The 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.NYTIMES
Geoff Dyer’s ‘Zona’ Examines the Film ‘Stalker’
Geoff Dyer on the Soviet-era cinematic masterpiece.
tzal.org
Acquired 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
YouTube
Stalker trailer for the 2017 restoration
First time I watched Stalker was on VHS (a double tape feature) in a 14 tube TV. So I guess it was a bit blurry.