honeypie, honeypie

i can’t believe i forgot the friggin golden globes this year. and they went exactly how i would have wanted them to! LOTR won best drama, lost in translation won best comedy and best screenplay. bill murray won, as did meryl streep, al pacino, and jeffrey wright for angels in america. and i was CLUELESS.

going away for the weekend, to ben’s father’s 50th birthday in brighton beach, must have disoriented me. it was indeed a disorienting experience: six hours in a russian restaurant that aspired to be the moulin rouge and succeeded only in being, if possible, more postmodern. i’m not even using jargon for jargon’s sake. the floor show was not only the best floor show this side of rocky horror; it was also the most amazing explication of postmodernism i’ve ever seen. pastiche/high art + low art IS the mix of opera, ballet, and acrobatics with russian rockettes, stripper-like women in cages, and pounding flourescent techno. nothing in the floor show made any sense or correllated in any way with that came before or after, but that seemed to be the point.

it was all surface, fishnet-stockinged high-heeled surface, and the russians ate it up, along with the six thousand steaming plates of lamb that kept arriving to each table.

i was almost too busy goggling at the fishnets and heels to eat even the veggie-friendly salad appetizers. in my wool pants, button-down shirt, and sweater, i felt and looked like a nun.

i am, however, glad i went. it was definitely an experience. i took lots of pictures, though not one of the many clusters of fishnetted, high-heeled girls smoking under the “thank you for not smoking” signs (the restaurant would do marginally better with signs that read, “thank you for not ashing on the carpet”) or the last stripper-like woman who danced in the cage, wearing a sparkly shirt and nothing else.

then go to new york

i’m off for the first of my indeterminate number of weekends away from swarthmore. this one is in honor of ben’s father’s birthday. being as he’s russian and everything, a whole rowdy group is descending on an authentic russian restaurant in an authentic russian part of brooklyn. i mean, you think ‘russian,’ you think ‘vodka’ — and you think ‘vodka,’ you think ‘fun,’ right?

it’s too cold to do anything outside. or maybe it’s too cold to do anything that doesn’t involve vodka.

first fight. then fiddle.

i have my schedule settled. my potential classes, in order of relative skate-through-able-ness to lip-biting hair-tearing difficulty, are:

contemporary women’s poetry

vampires in film, literature, and music

video production workshop

film theory (seminar, but only one credit)

on wednesday, when i had both video production and film theory, my profs each screened three experimental films. the grand total of six experimental films wiped me out.

(i know the word “experimental” is vague; essentially, it means NO DIALOGUE, NO STORY and NO ENDING, LET ALONE A HAPPY ONE.)

however, in the future it seems as though the video production class will focus on teaching us how to use a camera and then trying us by fire, and the film theory class will focus on, well, theory, making this past wednesday’s experience a unique one.

the video production class is exciting because i will actually be learning a skill. this is a first for me at swarthmore. i’ve never even held a mini-dvd camera and by the end of the semester i will have made three short films. not as practical, maybe, as learning to change a tire or file taxes, but one has to start somewhere.

and vampires! who wouldn’t be thrilled to learn about vampires! especially from a cute/dorky guy who seems simultaneously animated by the material and determined not to take it, or himself, too seriously.

thanks to everyone who passed on condolences re: gephardt, whether by email, in person, or shouting them across the cafeteria. the party went off well anyway. people rallied: they said “at least it wasn’t dean” and poured themselves another glass of wine.

on that note, i have a bet going about whether the nomination will go to kerry or clark. i say clark. feel free to add your opinion and maybe i’ll defend mine.

party prep

countdown to the caucus. this is serious business. if you don’t believe it, come to our victory party this evening: where there’s lamb, there’s serious business.

it’s always nerve-wracking to me to realize i don’t know something that 24 hours from now i will know. even though i couldn’t possibly know what i don’t yet know, it irritates me that my future-self will know something my present-self doesn’t. for instance, will i get into grad skool? i’d really they let me know before they let me know, you know?

speaking of rubbish, someone should buy the rights to my subconscious mind. not only do i come up with ridiculously creative horror scenarios, i dream some crazy shit. last night i dreamt i was carrying a wicker ring. once i dropped it i couldn’t find it again until i had the brilliant idea to turn off everything in the world that wasn’t wicker.

instantly, i found the ring. i turned the world back to normal again but i’d changed something irrevokably. as the pompous and irritated authority figure informed me, i’d “fucked with impossibility!” now EVERYTHING was possible — which meant, of course, everything was chaos.

please hope gep pulls through tonite. there are excellent political reasons but more importantly, if he does, it will make my family very happy.

things we said today

anxiety dreams the past few nights. in them, i throw books at people’s heads, curl into a ball on the floor and sob. people turn away from me. i wake up sorethroated and thirsty.

it must be related to returning to college. i’m about to return to college for the last time. well, actually, i suppose there’s returning from spring break too. perhaps i should instruct my subconscious not to be so melodramatic.

still, over and over again, i find myself telling people it’s almost over. cuz it is.

at times like these, i like johnny cash.

“animals laugh at me”

finally, an article on dogville, the latest and most controversial lars van trier movie. this is the one that was called anti-american and for a while couldn’t get a distributor. i think it sounds fascinating.

it will be released this winter, i’ve heard. maybe they’ll release it on the same day as the passion of mel gibson, and then all the righties in this country can go into their theaters and the lefties can go into ours. yay!

while browsing the internet, i came across this several-days-old-but-still-active discussion thread on book people vs. movie people. it’s written by a fella who uses too many semi-colons, tends to ramble, and who raised my eyebrows by suggesting that the vast majority of novels should just be 50 pages long.

he raises several interesting points about the literary world, which he indicts as being an extention of the academic one. in essence, he says that book people don’t have a sense of humor (about books or about themselves) while movie people necessarily do. moreover, movie people, unlike stodgy book people, glory in mixing art and trash and enjoying both.

it does remind me of my very first fiction teacher who drew a vertical line down the middle of the blackboard to segregate “FICTION” from “LITERATURE.” when we called out an author, she wrote that author’s name down either on one side of the line or the other. as i recall, there was no cross-over and there was no hazy in-betweenness.

that was my first introduction to that kind of thinking and it troubled me.

she did, however, say that it’s perfectly okay to love both fiction and literature; it’s just important to recognize the difference between the two.

mr. 2blowhards doesn’t think so. i once had a long argument where i argued the side of my fiction teacher. really, though, it doesn’t bother me overmuch. if i hadtohadto choose, i’d say i’m a movie person by his definition at least since i want to work in movies and not publishing. but i loved books first, including/especially fiction-not-literature: tom robbins, marjorie morningstar, gwtw, rebecca, douglas adams … and earlier, Choose Your Own Adventures, encyclopedia brown, the babysitters club. i look back on that reading with fondness. in fact, hell!, i just reread a douglas adams book, and that was after i reread two of the harry potterz. man, slumming it.

all better

i was a teeeeny iiiitsy bit depressed today after i got feedback on my short[screenplay] “EXIT” which i’d entered in its first contest. the judge liked it but didn’t love it and, naturally, it didn’t make the top ten.

short[screenplay]s about sex offenders finding love in purgatory over games of marbles just don’t do it for everyone, i guess. however, i did get high marks for originality.

i read the tvwop recap of the apprentice and it was all better. you know, the terrific new reality series where the dumbest-yet-most-attractive mbas in the country compete for the honor of someday working for donald trump. i’d say something snarky but believe me, the recap more than does that for me. hoo boy, i can’t remember the last time i laughed that hard.

wait, yes i can. it was earlier this evening when my father recounted his maiden attempt at a group cross-country skiing lesson.

dad: so we get to this mogul —

mom: mogul? MOGUL?

dad: and the teacher says go over the mogul and immediately i fall —

mom: MOGUL? MOGUL?

dad: — breaking the bindings on my skiis. the teacher’s really nice about it and she gives me her bindings. so then i try to go over the mogul again and i fall again and break HER bindings —

mom: paul, there was no mogul. you were on flat ground and the teacher just said, “move FORWARD.”

pause.

dad: well, at the very least, it was a bump.

two amazing finds

charlize theron in monster. whatever you have heard is in no way exaggerated. it is worth it, honestly, for you to spend $8 and 2 hours of your life, watching one of the most depressing rape-victim serial killer movies you will ever see, because charlize theron is astonishing. she transcends the material. moreover, she makes christina ricci look like an amateur.

it doesn’t even feel like acting. you get the sense watching ricci that she’s agog not because her lover has become homicidal but because she’s in the presence of a hurricane.

the movie gets extra props in my book for its hands-off approach to direction and pacing: nothing fancy or distracting, just straightforward unsentimental storytelling. the voiceover is the one exception to this but first time writer/directors can be forgiven for that.

it also gets props for not making a big deal about the love story which lies at the film’s center. neither of the two women has been in a queer relationship before but neither goes through any sort of traumatic coming out. neither agonizes over self-perception. it’s refreshing.

of course, the movie is as dark as you would expect from something called “monster.” that leads us to the next great find: metacritic.com, a site which catelogues all the opinions that matter and presents them in an approachable way. i’ve been obsessed with their 2003 awards page since ben pointed me to it. the most honored films of the year are ROTK and lost in translation, my two personal favorites.

is there a medical term for over-emotional?

besides “female,” i mean.

ha HA.

really, i hate television. really. it’s canned, predictable, idiotic — and that’s just the reality shows. but i became addicted to bravo’s Celebrity Poker Showdown the same way i became addicted to baseball back in october, watching on the edge of my seat, shouting along with the commentators, flushed and giddy.

and this time, unlike in october, i was rooting for the winner.

i’ve also become (nearly) addicted to reruns of west wing on bravo, making the fledgling network hbo’s rival for my most-watched. and hey, i’m a demographic they care about, right? i should treasure this while it lasts, while my opinions hold any cultural weight at all.

contributed to my overarching happiness are my terrific script conference with sam today; the last of my grades posted FINALLY this morning; and sense and sensibility which no number of viewings can or will ever decrease in quality or effect on me. it teaches valuable lessons, such as, Never trust a man who carries shakespeare’s sonnets around in his pocket.

the best thing about my new black boots

the looks on people’s faces as i swept past them that clearly said, “i’m sorry — for a second i could have sworn you were carrie ann moss.”