water body

严 佳 佳

[aether--or]

I used to have such a good time

[aether--or]

“It seems to me that I have always pursued pain and humiliation,” O’Brien told Dunn, in a conversation that Dunn recorded for an absorbing 1965 book, “Talking to Women.” O’Brien noted that she’d sometimes begun serious relationships with men “knowing that I was eventually going to write about them.” She continued, “You were asking me about what I live for? What matters? And this is the thing that matters, I live on expectation more than anything else. Of what I could become. I used to have hopes of what would happen to me, or that I’d go somewhere beautiful, or someone would touch my thighs or something. I used to have those hopes—I still have a bit—but I now have the hope of becoming a deeper person, of becoming a seasoned person. I may not.”

[aether--or]

Jane Fonda and Richard Burton came to her parties, and she was often a guest at parties thrown by others, although, as she once said, she never quite felt herself to be at a party; in her mind, she was in some other place, in the company of “an ideal non-existent male.”

[brixuth]

“I'm not stubborn. Life is stubborn toward me.”

The Green Ray (Le rayon vert, 1986)

[horror-aesthete]

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, 1989, dir. Peter Greenaway

[luckypluckychair-deactivated202]

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover | 1989

Director: Peter Greenaway

Production designer: Ben van Os and Jan Roelfs

[casino-bunker]

[thesnakeandthemoon]

Alan Howard & Helen Mirren in

The Cook,the Thief,His Wife & Her Lover (1989)

dir by Peter Greenaway

[aether--or]

I’m hopeless, I’m a mess. I need to reach the stage where I’m sufficiently obsessed that it calls to me first thing and won’t let me go. I do get there, eventually, but it takes a long time, and with a first draft and everything murky – I have the feel of a shape in mud, which I’m trying to pull up – I would rather do almost anything than write. It tends to be very good for household tasks.

[aether--or]

Lewis has surveyed a landscape taken by convention as settled and found it destabilized, at least here and there, by uneven and unreliable information.

[aether--or]

When I described these accounts to the filmmaker Olivier Assayas, a close friend of Denis’s, he laughed. “There’s a certain form of chaos in the way she works,” he said. “When you make movies, it’s always disturbing how confident everyone involved is that they know how things should be done. And you have to constantly remind them, No, you don’t know how it’s done, I don’t know how it’s done, nobody knows how it’s done. You create chaos as a way of destabilizing the surroundings that could bring you to make something that would otherwise be conventional.”

[aether--or]

Claire Denis was eight weeks old when she and her mother moved from Paris to Cameroon, where her father was serving as a French colonial administrator. In the course of the next thirteen years, the family expanded to include several more children, and lived in territories that would become Mali, Djibouti, and Burkina Faso. Denis’s parents supported decolonization, and she is adamant that “Chocolat” is not autobiographical. “My parents would certainly not have had someone serve them meals. I wasn’t raised like that,” she told me. “I was raised in a world that probably never actually existed, the world my parents hoped for . . . where there was no separation between people. I was raised in a dreamland.” Denis was at times the only white child in her class. “It was very embarrassing,” she said. “Not because I was white, but because I was not black.”

[aether--or]

Meanwhile, most of us in the New Narrative group were coming from queer and/or working-class backgrounds, and we needed a self, however unstable or provisional, in the stories we needed to tell, which resembled and engaged the social realities we inhabited. There’s a phrase from Fredric Jameson—by way of Althusser and Lévi-Strauss—that I found helpful. “Narrative,” he writes, is the “imaginary resolution of a real contradiction.” Althusser said something similar about ideology, Lévi-Strauss said it of myth. I felt the same could be said about the self. That gave me a way in—not to banish the self but to recognize it as collaborative, porous, an “imaginary resolution.” We were trying to mix different registers, to bring together lyric, essay, close-ups, wide shots. We were drawn to anything that led away from the middle distance.

[mariah-do-not-care-y]

UK VOGUE MAY 2014 Sky Ferreira by Theo Wenner

[aether--or]

It had not been a good couple of weeks, there in the dead of winter, and my anger at all of it boiled up in me when Addie began telling us something involving a lover, a story she clearly believed to be tragic and exciting, with herself at center stage, but that was, to me, and probably to Ellie, only dull and sordid.

[aether--or]

“I will be making an ethical mistake if I take myself to have the kind of grasp of a person that fiction makes available to me in my engagements with imaginary people… No human being will be knowable in the way that any literary character worth repeated readings is knowable.”

[duxuebing]

Photography by Xuebing Du

Instagram: xuebing.du