“Evil floats, weightlessly across the landscape of Los Angeles in Nicolas Winding Refn’s new film, The Neon Demon, co-scripted with TV writer Mary Laws and British dramatist Polly Stenham. It is a reverie of such sheer satanic rapture that Refn could be on danger of taking Bret Easton Elis’ crown as the Aleister Crowley of the 21st century.”
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I was fairly horrified by the film ‘A Promising Young Woman’, especially the murder at the end.
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‘There must be rites,’ [the Fox said].
‘What’s a rite?’ asked the Little Prince.
‘It is a thing too often neglected…’
The Little Prince,
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
p.61
I have a young man coming to see me for boxing training. His older brother bought him a ten-session package for an eighteenth birthday present, because learning to ‘handle yourself’ is considered one of the quintessential rites of passage.
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Anyone who has been abused by a family member, or a partner, understands unconditional love.
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You embarrass the roses
I see them leaning together, whispering, looking,
Murmuring in spiteful, jealous consensus
As you pass by
The authority of your stride moving through your skirt
with the subtlety of a breeze
You’re wearing your Mona Lisa smile
And I know
That the secret that fills the vortex
at their centre is darkness, emptiness –
Their petals shamefully shroud this painful secret
Until time undoes the strings of their bodice
and they are dissolute
The roses know
That your eyes, your centre, is filled with liquid electricity
that is ever lustrous
That liquidity, that electricity
Is the current that animates your animal grace
So potent that, at forty-four,
It’s begun to scorch the filaments of your jet-black hair
And the roses know I ache for you,
and they also know
that your light
and my ache
are the same.
I’d never read Flannery O’Connor until lockdown. I’d seen her listed as one of the outstanding writers of the twentieth century, specifically in terms of her short stories. I had time on my hands, so I bought her collected works.
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The first disturbing event of first-year university was the day I went to meet a childhood friend of mine when he was discharged from the insane asylum.
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2.
When Lisa Wilkinson explained on ‘The Project’ television program that Eurydice Dixon was murdered by a man who was the pointy end of a patriarchal culture which is driven to murder women as it sexualises them, I was outraged.
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1.
The patriarchy is like Satan, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. Sure, there’s some kind of cause and effect involved, but the figure itself is bought into being by those wanting to explain more subtle and complex phenomena, but are happy to settle for an easy answer with a face on it.
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“You think,” [Jacques] persisted, “That my life is shameful because my encounters are. And they are. But you should ask yourself why they are.”
“Why are they – shameful?”
“Because there is no affection in them, and no joy. It’s like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.”
“I asked him, ‘Why?”
“That you must ask yourself,” he told me, “And perhaps one day this morning will not be ashes in your mouth.”
– James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room,
P. 49
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Theme Park at its Darkest 