thedarlingone

For whatever it is worth to history, I wish to register that I do not like finding out that we are suddenly at war with Iran. I do not need any more specters of annihilation, nuclear or otherwise. I get enough stress from my regular life.

(These Crusader fantasists. My entire lifetime. Their Armageddon wet dreams. Why will the sand not eat them alone.)

Thanks to the effects of prolonged illness on my body, I have even more difficulty with it these days than in previous difficult years, but spatch took a picture of me on the way down the hill of Powder House Park that looked like I could still be the prow of a ship.



Listening to the radio in the car and tracking down songs at home, I seem to have amassed a small collection of music videos, more recent than not. I had never seen the studly single entrendres that accompany the blues-rock boasts of Elle King's "Ex's and Oh's" (2015). Rob identified the scratchy guitar chug in Sarah Barrios' "Thank God You Introduced Me to Your Sister" (2021) as a callback to Fountains of Wayne and thence the Cars, but it is a sapphic banger in its own right. It is generationally lovely to have the London Gay Men's Chorus backing up the acoustic version of Isaac Dunbar's "American High" (2024). Jean Dawson's "Pirate Radio" (2022) rocks like an Afrofuturist anthem and an autobiographical chantey at the same time. If it ever crossed your mind to wonder about a cross between the Preacher in True Stories (1986) and the High Voltage Messiah of The Ruling Class (1972), there's John C. Reilly in Jack White's "Archbishop Harold Holmes" (2025). The vintage riot grrrl of Halsey's "Safeword" (2025) is enthusiastically not safe for work. Patrick Wolf's "The Last of England" (2025) has so much Jarman in its DNA, it is almost gilding the lily to have filmed at Dungeness except that it feels like the correct acknowledgement. I just like the oneiric stop-motion of Witch Prophet's "Memory (feat. Begonia)" (2023).

Happy solstice! spatch and I celebrated the longest stretch of the year's light with the third-to-last night of Theatre@First's The Tempest, the farewell production of its longtime artistic director. Their lion-bronze Caliban stood laughing, in his hands the staff the island's magic had brought him in pieces, by right, made whole. In, summer!

Allison Bunce's Ladies (2024) so beautifully photosets the crystalline haze of a sexual awakening that the thought experiment assigned by its writer-director-editor seems more extraneous than essential to its sensorily soaked seventeen-minute weekend, except for the queerness of keeping its possibilities fluid. The tagline indicates a choice, but the film itself offers something more liminal. Whatever its objectivity, what it tells the heroine is real.

It's more than irony that this blurred epiphany occurs in the none more hetero setting of a bachelorette weekend, whose all-girl rituals of cheese plates and orange wine on the patio and drunkenly endless karaoke in a rustically open-plan rental somewhere down the central coast of California are so relentlessly guy-oriented, the Bechdel–Wallace test would have booked it back up 101 after Viagra entered the chat. The goofiest, freakiest manifestation of the insistence on men are the selfie masks of the groom's face with which the bride's friends are supposed to pose as she shows off her veil in the lavender overcast of the driftwood-littered beach, but it's no less telling that as the conversation circles chronically around partners past and present, it's dudes all the way down. Even jokily, their twentysomething, swipe-right femininity admits nothing of women who love women, which leaves almost literally unspeakable the current between ginger-tousled, disenchanted Ruby (Jenna Lampe) and her lankier, longtime BFF Leila (Greer Cohen), the outsiders of this little party otherwise composed of blonde-bobbed Chloe (Ally Davis) and her flanking mini-posse of Grace (Erica Mae McNeal) and Lex (Tiara Cosme Ruiz), always ready to reassure their wannabe queen bee that she's not a bad person for marrying a landlord. "That's his passion!" They are not lovers, these friends who drove down together in Ruby's SUV. Leila has a boyfriend of three months whose lingering kiss at the door occasioned an impatiently eye-rolling horn-blare from Ruby, herself currently single after the latest in a glum history of heterosexual strike-outs: "No, seriously, like every man subconsciously stops being attracted to me as soon as I tell him that I don't want to have kids." And yet the potential thrums through their interactions, from the informality of unpacking a suitcase onto an already occupied bed to the nighttime routine of brushing their teeth side by side, one skimming her phone in bed as the other emerges from the shower and unselfconsciously drops her towel for a sleep shirt, climbing in beside her with such casual intimacy that it looks from one angle like the innocence of no chance of attraction, from another like the ease of a couple even longer established than the incoming wedding's three years. "He's just threatened by you," Leila calms the acknowledgement of antipathy between her boyfriend and her best friend. It gets a knowing little ripple of reaction from the rest of the group, but even as she explains for their tell-all curiosity, she's smiling over at her friend at the other end of the sofa, an unsarcastic united front, "Probably because he knows I love her more than him."

Given that the viewer is encouraged to stake out a position on the sex scene, it does make the most sense to me as a dream, albeit the kind that reads like a direct memo from a subconscious that has given up waiting for dawn to break over Marblehead. It's gorgeous, oblique, a showcase for the 16 mm photography of Ryan Bradford at its most delicately saturated, the leaf-flicker of sun through the wooden blinds, the rumpling of a hand under a tie-dyed shirt, a shallow-breasted kiss, a bunching of sheets, all dreamily desynched and yet precisely tactile as a fingernail crossing a navel ring: "Tell me if you want me to move my hand." Ruby's lashes lie as closed against her cheeks as her head on the pillow throughout. No wonder she looks woozy the next morning, drinking a glass of water straight from the tap as if trying to cool down from skin-buzzing incubus sex, the edge-of-waking fantasy of being done exactly as she dreamt without having to ask. "Spread your legs, then." Scrolling through their sunset selfie session, she zooms and lingers on the two of them, awkwardly voguing back to back for the camera. She stares wordlessly at Leila across the breakfast table, ἀλλ’ ἄκαν μὲν γλῶσσα ἔαγε λέπτον δ’ αὔτικα χρῶι πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν to the life. Chloe is rhapsodizing about her Hallmark romance, but Ruby is speaking to her newly sensitized desires: "I just really hate that narrative, though. Pretending that you don't want something in the hopes that you'll get the thing that you're pretending that you don't want? Like, it just doesn't make any sense." It is just not credible to me that Leila who made such a point of honesty in relationships would pretend that nothing had happened when she checks in on her spaced-out friend with quizzical concern, snuggles right back into that same bed for an affectionate half-argument about her landlord potential. "I'm sure there are dishwasher catalogues still being produced somewhere in the world." Still, as if something of the dream had seeped out Schrödinger's between them, we remember that it was Leila who winkled her way into an embrace of the normally standoffish Ruby, who had her arms wrapped around her friend as she delivered what sure sounded like a queerplatonic proposal: "Look, if we both end up single because we both don't want kids, at least we'll have each other. We can have our own wedding." The last shots of the film find them almost in abstract, eyes meeting in the rear view mirror, elbows resting on the center console as the telephone poles and the blue-scaled Pacific flick by. It promises nothing and feels like a possibility. Perhaps it was not only Ruby's dream.

I can't know for certain, of course, and it seems to matter to the filmmaker that I should not know, but even if all that has changed is Ruby's own awareness, it's worth devoting this immersive hangout of a short film to. The meditative score by Karsten Osterby sounds at once chill and expectant, at times almost drowning the dialogue as if zoning the audience out into Ruby. The visible grain and occasional flaw in the film keep it haptically grounded, a memento of Polaroids instead of digitally-filtered socials. For every philosophizing moment like "Do you ever have those dreams where you wake up and you go about your day and get ready and everything feels normal, but then you wake up and you're still in bed, so you're like, 'Oh, was I sleeping or was that real?'" there's the ouchily familiar beat where Ruby and Leila realize simultaneously that neither of them knows the name of Chloe's fiancé, just the fact that he's a landlord. Whatever, it's an exquisite counterweight to heteronormativity, a leaf-light of queerness at the most marital-industrial of times. I found it on Vimeo and it's on YouTube, too. This catalogue brought to you by my single backers at Patreon.

I wish to express my strenuous distaste for this week starting off with the curtain rod falling onto my head as I stepped into the shower with such force that spatch heard the noise of stainless steel onto skull from the bedroom. It hurt appallingly. It still doesn't feel so hot. I called after-hours care and was duly presented with a checklist of symptoms of concussion and brain bleed to watch out for, an activity not exactly compatible with attempting to plunge myself into unconsciousness for the few short hours before I need to be functional for already scheduled calls and appointments. I would like to know who I need to sacrifice to get a break. I always liked haruspicy. I know it's your own liver that counts.