was partially produced thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts. these are the kinds of projects that so desperately deserve that kind of support to get made.
"Where is my dream?"
proto-Twin Peaks in a lot of ways! Laura Dern and Isabella Rosselini made my cry my eyes out through this whole thing. forever fascinated by the way Lynch poked and prodded to reveal the dark-hearted underneath of his idyllic societies, peeling back layers to showcase the ugly and the rot. like the bugs hidden by the grass, it's often not hard to find, but it's easy for the eyes to glaze over it when one doesn't…
“I’M IN MY WEDDING DRESS!”
“YES, YOU LOOK LOVELY!”
THERE IS—AND I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH—AN AFTERLIFE FOR TOYS
