Day 1

Hunger:
Most of my energy today has gone into food preparation. Really, I haven't been inordinately hungry at all because, although this initial three-day detox consists of eating simple carbs-- i.e., quickly digesting foods-- I've been able to continue feeding myself around the clock. My lunch today consisted of a makeshift guacamole, which I found surprisingly tasty, despite the fact that I couldn't eat it with chips and despite the other fact that I couldn't put salt in it. I also had a sizable bowl of mache with lemon juice and flaxseed oil. So far, this isn't really all that far off from what I usually eat. And then I got a weird afternoon snack of grilled grapefruit with ginger on top (this was a little odd but not too bad). And then for dinner, I made this thing that I thought I was gonna hate-- made from sweet potatoes and acorn squash (I don't like either of these particularly unless I can add a lot of salt to them-- and that's against the rules here) and a turnip (which I didn't have, so I substituted a couple baby Yukon golds). But then I got to load it up with garlic, cayenne, cumin, turmeric, coriander and paprika... and, I swear! I'd eat it even if I weren't on a crazy diet. Hell, I think it's a good option for a the obligatory Thanksgiving sweet potatoes which I resent having to make every year, though, I think I'd add salt if I were going to feed it to anyone else. And then I had another bowl of greens and flaxseed oil.

It's occurred to me as I've been standing in the kitchen all day that I've fallen into some serious single-girl eating habits. I rarely cook anything more often that once a week or so. My evening meal frequently consists of hummus, pitas, a carton of cherry tomatoes and a glass of wine. And the thing is, I eat in front of my computer screen and don't really spend much mental energy on what I'm consuming at all. When I was in my last long-term relationship, I cooked a lot-- and WE cooked a lot. And we grocery shopped together... and I feel like I just thought about food a whole lot more than I have since I moved to DC. It was more than a necessity; it was a part of our little two-person community. I do miss that part of being hooked up, I guess. And truly, food is important to me. More on this later.

Headache:
As I mentioned in my post earlier this morning, I awoke with a slight headache, which I attribute to my caffeine withdrawal. And this headache has swelled and blossomed into a real humdinger throughout the day. At some moments, it feels as though my brain is sloshing about in a bucket of water. It's dizzying and liquidy and thick. And then, at other moments, it's more of a shimmering sort of pain-- pointilistic, almost-- and it feels like it exists in a wide, airy halo OUTSIDE of my skull. It's so big, I swear. I napped briefly this afternoon, hoping to assuage my body's hew and cry for a friggin' cuppa joe... but, when my mom's phone call woke me up, I'm afraid I was barely coherent. And even now, this beast persists.

I had, in fact, been anticipating this headache. A couple of years ago, I found a lump the size of an olive in my right breast. After a visit to the radiologist, it was assessed to be just one of those cysts that a lot of women get, though its size seemed to impress the doctor, especially because I was only 28. The doctor told me that I could shrink the cyst significantly if I cut caffeine out completely. And so, I went through this business back then, too. Slowly, of course, first green tea, then black tea and finally coffee all found their ways back into my grocery cart. And so, here I am, suffering through this swimmy feeling all over again.

It has been suggested to me that perhaps this headache and, also, the rash that's prompted this little experiment, have occurred only because I've anticipated them. But I would venture to say that there's a big difference between hypochondria and being able to recognize the cues that our bodies give us. I mean, pain and physical discomfort have their uses. That's how our bodies tell us when we've done something that they don't like. And in the case of this headache, I know exactly what would make it go away but I'm choosing not to make myself that cup of coffee. And choosing anew with every minute. Ugh. Really, my being able to easily determine and attribute the causes of my weird symptoms-- instead of becoming increasing anxious and frustrated when I can't sleep due to my intensely itchy feet, for example-- is kinda the opposite of hypochondria. There is value to this sort of bodily awareness, I think. At the very least, I can feel proactive towards ridding myself of these annoyances.

Back on task:
So, yes, I've been meditating on food and its relation to self-- my self, in particular-- all day. In my own peculiar world view, food-- even moreso than sex-- is the bottom line for us all. And as such, I've come to see the consumption thereof as a deeply political act. Lucky for me, there are other folks out there with similar ideas...and some of those folks make documentaries! You didn't think I'd stop talking about movies altogether, now, did you?

Probably my favorite film that I saw during the Film Festival was a really-and-truly top-notch documentary called Milk in the Land: Ballad of an American Drink. The two directors, Ariana Gerstein and Monteith McCollum, have gotten a little notoriety in the past for another agricultural documentary called Hybrid, which is, I think, about corn. I don't know if I can get my hands on that film, but I certainly hope to. Part of what's so great about this film is that it's stylistically atypical of documentaries. They use quite a bit of creepy, foggy, time-lapse footage of cows and some other low-fi animation techniques to create an atmosphere that is positively Gothic.

I'm not sure I actually learned much from this film, which is, I suppose, intended to be informative, but I've also previously sought out most of the information conveyed here. The film opens with a guy discussing the ways in which cow's milk is generally detrimental to one's personal constitution-- he talks about all the cancers and diseases and weight problems and phlegm and skin problems and everything else that are more common amongst populations that consume large amounts of dairy. And I've heard these statistics so many times that I'm inclined to think they're true. But the quirky little zealot they have preaching this particular sermon is totally hilarious and really quite convincing. Well, sorta. There's not much that's gonna make me replace the cheese on my pizza with that pasty soycheese nonsense... or cut out icecream permanently.

There's also a lovely little segment in which they discuss the inherent racism in the promotion of milk as an All-American beverage. It's very well-documented that white folks are less likely to be lactose-intolerant than members of any other race on the planet. I, for one, have absolutely no issues digesting dairy. My Asian friend Brian, however, is quite proud of his puking-up-a-milkshake discovery of his intolerance. It's a gross story. Trust me. And I know that the public school system has always provided under-privileged students with free milk-- thus making them both sick and sleepy (sleepiness is a symptom of low-level food intolerance-- this happens to me every time I eat bread. Gluten, you're a bastard!). An interesting tidbit from the movie: in the early parts of the 20th century, most white babies were fed via bottles with these crazy long rubber tubes attached to the nipples. Bacteria would grow in the tubes and the babies would get sick and die... meanwhile, all the black babies, whose parents could afford milk, were breastfed and thusly, lived. Fascinating, eh? It is to me, anyway!

The movie then launches into a long section about organic and natural farming... and the ethics of food consumption. When I tell people that I do most of my shopping at organic grocery stores, they're frequently appalled that I would spend so much on food. Those with families say things like, "well, I have to buy so much for my kids that spending all that money is just a waste." And this sort of comment sickens my heart a little bit. There was one farmer interviewed in this film who relayed a story about a man approaching him at his farmer's market booth. The man asked the farmer how he could have the gall to charge so much for his eggs. The farmer answered, saying that he hoped to one day be able to achieve the same standard of living as his customers. And guys like him are just one of the beneficiaries of supporting sustainable agriculture. I mean, the effluvia that flow from big corporate farms? That stuff is systematically, unaccountably, destroying the ecosystems of their surrounds. And this film goes on to show plenty of creepy giant robots milking cows that see daylight maybe once a week-- if that! And this doesn't begin to address the fact that the hormone additives in all conventionally-produced animal products cause cancer, infertility, zits, and a host of other human ailments.

Oh, and there was also a rather elucidating segment in which the filmmakers explored these caves that were full, floor to ceiling, with bags and bags and bags of powdered milk that the government has bought off of dairy farms all around the country. And it's all surplus. Basically, they've created a system, now, in which cows lactate all year round (instead of just during calving season, as would be a normal expectation of your average cow body) and they produce about 20 times the milk that cows did 50 years ago... and plain and simple, all the humans in the world do not consume enough milk to keep up with the quantities that the dairies are producing. And so, we send out tax money to pay for the storage of this stuff.. and let's not forget that even powdered milk spoils. And sure, yeah, they ship some of it to other countries as part of assorted relief packages. But, let's also not forget that there aren't that many predominantly white third world countries. So, yeah, essentially, we're sending big pallets of gastrointestinal discomfort in the name of American generosity.

The one thing that I wished they'd talked a little more about is the corporatizing of organic farming. I mean, the big natural food chains like Wild Oats and Whole Foods are primarily supplied by big corporate farms, rather than smaller local operations. And according to my mom, my go-to girl for all things food-related, the Bush administration has taken great strides in lowering the standards for what is considered "organic." So, the jury's still out on whether or not the bigger organic facilities can operate both ethically (in terms of their environmental practices, their animal treatment practices, and their food-handling practices) and cheaply. But the whole thing makes me nervous. Once those sorts of companies get sufficient capital behind them, what's stopping them from bending the rules in favor of making more capital? I just wish Gerstein and McCollum had addressed this issue just a little... but then, the movie could have been 5 hours long and I would have been riveted.

In the end, eating is always going to be a question of values to me. I spend a lot of money on food because I do not want my money, even if it's less of it, to support an industry and companies that operate in opposition to my values. Incidentally, yet another contributor to this movie has a great segment in which she describes the reasons that people are more likely to spend their necessities budget on fancy clothes and houses than on fancy food because the former are visible to others while what we eat is not, in any way, equated with social status. Doesn't that just cut to the quick?

This stuff is so tremendously important to me-- moreso, even, than reaping the health-related benefits of eating primarily organic-- that I get a little hot under the collar when folks tell me that it's a waste. But truly, I think the concept of activistic consumerism is alive and well... and I hope to participate in it as much as I'm able. I'm not really the best audience for this movie because I walked in, already nodding my head in accordance with its sympathies. But I'm really really really hoping that it'll find its way to an audience that can really benefit from the truly fascinating exploration therein... and I hope that they'll also enjoy it for its stylish, funky presentation.

Oh dear god, how my head hurts.

Should I be disappointed?

So, not very much happened with my salt water flush except that initially, I felt very thirsty and very bloated... and then I drank more water and got more bloated. And then I got a little crampy sort of stomachache and then I got very very cold. And then, I expelled a very small quantity of matter. So, though I followed the directions to a T, I guess it's possible that I did it wrong? But then maybe because my usual diet is rather fiber-heavy to begin with, maybe there wasn't a whole lot backed up there? Yeah, I dunno.

So, now that I've arisen and begin the first day of eating monastically, I have fed myself a rather chewy smoothie of orange, papaya, coconut and cinnamon. It tasted quite nice but is no substitute for my Misha's Route 66 Dark Roast Blend. I have a little headache and I think I'm psychosomatically hungry. I mean, I rarely eat much of anything beyond coffee until 10 or 11 in the morning (assuming I've arisen around 6), but the idea that I now have to wait a couple of hours until I allow myself a lovely morning snack of 1 apple and 1 pear (both, unfortunately, out of season) incites in me a deep desire to go gorge on cookies.

I will stay strong.

Much prodding of beach rubble to come

The above title is a reference to one of Sappho's fragments that my friend Frances often quotes. I think the most common translation is something like "Those who are squeamish should not prod the beach rubble." I begin this post, which is likely to lead into a little bit of an intermission between movie posts, in such a way because I am about to begin a detox, followed by a little fast. I do not have plans to do as my friend Jason did and post pictures of the contents of my toilet as I navigate this little project (if anyone really wants to know, I think they're still out there. I can supply the link), but let this serve as fair warning that I do intend to document my progress here... and it may get a little ooky now and again.

I'm doing this because last week, I had yet another one of my recurrent bladder infections. From what I gather, yeah, sure, plenty of girls get these... but I'm telling you! They're really the total opposite of fun. Well, once my usual spasms had progressed to the point where I was peeing pink-- and staying up all night, thinking that reading my friend Jennifer's memoir manuscript-- which is a remarkable onomatopoeic screech of gorgeous writing -- was just about the only thing exciting enough to distract me from the needles in my urinary tract--I figured I'd better succumb and go on an antibiotic. Usually, my body hates foreign chemicals and rebels in all sorts of interesting ways. But this time, I'd made it all the way through my round of pills... and even several more days... but then, yesterday, I awoke to a sensation something akin to spiders crawling around my kneepits. But though I was itchy throughout the day, yesterday was manageable. Today, however, I think I would enjoy ripping the skin right off the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet very very much. And same goes for any place covered with hair. No, I'm not kidding. And no, I don't have crabs ( I did actually check... prior to reminding myself just exactly how unlikely that particular diagnosis is). But, yeah, so, I've got yet another creeping rash... and so, my solution is to smoke out as many nasty synthetic compounds from my body as possible... via my very own amalgam of detoxes and fasts.

My first step-- which will commence upon completion of this post-- will be to guzzle a quart of salt water. Everyone I know says that you really kinda have to be sitting on the pot to do this step because it acts pretty darn fast. I'm a little scared about this part. I don't like peein' out my butt. Really, I don't. And don't you worry. I'll let you know EXACTLY how it goes.

My next step will be to eat three days worth of weird mixtures of vegetables, for which I just went and spent $100 at Whole Foods. My poor checkout girl was slightly flummoxed when I arrived with pretty much one of everything from the entire produce section. The bad part about this step is that I have to eat healthy grains like millet and quinoa, for which I do not particularly care. The good part is that I get to eat a LOT of tomatoes. OK, really? I eat a crazy amount of tomatoes anyway. Pretty much every night, I eat about a pint of cherry tomatoes for dinner. Just because I love them so.

The step after that will be to repeat the unpleasant salt water flushing business.

And then I'll begin my fast in earnest. I hoping to be able to pull it out for at least 5 days. All I get to eat is this concoction made from water, lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper (that may sound distasteful to some of you, but I enjoy all the ingredients, so I'm hoping for the best). And I also get as much, uh, water (!) as I want!!! The guide to this fast says that I should do it for a minimum of 10 days... and if I really wanted to, I could go for 40 days drinking nothing but that weird lemonade stuff. That seems just a touch ambitious for a hedonist such as myself but we'll see how I feel 5 days in.

So, needless to say, the stuff that's really off my list right now includes caffeine, alcohol, meat, dairy, sugar and wheat. At least, those are the main things. I'm thinking I'll probably have a little caffeine withdrawal headache for the first couple of days... and shortly after that, I'll do that food obsessing thing that happens when you're just so friggin' hungry... but then, all the literature says that that fades and that you start to feel quite normal. I'm hoping to not encounter too many of the odors that the body is supposed to emit while ridding itself of the assorted venoms of the typical American diet (I self-flatteringly assume that my normal diet isn't all that typically American, seeing as it's so heavily weighted with tomatoes and greens and other fruit, but I do keep a pint of icecream in the freezer and I do put heavy cream in my chicory/coffee every morning, so I'm no food-saint). But I'm really really really hoping that I can get a little respite from the spare tire that seemed to show up long about the time I turned 24.. and hasn't loosened one iota since, regardless of strenuousness and frequency of my yoga practice. Oh, spare tire, how I hate you. How eagerly I anticipate your departure.

And now I commence. I may or may not spare you the details.

*Sigh*

Here's a post-vacation list of things I really do miss about my hometown, in no particular order.

1. Seeing Faith Hill at the mall, looking not at all like she does in videos

2. Nola, the Cajun/Uruguayan restaurant on West End

3. The shepherd's pie from Family Wash in East Nashville

4. Lightning 100 (there's not one goddamn decent radio station in DC!)

5. The fried green tomatoes at Jackson's in Hillsboro Village

6. Yazoo beer

7. The dude at daVinci's Pizza who makes googly eyes at me every single solitary time I go in there

8. Woo, the best cosmetics store ever

9. Getting pedicures with my mom

10. The Cotillionistas

11. Finding fruit tea at most restaurants

12. Movie after movie with Jon

13. Not having to Mapquest every-damn-thing so as to find my way around

14. Talking politics with my dad over coffee in the morning

15. Baja Burrito (Chipotle, you don't hold a candle!)

16. La Senorita Holly "Bunnyface" Meadows

17. People who know what both Red Velvet cake AND Chess pie are

18. Las Paletas (I have yet to taste the basil. Basil popsicle, you're waiting for me--taunting me,even-- aren't you?)

19. Seeing deer out the window during my yoga practice

20. And, of course, Noah, my beloved, beloved, beloved schmogface

A Pairing: Two Meditations on the Subject of "Home"

I still have several more Film Fest tasty treats that I want to talk about here… so I’m trying to get my blogposts written while hovering tentatively within the jetBlue hot spots in the airports. Unfortunately, the Nashville airport has no such thing… they charge you for the signal. Tres annoying!

So, anyway, I saw two more little narrative films that were both so pointedly grounded in their sense of place that I feel like I can talk about them together. The first is a really simple, but gorgeously shot, movie that came out of the African nation of Chad. It’s called Dry Season. The film guide for the festival describes it as a story about thwarted revenge... but that’s not entirely accurate. As the story goes, a young man is sent, by his blind, green-robed grandfather, from one dusty little desert town to another dusty little desert town to exact revenge upon the man who killed his father. Except that our villain turns out to be a gruff but generous bread baker-- who quickly takes the young guy on as his apprentice. And then when time comes for our hero to kill his newly adoptive father-figure, well, he fakes it. After all, the grandfather is blind, right? Any ol’ gunshot sound is a good as a true-aimed one.

This is the sort of film that isn’t groundbreaking in its filming or its storytelling, but it’s still pretty impressive that something this fluid and poetic and polished is coming out of a place like Chad. In some ways, it reminded me a little of Burnt by the Sun, a great little film that was one of the first stories-about-home to escape the Communist Soviet Union right after the fall. The characters in both are wholly products of their homeland and yet do not seem exoticized or fetishized for an American audience. Dialogue is employed minimally in Dry Season, but these people are intensely expressive-- the boy pouts and the old baker guy grouses-- and their triumphs and foibles are played out visually in such a way that the audience doesn’t feel led thru the story, but rather the story happens irrespective of the audience. Handholding on the part of the filmmakers is simply unnecessary.

Really, I’d anticipated that this would be a sad story, full of tough consequences, in the way that Tsotsi was. But, I was pleasantly surprised to find a sweet and simple story full of humor and a more complicated form of justice than I expected from a movie billed as a “revenge story." It’s much more of an “adoptive family” sort of movie, I guess. For a real revenge story, I’d be much more likely to direct viewers to the like of Corean director Chan-wook Park's Revenge Trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance—great and wicked films, all). However, for something homey that’s not about YOUR home, Dry Season is a sweet and sharp little film. May it find delicious distribution!

And I’d like to pair this film with a deeply, deeply American movie called Swedish Auto. I must concede that my feelings about this film are a little colored by the fact that I was utterly charmed by the director/screenwriter, Derek Sieg, during his Q&A session after the screening. Most folks seemed interested in asking him about technical filmmaking and marketing issues but I wanted to know how, as a writer, he defines his boundaries of "home." He'd said that he wrote the script while living in L.A., but it's set in Charlottesville, VA... where he grew up. And it's a very Charlottesville movie. Caressingly so. So, I wanted him to talk about writing about home when you're not home.

I suppose this is a thing I notice because I had to leave the South and move to Tucson in order to write my manuscript... which is mostly about the South-- Southern food and Southern race relations-- and just about every poem has a Southern accent when I hear it in my head. And I'm never so accutely aware that I'm a white girl from the South as when I'm not living there. Just yesterday, a co-worker totally raised my dander with her assumptions about racism and bumpkinism in my little corner of the country--- of course, there's far greater KKK membership in the mostly-white Midwestern states than there could possibly be in the southern states where the population is so much more diverse that it simply cannot support the same sorts of de facto segregation that, you know, Ohio can. I mean, Mississippi has one of the largest Vietnamese populations in the country and Nashville is home to more Kurds than just about any other metropolitan area. And that doesn't even address the fact that, in parts of the South, African Americans are barely a minority anymore. But I'm not saying that there aren't rednecks in Tennessee... of course there are. But there are also rednecks in New York. And Oregon. And certainly also in this co-worker's home state of Maryland. But simply because some white supremicists claim one particular region over another as their "home," they'll never be able make the region subject to any sort of group-think bigotry. That's just nonsense and so painfully offensive I can't even stand it. People are people-- and they will have their biases and blindspots, but those are definitely not predicated on where they're born/raised/reside. Wow.. this paragraph is rather tangential, eh?

Anyway, as I was saying, it seems to me that it's a rather writerly concession to move away from home and then obsessively write about nothing but home. Many of the shots in Swedish Auto are tight and close in; they lovingly probe the nooks and crannies of Charlottesville in such a way that belies the director's familiarity and comfort with this city. Sieg's clearly in love with this place. However, I find it pointed and significant that the resolution of his plot requires that his protagonists leave Charlottesville. When I asked him about his feelings about his subject matter, he became a little more animated and talked a little about exorcising those old demons of youth. Moreover, I think, he was excited to be acknowledged as much for being a writer as he is for being a filmmaker, though. Hence my being charmed: I love me some writerly enthusiasm! Well, and there's no denying that he's quite handsome, as well.

This is not to say, of course, that his filmmaking practice was anything less than thoroughly engaging. He whipped out a couple smart stage tricks-- including a sound effect and some flashing orange lights to denote an off-camera explosion. And because two of his characters where notable voyeurs, he was able to employ a succession of interesting through-the-window shots and cat-n-mouse kinda scenes in such a way that they felt new and untrodden.

I have a feeling that this movie, too, is likely to find distribution much in the same vein as a movie like Junebug. In many ways, it's got such a quintessentially "indie movie" feel-- and Lukas Haas, a frequent indie player, and January Jones (fresh from her knock-out spot in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada) inhabit these characters in a manner that is sensitive without being sentimental. While the script isn't dialogue heavy, it does occasionally dip into some slightly stock-sounding conversation, but overall, this film embodies the sorts of tensions that are very familiar to me: simultaneous loyalty towards and restlessness within that one place that you'll always consider home, no matter how far away, and for however long, you go. It's this place that imprints itself upon you and your identity in such a way that you'll always feel obligated to answer for it even while it pricks and festers in the back of your brain. And maybe that's just what it's like to have a home.

How strange that I feel this way about Nashville, even though I've never felt more at-home (i.e., happy) than I did when I lived in Tucson. Must I always have such an affinity for the thing I rasp against most?

Jon Enjoys Destroying Dirty Things

I guess Jon's claiming that Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's little oddness Syndromes and a Century is his favorite of all the NaFF stuff we saw together. But I had a harder time getting my footing. I have plans to rent two of Weerasethakul's others (Tropical Malady and Blissfully Yours) as soon as I get home, but in the meantime, I'm still thinking, plodding, really, through this curious piece.

Apparently, all three of these films share a similar format-- that being the fact that the narrative train abruptly stops mid-movie and then starts over, moving in a completely different direction. This reminds me a little of David Lynch's hinge-in-the-plot with the little blue box in Mullholland Drive, but this is really where this movie's similarities to the Lynch sensibility end. The first half of this movie, set in the 70's, is about a young doctor in the Thai countryside who, so as to fend off the attentions of another doctor, relays a story about her own previous infatuation with an orchid seller. The opening scene has this Dr. Toey (the woman) interviewing this other doctor (her soon-to-be suitor), seemingly for a job, except that the questions are playful and about things like his pets and what geometrical shape he prefers. And when she asks him what "DDT" stands for, he stares back at her and then finally says "Destroy Dirty Things." This sort of humor throughout this first section is subtle and mostly played out through long dramatic pauses. Characters disorient themselves and simply do not know how to respond to their environments. As a result, they all seem just a little hapless and cutely endearing.

I really don't know how to explain the way in which the narrative of this film begins to disintegrate except to use the word "hinge" again. Suddenly, mid-movie, we've got this goofy interview happening all over again, with a few differences of camera angles and slightly different questions, but this time, we're in a city hospital and the tone is ever-so-slightly more ominous. Stranger characters appear: there's a surly teenage boy who bats a tennis ball down the hospital corridors (we learn he's in for carbon monoxide poisoning, which immediately made me think that perhaps he'd survived a suicide attempt? Not sure if that was an intentional association on the part of the director or not), a crazy doctor who hides her whiskey in a prosthetic leg, and another weird woman who just stares directly into the camera. Oh, and there's a crazy spooky horn-like machine sucking smoke out of the air in the bowels of the hospital (maybe this references back to the carbon monoxide again? I really am just guessing there). Narrative becomes less and less important and, while the images sound sort of fantastical and wild, the filming technique renders them all atonal and mundane. I kept having to remind myself that I was watching something odd because the director has done a rather impressive job of normalizing all of his weird ideas... and I'm PRETTY sure that his application of this technique is intentional. But this tactic subverts the audience's attention to the details and frustrates us, too. I found myself being both a little annoyed by this and compelled to force myself out of the sleepy reverie this film induced in me.

So, all the publicity materials about this film tell me that it's based on Weerasethakul's (who, incidentally, likes to be called "Joe." I think my spell-check might like "Joe" better than "Weerasethakul" from here on out.) "pre-memories" of his parents before they met. In other words, it's probably based on second-hand stories, much yellowed over the years. And so, yes, in many ways, it's a love story. However, the whole thing is so impressionistic and the directorial touch is so light that I found myself fumbling through it, searching for some familiar convention thereof. I didn't find it... and I'm hoping watching "Joe's" other movies will help me understand his style a little better. Frankly, now that I've had a couple days to think about this movie, I'm a little annoyed with myself that I was so disoriented in and impatient with this film. I mean, I'm able to sit through the likes of Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9 without whining about feeling lost... but there were several moments in which I when I was actively waging war with my heavy eyelids in this one. I think this may be, in part, due to the fact that Joe frequently employs long, wide shots of stuff like a completely empty green field (you hear the actors talking-- gossiping, really-- but there's nothing visually engaging at all) or bunches of people Jazzercizing at the foot of a Buddha statue (this is the final scene, and it immediately follows at least 5 minutes of footage of swirling smoke and that aforementioned horn/pipe contraption). I mean, my attention span is only so long. I hate to be so impatient and so tethered to more conventional film-making practices, but I really felt like I was missing something here.


Jon, please do chime in and tell me what you saw that I missed. You always tell me you like to see a film more than once before you opine... and I'm thinking that's what I'm going to have to do with this one. Can't wait until the DVD comes out. Nor can I wait to see the other two. Is there something slightly masochistic that I eagerly anticipate seeing movies that I know will frustrate me and leave me as baffled as the characters therein? Oh, hey! Do you think there might be some sort of environmentalist message at play here--above and beyond the love poem that floats upon this film's surface? I mean, there's the smoke-sucking thing, the repetition of the DDT reference, the carbon-monoxide poisoning... all juxtaposed against the idyllic country house with all the lush jungle and orchids in the first half... and all the shots in the city park with the Buddha statue in the second half? OK, fine... I'm just grasping. Seriously though, Jon, please help!

What other folks do with their graduate theses

It was my friend Jennifer's idea that we go see one of NaFF's animated shorts programs and I'm really glad she suggested it. I found that, of these, the ones I liked best were the least slick, most homemade-looking pieces and I'm thinking that's because they're less interested in creating a space that replicates the real world (in the way that obvious CG cartoons do) and are more interested in creating brand new, weirder worlds.

The program we saw contained 11 shorts and had two extras tacked onto the end for the benefit of the Film Festival jury. The first of the two extras was this retarded bit if business called Once Upon a Christmas Village. It was voiced by Jim Belushi (a farting, loogie-hocking, trash-talking Santa) and Tim Curry (a self-professed evil and, uh, bisexual (he was, indeed, quite fey) one-eyed knight), and it looked like something out of the Pixar studios-- polished to a spitshine, even! And good lord, this thing was so full of lame jokes and saccharine musical numbers that 15 minutes was really far too long. Needless to say, it was my least favorite.

My second-least favorite was probably Dandelion. I guess it was a story about a little girl and her grandfather who were mystically connected through the wonder that is dandelion seeds... except that it made even less sense than what I just said. The grandfather had some outta-control eyebrows that covered his eyes and made him seem kinda creepy and the little girl sounded as though she'd been voiced by one of the girls who voices hentai videos... except she was supposed to be a toddler, not an animated nympho. Perhaps it would've been more exciting if she WAS an animated nympho. Oh, well. This was also very computer-y-looking. Slick and pretty with no evidence of the hand of the artist. Too, too bad.

Another one that kinda falls into the slick-n-pretty category is Mirage, except that it manages to scrounge up a little more pathos. It's about a robot with a beautiful baby face who needs water to live... and climbs this big pipe sorta structure and finds the fruit of the water plant (yeah, just bear with it...), which he taps and out flops a fish... which he decides to keep as a fun glowing pet within his body cavity (which also happens to function as the robot's reservoir for water). The face of the robot is what give this short its soul. It's frightening with its human expressiveness and I wonder that the animator (Youngwoong Jang) didn't actually film a kid and then transpose the video into the CG images. I'm not sure you could animate that kinda detail with a computer alone.

And then there was a slightly disturbing thing called Atomic Bananaabout a scientist and his chimp using some sort of Pinky-and-the-Brain-esque genetic mutating machine to turn themselves into a giant banana. The final image is of one big banana, one end having the scientist's head, the other end having the chimp's head... and the chimp hungrily eating this weird scientist/monkey/banana conglomeration-- which is maybe a little cannibalistic, I guess? I mean, it was kinda funny, I guess but there's also something dirty about a giant naked banana up there on the movie screen... I'm sorry, there just is!

Among the more folksy-looking ones was Dragon, about a little girl who becomes orphaned and draws a lot of pictures... until the director of her orphanage has a gallery showing of all her drawings, claiming them as his own... and then she sics her imaginary dragon friend on him for revenge. This one's interesting because it uses several different styles of animation to cue its audience about fantasy sequences and whatnot. There's a little claymation, a little classic Disney-esque painterly-looking stuff and a little line-drawing simple animation... and the animator (Troy Morgan) does a really great job of using all these different techniques to show us his character's different headspaces. Still, it's sad has an interesting Eastern European nesting-doll quality.

The program opened with a short called One Rat Short, which is a tragic love story about a street rat and a lab rat who are not destined to end happily, due to a terrible mishap involving a Cheetohs bag. This one was probably the most realistically animated piece in the show and it was certainly cute. However, the Cheetohs bag business was in such direct reference to American Beauty (it spends a lot of time blowing in the wind, as though it's filled with a soul), that I kinda felt like, yeah, ok, I get it: the Cheetohs bag is another character. Thanks for the explication! Still, it didn't leave as many plot holes as some of the others did... and as Jen said at the end, slightly ironically, "Oh, that was very sad." Such are the lives of street rats and lab rats and Cheetohs bags. Apparently, this one won a BAFTA, though.

Probably the goofiest among them was called First Flight about a pot-bellied sad sack of a man upon whom a little bluebird chick imprints. Yep, tiny bluebird... totally convinced this big goober with an ink stain on his shirt pocket is its mother... surely, this is the stuff of greatest comedy. The whole thing is kinda ridiculously cute, all the way down to the man's impromptu wings made of yellow post-its. Endearing through and through.

There was another strange one... I guess it was about death? Or angels? Or a little girl with a bad heart? Not quite sure... but it was all done with animated etchings and the animation itself was really something to look at... all scratchy and primitive. It's called Tragic Story with a Happy Ending and it just won an honorable mention for best animation. I suppose I liked it so much because it has that old-school styling and craftsmanship that reminds you what hard work hand-animation can really be. And I don't know but I imagine there was some computer work in this piece, too, but, man, it has a beautiful old patina for being so new.

So, it looks like The Wraith of Cobble Hill won for Best College Student Animation... and this one probably had the most realist subject matter of any of them. It's exceptionally well-done clay-mation and a pretty touching story about a kid's inner conflict with regard to responsibility within his Brooklyn neighborhood community. The animator, Adam Parrish King, employs some really effective lighting techniques that remind me a little of that old black-and-white movie of the Anne Frank play. You can tell that the spaces within which he's working are tiny... but his shadows and shadings are moody and demonstrative and exacting. Really just great.

In this collection was also this year's Oscar winning animated short, The Danish Poet, which was not really my favorite of the series, but was certainly pretty good. Its animation was simple and reminded me of some of the shorts they used to intersperse into shows like Sesame Street and The Electric Company. Except that it's all about the way writers influence each other and influence their cultures... and it's about simple mishaps that lead people into love. It's sweet, really.. and I might be inclined to say that it's too sweet except that there's a repeated series of frames in which a bunch of Scandinavian drunks board and deboard a boat... and it's hilarious. Oh, also, the subtle commentary about nationalistic feelings between different Scandinavian countries is pretty interesting. If you can get your hands on it, it's quite enjoyable.

Now, one of my two favorites from the main program, it seems, got an honorable mention for Best Student Animation... and that one's called Windows Masks Doors. This was probably the least narrative of all of them but it reminds me Jonathan's collection wall in the Everything Is Illuminated movie-- or a Rauschenberg sculpture or something. It's detailed and palimpsestic and crinkly and a little dirty and old-looking. It's mostly abstract but has a funky little conductor guy leading several tableau inside an ancient radio. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if Sarah Orenstein, the animator, has a little Julie Taymor-like career in her future.

And for all its macabre silliness, I think I loved Ujbaz Izbeneki Has Lost His Soul most of all. It's a totally rinky-dink little Scottish clay-mation about a guy who loses stuff and ends up having to go to Hades to find his soul... and winds up losing the devil while he's there. Besides the fact that his name is Ujbaz Izbeneki, which is comical unto itself and more comical when spoken with a Scottish accent, it's got a nice little corporate-bureaucracies-are-hell attitude about it and is lovely and deadpan in its minimalism. I think I have a little crush on it, quite frankly.

And then there was the other bonus short they showed for the jury... I can't seem to find a title anywhere... but it was another favorite of mine-- with a sad lonely mousy sort of creature on a ship. Something poetic being spoken over what appear to be mostly hand-painted images... mostly gray and black and white with a trickle of red and brown now and again. Damn, I wish I could find the title!

So, most of these are the masters' theses of artists from different schools all over the place. What fun it must be to spend two or three years working on projects like these. And probably, they are as insular and idiosyncratic and academic as anyone else's graduate project but I'm really glad they have fora for greater viewership than, say, a manuscript stuck on a shelf, all nicely bound in green.... just to use a completely hypothetical example.

May you all pray that they wind up on YouTube so you can all have a look!

Last things first

I've been silent for a few days, despite much avid movie-watching, mostly because there hasn't been time for both attending blog fodder and posting blog content. So, now that the Nashville Film Festival is all but over, I've finally got a few minutes for a recap.

I'm starting with the movie I saw last night called Adrenaline-- it was a bonus screening for a little Nashville-made film that I didn't think I'd be all that interested in--it's a thriller-sorta about a guy whose car satellite system gets intercepted by a hacker who claims to have abducted the guy's daughter-- nor did I think I'd have time to see it. However the fates conspired and apparently, I was meant to see this movie. When I first read about it, I felt rather disinterested, based on plot-outline alone but then as I learned a little more about it, I realized that it's hard to be a Nashvillian and not have some connection to it... and, you know, that just-nearly-touching-the-action thing is always fun. So here are my connections to it: David Alford, the star/co-writer, is a pretty prominent local actor and heads the Tennessee Repertory Theatre (probably the most notable local theatre group, for my non-Nashvillian readers). Now, when I was in high school, I volunteered at the Nashville Children's Theatre, helping out with costumes... and David was in a couple of those productions... and my recollections of him as a totally sweet and unassuming guy made me feel like I ought to go support the film. And when I mentioned to my mom that I was gonna skip out on dinner to go see this extra screening, she got all excited and starts telling me about interviewing the guy who invented Dippin' Dots (do people not from Tennessee know what Dippin' Dots is, I wonder?)-- and apparently, this guy happened to be the executive producer for this film. So, basically, Nashville is the smallest of all the small worlds.

Now the thing is, this film is destined to be picked up by some distributor somewhere, undoubtedly. I say this mostly because it's the sort of novelty that's likely to get some attention. It's 88 minutes long and the whole thing is just one shot. Yep, in the tradition of Hitchcock's Rope and that brilliant thing that came out a few years ago Russian Ark (if you haven't seen it, do so. Do so NOW!), just one little bitty shot. Or rather, one exacting, meticulously choreographed, driving-in-circles-in-downtown-Nashville, extremely loooooong shot. And they do a pretty good job of it from a technical standpoint. In the Q&A session after the screening, they confessed to several mishaps that we, in the audience, would never have noticed--like, for instance, Alford's hooked up to a live blue tooth all the way through and was in constant contact with this blonde woman (didn't catch what her job actually was, but I gather she was important) but in the middle of the 5th take-- the one that we saw-- apparently, his blue tooth died about 20 minutes from the end and when he leans over to vomit (scheduled, cued vomiting, mind you), he's really telling the DP that he's just gonna wing it for the rest! And this is pretty amazing, seeing as the remainder of the film is all a pretty tight action sequence. So, because this thing is so remarkable in its execution, I'm pretty sure everyone will have access to it sooner or later. And I can certainly reccommend it for the experience of it... it's a pretty fascinating experiment in filmmaking.

However, I feel I should offer a few caveats. For one thing, I think they had to make some pretty serious concessions here and there for continuity. I mean, the voice-over dude (the bad guy who's talking to Alford over the car satellite system) tells him to turn left a few times while he notably turns right. He plays a recording of the daughter's voice in which she repeats herself and doesn't answer questions-- which is a dead giveaway that Voice-over Dude is just pretending to have abducted her. Little plot issues like this seem par-for-the-course in this kinda genre film and didn't particularly worry me. But the Voice-over Dude himself? He vascillates between being campily sarcastic, issuing painfully overwrought decrees dripping with Hollywood evilness and obsequiously quoting Shakespeare (is this supposed to remind us that the writers are smart guys who've done their fair share of reading/stage-acting? Yes, thanks, I kinda already knew that). Basically, Voice-over Dude is Telephone Dude from Scream. Though, he's less ironic and aware of his own hamminess. Which is really too bad. He just chucked me right out of the moment with giggle-inducing cliches ever now and again.

That is not to say, however, that the film doesn't manage to mount a pretty serious tension. Because there is never any break from filming our protagonist, his own mounting anxiety is palpable and it's relentless. And, because Alford's plenty talented enough to go well beyond the bounds of the Nashville theatre scene, his Chris Thompson character is about as natural as they come.

This sort of thing is really what film festivals are all about: seeing some little experiment that some folks made for $65,000 (that may or may not catch fire) and being part of the local excitement. I just checked the NaFF website, knowing the awards were presented this morning and it looks like Adrenaline has won the Tennessee Independant Spirit Award for local filmmakers... and hopefully that'll give it some momentum. So, congratulations and good luck, David, et al! Should be at least as fun a ride for those guys as riding around an 8-block radius of downtown NashVegas, anyway!

of jinxes that persist

I suppose it's really too much to ask that I arrive at my destination on the same date that my boarding pass lists. After all, these dates are clearly mere suggestions to the air travel industry.

Tonight, I was scheduled to go back to Nashville to spend 9 days going to the NaFF offerings and hanging out with my baby schmogface Noah. When I arrived at the airport, it was sunny and lovely and still outside and the signs at the gate indicated that everything was running on time. Soon however, there was a delay... and another delay... and then, they pulled off the plane, saying that there was no way I'd make my connector... and, well, it's the same old tedious story all over again. I am an airplane jinx and really, the sooner I learn to accept this, the less stressed out all of this will make me, I'm sure of it.

Needless to say, I'm back in my apartment in Alexandria tonight. I have a rescheduled flight at 6 AM tomorrow.. which means I have to be at the airport between 4:45 and 5... which means I have to leave my apartment no later that 4... which means, in order to get my ass out the door at that hour, I have to rouse myself no later than 3. 3 fucking AM. I may have seen 3 AM on the other end of the day several times in my life but I have not once begun a day at such an ungodly hour. And by "ungodly," I mean that I assume that even God is on hiatus at that hour.

Now, I really don't know what the deal is with air travel these days...but this is really getting ridiculous. My dad suggests that I invest in a horse in hopes that he/she would be a more reliable mode of transportation. However, I don't know that my coccyx is up to the challenge. I'd be one serious mosey-er subsequent to one such trip.

This sucks. I fucking hate being a jinx.

corpus congealed

Thanks to Mom for this totally great, totally creepy thing.

She says she saw the real thing on a recent trip to Chicago. The one she saw was a boy. Apparently, this was both apparent and transparent.

I can only hope that my own pancreas turns out to be so cauliflower-like. And makes such lovely splooshing noises when extracted. I can only hope.

P.S. Play the video. You just gotta.

In case you're bored with the new-releases shelf...

Next weekend, I'm taking some vacation time and heading back to Nashville, just in time for the Nashville Film Festival-- which has proven to be a worthy investment of time in recent years and will doubtlessly be so again. And in case anyone reads my blog for info about independant films (as opposed to reading it because you are either a person who likes me or a person who is related to me (thanks, Mom!)), never fear! If there's a hot spot somewhere in the lobby of the Green Hills Commons 16, you'll doubtlessly find me there with my laptop. Maybe Jim Ridley, my movie-writing hero, will spot me and offer me a job. How cool would it be to get paid to write the sort of gobbledegook I spew out here where the brown rabbits roam?

In the meantime, here are a couple of short commentaries on a couple of older movies that I love:

The other night on cable, they showed one of my old favorites-- Marguerite Duras' The Lover. Duras is a writer I love because she is so very good at taking a couple of my fascinations-- sex and racial discontent-- and irrevocably entangling them with a unique and gorgeous poetic sensibility. In Hiroshima, Mon Amour, she goes so far as to name her two lovers after the cities from with they come: Nevers, France and Hiroshima, Japan. And in this way, that which is intimate becomes that which is geographic and sociological. Hiroshima, Mon Amour is another great film I'd highly recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it-- black and white, tragic, full of regret, and simply beautiful.

But, The Lover, a quasi-autobiographical story, is more invested in its erotic narrative than its politics... and yet, the politics persistently thrust themselves into its foreground. The basic story is one of a 15-year-old French girl, living in in Sa-Dec, outside of Saigon, who meets a wealthy Chinese man and begins a rigorous--and I mean RIGOROUS-- affair with him. The real tension of the story come out of the fact that, while her family rapidly becomes dependant on his money, they assume superiority over him for no good reason other than that they are white. And at the same time, he cannot acknowledge his sexual obsession with the girl, which he sort of pathetically insists is Love (capital L) despite her emotional unavailability, in any public sort of way because it is, or course, culturally unacceptable for him to engage with any woman who isn't a Chinese virgin (oh, to be a Chinese virgin...). The tension that results from both the Chinese characters and the French characters each assuming they they are socially superior to the other supplies the story with a wistful tone of doom-- but, while this tension is really just an undercurrent to the more overt soft-porn aspect of this film, it's really what makes it worth watching again and again and again. And in Jeanne Moreau's narrating voiceovers, you get to hear little snatches of Duras' liquidy prose... and, oh, how that makes me want to read the book all over again and again and again.

And then there's Sex, Lies, and Videotape. If you haven't seen it in a while, rent it again. It's friggin' brilliant. It's one of Steven Soderbergh's early directing efforts and it shows potential that he's been a little hit-or-miss about acheiving ever since. Its pacing is so unflinching and intense that it builds a sort of suspense from which most thriller-writers would do well to learn. And though this movie was made in '89 and is about a now obsolete video recording device, it has become, I think, even more relevant now than ever. What I mean is, there's an ever-present anxiety/desire that the private thoughts, cravings, images that we send back and forth to each other will somehow surface for the purposes of public inspection. People make sex tapes of themselves and post them on the web; people exchange flirtatious emails via their Outlook systems at work with full knowledge that their companies hire email spies; people fix their hair and pick their butts in the mirrored domes of drugstore security cameras. It's like so many of us are dying to spill out our secrets to anyone who'll listen or watch-- and yet the surveillance anxiety persists, too. Last week, my team at work had a meeting in a room set up for focus groups-- complete with cameras in the corners, drop-down microphones and one of those single-sided mirrored windows-- and I felt nervous during the entire meeting that someone was on the other side of that mirror. And while this movie came out of a pre-internet era, it feels as though it anticipates all of the anxieties of early 21ist Century life.

Beyond that, James Spader is just so damn good. The character isn't as unabashedly freakish as some of his subsequent roles but he's not exactly well-adjusted either. The movie's pacing allows him so many conversational awkwardnesses and silences that a lesser actor might have been tempted to fill with chatter-- but Spader just lets the space between people become corpulent in its discomfort.

Seriously. Pull one of these off the shelf while you're breathlessly awaiting the results of my film festival samplings. They deserve revisitation. But I shan't keep you waiting for long, even anyway, my dear devoted readers (um... yeah, that's still just you, Mom!).

Different anxieties, same ol' doom in the end

The entrance essay that I wrote to get into the school from which I received my undergraduate degree (Drew University) was all about how, not only was I convinced that Armageddon was right around the corner, but how I assumed that humankind, with all its simultaneous fragility and fury, would be wholly accountable for triggering the demise of its own species. Such an optimistic child of eighteen I was, wasn't I? I think I'd just watched some sort of new TV version of War of the Worlds (not the vomitously exploitative Tom Cruise version-- but some remake of the original radio play) the previous night and found myself newly troubled with a fear of the end of the world.

And truly, it seems that we humans have been scared to death that the sky was gonna fall on us pretty much as long as we've been sentient. This is why we have the Book of Revelations, which is, you know, a rather old document. And there are plenty of Doomsday predictions that predate Revelations, right? But there are also plenty of new anxiety-ridden films that seem to be sprouting up lately, aren't there? But the interesting part is that there seem to be two distinctly different tenors arising out of this more recent incarnation of apocalypse-fear.

On one hand, you've got the Left Behind boys. For any of my illustrious readers who might not have boned up on their Jesus-freak lit lately, Jerry Jenkins and Tim LeHaye are the two guys responsible for a laughable series of books-- and now movies, starring none other than Kirk Cameron-- about The End of Days. When I worked in a bookstore, the people looking for these books often also bought a lovely little piece of work entitled The Faith of George W. Bush-- and truly, has there ever been a more sure sign of impending death and destruction than the fact that the same folks who fear The Rapture have no fear whatsoever of our gigantic screw-up of a president? Seriously?! But all kidding aside, the idea behind these books is that, very soon, The Faithful will be lifted right outta their kitten heels and SUVs and taken straight to heaven, while the rest of us losers will be abandoned to the discretion of demons and fire-breathers and syphilitic lepers with bad breath and scabies. Oh, man! I can't wait!

And on the other hand, you've got another sort of dire prediction arising from an egghead-ier demographic--namely, scholars of ecology, economics, anthropology and sociology. And, of course, Al Gore! And Alan Moore, who wrote the graphic novel V for Vendetta. And this brings me to my recent viewing of Children of Men. In many ways, this film is just another branch in the intellectual genealogy that includes all those folks like Orwell and Bradbury and Huxley and Rand and so on. But it's basic tweak is that humankind has been struck barren-- the question of whether this infertility is the product of pollution or nuclear fallout or divine punishment being exacted upon us is never fully answered, but we do know for sure that any and all members of our species are dropping like little radioactive flies-- and we can't seem to produce any replacements-- and it's our fault!!! In and of itself, the story is compelling because it feels timely and portentous, but then, most stories of this nature feel that way to me.

What's really and truly remarkable about this film, though, is its technical craftsmanship and artistry. There are several very carefully choreographed, very loooooong shots which build such a palpable sense of the characters' desperation that I found myself leaning forward off my couch several times. There's one scene, towards the end, in which, early on in the shot, blood gets spattered on the camera-- and doesn't get wiped off for a good five minutes as we watch our incidental hero (Clive Owen) duck and cover and scramble and trip and wriggle through and over and around the rubble of some English city that has become a bombed-out refugee camp. Frankly, I'm generally unimpressed with special effects in movies-- particularly those of the CG variety. But a carefully orchestrated synthesis of technical maneuverings and actorly emotiveness... well, OK, I bought it-- 100% bought it. And while I was completely aware that what I was watching was just so much filmmaking artifice, that artifice didn't , for once, manage to chuck me right out of the story in the way that most effect-heavy movies usually do.

Now, to make a more explicit contrast between the Left Behind movies and Children of Men, I'd like to offer that the former is uniquely American while the latter is pointedly British. American fundamentalist Christianity has taken on a curious countenance of primitive superstition. It strives for a purity of belief that cannot be dissuaded with any sort of evidence to the contrary-- and frequently invents mythologies that explain away that which cannot be accounted for in a hardline biblical interpretation. Truly, its singleness of mind is remarkable. And it is simultaneously a long, ominously black viper wriggling across the underbelly of American culture and a laughable, kitschy subject of derision -- like Elvis memorabilia or something.

Children of Men, on the other hand, in its best Queen's English, posits that England will be the last bastion of human civilization, and, as a result, all remaining survivors of nuclear holocaust and global warming and pestilence and strife must beg pitifully for entrance into Mother Britain. Indeed. Early in the film, as our hero boards a bus, we note a mounted TV screen on the bus that, in clear tribute to the Orwellian charactization of mass-indoctrination, runs an advertisement that has a series of pictures of the ways other countries around the world met their demises and then flashes a clever slogan: "England soldiers on." While I do not find it all that far-fetched to think that the belching, pawing, fossil-fuel drooling behemoth that is the current incarnation of The United Sates of America would be one of the first to fall in apocalyptic times, I am just a smidge skeptical that the Brits will be the ones left standing. I mean, Tony Blair's still on our side for the time being. This does not bode well for them, I think.

However, this movie is also able to use its Anglophilia to brilliant and pointed end. The final scene (yep, it's me, your favorite spoiler, once again) has a girl-- who's just birthed the first baby the world's seen in 18 years-- in a tiny rowboat, in the middle of a fog, off the coast of England. And she's being picked up by a boat run by this mysterious organization called the Human Project, allegedly, the saviors of humanity. But what I found so striking about this image is that it's so clearly a Return-of-the-king moment. Mists? Off the coast of England? Is it not our very Arthur reborn, and just in the nick of time? I thought it was a particularly well-conceived and cleverly executed way to end this movie. And had it not been so very British, I'm not so sure that this sort of referencing of a particularly nationalistic sort of mythology would have played nearly so well.

Also of note, in the bonus material on the DVD, there was a little documentary full of assorted eggheads opining on the end of the world-- and I highly highly highly recommend this documentary. Because these economists and ecologists and sociologists are all using their respective vocabularies to say essentially the same thing, their conflated message is moving, terrifying and elucidating. And there's this one great character of a guy--with a strong Eastern European accent and one of those lisps that makes him whistle all his S's-- who has a very interesting (though much different from my own) interpretation of the boat scene at the end. OK, really? this short-form documentary is the best part of the movie, in my opinion-- that is, if you enjoy watching nerds get excited about their respective fields of expertise, particularly if that field of expertise has a political angle. And I for one am not ashamed to admit that excited nerds get me all excited, too.

Oh. Yeah. I've probably just implicated myself in nerdiness here, too, huh? Yes, and I OWN that!

Don't get mad; get plaid!

I was going to write a short comment in response to the post about mandated high school attire in Nashville over on Jon's blog, but I got going in my comment window and realized I have more to say here than I thought.


The truth is, I don't really have a strong enough opinion about this to really offer anything terribly interesting here but I can say this: having gone to a high school where uniforms--not the khaki pants and polo shirt, but plaid skirts and saddle oxfords--were required, I really found the uniform rather empowering. I mean, the Catholic schoolgirl image is an American pornographic icon-- and because we weren't religiously affiliated, we got to hem our skirts so short as to blur the line between "skirt" and "belt." The sexual heritage of that uniform is a really rich ground from which a young hyper-sexual girl such as my high school self could draw a certain variety of self-affirmation. In retrospect, of course, I realize that those uniforms were really not terribly flattering-- the skirts were too high-waisted, the blobby sweatshirts we all wore all winter long were pretty damn hideous, and a yellow oxford-cloth shirt (2 sizes too big-- to hide your over-developed/under-developed boobs--I had the latter) just doesn't look that good on anyone.

But, now, the most common complaint from the other girls was that the uniform "prevented us from expressing ourselves." And while I do agree that clothing is one way in which kids can and do "express themselves," wearing a uniform provided an opportunity for me to decide that no matter what I wore, I was really very dissimilar to the other Harpeth Hall girls. And even now that I'm an adult, I tend to dress somewhere more on the conservative side, with a little too much cleavage now and again (oh, and, well, with liberal applications of various pairs of fuck-me shoes). And while my clothing, I'm sure, engenders opinions from other folks, it's certainly not the last word on my personality. Really, once I open my mouth, people generally appreciate my relative freakishness with great speed. So what I'm saying is, the self-expression argument doesn't hold much water with me.

There is, however, one of Jon's points that does, in fact, hold plenty of water for me. That argument being the cost thing. I went to a fancy-pants private school. I mean, quite literally, I'd bump into a cranky first-thing-in-the-morning Reese Witherspoon with her big black horn-rimmed glasses and her stringy-from-the-shower hair every morning by the lockers. Harpeth Hall, with its rolling lawns and big white-pillared buildings and state-of-the-art Fine Arts building is like another planet when compared to your average Nashville public school. My parents could afford two or three high-waisted plaid skirts. Joe Schoolboy from Stratford High in East Nashville? Maybe, maybe not... the point is, he shouldn't be required to publicize his parents' socio-economic status via the conduit of his clothing. I doubt that would be the sort of self-expression some of these kids are arguing for, right? Of course, the argument here is that dressing all the kids in the same clothes will help erase class strata in the classroom... but you just know there are plenty of kids who get by wearing hand-me-downs.. and those are the ones who'll be having the hardest time dressing within the confines of the dress code every morning. And aren't they the ones proponents argue will be helped the most? I'm skeptical.

And, truthfully, khaki pants and tucked-in shirts are a whole lot more Orwell and a whole lot less Jenna Jamison. Had I been forced to wear nothing but khaki for the duration of my early education, I might not have been so complacent as I was in my plaid. And, I know, I know... staid grown-up that I am, I supposed to think it's bad when kids look too sexy. But-- and I've made this argument plenty of times before--teenagers have sexual agency! And, within reason, what the hell is so wrong with enjoying your pre-spare-tire body?

So maybe this is the thing: if we ban khaki and institute an all-plaid clothing policy... and help the kids parse out the cultural mythologizing of what the plaid has come to mean... maybe everyone-- dirty old men included-- will be just thrilled with the whatever dress codes Metro Nashville decides to put in place.

Daddy issues

I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw,
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.


Apologies. Every so often, a girl's just gotta quote Plath.

And tonight, I do so with purpose. The last time I went to see the woman to whom I often refer as simply "The Psychic," I'd spent the entire previous night awake with a guy with whom I knew good and well I had no future. And in that session, she told me that I'd been that very same guy's father in a previous life (sorry, honey, she said it... I know you think it's crap, but I'm not making it up). And she also issued forth a rather ominous warning that women tend to marry their fathers, regardless of the anxieties exacted upon us by our fathers ... a la the Plath quotation above. Truth be told, this is a recurrent quandary for me anyway. While I've gotten along rather well, for some years now, with my own father, I certainly do not want to live out my duration with a knee-jerkily reactive and jealous person such that he is.

Alongside this train of thought regarding fathers in general, and my own in particular, is a train of thought about what an audience in general and me in particular looks for in a film. Recently, a friend of mine made an assumption that I would enjoy a particular movie-- of a genre I generally deem "a waste of time"-- because he thought I had something in common with the main character. Now, really, I do not seek out films to which I hope to "relate" in some way. This idea of relatability strikes me as very Oprah Book Club...and simply not a priority for my in terms of what I look for in an aesthetic experience. After all, if someone makes a movie about it, it damn well better be more interesting that my little life, right?

That said, every once in a while, a little movie shows up in which I recognize some aspect that is so particularly human that I can't help but acknowledge seeing an all-to-familiar molecule of myself therein. And it is Come Early Morning that reflects back some of my sins-of-the-father issues. This is Joey Lauren Adams' directorial debut, and damn if it isn't pretty good. Ashley Judd plays a drunk-a-little-too-often girl who seems to be working far too hard to scrounge up some male affection. And when some poor guy actually delivers, she transmogrifies into a polluted dervish of boy-repellent. Why? Because, of course, her father is a taciturn, affection-withholding, artistically stunted, drunken ne'er-do-well himself!

The thing is, all of the characters in this film seem as though they've been plucked right outta family therapy on Party of 5 or something. Their foibles are nothing new. However, they're all just a little bit smarter than prime time television. In one scene, Judd's character goes to speak with her father-- invites herself into his home, because he won't do so himself-- and ostensibly, he's heard through the small-town rumor mill about all the man-trouble into which she's gotten herself. But she just wants to talk. Instead, he plays his guitar for her. And at first, this frustrates her-- until she realizes that this is how he--sufferer of extreme stage-fight that he is-- lets her in and accesses his own conflicted feelings about their relationship. So, while this moment doesn't, by any means, repair thr rended fabric of their relationship, she suddenly realizes that she'd misinterpreted her own father for pretty much her entire life. That's a big damn deal, you know?

And were I to happen upon such a moment in my own life, I'd like to think I'd know I'd accomplished something. So, dammit, although I'd really rather shy away from insinuating my own life onto all these celluloid stories, well, here, it seems to have happened. And, as a result, it seems I'm unable to offer much commentary other than "I like this movie a whole lot." And, yeah, I know, it's not really about me at all.

However, seeing as this post is already all about me, I now ask, self-servingly, what does it say about me that I relate more to a furious sexpot relationship-saboteur than a kicky urban career girl who actually manages to land her (trite, one-dimensional, tiresome) boyfriend/job-of-choice in the end? I shall not name to the movie to which I'm referring here, but let's just say, I've already disparaged it in a previous post...

April is National Poetry Month (Period)

During my three years of blissfully part-time employment at the UofA Poetry Center, today would mark the annual changing of the banner on the front of our (now bulldozed) little stucco house. Or really, at some point in early April, I'd drive to work and notice, hey! the Poetry Month banner is up! But apparently, there had been some controversy about this very banner. From what I understand, the damn thing had to go back and forth from the printer several times because "April is National Poetry Month." is a complete sentence... and some felt the rules for bannerness negated the need for correct punctuation while others felt correct syntax was paramount. The punctuation sticklers won out. And now, during this month, every time I have to datestamp something, I hear "April is National Poetry Month (period)" in my head.

This is all just to say, Happy Month to all those who are poetically inclined. Bless you all. And let the media spotlight shine a little brighter on your deserving work during this very special time of year.

Isn't it cool how the vocabulary of Christmas almost, very nearly, applies?