Blackbird Archivefrom Our Secret Life in the Movies
We wrote Our Secret Life in the Movies in San Francisco, in a shared sublet a block away from the Mission Dolores, the site of Carlotta Valdes’s grave in Hitchcock’s Vertigo . We’d hatched a plan to watch every film in The Criterion Collection’s sweeping catalog of world cinema classics over the course of a single year, an obsession that fed off pizza boxes, sambuca fumes, and whatever is damaged on the Y chromosome.
We watched film after film—as many as two or three a day—and wrote stories inspired by them. After completing a dozen sketches, it became obvious that we were writing a fragmented book of linked snapshots chronicling our parallel trajectories as the last children of the Cold War and the analog era, coming of age in the 1980s amidst the white noise of intercontinental-ballistic mayhem and Reaganomics.
Nearly all of us have a secret life in the movies, in which the pictures seep through our dreams until fantasy and reality become hopelessly blurred. We are in the movies, and the movies are in us.
A couple's relationship spirals into escalating, dangerous role-play games against a backdrop of small-town paranoia and rumor.
FictionMy Friend Who Climbed into a SentenceA narrator recalls the last time he saw a woman before she vanished into a strange, sentence-like winter departure.
FictionSheets of GalaxiesA narrator recalls a childhood fascination with astronomy sparked by a science teacher's sheet of galaxy photographs.
FictionStationsA man recounts the sudden, unexplained disappearance of a partner and his subsequent aimless nighttime bus rides through the city.
FictionThrown Rod, Cruel StarsAfter their son dies in a car crash, a grieving couple retreats into conspiracy theories while a neighbor quietly helps out.
FictionFor UsA darkly comic monologue from a man justifying his bizarre collection of human ears to a partner who is leaving him.