Will I see you again? he wanted to ask. But he was afraid of ruining everything.
He left the circle, and after waiting a long time caught a bus on the road back into the city proper. Whatever I do now, he said to himself on the bus, staring out the window at the volcano in [...]
She wanted him to say something. She wanted him to say it was alright, but more than that she wanted some ridiculous sort of reassurance that somehow it all didn’t matter. The enormity of what she’d done hadn’t sunk in. She hoped he wouldn’t hate her, and she could take some relief in that, because [...]
I love the ashes. I love the endless smoky twilight of Los Angeles. I love walking along Sunset Boulevard past the bistros where the Hollywood trash have to brush the black soot off their salmon linguini in white wine sauce before they can eat it. I love driving across one black ring after another all [...]
At the dawn of cinema these two tendencies were already evident in the split between the brothers Lumiere and George Melies, for whereas the former concerned themselves with realist spectacles such as the arrival of a train at a station or people sitting around playing cards, Melies invented the special effect as a tool by [...]
Listen. I’m going to try one more time. I don’t promise anything will come of it, or that I won’t try to put it off for as long as possible, or that in the meantime I may not have to do something sensible first, like find Viv for instance. I don’t promise that the deep [...]
America is where only memory divides the present from the future, and where the unconscious dreams of the people who live here understand that the Declaration of Independence was signed after Hiroshima, not before, and neither has yet happened (33).
People with nuclear imagination not only conceive of the abyss and confront it, but are liberated [...]
“The thing is, that movie last night is a completely different movie when you watch it by yourself. Why is that? Movies are supposed to be watched with other people, aren’t they? Isn’t that part of the point of movies - you know, one of those social ritual things, with everyone watching? It never occurred [...]
“You know, vicar,” Viking Man says, tossing away his half-devoured cigar, “for some reason I feel like maybe you and you alone would understand this, but God loves two things and that’s the Movies and the Bomb. Of all the monuments we’ve made to God over the last five thousand years, have there been any [...]
L.A. is all that’s left of America the Delirious. Long ago, in the movie theaters of the land, L.A. collectivized the American dark; it cleaned up the depraved whispers and messier impulses of America’s deeper recesses and reduced them to archetypes or, even better, commodities. L.A. insisted that the subconscious didn’t own us but we [...]