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.
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