Come Downstairs Now

“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!

I’ve been thinking WAY too much about the economic/identity politics/prejudiced side of filmmaking. And I know I must do this if I truly want to become a filmmaker, but I am ready to see filmmaking as an art again. Or maybe I should wait until December 1st when my applications are in. But that is so far away!

chan is missing streams instantly on netflix. do with this information what you will! also, if the loudest thing about a film in black & white 16mm weren’t (contemporarily) its pretentiousness … wow wow wow what a medium! i’m late for everything today, but i feel kind of great.

the lovely AGS (on my paper proposal): paradigm shifts in 20 pages are hard to pull off!

heart!

also, reading good academic books like Terry Castle’s “Clarissa’s Ciphers” and Scott Bukatman’s “Blade Runner” (for BFI Modern Classics) makes me want to be an academic! but what it really makes me want to do is strive to apply these ideas in art. still. i can see myself getting a master’s in english lit (but possibly only in england) or a ph.d in film studies. alive! alive! must. make. art.

p.s. when i grow up, i will make movies about plump black women who are into aesthetics so that all the plump black women who are into aesthetics won’t have to use images of white/skinny/boys. or won’t have to find false solace in ghetto tearjerkers (because we all know that america loves to see her heartwarming tales from the ghetto’s dirty recesses). or won’t find false solace in the art house african cinema women of decades gone by … but we all know that i really think that finding myself in the dirtily projected images of others is futile and sad … and so, so pertinent.

i have been thinking about this a lot though, that the casals’ travels project will be the last one in which i use a white person by default (and only because it’s already all been filmed). i’ve previously used my lack of resources as an excuse to take on the liberal view that “it doesn’t matter” and “we are all the same” but i am sick and tired of telling stories of white people’s frustrations. i hate to put it in those terms, but it is true, especially when—generally, in american cinema—you never, ever, ever, ever (rarely) get these stories told in another colour unless there is the context of war/poverty. this begs the question of whether it is simply a matter of privilege? if these stories of objectless frustration are white stories? NO! NO! NO! NO! this is something bigger than the simple NB: why do you always use blonde white girls in your films? it’s not identity politics. or psychoanalysis. i am not only going to reactionarily (sp?) cast black people. that is not my meaning. oh, i cannot be bothered. talk to me instead.

i will not filter or act up this anxiety through that of antichrist’s she (charlotte gainsbourg). but oh, how i feel like i am stuck in that (salvia-n) violent matrix! and oh how i feel trapped by cirmcumstance! and oh how i want to run, run, run!

therapy today.

i fucking hate … i’ve hit such a huge brick wall. i’m paying $300 for a puppet to make a fucking movie that can’t and won’t be finished any time soon, i’ve paid $75 in festival submission fees and i can’t even get a hold of my .mov file to mail in my movie for the postmark deadline. i’ve been down to nyu god-knows-how-many-times in the past few days and always there’s a new problem. i bought a $90 hard drive and it didn’t solve the problem. i’ve hit such a huge wall, this all feels impossible. i can’t fucking believe the extent to which the earth won’t throw me a bone. throw me this bone! i’m broke beyond reason and throwing money at film festivals for no good reason. and this comes after THE talk with both my recommenders, the knowledge that i’m going to be broke for YEARS to come. i hate money. i fucking hate it. i want to live in the woods again. remove me from film from concrete from “civilization” from cigarettes from debt and books and big-T Thought and give me my mountains!

and what is going on on the other side of morningside? i swear i hear people being tortured every night after midnight. there is screaming. male screaming. yes, it’s scarier.

i have never felt warmer than in my 7-year-old body and under the swoosh-swoosh of the full-body car wash.