From the light of a different sun

A forum for discussing fan art related to Let The Right One In
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PeteMork
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by PeteMork » Sun Sep 24, 2017 4:55 pm

sauvin wrote:Image
Wow. The color and detail of this one is amazing. I've actually had indigestion-inspired nightmares that reflect this same sense of decay and hopelessness . (I'm not kidding. :shock: )

Abby's slight fuzziness with respect to the rest of the photo's detail can be interpreted as her not quite belonging in our world -- even as decayed and threadbare as it appears here.

To make a long explanation short: I like this one.
We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain. (Roberto Bolaño)

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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by sauvin » Sun Sep 24, 2017 8:18 pm

PeteMork wrote:
sauvin wrote:Image
Wow. The color and detail of this one is amazing. I've actually had indigestion-inspired nightmares that reflect this same sense of decay and hopelessness . (I'm not kidding. :shock: )

Abby's slight fuzziness with respect to the rest of the photo's detail can be interpreted as her not quite belonging in our world -- even as decayed and threadbare as it appears here.

To make a long explanation short: I like this one.
Gee, thanks.

The "amazing" detail comes from the fact that the room is a photo I found on the web, and it's in high resolution. Abby's blurriness is partially a consequence of my inability to deal well with low resolutions (screen shots, in this case, from a DVD played with VLC). That's why she looks other-worldly.
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by sauvin » Sun Sep 24, 2017 11:20 pm

As an addendum to the foregoing post:

I moved away from my ocean of cornstalks to the Atlantic in my later twenties, and to Detroit when I was just shy of forty, only to return to the waves of grain when I was almost fifty. While I was growing up, when this building went down or that one went up, it was just part of daily life, and maybe years later we'd comment over lunch or a Sunday dinner that this gas station used to be that restaurant years ago, and my, wasn't the food there so flipping yummy? The movie theater was one of those grand old ladies with moldings all over the seats and walls, a balcony that seated dozens of people and a screen only slightly smaller than the nighttime sky, but when they chunked it up into two smaller theaters, we all just sorta rolled with it.

I'd been away for almost twenty years when I drove back to the corn patch during my vacation, and was shocked and occasionally appalled at how much could change. My boyhood best friend's house and its few immediate neighbours were now open grassland. A couple of the elementary schools that'd been around almost since horse-and-buggy days had been razed and their lots turned into playgrounds, memorials and historical markers - and no new schools to replace them. What for me personally is almost the worst crime is that the grand old dame where I watched the original Jaws on the Big Screen (the one the size of the sky) was now just a bunch of cubicles that seated maybe two dozen each.

Neither the town I grew up in nor the town I lived in on the Atlantic had much in the way of abandoned buildings. Quite the opposite at the Atlantic, in fact: finding a new apartment was the very devil because just about every broom closet available already had a tenant and a waiting list, and more buildings were popping up like dandelions everywhere. Every KIND of building: apartment buildings, malls, hardware stores, Big Boxes, you name it. Man, I'll bet that would have been a great time to be in the construction business!

I was completely unprepared for Detroit. Downtown itself looked basically OK, but it was a bit small (Boston makes Detroit look like a village, and Chicago makes it look like a backyard slum), and grimy, but it wasn't very busy, and there weren't a lot of businesses open. Driving around was depressing as hell: everywhere you went, there was a house, a hotel, a mansion that'd been hit by a tornado or burned halfway down and never repaired. Whole warehouse yards were abandoned, and so were skyscrapers. Hospitals. Schools. Libraries. Factory complexes. Heck, there were whole neighbourhoods that really looked like the only things living in them were the termites and the rats.

I lived in that area long enough to see businesses in the process of going: traffic through them dwindling, all the "STORE-WIDE SALE, EVERYTHING MUST GO!" signs, the soaped or boarded windows with "NO TRESPASSING" signs. I saw hardware stores and pharmacies go; I saw grocery stores go. In my time there, I was rudely surprised twice to see that a movie theater I'd planned on watching a movie in had been suddenly closed without warning. The mall nearest to where I lived went from nearly full occupancy to being about half occupied - when I left, the only businesses still running were a second-run movie theater, a Burlington Coat Factory, a dollar store, a liquidator a la Big Lots and a little cubbyhole selling donuts to the armed security guards.

All this happened rapidly enough that I was able to see it: if you wanted safe to shop in safe, decent places, you had to drive away from the city, and you had to drive further and further every year. At the time, I called it something like "burgeoning urban blight" before running across the term "white flight". The latter term is a bit misleading because everybody who could leave those areas were leaving just as fast as their U-Hauls could carry them.

I lived in the Detroit area less than ten years.

In the time since, I've developed something of a morbid fascination with abandoned buildings. They're not hard to find. Just fire up Google, enter "abandoned buildings", hit "images" when the result set displays, and click around. You'll not only find tons of buildings of every sort rotting away, you'll also find abandoned trains, aircraft, amusement parks... you'll find ghost towns. You'll find ghost cities.

Here's the thing that stings me most: there was a mall about an hour from where I lived while I was growing up. BIG honking mall in the overall floor plan of a Chicago city block with a large plenum in the centre. I was seventeen at the time, very much in love and loved to take her to that mall to snoop around all the quaint little boutiques featuring knick-knacks (think Things Remembered), candies from all around the world, magic crystals and figurines of Gandalf. All the hallways looked like streets in a European village lined with houses, and at the mall entrance was an organ grinder with a tiny LIVE monkey collecting quarters. There were specialty restaraurants, so you could load up on gourmet pizza before running off to the amusement park in the mall's plenum and yark dinner up on a roller coaster ride. It was a kind of Shangri-La I took her to every chance we got, a place to get away and to get lost in an indoors cotton candy heaven.

We were very much in love; sunsets had never before been so vibrant, nor the moon ever so luminous. We're not anymore (well, she isn't, anyway), sunsets are just a bunch of dull, nondescript oranges and the moon is just a light in the night sky to help me see well enough to drive - and that mall is gone. Seems like it went up the same day I met her, and foundered not long after she told me it was over. Pictures of that mall are hard to find on Google, and they'll all be scans of fading Polaroids or black and white prints. A fast pass with Google Maps suggests that absolutely nothing of that place remains. There's just a couple of smaller factories, maybe a warehouse or two, couple of hotels and fast food joints.

Dandelions and milkweeds.

In one of the foregoing images, Abby is passing through the door of an apartment that hasn't been occupied for many, many seasons. She's saying "It can hard to make friends. It can be harder to visit them when you've not seen them in... a while". A backstory for this image isn't hard to dream up: she'd not been in $City in, well, maybe a few years, and decided to look them up and maybe catch up on old times, only to discover they've long since departed from this place without leaving a forwarding address. Given the place's advancing state of decomposition, the subtext to the image is that the former tenants have been dead for many years.

This is Abby's immortality, the one that that Queen (a rock music band) sings about:
Queen, heavily condensed wrote: What is this thing that builds our dreams, yet slips away from us?
This world has only one sweet moment set aside for us.
Who dares to love forever, when love must die?
We can experience it, even if we don't live more than two or three decades, by watching huge institutions we'd thought eternal shutter their windows and rot under the seasons' rains; we can experience it when we go back Home again to find that the only things remaining of our childhood friends are fields of milkweeds and the fading memories we carry around of them; we can experience it even if we only live six decades when we learn years afterwards that the girl with the sense of humour to keep you laughing for hours, the strength of character to endure an unimaginably painful illness, and (dare I say it?) a love of some "afternoon delight" that'll leave you unable to move... well, she had passed away of natural causes.

She's a selfish, evil, manipulating B****? Maybe so, but at twelve years old, Abby has already long ago had to resign herself to an existence that a grumpy old man had previously only understood as an abstract concept: if we couldn't all live forever, very few immortals would have a future worth living through.
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dongregg
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by dongregg » Mon Sep 25, 2017 12:28 am

Dear Sauvin. Your words have touched me -- transported me -- beyond my ability to convey properly. Thank you and may whatever is benevolent in the universe bless your noble heart.
Last edited by dongregg on Mon Sep 25, 2017 3:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by sauvin » Mon Sep 25, 2017 8:28 am

Image
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by sauvin » Thu Sep 28, 2017 8:13 am

My Photobucket images are now on flickr here (in an album) for any who might be interested. Flickr seems to be working out OK so far, even if I'm still hurling all kinds of epithets and invective at its user interface. The images are in no particular order.

Edit: I don't remember why one or two of these images are here, and had most likely been used in some old post somewhere on this forum.
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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by dongregg » Thu Sep 28, 2017 9:57 am

Thanks. There are plenty of gems.
“For drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.”

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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by sauvin » Mon Oct 02, 2017 9:35 am

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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by PeteMork » Mon Oct 02, 2017 2:38 pm

sauvin wrote:Image
I would definitely expect these two to get along famously. They are soulmates.

Well done. Everyone is looking in the right place, and the coloring is almost perfect.
We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain. (Roberto Bolaño)

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Re: From the light of a different sun

Post by sauvin » Tue Oct 03, 2017 5:18 pm

Image
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