Chemlab Pink
darkness, and a scratching, whirring noise.
darkness, and then, slowly, the pictures shudder up in sight.
a building string of images like silvery bubbles surfacing from the deep.
it's almost always raining, drizzling, misting, slightly, lightly, heavily,
but almost always dripping.
the kitchen faucet marking time.
camera pans across it through washed out black and white Tin-tack.
across the dark, the color a saturated smear;
the Lighting Director's guiding
the highlights all the time.
the print is scratchy and smells mildewy... too much rain.
stomach's empty... the fridge is a booming echo chamber.
they edit in stock horror darkening footage of
starvation, atrocities, Vietnam war footage,
descending through it. the crackling of outtake sections litter the stairwell, serpentine and yet brittle, a close crop.
zoom to feet descending, descending,
frames skipping and jumping in vertical crash scratching.
the hallway to street sub-lit in shadow,
casting rotting thick as broken glass shards,
and the reflections sparkle in the rain-speckled sidewalk.
it's always raining.
but that's the way this film runs.
the scenes seem clear, but the final print is always too grainy or scratched...
blurs the longer you watch it and
finally just falls away to clips and snapshots of its former glory.
Loop that frames the whole world outside, often running in slow motion.
perhaps the projectionist has nodded off in a stupor during the last showing,
his elbow hitting a switch,
and for a second, or a week, the world runs in reverse,
the images all silent,
filmed and jerking nervously back across the streets.
seems like the reel is always running backwards.
Time is fiction.
Time is fiction.
so, why don't you come lay down with me
in this pitch-bending film loop,
and let the acid rain beat down on our bodies.
