Sunday, September 30, 2007

Drama Queen

I haven't painted since May. And believe me, listening to the soundtrack of Frida makes you wanna paint like van Gogh's holding a knife to your ear (Heehee, I once got a card informing me that I had van Gogh's ear for music). But fo sho, I haven't touched my paint-brushes. Well, I kinda can't, they're actually my mom's, and therefore they live in my house. So too bad for me. Or I could sign up for a painting class. But I don't think that would be such a good idea. It's not that I'm a horrible painter. It's just that I go through these phases. Like with dance. I really wanted to dance last year. I went to my first dance class in six years. I fell down the stairs. I didn't want to go back. Fun times. And I stuck with it, and was in really great shape, but I just got so sick of it. I developed a metaphorical allergy to dance. I wish that I was one of those people who was amazing at one thing and one thing only and that this one thing was my everything. As cliche as that sounds. But I'm no permanent resident.

Saturday, September 29, 2007

If only I could upload photos...

I flip-flopped my way over to Film History this morning, more leisurely than usual because I had somehow managed to leave the GQ (General's Quarters, the caf where I have breakfast, for all you non-Bergers) with a few minutes to spare. What an overused expression that is. But I'm a little too tired to change it right now. I'm so tired that I wrote 'write' instead of 'right', but I fixed that, of course. And then I go and tell you all about it, so it's not like fixing it actually accomplished anything, but...anyway...I was flip-flopping when an image assaulted my senses and stirred up everything twisted and surrealist that has ever taken liberties to breed in my preconscious. If only I could upload photos, but this computer is strange and won't let me upload anything from my hard drive...

How to begin...

Allow this image to hover before your inner eye: A haggard line of life-size wooden crosses has been sewn onto Academic Row, complemented by bales of hay that sit, neatly packaged, on the grassy, er...grass. So I think, okay, I know a lot of people like Civil War reenactments, so is this...it can't be...is this supposed to be the Spartacus slave revolt?

The atmospheric aura (that's the buzzword of the day, according to my friends Jordan and Devin) reeked of...I don't even know...it was just incredibly creepy. I mean, a row of life-size crosses (anything life-sized that's not actually alive is creepy. Like life-sized Barbie). Turns out it's for the Muhlenberg Scarecrow-making contest. Which makes sense, I guess, but even when I realized this, I was contemplating the purpose of the hay (maybe the block of hay serves the same purpose as the trapdoor at a hanging?) and especially of the mysterious signs posted on each individual cross.

Delta Zeta.

Communication Club.

Girls Varsity Lacrosse.


Watch out, Chemistry Club. They're gonna crucify you, too. But no, there's a much more realistic explanation: each of the clubs listed above, in addition to several others, purchased a "scarecrow frame"(choughCROSSchough) and bale of hay for the upcoming (well, not really, depends on your definition of upcoming, but let's not get caught up in semantics, here) Halloween festivities.

At least that's what the ADMINISTRATION is telling us.

Hmmm...

In Film today, we studied surrealism: Un Chien andalou, L'age d'or, and some other stuff. Freud would be proud. Maybe he saw them, I'm not sure. I came to one conclusion about surrealist filmmakers:

They're sixth graders with high voices who still have not accepted the fading allure of the penis game. You know, the one where you shout 'penis!!!!' in the cafeteria to your friend with greasy hair at the other end of the room. You have greasy hair, too. You're in middle school.

But seriously. How many penis jokes can you fit into a seventeen-minute film? It reminds me a lot of John Barth and post-modernism, which also boasts more than its share of penis jokes. Eisenstein was a pubescent boy as well in this respect. It's pretty ridiculous. In a way, I can kinda see where Frida was coming from when she said, "I would rather sit on the floor of the market of Toluca and sell tortillas than have anything to do with those "artistic" bitches of Paris." Nevertheless, she was a surrealist as well, but not by her own definition. Sorta like Barth and postmodernism (Postmodernism? post-modernism?), but I digress. At the beginning of film class this morning, we delved into our unconscious by freewriting.

The basin has been full for the past half hour as I sit, drinking its silvery metaphor and I like it and the golden key, resting precariously on the edge of my unconscious with that water. Water may be in the basin what is in the basin is no different that what is in your mind. Now we look contemptuously at it, grinning with all power from the starlit heights, the mist-filled eyes.

And so on. And ending with:

The key looks at us. We look at me. I look at me without a mirror and I mow the lawn as fast as I can. I mow rocks. Someone left them there. This is saddening like the turtle of laughter and Salvador Dali. I think too much about my future, not futurism, my life, as if it doesn't already exist.

Dr. O called on me to read part of it out loud, so I read the first part. She said it was sophisticated and quite surrealist. I said, cool.

Well, not really. But it was a fun exercise. The phrase "turtle of laughter" reminds me of "rabbit of Easter" from David Sedaris' story "Jesus Shaves" Me Talk Pretty One Day (Kim is probably the only one who gets this reference). That means David Sedaris like, lives in my unconscious.

I bet he vacuums, like, all the time. He vacuums my unconscious, I mean. If it has a floor. If it does, I'm sure it's carpeted and covered with cat hair.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Kerenski!

That is K's name. I remembered when I came back from my voice lesson. I didn't even have to look it up. I'm so intelligent.

By the way, if this is the first blog you've read, be sure to scroll down the page and read the posts from earlier today and yesterday if you haven't already. Otherwise I probably am not making much sense.

But do I ever?

Why did I get up at eight?

There was really no need. My first class is at ten. I really don't have that much homework. Then I realized---Oh! I got up so early so I could write another post for my blog! Could anything be more obvious?

To those who commented, thanks for "reading my shit", as a fellow blogger friend would say (her blog is at http://myblasphemousramblings.blogspot.com/, check it out, it's really the highlight of my day). To those who didn't comment, since you're reading this now, I'm assuming you read my shit and just didn't, well, comment. I like comments!! They're like birthday presents. Really.

Do you know who's really funny? Sergei Eisenstein. He's another Soviet filmmaker; the first to really push the limits of montage. He defined about six different types of montage, ranging from the basic temporal to the intense intellectual. Intellectual montage was his favorite. It consists of showing two shots of completely different things that collide (metaphorically) and make a whole greater than the sum of its parts (like Gestalt psychology!) in the mind. One of my personal favorites is from October, which celebrates the (failed) October revolutions of 1905. There's this guy whose name begins with a 'K' (I think) who climbs up the same set of stairs over and over again to represent that his ascendence to head of the provisional government was really no big deal. I mean, provisional government? Please. If that's the best you can do... So anyway, then he's walking towards the door, and shots of him doing this are intercut with shots of a mechanical peacock. And Eisenstein really hits you over the head with this one. It's like "get it? K is as vain as a peacock! OMG! I'm so intelligent! Did you see it again? Get it?" And then K walks forward and there's a shot of the peacock's ass, so it's like he's, well, walking into the peacock's ass. Hmm.

But really, K. Provisional Government is just not good enough.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Dziga Vertov is the shit

And by God, I mean that. I just watched all 68 minutes of The Man With a Movie Camera. Think USSR, 1929. What I found amazing is how he managed to pair his form (montage [editing], and lots of trick shots) with his content (a day in the lives [not LIFE, because this is Soviet Cinema, goddamnit, and we're talking about the proletariat here, not the silly little individual] of the Russian people). His style of filming combines a paradox of the artificial and the naturalistic; yet he manages to connect the two with industry. MY GOD!!!

Okay, I'm going to calm down now. Most of you probably don't care about Dziga Vertov, anyway. Well, you should. Dziga Vertov is my homeboy.

So this one time I was wandering the streets of Ogunquit, Maine, pretending not to be a tourist, when the woman in front of me stops walking and shouts at her boyfriend, as loud as anyone ever has, "Oh my God, your ass is HUGE!" I guess tourist towns bring together a conglomeration of really unusual people. They're tourists, so they're kinda homogenous in that respect, but they (should I be saying we?) each bring a little special something to my favorite part of Maine. In this case, it was a gargantuan ass, but I guess that's better than nothing...

By the way, I'm listening to the soundtrack for Frida at the moment. I've kinda been listening to it on a permanent loop for the last four days. There's a slightly hilarious song called "La llorona" which includes the lyric "Yo soy como un chile verde, llorona, picante, pero sabroso," which translates to "I'm like a green chile, weeping woman, spicy, but...delicious!"
I just think that's pretty amazing. In a funny little way. Or maybe I'm just tired and need some sleep.