When I read, I need a visual representation of the characters. This list is just my favourite actors as some of my favourite characters. No hope that this series will ever be anything movie or tv show but a girl can dream. Casting directors, I did your job. Take a seat, it’s a long one…
[IMAGE ID: A tweet by “minh tâm h. 🌾 on concrete” @HAEDRAULICS on Apr 20: “everything everywhere all at once had me writing down english class notes in the theatre” with two drawings of sets of two nested circles, one black with a white center, one white with a black center. They are respectively labeled, “the bagel (yin) // -life is mostly dull and bad // -joy is fleeting and ultimately meaningless” and, “the googly eye (yang) // -life is mostly good and worthwhile // suffering is transient and fixable” END ID]
“nothing matters so do what you love and be kind” is the single most viscerally impactful message i have ever gleaned from consuming media and i’m going to live every day with that kind of hopepunk nihilism for the rest of my life
“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”
i love reading sad books bc when your own grief is stopped up inside you like a clogged drain you can grieve for a character on a page and understand that you’re also grieving for yourself a little bit
‘There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.’
-Anne Carson, ‘Grief Lessons: Four Plays By Euripides’
Hannah Gadsby in Nanette (2018)// At Eternity’s Gate dir. Julian Schnabel (2018) // Loving Vincent dir. Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman (2017) // Vincent Van Gogh in aletter to Theo Van Gogh (1880) // Almond Blossoms by Vincent Van Gogh (1890); painted as a gift for the birth of his brother Theo’s son named after him
“It is not immediately obvious which of Zadkine’s figures is Vincent and which is Theo. Like all who relieve the suffering of others, Theo—in a process that is the exact opposite of a blood transfusion—has taken some of Vincent’s pain into himself. Soon, however, it becomes obvious that while the sky weighs heavily on both figures, one, Vincent, feels gravity as a force so terrible it can drag men beneath the earth. From this moment on you are held by the pathos and beauty of what Zadkine depicts: despair that is inconsolable, comfort that is endless. One figure says, “I can never feel better,” the other, “I will hold you until you are better.”
Geoff Dyer on Ossip Zadkine’s sculpture of Vincent and Theo Van Gogh (from “Blues for Vincent”, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition)
