And we're back in the game!
'"Robbers" is a love song, it was originally inspired by my love of the Quentin Tarantino film True Romance, the story of an Elvis obsessed loner who falls in love and marries a prostitute. In the movie the couple run away to California after killing her pimp and stealing his drugs to start a new life financed by a once in a lifetime drug deal. It's the sentiment behind the film that appeals to me, the hopelessly romantic notion that two people can meet and instantly fall in love, an escape story where love is the highest law and conquers all against the odds. Characters like Bonnie and Clyde always appealed to me as a teenager - couples so intoxicated with one another that they fear nothing in the pursuit of the realization of each other, actions fueled by blind unconditional love.
'Robbers' is an ode to those relationships. The type of relationship all humans long for. All or nothing.
This video is about when love makes two people feel they are the centre of the universe.
- Matthew Healy
Cracked it.
I'd somehow managed to confuse my extreme terror of Ralph Bakshi's Ringwraiths in The Lord of the Rings with Elidor...
Apparently my adolescent brain made inexplicably simple leaps.
See a horse.
See another horse.
Merge the fear!
They are bloody terrifying though...
Look at that bad boy rotoscoping.
'Roland searched for a place that would be safe to climb, and found a staircase on the exposed inner wall of a house. The top step was the highest part of the house: everything above it, including the bedroom floor, had been knocked down.
Roland tested his weight, but the wood was firm, she he went up.
He could see little more of the streets from the top than from the ground. Behind him was a double row of back yards. The entry between them showed as a cleft.
They're bound to come sooner or later, thought Roland. The best thing is to stay put.
He sat on the top of the stairs in the moonlight. It was freezing hard. Roofs and cobbles sparkled. Roland felt better. The menace left the streets, and instead he was aware of the quietness as something poised, as if he could always sit here under the moon.
But the cold began to ache into him. He wondered if the others had decided to stay in one place and to wait until he came.
This thought bother him, and he was still trying to make up his mind when the unicorn appeared at the end of street.
He was moving at a fast trot, and he wheeled about at the cross-road, unsure of the way. Then he came on towards Roland.
Roland sat there above the street and watched the unicorn pass below him, and he dared not even breathe.
The unicorn turned aside to pause at entries and gaps in the walls. He would stand at the threshold of a house, one hoof raised, but always he swung away, and on down the street.
His mane flowed like a river in the moon: the point of the horn drew fire from the stars. Roland shivered with the effort of looking. He wanted to fix every detail in his mind for ever, so that no matter what else happened there would always be this.'
Elidor
(Page 157-158)
After the dense words of Isabel Allende, i needed something brief, fantastical and easy-going to give my brain a rest and Elidor fit my needs perfectly.
I've been obsessed with reading it ever since i was traumatised as a child by the 90s tv adaptation.
I've never been able to forget the obsidian coloured horse with glowing red eyes.*
I was eight and frightened of everything.
But as most things i was terrified of as a child, i can't help but be drawn to as an adult.
Apparently with age i've gotten creepier and i'm pretty okay with that.
So much to my dismay, there was no sign of this demon horse within the book.
Not a single hoof print.
There is only one four-legged beast and it came in the shape of Findhorn the Unicorn.
"Findhorn the Unicorn."
I'll be saying that for weeks.
Much like the rest of Alan Garner's books, i feel that it would have been better if i'd read them as child.
Their elegant simplicity isn't enough to feed my literary hunger but for a child, i can see why his works have remained beloved classics.
However, i cannot forgive that every damn time i read one of his novels he leaves me with an infuriatingly ambiguous ending.
I want finality dammit.
And there isn't even a follow up to Elidor to provide me with some much needed relief.
Argh and grumph.
Charles Keeping's illustration dotted throughout the pages did slightly help curb my rage.
Slightly.
*There is no red-eyed demon horse in the tv series either...Wuh? What have i been terrified of all this time? Did i make it up? WTF?!
Obsessed
'Dr. Cuevas, that kind, sweet, wonderful old man with the thick beard and ample paunch, who had helped her into this world and attended her through all the usual childhood illnesses and all her asthma attacks, had been transformed into a dark, fat vampire just like the ones in her Uncle Marcos's books. He was bent over the table where Nana prepared her meals. Next to him was a young man she had never seen before, pale as the moon, his shirt stained with blood and his eyes drunk with love. She saw her sister's snow-white legs and naked feet. Clara began to shake. At that moment Dr. Cuevas moved aside and she was able to see the dreadful spectacle of Rosa lying on her back on the marble slab, a deep gash forming a canal down the front of her body, with her intestines beside her on the salad platter. Rosa's head was twisted toward the window through which Clara was squinting, and her long green hair hung like a fern from the table onto the tiled floor, which was stained with blood. Her eyes were closed, but the little girl, because of the shadows, her own distance, and her imagination, thought she saw a supplicating and humiliated expression on her sister's face.
Stock-still on her wooden box, Clara could not keep from watching until the very end. She peered through the crack for a long time, until the two men had finished emptying Rosa out, injecting her veins with liquid, and bathing her inside and out with aromatic vinegar and essence of lavender. She stood there until they had filled her with mortician's paste and sewn her up with a curved upholsterer's needle. She stayed until Dr. Cuevas rinsed his hands in the sink and dried his tears, while the other one cleaned up the blood and the viscera. She stayed until the doctor left, putting on his black jacket with a gesture of infinite sadness. She stayed until the young man she had never seen before kissed Rosa on the lips, the neck, the breasts, and between her legs; until he wiped her with a sponge, dressed her in her embroidered nightgown, and, panting, rearranged her hair. She stayed until Nana and Dr. Cuevas came and dressed Rosa in her white gown and put on her hair the crown of orange blossoms that they'd kept wrapped in tissue paper for her wedding day. She stayed until the assistant took her in his arms with the same tenderness with which he would have picked her up and carried her across the threshold of his house if she had been his bride. She could not move until the first lights of dawn appeared. Only then did she slide back into her bed, feeling within her the silence of the entire world. Silence filled her utterly. She did not speak again until nine years later, when she opened her mouth to announce that she was planning to be married.'
The House of Spirits
(Page 53-54)
Have you ever read something that is so distant to your own existence but somehow feels the most familiar of all?
It's a rare feeling.
One i've only experienced with the unparalleled tales of Angela Carter, Louis de Bernières and Norman MacLean.
I'm sure there are others but these are the ones that made me feel nostalgic for places i've never been.
People i've never met.
And emotions i will more than likely never feel.
Except from within the pages of their books.
Pages that now feel like a second skin.
And i can now add Isabel Allende to the list, as the world and its inhabitants she created, revived even, in The House of Spirits is something i hope to never forget and revisit time and time again.
I'm such a sucker for Magic Realism.
Especially when set in the rich and often phantasmagoric landscape of Southern America.
Inframen
'To be a dancer is to work your body to the breaking point. In my project “Inframen”, I created a series of portraits using an infrared technique that reveals details that are under the subject’s abused skin. I am taking the dancers out of their roles as performers and revealing personal intimate individuals. Through these subtle and surreal portraits, I aim to continue my studies of contemporary male dancers, peeling the physical shield and exposing fragile human beings – The scars show on their skin and in their eyes.'
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