169. Despite his falling away from film, Kelley remains charmed by Joseph Cornell’s 1936 film Rose Hobart, a collage of found footage of a jungle b-movie called East of Borneo. Using scissors and tape, Cornell cut East of Borneo down from 77 minutes to 191/2, focusing fairly exclusively on shots of Rose Hobart, the movie’s spunky female lead. Cornell’s instructions for the film state that it should be screened with a soundtrack of Latin dance music, and that it should be projected through a deep blue filter, so as to bathe Rose in the color he so loved.
172. To stumble upon discarded canisters of a bad Hollywood movie, to cut the reels up in an effort to isolate the thing you love to gaze upon most, to project the resulting patchwork through the lens of your favorite color, alongside a bustling “tropical” soundtrack: this seems to me, right now, the perfect film.
187. Is it a related form of aggrandizement, to inflate a heartbreak into a sort of allegory? Losing what one loves is simpler, more common, than that. More precise. One could leave it, too, as it is. —Yet how can I explain, that every time I put a pin in the balloon of it, the balloon seems to swell back up as soon as I turn away from it?
188. How often I’ve imagined the bubble of body and breath you and I made, even though by now I can hardly remember what you look like, I can hardly see your face.
189. How often, in my private mind, have I choreographed ribbons of black and red in water, two serious ropes of heart and mind. The ink and the blood in the turquoise water: these are the colors inside the fucking.
190. What’s past is past. One could leave it as it is, too.
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