Sinners and Saints
I.
The trees are blue and the air red and a terrible beard of thorns grows from your softest lung.
II.
The only thing moving within seventy acres of desert is a forked tongue.
III.
The tree breathes like lungs. The thorns in this film are painted red. The weather will continue to be tinted blue.
IV.
The later parts of the film dealt with the life story of Mick Jagger’s tongue.
V.
The crucifixion of Mick Jagger’s tongue in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1980s version of Our Lady of the Flowers.
The First House on the Right
The season kept its hands scurrying behind the sad house, the unkempt house, the ninth and eleventh house, the gaunt house, the gutted house, the mangled house, the house with no roof or wall or obligatory history, the house with little else, the house with a single color, the house with a single shadow inside, the house with a single strip of light glowing under its door, the house on the white beach that will never recover, that will never remember, that will never return, the fish flopping on the sand, the swimmers in wet gowns barking at the wind.
Part Five. The Stiletto Museum of Petra von Kant
Imperial Tangos #1
If you look at something long enough, I’ve discovered, the meaning goes away.
— Andy Warhol
They have arranged it so that the scene takes place in a ballroom. There are countless chandeliers, though only a few are on. There are countless mirrors along the wall, though most are hidden in shadow. And the ones not in shadow are freckled with bird shit.
The dancing couples shift their leaden figures to the leaden orchestration. The purpose is to dance until someone not themselves is either born or laid to rest. The ballroom is lit by a grainy light. The theme of the dance is Extraction. The thinking by the dancers in the ballroom tends toward sockets of grainy light. Others stand near the edge of the scene waiting for the light to flicker out.
One dancer who had once been laid to rest or possibly born is writing in the hotel bed this ugly ugly, this red red, this leaden leaden, this mirror mirror. Her dress wilts in the hot uneven room. Her idea is starting to ache. Yet the ache is not unpleasant. It makes her skin feel like streams of warm milk: milk that drips from the bed and through the floorboards into the room below, where it continues to drip through the floorboards, and so on, until it reaches the sewers.
They have arranged it so that the heads of many of the couples have been hallowed out by extractions. The have arranged it so that the heads of many of the couples have grainy and countless notions pouring from their faces.
Imperial Tangos #2
The endless boulevards extend among endless extractions.
Imperial Tangos #3
The dance is based on the Fassbinder film that has long been laid to rest, its head stuffed with roses. They have found a pink hotel by the cellophane lake, with many pink sugary swans in the distance. They have arranged it so that the dancing takes place from the knees down.
One of the ballroom dancers reads his diary while his lover fucks another dancer in the hotel elevator. They are like a pair of hips almost but not quite born.
The diary consists of scenes in which figures covered with bird shit and gold glitter and clothed by tattered silk stand like statues in a meadow that is really a stage in an abandoned factory. But they soon arrange it so that night falls on the meadow. They dim the factory lights one by one. The lovers in the elevator dry. The clothes in the elevator remain like sunlight.
Another film could have taken place. And maybe it will. Or maybe the film that could have taken place will only consist of a few scenes, and the rest will remain written in diaries and on the backs of napkins and one or two postcards.
The hips approach the mirror and draw back and approach and draw back.
Imperial Tangos #4
One dancer realized she could only have been born. Her idea making the dance ugly ugly.
The others waiting in the corner for the lights to flicker out begin vomiting an almond light of their own. They had arranged it so that the scene is truly and utterly fucked.
The dancing itself is partially asleep as if the orchestration surrounding it had forgotten to misplace its ugly ugly.
The elevator remains on the beach, its mouth ajar and releasing pink mist. The sand on the beach heavy as clay. The sand around the elevator is pink, but it is unclear if it is pink because of the sunset, or because of the pink film lights, or because the sand is really a hillside of pink sugar. The ballroom is empty except for the last extraction.
Imperial Tangos #5
The black wall and a white wall and a carpet of sand between them, a film being made without actors or trees or guns or eyes or headlines, I wanted to be the gravedigger with the blackened smile, you wanted to be a window staring out on to prison yard, a window splattered with cheap cosmetics, we had some things going for us, a mouth twisted by a red thumbprint, part of the snarl flattened, a bared chest covered with goose bumps, a single pale nipple white in the light, a dab of paint with its snout sniffing, shifting. The director an assembly of snouts twitching.
The black wall and the beach and the pad of flesh scratching at the air.
Imperial Tangos #6
So many arms alone in the air. So many thighs blinking in the light. So many hands drying in the weeds. So many necks waiting in the heat. So much hair alone in the basement. So many eyes staring at the wall. The ugly ugly thoughts strewn along the beach. The parade of extractions with their roots dripping. The sunlight piercing through the pink mist like useless noise. The elevator door with its jaw broken and askew. The road of sand leading from the door and through the door and away and toward.
Gods of the Plague #1
And Mieze says yes, she remembers that scene from the Fassbinder film, the one with the gangster with the fatalistic 70s mustache, and his long black leather coat, and his head of prison light, and his thoughts in black-and-white film colors, and the woman who will one day claim to be Maria Braun beautiful in the mirror in the room behind the stage, and the two of them flipping through a porn magazine given to her by the woman from the east who sells secrets.
And Mieze picks up the cold turkey leg while wearing black gloves. The meat is cold and greasy and the room around the meat is clean and cold.
And later that night Mieze says yes, that’s right, she had said previously the woman from the east was her favorite character, though she by the end is another victim, and the shock of it is that it’s hard to imagine a beautiful woman selling so many secrets could ever be gotten rid of by such a simple fact as a bullet.