- I don't think they ended up seeing it after all.
- last night I made a paper lantern! Maybe I can use it to light the house once we lose power, which will doubtless happen tomorrow.
- I'm gonna watch Woman on the Beach again soon! exciting. And today I watched about half of The Godfather (first time ever) then turned it off - boring.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
I got a little depressed about a month ago when my sister's boyfriend convinced my dad that we all oughta go see Zack and Miri Make a Porno. terrible.
top ten albums of 2008:
1. Kevin Drumm - Imperial Distortion
2. Prurient - Arrowhead
3. Paul Westerberg - 5:05 / 3oclockreep / Bored of Edukation
4. Evangelista - Hello, Voyager
5. Have Heart - Songs to Scream at the Sun
6. Li Jianhong - San Sheng Shi
7. the Advisory Circle - Other Channels
8. Portishead - Third
9. Dusk + Blackdown - Margins Music
10. Graham Lambkin/Jason Lescalleet - The Breadwinner
top ten albums of 2008:
1. Kevin Drumm - Imperial Distortion
2. Prurient - Arrowhead
3. Paul Westerberg - 5:05 / 3oclockreep / Bored of Edukation
4. Evangelista - Hello, Voyager
5. Have Heart - Songs to Scream at the Sun
6. Li Jianhong - San Sheng Shi
7. the Advisory Circle - Other Channels
8. Portishead - Third
9. Dusk + Blackdown - Margins Music
10. Graham Lambkin/Jason Lescalleet - The Breadwinner
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Yesterday afternoon, around 2.30 or so, Kyle and I went to see Changeling. For the first half or so I kept contemplating Clint Eastwood's incapacity to illuminate scenes properly. This does serve some scenes well, the dessicated horror of coming home to find one's son is missing - something difficult, I guess, to evoke - reminiscent of that scene in The Lime Twig: "Something was coming toward the window and it made her lonely....The missing of Michael came over her, the loneliness, the small grief, and she was drifting quickly down the day and time itself was wandering."
But other poorly-lit scenes put me in mind of Seven, something I've always thought of a piece of hackwork (which may yet deserve revaluation since I haven't seen it in years), a movie the doings of whose characters unfold in a city apparently lacking in proper interior lighting. Is it so much to ask?
Usually Angelina Jolie strikes me as smug, but here I couldn't stop looking at her fine features, her skinny body, would that everyone were so well-formed! I dislike seeing executions on-screen.
We left in the evening, at sunset, and it was chilly - a time of night carried forward from the somber bleak entertainment we'd just witnessed.
Later I got to hold a guinea pig! Now I'm sitting here drinking coffee and listening to Neurosis.
But other poorly-lit scenes put me in mind of Seven, something I've always thought of a piece of hackwork (which may yet deserve revaluation since I haven't seen it in years), a movie the doings of whose characters unfold in a city apparently lacking in proper interior lighting. Is it so much to ask?
Usually Angelina Jolie strikes me as smug, but here I couldn't stop looking at her fine features, her skinny body, would that everyone were so well-formed! I dislike seeing executions on-screen.
We left in the evening, at sunset, and it was chilly - a time of night carried forward from the somber bleak entertainment we'd just witnessed.
Later I got to hold a guinea pig! Now I'm sitting here drinking coffee and listening to Neurosis.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
the following, this season
Listening to John McCain, I think "I never liked you - not in 2000, not now." A minor variety of liberal groupthink holds that he was respectable eight years ago. He was not.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Some friends and I are watching right now Star Trek: First Contact (wasn't my choice but it seems fun, Alice Krige!) after Drop Dead Gorgeous earlier and a visit to a coffeeshop across 11th for dinner.
So what I really want to chronicle is: albums listened to today.
- Bjork - Homogenic
- Robert Horton - Winter Suite
- Filament - 29092000
- and the real treat, Ex-Cocaine/Yellow Swans' split on No No Fun. The Yellow Swans' track is nothing to write home about, though not bad either - but Ex-Cocaine! Music to my hungover ears around 11 this morning.
tomorrow: to write at least two pages on Paradise Lost and one on Nightwood; to watch Night of the Hunted (not a typo! a Jean Rollin flick) and later maybe Saw V if I'm lucky.
So what I really want to chronicle is: albums listened to today.
- Bjork - Homogenic
- Robert Horton - Winter Suite
- Filament - 29092000
- and the real treat, Ex-Cocaine/Yellow Swans' split on No No Fun. The Yellow Swans' track is nothing to write home about, though not bad either - but Ex-Cocaine! Music to my hungover ears around 11 this morning.
tomorrow: to write at least two pages on Paradise Lost and one on Nightwood; to watch Night of the Hunted (not a typo! a Jean Rollin flick) and later maybe Saw V if I'm lucky.
Friday, October 10, 2008
A question put across on Livejournal about a week ago, in one of the communities meant to help listless users who might not otherwise be writing to overcome writers' block: "It’s the Day of German Unity, marking the 1990 reunification of East and West Germany. In our current period of global instability, do you ever feel nostalgic for the seeming simplicity of the Cold War?" The immediate answer: of course not! Mutually-assured destruction, the threat of Communist encroachment, Western jingoism, who would care to return to any of that?
Yet analyze with rigor the idea of nostalgia, a subject on which Svetlana Boym writes eloquently, noting that the opposition between modern Russia and the West still holds currency there. (Or Andrew Meier, quoting a poll in Black Earth: "43 percent of those queried yearned for the return of Revolution Day.") Nostalgia is not necessarily intended as a healthy emotion, one rooted in a stable grasp on the difference between here and there. It's also an emotion that erases these distinctions, that blurs earlier sensibilities and selves into the present, an impingement on the possibility of acting with reference to what's right around you.
And we find that this nostalgia persists. Taking into account something like the specific allure of Eastern Promises. What are the eastern promises exactly? The obvious answer would be the promises made to Tatiana, of a rich and successful life in England, escaping her home village - promises heartlessly broken as she's raped and drugged, turned into a teenage hooker, makes it out of her captivity and dies anyway. (The drugs, an interesting touch: heroin, an emblem of Western anomie deployed against a figure who rejected the same.)
But those promises aren't "Eastern," she'd have had to go west to get to England anyway. The eastern promises are those invoked through a scene like Viggo Mortensen's initiation into organized crime. Or the voyeuristic foray into a bathhouse that no one except cultural outsiders would ever want to patronize, or the restaurant where a creepily epicene figure sings a boisterous birthday anthem, untranslated in subtitles, to a decrepit old lady slumped at the head of the table. The promise of a region entirely outside Western sensibilities and mores, one which we can potentially access but which retains its impossible allure.
And yet the portrayal of this region is as a construct. Viggo went to great lengths for the sake of a convincing performance, but he's still Viggo Mortensen. Armin Mueller-Stahl is German. Tatiana is played by a French actress, Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse, but voiced by a girl who can more convincingly manage the accent. The crime family seems increasingly inflected by the culture of contemporary England, and beyond the scenes of impossibly exotic, sordid glamour - the warm temptation of the restaurant in the rain, a room that shifts into a distant outpost the minute it's assigned a new symbolic role - the specific markers of their own culture are almost put forth post mortem. I watched the movie with some folks a few nights ago; my friend Rachel commented right after the opening scene of throat-slashing violence that it reminded her of Sweeney Todd. Exactly! And Tatiana's ventriloquized diaries, heard through smothering layers of translation, cliche and subjective sensibility, reduced by Stepan to a series of abject keywords ("'prostitutsiya,' I think you can guess. I'm going to wash my hands").
Nostalgia is with us whether we like it or not. There's the widespread, baffling appeal of Dr. Strangelove, a movie as dated and irritatingly lacking in cleverness as the worst comic productions of that period. No one could possibly watch this movie for the contrast, the relief it provides: they watch it for its vivid invocation of a time when imminent destruction was a terror, when we could afford the sort of sour misanthropy that's the comic stock of the movie because the alternative, to internalize the possibility of this destruction in full, would be too nerve-wracking.
More nostalgia: the success of contemporary stories - Jarhead and even Three Kings, up against the failure of various Iraq War-era movies (the latter none of which, I'll admit, I've actually seen). Already exhausted, I want to answer that I feel this nostalgia, and so does everyone else - and more, that as Derrida points out, the subject of nostalgia remains with us. "Seeming simplicity" indeed.
Yet analyze with rigor the idea of nostalgia, a subject on which Svetlana Boym writes eloquently, noting that the opposition between modern Russia and the West still holds currency there. (Or Andrew Meier, quoting a poll in Black Earth: "43 percent of those queried yearned for the return of Revolution Day.") Nostalgia is not necessarily intended as a healthy emotion, one rooted in a stable grasp on the difference between here and there. It's also an emotion that erases these distinctions, that blurs earlier sensibilities and selves into the present, an impingement on the possibility of acting with reference to what's right around you.
And we find that this nostalgia persists. Taking into account something like the specific allure of Eastern Promises. What are the eastern promises exactly? The obvious answer would be the promises made to Tatiana, of a rich and successful life in England, escaping her home village - promises heartlessly broken as she's raped and drugged, turned into a teenage hooker, makes it out of her captivity and dies anyway. (The drugs, an interesting touch: heroin, an emblem of Western anomie deployed against a figure who rejected the same.)
But those promises aren't "Eastern," she'd have had to go west to get to England anyway. The eastern promises are those invoked through a scene like Viggo Mortensen's initiation into organized crime. Or the voyeuristic foray into a bathhouse that no one except cultural outsiders would ever want to patronize, or the restaurant where a creepily epicene figure sings a boisterous birthday anthem, untranslated in subtitles, to a decrepit old lady slumped at the head of the table. The promise of a region entirely outside Western sensibilities and mores, one which we can potentially access but which retains its impossible allure.
And yet the portrayal of this region is as a construct. Viggo went to great lengths for the sake of a convincing performance, but he's still Viggo Mortensen. Armin Mueller-Stahl is German. Tatiana is played by a French actress, Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse, but voiced by a girl who can more convincingly manage the accent. The crime family seems increasingly inflected by the culture of contemporary England, and beyond the scenes of impossibly exotic, sordid glamour - the warm temptation of the restaurant in the rain, a room that shifts into a distant outpost the minute it's assigned a new symbolic role - the specific markers of their own culture are almost put forth post mortem. I watched the movie with some folks a few nights ago; my friend Rachel commented right after the opening scene of throat-slashing violence that it reminded her of Sweeney Todd. Exactly! And Tatiana's ventriloquized diaries, heard through smothering layers of translation, cliche and subjective sensibility, reduced by Stepan to a series of abject keywords ("'prostitutsiya,' I think you can guess. I'm going to wash my hands").
Nostalgia is with us whether we like it or not. There's the widespread, baffling appeal of Dr. Strangelove, a movie as dated and irritatingly lacking in cleverness as the worst comic productions of that period. No one could possibly watch this movie for the contrast, the relief it provides: they watch it for its vivid invocation of a time when imminent destruction was a terror, when we could afford the sort of sour misanthropy that's the comic stock of the movie because the alternative, to internalize the possibility of this destruction in full, would be too nerve-wracking.
More nostalgia: the success of contemporary stories - Jarhead and even Three Kings, up against the failure of various Iraq War-era movies (the latter none of which, I'll admit, I've actually seen). Already exhausted, I want to answer that I feel this nostalgia, and so does everyone else - and more, that as Derrida points out, the subject of nostalgia remains with us. "Seeming simplicity" indeed.
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