I am so fucking distracted not only accidentally distracted by an event that happened on this morning’s trip from the village to the house but by trying to be intentionally distracted. However, inside these diversions I’m searching for a driving force that will direct my performance.
He has shouted again in his insidious, attractive Bavarian accent. He is a child and I literally can’t stand his voice any longer. But what can I do? More plays in dreary Darmstadt?
Oh, this is good. I’ve already wasted 15 seconds. It’s really not easy putting on this state of mind, this necessary exercise; a constant internal monologue. Distraction, concentration, and distortion.
Slowly I lift my head and I can feel the second camera taking over, Andrea looks knowingly pensive.
The wind in the trees has a perfect momentum echoing the delicate sound of nothing being played on the turntable. Last night at the bar Raben was trying out records, matching composers to pills. He ended with what he will dub the scene with; an all too obvious choice of Mahler’s eighth symphony, he is such a sentimental phony, why is he still around? Did R.W. not stop fucking him last year?
It’s easy to smile and I can tell R.W. is enjoying this. I drink in his eternal character and externalize it through the tight corners of my lips, hoping and knowing that the lip-gloss has a perfect, tight uncrackable surface. Why can I never believe a reality that someone else creates, even when it is on my own body?
I just don’t have faith, spiritually or practically.
The truth evades me in every splintered second. Anxiety crawls into every part of my body and always has control…
Good, this is working I can turn my head, keep the smile, keep the negative thoughts yet remember as R.W. said ‘like a machine, a romantic anarchy in movement.’ I therefore turn my head as if it were a perfect sphere locked onto a pole, joined by a greased socket. Then I let my lungs take over. The inward and outward movement of air brings the entire gesture to a perfectly choreographed conclusion.
The rolodex in my mind flutters like a cloud of bees escaping small puffs of smoke. I’m searching for yet another character. I feel the camera over my left shoulder. I put my left hand in a clutched position (I imagine the bee keepers smoke gun in my grip) and I move my hand towards the open packed of unmarked cigarettes.
For an instant I see my nail under a microscope. Tessellating plates of hard matter, interlocking lines, jagged like the peaks in a dried up muddy puddle. I slowly pull my hand back. I have managed to use only my middle finger and thumb to remove the cigarette. I have completely avoided using my index finger lending an air of exact complicity to the act. I want the lens to see the full cigarette, both colors, dirty speckled orange and off white. I drag it through the frame and over the mirror; its reflection is tantalizingly blurry. The bees have been chased away by the time I pick up the lighter.
It is all I can do to muster the energy that is needed to keep my concentration on the formless dimension I have created with the resulting smoke.
I let my mind become opaque with the imagined noxious world of gray fumes.
I haven’t blinked throughout this thought.
Again I mentally prepare another fictitious mood. I know the camera has pulled back. R.W. can only think in specific compositions and he is looking for another one.
I quickly raise the cigarette to my mouth. I want the trees ruffled by the wind to frame this action. The trees will decorate the edges of my form and imply a stark contrast between the suicidal tendencies of a human being and the unrestrained shape of nature.
I raise the lighter bringing it to the cigarette. For a very short moment I reach back 6 seconds and grab the mechanized articulation I used on my neck pointing my attention to my hand. The lighter’s hinge makes a sharp noise, the cigarette ignites and I inhale. It’s disgusting and has a peculiar armor of wet logs sprinkled with cinnamon. The feeling of the smoke in my lungs completely envelop my body. I let a small cloud of smoke linger on my lips and I inhale.
My dead brother, my poor dead brother is alone.
This is not working so I concentrate on a workman I saw 13 years ago at 5.31am on a Tuesday morning when because of by ex-husbands bizarre habits I couldn’t sleep.
I focus on the memory of the stranger’s hands; wrinkles, dark yellow skin, veins, cracked fingernails. His fingertips are worn smooth by handling hundreds of cold glass objects.
I tap the ash. I pick up a small blush brush in the same mechanical gesture. Before I bring it to my face, I imagine the instant the man’s little finger glanced the cold white object. The object splinters. I feel the glass separating the flesh from the food, magnifying the milk. I gently stroke my face drawing the brush slowly across my cheek.
My distraction is intentional. I hope the image of the man will complicate my action to create an atmosphere of childhood innocence, the child that Andrea is playing across the room.
The glass bottle in my daydream looses its comfortable form and becomes a single hook tearing at the man’s hand, drawing a line from his thumb to his wrist. Blood slowly, neatly, cleanly flows.
I channel this image to refresh my body language.
I spin my head (again mechanically) to look at Andrea. I have not forgotten my eyes, heavily made up they flick into action highlighting my characters vanity. This introduces Andrea’s character and the inhuman distance between my thought and actions and the very human love of a mother for a child. I know the shot has changed but I keep firm and Andrea raises her head, her blue eyes like the workman’s meet my own.
Immediately yet slowly I swing my right leg onto the floor. The vibration of the impact echoes through my leg and I use it to shake off my melancholic persona of the last 76 seconds. This is a disciplined and well-practiced move, one I have been using in films with R.W. since The Bitter Tears.
I move casually across the carpet letting my whole body subtly curve and glide. I hold my cigarette up to echo the previous movement’s frozen anxiety. Then I calmly raise it to my lips, my eyes at the same time focus on the orange dot placed by R.W. to create an exact diagonal between the, the center of my pupil and the frame of the camera. I imagine all the other orange dots strewn across the room designed to create an image the audience’s eyes will follow and subconsciously interpret.
I raise my head slowly and while looking past the new Aalon 35mm gingerly clutched by Michael I utter the first work of the film,
‘Schon.’
In this final collaborative A Moment of Eternal Noise Exquisite Corpse the project started with an image created by Alex Eagleton this was given to Ebe Oke who donated the song, this was sent to Richard Evans who wrote the text.
The text is a fictional internal monologue imagining what the actor Margit Carstensen could have been thinking before the first word uttered at 92 seconds into Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1976 movie Chinese Roulette.
The title Coolsville was picked at random from all of Laurie Anderson‘s commercial recordings that use a place name as the title. The date is a randomly generated number from 0 to 2014.
A MOMENT OF ETERNAL NOISE 