i’ve a Film Theory midterm today.

last night was spent wrestling with concepts of the ontologies of cinema, soviet montage, theories and requirements for cinematic Realism, questions of auteurship and genre and a little bit of semiotic icing to top it off. currently i’ve something akin to Walter Benjamin’s Marxist ideas of base/superstructure (in re: to the aura of mechanically reproduced objects like film) brewing with Rick Altman’s semantic/syntactic approach to film studies and Christian Metz’s idea of denotative and connotative implications of film form. i wonder what is going to percolate?

in the meantime go amuse yourself at Bitter Films with Temporary Anesthetics.

i don’t like to toot my own horn but jmay requested what the class thought of my latest. here are some of their comments:

cool chess imagery - this is quite an accomplishment. juggler. juggler…

once again, your depth of historical or thematic knowledge here is applied and over my head, but in this case it doesn’t take away from the grasp on the poem. i really can’t say anything about this poem negatively.

great imagery, also great use of enjambment… very nice use of words, esp. descriptive verbs & adjectives.

all around great language, crisp specific word choice.

your use of meter is…well done and keeps the poem moving forward.

works very well in sonnet form.

i really like the way chess becomes a metaphor for politics or the chessboard comes alive and the pieces become sentient.

Score!

from the Tao Te Ching (50):

A person comes forth to life and enters into death.
Three out of ten are partners of life,
Three out of ten are partners of death,
And the people whose every movement leads them to the
land of death because they cling to life
Are also three out of ten.

Now,
What is the reason for this?
It is because they cling to life.

Indeed,
I have heard that
One who is good at preserving life
does not avoid tigers and rhinoceroses
when he walks in the hills;
nor does he put on armor and take up weapons
when he enters a battle.
The rhinoceros has no place to jab its horn,
The tiger has no place to fasten its claws,
Weapons have no place to admit their blades.

Now,
What is the reason for this?
Because on him there are no mortal spots.

my regular season is over. i was 4-1 on the weekend, and finally got my act together. the men’s squad is now 82-0 over three years of fencing. and my time fencing as a part of the team is almost up. the drive back from East Lansing was quite an experience. the weather was awful. snow snow snow. a bunch of the team went out drinking. i would have liked to join them but as always, i’m flatass broke. today i will look for a job and try to write a poem in iambic pentameter. writing with accent and meter is much harder than writing normally.

i often think that i am too far behind in the dating game to ever make a good play of it. resignation fills the air like stale gym socks fill the locker room with that stale gym sock smell. (horrid simile intentional). i’ve still no idea what i’m doing. pretty much ever. everything gets recycled, masticated over and over until this gruel that is bewilderment serves up another helping of ‘whateverness.’ i’m at least competent with every other aspect of my life, and since my life is already one-third finished and settling down for the long haul, why rock the dream-boat by attempting to force my nerdilicious pre-adolescent knowledge of relationships into a semblance of maturity? i’m already too far behind the pack to catch up to the stragglers. how many people do i know who are getting married? a lot. how much confidence do i have? { }. The Null Set. what would confidence get me? perhaps a date in which i would have the chance to parade my ignorance in front of someone relatively close to my age with a quite healthy sex life and a working knowledge of ‘how this thing is done.’ its like that dream when you are naked at school and its really cold out so ‘your boys’ are all shriveled and everyone laughs at you because you are naked at school and have a miniscule penis. except its not really like that. because that is a dream. and this is real.

With the slightest touch,
a sleeping dragon awakes.
Odin’s ravens, Thought

and Memory,
croak.
They eat mushroom clouds for lunch,

dark rain for dinner.

Gorged after this meal,
they hear What
the Thunder Says:
‘All the world has aged.’

Immolated in

Inextinguishable Fire,

Megiddo is quiet.

Two men lay like sleep,
bowing to once fertile ground.
Interrupted by

a child without eyes,
Winter settles on a land
too burnt for lilies.

not very many got this in class, so i thought i’d better put some explanatory
links here.

MTV actually has a good new show for once. It is called Clone High. The premise, famous dead people were cloned years ago and the clones are now all in high-school. apparently they are supposedly being trained into a clone army, but that isn’t really happening. forget the nature/nurture argument. the clones act like their predecessors to the extent that they want to. There’s Abe Lincoln, the gangly indie rock guy who reminds me of me. He wants Cleopatra a manipulative and sexy as hell popular girl who happens to date JFK, the school bully and captain of the football team. Abe is friends with Gandhi, who is comic relief and a stereotypical crazy person, and Joan of Arc a angstridden goth chick who is desperately in love with Abe. Other characters include, the idiot Genghis Khan and the latin thug Jes s Cristo. I’ve laughed my socks off at every episode. check it out, on Monday nights 10:30 EST.

this review has been a paid advertisement of MTV, LLC., CO., INC. void where prohibited.

senioritis is officially here. i’ve this class called Fictions of Insanity. It is insanely boring. we are supposed to have the next book read for thursday. i have not purchased said book, nor do i intend to. i also firmly intend to not read a word of it. this class does not deserve my time because i get more intellectual stimulation out of playing video games than i do by listening to the grad student prof read her lecture word for word off of a paper. instead of classwork, i’ll do laundry, play Halo, and try to get a job. the rest of my classes? they’re fun.

another wildass dream last night. i was the rebellious son of a fictional President. Then the aliens invaded and all hell broke loose. as i fled with my father the president (he was more like a retired commando than a commander in chief) we went to this secret underground/water base in St. Joseph’s lake. what was left of the government formed a resistance against the invaders. and I became a badass chopper pilot and special ops leader. the world post-invasion was a curious mix of normalcy and the surreal. much of the world stayed as it had been but often within one step and another a person could go from this into huge piles of noxious ashes. picture chocolate swirl ice-cream with the swirl parts being the destroyed parts of the earth. this has been done by both humans attempting to destroy the aliens (using nukes to no effect) and the aliens themselves. anyway, i’m on this special ops mission to inifiltrate a human organization that has made a deal with the aliens, when my partner - this hotass special ops girl- and the person we had been interrogating - an old hermit woman - were captured by a combined band of aliens and rebels. i had barely escaped their notice and hid myself in a enormous pile of ash. then i left my character and started what i assume was intended to be cross-cutting as i (now the spectator) watched the aftermath of my partner’s torture, a curious blend of mindwracking and body-racking. all through this i recognized that the aliens were very similar to The Covenant from Halo and that i kept wondering if anyone in this place had seen Independence Day and why didn’t we just send a virus to the ships and then kick their asses. that’s all i remember.

i realized as i went through my collection of mp3s and deleted 853mb of them that i have very few of what might be termed ‘love songs’ on my computer. most of the few that i had were subsequently deleted. what does this mean? does it reflect an inherent lack of love within myself, or perhaps an alienation thereof? is my musical taste a signifier of a brooding sense and darkling humour? nah, i just think they are sappy.

*intentionally runs into a wall*

Last night I had a completely awful dream. We were about to start a war. I was walking down the hallway and the guys were in the lounge watching The Toob . On it was one Showdown: Iraq now reporting on the immanent eminent imminent initial US strikes. I was only ten when the 1st Gulf War began, and I watched it begin in night-vision on CNN. Tracers, flares and fuzzy-voiced commentators. What I saw on The Toob was quite similar to this, except in better digital/satellite quality. Apparently we hadn’t started bombing yet, and all of the anti-aircraft fire was just for show to scare our pilots away. We were waiting for 10 or 15 more of something before we began to attack. i figured we’d already began it and the media were just trying to see how much they could convince us of.

that’s all i remember. what makes this awful is that the war which no one wants looks like it could still happen, and that all the months of talk about it has resulted in nightmares for me. I don’t blame Saddam Hussein for this fear. I blame Dubya, and the media for fearmongering and scaring scaring scarring the American public about what Iraq could do, someday. As a person who has never experienced the true effects of war, I feel uncomfortable saying this next thing, but will say it anyway. For me, living permanently on the edge of war is a much more subtle terrorism than living in the midst of war itself.

Millions of young men have now been vindicated by the actions of one of the greatest anathemas of our time. Steve (a.k.a. Benjamin Curtis; a.k.a. The Dell Guy) was arrested on 2/9/2003 for criminal possession of marijuana. Now all of the mothers, friends of mothers, aunts, great-aunts, grandmothers, older female coworkers, lunch ladies, and nuns all must admit that we, the Young Men of America, are nothing like the Dell Guy. We do not preface or wrap-up every sentence with the word ‘dude.’ and most importantly none of us smoke pot. not a single one. and you know it too. right now half of all the aforementioned women who know of this little newsy tidbit are thinking to themselves: ‘Oh My! Steve smokes Wacky Tabaccy? And I compared him to my own son/friend’s son/nephew/great-nephew/etc… What a horrible mistake I have made!’ the other half of the women, so convinced that the young man who happens to know which end of a mouse to click is just like Steve are thinking: ‘Does my son/friend’s son/nephew/great-nephew/etc… have a problem smoking the ganja?’ I’m sure my mom fits into this latter category.

perhaps Benjamin and Ellen Feiss the chick from the apple/switch ad should get together…

-Why are things like this reported?

Honestly, it serves only as an explication of cultural values instead of anything remotely health-related. It is also far too narrow, dealing only with Welsh men. Now, they mention that social factors are probably the cause of a majority of the diseases, apparently because men that don’t shave regularly are blue collar workers that don’t get any. But this is immediately dismissed in favor of the evidence for shaving. and apparently, not shaving regularly fucks up the testosterone levels which in turn leads to stroke. excuse me, but a beard grows whether or not you shave it. and the lack of sex is most definitely due to mate appearence preferences rather than anything to do with the physiology of facial hair. if a girl doesn’t like facial hair she won’t sleep with you. if facial hair messes up sexual virility Homo sapiens sapiens would have died out long before the first razor. how can people get 20 years of funding for this when an artist or independent filmmaker has to kiss pimply ass and jump through flaming hoops blindfolded just to get the chance to ask for money. Stuff like the above article will destroy the world.

why am i so emotionally involved? well, i do have facial hair. i do not get any, and i would much rather think that it is because girls don’t like facial hair rather than the idea that hair makes me impotent. was it not a sign of potency back in the day? also the NEA gets axed while 20 year studies on shaving get plenty of funding. yeah, the NEA was a US thing and this was in Britain, but they are most definitely related phenomenon.

*UPDATE*

not two minutes ago after going to the bathroom to trim said facial hair, the electric trimmer slipped from its selected trimming length and before i knew it i had taken quite a chunk out of my beard. i had to trim it almost to oblivion. poetic justice my ass.

ever victorious, the fencing team #2 in the nation - soon to be #1 later this week - swept the field again at Duke this weekend. i only fenced one bout. but when i got on the strip, the overall winner for men’s epee was still up for grabs. by the time i left the strip we had it clinched.

but i lost the bout.

y’see, Duke was tied with us, but their loss against Stanford gave us the edge to win and even though i lost, there was no coming back for them.

the women won it all too. so we took home 6 cups. we drank out of the trophies last night. and i’m going out to celebrate more this evening.

read about it.

see it from behind the scenes.

ok so i left here to go do a little drinking before i posted. went over to Jan’s and i finished off his crapass vodka and put a dent into his whiskey, so accordingly and in full cognizance of my actions, i am fighting a small hangover. i deserved both. some other stuff about the Duke trip: some of us ate in a restaurant that was somewhat Kenyan somewhat soul food somewhat shady and eclectic as all hell. they had Fried Spam on the menu to give you an idea of what kind of place it was. i had something called Samosa that was pretty damn good though.

i’m flying to Raleigh-Durham, N.C. today for the Duke University Duals. Its just the top four from each squad that travel when we fly. the guys leave today and the girls leave tomorrow. i’m excited to be traveling. i do, however, have the sniffles. last night i put on lots of clothing turned the heat up and put on a sock-hat then got under the covers and sweated myself out. hopefully i didn’t just incubate the cold.

anyway, i get to wear my suit today. i don’t get chances to dress up often so i figure i’ll make the best of it and go all out.

no friday mp3 this week…

seeya sunday.

Something vaguely Lacanian has been running through my mind the past couple of days. a monolectic about identity. when a person’s identity is secure, (and by secure i mean that the positive aspects that a person perceives in themself are validated, affirmed and reiterated by someone else) this enables them to revisit the dark moments in their past and learn and heal from them. this revisitation is not nostalgic which in effect creates a world that is an ideologue and cannot be returned to. the revisitation instead is truly cathartic, the truth is confronted and dealt with instead of mythologized.

the difficulty is successfully challenging this trauma-memory without sacrificing your own identity in relation to it. that is why you need a buddy to reaffirm and hold on to your self while you are off slaying whatever dragons are in your past.

i don’t know quite if this is right or not, but i think i have been either brave or foolhardy and gone off to wrestle with memory without having the necessary backup. mayhap, it has made me more individual or mayhap this thought is a result of an individualism that existed before trauma was confronted. in any case i’ve a problem with individualism. but that is another story.

i suppose i’ve been successful at these confrontations (if they actually happened) otherwise i’d be a bit loony.

this job hunt thing is rough. i’ve been looking at the National Park service, and related jobs, the Smithsonian, Discovery Channel, National Geographic…but all of the job openings are aimed at people that have 2-3 years of experience in the field. no one wants some apparently wet behind the ears college kid. i’ve got the skills, just not the experience, and i would think that background in both anthropology and film would be appealing to these folks. i haven’t got my cover letters ready yet but i hope when whoever is in charge of hiring sees my qualifications they will realize i am an asset. that’ll take some luck in the in-one-ear-out-the-other world of corporate bureaucracy.

what a damn long weekend that was. i was 2-0 today and my aunt and uncle got to see me win one of those bouts. it was a long trip for them for only a couple of minutes of fencing but i’m glad they came. they also gave me a gift certificate to the best pancake house ever. bibler’s. tonight there is a team dinner at Bruno’s pizzeria. that will also be very good. but until that time rolls around i’ve two poems to write, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to read, the preface to Paradise Lost (the Satan part) to read and a response paper to write regarding sigfried kracauer’s film theories.

so i’m outta here.

my weblog is one year old today. and i was 2-1 fencing today.

But more importantly, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry today. For no good reason, i have a strong emotional attachment to the space program and NASA. i didn’t hear about this until long after it happened. i hate it. when i was 5 back in 1986 i was watching the TV when Challenger went up in smoke. and already at that young age i had great admiration for the explorers of space. and my mom was a teacher, and Christa MacAuliffe was a teacher. the Challenger became the first event that scarred myself, not to mention America as a whole.

then the World Trade Center Towers fell over. Scar number 2.The Doppler radar of Columbia’s debris trail on reentry.

and now another space tragedy. Scar number 3. how something so small can cause something so destructive just makes the event all the more painful. ahh, you few brave astronauts, sailing in the heavens. god shelter you. sail in the heavens and protect your fellow space crusaders. the only way i can talk about this is to wax romantic. this picture in particular is rather haunting. that streak.

it can’t all be horrible though can it? why are there always scars, but so few moments of pure worldwide joy. the closest i can think of is the Fall of the Berlin Wall. what a great thing that was. probably the only way we’ll know the world is getting better is when the universal goods start outnumber the tragedies.