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.