1) Gone to Père Lachaise and done homework on my favorite authors' graves
2) moved out of my éstudine apartment and into one a decent distance from school, so that I would not be scarred by commuter life. On to touristy things, though...
3) Gotten falafel somewhere
4) vintage shopping
5) open air-market antique shopping
6) Versailles
7) all the cool off-beat museums
8) lunched at the Louvre outside on a Monday
9) bought running shoes and gone running
10) ladies' night at Queen
11) Happy hour in the Latin Quarter where the vrais students drink
12) Îsle Saint-Louis.
13) frequented the canals.
Je devine que c'est tout.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Monday, June 7, 2010
3D IS RETARDED.
PERIOD.
And I'm NOT talking about my neighbor, whom I only see going to or coming from the gym.
The dumbest thing about 3-D is that the screen is always the same shape, no matter what the film projected onto it does. A character can reach out towards the audience, but his hand will always be bound in on four sides. It will never really look like it's coming off the surface and into the room.
So really, they just make these movies look all blurry and stupid so that you have to put on these glasses in order to see anything clearly and not throw up from motion sickness. And they make you think that this process of needing to put on these glasses is cool. But I still leave with a headache.
It's like how tap water is dirty or unavailable so you have to buy bottled water, when they could just make filtered public drinking fountains open to all. It's like a lot of things.
And I'm NOT talking about my neighbor, whom I only see going to or coming from the gym.
The dumbest thing about 3-D is that the screen is always the same shape, no matter what the film projected onto it does. A character can reach out towards the audience, but his hand will always be bound in on four sides. It will never really look like it's coming off the surface and into the room.
So really, they just make these movies look all blurry and stupid so that you have to put on these glasses in order to see anything clearly and not throw up from motion sickness. And they make you think that this process of needing to put on these glasses is cool. But I still leave with a headache.
It's like how tap water is dirty or unavailable so you have to buy bottled water, when they could just make filtered public drinking fountains open to all. It's like a lot of things.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
My Favorite Streets.
Few things make me happy. One of them is walking down a street that I like. In the last NY Mag that I bought, at the beginning of the neighborhood guide (or at the beginning of "Urban Villagers" because the whole issue is supposed to be a neighborhood guide), Justin Davidson mentioned how we "follow the same immemorial cow path through the city's endless array of routes because it means passing better shops or getting a glimpse of some especially whimsical gargoyle." This is true but it's so much more than shops and gargoyles. If I wanted gargoyles I would have stayed in PA and stood at the County theater starting across the street into the Nejad Gallery's attic window, for forever. Obviously. Note: I don't have favorite streets, as much as I have favorite blocks.
1) E. 9th Street between 2nd and 1st Aves. The cutest boutiques, vintage stores and junk shops ever, plus tree-lined and always lit with xmas lights. And what, pray tell, is on the corner? Veselka. Quiet overall and like all numbered East Village streets, one-way, but 24-hour sensibility is around the corner.
2) St Marks between 1st and A. Dead ending into Tompkins Square Park feels like being reeled into a movie set sometimes. Such a contrast between this part of St. Marks and, well, the shitty part we know and love, down which I once led my mother, who then sputtered, "I just walked through the dregs of the earth!" Such a contrast. Trees instead of tattoo parlors, yogurt, falaf and burrito chains, and pipe tables. And really nice looking stoops. I imagine this is the part where WH Auden wandered around in his bathroom garnering his reputation as a neighborhood eccentric.
3) All of E. 5th St. Tea and townhouse or faux-townhouse buildings.
4) Rivington St between Essex and Clinton, but also kind of between Essex and Forsyth. ABC No Rio and El Somb and other fond memories. The cafe on the corner of riv and clinton used to always play Patti Smith, and they are generous with coffee and baguette. Crazy Belgian boutiques. Any additional info will just be a LES stereotype...
And any more streets would not really be favorites.
1) E. 9th Street between 2nd and 1st Aves. The cutest boutiques, vintage stores and junk shops ever, plus tree-lined and always lit with xmas lights. And what, pray tell, is on the corner? Veselka. Quiet overall and like all numbered East Village streets, one-way, but 24-hour sensibility is around the corner.
2) St Marks between 1st and A. Dead ending into Tompkins Square Park feels like being reeled into a movie set sometimes. Such a contrast between this part of St. Marks and, well, the shitty part we know and love, down which I once led my mother, who then sputtered, "I just walked through the dregs of the earth!" Such a contrast. Trees instead of tattoo parlors, yogurt, falaf and burrito chains, and pipe tables. And really nice looking stoops. I imagine this is the part where WH Auden wandered around in his bathroom garnering his reputation as a neighborhood eccentric.
3) All of E. 5th St. Tea and townhouse or faux-townhouse buildings.
4) Rivington St between Essex and Clinton, but also kind of between Essex and Forsyth. ABC No Rio and El Somb and other fond memories. The cafe on the corner of riv and clinton used to always play Patti Smith, and they are generous with coffee and baguette. Crazy Belgian boutiques. Any additional info will just be a LES stereotype...
And any more streets would not really be favorites.
Friday, January 22, 2010
RE: Angelique
My favorite café slowly grows less and less appealing to me as I have discovered the oven-source of their delicious pastries (Ceci-Cela on Spring St), and the brand of coffee they serve, Lavazza, highly advertised in the mainstream, but a delicious standard I grew to accept after high consumption of the Italian espresso brand while in Europe.
I have found another café that's stocked in high-density with baskets of croissants--plain, almond, chocolate, almond-chocolate--and I don't even like eating them anymore. (As much). An era has ended. Au revoir, mes potes les croissants, ou, à toute à l'heure, si vous voulez.
I wonder if Ceci Cela is en faite the engine that mobilizes all quality pastry-vending cafés in the downtown area.
I have found another café that's stocked in high-density with baskets of croissants--plain, almond, chocolate, almond-chocolate--and I don't even like eating them anymore. (As much). An era has ended. Au revoir, mes potes les croissants, ou, à toute à l'heure, si vous voulez.
I wonder if Ceci Cela is en faite the engine that mobilizes all quality pastry-vending cafés in the downtown area.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
film
Literature's capacity to intoxicate is itself a literary theme in classics like Madame Bovary and The Picture of Dorian Gray. It goes farther than a mere warning to defend against the influence of others or persuasive literature and addresses novels specifically. The mind is so impressionable to books because when reading, we think out the thoughts that others have written down. When we read a note or a sentence we do not necessarily appropriate someone else's opinions, but after reading a book cover to cover the brain cannot remain unchanged.
Film on the other hand only needs to be observed as one observes reality. The viewer's thoughts are guided by what he or she sees and hears, and the imagination is told what to imagine. Surrendered and absorbed thus, thoughts cannot be as actively focused when watching as they are when reading. Watching movies is easier; this is why we devote so much time, money and imagination to creating and consuming them. Because life is not a movie it is easy to cast off the enormous impact that movies have on our lives, daily and from beginning to end. But we must recognize that we spend so much of ourselves watching and listening to things that have been filmed, on Television shows, the news, youtube videos, music videos, videos of each other and surveillance cameras as well as on the big screen.
With this wide stretch of influence comes a kind of omnipotence, and responsibility. Celebrities think that because they live in the public eye, they have responsibility to speak out on political issues, about which they may hold zero qualifications to pontificate other than the freedom of speech allotted to them as a citizen of the world plus whatever life experiences. And we criticize them for it. The real responsibility lies with the filmmakers, the reality TV producers, the news network executives, not their messengers onscreen. (If the actress has no 'qualified opinions' and it is not worth hearing her talk, then please let the cameraman turn the lens towards something worthwhile before I the viewer must decide to change the channel).
But the people in charge of programming have to consider what the public wants to see and hear so that they can make money, or else the viewer will change the channel, ratings or ticket sales and thus revenues will drop and the studio will go broke. Oh, capitalism. Oh, supply and demand. The film industry cares so much about making money that is neglects the fact that it holds the medium with the highest potential communicability in its hands. It has a moral conscience called the MPAA, and allows various auteurs to realize 'visions,' but not enough is intelligently expressed. There are not enough auteurs. Or, there is too much Hollywood.
Yes, books can more thoroughly seize a mind and brainwash it, but the film assaults all senses, save, arguably, smell and touch. ...and taste. Anyway. If you could make a movie that would infiltrate and guide the brain like a book, it would be the key to world domination. In addition to world intoxication, if you recall what Flaubert and Wilde believed books can do.
It is said that European film pulls its structure from the novel and American film from the stage. But I don't think even that European film (or film structured as a novel) can do what a book does. Maybe films accompanied entirely by subtitles, where we are forced to read while we watch, would. But then we are distracted from words by images and from images by words. I think that The Werckmeister Harmonies balances the two the best; even if you speak Hungarian and do not view the film with subtitles, the dialogue occurs in long speeches that truly listening to it must be like reading a book. Meanwhile the images are stark, sometimes simplified, and evolve hypnotically over long scenes, guiding the mind and communicating changes visually.
There are some movies I love but I don't want to watch them over and over again. I care less about cinematography than the ideas and emotions that I hope exist behind it, and which I hope the filmmaker tries to express. I care less about nit-picking an entire film over than I do extracting its 'ontological mystery.' If easily extractable, all the better, (in contrast to critical theorists who would argue that art with an easily extractable idea lowers its artistic value), because communication need not cloud itself into a mystery; such a 'mystery' pre-exists which calls to be deconstructed, and fabricating a paradox in this situation does nothing but harm the art. Such a false paradox cannot embody the true and existing paradoxes of life and is pointless. Translation: if you are going to try to say something (in art), don't intentionally make it impossible to understand. It's not cute.
Overall I feel like less films are being made that express any idea, or else I have seen them all. But I think that all films should do this and maximize the medium's communicative capacity, and I don't mean that every film has to contain a philosophical treaty; in fact, stupid comedies may do this best. Superbad in this reasoning may be a perfect film. A joke has to crawl inside your head and wake up thousands of your personal symbols of irony to make you laugh, straight back to the first time you were ever tickled. Some films marketed as comedies can't do that. And thus, they "aren't funny." I wish that there could be some coup d'etat in the film industry. I wish filmmakers who have become beloved public figures like Tim Burton and Michel Gondry could do something to govern the machine's output and cultivate new filmmakers who would take on the filmmaker's responsibility towards political efficacy and emotional communicability in films like a TV paragon of law enforcement takes on his badge as a duty to serve the law in some fictional troubled town. And as I said, this would be the key to world domination and making it a better place.
Film on the other hand only needs to be observed as one observes reality. The viewer's thoughts are guided by what he or she sees and hears, and the imagination is told what to imagine. Surrendered and absorbed thus, thoughts cannot be as actively focused when watching as they are when reading. Watching movies is easier; this is why we devote so much time, money and imagination to creating and consuming them. Because life is not a movie it is easy to cast off the enormous impact that movies have on our lives, daily and from beginning to end. But we must recognize that we spend so much of ourselves watching and listening to things that have been filmed, on Television shows, the news, youtube videos, music videos, videos of each other and surveillance cameras as well as on the big screen.
With this wide stretch of influence comes a kind of omnipotence, and responsibility. Celebrities think that because they live in the public eye, they have responsibility to speak out on political issues, about which they may hold zero qualifications to pontificate other than the freedom of speech allotted to them as a citizen of the world plus whatever life experiences. And we criticize them for it. The real responsibility lies with the filmmakers, the reality TV producers, the news network executives, not their messengers onscreen. (If the actress has no 'qualified opinions' and it is not worth hearing her talk, then please let the cameraman turn the lens towards something worthwhile before I the viewer must decide to change the channel).
But the people in charge of programming have to consider what the public wants to see and hear so that they can make money, or else the viewer will change the channel, ratings or ticket sales and thus revenues will drop and the studio will go broke. Oh, capitalism. Oh, supply and demand. The film industry cares so much about making money that is neglects the fact that it holds the medium with the highest potential communicability in its hands. It has a moral conscience called the MPAA, and allows various auteurs to realize 'visions,' but not enough is intelligently expressed. There are not enough auteurs. Or, there is too much Hollywood.
Yes, books can more thoroughly seize a mind and brainwash it, but the film assaults all senses, save, arguably, smell and touch. ...and taste. Anyway. If you could make a movie that would infiltrate and guide the brain like a book, it would be the key to world domination. In addition to world intoxication, if you recall what Flaubert and Wilde believed books can do.
It is said that European film pulls its structure from the novel and American film from the stage. But I don't think even that European film (or film structured as a novel) can do what a book does. Maybe films accompanied entirely by subtitles, where we are forced to read while we watch, would. But then we are distracted from words by images and from images by words. I think that The Werckmeister Harmonies balances the two the best; even if you speak Hungarian and do not view the film with subtitles, the dialogue occurs in long speeches that truly listening to it must be like reading a book. Meanwhile the images are stark, sometimes simplified, and evolve hypnotically over long scenes, guiding the mind and communicating changes visually.
There are some movies I love but I don't want to watch them over and over again. I care less about cinematography than the ideas and emotions that I hope exist behind it, and which I hope the filmmaker tries to express. I care less about nit-picking an entire film over than I do extracting its 'ontological mystery.' If easily extractable, all the better, (in contrast to critical theorists who would argue that art with an easily extractable idea lowers its artistic value), because communication need not cloud itself into a mystery; such a 'mystery' pre-exists which calls to be deconstructed, and fabricating a paradox in this situation does nothing but harm the art. Such a false paradox cannot embody the true and existing paradoxes of life and is pointless. Translation: if you are going to try to say something (in art), don't intentionally make it impossible to understand. It's not cute.
Overall I feel like less films are being made that express any idea, or else I have seen them all. But I think that all films should do this and maximize the medium's communicative capacity, and I don't mean that every film has to contain a philosophical treaty; in fact, stupid comedies may do this best. Superbad in this reasoning may be a perfect film. A joke has to crawl inside your head and wake up thousands of your personal symbols of irony to make you laugh, straight back to the first time you were ever tickled. Some films marketed as comedies can't do that. And thus, they "aren't funny." I wish that there could be some coup d'etat in the film industry. I wish filmmakers who have become beloved public figures like Tim Burton and Michel Gondry could do something to govern the machine's output and cultivate new filmmakers who would take on the filmmaker's responsibility towards political efficacy and emotional communicability in films like a TV paragon of law enforcement takes on his badge as a duty to serve the law in some fictional troubled town. And as I said, this would be the key to world domination and making it a better place.
Monday, November 16, 2009
angelique
Few things make me happy. Most of them I have encountered or perceived while stimulated by immense amounts of caffeine. And probably also sugar. But, there is no question about the difference between my indifference to most things and the sublime joy inspired by others, like CAFÉ ANGELIQUE.
I have drank coffee far and wide, many a cup. But nothing compares to a simple café au lait chez Angelique. I used to go there every day when I had class near it last year in the mornings. I would order my coffee and pastry in preparation for my semester in Paris. (Like I needed preparation for the fucking google of calories I was about to consume over the subsequent 4 months). I have since struggled to recreate the magical, phenomène madeleine moment with other coffees, other pastries, lattés, cafés crèmes, pains au chocolat, macarons, du café viennois, et ben, je n'ai rien atteint. That's just it--I was trying to re-create a unique and original experience that cannot be re-created. Thus is the epiphany I had when I revisited my long lost favorite café on Bleecker. I will try not to describe like such a horrible romantic, but their chocolate almond croissants are unparalleled, and they dillute that lavazza coffee with hot milk for me at an also unmatched ratio. Such singularity. But maybe it's just familiarity. Maybe I find it so ideal because it matches a standard which I deemed satisfactory in the past, defining an expectation I am happy to satisfy. Like solving a cross-word puzzle that I made up myself.
Also they always play what I imagine was played on college radio in 1994.
I will have two classes near my favorite place next semester. oh how fate brings me back to the tested receptacles of my esteems.
I have drank coffee far and wide, many a cup. But nothing compares to a simple café au lait chez Angelique. I used to go there every day when I had class near it last year in the mornings. I would order my coffee and pastry in preparation for my semester in Paris. (Like I needed preparation for the fucking google of calories I was about to consume over the subsequent 4 months). I have since struggled to recreate the magical, phenomène madeleine moment with other coffees, other pastries, lattés, cafés crèmes, pains au chocolat, macarons, du café viennois, et ben, je n'ai rien atteint. That's just it--I was trying to re-create a unique and original experience that cannot be re-created. Thus is the epiphany I had when I revisited my long lost favorite café on Bleecker. I will try not to describe like such a horrible romantic, but their chocolate almond croissants are unparalleled, and they dillute that lavazza coffee with hot milk for me at an also unmatched ratio. Such singularity. But maybe it's just familiarity. Maybe I find it so ideal because it matches a standard which I deemed satisfactory in the past, defining an expectation I am happy to satisfy. Like solving a cross-word puzzle that I made up myself.
Also they always play what I imagine was played on college radio in 1994.
I will have two classes near my favorite place next semester. oh how fate brings me back to the tested receptacles of my esteems.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Unpaid Internships: Modern Slavery, or A Stockholm Syndrome of the Master-Slave Dialectic
Everyone who has an unpaid internship in say, marketing or editorial at some magazine, television station or fashion house always tells their yearning non-intern friends, earnestly, how much it sucks. But no one listens. Everyone becomes psychotically convinced that they need an internship in order to muster any ounce of self worth, or to even deserve self-worth. It's sort of like how high school girls are convinced that they need boyfriends. Except in this case, no one is going to stand out from the crowd and say, "It's okay to me to not have an internship--I can still be happy with myself, and self-esteem is healthy and hot," like they tell you to do in Seventeen and CosmoGirl Magazine. It's true that you need an internship. When you graduate from college, you better have spent your time in college networking and garnering a shitstorm of experience for your resume or you will have to bow down to those who have and watch them take your future job. No one will ask you where you went to college, they say. But somehow your internships are supposed to count big time.
Not all internships suck. In fact mine have been quite fruitful, but that is because I love writing and I've gotten to write, but internships in general have become so coveted that I could--myself, a college student--post an ad on Craig's List soliciting unpaid interns to help me go about my regular duties. And with my middling array of experiences and organizations I could polish my virtual identity and look completely legitimate, in the same way that I labored over my pre-internship resume to make it look substantial. This has been something that I have been seriously considering doing for some time now.
People willingly offer themselves up to be someone else's slave; that is what society has come to. I mean, basically it's like being someone's personal assistant, but without getting paid and to a lesser extent of responsibilities because you can't be there all the time... because you're not getting paid. Since you're not getting paid you are probably also involved in something else, such as school, thus your life would demand as much as one with a full-time job, but with your attention divided. Again, without getting paid for your time. A.K.A. SLAVERY. I guess you could argue that you're not getting nothing in return for your labor, because you get to put the internship on your resume and can potentially get a reference for a future position somewhere... maybe even with money. The process is justified as a road to eventual compensation.
Still, people's conception of self-worth is so low, so bankrupt, that they feel it necessary to institute a master-slave dialectic for zero interim/immediate compensation save the status and honorary title as "intern." You get to learn a lot from working at a company and everything, but the notion of the nature of the work is so degrading. Even the afforementioned justification is just a comforting lie you tell yourself in the mean time. A False Consciousness, if you will. Even if you enjoy it, you've just been so beaten over the head and brainwashed by the SYSTEM you don't even realize they are taking advantage of you, and you won't, fully, until you are in some established and paid position and you have to look down on the next generation of lowly interns. You'll remember how sometimes people were really nice to you and got you lunch or coffee, and then retrospectively understand from your new experience, that they only did that because they felt guilty, about having a slave in 21st Century society.
Not all internships suck. In fact mine have been quite fruitful, but that is because I love writing and I've gotten to write, but internships in general have become so coveted that I could--myself, a college student--post an ad on Craig's List soliciting unpaid interns to help me go about my regular duties. And with my middling array of experiences and organizations I could polish my virtual identity and look completely legitimate, in the same way that I labored over my pre-internship resume to make it look substantial. This has been something that I have been seriously considering doing for some time now.
"Young writer/radio personality seeks detail-oriented, motivated spring intern to assist in tasks such as editing, transportation of documents, artist research, compiling multimedia, data entry and other organizational duties. Knowledge of pop-culture and computer savy a must. Experience with Macintosh programs and Microsoft excel definitely a plus. New York residents only, as you must have a superior mastery of the Metropolitan public transportation system."See? It looks pretty legit, right? Just think: they could follow me around everywhere, carry some of my things, keep my schedule in a sort of blackberry, but not a blackberry because I don't want them to be able to use it to socialize, just to organize my life, so maybe more of a modern palm pilot, and help me do all of the things I want to do. I could make them search for and compile a list of all known doo-wop bands, and then rate them, for my radio show because I am too busy reading Russian literature, German philosophy and pages of technical, hermeneutic psychoanalytic rhetoric. They could grocery shop for me. Help me do my homework. Send memos for me. Clean my kitchen and vacuum my carpet. Do nice things for my roommate. Basically, HE/SHE WOULD BE MY SLAVE.
People willingly offer themselves up to be someone else's slave; that is what society has come to. I mean, basically it's like being someone's personal assistant, but without getting paid and to a lesser extent of responsibilities because you can't be there all the time... because you're not getting paid. Since you're not getting paid you are probably also involved in something else, such as school, thus your life would demand as much as one with a full-time job, but with your attention divided. Again, without getting paid for your time. A.K.A. SLAVERY. I guess you could argue that you're not getting nothing in return for your labor, because you get to put the internship on your resume and can potentially get a reference for a future position somewhere... maybe even with money. The process is justified as a road to eventual compensation.
Still, people's conception of self-worth is so low, so bankrupt, that they feel it necessary to institute a master-slave dialectic for zero interim/immediate compensation save the status and honorary title as "intern." You get to learn a lot from working at a company and everything, but the notion of the nature of the work is so degrading. Even the afforementioned justification is just a comforting lie you tell yourself in the mean time. A False Consciousness, if you will. Even if you enjoy it, you've just been so beaten over the head and brainwashed by the SYSTEM you don't even realize they are taking advantage of you, and you won't, fully, until you are in some established and paid position and you have to look down on the next generation of lowly interns. You'll remember how sometimes people were really nice to you and got you lunch or coffee, and then retrospectively understand from your new experience, that they only did that because they felt guilty, about having a slave in 21st Century society.
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