Legend

23 March 2009

Sheffield. Late in the night/early two mornings ago, woken by a drunk bloke yelling to his mate in the street.

I tell you what John Man (or maybe John John) you are a fucking legend. You are an absolute fucking total legend. You are a fucking legend.

He speaks with that special quality of the voice reserved for drunks and the guys who voiceover movie trailers – where the emphasis falls on every single word equally and with great force and enthusiasm never once not even for one single moment letting the constant patina of vigour or animation drop – only in this case, that of the voice that pulls me out of sleep, all hideously slurred.

*

In another city two girls are sitting on a bench in the railway station. As your train pulls away you see that one holds her mobile out to the other, and sat together there on the bench in the sunshine, they watch the tiny screen, on which it seems from their gestures, that a picture is moving. They discuss what's in the image, the one whose phone it is explaining something, laughing, smiling at the other, then the fingers of her hand touch the screen for a moment, a kind of contact with this person that is absent, the gesture soft and practical at the same time, its intimacy to the surface of the screen maybe connected to love, or to desire.

*

In a dream I'm watching the start of a horror movie. Teenagers are entering a high school. From the haircuts it's 60's and the film quality (analog, rich in browns and yellow, half chemical, half autumnal, backs that up). The clip plays in slow motion. Not sure if that's part of the film or part of the context – we're watching the movie in some kind of film studies class. There is discussion of this opening sequence. We're watching it again and again. One shot down the corridor, a second shot at an angle, kids rising from a stairwell, turning right towards the camera, some of them turning away. Watching this you don't know yet which of them will be the protagonists, which of them will enter whatever tangled web of terror and entrapment the movie will bring.