currently listening to anne rice's "interview with the vampire"(mostly on the drive in to work and going back home). at first it was cool, then i started getting glimpses of some disturbing shit, until it became totally disturbing and a bit of a downer there for a while - almost an ordeal to get thru, and now its finally mostly back to interesting and exciting. i tried to think of the movie, which i had seen not long after it'd come out, and i realised that i actually dont really remember much at all from it, other than tome cruise, brad pitt, and kirsten dunst or whoever. and there was a fire. and lestat died. and they were in paris. and that's the part i'm just getting to now. maybe the disturbing shit was more disturbing to me because i kept thinking of Lily when they were talking about Claudia - it was just too close to home, when he nearly kills her. here's the excerpt:

"... And when I thought of this, I saw Babette's face contorted with
hatred when she had held the lantern waiting to light it, and I saw
Lestat in my mind and hated him, and I felt, yes, damned and this is
hell, and in that instant I had bent down and driven hard into her soft,
small neck and, hearing her tiny cry, whispered even as I felt the hot
blood on my lips, `It's only for a moment and there'll be no more
pain.' But she was locked to me, and I was soon incapable of saying
anything. For four years I had not savored a human; for four years I
hadn't really known; and now I heard her heart in that terrible rhythm,
and such a heart not the heart of a man or an animal, but the rapid, tenacious heart of the child, beating harder and harder, refusing to die, beating like a tiny fist beating on a door, crying, `I will not die, I will not die, I cannot die, I cannot die . . . .'
I think I rose to my feet still
locked to her, the heart pulling my heart faster with no hope of cease,
the rich blood rushing too fast for me, the room reeling, and then,
despite myself, I was staring over her bent head, her open mouth,
down through the gloom at the mother's face; and through the halfmast
lids. her eyes gleamed at me as if they were alive! I threw the
child down. She lay like a jointless doll."

the part in red probably hit me the hardest - almost made me cry. i was not expecting that.
it might not have had that effect on me had i read it. but the way the reader read it, embuing it with emotion... actually, that was probably a big part of it. it reminds me of the time we saw "moulin rouge", and somewhere along the line i accidentally turned on this option they had, which was something like an audio commentary of what was happening for the visually impaired. in the part when satine finally succumbs to her illness and falls to her doom - the way it was narrated, and then accompanying the cuts to the different characters from the show, watching in astonishment, and the big black dude's name was chocolat as it turned out, and it probably didnt help that i was on shrooms - the narrator was putting words to my feelings, crystallising them, making them explicit - i cried like i havent for a long time. and i've been afraid of watching the movie again, even though i thought it was deffinitely worth buying and bought it.

it seems almost banal or down right irreverent to go back to the vampire story, to their enchantment with paris, which immediately brought back memories of the movie "sabrina" (the remake) which we saw recently, and how many people seem to have fallen in love with Paris. and so now i wanna see it too. though for the longest time i thought it would be too stuffy, and sick of tourists.


i'm spent...