Crazy as they are beautiful, no amount of simple or complex thought is ever enough to figure them out, and yet sometimes there's nothing more straightforward. When they're good they're very very good, and when they're bad they're horrid, but the good ones are good enough to redeem the whole gender and sometimes the horrid ones are delicious. Yerp. I'm on some different kind of mid-month dragon this weekend. A much nicer one, who still makes my brain do strange things.
Saw Little G last night and had the first frank sex talk I'd had with a girlf in awhile, which was different of course because there are ways one can be a little more frank and funny with a girl than with a boy, whose more tender sensibilities must always be protected.
I used to think sex talks were great fun, and then decided they were pretty inappropriate, but now I'm thinking they're mostly useful because they can point to common patterns - little clues about where such and such a thing might have come from, insights about some behaviour thing or other - extra dribs and drabs of information that help one, in the long run, to be an easier person to live with.
Not much other news as the weekend breaks over us - I decided yesterday should be Friday so today I'm pretending it's Saturday and I'm having to go to the office to clear up a backlog of work. I will commit myself accordingly, that is, hardly at all.
venerdì, novembre 17, 2006
giovedì, novembre 16, 2006
People these days (cinema edition)
Figaro, as an artistic type, has an affinity for older movies, particularly older schlock like the Godzilla series and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He gets a big kick out of seeing how scary or kerrrrr-azy effects were produced with minimum know-how and money - a huge kick. I sympathize but I don't care all that much unless I'm snaked, until it comes to the film noir, which, thankfully, he also gets a kick out of. Last night we saw The Third Man and I was suitably flabbergasted.
The producers really benefitted from having Vienna right there, in a state of what was for the forties quite artful destruction I suppose. Still a fucking beautiful city with just enough rubble to make the chase scenes scintillating and to illustrate a pre-Cold War tension Americans could only get an echo-y chill of (which was quite enough for them, I'm sure). And I suppose they also really benefitted from the caustic but very human wit of Graham Greene, who did the screenplay as well as the novel it was based on. And they were fortunate to have a really capable cast - a fucking lovely cast - though that was obviously more good management or good directing than good luck.
But damn, those huge advantages aside, the film was so fucking good that I really had to ask myself what the hell happened to mainstream American film. The effects of tension and things equally lovely - big fucking spotlights creating the most incredible shadows - low lights shining on Orson Welles' little white fingers poking through a grille. And the creation of conflicting sympathies for at least four characters with opposing interests - it was art, and it was exciting.
I suppose what I'm driving at is that if the American mainstream was producing films that good in 1949 with lousier cameras and low-tech lighting effects, there's no excuse for the rubbishy crap it produces presently, and now I'm even more determined that studios whining about declining profits and cinema attendance should just shove it up their asses and stop expecting us to pay $12 to watch their awful cocking rubbish.
The producers really benefitted from having Vienna right there, in a state of what was for the forties quite artful destruction I suppose. Still a fucking beautiful city with just enough rubble to make the chase scenes scintillating and to illustrate a pre-Cold War tension Americans could only get an echo-y chill of (which was quite enough for them, I'm sure). And I suppose they also really benefitted from the caustic but very human wit of Graham Greene, who did the screenplay as well as the novel it was based on. And they were fortunate to have a really capable cast - a fucking lovely cast - though that was obviously more good management or good directing than good luck.
But damn, those huge advantages aside, the film was so fucking good that I really had to ask myself what the hell happened to mainstream American film. The effects of tension and things equally lovely - big fucking spotlights creating the most incredible shadows - low lights shining on Orson Welles' little white fingers poking through a grille. And the creation of conflicting sympathies for at least four characters with opposing interests - it was art, and it was exciting.
I suppose what I'm driving at is that if the American mainstream was producing films that good in 1949 with lousier cameras and low-tech lighting effects, there's no excuse for the rubbishy crap it produces presently, and now I'm even more determined that studios whining about declining profits and cinema attendance should just shove it up their asses and stop expecting us to pay $12 to watch their awful cocking rubbish.
mercoledì, novembre 15, 2006
A bird in the hand is worth you in my bush
Here's something none of you know about me, and I'm sure you don't because I forgot about it myself until last night when I was trying to explain to Figaro why I need a twelve times zoom on the digital camera I plan to get before long. Sorry for the long sentence - I was reading the chapter of Busman's Honeymoon last night that's in the form of the Dowager Wimsey's diary. Her sentences are mighty beasts.
I really like birds. I like watching them and photographing them, I used to do that in an organized fashion with my mum up North, and I decided I needed a ridiculous camera when J*Fish showed me a picture he'd taken of a sparrow wherein you could make out the individual little feathers on its chest. It makes me sad when there aren't enough birds around and disproportionately happy when there are - even if its just a bunch of fuckhead starlings roosting outside our bedroom window on a cold morning waking us the fuck up.
Toronto is hard in a sense because almost all the birds are pigeons. Even though it's so much warmer than where I grew up the grind of the city keeps them away and the lake is too out of my way to go admire the diving birds more than once every long while. So I get pigeons, and starlings and sparrows too, which Lexie occasionally attacks and - twice - has caught. But then when I wake up early enough and look out back - even in the mess of urban jungle where I live - I get to see cardinals, which we didn't have up in North Bay, and blue jays, which we did but I'm still fond of. And of course, the occasional turdus migratorius (pffffft!) which is unduly exciting to spot this late in the year since one expects them to have left this stupid shitty weather behind long ago.
And there maybe is the mystery of why I like these smelly, filthy little creatures so much, besides as a plaything for my cat. They don't really have to be where they don't want to be. Either they leave or they die. Pigeons aside (although I maintain a well-groomed wood pigeon would be one of the handsomest animals in creation if its head wasn't so tiny), they shun insalubrity and keel over when you bring them into a mine with too much carbon monoxide or whatever in it. But if they're happy, they sing, and what's more, fly stupidly huge distances to get to the places that make them happy or else find ways to adjust to ridiculous temperatures like in North Bay - by huddling or standing on a badly insulated roof or something - so they can be happy in retarded weather.
The times I was happiest in Paris - where, for all my complaints, I was often happy - was when I was walking home from parties at five or six in the morning. I'd always have to walk instead of take a cab or the metro because of the birds. During the day, Paris is just a pigeon's paradise with no sounds in earshot besides traffic and French people - but at dawn the whole town erupts into a symphony of beautiful birdsong . . . I've been to alot of beautiful places but I don't know if any of them were as beautiful as Paris when the birds are singing.
Anyways, my point is that I need a camera with high resolution and twelve times zoom. And that birds taste delicious.
I really like birds. I like watching them and photographing them, I used to do that in an organized fashion with my mum up North, and I decided I needed a ridiculous camera when J*Fish showed me a picture he'd taken of a sparrow wherein you could make out the individual little feathers on its chest. It makes me sad when there aren't enough birds around and disproportionately happy when there are - even if its just a bunch of fuckhead starlings roosting outside our bedroom window on a cold morning waking us the fuck up.
Toronto is hard in a sense because almost all the birds are pigeons. Even though it's so much warmer than where I grew up the grind of the city keeps them away and the lake is too out of my way to go admire the diving birds more than once every long while. So I get pigeons, and starlings and sparrows too, which Lexie occasionally attacks and - twice - has caught. But then when I wake up early enough and look out back - even in the mess of urban jungle where I live - I get to see cardinals, which we didn't have up in North Bay, and blue jays, which we did but I'm still fond of. And of course, the occasional turdus migratorius (pffffft!) which is unduly exciting to spot this late in the year since one expects them to have left this stupid shitty weather behind long ago.
And there maybe is the mystery of why I like these smelly, filthy little creatures so much, besides as a plaything for my cat. They don't really have to be where they don't want to be. Either they leave or they die. Pigeons aside (although I maintain a well-groomed wood pigeon would be one of the handsomest animals in creation if its head wasn't so tiny), they shun insalubrity and keel over when you bring them into a mine with too much carbon monoxide or whatever in it. But if they're happy, they sing, and what's more, fly stupidly huge distances to get to the places that make them happy or else find ways to adjust to ridiculous temperatures like in North Bay - by huddling or standing on a badly insulated roof or something - so they can be happy in retarded weather.
The times I was happiest in Paris - where, for all my complaints, I was often happy - was when I was walking home from parties at five or six in the morning. I'd always have to walk instead of take a cab or the metro because of the birds. During the day, Paris is just a pigeon's paradise with no sounds in earshot besides traffic and French people - but at dawn the whole town erupts into a symphony of beautiful birdsong . . . I've been to alot of beautiful places but I don't know if any of them were as beautiful as Paris when the birds are singing.
Anyways, my point is that I need a camera with high resolution and twelve times zoom. And that birds taste delicious.
martedì, novembre 14, 2006
A Room With a View
Last night I dreamt my office building was being moved from where it is now to some raised foundations on the river (which isn't there. On Sunday whilst photographing prettiness with Figaro, I realized how fucked it is there isn't a proper river in the city.) I thought the move was the height of idiocy, especially since it happened in the middle of the working day whilst we were all there. But as we approached the river and I realized the sweet fucking view I was going to get, I experienced a moment - just a moment - of pleasure.
Anyways, the building movers overshot the mark and released us in the middle of the river just past the foundations. It felt as though my skyscraper was rocking back and forth on a sandy riverbed, about to topple. Luckily I had broken my window in a fit of pique earlier that day, and gauged that I could use my chair to beat down my co-workers while I broke the windows on the opposite side of the building. The fact I was on the 16th floor didn't seem to bother me; the only thing that bothered me was waiting to see which way the building was going to fall so I could scramble out the other side.
It was sensible that it didn't bother me, because the building turned into a schoolbus floating in a huge pool. My broken window was just above the water level. My co-workers started acting like retards, talking about opening the doors and going out, forgetting the water would wash in and maybe break their necks. I was annoyed but couldn't get my tits up to climb out my own window without a sort of group acquiescense until I saw someone in a floating schoolbus ahead of us do just that. I scrambled out, clambered over the side of the pool, and went back to my apartment to search for the reefer a Basque terrorist had hid in my jewelry box.
The moral of the dream?
I need a new fucking job. But will it help? Since I gave up television, never liked magazines that weren't the Economist (though I am waiting for my first issue of the Utne Reader, that I bought from my neice while she was carrying out a subscription drive for her crazy-ass school) and don't watch MSN Video, I'm exposed to comparatively little aggressive advertising, but it's more than enough. I could quit my job ten times over, and the only result would be that I didn't have to study and write about methods of aggressive advertising - I'd still see them every day.
Sometimes I think the real reason I want to move back to France is that it's still socially acceptable for angry young men there to spray-paint obscene messages on billboard advertising about how much they fucking hate advertising.
Anyways, the building movers overshot the mark and released us in the middle of the river just past the foundations. It felt as though my skyscraper was rocking back and forth on a sandy riverbed, about to topple. Luckily I had broken my window in a fit of pique earlier that day, and gauged that I could use my chair to beat down my co-workers while I broke the windows on the opposite side of the building. The fact I was on the 16th floor didn't seem to bother me; the only thing that bothered me was waiting to see which way the building was going to fall so I could scramble out the other side.
It was sensible that it didn't bother me, because the building turned into a schoolbus floating in a huge pool. My broken window was just above the water level. My co-workers started acting like retards, talking about opening the doors and going out, forgetting the water would wash in and maybe break their necks. I was annoyed but couldn't get my tits up to climb out my own window without a sort of group acquiescense until I saw someone in a floating schoolbus ahead of us do just that. I scrambled out, clambered over the side of the pool, and went back to my apartment to search for the reefer a Basque terrorist had hid in my jewelry box.
The moral of the dream?
I need a new fucking job. But will it help? Since I gave up television, never liked magazines that weren't the Economist (though I am waiting for my first issue of the Utne Reader, that I bought from my neice while she was carrying out a subscription drive for her crazy-ass school) and don't watch MSN Video, I'm exposed to comparatively little aggressive advertising, but it's more than enough. I could quit my job ten times over, and the only result would be that I didn't have to study and write about methods of aggressive advertising - I'd still see them every day.
Sometimes I think the real reason I want to move back to France is that it's still socially acceptable for angry young men there to spray-paint obscene messages on billboard advertising about how much they fucking hate advertising.
lunedì, novembre 13, 2006
Voyeurism and Intimacy in a Exhibitionistic Society: Ick
I was thinking of being lazy today and just posting an article I wrote elsewhere about Turkish accession to the European Union, but I decided most of my readers would rather see this:
Pretty fucking sweet, no?
Except there's something wrong. Hard to explain. Figaro remembered the clip above from his childhood and showed it to me while we were snaked to the gills, and then we looked for more. It looks like the man who was Piffy, based on the one video we saw of him as a grown-up, may have turned into (?) a nutter. Maybe he hasn't; maybe the video we saw was a weak part of an ongoing online YouTube joke, but he seems to be a nutter.
And then one asks oneself, poor kid, his parents were probably awful to him in my terms by making him practice that act ad nauseum, and who knows how that would ever not make you a nutter? I've been on extremely intimate terms with enough people whose parents could only show their love in difficult ways (which made them difficult people in the end) to feel sort of queasy at this prospect. Not queasy out of sympathy, but queasy that I have to think about these things in terms of complete strangers. It feels far too intimate. But maybe it's my fault for watching him on YouTube when I wanted to be further amused by his act. Maybe it's my fault for wanting other people to amuse me once in awhile.
But what the fuck is WITH people posting videos of themselves on YouTube? I only realized this weekend that there are THOUSANDS of people who do it. I sort of knew from having to cover that Loney Girl shit for my work magazine, but I didn't understand until just now.
What I don't understand is why it's such a mystery to me. With this blog I can pretend it's just a question of personal expression and I'm not just splashing my own brand of nutbarishness across the screen. I write for a living for a crappy industry-promotion magazine so this is a way to be allowed to write with my real opinions, swearwords and shitty grammar. But those seem like lousy excuses even to me, and I'm sure most people would say it's probably something like the same exhibitionism that makes people post emotional videos of themselves on YouTube.
The thing is, videos are different. Harder to just look away from. More raw than words. Stopping it feels like you're insulting the person who made it. And then being presented with the video feels like a hijack of my faculties for intimacy, and that makes my tummy feel funny. From what I remember of TV, that was part of the reason I had to stop watching it. Too many highly personal narratives. On reality television, even on fucking commercials. Too much for me.
I suppose what I'm saying is that the fact that a woman who likes porn and streetfights as much as I do has to make an effort to look away from alot of things these days shows we live in degenerate times.
Pretty fucking sweet, no?
Except there's something wrong. Hard to explain. Figaro remembered the clip above from his childhood and showed it to me while we were snaked to the gills, and then we looked for more. It looks like the man who was Piffy, based on the one video we saw of him as a grown-up, may have turned into (?) a nutter. Maybe he hasn't; maybe the video we saw was a weak part of an ongoing online YouTube joke, but he seems to be a nutter.
And then one asks oneself, poor kid, his parents were probably awful to him in my terms by making him practice that act ad nauseum, and who knows how that would ever not make you a nutter? I've been on extremely intimate terms with enough people whose parents could only show their love in difficult ways (which made them difficult people in the end) to feel sort of queasy at this prospect. Not queasy out of sympathy, but queasy that I have to think about these things in terms of complete strangers. It feels far too intimate. But maybe it's my fault for watching him on YouTube when I wanted to be further amused by his act. Maybe it's my fault for wanting other people to amuse me once in awhile.
But what the fuck is WITH people posting videos of themselves on YouTube? I only realized this weekend that there are THOUSANDS of people who do it. I sort of knew from having to cover that Loney Girl shit for my work magazine, but I didn't understand until just now.
What I don't understand is why it's such a mystery to me. With this blog I can pretend it's just a question of personal expression and I'm not just splashing my own brand of nutbarishness across the screen. I write for a living for a crappy industry-promotion magazine so this is a way to be allowed to write with my real opinions, swearwords and shitty grammar. But those seem like lousy excuses even to me, and I'm sure most people would say it's probably something like the same exhibitionism that makes people post emotional videos of themselves on YouTube.
The thing is, videos are different. Harder to just look away from. More raw than words. Stopping it feels like you're insulting the person who made it. And then being presented with the video feels like a hijack of my faculties for intimacy, and that makes my tummy feel funny. From what I remember of TV, that was part of the reason I had to stop watching it. Too many highly personal narratives. On reality television, even on fucking commercials. Too much for me.
I suppose what I'm saying is that the fact that a woman who likes porn and streetfights as much as I do has to make an effort to look away from alot of things these days shows we live in degenerate times.
Iscriviti a:
Post (Atom)