Related links
Carrie Wexler, A Conversation with Mira Shirlihan: Number 8
Meadow Mori interview, Sound on Sound, June 1999
Meadow Mori film channel at Gleaners.net and Vimeo
Comments (866)
Mouchette Jan 6
This is so disgusting.
Sleepovergirl Jan 6
She was Carrie Wexler’s best friend, but she barely mentions her here.
LegacyAdmit 12:15 am
What happened to the letters?! Did she finally publish them?
Eds 12:30 am
A Carrie Wexler interview can be read here.
Limpidpools 12:33 am
Is it just me, or is this a straight-up star fucking/sleep your way up story? Yay, feminism. Not.
Limpidpools → Mouchette 12:40 am
Like you said, disgusting.
Mouchette → Limpidpools 12:41 am
I meant a teenager sleeping with an old obese man. And calling that a “love story.” Call it whatever you want. It’s just sad.
dogyears → Limidpools 7:22 am
Nice to be so judgey about a great artist. Yay, female solidarity.
Limpidpools → dogyears 9:30 am
Who says I am a woman. #feminismfail
TheQualiaConundrum22 → LegacyAdmit 9:33 am
She has never published them. She also stopped making films a few years ago. She had some sort of breakdown.
Eberhardfaber 9:37 am
I want to read the letters. I wonder if she will publish them now that she has told everyone about this relationship. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a setup for an announcement of a publishing deal.
deranger 10:02 am
So cynical! Don’t you think the point of this is that she doesn’t plan on exploiting the letters? That she got what she got on her own. His help to her was inspiration. What she did is unrelated to the famous boyfriend.
Makemoney 12:42 pm
I didn’t believe it until I saw this with my own eyes! I work from home and make $1050 a week doing easy transcription and data entry. Go to www.workfromhome.com and stop struggling.
films4freedom 1:00 pm
If you like Meadow Mori’s films, you should check out theendpoint dot net. We aggregate nonfiction and essay films that spotlight the struggle against corporate imperialism and environmental degradation. Many important documentaries all streamed for free.
RitaHayworth 3:30 pm
So she fucked Orson Welles. Who hasn’t?
Rulalenska 3:37 pm
What happened with Carrie Wexler?
IrrealisMood → RitaHayworth 3:38 pm
You are killing me Rita. I laughed so hard I almost choked when I read this.
Canyouhearmenow → Rulalenska 3:39 pm
They don’t speak because Wexler screwed her over. Neither Mori or Wexler will discuss it.
Limpidpools 3:45 pm
She hardly followed in his footsteps. Making those horrible films. Those distortive, pretentious documentaries. She is a tasteless, self-righteous defender of monsters. And it turns out she is the biggest woman-in-Hollywood cliché of all… expand comment to read more
deranger → Limpidpools 3:49 pm
I love when the mens start explaining how feminism works to the womens. Thank you. Whatever origins Mori has had, she came to be a fascinating artist. Why is it that only men get to have colorful pasts?
Limpidpools → deranger 3:51 pm
Men can’t have opinions about female behavior, huh? Well the jokes on you, since I am actually a woman.
JennyW28 3:55 pm
The Children of the Disappeared is an incredible film.
rookiemistake 4:00 pm
I wonder why she never re-enacted Citizen Kane?
dogyears → Limpidpools 4:02 pm
No one cares if you are a man or a woman because you are simply a troll. #dontfeedthetroll
BarbiesCervix 4:02 pm
People, I am calling BS on this whole essay. Welles famously lived and died on Stanley Avenue in Hollywood, not in Brentwood. Everybody knows that. Even the death date is off. She is pulling your chain.
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PART TWO
JELLY AND JACK
1985
Jelly picked up the handset of her pink plastic Trimline phone and the dial tone hummed into her ear. She tilted the earpiece slightly away from her, and she heard the sad buzz of a distant sound seeking a listener. How many times had she fallen asleep after she said goodbye and not managed to get the thing on the cradle. The little lag when his phone was hung up but you were still on the line, in a weird half-life of the call, semiconnected, followed by the final late disconnection click, then silence, and then if you didn’t hang up, sharp insistent beeps. These were the odd ways the phone communicated with sounds: urgent beeps to say hang up, long-belled rings to say answer, rude blasts of a busy signal to say no. The phone always telling her things. She pushed the eleven buttons — the 1, the area code, the number, zeroing in, the nearly infinite combinations ousted — her fingertips not needing to feel the grooves of the numbers, but feeling them nevertheless. So many distractions, unneeded and unwanted. She had to concentrate to keep the information away. There was a bird outside, trilling at her. It was at least fifteen feet from the closed window, but it still bothered her. It must be in the Chinese oak in the courtyard. The ring of another person’s phone sounded so hopeful, and then it grew lonelier. It lost possibility, and you could almost see the sound in an empty house.
He didn’t have an answering machine. Make a note of that. A distinction. You can let it ring all day. Is that true? Has anyone ever tried it? The plastic rubbed against her jaw and her ear. She tilted it away again. If she lay on her side and let the receiver rest on her head, using a hand only for balance, she could talk for hours.
“Hello?” said a male voice that cleared itself as it spoke, so the end of the word had a cough pushing through it. Then came another cough. Was it the first time he had spoken today? Or had she woken him up? Roused from sleep was a special, intimate opportunity. But it carried high risk also. The woken person could sometimes start out frightened or vulnerable and then grow angry as the reality of the call’s interruption hit his conscious mind. It had happened to Jelly once: “Why the fuck are you disturbing my sleep? You have no idea how hard it is for me to fall asleep. And now. Well now I am awake for the goddamned duration, you bitch.” Jelly couldn’t get through a feeling like that. Not even Jelly. But this man just finished coughing and waited. She closed her eyes and focused on the white of ease, of calm, of joy. The pure and loving human event of calling a stranger, reaching across the land and into a life.