Following the unnecessarily exciting events of yesterday, I did as much of nothing as I could for the rest of the night, primarily characterized by eating a lot of chicken noodle soup, reading underneath a cat, and watching movies with and without ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch. Today my neck hurts and I am eating chicken coconut soup for a change. I have been listening to Grian Chatten's "Fairlies" (2023) on repeat.
It has become inescapable to me that I am doing nothing creative except for the debatable category of my film reviews. I am frustrated about it, but then I am also frustrated that I am not writing more about movies, since it is an application of my brain I actively enjoy. Really I just want the capacity to do more than one or two things a day. I remember taking it for granted; it was fun.
In response to a request for appreciations of beautiful '90's actors, I wrote:
He was credited as Kevin Collins in Derek Jarman's The Garden (1990), Edward II (1991), and Wittgenstein (1993) and he appears under the alias of "Hinney Beast" or "HB" in Jarman's diaries, but when he died in 2018 I discovered that his name was Keith Collins and he had not been the director's lover as I had assumed from his importance in Jarman's life but a partner in all other ways, an intimate muse and helpmeet and fiercely practical in his preservation of Jarman's memory, though not to the exclusion of a long-term lover, later husband of his own. I knew none of these facts when I saw him in Edward II as Lightborn, the jailer of the imprisoned king with his welder's stubble and his slicked-black hair, his long-planed face that a leather jacket and an enigmatic Geordie accent make look as closed and tough as it suddenly opens in the eucatastrophe of Jarman's ending, where the sadistic death of the hot poker is Edward's hell-lit nightmare and in the defiant reality of the film, Lightborn throws away the gross implement where it sinks in a ghost of screams and kisses his king, not like a lover, but like a blessing. In a rainbow of student's rugby sweats in Wittgenstein, he's as luminously, ludicrously chiseled as some Cambridge ideal of sport and candid aesthetics, but he's not too much of an object to hold his own in affectionate argument with his prickly lover—a composite of real-life boyfriends—or hold his hand in the cinema, his eyelashes so thick and dark they look like kohl around his clearwater eyes, a tattoo of roses revealed on his naked shoulder as they lie together in bed. I have never seen him in The Garden, for years because it was difficult to get hold of and lately because it is supposed to be the hardest of Jarman's films to watch, made as it was in a despair of Thatcherism and AIDS, but I have nonetheless seen a wonderful still of Collins kissing Johnny Mills on a shingle beach in the lee of a weathered boat, their white shirts open and their long legs tangled in pinstriped trousers, like a Forster novel that didn't happen. He kept Jarman's cottage to the end of his life; he kept his beauty and should not have died young, not from AIDS, but it still feels like cheating. He never acted for anyone else. He could have; his face was not the only interesting thing about him, although well worth the appreciation.
spatch. Today my neck hurts and I am eating chicken coconut soup for a change. I have been listening to Grian Chatten's "Fairlies" (2023) on repeat.It has become inescapable to me that I am doing nothing creative except for the debatable category of my film reviews. I am frustrated about it, but then I am also frustrated that I am not writing more about movies, since it is an application of my brain I actively enjoy. Really I just want the capacity to do more than one or two things a day. I remember taking it for granted; it was fun.
In response to a request for appreciations of beautiful '90's actors, I wrote:
He was credited as Kevin Collins in Derek Jarman's The Garden (1990), Edward II (1991), and Wittgenstein (1993) and he appears under the alias of "Hinney Beast" or "HB" in Jarman's diaries, but when he died in 2018 I discovered that his name was Keith Collins and he had not been the director's lover as I had assumed from his importance in Jarman's life but a partner in all other ways, an intimate muse and helpmeet and fiercely practical in his preservation of Jarman's memory, though not to the exclusion of a long-term lover, later husband of his own. I knew none of these facts when I saw him in Edward II as Lightborn, the jailer of the imprisoned king with his welder's stubble and his slicked-black hair, his long-planed face that a leather jacket and an enigmatic Geordie accent make look as closed and tough as it suddenly opens in the eucatastrophe of Jarman's ending, where the sadistic death of the hot poker is Edward's hell-lit nightmare and in the defiant reality of the film, Lightborn throws away the gross implement where it sinks in a ghost of screams and kisses his king, not like a lover, but like a blessing. In a rainbow of student's rugby sweats in Wittgenstein, he's as luminously, ludicrously chiseled as some Cambridge ideal of sport and candid aesthetics, but he's not too much of an object to hold his own in affectionate argument with his prickly lover—a composite of real-life boyfriends—or hold his hand in the cinema, his eyelashes so thick and dark they look like kohl around his clearwater eyes, a tattoo of roses revealed on his naked shoulder as they lie together in bed. I have never seen him in The Garden, for years because it was difficult to get hold of and lately because it is supposed to be the hardest of Jarman's films to watch, made as it was in a despair of Thatcherism and AIDS, but I have nonetheless seen a wonderful still of Collins kissing Johnny Mills on a shingle beach in the lee of a weathered boat, their white shirts open and their long legs tangled in pinstriped trousers, like a Forster novel that didn't happen. He kept Jarman's cottage to the end of his life; he kept his beauty and should not have died young, not from AIDS, but it still feels like cheating. He never acted for anyone else. He could have; his face was not the only interesting thing about him, although well worth the appreciation.
