#teju cole
If you’re too loyal to your own suffering, you forget that others suffer, too.
—Teju Cole
[Dallapagina/progetto Instagram del curatore d'arte Hans Ulrich Obrist]
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These days, it often seems the world has tilted on its axis: nothing is the same, we’ve broken with the past, there’s no going back. But we’ve still got an old friend kicking around—the barf bag. In these uncertain times, Hollywood’s horror filmmakers still turn to sick bags as a primo promotional gag. For there is still vomit in this realm, and still a need to contain it in the face of extreme spectacle. Cara Buckley writes: “After a moviegoer apparently vomited during a Los Angeles screening of the French coming-of-age cannibal flick, Raw, the theater began handing out barf bags … The move is a vintage publicity stunt going back some fifty years. Among the standout bags in movie history: The keepsake vomit bag from the 1963 splatter film Blood Feast came with an encouragement, ‘Spill your guts out!’ ‘Guaranteed to upset your stomach!’ proclaimed the bag from the 1981 Italian film Cannibal Ferox. The bag for The Beyond (1981) came with the thoughtfully worded warning, ‘Individuals with sensitive constitutions may experience stomach distress,’ and advised that the bag be used only once and not overfilled.”
This and more in today’s culture roundup.
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Before I entered the door, holding it open with relief and gratitude, it occurred to me to look straight up, and much to my surprise, there were stars. Stars! I hadn’t thought I would be able to see them, not with the light pollution perpetually wreathing the city, and not on a night on which it had been raining. But the rain had stopped while I was climbing down, and had washed the air clean. The miasma of Manhattan’s electric lights did not go very far up into the sky, and in the moonless night, the sky was like a roof shot through with light, and heaven itself shimmered. Wonderful stars, a distant cloud of fireflies: but I felt in my body what my eyes could not grasp, which was that their true nature was the persisting visual echo of something that was already in the past. In the unfathomable ages it took for light to cross such distances, the light source itself had in some cases been long extinguished, its dark remains stretched away from us at even greater speeds.
FRAGMENTVM Open City
Prius quam grato animo suspirans in ianuam apertam intrabam, in mentem venit quod caelum est spectandum, et imprudens sidera conspexi. Ecce sidera! Propter magnarum lucum orbem et imbres eodem die fieri posse non credideram, imbres autem quae dissipata me descendente erant puras aeres laverunt nubesque Manhattani lucentis haud alte in altum pertinebant ut caelum defecta luna sicut tectum lucibus perforaretur luceretque. Mirabiles spectatu, cicendelae longinquae! Quod oculis non poteram id meo corpore sentiebam, quod imagines candidae verorum mortuorum mihi semper reddebantur. Lux igne interdum diu exstincto innumeros annos ad nostram terram intendit dum cinis ater celerius fugiunt.
