Local Gestures
because the personal is cultural
|
I’ve always been a sucker. Not as in gullible, mind you. What I mean is that, when I was seven years old, I watched Dr. Zhivago over two nights as it played on TV and, when the titular character saw the woman he loved as he passed by her on a tramway and ran after her, dying of a heart attack while she kept on walking, completely oblivious to the drama unfolding behind her, I also died a little. It became my favourite movie, as it would for any normal seven-year-old. When I saw it on VHS a few years later at the store, still split over two cassettes, I bought it with the hard-earned money I made babysitting my cousins.
Keep reading... |
Ninety percent of the time, when I went clubbing, I didn’t have a good time. So it was surprising to me, when rereading my old LiveJournal, to realize how often I went out all the same. Why did I keep on doing it in spite of everything? Because I was desperate.
I’ve always been an introverted loner. I like to say that it was because I grew up on a farm in the country and that I’m more used to the company of cows than that of humans, but that’s probably only partially true; I have two older brothers whose personalities are vastly different from mine. Yet I’ve probably gone to clubs hundreds of times more than both of them combined. I was hoping to meet someone. I never did. Still I kept going. Keep reading... |
Shock
Online events. Denial Ça va bien aller. “We’re all in this together” and other positive affirmations. Early in the pandemic, in a panel on Zoom, one of the curators where I work said that he feared that all new works would be about the pandemic, although he understood that it would be something that people would need to process. Now I fear that none will be. Even the most realistic movies and TV series have gone out of their way to create a world where the pandemic never happened. Judges on Nailed It sat a bit further apart. If there were post-pandemic generations, they would not believe us. Keep reading... |