Color of Wheatverse. Unimportant ramblings and interludes. Part 5ish


hackthis and me. Y'all tell her she should keep on joining in.





On Best Mates and Pulling Birds (Jonny Lee Miller):

People never give Jude enough credit. Whether it's because of his looks, or his fame, or his mates, or his bat-shit ex-wife, he's never entirely sure, but he knows for a fact that he's spent a good amount of his life being underestimated. He reckons this is probably what led him to acting in the first place. Well, that – and the ease with which Jonny was forever getting laid when he told birds he was 'an actor.'

Jude will never forget the first time Jonny actually pulled using that actor bit. They were fifteen, and there was this bird in sixth year – Susan Wilkes – and Jonny didn't ask her out, because that was just too obvious. Instead, he started going on about his auditions during lunch, somewhere near where she was hanging about with her mates, and she overheard him -- and it actually fucking worked.

Jude hasn't yet met a bird who can help listening to other people's conversations – and it was all downhill from there. Well, it was uphill for Jonny – because Susan was well out of his league, and he managed to blag his way in there just as he managed to blag his way into Angelina's knickers. If nothing else Jonny must be doing something right, because Jonny and Angie have been divorced for eight years now, and she's still sniffing about him.

Jude knows for a fact that the Brad and Angelina thing is a big ploy, because he was just around at Jonny's last month and Angie was there with her little boy, who calls Jonny 'Uncle Jonny', and Jude just raised an eyebrow and kissed Angie on the cheek.

Jonny hasn't had a huge role since, well, Trainspotting, but he's doing this run at the Ambassador Theatre, and he's in Aeon Flux, which is supposed to be 'the Next Big Thing'.

More importantly though, he seems really fucking happy.

Jonny's been acting years longer than Jude, hasn't done half as much work, doesn't get offered the roles Jude does either -- but he's so much fucking happier that it makes Jude green with the unfairness of it all.

Jude wants that. He just doesn't know how to go about getting it.


*


Hayden buys AutoCad from the internet, and when it’s delivered he realizes his computer doesn’t have enough memory to run it.

Hayden decides to buy a new computer. Henry drives him in Viggo’s old, banged up, rattling Peugeot. The car makes Hayden wonder what would happen if Viggo ever did anything normal, like buying a Ford.

“This car’s fucked up,” Hayden punches the radio on--the almost new Blaupunkt car radio. Doves fill the car with their Mancunian melancholy – a life other than the one Henry and Hayden know.

“It was Pilar’s. Long story. Long, boring story involving horses.” The tips of Henry’s hair are black, and the rest is various shades of purple. The tips of his hair match his black nail polish and thirty bracelets.

“Pilar?” Hayden can’t keep all of Henry’s friends and girlfriends and “aunts” and…

“You met Pilar. Pilar Perez. At the cook-out. She’s pop’s business partner. At Perceval.” Henry pulls into the parking lot of a generic southern California mall.

“Perceval?” Hayden isn’t really paying attention to Henry, and he doesn’t care who Pilar is, or if she hooked to pay for the beat-up French car. He’s focused on how Ewan called the night before to tell him he was wrapping on the Von Trier project and heading for France for a few days with Eve. Hayden really tries not to hate her. Some days he fails.

“Dude, I’m thinking you’re coming up on the hard-core drugs phase of your depression. I can make some calls.” Henry could be joking, and he could be dead serious. Hayden knows that either way, it doesn’t matter. He watches a mom wearing Juicy Couture strap a baby into a billion dollar car seat in the back of her Escalade.

“I was thinking heroin.”

“I was thinking you need to start with something you don’t inject. How about photography? I know a pusher.” Henry pulls the key from the ignition and unfastens Hayden’s seatbelt.

“What’s Perceval?” Throwing open the door to the car, Hayden resolves to move on, keep going, fix himself, choose life, choose the suburbs, buy tins of tomato soup and tubs of vanilla ice cream.

“Not like you care, since you’re obsessing, 'oh my god, he doesn’t call, doesn’t come by'.” Henry slams his own car door and rounds the dented front of the Peugeot. “Dude, if all you do is think about someone else, how can you be you? You’re just a reflection of who you think they are. And Perceval is the publishing company pop owns.”

“Huh. So, you think I’m boring?” Hayden side-kicks Henry in the ass and raises his hands in mock battle. “I have my talents. Like kicking your ass on the PSP.”

Henry chit-chats about video games being good training for hand-eye coordination while at the same time tools of an oppressor-consumer culture.

Hayden thinks about blowing his house up and starting over with a geodesic dome in the desert. But then he would be alone, and Hayden hasn’t ever really been alone for longer than, oh, about an hour at a time in his life.

He buys the most expensive laptop he can find in silent protest to Henry’s punk-rock, DIY propaganda.


*


Two Tears in a Bucket, Motherfuck it (Sadie):

To say that Jude's relationship with Sadie right now is contentious is a wee bit of an understatement – like saying that Ewan doesn't mind getting his kit off or that Charley's acting career is a stalled in the water. The thing is, though, no matter how hacked off Sadie is about Sienna, or how irate Jude gets about Sadie's toy boy, the fact remains that when Jude first met Sadie, she was the star in the relationship. She's been with him from the jump. The tables may have turned, but if anybody knows Jude's demons, it's Sadie. She knows what buttons to push, what words to say, and what will drive him mental in the least amount of time.

She's also believed in him from before the word 'go'. They have children together, beautiful children that Jude loves dearly, and no matter what happens, their lives will be entwined forever.

There's some shit you just have to accept.


*


Hayden isn’t surprised when the poems start appearing on scraps of paper and pieces of ripped-up wallpaper around his house.

Written on the back page of Wicked, with annotated notes by one H. Mortensen, laying face down, it’s spine long broken, on Hayden’s sawhorse and wood-plank desk: Summer is a season of feigned Autumn and lingering Spring, of last frosts and first dropped leaves. You stand with your rubber soles resting on ten rainbows’ worth of murderous glass, light refracting up your legs, across your maple leaf blue shirt and ask me questions with words that ride over your meaning like words erased on a page and rewritten. The Spring leaving you doubts. The Autumn shadowing you judges. I wait for your words to fulfill the ten rainbows, the Summer that’s right there under your feet.

Scrawled on a serviette from In-And-Out Burger, abandoned on the brand-new kitchen counter: Love is the shadow of fingers dancing against brick, black and grey spikes pressing with no weight.

Screaming in all caps and Sharpie on the title page of a Paramount/Plan B script:
I remember the sound of gold
falling through a cloudless sky
tumbling up instead of down
in defiance of universal laws.

Turning to search for you
I saw you were doing the same.
You tumbled up into your own life
In defiance of my expectations.


On that same script, that Maya had defiantly sent him in contravention of his express desire never to act again, she had written: Brad fucking Pitt said to send this to you. Read it or I will remove your fingernails with my tweezers.

-M



*


We All Have That One Person Who Would Be So Perfect for Us, If It Weren’t For, Well, Life (Ewan):

There was a time when Jude didn't have Ewan in his life. He doesn't really remember it, but he knows it existed, because Jonny introduced them, and it was like someone had reattached on a limb that Jude didn't know was missing in the first place.

Jude likes to say that if he were into men, he would obviously fancy Ewan, because Ewan isn't just an actor, he's a fucking star. Ewan radiates like most people breathe and sweat and exist in the mundane. Ewan has this thing that draws people to him, and despite his own brilliance, Jude's just as helpless as the rest of the poor bastards out there.

Jude's spent his entire life trying to prove that he's not just a pretty face, but the first thing Ewan ever said to him was 'You're not nearly as pretty as Jonny made you out to be.' And that was it.

Jude was done for.

When that American rag said Jude was the Sexiest Man in the World, Ewan rang him up and just laughed. "I don't know what they're seeing in you, sweetheart," he said. "You've always been the dog's dinner to me."

And Jude thinks that this why he loves Ewan as much as he does, because Ewan doesn't think Jude's some nice trophy on the ledge, or a pair of Jimmy Choos to be displayed for company. Jonny says they make each other human, and Jude thinks that that's why they've never done a film together, because Jude doesn't need to be exposed for the entire world to see.

Jude's been acting for a while now, and from the start it's been about his face. It's been about how pretty he is, or what he wears, or how he looks. For the longest time the roles he got weren't about his acting, but about him being a good piece of eye candy for the people watching the screen; he's not fucking stupid, he knows this. He's always wanted to step above that though, like with Road to Perdition, but all he got for his troubles was a hairline that's now steadily trying to climb away from his forehead.

Jude doesn't know what he has to do to be taken seriously: work more, work less, kick Chris Rock's teeth in? He just knows that something has to change, because it's really starting to crawl under his skin, and it's making him very unhappy.

And when he's unhappy, everyone else suffers for it.


*


Henry comes in with the mail, arguing about James Bond with his girlfriend, Evan.

“Look, James Bond is reprehensible. It's beyond sexist. It's vile and everything disgusting about plastic, gun-obsessed modern culture.” Henry tosses Hayden’s mail into his lap. A huge, manila envelope weighing fifteen pounds from Maya, sweepstakes, coupons, and a postcard of Unite d'Habitation by Le Corbusier.








On the back, marching in Ewan’s blocky, print is the message:

Rules of Propaganda:
1. Simplification: reducing all data to a simple confrontation between two easy ideas: Right and Wrong, Enemy and Friend.
2. Disfiguration: smearing your opponent with libel and lampoons.
3. Transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the audience for one’s own ends.
4. Unanimity: presenting one’s own opinion as the only, right view; appealing to the masses through actors, musicians, and other people of note; appealing to the doubter with authority figures agreeing with your position.
5. Orchestration: sticking to your “talking points” and “message” at all costs, ad infinitum.

Got that off a book. What do you think of me as Trotsky?
E. !

Hayden thinks Ewan sucks a lot. More than a lot. Hayden thinks…

“Like, Hayden, do you think James Bond is eroding the moral fiber of the entire world through product placement and cleavage?” Evan pops her gum and smiles at him. She’s only been around as long as Hayden has, and at first he thought it was sort of weird that Henry went out and found a child-star girlfriend just as Hayden, himself a child-star girlfriend-acting sort of guy happened into his life. Now he knows that’s not paranoia, that Henry is trying to ease Hayden’s transition. Transition from what to what, who knows. Plus, Hayden feels sorry for Evan -- but then he feels stupid for feeling sorry for her, because she’s hot and on the verge of becoming an It-girl. So whatever.

“I like James Bond. But only Sean Connery.” Hayden says, turning the postcard over in his hands.

“Dude, seriously, do you even think before you speak? Sean Connery. You’re priceless.” Henry’s laugh is followed by Evan’s, even though Hayden doubts she has any idea what she’s laughing at. There is no fucking way Henry’s told her word one about Ewan. But she’s a girl, so who knows.

“Look, asshole, I can like Sean Connery.”

“The beating women issue aside, he has his charms.” Hayden turns to see Viggo backlit by the eerie blue light filtered through the tarps covering the back of the house. He’s got his Hasselblad dangling from one hand and a sheet of iridescent, black and blue and grey glass clutched in the other. “I have a friend who has a friend. We can start soldering this tomorrow.


*

Sometimes, When You’re Not Looking, Life Happens to You (Sienna):

Jude doesn't think he would be engaged to Sienna Miller if Ewan had just managed to keep his dick in his trousers for once. In his mind, Jude knows these things aren't connected in any way, shape or form, because Alfie was shooting while Ewan was smoking weed with Charley in Mongolia and doing reshoots for Revenge of the Sith in Australia. Jonny was puttering around, playing happy families with Angie; Sadie was crawling up his arse with her craziness; and every conversation with Ewan was about fucking Hayden Christensen, and Jude just couldn't cope. He needed something or someone, who didn't seem to crack open his ribcage every time they talked and extract something vital, and Sienna was there.

She was just there.

And now he can't get rid of her, because she's the only thing between him and that all over again. Jude doesn't want Jonny or Sadie or Ewan for himself, he just doesn't want anyone else to have them either. He knows it’s selfish and stubborn and wrong, but Jude never claimed to be a saint. He's never claimed to be perfectly flawless, despite whatever the tabloids and the industry try to make him out to be. The truth of the matter is that he's just as imperfect and damaged as anyone else, but people don't seem to want to see that when they look at him. They don't want depth; they just want him to smile and be perfect and non-threatening, and all Jude wants is to walk around shooting handgun blanks in the air.

Then maybe people will stop looking at his face and start looking at him.




~tada


a. Evan Rachel Wood
b. Le Corbusier
c. Hasselblad cameras (Viggo’s real camera)