Karen slept with her when they shared a flat on The Corso and Helena was dabbling in film, acting, running and so forth and Karen was a USP freshman . . . though Karen may have been totally lying and just trying to get a reaction from me. Then it didn’t happen at all. It’s difficult to tell.
Karen looks up in my direction. I phone shoot them both in American shot, shaking their heads and grinning like juveniles, and then I call out from behind the Kencaf: “Hi, Helena.”
“What’s got into you, Ciaran?”
I don’t bite at this and just go on filming until the waitress, who reminds me of Drew Barrymore, comes over to take Helena’s order.
“You won’t believe this,” says Helena, “but what I really want is the moussaka, but I know it’s like impossible. So I guess I’ll just have the au lait—a Kenyan—and, by the way, is it okay to use the . . . ?”
Drew Barrymore points her out through the bead curtain (Candia is, to my mind, a cross between ’70s retro and a place done over with nice white enamel touch of Zanussi) and Helena, first lighting an MB Light Tar, then leaving it smoking in foil ashtray on the table, sidles out.
For some reason Karen has her face dipped into her Viennese, which she has half drunk, staring at me, and I think it’s just lucky that Candia serves decent sized coffees or she wouldn’t be able to do whatever she thinks she’s doing. I try to ignore her and, looking out into the mall where maybe a hundred people are now sliding past in the direction of The Eastside and Grantham which have not yet opened but which have turned on their music which sends into the mall Sex and Candy by Marcia Playground and also The Daddy of The All by The Space Monkeys which really surprises me, I describe to her for no good reason the differences between J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear made in 1962 and starring Robert Mitchum and Mark Scorsese’s Cape Fear, made in 1991 and starring Robert de Niro. This is basically the difference between Polly Bergen and Jessica Lang and just how good Juliette Lewis really was. Personally, I think Gregory Peck had no range.
“So Ciaran,” says Helena, returning, “what’s your film going to be about anyway?”
I think that maybe I would like to phone film her in a thunderstorm on the beach with the sea the color of gunmetal like something out of Apocalypse Now, but put this aside and answer (lying a little):
“Actually Helena, it’s about Karen.”
Karen smiles, finishing her coffee, and Helena, who tips two packets of NutraSweet into her au lait which has arrived, pulls her white gloss lips into a shape which resembles one moon smothering another:
“Koo-key!” she says, lighting another cigarette, inhaling. “You’re one weird guy Ciaran.”
5
I think this is totally relevant:
Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
Also this, more accurately:
Whereas the reading time of a book is up to the reader, the viewing time of a film is set by the filmmaker and the images are perceived as fast or as slowly as editing permits.
(Library Shelf: T055589, Susan Sontag,
On Photography, Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1977, 23, 81)
So fab!
6
In the video shop where Karen works there are four other assistants. Neve Campbell, Liv Tyler, David (Duchovny, possibly) and Denise Richards. The place is owned by Nic Cage. I mean, seriously.
Now I know this sounds crazy but you can make of it what you will. I figure everyone has a role model and, to be honest, they could do worse. Also, I just want to set the record straight that I don’t have a thing about Gwyneth Paltrow. Not even when she was going out with Brad Pitt and starred in Mrs. Parker and The Vicious Circle, which was filmed in three weeks using three Bolex’s, I’m told, did I have a thing about Gwyneth Paltrow. The fact is, I can take or leave Gwyneth Paltrow and felt exactly that way when she was interviewed by Film Mania—or was it Cine-Ma?—and said, and I quote, “I need to express every emotion that I have, the second that I’m having it, which is bad.” Actually, I think she should have kept her hair long, too. But, of course, they can do something about that with hair extensions and thinking that she had better hair in Sliding Doors than any other film is no indication that I have a thing about Gwyneth Paltrow. It’s just that very few women look like her. Hell, Karen is trying her best to look like a younger Ingrid Bergman, and she does (enough anyway)!
I crouch in Modern Film Classics while Karen, coming in from the backroom, and from the left, ten minutes after opening, makes some comment about some writer or another looking like Rene Russo. To which I call out: “O, right, who exactly?”
I phone shoot her in medium shot with a wall of films by Scorsese behind her.
I believe the world’s most perfect car is a white 1968 Corvette Stingray convertible. That also is a classic. A Scorsese classic is like that. Definable—to the knowledgeable—by its parts. The ’68 ‘vette has a large block V8 developing a maximum power of 339 bhp at 4800 rpm. The nose style is straight, zippered, like an Empire fighter from Star Wars IV. The motor is blueprinted and the wheels, naturally, are deep dish alloy. There’s a gauge for oil pressure, battery, and a tachometer which redlines at 6000. The instruments are heavily cowled (meaning, they are set back in circular slots). The upholstery is cowhide, in white. I would fit, personally, a twelve disc CD auto-changer or more probably use the MP3 from my phone and plug that into an amp, probably a Class D Monoblock Premium Digital Amplifiers Series Amplifier, though I’m also partial to Kenwood. But that’s another story, and as long as it has dynamic base control and a joystick remote changer then that’s fine by me.
Things seem to go well this morning. Supa-Video is down below the street and, at first, there’s no one much coming in, just a woman of about one hundred and twenty who seems to be looking for a doco on natural dietary fiber and then changes her mind and stands with her wheely bag in front of a dump bin full of 3 for the price of 1’s. I try to defocus dissolve her but for a long time no one else enters and the shelves impose too much contrast of a kind I’m not happy with and I decide on editing the sequence so that when three GI Janes walk in down the stairs I’m ready for some light relief and give them considerable gravity as they move between the bright of the street and the dark of the shop.
“Cast your eyes,” whispers Karen to David Duchovny, with whom she is now loading shelves from a box marked RETURNS, because she can see that the Janes are not from any known university but from the community college, Machin College (named, apparently, after some local poke who discovered, sometime around the last pass of Haleys, the reason why Saturn has its rings and Mars its Martians). They wear zip pocket skirts, strap vests, black, fetish shop pvc, KA boots.
“What are these three looking for,” says Karen to David, “the life and times of the New York Dolls?”
Duchovny, in close-up, begins to sing in a voice which is a mere whisper but certainly masculine and the words that come out are the lyrics to Alison by Elvis Costello. Duchovny was born, as this confirms, in 1960. “This world is killing you. Al-li-son” and all the while he keeps his eyes looking straight at Karen, with a intensity which can’t have just come out of nowhere.”—your aim is true.”
Meaning that
