“Planet of Love”, Richard Siken
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

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@truetrueblue
“Planet of Love”, Richard Siken
Gerhard Richter - Overpainted photographs (Rural Landscapes), 2008/09
“All of my close childhood friends died because of the bomb… so I wanted to write a fantasy with the atomic bomb as a theme.” - Nobuhiko Obayashi
“Having the atomic bomb as a theme is a serious endeavour - even more so if you were born in Hiroshima in 1938. And yet, if you’ve seen Obayashi’s ‘House’ what you probably remember is the silliness - like the head of the hungry girl who takes one final bite, or the skeleton dance sequence, or the hungry piano. What you might not recall is any serious engagement with the atomic bomb. There’s the World War II backstory that the main character shares with their friends which involves the girl’s aunt who they are about to visit. The aunt loses her only true love in the war. The younger sister, who’s the main character’s mother, gets married. A photo is taken, a flash of light, and then an explosion of the atomic bomb which is on the screen for just two seconds. During the explosion, we hear one of the girls describe it as ‘cotton candy.’ Afterwards there is no more mention or footage of the bomb. In the entire film we only have these two seconds. The film consists of two halves. The first half establishes the lightness of a new generation, born after the bomb. In a number of interviews, Obayashi has stated his desire to offer a sense of the bomb’s impact on the younger generation. The second half of the film is primarily dedicated to the non-sensical destruction of the girls. If we were to find the exact centre of this film, we would land on what I consider to be the most significant and telling scene. We see the convergence of identities played out in the mirrors: between two generations; between the past and the present; between the dead and the living. Part of the absurdity of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was its codename, Little Boy. Of course the greater absurdity was the scale of the destruction that happened in an instant - a flash of light, a whole population gone. Tim O’Brien writes that some things are so horrific that truth isn’t sufficient for the truth. The only way to convey it is with fiction so outlandish that it approximates the absurdity of true horror. In the film, [the cat] Snowflake signals impending doom with a flash of light in her eyes. The first time we see Snowflake’s eyes flash green is when a photo is taken. Seen in this light, the atomic bomb is everywhere in this film.” - Kogonada (Trick or Truth)
ハウス | Hausu | House (1977) dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi
narrows it down
ゴジラ対ヘドラ | 1971
INTERVIEWER: When I consider what a risk it must have been to write about homosexuality when you did…
BALDWIN: You’re talking about Giovanni’s Room. Yeah, that was rough. But I had to do it to clarify something for myself.
INTERVIEWER: What was that?
BALDWIN: Where I was in the world. I mean, what I’m made of. Anyway, Giovanni’s Room is not really about homosexuality. It’s the vehicle through which the book moves. Go Tell It on the Mountain, for example, is not about a church and Giovanni is not really about homosexuality. It’s about what happens to you if you’re afraid to love anybody. Which is more interesting than the question of homosexuality.
— James Baldwin, from an interview with The Village Voice
“The illusion that, if we can see something clearly, we see it as it really is, is hugely seductive. Ruskin, in Modern Painters, makes the point that clarity is bought at the price of limitation: ‘We never see anything clearly … What we call seeing a thing clearly, is only seeing enough of it to make out what it is; the point of intelligibility varying in distance for different magnitudes and kinds of things …’ He gives the example of an open book and an embroidered handkerchief on a lawn. Viewed from a distance of a quarter of a mile, they are indistinguishable; from closer, we can see which is which, but not read the book or trace the embroidery on the handkerchief; as we go nearer, we 'can now read the text and trace the embroidery, but cannot see the fibres of the paper, nor the threads of the stuff’; closer still and we can see the watermark and the threads, 'but not the hills and dales in the paper’s surface, nor the fine fibres which shoot off from every thread’; until we take a microscope to it, and so on, ad infinitum. At which point do we see it clearly? 'When, therefore, we say, we see the book clearly’, Ruskin concludes, 'we mean only that we know it is a book.’ Clarity, it seems, describes not a degree of perception, but a type of knowledge. To know something clearly is to know it partially only, and to know it, rather than to experience it, in a certain way.”
— Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary
“The shadow isn’t always “bad.” Sometimes the shadow is the most grounded, loving, activated, attractive, aroused, creative, illuminated essence and purifying truth that we have been conditioned to be too afraid to let leak all the way out into the world. Think about it.”
— India Ame’ye, Author, The Melody of Love
gucci ss98
Mädchen Amick dancing to “Do You Love Me” by The Contours SLEEPWALKERS (1992), dir. Mick Garris
I have never been a crier
but lately I can’t stop crying
Jenny Slate, Little Weirds
[Text ID: “You are dear to yourself in the morning and it is the morning now. It is very private to have such a love for yourself.”]
— Heaven, Mieko Kawakami
[text ID: I knew that it was cruel to be so optimistic, but, in my solitude, I couldn't resist the urge and spent entire days basking in idiotic fantasies, sometimes verging on prayer.]
Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals [ID in alt text]