Monday, December 08, 2008

I used the restroom at a Macy's to-day, and, while I was on the toilet, I distinctly heard the guy in the stall next to me say, "I want your ass." After a few moments of awkward silence, a woman came in the bathroom saying, "Are you ready?"

"Yes, I'm almost done," said the guy irritably.

"I was just making sure you were still here," said the woman. They both sounded old.

"Jesus Christ," said the man after she left.

She came back again as he was exiting the stall. "You're not at home!" she said. "You can't take that long!"

I was at the mall because it's the easiest place to buy minutes for my phone. I thought I might do some Christmas shopping while I was there but I couldn't think of anything to buy.* I still had a bit of the headache that'd kept me up this morning, though it was slaked somewhat by the hot cup of green tea I'd gotten from the mall's sushi place.

The headache didn't come on seriously until around 2:30am last night. Before it had hit, I'd gone to The Living Room to work on the Chapter 15 script. The Living Room is in the SDSU college area and the place is typically packed with college students until it closes at 2am. As I wrote, I listened to a guy and a girl who were apparently on a first date, or something deliberately less defined. The girl awkwardly described herself as an "early bird" when the subject of her age came up, and from the way she kept trying invoke her lesbian acquaintances, dildos, and drugs, I could tell she was trying to present herself as more hip and sexually mature than she actually considered herself to be. And I could tell the guy was marvelling at his good fortune, egging her on and at one point defensively asking a student reading at a table nearby, "Are you listening in on our conversation, man?"

"Er, no." said the student.

I wonder why he didn't mind me sitting there. It's true, I was writing pretty incessantly, but he didn't know for sure what I was writing. I had a writing teacher once who had us go to public places alone and write down conversations people were having around us to get a feel for how people actually talk.

Afterwards, I went to the last remaining 24 hour Ralph's, and came back here to colour a bit before this brain just couldn't handle itself anymore. I made some Darjeeling tea, put Blade Runner on the big, 42 inch wide television, and vegged in front of it for the rest of the night. Blade Runner's often the first movie I think of when I get a bad headache. It's just so soft, enveloping, and lovely, especially now with this final cut.

I found the scenes in Deckard's apartment curiously transcendent last night. It really hit me when Rachel first confronts Deckard at his apartment, and there's a washed out, sallow quality to the light as Deckard callously reveals the awful truth, feeling defensive after his failure to notice her in the elevator.



Then as he softens up and starts to feel bad for her, he offers her a drink a second time, this time because he understands he'd need it if he were in her shoes. And the lighting turns to a much warmer yellow as the track called "Memories of Green" from Vangelis' score plays, a song both tentative and flowing.




I don't know why, exactly, but I suddenly very badly wanted to be there in that apartment. The song, too, I felt connected to. Back when I made Quake mods in my spare time, I'd used "Memories of Green" for a level I'd done mostly with blue lighting. Going through the level with the song looping, I think I wrote it somewhere on my subconscious.

The next time Rachel's at the apartment, the colours are predominately green and a subtle, luminous yellow, like Waterhouse's Hylas and the Nymphs.




It's a colour combination I usually associate with more unequivocally dire or depressing circumstances. But in both the case of the Blade Runner scene and the Waterhouse painting, there's the theme of physical love layered over alien and potentially dangerous circumstances.


*They had a DVD of the first two episodes of Gunbuster 2 for forty dollars. For two episodes! Does anyone really actually buy these things?

No comments:

Post a Comment