Liv Barrett:
Spray the same perfume to clothes or the pulses of a body, everyday, and eventually the scent will no longer register. Repetition is a performance of love, eventually it erodes its object.
A movie is an island: it is aware of the world beyond its edge, but the edge is always visible. The opening sequence of Mister Lonely follows a Michael Jackson impersonator on a small motorbike around a practice track. A toy imitates a monkey and the song Mister Lonely plays, of course. The sequence ends, there is a technical fault in the cinema and the projection of the film cuts out. The cinema operators recommence the film from the beginning. The second time the opening sequence is played it feels much shorter. It seems the first time you experience something you can’t appreciate its distance.
Their life is like playing the eternal football game… There is always football being played on the island, because it is perpetual, a game can never be repeated, so M plays everyday and everyday it is the same and everyday it is different. He watches a movie, although in fact it is a documentary about movies, called Los Angeles Plays Itself. Everything about the place seems so loaded with meaning. A different video plays through M’s mind, two people in a car, subtitles read: Something happens, then it happens again, this is meaning. Yet a song or perfume may be repeated too often and some meaning disappears because its vitality is somehow diminished through familiarity. Los Angeles is always repeated in movies, so everything about that LA island, that M watches from his own island, seems so meaningful until the narrator says that really it is just a very convenient location, because it is just there, just outside all the studios. M sprays perfume in front of him and walks through the mist, this way the fragrance is a little bit weaker than how it smells in the bottle. In the bottle it is an object, in the air it contributes to atmosphere. Atmosphere is what spaces have instead of emotions. M prefers perfume ads in magazines that do not contain a sample of the smell, he considers the atmosphere inferred in the advertising image to be more descriptive and of course there is always a slight scent of the cheap glue. Perfume titles include Obsession, Mystere and Island Bermuda.
The only way to reach the island is by plane.
I threw up twice before getting on the plane.
36. Dear Dick,
No woman is an island-ess. We fall in love in hope of anchoring ourselves to someone else, to keep from falling.
—Chris Kraus, I Love Dick
When you wrote to me I thought of a story that is stuck in a loop.
M lives on an island. Each day the sun rises and falls.
