The Others – Seven

Posted on June 22, 2015 by Helen
Image credit: Daniel M Nagy

Image credit: Daniel M Nagy

As simple as that. She just disappeared. One minute she was doing her job, as clear and present as I am right now, the next she was sort of flowing in and out of focus like a hologram that was playing up or where the battery is running down – and then she just disappeared. Sometimes the passage from full body to nothing was almost instant, sometimes it seemed to take some time.

No-one seemed to notice. The fact that there were now only two barmaids wasn’t even noted. Punters who might have been chatting her up a few minutes before were now happily talking to the other barmaids or to others who had come to the bar. Not one person seemed to have taken in that a person had just disappeared before their very eyes, and this doesn’t happen just once, but a number of times each night and some nights more than others. Because she’d suddenly reappear on camera a bit further away maybe twenty minutes later – appearing just after it seemed like one of the other barmaids was talking to no-one, into nothingness – and there she was, responding, and then she’d be serving again, then wait a while and it happened again, and so forth.

And it happened every night, every film, and it was only ever her, and no-one even saw it at all.

I found myself wondering if, when she reappears, she has spoken first, has forced someone to acknowledge her and so be seen again, but as the film is silent, I can’t know. I can hardly read invisible lips, after all.

I actually can’t read visible lips either. I’m not that clever in that sort of way. But that’s by the by really.
I started to study her expressions and her situations prior to her disappearing acts. There seemed to be two types I could note, rarely together. In some she looked tired or wary or displeased, and this was always when someone was trying to engage her in discussion or when the crowd has reached greater proportions near the bar. Many might be looking at her, and one by one they look away, as though something else had suddenly whispered in their collective ears. Then she was gone – whoosh – quick as a flash, sometimes so fast there’s no real wavering to be spoken of at all. At others it was like everyone decided not to see her, as though for a moment or two the attention more naturally turned to other things, the bar was less crowded, the other girls more appealing, and then she wavered, as though the energy has been reduced, until she was gone.

On occasion it seemed that those around her before she disappeared looked a bit stricken, confused, even slightly ill. It seemed to pass quickly, but I’ve played a few scenes back a number of times, and it looks a bit like vertigo. One guy actually swayed in his seat and almost toppled over, but this somehow re-positioned him enough to laugh into the face of another of the barmaids, as though he had just done something rather clever rather than looking like a typical alcoholic fool. Ah, the bravado of liquored up idiots!!

It occurred to me that the thing in common is that before she is “gone” she withdraws – deliberately or by accident – from the attention of everyone else, and when she returns it may be because she has somehow demanded the attention back to her. As though she needs eyes on her and thoughts towards her to even have a physical existence. But also, perhaps that she doesn’t like that attention at all. It’s the strangest thing. And no-one notices, it seems as natural as day. But there is a price, of sorts, she always ends up alone. No film ever shows her pick up, and the later scenes as the club shuts down see her bidding farewell to her workmates, ever alone.

I wonder if she minds that.

She seemed very lovely, a little lost. It seemed a great shame.

I wondered if she knew what happens. I wondered if she had any idea. Perhaps she just thought she’s always alone because no-one is attracted to her. I freeze framed on her form and touched the monitor. It’s not that, I thought, it would never be that.

Or maybe she did know and she did it deliberately. But then, if you had that power, if you were that clever, then you’d be happier I suspect. She always looked quite sad. Someone playing a complicated trick on the rest of us wouldn’t look like that.

It interested me also that if the key to her physical “being” is attention, that the camera eye was insufficient. It ceased to see or record her also – it had no intelligence, no awareness behind the physical apparatus of sight. But it recorded everything, and therefore it displayed her secret.

If she even knew she had a secret.

This was the most fascinating thing I’d ever seen. Far more than I would ever have imagined this project could provide. Of course I had to know more.

Of course I had to know her.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

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Animation – Seven

Posted on June 19, 2015 by Helen
Image credit: Lucky Images

Image credit: Lucky Images

I am watching him talking with a friend. They have met at the doorway to his favourite café – now mine (I even go later in the day and sit at the same table, the same seat and drink coffee from the same long tall glasses). It is his place and there is a delicious sense of invasion and transgression in inhabiting it in his absence. It is the closest I expect to get, the closest I would dare.

I understand the mind of a stalker now. In my own limited way I have perhaps become one. But I know so little of him really, and I am no inquisitive voyeur. It does not occur to me to follow him, nor anything else so banal. I would not go through his mail, would not telephone (if I even knew his name!) and sit silent at the other end as he answers, would not even plead with him for a moment’s attention. I do not beg. A lifetime of lack has inured me to that – I have my pride. I sit above him and watch and pray that this will be enough, that it will not destroy me, this slow, trickling pain that is denial and fear.

I hate his friend in this moment more clearly and cleanly than I have hated anyone, even myself. I envy. I loathe. I covet. Each smile, each casual touch on the arm, the happy and easy assent as the one asks the other to join him. They are both so young, and this friend is nearly – but not quite – as beautiful as my Hope. They belong. They fit in a manner that I never could. I would obliterate the friend now; wipe him from the canvas, return to the solitude I thought Hope and I shared.

His friend is more flamboyant. I find myself thinking that the more colourful garb of the intruder would find a far more worthy host in my love. I do not wish to criticize or judge the one I adore – it seems wrong, uncivil even – yet one does it despite oneself. There is no satisfactory way to shield oneself from one’s own opinions. Not matter how hateful. My love is a beautiful flower clothed normally in drab greys and browns. He shows no real imagination or flair. I hate that I see this, even more that I can put words to it, form a critique in this manner, but it comes unbidden and complete to me.

I cannot hide from the facts that face me.

But an idea occurs to me. I cannot have my love, but I can paint him, and in doing so I can create him in the colours that would more fit his beauty. High above him in this apartment block I can dream and put form to the life he should live, if only he would realize.

My beloved on my canvas comes easily, almost too easily, as though angels or demons guide my hand. I have him in a grey suit still, to retain some of his essence, but here a cheeky red cap, matched with a flowing red scarf. Finished with a simple red handkerchief peering out from his coat pocket. Two silver rings on his fingers – a thumb and a middle finger. He is striding towards the coffee shop, his lovely eyes shielded by fashionable sunglasses. Among the dark and drab inhabitants I use to fill out the scene he is an exotic creature, a darling of the gods. He is what I have dreamed and my art could be enough, after all.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

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The Others – Six

Posted on June 15, 2015 by Helen
Image credit: Jin Jo

Image credit: Jin Jo

I would have thought she was George’s type. He liked them dark, small and slim, like they might almost disappear with a strong gust of wind. He liked a fragile looking face, like hers. I often wondered if George was a bit physically abusive because his uses of words like “breakable wrists” and “vulnerable faces” so often in his descriptions of women caused me to wonder why adjectives of weakness were so appealing to him.

George is no oil painting; perhaps he just liked some form of balance in his relationships. He was married once, a long time ago. He calls his former wife “the ogre”. An interesting description, the only one he ever proffers on the subject and one that does not bring breakable wrists and delicacy to mind. Perhaps she was abusive to him. Perhaps it’s his way of evening out the odds. He gets by on charm and success though, and he seems confident, so you just have to wonder.

Well I wonder, anyway. I spend a lot of time wondering about things like that. I blame my psychology classes at university. A little information, as they say, is a very dangerous thing.
And what I had on film seemed to be that very ‘little bit of information’ meant by the warning ‘they’ give. I know when I started to see the pattern there I actually felt quite chilled. I even stopped to look to see if the door to my little watching room was open because it felt like something cold caressed the back of my neck and I thought it might be a draught of some sort.

They say when the mystic achieves communion with their god, the sense of the numinous is bright and frightening and strange and alien all at once. Well this was something like that without the communion bit. High strangeness I think they call it. This was high strangeness indeed, and while intrigued, I admit to some fear also. We only really expect what we expect. Something completely new is…unexpected. You don’t see it coming. And in this case, you literally couldn’t.

What I saw of this woman might better be described as what I didn’t see.

She was a barmaid, first and foremost, dressed in the dark, low cut uniforms George requires. She seemed efficient, friendly in a vague way, but a bit aloof. Watching her you could speculate on what her dreams might be or what she was paying the way for by doing this job. You definitely got the sense this was a way-station for her. She wouldn’t be a barmaid for life.

This was not true of all of them. In some there was a sense of the lost and broken, of having given up already, in their stance, their expressions and the lack of energy at times in their movements. All were young here. George could probably get done for age discrimination in his hiring practices if anyone ever bothered to take him on. But some seemed destined, perhaps doomed, to this twilight world forever.

Not her though. Her twilight world, if it could be described as such was different indeed. Though I admit I didn’t realize this at first. It was just that she seemed different somehow, and so not likely to remain. I had no idea, initially, how different she would really turn out to be.

She made drinks for the punters, sometimes had a conversation or two, checked the till, stood up at all times with surprisingly good posture for the effort required, remained polite even when the night became tedious and seemingly never-ending. In those ways she was pretty much the same as all of them. They talked amongst themselves – there were usually three at least at any given time. They had a little dance for who served whom and to balance out the workload. It was a well-oiled machine.

But each night, as the hour got later, you could start to see weariness in her stance. At times this was heightened if there was some freak at the bar demanding more attention. That’s when it started to happen. Somehow the other barmaids seemed to pick this up, they moved forward more often, cut her some slack. But she..she…I don’t know how to explain this, apart from just saying what the film shows. At first she just seemed to waver, like some special effect I’ve created, or some glitch on the camera, and I’d curse the technology but it only happened with her, and it happened regularly. She almost shimmered. And when this happened, everyone started to look away from her if they haven’t already done so. It was like she wasn’t even there.

And then she wasn’t.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

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Animation – Six

Posted on June 12, 2015 by Helen
Image credit: portumen

Image credit: portumen

One morning I was running late to the balcony. I am a creature of habit so this could have been disconcerting, but even my timing was now more governed by my elusive distant love. He rarely came to the café before 10am, I therefore felt less compelled to have risen, shaved and breakfasted before 9.30. The better pleasures were to be had and savoured later, and so I was slowly adjusting.

Therefore the phone call at 9.45 did not vex me unduly. I hate the telephone and rarely speak on it for more than minutes, the perfunctory politeness of business calls, the arrangements – brief and rare – for social interaction with those who have become my friends. None take much time nor demand much eloquence. I could attend to my caller and be comfortably out on the balcony in time to see my beloved’s brisk, elegant promenade down the piazza to his habitual café (and yes, if you have suspected I enjoyed that he was as habitual as myself you are right, we look for similarities in our loved ones once the differences have initially captured us).

I answered the phone as I always did.

– Richards here.

Richards is my surname. My full name, as shown on every painting, and the one of my fame, is Paul Arthur Richards. Of these three potentially first names I prefer the last. It sounds stronger somehow – Paul seems both pristine and common at once, Arthur is hardly the heroic man of myth on my shoulders, more the under-trodden husband of a myriad of middle class English marriages. Richards, however, has a strength. I crave strength.

All my friends know me as Richards, and are required to address me as such. To call me Paul is to court my disdain.

– Richards, mate, it’s Cliff.

Cliff is a former art student who has progressed primarily to computer art. I know him less from this than from vague family connections – his sister once went out with one of my nephews. Cliff is a clever boy and often disarming. He is also an opportunist. He has no sincere affection for me. His contact will no doubt be for something. Something he considers perhaps only I can provide.

– Cliff, how are you my dear boy?

I am allowed the affectation of my sexual taste, although I advertise its actuality to none in my personal circle, none who could call and recognize me by my name. It is accepted in an artiste, and an old one at that. Most things are accepted of the famous, as I have said earlier.

I also like insincerity in myself; I like to send it out as I expect always to receive it. As you have received, so shall you give. I have few things to divert me in such a manner. I make the most of what I have, and hurt none after all – they do not know that is what I am doing.

– Fine, fine. I have a proposition to make to you.
– Ah, all my Christmases coming at once? Do tell, you know I hate surprises.
– A project Richards. A project I’m working on. We – my friend Ant and myself – are working on a series of animated ‘stories’ for want of a better word to have in a virtual collection.
– I’m not a writer Cliff
– Nor do you need to be! The point of you..the point of calling you..is the same as the others we are approaching!
– Others?
– Other artists, other painters and so forth. Others of your caliber, in your league.
– Few of them
– Oh, of course Richards! But we only need four. Four artists for four perfect virtual art stories. Four very different artists, your work being the most traditional. You provide us with a story and some storyboards, some paintings…and then we animate them to fit the story. Or someone else writes the story and you illustrate it, then we animate it.
– Comics?
– No, not comics! Not Disney-fucking-land! Art Richards! Living art! Controversy! Soul! Not bloody Mickey Mouse I assure you!
– On a computer?
– Don’t be a snob old boy…computers are just a medium, like your canvas and paint..your art, in a living, moving form – animated through technology but still your art. Art in a manner never seen before. Not comics, nothing banal and usual. A new concept. A new way for your art to be.
– Have you approached your other three artists?
– Yes!
– And they are interested?
– Yes!
– I am surprised. But then, you can take hope in that. No doubt you will find someone to replace me.
– Richards..don’t be like that…
– Cliff, I have no wish for my art to be ‘animated’..I believe it has more than sufficient life on the canvas. I will not take part in some space age comic book sideshow…
– Richards..
– Cliff, I accept you have not meant to offend me, but persist and you most definitely shall…

I was looking at my digital clock in that moment, realizing it was drawing perilously close to 10am. I could not miss a footstep of my love for this drivel!

– Richards, you are taking this the wrong way..
– No Cliff, I am taking it my way..thank you for the offer, I politely decline..and if there is nothing else, I bid you good day….

I hung up the phone and looked at it for a few moments, as though some explanation for the indignity that had just been suggested to me could come forth from its inanimate form. My art was not a comic. There was nothing ‘virtual’ about my work. Cliff had clearly missed the point of art itself, which was hardly surprising. It occurred to me that Cliff would usually miss the point.

I took out a cigarette from the packet next to the phone and tapped it, almost absent-mindedly, on the teak table top. I looked to my balcony, the bright rays of the morning sun painting the scene with its own welcoming light. I had an angel to watch.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

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The Others – Five

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Helen
Image credit: Michal Durink

Image credit: Michal Durink

I was beginning to see finally that they were a beginning – that the artistry of the film might be to draw lines of action, like a grid of activity, which showed places that pulsated with life – like the dance-floors, or the toilets – ones that seemed to be a way station from one activity to another, like the bar – and ones where everything seemed to disappear into entropy.

Maybe this was like an allegory of life, the macrocosm hidden in the microcosm, or something equally profound. The cycles of life, played out on a smaller stage, a nightclub at night, form following function, people unknowingly repeating the larger patterns which were the inevitability of their life, then death, then nothingness.

Perhaps over the centuries human consciousness had evolved only to be repetitive and functional. Perhaps the crowning achievement of humankind knowing itself was to be bored with itself and to just not care enough to do anything different. It would be an interesting conclusion to reach, although a depressing one I suppose. But perhaps we’d crawled out of the primordial sludge and knew ourselves only to not really care.

Or we really are like robots, limited by our programming, conscious only in relation to what we can knowingly experience and see. There could be something in that, given what I found, but then, I found it. So doesn’t that mean something more is possible? Or is self delusion part of the programming also?

In any case, I wasn’t thinking that deeply about it at the time. Finding the other, the strangeness elevates your philosophical musings I find, but at the time I was just searching for a pattern that was remotely interesting and informative. And with this realization I was thinking maybe there was something there. Maybe a combination of night energy, physical longing and exertion, drugs and alcohol, and the social instinct, make us replay the essential pathways of our lives without us even realizing we are doing so. Perhaps at night we know our own mortality better in the reptilian areas of our brains.

Or perhaps it was just an idea I had, an artistic tableau, a structure within which I could place the rhythm of this project.

I imagined coloured lines of light creating the patterns – I saw them like one might on some computer game. The moment the idea came to me it was like a revelation, the way through. The lines danced before me. I saw them, even in their actual absence. And the patterns started to emerge, leading always towards and away from the bar, like some source of more than alcohol, some source of life and light and animation.

The bar – my eyes kept returning to the bar. And it was then, as I began to isolate my attention to that set of films from a range of nights, just in at the bar, that the real mystery struck me.

I may not have noticed if she hadn’t been gorgeous. But hey, George wouldn’t have employed her if she wasn’t. Strange though, I didn’t know who she was. She clearly worked the bar for him, but he’d never mentioned her. George generally talked about everyone he employed, particularly the women – and on this topic his descriptions were not well phrased but very intense on certain aspects (I need not, I think, give you an example? I am sure you have the idea by now about George…).

So it was odd. I first thought, well, who is she? And that got me watching her.

And that was when I realized. She was very, very strange.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

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Animation – Five

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Helen
Image credit: Nikolastock

Image credit: Nikolastock

I watch him from my balcony and wish for some suitable epigram, some wondrous words, to sum him up. I would be the Oscar to his Bosey, but without history’s ignominious end. It seems fitting. The art world is not so very different from the literary, and already I am fashioning the doomed love between us and my absolute loyalty to it, even unto the bitterest of ends.

He will be cruel, I think, as all the truly beautiful are cruel – unknowing of the obscenity of their selfishness and forgiven it eternally for the slow steady gaze from eyes under long, lush lashes. He will be inconstant and demanding to the very level that I will be constant and selfless. He will cause me pain but he will be mine and I will be his.

All this I dream and hope, watching this new, wondrous life in my midst. I shall call him Hope, though he will never know, because that is what he has born within me.

I am ready for the pain, I think, finally ready. But I do not know, I cannot even begin to plan, how to bring this morsel into my web.

To go out into the unknown of his life is unthinkable. I cannot even leave the balcony to traverse my apartment to the door, and then the ancient stairway, and then the glittering pavement below. I cannot. I dare not. His rejection is of course inevitable. I cannot kill my dream that quickly. I must be allowed to dream longer, sweeter, even if I cannot make the dream come true.

He can be art at least. He must be art. Because he is my love.

And so I watch him for days, learn his habits, his timing, and conjecture his life around it. He seems alone, he seems to be looking, just as I am, though he is braver, out in the world. Of course he is brave. Everyone loves his beauty. You can see people turning to watch him pass in the street. From my vantage I can see waiters and waitresses alike fawning over him. He seems oblivious to their attentions, locked within himself, a king sure of a kingdom to the point he would not even acknowledge it.

He will have had this affect from his youth, from childhood even. The world would always have been in thrall to him, as was I. So of course he was braver. Of course he could do what I could not. Of course.

I knew I would paint him, once I had observed sufficiently. It was the only way to possess this exotic butterfly, or so I believed. And in a manner of speaking, I was right, though not in the way I had supposed.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

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The Others – Four

Posted on June 1, 2015 by Helen
Image credit: Ruslan Guzov

Image credit: Ruslan Guzov

As I said, my parents gave me the technology for my project. My mother, god bless her, believes in my artistic soul and my attempts to reach my “potential”. She sees me as this little flower, worthy of praise, attention and endless support. My father is less convinced, but less interested. All he cares about is money, which he spends all his time making, and who am I to disrespect that – or to turn down any of the financial aid he gives me, possibly out of guilt at his “emotional absence” (as mother calls it), or maybe just because he can (which I suspect is more the case)?

“I just know you’ll do wonderfully,” my mother once said, touching my cheek fondly, her eyes brimming with lovely, naïve tears, “You always were such an artistic child.”

“It would be nice if you did financially “wonderfully” actually” my father averred, looking up from his laptop where doubtless endless rows of profit figures scrolled down the screen, “Do try to do something successful like that in your life before I die, if you can..”

“Of course mother” I said.

“Of course father,” I repeated. And both seemed satisfied, at least with me, if not with each other.

George paid for the changes to the architecture to house the cameras and recording devices for my project and even gave me a little “viewing room”, which no doubt was really there so George could sometimes go and watch it all himself.

I love how the generosity of others is sometimes so singularly and selfishly motivated. It makes me think most things in life are brilliantly layered, and never what they purport to be initially. It’s why I was so interested in pursuing this project – the real actions of others, without the artifice of knowing they are being watched, and without the confusion of what they are saying. I wanted to capture something immediate and visceral and true.
The beast uncovered. Well, I certainly uncovered a beast of sorts.

How little I realized at the beginning of how literal my analogies would prove to be.

So others paid for the set up. I loved that. It’s part of being the guy with the ideas. You usually don’t pay for them yourself. But the USBs and portable hard drives to be used and any other sundry production costs fell to me, thus my disquiet at the ending of my artistically challenged but financially rewarding stint at the home shopping channel. The truth of the matter was that I’d been filming The Inferno for a couple of months by the time Roger let the axe fall, and while there were patterns emerging in the mating and dating rituals on my film, there was nothing really new or interesting in it at all.

To be honest, I never really thought it through that much – I just thought if I got the project going, something would have to come up and show me what it was I was looking for. I was starting to worry it was all a big waste of time. If I didn’t get something soon I’d find it harder and harder to justify the gradual decrease in my savings as this unproductive monster kept gobbling up my funds. And I suspected I wasn’t getting anything “useful” enough for George for him to make good on his implied promise to help with the running costs if I hit pecuniary disaster.

I hate giving up, but I hate wasting money even more. I am my father’s son, it seems, after all.

My tenacity fights regularly with my conservatism. I believed in my project, still, very much. It could have been stubbornness. I can be stubborn I suppose, though I prefer to think of it as determined. An ex-girlfriend of mine said I raised stubbornness to an art form. I replied that instead I was just committed, to which she replied that I should be committed. Little wonder she’s an ex-girlfriend.

In any case I believed enough to keep going for now, keep trawling through hours of film – about five hours for each night per camera, of which there were four, covering 10pm to 3am, the busiest times of the night and morning. I fast forwarded through dull periods of nothingness, mostly these occurred on the footage of the camera fixed on the toilets. I was even thinking of ditching that camera angle all together, there is only so much that can be gained from seeing people streaming in and out, more inebriated or coked out of their heads each time, or the stumbling of people wanting either sex or to actually go to the toilet and barely getting inside the doors in time for either.

Apart from this, you tell me that watching people take a dump is an interesting way to pass the time and I’ll check you into the nearest psyche ward.

I alternated male and female toilets each night – it made little difference. The main activity was always sex or drugs, the secondary one in the female toilets was applying makeup, the secondary one in the men’s…well, there barely was a secondary one after sex and drugs, but they did sometimes take a piss as well. Any tribal rites in those vestibules were banal at best, highly repetitive, and uninteresting. I think George might have liked them though. It’s just a suspicion. I don’t have proof or anything; it’s just what I’d expect.

The darkened areas were more interesting – there did seem to be a lot of voyeurism that emanated from those areas, as though the people thought the shadows hid their obsessions. Mostly the people who gravitated to those nooks and crannies did not venture forth except to get a drink. They weren’t there to mix, or dance – even consumption of alcohol and drugs seemed secondary, though necessary. They were just people interested enough in watching others to venture out, to eschew the more inert forms of the myriad of people like them stuck in front of televisions every night. So they were social on some level, but reserved, dispassionate perhaps – removed. I thought something might be made of them, though it would be a slow process to get anything definitive.

And when I thought that, the idea struck me.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

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Animation – Four

Posted on May 29, 2015 by Helen
Image credit: mangostock

Image credit: mangostock

I first saw him over four months ago, a full month before I would understand what I had begun.

I live in a comfortable, almost sprawling apartment. There is a cosmopolitan piazza below. Every morning at 9.30 I light a cigarette and sit on the balcony, watching the life teeming beneath me. Those going to work, those more essentially lazy, emerging to have coffee or breakfast in the cafes across the way from me. I look at life and draw from it for my art. I watch a world I am simultaneously fascinated and repelled by – some know who I am and look up. At these moments I withdraw, either back into my apartment, or behind a convenient hat. Most do not know, however, and have little sense that they are being observed.

It is pleasant to watch. A million possibilities play out before me each day, combinations of lives I will never touch, never know, but may dream of, as they walk past my line of sight. It always seemed enough.

Until the day that he walked into my vision, and all sense escaped me.

What can I say of him that you will not censure? What should you not deride, after all? He was everything I was not, and that was the essential point – more essential than I realized in the beginning, and this was everything. But still, I could see, I have eyes that observe more keenly than most. It is part of my art.

Let me list the differences and you can make your judgments quickly and silently. I am used to the unspoken judgment of others, do not think you can distress me. There is nothing you can think of me I have not already thought myself. I deserve and accept it all, though I did not know this then.

He is young. At most early twenties. He is athletic in build, like the boys I would watch in the rugby games at school. He moves quickly as though time is perpetually a hound at his heels. He is alive in a way I have never been and he is beautiful, which gives him this life.

Blonde hair in the longish, fashionable style of his age. Eyes that I can see, even at a distance, are large and almost innocent. Fine features, the sleek bone structure of the middle to upper classes. Clothes that speak of reasonable money, though not affluence. A fluidity in his form, a natural elegance – even grace – that is uncommon in those of his age. Michelangelo would have painted him, or sculpted his form; he might almost have been that mythic David. And I, the Goliath on the balcony, yearning to be struck down by even a glance back to me.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

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The Others – Three

Posted on May 25, 2015 by Helen
Image credit: mashurov

Image credit: mashurov

I should start by explaining my personal filming project in a bit more detail, because if I hadn’t been doing that, none of the rest would have followed. George’s club is rather unimaginatively called The Inferno. I think he wanted some girl to think he was classically educated at the time he was opening it as a means to opening her, so to speak. I doubt he’s traversed even as far as Dante’s first circle, but the internet’s a wonderful thing and you can get these outlines of any of the classics on it and appear to be far more erudite and insightful than nature would ever have provided. You certainly don’t need to waste any time or brain power reading the books.

At least it meant he didn’t spend all his time on the net just searching for porn I suppose.

I’ve got a classical education, mind you – English, philosophy and a bit of psychology for my first degree, then on to film school. I must say, I learned a hell of a lot more useful stuff at film school than that BA ever gave me. Anyone who thinks an undergraduate university degree gives you anything but information skimmed from the surface of things is an idiot. Ah well, there’s a lot of idiots in the world paying university fees I suppose, or parents with idiot pretensions and more money than sense, like mine, sending their kids off to the hallowed halls.

So, just think twice before that sort of thing impresses you, is all I’m saying. Or by people sprouting off classical references, or naming their clubs (which are basically just drug riddled pick up joints in the final analysis) after the works of the great poets.

George is a funny guy. He’s so transparent, but that makes him useful and genial. Stroke his ego a bit, see him as this great entrepreneur, and he’s like a puppy dog at your feet. It’s an incongruous image in a way because George is rather too large to be a puppy dog, rather too balding and rather too fat, though I suppose some puppy dogs might be portly. Still, offer him something a bit illicit also, or something that he thinks he can use in a business sense, and he’s right there with you, sharing the “dream”. And that suits me.

Anyway, back to The Inferno. It’s actually very successful – fashion is fickle and I must admit that George has an uncanny instinct for this sort of thing. I doubt he’ll ever be rich, but he’ll always more than make do. He knows to bring in good people – designers and architects and DJs, and he has enough connections with the drug world to make sure all substances run freely in his midst. George understands his market, and that’s a valuable skill in itself.

The club had established itself very well – it had been open for about six months and the crowds were growing – when I brought my concept to him. He was just starting to get obsessed about security. He had cameras and response units in place, but he is delightfully paranoid. George has possibly missed his calling, he should be writing for a reboot of the X Files really, he can see darkness in everything. Even in the deliberate shadows he created himself for ambience. Given what was really there in his club, right under his nose, it’s very ironic that he didn’t see it. But that’s the point I suppose. He couldn’t.

Perhaps that’s the thing. If you look for darkness it will ever elude you, but if you don’t go looking it will find you, and when you least expect it. Darkness is clever. It recognizes the advantages of surprise.

Still, as it happens, a project that involved multiple cameras in his set up was immediately appealing to him. I explained my concept to him over vodka tonics and a couple of lines of coke. We were both a bit wired, as you’d imagine, but also very clear. What I wanted, I told him, was to film certain patterns of interactions over and over to find any similarities, any rituals and any habits that emerged. I wanted to see if a class system still existed in our supposedly post modern, freedom loving, egalitarian world. If there are things in the nature of humanity which we just can’t erase with social slogans, political advances and higher education. Do we, I wondered, like hierarchies because we are inherently competitive? And if so, if our politically correct societal rules explicitly limit that tendency in our day to day lives, does it emerge in another form somewhere else?

And if so, I wanted to see what this was based on, if certain patterns of behavior were more socially successful than others, if there was some identifiable and replicable ‘dance’ of social success that anyone could learn and inhabit. I was looking for tribal rites, I told him, and realized I was starting to lose him. Psychology and sociology weren’t his field it seemed. In the final analysis, I think thought itself wasn’t really his field. He’s a gut and gonads type of guy. I got back to the basics before he was lost to me.

“Cameras set up to observe the bar, the main dance floor, the toilets, and the shadowy parts where people seem to go to try to hide. Four main perspectives, filmed over and over, every night, recorded for patterns that are constant and those that change depending upon the night of the week or the people involved. Eventually I’ll make it a collage, a kind of layered visual picture, but for the moment I just need to see what’s there, if anything..”

“I’ve got some security cameras.” George muttered, swirling the remnant of his drink with the ice in the glass. He looked a bit mournful for a moment, like a man knowing he is teetering on the abyss of middle age, sinking fast. Probably just the alcohol though. George is not a creature of any great self-awareness. I sometimes envy him that attribute, or that lack.

“The quality of that film is shite, man, you know that. I’m talking the best digital technology. I can get that from my parents. I want it so good I could zoom in and almost see and taste the sweat on a girl’s chest when she’s getting turned on.”

“Or the nipples hardening?” George asked, suddenly more enthused. “You’d do that, sit and manipulate the images that way?”

“Well no George.” I replied, irritated. He never really listened to what you had to say. “I don’t intend to be there. I don’t intend to manipulate the patterns at all. It wouldn’t do to impose my will on it in that way. The idea is the camera eye sees without discrimination, without judgment, without choice, only what is there, not what the seeing eye may choose to see…”

“Pity.” George commented. Perhaps even in the dim recesses of his mind he was calculating how unlikely it was for an inanimate camera to choose to zero in on what he wanted with any intelligence or purpose. Getting to see girls in a state of arousal would be luck at best, which fitted my thematic requirements, but not his. Or perhaps even thinking that through was presently beyond him and he was just disappointed in general. In either case, I was losing him again.

“All I was saying was that the technology is that good, and that security cameras just don’t cut it. We could see all that other stuff later, once I get into the analysis and editing stage.”

I was promising him something here that may or may not be possible to deliver in the end. It made me feel like a real estate agent or a used car salesman. The house will appreciate in value, or the car will not require further mechanical work. When in fact I didn’t really know what I would find or have to manipulate from the filming.

George raised one eyebrow above the other, looking more intelligent and laconic than he really is. I always hate people who can do that. My eyebrows stubbornly refuse to go anywhere on my face separately. They follow each other – up or down – like siamese twins. I feel robbed of a sign of style that I should rightly have.

“And you could see what turns the different girls on, what makes them respond…your own little information source that they don’t know you have” I went on promising, sorry, lying.

“Sounds kinky, are you sure it’s legal?”

“Oh, yes,” I replied, knowing I had him, that he was going to agree after all, “It’s absolutely legal”.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

Posted in Serial Horror Stories, The Others | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Animation – Three

Posted on May 22, 2015 by Helen
Image credit: bahri altay

Image credit: bahri altay

Combine this problem, as it seemed to me in my lost and loveless life, with my ugliness, and even my eventual fame did not allow me to reach out for affection that was in any way lasting or sincere. I used to live for brief moments with strangers in sordid surroundings, mostly ‘rent boys’ under the kinder cover of night, hating my actions the next day, pursuing even this exceptionally rarely, never allowing anyone to see my face clearly or gain any purchase in my heart. I lived the clichéd gay life rather than a truly authentic one. I was absurd even to myself, but saw no other possible future for myself. But for almost a decade I had not even ventured out in this manner, I was celibate and more comfortable, if no happier, for it.

I was alone, for almost fifty years, and did not dare to dream of any other existence. To ask the universe for more than my talent seemed churlish. To expect love for a face I could barely stand to view in my own mirror seemed obscene. I had not the slightest hope. I was resigned to this.

But hope is a strange thing. It wakes and breathes within you so silently, but so inexorably, it takes you somewhere foreign before you realize your flight. And by then it is too late. It has begun. The music for the dance you know is forbidden has begun to play. And it will not stop until you dance.

It will not stop.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved

Posted in Animation, Serial Horror Stories | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments