sunfeather

Friday, after work, Emma C and I go and watch Gus Van Sant's Last Days. Emma C, who obviously doesn't go to the cinema very often, thinks it's the best American film she's seen since The Conversation (1974). I, who go to the cinema every week, think it's only the third truly interesting film I've seen this year (after Million Dollar Baby and Mysterious Skin). We both agree that the scene in which the Kurt Cobain character (Michael Pitt) squirrels around in his home studio layering feedback upon feedback while the camera remains discreetly outside in the trees, offering no clues to the mystery of artistic creation, is the most beautiful thing in the film, the moment where it tips over into greatness.
(I could say more but I'd like to see it again. I think it's a film about America, and the best Gus Van Sant has ever made, so much better than the over-inflated Elephant. It's a film about a country where half the population is buying helplessly into the lies of capitalism and religion and the other half is opting out entirely but finding nowhere to go. And yet, this remarkably generous film has as much sympathy for both camps, even as it exposes the alternative crowd's suspect re-investments in the comforts of god and money.)

Afterwards, buoyed with wonder, we go to a cute cellar bar in Leamington Spa where, over tapas and a vinegary bottle of house red, Emma C tells me about her history of depression and eating disorders (yeah, that again) and I tell her about mine (not that I've ever had eating disorders). And I'm sitting there grinning to myself thinking that this combination of a history of pain and self-hatred welded to a settled state of beauty, intellect and style is precisely what I want in a woman, I'm sitting there thinking Emma C is marriage material.

And when we get kicked out around midnight, she invites me back to her place for more drinking, and obviously I go. And it's only around 1:30 in the morning, when I'm fingering the absent elephant in her key-ring, that she casually mentions her 'partner', 'Guy', who's a 'medieval historian' at 'York university'. I mean fucking hell. Why do they always wait until after they've invited you back and you've missed your last bus to tell you about their partner? No wonder she doesn't understand when I try to explain Michel Houellebecq's theory of the international sexual economy and those who are condemned to live outside it.

Emma C wears perfume by Issey Miyake, who I never did like. Too clean by half.

By the end of the night, I have drunk well over a bottle of wine, two cosmopolitans and a couple of beers. I pass out and seep my acrid alcoholic sweat over the crisp white sheets of Emma C's spare bedroom.