The world is moving along. My life is changing. But more of that at a later date. I wanted to post about the [proposed] changing diagnoses in the DSM V, which I’m not really qualified to comment on but am still interested in. Again, now is not the time—suffice to say that more than anything, the entire thing makes me wish that diagnosis wasn’t linked so closely to whether or not people can afford mental health care. That would’ve been the thesis (see: tl;dr) of my blog entry on the subject, in any event. Perhaps I’ll be inspired to write that at some point soon.

Music, as promised.

Zebra Katz – “Ima Read”.

I’d normally edit the spelling, but this is their own upload. This song is filled with cursing, and rather strange; it’s also musically really brilliant. The video is creepy, in a way I really quite enjoy. It’s really well-done, actually. Even though I got the song I still keep going back to the video. Also singing along to this in my head.

Astro – “Colombo”
One of the most excellent bands of last year, I say. This is the second single off of their album; a music video will come out pretty soon.

Radical Face – “Welcome Home, Son”
I’d never seen this video before right now. It’s just okay. Too much tilt-shift. The song, as above with Astro, is what I think of as the second single off of Radical Face’s album, Ghosts. It’s a gorgeous song.

Last night was the first night that I’m willing to qualify as proper Miami winter (yes, yes, the 21st is still a few days off), which is to say that driving home late at night with the windows down, in t-shirt and jeans, I felt a shiver or two from the breeze.

I hate not having real seasons, even though I also do appreciate some things about the temperate climate. But, well, I’ll enjoy what I get. Wear a sweater or two.

I’ve found myself really busy over the last few months, which makes things go more smoothly for me, I think. I have less to say on this forum because I’m saying it in others. I’m working, and exercising, and spending time with friends and family and romantic partner, and all of this together conspires to bleed me of the meagre stories I have, until I’m not sure what to write down here when I try to journal.

My life’s grown very comfortable, such that the excitement is minute and perhaps uninteresting. I haven’t been in the mood, I guess, to write about the wonderful meal I made, or ate; the adventure I went on this weekend. I suppose I’ve been unable to write fiction, or poetry even, as well. I think I’ve written six poems in the past six months, which in fact is an improvement upon the preceding year, but is by far a decrease from years before.

I don’t think I feel the drive less, exactly. It’s more of a motivation issue. Always in the past, there’s been some element of conclusion—a poem to submit to the review, or send to a friend; a story to submit to my workshop. Without any driving force, the ideas well up and then die down. That was what was so brilliant about LiveJournal and the other journalling platforms that were abounded in the early/mid 2000s: your friends provided support, encouragement. Just having twenty “friends” on xanga or LiveJournal meant that you could imagine that there were twenty people awaiting your next update.

Tumblr provides that as well, but I think in an age where facebook already records the minutiae of your life, tumblr and the blogging platforms that remain have veered away from self-observation and towards more specific blogs. (The primary exception to this seems to be travelogs.) How many people still write blogs about their lives? Facebook is already recording your life as you live it. (And now, with the new timeline feature, you can go back and browse through the past. It’s a strange concept that I’m sure better essayists than I will cover.)

When I was perhaps a senior in high school, I set about writing a mini-autobiography, chronicling the stories of myself. When I first heard about the timeline idea, I thought of it as an opportunity for everyone to do that, to write an autobiography. I’m curious to see what people will do with it, to see who will create a false identity, who invent a past. Who will be the first artist to publish a character on facebook, whose story we can read? When we can detail our lives with images and video and interactions, map our paths and locate each moment in time, is a personal journal of interest?

As it is, I’ve veered very much towards anecdote-tinged essay on this forum in recent time, coupled with travelog and interjections of films. My earliest journal posts on the web are almost postmodern in style, spastic and jumbled. These days, I use paragraphs.

I don’t know where we’re going, this space and I. I’m sure I’ll keep writing. I hope the subjects continue to blossom.

Jesus Camp, 2006, dir. Rachel Grady & Heidi Ewing
Watched this with Ian. Fascinating. Well-made. Pretty even-handed. I enjoyed it quite a lot.

Ides of March, 2011, dir. George Clooney
Saw this with Blake. I keep forgetting what this is called, but I remember the film pretty well—George Clooney and Ryan Gosling do a very good job adapting Farragut North, a play, into a film. At least, it’s appropriately demoralizing and fascinating. I liked it. Great acting, a good script. A bit confusing in terms of motivations, but I felt pretty much like they knew what they were doing.

También la Lluvia (Even the Rain), 2010, dir. Icíar Bollaín
I’m glad I finally saw this. Gael García Bernal is awesome (as usual, I suppose). The plot is really well-crafted. There’s perhaps a mite too much melodrama, but in general I think the acting is good, the ideas moving, and the result well worth watching. Also it’s nice to watch movies in Spanish.

El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, 2011, dir. Gereon Wetzel
Not in Spanish, despite being about a Spanish restaurant—but it’s (a) made by German filmmakers/documentarians and (b) about a Catalan restaurant more explicitly, which is to say predominately in Catalan. I like food; I liked this movie about food. It is strictly documenting a year in the “life” of this restaurant and its chef, Ferran Adrià. I enjoyed it, although it was pretty slow. Worth seeing if you like food/cooking/molecular gastronomy/creativity. Saw this with Justin and his friend Galen.

Jane Eyre, 2011, dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga
Jamie Bell is in this. Isn’t that weird? Jason tried to convince me to go see it months ago when it came out, and I was interested from then on; I finally watched it. I’d never seen any adaptation, or read the book, which was nice. This was a good introduction. I’m curious about the book now. A dark, brooding, gothic interpretation of the story.

La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In), 2011, dir. Pedro Almodóvar
Saw this in theatres in D.C., with Ian. I like Almodóvar films. I liked this one. It was a bit less silly than his older movies (although I guess the same could be said for Volver). It’s about a plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas, back with Almodóvar) who’s created a burn-resistant skin and is testing it on a captive. That’s all I’ll say. Watch the trailer. I think it’s worthwhile. Creepy. Very creepy. Predictable, but predictably good and intense.

We Need to Talk About Kevin, 2011, dir. Lynne Ramsay
I just saw this one yesterday with Jason and his friend Sean. (Thanks, J.) Tilda Swinton is one of my favorite actresses, and she’s amazing in this, as usual. She’s on-screen most of the time, as we weave through time to learn about the events preceding, during, and after a violent act by her son that leads to his imprisonment and her, well, downfall. It was well-shot, although sometimes a bit confusing in a way that I didn’t think was useful. Still, a really moving film.

Melancholia, 2011, dir. Lars von Trier
And this one I saw today, with my parents. It wasn’t as depressing as I was expecting, or as the above film. Still sad, though. Beautifully, beautifully-shot. Great acting from Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and everyone else actually. I had some problems with it (what was the point of the kid?!), but I liked the movie in general. It’s a bit slow (since it’s Dunst, I thought of Marie Antoinette a few times), but there is some action, and I kind of liked the way it was split into two fairly distinct stories. I interpreted it loosely as an “internal” depression and an “external” one, although I don’t mean that as a reading of the film. I think it’s one to think about.

Books.

I’ve been reading some, although nothing that I meant to. I finally read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson), and I suppose I’ll read the sequels, too, since I got through it so quickly. It was fun, although there were plenty of things that pissed me off / bored me / didn’t make sense stylistically. I thought once or twice of this piece in the New Yorker.

I also read Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, in just one night actually. (I’ve been reading Infinite Jest for over a year, Los Detectives Salvajes for four months, and The Magic Toyshop for two weeks, and I pick up this book and plow through it in a night? Dammit.) It’s not quite YA, but it almost qualifies, at least by virtue of its character’s age. It’s sort of a mix of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and maybe a few similar books. Mostly it’s the Stephenson, although I’ll grant him that Stephenson (and, probably, Gibson’s Neuromancer, probably; I never managed to start that, although I know I should) is more the starting point than the plot he follows. The plot is relatively distinct, and pretty clever/silly/both.

I was thinking this—including the bit about Grossman—and then I was at the Miami Book Fair and saw Grossman speak, which was fun (I like the guy). I need to get The Magicians and The Magician King from the library and re-read the first and read the second. I shall be on that!

The Book Fair was nice, but I’m done writing and going to publish this. Yep.

Anyway, today I decided to make a completely incomplete list, to which I am giving the lukewarm title of “Things that I like on the internet and think you should have seen, too.” Some of these things are older, and I kind of assume that everyone of my generation knows them. Others may be more recent. Most are videos or websites. Many are pre-youtube (woah!), although some of them now live there. Some will be vulgar; others entirely PC. I’m not necessarily going with the super-super famous— no Bed Intruder or Charlie bit me here. No cat videos, either, I don’t think. In any event. I present:

Things that I like on the internet and think you should have seen, too

• Don Hertzfeldt’s Rejected cartoons. I still have a t-shirt from this.
• Bred Neely’s George Washington song. Neely also does Creased Comics and the fantastic Wizard People, Dear Reader, which I would recommend listening to alongside the movie some day. (It’s on youtube sometimes, although it does get taken down.)
• Eric Conveys an Emotion. This is really, really old.
• Homestar Runner. Especially for Trogdor! and Teen Girl Squad.
• Weebl and Bob: Pie. I refuse to watch any other video on this site, but I somehow love this one.
• El Mamut Chiquitito. Okay, so maybe you didn’t see this if you’re not from Miami. Still. If you have any Spanish, I still think this is pretty hilarious.
• The End of the World. You can find this on youtube, but I’m linking to the original website. I like that it’s still around.
• Salad Fingers. Say what you want, I still think this is kind of interesting. Creepy, also. I assure you that David Firth, the creator of this, has more upsetting videos. I won’t link.
• Charlie the Unicorn. Not as funny as it once was, but I still think of it occasionally.
• Potter Puppet Pals: The Mysterious Ticking Noise
• Where the hell is Matt?
• Some select webcomics. Especially Perry Bible Fellowship and xkcd. Also probably A Lesson Is Learned But the Damage is Irreversible. And then, for funny, Hyperbole and a Half and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
• NY Girl of My Dreams
• Cadbury ad with Phil Collins song. Yeah. I know.
• The Slow Jerk. Yep, really inappropriate, this.
• Those websites that compile people’s submissions: failblog, autocorrect mistakes, When Parents Text, texts from last night, overheard in NY. Too many of them.
• Chromeo – Night By Night. This doesn’t really fit, but I always get the video stuck in my head.
• Cooking by the Book. Really inappropriate. Vulgar. Lil John mashed up with a kids’ show. Amazing.
• The Count, Censored. The Count from Sesame Street with some subtle changes to make it hilarious.
• My Immortal. Fan fiction. Terrible. The full story isn’t as easy to find right now, but I’m sure it’s on The Internet Archive.
• Ukrainian Polka cover of Hot n Cold (the Katy Perry song). Thanks to This American Life.
• Mosh Girl. One of the first of those pictures that got Photoshopped into many, many other pictures. (Like Sad Keanu. But better.)
• Gimme Pizza. The Olsen Twins. Ridiculous song about pizza. Sure.
• Hamster Dance. A clip of the song from Robin Hood, sped up. Tiny gifs of dancing hamsters. Yeah. You remember this. Relatedly, that Spiderman will make you gay gif.
• Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”. Really, you knew what Rick Rolling is.

I’m missing a bunch that I may add later. For the moment, though. Enjoy.

I invite commenters to add their own. Yessir.

Additions as I remember them:

• Happy Birthday, Calvin. The guys from Robot Chicken re-imagine Calvin & Hobbes. “Mars is amazing!”

Beginners, 2010, dir. Mike Mills
I really enjoyed this, when I saw it at the Coral Gables Cinemateque¹. Christopher Plummer plays Ewan McGregor’s father, who comes out as gay as an older man after his wife passes away, dates a much younger man, and then passes away; we watch McGregor’s character deal with the death of his father and interact with the really stupendous Mélanie Laurent², with whom he begins a relationship. It wasn’t a perfect movie, but it was very amusing, and sweet, and dealt with many difficult subjects well. Recommended.

Gasland, 2010, dir. Josh Fox
A documentary about hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and the US natural gas industry. Really depressing because on the one hand, natural gas is a great resource, while on the other hand, the means we’re using to get it out are damaging the earth and people’s lives. This is where those videos of people lighting their tap water on fire are from. It is one of the only reasons I am glad that I have an electric range at home. Worth watching if you don’t know much about fracking.

Los Amantes del Círculo Polar (Lovers of the Arctice Circle), 1998, dir. Julio Médem
One of my favorite movies ever. Watched it this time without subtitles, which was fun. (Although I watched this and the movie below while I was sick, which was not fun.) Médem also directed Lucía y el Sexo (Sex and Lucia), which is also a good film. This movie is sweet and sad and technically very clever; it’s also sexy and has a good plot. Otto and Ana become interested in each other as children; their parents, divorced from other spouses, end up marrying each other. And I think I’ll leave the description there. The film is mostly just a drama, but it’s intriguing, I think. I first watched this movie in a class, where we watched a number of really good international films. This one wins out, though. Oh yeah.

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, 1971, dir. Mel Stuart
A classic! Although I like the newer version as well, this one’s the best. Another movie I own; another fun watch while I was sick.

Freakonomics, 2010, dir. Ewing, Gibney, Gordon, Grady, Jarecki, & Spurlock
A documentary based in part on the book. I never really wanted to read the book, but I find the ideas interesting. My mother and I were looking for something streaming to watch and happened upon this one. I had fun watching it, but don’t really remember much of it.

L’Illusionniste (The Illusionist), 2010, dir. Sylvain Chomet
I talked about wanting to see this on Halloween, almost a year ago; I didn’t like it quite as much as I hoped I would. It was, as I text-messaged a friend in Philadelphia while watching it, quite dispiriting: “Damn the French make sad animated films,” I sent him. It’s made by the same people who made The Triplets of Belleville, which I quite liked; it’s quiet and sad and not very uplifting at all. I don’t know if I recommend it, but I also didn’t dislike it. I just think there are other things I’d rather see.

Persona, 1966, dir. Ingmar Bergman
I saw this with my sister, on a rainy Sunday while visiting her in New York. She convinced me to see this over several other options. I think I’d only seen one other Bergman film³, and I was glad to see another. I like him, when I’m willing to invest some time and patience in a film. This is considered a classic, and one of his best films. It was haunting and kind of bizarre, and manages to be weird without being particularly silly. It didn’t hold my attention perfectly, but at the same time it’s the sort of film I’d like to watch again, and think about some more. One that requires a bit of work, but might be worth it. I don’t watch that kind of film often, but it’s nice on occasion.

Balada triste de trompeta (The Last Circus), 2010, dir. Álex de la Iglesia
This movie was pretty ridiculous. I saw it last Sunday, and spent the entire drive home from the theatre (the awesome O Cinema) trying to decide if I liked it. My friend Justin, with whom I saw it, concluded that he did; I guess I have to as well. It’s about, errr, a clown in a circus who goes insane? I guess. It’s really bizarre, and you have to spend a lot of time suspending your disbelief—but they do a good job of stretching the conceit (clowns gone mad; violent men dressed as clowns) a lot further than you’d imagine. I don’t know that I’d recommend it, exactly. It’s a bunch of g’s: gruesome and graphic and grotesque. But if you watch the trailer and think, “oh man!, this looks ridiculous and fun!,” which is what I thought, then maybe you’ll like it as well.

1. They insist on misspelling the word “cinematheque,” although I don’t know why. Otherwise, they’re great; Miami has been lucky in the past year to suddenly gain two new art cinemas—this and O Cinema, in Wynwood—and have the Miami Beach Cinematheque re-open.
2. She played the awesomely mad French woman in Inglourious Basterds.
3. The Seventh Seal

I’ve been failing to do quite a few things recently, which I won’t get into here, or not right now. What I have been doing is listening to a fair lot of music. I’ve posted about some songs I like—there’s actually a category for music posts—and I’m sure I’ll keep doing so.

First, I wanted to mention this vaguely-bizarre musician I heard of a few days ago, Cosmo Jarvis, whose videos for his songs “Gay Pirates” and “My Day” are actually pretty fun. I think I might even like the music. I guess I’m just amused enough to note this down? (Also I find it weird that normal musicians are now sometimes younger than me.)

Last night, I went to see a show at Miami’s Grand Central, a relatively new club/performance space that I rather like. The bands performing were Cut Copy, an Australian electronic band, and openers Washed Out and Midnight Magic.

I’d only heard Midnight Magic once before, but I quite enjoyed them; they describe themselves as “funk, disco, electro and soul,” which I guess I get. Here: take a listen to a remix of one of their songs I liked best. Anyway, the singer was charismatic; I was in a corner of the crowd that felt like dancing, and so I danced. It was fun!

Washed Out came sandwiched in the middle. Washed Out is Ernest Greene, but live it was him with a backup band (see below for Greene and three of the four). I wasn’t sure how they’d sound live—listen to this song, one of their best, to see why—but the music worked to dance to, and I was in the mood I guess; they also, sort of unexpectedly for so-called “chill-wave” music, had a bit of a stage presence. I think I liked them best of the night, which I guess I expected to.

Cut Copy (see picture at top) were the main band, and they were a lot of fun. The singer is enthusiastic and feels comfortable on the stage, and seemed happy to be there. I guess all in all there wasn’t anything remarkable about their set, or even their music, but I was glad to be there. I left early, at not-quite-2:00, but I was super-glad I went.

I went last week to a concert as well, to see the Swedish band Peter, Bjorn and John, who have that song “Young Folks” that you know you know. They were great; I surprised myself with how well I knew their music. The opener, Dinosaur Feathers, were great too; I really love their song “History Lessons”. I think you should watch that video.

Todo lo demás viene después. Estoy bastante contento con como está la vida.

More specifically, I hurt my lower back. Lumbar spine. There’s pain hovering around pretty much the entire lumbar area, moving down; I also sometimes feel pain around both piriformis muscles, around my exterior hips where the tensor fasciae latae connect to the iliac crest, and into the hip adductor¹ muscles and the quadriceps/thigh. This pain is not always present, and when it is present it’s not always in all of these regions. But it’s never gone away for more than a few days.

I don’t know how I hurt my back. I don’t know if it really matters how. It’s possible that I yanked it when I fell while climbing. It’s possible that I pulled it at a yoga class, or that I overstretched one set of muscles and under-stretched another. There’s also been the suggestion that apparently sitting at work all day isn’t so good for you. (Of course it’s not. But while it may be a factor, it’s probably not when it first started hurting. I’m of the mind that it was probably a fall from climbing, combined with other things, that set it off.)

I try not to think about it too much, and I don’t actually talk about it all that often, except for when I’m in rather more pain. Fortunately, that isn’t all too often. But it has been just about a year (I date the beginning as the end of August, 2010), and things aren’t fixed. So if we talk regularly, you’ve doubtless heard mention of this by now.

Immediately I should assure you, o reader of this blog, that I have seen plenty of doctors. One general practitioner, four physical therapists, one chiropractor, one rheumatologist, one neurologist, one pain specialist. I’ve had an MRI (inconclusive). Things that have been ruled out: this is not a nerve problem (I don’t have sciatica, numbness, or sharp pains), and it’s not caused by the piriformis even if there’s pain there (again, no sciatica or pinched nerve reactions). It’s probably not caused by a spinal disc herniation. It’s probably not based on how I sleep (although no one has come to watch me sleep), or on the shoes I wear. And so on.

Nonetheless, the problems are manifold:

1. We, meaning humans, don’t really understand back pain. The general feeling is that the body probably isn’t meant to be sitting for as much time as we sit, and so since it’s such a complex process to keep the back connected with the body (those muscles I named up in the beginning are only a few of the ones that connect in the lower back area), of course things are going to go wrong reasonably often. But how do you figure out what is causing the “wrong”?
2. I’m very flexible in some places, but relatively inflexible in others. I did gymnastics as a kid, but then I didn’t do anything other than runner’s stretches until I got into yoga at 16 or so. I’ve also regularly sat oddly, or so I think. There was a point where I thought that normal cross-legged sitting involved one foot over the knee², and so my hips open very easily in some ways, but are very tight in others. I can stand and bend to touch my toes and, with straight legs, slide my entire hands under my feet—but it’s all coming from a super-flexible back, and not from my legs.
3. For years, I used to occasionally lie down at night and feel some slight lower back discomfort. I can only assume that’s because I have, for years, been standing and/or sitting in ways that pulled on the muscles.
4. According to the physical therapist I’ve seen for the past eight months or so, my back muscles are relatively weak. I need to be engaging my lower abdominal muscles, including the psoas (coolest name ever), and using them and my back to hold myself erect. But somehow they’re not as strong as they should be, or not as strong as my leg muscles which are fighting with them.

That’s the problem, at least according to the prevailing theory right now: my back problems come from a combination of weak back muscles and overly-tight leg muscles. The tight leg muscles connect to the back muscles, pulling my back out of shape and causing it to arch when I stand, and curve when I sit. At the very least, it’s a pretty comprehensible theory.

If it’s the leg muscles that are too-tight, then the question is: which ones? My hamstrings are really tight, but so are the hip adductors and the quadriceps; so is the ilio-tibial band, which runs from the ilium (hipbone) to the tibia (calf-bone), and connects with a number of muscles. Will stretching these muscles/tissues result eventually in a reduced problem? I hope so. But it’s not as though we’re sure.

An example of how this is complicated: it was only recently that, upon a renewed complaint on my part, the physical therapist pressed on the bands of muscles and tendons that form the hip adductors, and noticed how tight they were, how much pain the pressure caused me. You can’t discover this stuff from an MRI. I wish you could.

I feel pretty confident that eventually things will calm down, and I’ll be able to work without feeling back pain. I’ve actually learned a lot about muscle connections through this, and about back pain in general; my posture has improved, and I think my yoga practice has as well. I just wish that “eventually” were now. When I was living in Madrid, I learned that eventualmente meant that something were possible. “Eventualmente, este dolor desaparecerá” is more “Maybe this pain will disappear” then the supposition that it in fact will do so, as is contained in the English phrasing. I’ll go with the English concept. Sooner or later.

P.S. I should probably put some pictures up here, huh?

1. I did not know this—apparently an adductor is the muscle that brings your limb in towards the center of the body; the abductor (note the consonant change) brings that same limb away from the center. The hip adductors are part of the muscles known as the hip flexors, which in general are pretty tight for me. But more on this in a moment.
2. In yoga, this would be called ardha padmasana—half lotus.

I left myself a note to find in the morning: “defining something by what it is not?”

This morning, a bit of searching found it for me. Wikipedia explains: “Apophasis was originally and more broadly a method of logical reasoning or argument by denial—a way of describing what something is by explaining what it is not, or a process-of-elimination way of talking about something by talking about what it is not.”

They go on to talk about apophatic theology, which is caught up in defining God by describing what God is not. It’s a pretty cool concept.

Further down in the article is the thing I was doing yesterday, which made me think of the word itself—this is apparently called paralipsis. It’s a rhetorical device where the speaker, which is to say me!, describes something by talking about how it won’t be described. “I won’t write to you about politics, because I don’t want to bore you, and I won’t tell you about how scared I am about the political landscape, and I won’t talk at all about…”

I don’t know that I actually care that much about the word itself. It’s more the concept that I like.

My thoughts today have been jumping around, maybe as a result of coffee when I was already somewhat off, and so I went for a run just now. The weather’s pretty good for Miami August: maybe mid-80s, humid but not suffocatingly so. After the run I found my chest and back covered in little black bugs, which I’ll admit isn’t the most pleasant feeling; a shower will get rid of them, once I’ve finished cooling down and listening to this Animal Collective album.

While I was running, I reflected a bit on a correspondence I was engaging in earlier, wherein a friend and I were talking about Freytag’s pyramid, dramatic structure, and linear/nonlinear narrative. I was trying to explain why, despite his distaste for it, I find stories that don’t conform to that structure to be often frustrating. Somehow, I felt particularly inarticulate, and finally ended with an analogy, rather than a pure conclusion. I’ll begin by elaborating on that story:

When I was in the latter years of high school, I wrote a lot of poetry. I probably wrote my first poem that I cared about that year as well, and then my friend Michael organized a series of open mic events, and I would regularly write poems to read at them. Obviously, some were better than others. Eventually, someone more knowledgeable than I explained to me that, while free verse was a lot of fun, sometimes a poetic structure makes the ideas stand out more, because the mind no longer needs to focus on the line length or meter (this is a paraphrase; I don’t actually think he was so specific). (I sort of mentioned this concept when I wrote about writing poetry a while back.) Essentially, when a strict form is [mostly] observed, and observed well, it lets you do something stronger. I don’t necessarily mean that every poem should be able to be measured in metric feet, or that free verse is unwise; I often write in free verse, and so do poets who are much better than I. But these rules exist because they make sense, and when they’re broken we take note, even unconsciously.

Obviously, sometimes form is used for another reason—Dr. Seuss is Dr. Seuss for his anapestic tetrameter as much as for the narrative of his poems.

To bring this back to stories: I was planning on presenting case studies, but I don’t particularly feel like doing the Freytag version of sentence diagramming, and besides I’d hate to spoil any short stories for you, o dear reader. The essential question is this: What makes a good story? Does it need, or benefit from, a linear structure: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, dénouement? Is plot necessary to a good story?

When I’m talking about linearity here, I don’t mean the more concrete idea of linear time. A story can carefully follow that dramatic structure while jumping about in time. What does it really mean to break this structure? What is a short story that doesn’t conform to it? Clearly, a story without plot can’t follow this structure, or not well. But the thing is, a super-short story (e.g., John Cheever’s awesome “Reunion”) can still tell a full story, have a complete plot. (That story very decidedly also applies the Hemingway/iceberg theory of not giving any details that aren’t strictly necessary.) But even such a short story still has a clear exposition, a clear rising action, a series of small climaxes, a falling action. The dénouement is a bit more vague, but it always is.

I can certainly think of [post]modern stories that don’t follow traditional dramatic structure. Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse.” Gertrude Stein’s “Miss Furr & Miss Skeene.” Stein’s story is almost absurdist; Barth actually talks about dramatic structure straight-out, but that story is kind of the poster child of metafiction.

It’s funny, though. When you get down to it, most narratives have that driving force, somewhere in there. A beginning, middle, end. Which should be clear. Otherwise, it’s not really a story. The brilliance in a good short story is watching the author play with the structure—use it to her advantage, mold it. Make it new.

I really like learning the Sanksrit names for things in yoga. It’s fun, but also kind of interesting, at least when they do a different description of the pose than the English. For example, I love the Sanskrit name for handstand: Adho Mukha Vrksasana. Downward-facing tree. That’s quite evocative. (If you’ve got some yoga [or, hey, some Sanskrit] under your belt, you’ll note perhaps that the first two words are the “downward-facing” bit; Adho Mukha Svanasana is downward-facing dog pose.²) On the other hand, I do tend to dislike the [names of] poses named after sages—not because I have any problem with sages, per se, but because I tend to confuse, say, Marichyasana with Matsyendrasana and Bharadvajasana³.

This afternoon, my friend Ashley and I went to an Anusara yoga class, which is a style modeled on Iyengar but divergent from it; as Ashley put it, they do a bit of Flow/Vinyasa yoga, and a bit of Iyengar. That was certainly my experience of it. [The best of] Iyengar classes sometimes seem to be working up to a specific pose, circling around it, and this was not that. The instruction, the way of doing the poses, all of this was very Iyengar. But the layout of the class, I guess, was fairly unsurprising: it began with sun salutations, cycled through a number of vinyasas, did some standing poses, did a handstand, did some backbends. But I liked the instruction, I enjoyed the focus on opening up the chest, and on flexibility through strength, expansion through contraction, and thence stability. (I also, despite what I said in that first footnote, liked the fact that I got my heart rate up a bit during the class, which doesn’t always happen at my normal studio.)

There’s a surprising amount of seeming-contradiction in yoga-speak, which is the sort of thing that either one begins to understand, or one becomes brainwashed by (I don’t know which). Two examples:

1. What I said above there, expansion through contraction. The idea, as I understand it, is that you’re contracting your muscles and therefore allowing them to pull away from each other—contracting into the bone, but allowing the body itself to expand/stretch. But at the same time, sure, this is just contradictory.
2. In Adho Mukha Svanasana (downward-facing dog), the arms are rotating both inward and outward. Not at the same time, of course; the lower arms (by the hands) rotate inward, allowing the weight to press into the index finger’s mount at the palm. The upper arms rotate outward, allowing the upper back to broaden and the shoulders to descend (away from the head, which is technically towards the sky, no?). The legs, meanwhile, are supposed to be moving both downward (into the ground) in the inner leg and upward (into the hips) on the outer leg.

Some of this can sound like nonsense. But when you’re in the pose for a few minutes, and the instructor keeps coming back to the same details, it eventually starts to actually make sense. Which is both cool and a bit bizarre.

The fact that you can be thoughtful about each and every pose is what I like about Iyengar yoga. There’s definitely fun in doing the same poses every day. I can see, I think, why people like Bikram yoga⁴ for this reason, for the ability to get better and better and watch your progression. But I do kind of like that, with the exception of a few poses that show up in most Iyengar classes⁵, you can learn a pose and then not come back to it for a few weeks, at least not in an instructed class. It’s exciting; it makes for an active mind⁶.

1. Iyengar yoga is named after B.K.S. Iyengar, its founder, and is one of the more common kinds of yoga taught today. It’s my preferred style, although I do still enjoy flirting with the other styles. It focuses on anatomical alignment, on ways of moving. They tend to use a lot of props and are great for people with any physical disabilities, but there are also some very difficult Iyengar classes. I’ve heard that some teachers recommend people come to Iyengar classes if they’re having trouble in another sort of class, but I can’t attest to that. What I can say is that sometimes I get frustrated by the simpler classes, but a good Iyengar class can be really wonderful and challenging, even if you don’t break a sweat. (Which you don’t always do.) I can get my aerobic exercise elsewhere.
2. Asana means pose, and is almost always the end of any pose name (with the exception of, say, Setu Bandha, or bridge pose—setu is bridge, and bandha is formation/bond). Sometimes teachers drop the terminal a, and I’ve never been able to ascertain why. Besides which, accents often blur the pose names. Still, my experiences with Spanish-language yoga teachers have led me to believe that most people pronounce them equally badly. I’m obviously no exception to this. I’ve also been told that teachers who speak Hindi may say the names of poses rather differently than we’d imagine, but I don’t really have any experience.
3. All three of these, Marichyasana and Matsyendrasana and Bharadvajasana, are seated twists. However, Matsyendra is the Lord of the Fishes; the other two are, yes, sages.
4. Although I took a Bikram class a week ago and didn’t really enjoy it. I guess I’d try it again, but the sequence neglects some of my favorite poses, and I am not so into the sweating buckets thing. Besides which, and more to the point, Bikram completely eschews corrections and really kind of ignores the mechanics of the pose; it seems to me that it’s a lot more about doing the pose fully than doing it correctly, if that makes sense. I have other problems with Bikram as well, including the higher risk of hurting yourself.
5. Almost all Iyengar classes I’ve taken end with shoulder-stand (Sarvangasana); rare’s the class that doesn’t do downward-facing dog and Uttanasana (standing forward-bend/extension).
6. A lot of footnotes and parentheses today, no? Glad they’re here and not in the way up there.

I have a few songs I keep getting stuck on my head the past few weeks. A few are kind of irrelevant, but I keep coming back to this one. I mean, Bomba Estéreo are a weird band—lots of songs that I only kind of like, but then also music like this. Beautiful and sad. “Let me cry,” she sings¹, and later she tells us that “I dreamt that I was sleeping / and you woke me up / in the full light of the night / becoming dawn, / and I changed into salt water, / and now I am one with the sea.” I love the way she plays with sweat and tears; I love the way she sings this.

I also spent all of Friday with Patti Smith’s “Because the Night” stuck in my head, but that’s perhaps less exciting.

I’ve been thinking rather often about story-telling, and what makes people good or bad at it. It’s a conversation that happens in my head pretty regularly, at least for the past nine years or so. I’ve never found a perfect way to illustrate my thoughts, which is frustrating (and, incidentally, fairly demonstrative of the very issue I’m talking about). The gist of it is this: I have some friends who are fantastic story-tellers. They can describe a trip to the supermarket in a way that makes it engaging, while someone else would tell the story in one sentence: “I went to the store and bought some cookies.”

I think I fall somewhere in the middle. I can’t create a story out of nothing. If I went to the store to buy cookies, I might remember it as a non-story, and then it is one. But if something interesting happens on the way—I run into an old friend, someone flash mobs the store, I’m sleep-deprived and stumbling—I can usually find a way to fit it into a story. But it doesn’t come naturally to me, despite how much I like doing it. I have to mold it. This is a surprisingly-exacting process; it requires actual effort. So I’m often lazy with it.

When I was younger, I used to use my blog/online journal to write thoughts down. They were often disconnected; even more so than today, I liked to number paragraphs to keep things separated into sections. But these days, I prefer to try for connected, coherent posts. I would rather write a whole piece that makes some sort of [non]sense. It’s kind of sad to lose that container-for-everything mentality that my blog used to have for me, but it’s also quite pleasant to try to craft an essay, rather than just throw something out into the internet². This does mean that I post less often, as I’m trying to find things that can be framed in the way of a story—or ideas that have a conclusion, at least.

1. In Spanish, in case that isn’t clear. I installed a footnotes plugin! Awesome. And a music one, too, so that song should play up top there.
2. It also means that this post has no real room for me to talk about all of my awesome cooking I did this weekend. So I’ll throw it into a footnote! I made three kinds of ice cream for some friends last night: chocolate sherbet (from David Lebovitz, here), , to which I added a pinch of cinnamon and a pinch of cayenne pepper; strawberry sherbet, which I adapted from another Lebovitz recipe; and coconut ice cream, which was vegan because hey!, why not (recipe here). The coconut might have been the best, although I love the chocolate. I accidentally melted the strawberry one a bit (didn’t put it away soon enough) and so it wasn’t quite as tasty. Right. Here’s a photograph of all three, in the ice cream-maker. I made Ramos Gin Fizz drinks last night, as well, and used the reserved egg yolks this morning to make super-rich French toast. Hurrah!

Never Let Me Go, 2010, dir. Mark Romanek
I really liked this movie, although it’s a bit slow. Really good, creepy sci-fi-ish plot (cloned Brits are raised in boarding schools and then sacrificed for their organs), with a strong main character, good emotional development, excellent acting. Beautifully shot. I saw this over two months ago, so I can’t say much more than that, but I’d definitely watch it again.

Hanna, 2011, dir. Joe Wright
Hanna was not a thought-provoking movie, but it was a well-done action movie. The character is cool and smart. The violence is well-organized and not the point. I really liked it.

Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires), 2010, dir. Xavier Dolan
Okay, so I might think that Xavier Dolan is ridiculously cool, and I might have liked this movie in part because of that. And maybe it could’ve been better as a short film rather than a full-length film that felt like a shorter film interspersed with little story-telling vignettes. But I liked the vignettes, and the shorter film. I thought it was a simple story told well. The acting is pretty good and pretty believable. Some people raved about this movie. I see why.

Beaches, 1988, dir. Garry Marshall
I was told that I had to see this. I did. It was fine. I wasn’t bored. But it was ultimately pretty forgettable.

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, 2009, dir. John Krasinski
I really liked this. I haven’t read the David Foster Wallace short story (stories?) on which it’s based, which is totally fine. I liked the story, I liked how weird it was. I liked the confusion about which story was real. Apparently lots of people didn’t like it, but so what.

The Cove, 2009, dir. Louie Psihoyos
This documentary (about the killing of dolphins in Japan) was fucking intense. Really good. Very scary. A thriller despite being documentary-style. Upsetting. I was really impressed.

Little Shop of Horrors, 1986, dir. Frank Oz
I’m glad I finally saw this. I saw some friends / fellow students put on the musical a few years ago, and liked it well enough. I think I also saw the original non-musical movie, long ago. But the musical was fun. I like musicals, sometimes, sort-of.

TiMER, 2009, dir. Jac Schaeffer
This was cute. I’m not the biggest romantic comedy man, but this was fun and distracting, and it was relatively clever. I definitely enjoyed it while I watched it, but I’m not sure I have anything to say now.

Exit Through the Gift Shop, 2010, dir. Banksy
Not sure that I liked this movie, but I think that was partially the intention. I like Banksy. I didn’t like the person who became the primary character of the film, Thierry Guetta / Mr. Brainwash. Don’t like his art, either. But I certainly wasn’t bored. I just.

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 2011, dir. Werner Herzog
I’m really glad I got to see this in 3-D, even though I’m not sure how I feel about 3-D movies. (It hurt my head.) Getting to see the cave paintings he filmed in “three dimensions” was pretty amazing. Herzog’s narration is actually relatively fun. Not the fastest-paced documentary I’ve ever seen, but I liked it a lot.

Down by Law, 1986, dir. jim Jarmusch
My sister bought this for my father for his birthday. I like Jarmusch (Coffee and Cigarettes, Dead Man, Broken Flowers). I like Tom Waits! Not the fastest-moving film I’ve seen. But seeing shots of an older New Orleans was really cool. A young Roberto Benigni was interesting. I enjoyed this.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
I liked this about as much as I expected to. I tried to see it last weekend, but the screening was canceled, and so O Cinema organized a free screening mid-week. It was a slow film, but honestly I enjoyed something about it. Thailand is beautiful. The title gave more description than the movie itself did, maybe. I might’ve felt differently had I seen it alone. But with friends, it was an interesting experience.

Paprika, 2007, dir. Satoshi Kon
People really admire this director, but I didn’t much like Tokyo Godfathers, the other movie of his I saw. I liked this. I saw in in 2007, I think, with my friends Jacob and Sophie and Rachel. After I watched Inception, I’d been wanting to watch this again, to confirm my suspicion (confirmed indeed) that Paprika was so much better. It’s not a perfect movie by any means, but the animation is great, it does a wonderful job of treating dreams and confusing reality/dream, and the music is awesome. (It’s anime, in case that’s not clear.)

I should probably add in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks television program, but I haven’t finished the series yet, so I’ll write about it when I do.

Right.

Cait’s question is this (paraphrased/rephrased): In languages like Spanish, where gender is embedded in every noun and every adjective, is the gender something people think about, or is it just a part of life? I mean the significance of gendered language, especially in cases where gender isn’t clear-cut. Secondarily, how do queers in Spanish interact with the gendered language? Under some circumstances, where one would want to be ambiguous about one’s partner, how does one handle that in Spanish? In English, you can say, “I went out with someone last night,” or “I was really in love with my ex,” and it’s gender-neutral. But you can’t do that in Spanish—you have to pick a side. How do queers handle that?

(She had just watched the film XXY, which is where some of the questions originated for her. I haven’t seen it, so I have no more to say specifically.)

I responded to her email, and I’ll rephrase what I said to her below.

In essence, I think because of the gendered nature of the language, gay men tend to use a lot more feminizing language in Spanish. (I don’t actually think I’ve met any natively-Spanish lesbians, although it may be true for them as well.) I guess gay men do this in English, too—girl, she, queen, etc. Between each other, Spanish gay men do sometimes mix up the feminine and masculine forms intentionally. But I’ve read, and I can definitely believe this, that to native speakers of gendered languages, the gender just seems natural and implicit.

There’s an article I read a while back in the New York Times about, generally, linguistics, but more explicitly about how differences in language may (or may not) affect the way we think. Here’s a relevant quote:

Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.

…

In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love.

On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed. (Deutscher)

That is to say, I think people pretty much never think about gender when it comes to their nouns. I mean, I once asked someone about the variety of feminine and masculine forms for referring to the genitalia, and whether they thought it was weird, and I essentially got the answer of “No.” (To be fair, there are probably some people who do think this is strange. I don’t know.)

Here’s another relevant quote from that article:

Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so. (Deutscher)

This is sort of the best article ever.

As to the question of ambiguity, I think that one could handle this in two ways.

a. An individual who wishes to wholly obscure his/her actions/desires has to lie from the outset. In English, Paloma might say “I was hanging out with my significant other last night,” but in Spanish she couldn’t. She’d could say, instead, “Salí con mi novio anoche” if she wanted to avoid expressing that she has a girlfriend.

b. On the other hand, there are one-gendered words. There are also ways of avoiding genders in speech. A friend told me once that he had discussed his boyfriend with his flatmates for a while without ever mentioning that the boyfriend was, in fact, male—presumably by saying things like, “La persona con quien estoy saliendo,” or referring to his “friend,” without specifically suggesting romantic leanings. I never got why he didn’t just come out with it, since he wasn’t closeted. I think he, at least, enjoyed the game—but he grew up bilingual. One could also just go about using the word “amante” (lover), which is masculine and feminine both. (“Mi amante,” my lover, would be gender-neutral, but when the word still does takes a gendered article—el amante, la amante. This doesn’t apply in French, at least not this way.)

Of course, one can sometimes say “their” as an ambiguous pronoun in romance languages: “ellos” can contain men and women; “su” (“their”)(“leur” in French) is gender-neutral as well.

But I’ve never watched the dancing around a topic happen. I reason that there’s probably a lot more secrets/lying in young queers in Spanish than in English, but then again young not-out queers tend to be secretive in any language, I would guess.

It was really good to see my sister, who I only see rarely. It was nice to get to disconnect, especially in the mornings. Somehow, I feel less of a desire to be connected to the rest of the world in the morning, but my awareness of the fact that I’m “missing out” on the internet, on what my friends are doing, on what’s happening in the world, always ends up coming back. This was the first vacation I’ve taken since I became the owner of a smart phone.

Okay, so I originally meant to talk about the vacation itself, but I’m maybe more interested in writing about this: the ways that having constant and easy access to the internet, via a small mobile device that fits in your pocket, really changes the way you wait for things. Over the past month or so, I find myself eagerly awaiting messages from my friends in a way that I think was never really part of my life before. When I’m focused on something, I’m still focused—but it’s become so much easier to un-focus, to be consistently distracted. It’s part of why I thought for a long while that I didn’t want to get a phone with internet—I’m all at once happy to have this unprecedented access to the world and frightened by how much time I can spend plugged into a computer.

During the vacation, I would estimate that I only spent a couple of hours on my phone. Checking email, reading some blog posts, responding to some messages. I read quite a lot. My family and I conversed quite a lot. Yet somehow I felt like I was wasting my time with the phone, like it was keeping me from something in the moment.

Regardless, a few photographs.

1. Around that same time, I went to New York City with my family. There were a bunch of things I was originally going to write about—and some pictures I was going to post—but instead I’ll just mention that we had the good fortune of seeing Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, which was wonderful. You can read the wikipedia article for a detailed description of the convoluted plot, but suffice to say that the acting was not-quite-but-almost-unilaterally great, the stage design clear, and the play itself, well, is just really fucking cool.

2. I really like the poet Anne Carson, who wrote the really bloody cool book Autobiography of Red, and more recently wrote a book called Nox. She’s a classics professor, and blends ancient and modern in her poetry/not-quite-poetry. Also in April, I had the good fortune of seeing a live performance—a collaboration between two dancers and Carson. It was in the Moore building in the Design District of Miami, and was all of these things: an interesting dance piece, a lovely “reading,” a good time. (I took my mother for her birthday.) Here are three photographs.

3. There have been other things going on—this week in particular has been tumultuous—but I think perhaps I’ll leave them up in the air. I haven’t done much reading recently. I guess in general things have been kind of a mad dash towards nothing so much.

I’m going away this week—I leave ridiculously early tomorrow morning. The day before I travel always seems like a great time to write about my life. Set things aside for a moment so we can relax. And so it is. I imagine I’ll be posting pictures on here when I get back. I’d like to. I’ve missed updating my blog, in some sense.

In any event:

The City of Lost Children (La Cité des enfants perdus), dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, 1995
This was a weird film—but then again, it’s Jeunet, who’s the director who also did Amelie and, before this, Delicatessen. There were some things I really liked about it. I loved some of the Rube Goldberg machine style events. I liked the set design. The plot itself is very weird, and intentionally so… but I enjoyed it, as a whole.

127 Hours, dir. Danny Boyle, 2010
James Franco plays Aron Ralston, who was trapped under a boulder in Utah when he went solo exploring, and ended up cutting off his own arm to escape. I remember reading about Ralston when this happened; I really enjoyed watching this movie, although I think it could have had about thirty minutes cut (it was already only an hour-and-a-half; I understand why they didn’t cut). Franco is great; the cinematography is wonderful. It made me want to go to Utah.

Enter the Void, dir. Gaspar Noé, 2009/2010
(See my review/thoughts)
I think in the end I would say I am really glad I saw this movie, but it definitely inspired mixed feelings.

El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret of Their Eyes), dir. Juan José Campanella, 2009
This movie won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film last year; I’d been meaning to see it but hadn’t gotten around to it. I really liked it, but I guess there were some things I disliked about it. Still, a pretty cool movie; I definitely recommend it.

Black Swan, dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2010
Really amazing. I know some people hated this movie (starring Natalie Portman as a dancer in the Tchaikovsky ballet), but I really liked it. It may have had something to do with the excellent company, but I think most of me liking this film had to do with it being an excellent film. There was one scene (the hospital scene near the end) that I think was wholly unnecessary, but the movie struck just the right cord of creepy with me (especially the feathers stuff—gah, but that was effective). I think of all the movies on this list, this one’s up there as the best. Although many of them were great, actually.

Wit, dir. Mike Nichols, 2001
This was an HBO movie (co-written by Nichols and Emma Thompson, who starred in it) that I watched the day after I saw Black Swan, with the same company. It’s about a woman (Thompson) dying of ovarian cancer, and struggling with her own death. It was really intense, and certainly sad. Like 127 Hours, it’s essentially a one-character film, and that’s great—Thompson is wonderful and funny and sad. Definitely recommend.

True Grit, dir. Joel & Ethan Coen, 2010
I liked this film, but I didn’t quite see why people raved about it. I liked the acting; I loved the oddly stilted English (although it reminded me a bit of Diablo Cody’s writing in Juno in a weird way). I never quite felt like I cared, though, and I’m not sure why not.

The Fighter, dir. David O. Russell, 2010
I really liked Russell’s I &heart; Huckabees, but this was better. I guess I might’ve liked it more than Black Swan, actually; it’s the first fight movie I’ve seen in years that was this good. All of the acting is amazing—woah, but Christian Bale is wonderful here—and the story is damn-good as well. The movie’s about Mark Wahlberg as a boxer; his older brother (Bale) was once reasonably successful, but now has a drug problem. Wahlberg is struggling to figure out what he wants as a man and as a boxer. There were plenty of things to love in the movie—the fact that boxing was more the vehicle than the story helped a lot, if that distinction makes sense.

The Virgin Suicides, dir. Sofia Coppola, 1999
This was Coppola’s first film, and I had never seen it. I loved the novel (by Jeffrey Eugenides, who also wrote the amazing Middlesex) when I read Emily Alves’ copy in high school. So I figured it was finally time to watch it. The movie’s really beautiful, and very Sofia Coppola. Seeing a young Josh Hartnett is pretty awesome. On the whole, I didn’t feel like my attention was entirely held. I guess it’s sort of the same reaction I had to Marie Antoinette.

I’ve been watching the David Lynch-directed TV show Twin Peaks, slowly, with my folks; it’s good fun. I also went through the entire first season of Veronica Mars, which is considerably lower brow, but also fun.

This past week was the Miami International Film Festival (MIFF), and I only went to two films this year, primarily because I was busy.

Black Field (Mavro livadi), dir. Vardis Marinakis, 2009/2011
I saw this movie last weekend with two high school friends. It was kind of ridiculous. Definitely my least favorite of the movies in this post. It’s about a convent in Greece in the 1600s, where a wounded Janissary who has desserted is nursed back to health by the sisters, and about the young nun who becomes fascinated by him. The general story was, sure, interesting. But the plot was somewhat convoluted and didn’t really follow; the ending left me thinking, “Wait, what?”

Incendies, dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2010
This French-Canadian film was pretty wonderful, if occasionally a wee bit over-the-top; I just watched it last night. It was nominated for an Academy Award, although it was beat out by another film that was at MIFF (last weekend), which I didn’t make it to. It did, however, win a bunch of Genie Awards, Canada’s highest film prize. Understandably so. It’s about twins whose mother dies and, in her will, leaves them a mystery which they unravel during the film. It’s based on a play (whose title is translated to English as Scorched, although the word incendies means fires/blazes; the movie is presented without a translation for the title). I have several criticisms beyond that “occasionally a wee bit over-the-top,” but I was definitely perfectly engaged throughout the film, and I really liked the acting, the setting, and the Radiohead soundtrack (although I’m sure some people will dislike this). I have mixed feelings about the fact that they chose to set the film in an unnamed, imaginary Arabic country; more than anything, the mixed feelings have to do with my being confused most of the film about where they were. (Some of the movie took place in Canada, but much of it did not.) I thought it could be Lebanon, but they intentionally used names that could be real but were not. (Obviously, this was intentional; I think it was probably a good move, but it is mildly confusing.) In any case, a really excellent movie, and a moving one (hah!).

Okay, that’s the present.