Come Downstairs Now

I am going to have to stop making fun of Bushwick because we all know I will be living there next year. Goodbye Park Slope / Chinatown / Nolita dreams!

Went to see The Celluloid Closet, which was interesting but not mind-altering. Want to see the following movies now:

Morocco
The Children’s Hour
Walk on the Wild Side
(yes,) Philadelphia

So much to do do do!
North by Northwest in Butler tomorrow. Let me know if you want to join!

I love my father and love the fact that next semester will be the last time I will see his face cave like that.

Also, registration:

Theories of Embodiment
Filmwriting (or: Narrative Strategies)
Topics in World Cinema: Africa & Arab World
Symbolic Logic
Hiking

I sat in the Hungarian yesterday and planned everything in my script (currently called PETRI, but I hate that title) from opening to inciting incident. Working on the rest of it, working on not letting the dead body decide the tone of my film, working on not feeding into other films like Dirty Pretty Things, The Visitor, and Ballast.

Registration tomorrow. Once again, can’t register because of a hold on my account. Thinking too much about the cost of film school (especially when I have to pay back loans, which jacks up the cost of living in New York to $30,000 per year).

On my grooveshark queue:
Just A Friend – Biz Markie
An Eye For Optical Theory – Michael Nyman

One day in the late mid-eighties, I was in my early late-twenties. I had just been dismissed from University after delivering a brilliant lecture on the aggressive influence of German philosophy on rock ‘n’ roll entitled ‘You, Kant, Always Get What You Want.’ At 26, my academic career was over, I had never kissed a boy, and I was still sleeping with mom. Such were the thoughts flooding my tiny head on the day that I was sunning myself…

<3

Have almost entirely decided to drop my thesis and spend next semester writing a feature screenplay that is just fucking amazing. This is the end of my four-year attempt to hold on to the parts that made me. I cannot write a thesis as a testament to the person I was in high school. But I can write a screenplay and try to get into a screenwriting lab and go go go! Also, am already writing a film thesis (Toward a Ghanaian Independent Cinema). Will talk to parents.

This: ”If I must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere.”

“This is going to be way better than when we had that Victorian girl ghost over for dinner.”

Ran into Maya & Kate in Butler today. It made my week. Dessert with Nora, and then drinks with them tomorrow! My schedule next semester is looking to be as lackadaisical as this one. Got into Filmwriting. Decided on the Esi/Paranoia/Undocumented African Immigrants as the script that will (hopefully) be my first feature. Ooh! RE-SEARCH! Thinking of dropping my English thesis in order to devote my life to this script … also because I have been agonizing for days in search of the piece of literature that will tie all this discourse on pain/embodiment together. Just cooked at 2am and am eating a day’s worth of calories in the next 30mins. So bad at losing weight … also started The Bicycle Thief but not in the mood for cinema I need to think about!

Festival submissions thus far: Slamdance + SXSW + NFFTY + Ivy Film Festival = Total of $120 spent.

The article on postmodern pain wasn’t that great. More of a survey on image / bodybuilding / anorexia operating on the idea of a culture that will make itself sick to look healthy. Pertinent. But not my topic.

I’ve been taking full advantage of the Netflix watch instantly feature (the only real justification of my subscription, since I’ve had Touch of Evil on my desk since August). Seen Helvetica, Chan is Missing, and Man on Wire. Good pieces of filmmaking!

Circa 2 weeks to application lockdown.

Need a literary text! This is why I am not an academic. I have this tendency to want to make grandiose discoveries and “do it all.” Been reading Nausea and The Magic Mountain. Good! But not of the era I want to look at & I am also weary of doing translations. Going to get a hold of Slow Man and The Body Artist.

I am still at, “can pain be expressed? how do people go about expressing pain?”
And I need to be at, “the pains of expression in [EXEMPLARY WORK OF WONDROUS LITERATURE]“

But I got Heterotopia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politic from the stacks and I am rearing to go! Can’t wait for class to be over so that I can read David Morris’ essay, Postmodern Pain. Yay for visual culture!

Also, obligatory nod to der 20 Jahrestag des Mauerfalls and my ostalgia for a regime I did not experience. Still, I have ostalgia!