one of my favourite favourite movies ever. i still remember seeing begnini win his oscar, leaping all over the chairs. this movie is so beautiful & so heartbreaking at the same time. i always cry at the end. (& sometimes throughout) if you haven't seen it, get your hands on a copy NOW you heathen. more info here.
most gorgeous scene in a movie ever. (i may or may not have teared up just watching it to post.)
buongiorno principessa! stanotte t'ho sognato tutta la notte, andavamo al cinema, e avevi quel tailleur rosa che ti piace tanto, non penso che a te, principessa, penso sempre a te!
a lovestruck romeo sings the streets a serenade laying everybody low with a lovesong that he made finds a streetlight, steps out of the shade says something like "you & me babe, how about it?"
juliet says "hey it's romeo. you nearly give me a heart attack" he's underneath the window, she's singing "hey la, my boyfriend's back" "you shouldn't come around here, singing up at people like that... anyway, what you gonna do about it?"
juliet, the dice was loaded from the start & i bet, & you exploded into my heart & i forget i forget the movie song when you gonna realise it was just that the time was wrong? juliet
come up on different streets, both were streets of shame both dirty, both mean, yes & the dream was just the same & i dreamed your dream for you & now your dream is real how can you look at me as if i was just another one of your deals?
& you can fall for chains of silver, you can fall for chains of gold you can fall for pretty strangers & the promises they hold you promised me everything, you promised me thick & thin yeah now you just say "oh romeo, yeah, you know i used to have a scene with him"
juliet, when we made love you used to cry you said "i love you like the stars above, i'll love you til i die" & there's a place for us, you know the movie song when you gonna realise it was just that the time was wrong? juliet
i can't do the talk like they talk on tv & i can't do a lovesong like the way it's meant to be i can't everything, but i'll do anything for you can't do anything except be in love with you
all i do is miss you & the way we used to be & all i do is keep the beat & bad company & all i do is kiss through the bars of a rhyme juliet i'd do the stars with you anytime you like
juliet, when we made love you used to cry you said "i love you like the stars above, i'll love you til i die" & there's a place for us, you know the movie song when you gonna realise it was just that the time was wrong? juliet
& a lovestruck romeo sings the streets a serenade laying everybody low with a lovesong that he made find a convenient streetlight, steps out of the shade says something like "you & me babe, how bout it?"
dire straits
not sure if this is the original filmclip or not but it's pretty hilarious. download here.
i hate the way you talk to me & the way your cut your hair. i hate the way you drive my car, i hate it when you stare. i hate your big dumb combat boots & the way you read my mind. i hate you so much it makes me sick; it even makes me rhyme. i hate the way you're always right, i hate it when you lie. i hate it when you make me laugh; even worse when you make me cry. i hate it when you're not around & the fact that you didn't call. but mostly i hate the way i don't hate you- not even close. not even a little bit. not even at all.
i really need to watch this movie again. ♥ oh heath.
1. My body opens over San Francisco like the day- light raining down each pore crying the change of light I am not with her I have been waking off and on all night to that pain not simply absence but the presence of the past destructive to living here and now Yet if I could instruct myself, if we could learn to learn from pain even as it grasps us if the mind, the mind that lives in this body could refuse to let itself be crushed in that grasp it would loosen Pain would have to stand off from me and listen its dark breath still on me but the mind could begin to speak to pain and pain would have to answer:
We are older now we have met before these are my hands before your eyes my figure blotting out all that is not mine I am the pain of division creator of divisions it is I who blot your lover from you and not the time-zones nor the miles It is not separation calls me forth but I who am separation And remember I have no existence apart from you
2. I believe I am choosing something new not to suffer uselessly yet still to feel Does the infant memorize the body of the mother and create her in absence? or simply cry primordial loneliness? does the bed of the stream once diverted mourning remember wetness? But we, we live so much in these configurations of the past I choose to separate her from my past we have not shared I choose not to suffer uselessly to detect primordial pain as it stalks toward me flashing its bleak torch in my eyes blotting out her particular being the details of her love I will not be divided from her or from myself by myths of separation while her mind and body in Manhattan are more with me than the smell of eucalyptus coolly burning on these hills
3. The world tells me I am its creature I am raked by eyes brushed by hands I want to crawl into her for refuge lay my head in the space between her breast and shoulder abnegating power for love as women have done or hiding from power in her love like a man I refuse these givens the splitting between love and action I am choosing not to suffer uselessly and not to use her I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence
another adrienne rich. i do adore her work. this one in particular.
Adrienne Rich (born May 16, 1929 - one day after me!) is an American poet, essayist & feminist.
"The pamphlet Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), which was incorporated into the following year's Dream of a Common Language (1978), marked the first direct treatment of lesbian desire and sexuality in her work."
this is one of my favourite poems. it is incredibly long, so i'm just going to post the passages that i like best.
II I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming. Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other, You've been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed: our friend the poet comes into my room where I've been writing for days, drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere, and I want to show her one poem which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate, and wake. You've kissed my hair to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem, I say, a poem I wanted to show someone... and I laugh and fall dreaming again of the desire to show you to everyone I love, to move openly together in the pull of gravity, which is not simple, which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.
II Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we're not young. Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty, my limbs streaming with purer joy? did I lean from my window over the city listening for the future as I listen with nerves tuned for your ring? And you, you move towards me with the same tempo. Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark of the blue-eyed grass of early summer the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring. At twenty, yes: we thought we'd live forever. At forty-five, I want to know even our limits. I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somehow, each of us must help the other die. IV I come home from you through the early light of Spring flashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado, the Discount Wares, the shoe-store...I'm lugging my sack of groceries, I dash for the elevator where a man, taut, elderly, carefully composed lets the door almost close on me. - For God sake hold it! I croak at him - Hysterical, - he breathes my way. I let myself into the kitchen, unload my bundles, make coffee, open the window, put on Nina Simone singing Here Comes the Sun...I open the mail, drinking delicious coffee, delicious music, my body still both light and heavy with you. The mail, lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison: My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display they keep me constantly awake with the pain... Do whatever you can to survive. You know, I think men love wars... And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly, and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms. VI Your small hands, precisely equal to my own - only the thumb is larger, longer - in these hands I could trust the world, or in many hands like these, handling power-tools or steering-wheel or touching a human face...such hands could turn the unborn child rightways in the birth canal or pilot the exploratory rescue-ship through icebergs, or piece together the fine, needle-like shreds of a great krater-cup bearing on its sides fingers of ecstatic women striding to the sibyl's den or the Eleusinian cave - such hands might carry out an unavoidable violence with such restraint, with such a grasp of the range and limits of violence that violence ever after would be obsolete. XII Sleeping, turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep: the dream - ghosts of two worlds walking their ghost-towns, almost address each other. I've walked to your muttered words spoken light - or dark - years away, as if my own voice had spoken. But we have different voices, even in sleep, and our bodies, so alike, are yet so different and the past echoing through our bloodstreams is freighted with different language, different meanings - through in any chronicle of the world we share it could be written with new meaning we were two lovers of one gender, we were two women of one generation.
XIII The rules break like a thermometer, quicksilver spills across the charted systems, we're out in a country that has no language no laws, we're chasing the raven and the wren through gorges unexplored since dawn whatever we do together is pure invention the maps they gave us were out of date by years we're driving through the desert wondering if the water will hold out the hallucinations turn to simple villages the music on the radio comes clear - neither Rosenkavalier nor Gotterdammerung but a woman's voice singing old songs with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute plucked and fingered by women outside the law. [The Floating Poem, Unnumbered] Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine - tender, delicate your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond of the fiddlehead fern in forests just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs between which my whole face has come and come - the innocence and wisdom of the placee my tongue has found there - the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth - your touch on me, firm, protective, searching me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers reaching where I had been waiting years for you in my rose-wet cave - whatever happens, this is. & the very last line: a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.
a lot of my favourite passages are the ones that speak directly about being a lesbian, but not in an obvious way. it may be because i wrote as essay on the sublety of her language in relation to her sexuality, but i find the way she writes about it just breathtaking.
some of my favourite lines:
and I laugh and fall dreaming again of the desire to show you to everyone I love, to move openly together in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
I am crying helplessly, and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms. The rules break like a thermometer, quicksilver spills across the charted systems, we're out in a country that has no language no laws,
whatever we do together is pure invention the maps they gave us were out of date by years we're driving through the desert wondering if the water will hold out
these particular excerpts above speak to me in a way i can't even put into words properly. the language is just so beautiful & the sentiments SO true, i can't even.
i find her incredibly inspirational. check out her wiki entry, it's fascinating.
i could go on about leisha hailey forever. she is amazing. gorgeous, LESBIAN (woo!) & out, musician, actor, & just all-round completely talented & hilarious. expect another post (or two..) on her sometime soon.
just found these & YUM. totally loving demi & selena at the moment, they are adorable. i refuse to apologise for my disney-obsession. judge away, i don't care.
