From Ian to Debbie ♥

I wish I were a Warhol silk screen

Hanging on the wall

Or little Joe or maybe Lou

I’d love to be them all

All New York City’s broken hearts

And secrets would be mine

I’d put you on a movie reel

And that would be just fine”

—

St Valentine’s Day poem

from Ian to Debbie, 1973

Yes, he really had done it...

I stared at him, he was so still.

 Then the rope - I hadn’t noticed the rope. 

The rope from the clothes rack was around his neck. 

I ran through to the sitting room and picked up the telephone. 

No, supposing I was wrong - another false alarm. 

I ran back to the kitchen and looked at his face - 

a long string of saliva hung from his mouth. 

Yes, he really had done it. 

What to do next? 

I looked around the room expecting to see 

Ian standing in a corner watching my reaction. 

My instinct that he was playing a cruel trick

I believe Ian chose his deadline

I believe Ian chose his deadline. 

It was important to keep up the charade in front 

of the band in case they tried to dissuade him. 

The only reason he was no longer worried about 

the American trip was because he knew that...

 he wasn’t going

Gentleness and thoughtful sincerity

People who knew Ian remember him for his gentleness and thoughtful sincerity. Possessions never really meant a great deal to him and, although his passion lay with buying records, once the shine had worn off he would be amenable to lending or giving them away. He was generous to a fault and it seemed to give him much pleasure

He’s dancing really great...

I saw three attacks and it was always two-thirds of the way through a set. And it came to a point where in the last year, you’d watch the group and suddenly you’d feel Ian may be dancing great and suddenly he’s dancing really great. Hooky and Barney would be looking nervously at the stage and you could see what was going through their minds. So I always presumed that it wasn’t because he wasn’t taking the tablets, but that he wasn’t taking enough. For something was happening within a set, doing what he did, that actually took him to that point, that actually overcame the drugs and made him have the attack

He killed himself on Saturday night...

He killed himself on Saturday night.

 I couldn’t believe it. 

He must have been a pretty good actor. 

We didn’t have a bleeding clue what was going on. 

You tried to help him with your limited experience and 

you did what you could, but as soon as you left him he went back, 

you know?

I took it as a pinch of salt...

When he told me that he had no intention of living beyond his early twenties, I took it as a pinch of salt, assumed it was a phase and that he would grow out of it. 

He seemed terribly young to have already made the decision that life was not worth living

Why, you wouldn’t recognize love if you met it!

Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn’t! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate. 

Why, you wouldn’t recognize love if you met it! You’d suspect love! You’d think there was something behind it some motive, some trick.

In rage or in love...

Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in this small space, standing elbow to elbow cooking at a small stove, squeezing past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same small bathroom mirror, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping into each other’s bodies by mistake or on purpose, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly, impatiently, in rage or in love ... think what deep though invisible tracks they must leave, everywhere, behind them!

I am horribly limited

I can never read all the books I want;

 I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. 

I can never train myself in all the skills I want. 

And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, 

tones and variations of mental 

and physical experience possible in life. 

And I am horribly limited

Death must be so beautiful.

Death must be so beautiful. 

To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses 

waving above one's head, and listen to silence.

 To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. 

To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace

I have to live my life...

I love people. Everybody. I love them, 
I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. 
Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation 
is raw material for me. 
My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either.
 I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, 
and then come back to write about my thoughts,
 my emotions, as that person. 
But I am not omniscient. 
I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. 
And you cannot regard your own life 
with objective curiosity all the time...

All I want is blackness...blackness and silence.

Sometimes I feel like I am not… Solid. 
I'm hollow. There’s… Nothing behind my eyes.
 I'm a negative of a person. 
It's as if I never... I never thought anything. 
I never wrote... anything, I never felt anything. 
All I want is blackness... 
blackness and silence. 
Look, one thing I do know about death.. 
is it is not a...a reunion or a homecoming. 
There's... there is no your life doesn't flash 
before you and the missing pieces of you dont click into place. 
Its just…. there's fuck all. 
There is nothing. 
So what do you do when your life... gets as bad it can. 
And just keeps getting worse

Just to make myselfmore attractive to you

I never wanted to kill.

l am not naturally evil

Such things I do just to make myselfmore
 attractive to you

Have I failed!

The mysterious magnet is either there

One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. 

To feel physically comfortable with someone else's 

body is not a decision you can make. 

It has very little to do with how two people 

think or act or talk or even look. 

The mysterious magnet is either there, 

buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not. 

When it isn't there (as I have learned in the past, with heartbreaking clarity) you can no more force it to exist than a surgeon can force a patient's body to accept a kidney from the wrong donor. 

My friend Annie says it all comes down to one simple question: 

"Do you want your belly pressed against 

this person's belly forever...or not?

In desperate love...

In desperate love, 

we always invent the characters of our partners, 

demanding they be what we need of them, 

and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform 

the role we created in the first place

Learn your way around loneliness.

When I get lonely these days, 
I think: So BE lonely, Liz. 

Learn your way around loneliness. 

Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. 

Welcome to the human experience.

 But never again use another person's 

body or emotions as a scratching post 

for your own unfulfilled yearnings

I am braver than Loneliness ♥

I’m here. I love you. 

I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, 

I will stay with you. 

There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. 

I will protect you until you die,

 and after your death I will still protect you. 

I am stronger than Depression and 

I am braver than Loneliness 

and nothing will ever exhaust me.

Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists & Dreamers

Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry 

Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers

an excursion into the American New Wave

Since the late 1990s, a subtle, subversive element has been at work within the staid confines of the Hollywood dream factory. Young filmmakers like Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, David O. Russell, Richard Linklater, and Sofia Coppola rode in on the coattails of the independent film movement that blossomed in the early 1990s and have managed to wage an aesthetic campaign against imaginative cowardice of all persuasions, much like their artistic forebears – the so-called Movie Brats Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Altman, and Ashby among others did in the 1970s...

That was one of Oskar's dreams

That was one of Oskar's dreams: 

to see someone executed in the electric chair. 

He had read that the blood started to boil, 

the body contorted itself in impossible angles. 

He also imagined that the person's hair caught on fire

 but he had no official source for this belief.