Visual Diary #23

The sea , the sea, The Morning Stars, a flaw running through it & heterotopias

Hi readers,

I’m tired today and not up to much, apart from being mildly excited that Barry Williams is in I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Here’s a clip from the Brady Bunch episode where Greg turns his dad’s den into a funky pad. This week I have done a lot of cleaning and culling. I vacuumed up enough dog hair to knit a jumper and washed the windows and moved the furniture around. A friend once told me that when Capricorns don’t know what to do they move the furniture around. I didn’t write as much as I wanted to (hence cleaning/culling/moving) but hopefully my subconscious is hard at it.

Meanwhile some hasty pictures:

This is the beach on a day where it looked like it was all disappearing into itself.

This is Tito Yupanqui and Khosinaira ‘The Morning Stars’ on their album Gods and Demons of Bolivia (Folk Songs of Magic, Love and Fiesta), a speculative op shop buy that has paid for itself many times over in the last two weeks. (He is playing some kind of Incan pipe and she is holding up Cantua, being the sacred flower of Peru!) Can’t find anything on Youtube to share but it is on Spotify …

This is the house from the movie Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier 2025) - loved the film - about a prodigal father, family home as holder of secrets, sad sisters, movie-making, breakdowns, patterns, echoes. It opens with child Nora’s assignment: to write from an object’s POV. The object she chooses is the house. There’s a very nice line about the flaw that runs through the house, so you know early on that this is going to be a film about the cracks. The house exists in real, and is in Oslo. I read a bunch of articles about how they built sets of the house - because they had to go through so many eras/emotions, and it was just easier that way.

Tommy: “Is it serious or something?”

Andy: “He makes my heart beat.”

A scene from Gregg Araki’s Totally F***ed Up (1993) which I somehow missed at the time - it’s part of his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy that includes Nowhere and The Doom Generation. It follows a group of queer characters as they wander around ghost town “gay mecca” Los Angeles, trying for sex or maybe even romance, or just existence, while dealing with homophobia and weltschmerz and rage. It’s sometimes kitschy and sometimes clunky, sometimes very funny, a lot of the shots look kind of like a graphic novel - especially the way Araki shoots figures against the city, landmark buildings, neons. (Afterwards I was looking to see if anyone has written anything about the way he uses space/isolation, made me think of the idea of teenagers out in the world always being in contested territory - maybe I will have to try and write something.) On the whole I found it great but totally sad. To quote from the film: “Can this world really be as sad as it seems?) Love how the story is told in vignettes with titles ( ….), love the soundtrack but oh- the ending! NB: Great and recent interview with Gregg Araki here on Synth History. Watched on MUBI.