Writing on the Wall (2011)

Jenia Emmanuelle: Mary Jane D'Arbanville

Photos 

Quotes 

• Paul : [Set in exterior: Hoxton, London]  At least we've lived there before it became all trendy.

  Mary Jane D'Arbanville : Trendy, my ass! Hoxton indeed! Bloody Old Street, Shoreditch. The price of an average run-down squat rocketed from 50 000 to 3 million... In spite of all this we have the muggings, burglaries, pollution and the local mafia shooting up in broad daylight.

  Paul : That's London for you! You do have to pay for live entertainment!

• Mary Jane D'Arbanville : [Jane's Story, set: interior, Candle-lit dinner]  When I was 5, my mom and I moved from Knoxville, Tennessee to Downtown New York. It was quite a change. I grew up in the early eighties. My mom used to play Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker all the time and it has been playing in my head ever since, though not as much as it used to. Growing up in NY was terrific and the underground club scene was at its peak in the late eighties.

• Paul : Jails are like the good old days of chuckles and straw; moldy water and rancid bread. If the decor and the props may have changed, the principles remain. The beatings and abuses are omnipresent. There was a man who has just been released after serving a third of his life in jail. For allegedly murdering his neighbor when in fact the guy died of a heart attack. He was a healthy young man when he was sent to the reservoir dogs. On his release he was old, very old. He could barely walk. If he dies now it would be of a heart attack, ironic! He was lucky!

  Mary Jane D'Arbanville : Lucky?

  Paul : Yes, lucky! He was released by chance. Some researchers who investigated the case managed to access the body. Who would otherwise agree to take on a case like this after twenty-five years?

• Mary Jane D'Arbanville : I did a BSc in Psychology. I think it was the shittest thing I ever did. I ended up riddled with debts because my scholarship money had run out halfway through. In 1991 I won a Pepsi-Cola competition and won a holiday to London. The clubs were then tremendous. They retained a smell of thirties and fifties. I like that. In London I met X. X and I had our ups and downs, little sex, and many gay encounters, plenty to talk and shout about. We remained best friends ever since. I returned to NY after my holiday and never anticipated returning back. X joined me for a while.

• Mary Jane D'Arbanville : The rest of the story need not be cut off in action and indeed would hardly need telling if my imagination wasn't so cribbed by the sheer lack of objectivity and lazy care for my demented surrounding. A surrounding filled with the 'ready to wear' slap-dash, cocky bitches and pansies in which decadence keeps its toll of natural disasters. It is thus possible for me to interact in a more cohesive fashion. This is merely based on my own assumption that my life, or the decade we've just missed is easily moveable, adjustable and reshape-able, therefore flexible enough to be played with again and again. If ranting on the bitterness of Being wasn't a state of mind already invented, then this "Great Swindle of Being" so described by X would render the torrid notion 'so noble in the mind to suffer', so described by Hamlet into the biggest E ever conceived in the history of mankind.

• Mary Jane D'Arbanville : I returned unexceptionally in London in 1991, but not out of choice. If all the events took over 10 years to develop, this slow motion of being never occurred to me, as everything travelled at the speed of life. Only now I can be in a position to go back in time, maybe not in the right order, but then again things never turned out the way they should have been in the first place. I always had this dream about England, being Heaven in a little cottage in the countryside surrounded by roses. I wonder if that would be heaven, if I wouldn't be bored beyond redemption.

• Mary Jane D'Arbanville : The music from the Nutcracker plays in my head. I'm bored stiff.