The Red Tent

"The painful things -- Werenro's story, Re-nefer's choice, even my own loneliness -- seemed like knots on a beautiful necklace, necessary for keeping the beads in place. My eyes filled as I bade farewell to those days, but I felt no regret."

~Anita Diamant p. 264

Song of the Day

The Hymn for All the Things We Didn't Do ~ Hefner

I made an off-hand comment today about how song lyrics are omens, tea leaves, and sometimes cheap psychiatrists, and V thought I was making fun of her. Really I was making fun of myself, but it's nice to know that someone else's day often hangs in the balance of iTunes -- that someone else finds the same hope in Ben Lee, despair in David Gray, and generally over-identifies with musical sentiment.
That is often what the Song of the Day ends up being. A song that comes on iTunes randomly and makes me sit up and listen. Sometimes I'm tempted to post not only the song title, but the lyrics as well, because there are certain lines that just say it so well, and most importantly SAVE ME FROM HAVING TO SAY ANYTHING MYSELF -- which is always key. V is laughing right now. But I don't post them, because that would just be too obvious. And I am anything but obvious...

The ghetto is alive tonight and the moon is almost new.

Rain, rain ... F*** the hell off.

Seriously. Are you joking me?
I hope you realize you've deprived the world today of a perfectly good skirt.

Song of the day: Caribe Atomico ~ Aterciopelados
Colombian pop rock will surely chase away the grey sky blues.

Have I ever been this bored before in my life? Let me think about- NOPE NEVER

Should've gone, would've gone, didn't have any cash to go -- home.
It wouldn't be so bad, except for this F-ING WEATHER. I mean WHAT THE HELL?
So, I am sitting in my bedroom with a tube of henna, drawing on myself, and listening to Sarah Vaughn and Iron and Wine. Considering careers as either a jazz singer or a tattoo artist. Someone had better rescue me before I cover my ENTIRE BODY. I've already done significant portions of my left arm and my right leg. Please, I NEED SOMETHING TO DO, or at least another body to start on.
Holy crap.

Song of the day:

Naked as we came ~ Iron and Wine

Song of the Day

Songbird ~ Eva Cassidy

I hope today that if you are in need of comfort, you find some.

NOT Japornimation

When I was about 12, I got a phone call from my friend ZLA demanding that I drop what I was doing and go turn the volume up really loud on my copy of Disney's Aladdin, because apparently you could hear something dirty if you did that. Obviously I jumped to it. As it turns out, and in keeping with this investigation, I couldn't hear anything. But over the years, these claims, urban legends or no, have popped up in the news from time to time. Mostly, they're probably the result of over-caffeinated religious crazy groups with too much time on their hands, and an unwillingness to acknowledge the validity of the phrase "he who smelt it delt it." I haven't seen any of the in-film messages or images (not for lack of trying) but I have seen the phallic tower on the Little Mermaid box and well, you really had to be searching for something, which says more about you than about Disney's perverted artists.
That said, had the before-mentioned hyper religious groups turned their attention to Disney a little earlier in his career they might have come across cartoons bearing titles the likes of which I found in the basement of the FH today while going through old 3/4" videos. Read on and judge for yourselves both my wicked mind, and what could have POSSIBLY motivated this nomenclature, BESIDES drugs and sex:

DRUGS
Minnie the Moocher
The Stupid Cupid
Porky in Wackyland
(okay those were maybe a stretch but read on)

SEX
Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B
Red Hot Riding Hood
Brownie Bucks the Jungle
Bimbo's Initiation

This just goes to show that although Disney may not be hiding messages in its features anymore (or else they're just much cleverer than us), they have still embraced film's general propensity towards pornography. And don't try to give me any "Those were more innocent times... They wouldn't have made those associations..." bullshit, because I've seen Abigail Child's Mayhem and all of its turn of the century porno footage (I can't find any reference to it, but I don't THINK it's reproduced). Anyway the point is, the association of sex and film and its subsequent repression has been around as long as the medium itself. When I get to dub those tapes I'm so watching these cartoons.

Smarter Than the Average Bear

In a department like Film Studies, it goes without saying that there's a lot of technology to be mastered. There are dubbing systems (I'll use that term loosely, let's just say "system" stands for the more accurate "system funded and bought on University budget allocated to departments they don't really care about"), editing suites, printers, computers (PC and Mac OS), scanners, and a photocopier which I'm pretty sure is more intelligent than I am.
Nonetheless, with possibly the exception of one very stubborn vacuum in our house last year, I have never met a machine I could not operate successfully, usually the first time around and most times without the aid of an instruction manual. It's just intuitive for me, as I expect it is for many people of my generation.
In the FH, I have tried to express this, to instill confidence in my expertise, and yet every time I'm about to be acquainted with a new piece of equipment, people drop what they're doing in order to either show me how, or find someone who can. Or worse, they ask me to do something, I give my standard response of "No I haven't done that before, but I'm sure I can figure it out," and they decide they'd rather do it themselves.
More than anything else, I think this represents the differences between successive age brackets. It makes me wonder, if people older than me can't understand my communion with technology, how will the gap widen for those who come after me? When will I look at youth and not be able to wrap my head around the things they take for granted?
Already I feel myself slipping dangerously into that territory. The other day, a group of 14 year old girls did their very best to harrass me on the street. Unfortunately for them I really didn't catch on that it was directed at me until they'd given up. I guess they thought I was ignoring them but I really just wasn't paying attention. Anyway, it's a longer and more annoying story than really warrants getting into, even on this website, but the upshot was my realization that these kids had identified me as an element to be rebelled against. Which I guess to them puts me in that middle age group: not old enough to be really upset by them and defended by other adults, and not young enough to risk my getting my posse together and coming after them to beat down their smart little asses.
Although I'm still not old enough to think that wouldn't be fun. I don't think I ever will be.
Hmmm.

Surprise Hit (with a 2L bottle of wine)

Last night JHR blew through town and we celebrated with pizza, movies, and cheap white wine.
Under the influence of the first and the latter, the movies became that much more hilarious, and I found myself being impressed by what I had assumed would be pure straight up chick flick, and was actually an uncannily realistic portrayal of a relationship.
Prime really pulled something off, and I'm pretty sure it's not just the wine talking.
Some good lines:

"His penis is so beautiful . . . I just want to knit it a hat."
"Let me ask you a question. Do you like having sex? . . . Don't get him a nintendo."

Song of the Day

Nature Boy ~ today by Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Pass, but also good by Nat King Cole, whoever.

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love, and be loved in return."

I like that, the idea that it's all a learning process, both the active and the passive.

Things I have enjoyed today:

1. Women riding bicycles in skirts and high heels. I have great admiration for them. I haven't worked up to this level yet. I'm still concentrating on the not-dying of the whole operation.

2. The smell of rain on warm pavement.

3. Having JHR's voice in my head. Not as the disembodied voice of my conscience, but as the disembodied REAL voice of JHR. Rather uncanny.

4. Campbell's ready-to-serve minestrone.

5. My red chair.

6. The back cover of my chick-lit, which has an array of similarly gaudy book covers with titles to match. "Nadia knows best." "Staying at Daisy's." "Millie's Fling." "Good at Games." "Miranda's Big Mistake." "Two's Company." Voting on favourites may now begin.

7. My phone, which for the first time since I got it, actually rang. Actually rang more than once. I'm pretty f-ing popular.

8. The Song of the Day: On My Balcony ~ Flunk

Song of the Day

It occured to me that we haven't had one of these in a long while. I was thinking this on the bus home on Sunday night, while I was listening to music. I have a system when I ride the bus, wherein I watch one TV show, and then spend the rest of the bus ride listening to a play list (one marked "bus rides" in my iTunes) on random either with my eyes closed, or looking out the window. There were lots of candidates for this song of the day slot, but the winner, because it spoke to me louder than the rest at that particular point in time, is:

You Made Me Forget My Dreams ~ Belle and Sebastian

The runners-up will follow.

The True Story of My Day (selected anecdotes)

- Wake up and go into kitchen to make lunch for the day, only to discover that what I had planned to make - tortillas - is no longer there. The whole package of spinach tortillas has mysteriously disappeared from my shelf in the fridge. Yet I was sure that I saw them when I came back home and meticulously checked my food supply for shortages (yeah yeah, laugh it up). And then it dawns on me. The cleaning crew who came through the house on Monday morning (all hail the mighty cleaning crew!! - they who tamed the mold and bleached the shower into submission) cleaned out the fridges. My tortillas, being green, and not looking like normal tortillas... well, I guess they joined the mold by wrongful conviction.

- At lunch time I go into town and pick up my bike, then ride it back to work. When I get back into the office I realize that unaccountably, the theme to Flashdance has been running through my head.

- I eat lunch on a picnic table outside the FH (no that doesn't stand for fire hydrant, or hose, or hall, I'm not a fire...person, anyway...), and a bug lands on my book. I try to brush it away but it just smushes on the page, which I SWEAR was not my intention. I look around to see if there were any other bugs watching and actually feel guilty. An ant comes strolling towards my bag of salad, and I brush him away too, just to prove I can do it. He does not smush.

- Still eating lunch, and distracted from the INCREDIBLY ridiculous "chick-lit" which I've brought for company, I start a mental game of What Not to Wear which lasts the rest of the day.

- In the afternoon I sit and input data from surveys about second year film courses into Excel. I chuckle to myself everytime I come across a survey where the question is "What year did you take FILM 215?" and the person has written "YES." After all, they're film students. Not rocket scientists. I laugh harder when I see that the perpetrator is in 4th year, and is probably someone I know.

- After work I go to a HAWKSLEY! concert and stare dreamily at him eventhough he seems to be developing a paunch. He rocks my world and talks a lot about soap. Red soap that costs $6 and comes from a health food store and has something kinky on the label and makes you feel not just clean but "REALLY clean, like you're a spiritual animal." I make note of these things so that someday I might track down and use the same soap as Hawksley, to, like, you know, be closer to him some how? Not to try to become a spiritual animal, because if I wanted to do that I'd just start experimenting with drugs, and we all know how likely that is.

- Every once in a while during the concert I am distracted from thinking about Hawksley, and soap, and Hawksley using soap... on his newly developed paunch... because the guy in front of me has shifted and let off another waft of stinky-dread air. He scratches his head a lot, and it smells every time he does, and I think, dude, you are not doing something right. You know all this talk about soap? IT'S DIRECTED AT YOU. The smell reminds me of when I was 16 and used to hang out with hippies. Especially the girls who didn't shave their armpits in the summer.

- We go to DQ after the concert to sate an onion ring craving (mine, *sigh*). The girl in front of us (a contestant in the WNTW game, still going on) steps in some icecream offal on the floor and freaks out saying loudly "OH MY GOD THAT'S DISGUSTING!" and then promptly flips the bird -- at the ice cream on the floor. I try very hard not to collapse. We spend an inordinate amount of time after that giving the finger to inanimate objects and cackling maniacally. We sit in an orange booth and eat grease, and I notice a girl sitting with her back to us has a CHANEL hair clip in her hair. And I squint, and wonder, does that REALLY say CHANEL?? On her HAIRCLIP?? Finally I have to conclude that indeed it does say Chanel on her hairclip, it even has the double C logo.
At least though, in one night, I've covered both ends of the hair spectrum.
It was a mighty fine day.

In-animation

My decided lack of human companionship in the last day and a half has resulted in my usual skills of anthropomorphization being blown to extremes. The computer at my desk in the filmhouse (FH) for example has now been dubbed (mentally by me anyway) "The Chugger", as it runs on OS9 and reminds me at times of a little old man walking down the sidewalk bent over a cane, and at others of a cheerfully animated cartoon tugboat.
Also, today when I was returning from lunch, out of nowhere a yellow and green soccer ball came rolling past me down the street. I watched it's trajectory and it finally stopped just in front of the path to the front door of the FH, and rolled around hopefully for a moment before coming to rest. I looked around and there was no one in sight but an old man who was looking just as perplexed at the green and yellow ball as I was (sort of the look my computer gets when I try to get it to reopen an app that's already running, but it's forgotten, and has to start from scratch). So I decided the obvious thing was that the ball wanted a home. And I brought it with me.
This heightened sense of the animus totus (? I just made that up) has even led me to bond with my cell phone. (Yes, yes, it's seducing me against my will. I won't go any further with that techno-societal metaphor.) So much so, that the other day when for the first time it ran out of batteries and showed me the polite little message "Battery Low. Phone is shutting off!" my first thought was, "Why is it talking about itself in the third person?"
You can guess what my second thought was.

Habituation

I woke up today on an island of mattress in a sea of my own junk. Yes, that's a rather purple way to put it, but fitting. I woke up, and I clambered around my stuff, and went to work, and now I've come home and clambered around my stuff and have squeezed myself into a corner of my bed near the window so that I can steal the internet and write this. I should be decreasing the clamber-factor in my new space, but never mind, just a word.
People talk here all the time. I walk down the street and doors stand open and voices issue out, people stand on balconies, porches, and talk and talk. My neighbour sits in his room alone and talks on his phone. I open my window and voices come in with the breeze. The ghetto is noisy.
Downtown is filled with parents and teenagers, tourists, toddlers, tricycles. Seagulls. The sun is so warm it makes the difference of a jacket between sun and shadow. It's summer all of a sudden; and not because the season turned on a dime. I think the moving made it happen. So quickly -- One night and a few blocks, and my whole life rearranges.
I'm not ready for you to be gone.