portuguêsMonkey
MONKEY, IN PROFILE and in colour, still wearing that autumnal gold-brown headscarf, reading. Reading in the way people used to read, before there were so many books that they became a bit of a nuisance and burden, before there was even an inkling of the Kindle. Smoke is drifting. Nice-looking smoke, incense. Floating blossom. The loud cheep and chirrup of birds: Zone sounds, Zone blossom. But also the railroad and dockside moan of horns— sounds that were nowhere to be heard in the Zone, the quietest place on earth. We are on the brink, here, of one of the all-redeeming moments of any art form. It can’t be isolated from what has gone before, it gathers into itself the whole film. But by ‘all-redeeming’ I don’t just mean in the context of this film. It redeems, makes up for, every pointless bit of gore, every wasted special effect, all the stupidity in every film made before or since. Oh well, you think, none of that matters, all of that is worth it, for this. Geoff Dyer, Zona
tzal.orgAcquired Taste
“It was not a case of love at first sight: the first time I saw Stalker I was slightly bored and unmoved. I wasn’t overwhelmed (to put it slightly stupidly, I had no idea that, thirty years later, I would end up writing an entire book about it), but it was an experience I couldn’t shake off. Something about it stayed with me.” Geoff Dyer, Zona
INDEPENDENTZona by Geoff Dyer
Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker, released in the USSR in 1979, radiates an enduring sense of mystery and disquiet. I have seen it five times, though viewing can feel like a penance. // Tarkovsky erupted: it actually needed to be slower and duller at the start so that anyone who had walked into the wrong theatre would have time to leave before the action got under way.
tzal.orgThe Room Reveals All
What you get is not what you think you wish for but what you most deeply wish for. In which case my fear is that my deepest wish might not be to have had Jane sitting on my face and Cindy on my dick but something really embarrassing, something that I would not want to be made public. Like what? That instead of basking in the fact that I’d managed to get a squalid, rent-controlled flat in Brixton I’d somehow cobbled together money for the deposit to buy a flat in the area when prices, as a result of the riots—or ‘uprisings’ as we insisted on calling them—were at an alltime low, ideally a council flat during the big Thatcherite sell-off to which we were all bitterly opposed. I bet that’s the universal wish of most people in the Western world: that they’d got on the property ladder earlier.
If you see any merit on this website's content, please spread the word—comment and share on social networks. It is a practice of generosity that helps my own practice of generosity in producing and making this content available.
(except where explicitly otherwise indicated)
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 
