16 August 2011

APOPHASIS

Posted by admin @ 9:41 am    categories: language

Lying in my bed last night, I remembered this word, or rather the idea of this word.

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.

14 August 2011

on dramatic structure… okay, sure

Posted by admin @ 20:20 pm    categories: writing

(I wrote this earlier and then got side-tracked eating dinner, tutoring, hoping a friend would show up on Skype, and so forth. I’m too lazy to change the way the text refers to time.)

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.

20 July 2011

yoga

Posted by admin @ 21:39 pm    categories: physicality

For the past, oh, eight years, I’ve been doing yoga on a somewhat-consistent basis. As with my rock climbing, there have probably been some months in which I did no yoga, but I’d say that for the past three or four years it’s been fairly consistent. Beginning in January, I took an intensive Iyengar yoga1 class, which was really nice—both in the sense that I feel like I learned a lot, and in the sense that it got me practicing a lot more seriously. I like learning the way the body fits together; I get a very real sense of accomplishment when I figure out how to do a pose better. Today, for example, I think I got a step or two closer to doing a better handstand and, actually, to doing a better downward-facing dog pose. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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. [↩]

17 July 2011

sounds and stories

Posted by admin @ 13:31 pm    categories: music • writing

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Bomba Estéreo – Agua Salá

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! [↩]

2 July 2011

thirteen films

Posted by admin @ 14:32 pm    categories: film/movies

I left it a bit too long, so I have a bunch of movies to add to my list-of-movies-I’ve-seen-recently. I’ll go through them briefly, rather than as I often do. Oldest first.

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.

26 June 2011

gendered nouns

Posted by admin @ 20:56 pm    categories: language • Spanish

A friend of mine, Cait, emailed me a few nights ago to initiate a discussion about languages where nouns are gendered. To explain as quickly as possible: English, as a language, is relatively neuter. Nouns tend not to have inherent gender attached to them. There are some, of course—boy and girl are not interchangeable—but in general, table and bed and cat and glove are neuter. In many other languages, those words are gendered (I’ll mostly rely on French and Spanish here): la mesa / la table; la cama / le lit; el gato / le chat; el guante / le gant.

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.

22 June 2011

a trip out of town: US Southwest

Posted by admin @ 22:45 pm    categories: images • traveling

I spent last week with my family, in Utah and New Mexico, mostly. (Although I guess we were briefly in Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada…)

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.

12 June 2011

things I keep meaning to update on

Posted by admin @ 16:44 pm    categories: art • images • Miami

For a while starting in early April, I was certain that I would eventually finish (start) writing this post. Unfortunately, it’s instead sat on the back-burner for a long while now, and it’s gone sort of congealed and rubbery. So I’ll just abbreviate it. With numbers.

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.

23 March 2011

oh right

Posted by admin @ 9:27 am    categories: Uncategorized

Apparently, my banner-photograph has changed. I think I like the new one, although I miss the old one, also. It was time, however. There have been a few minor cosmetic changes, also, but otherwise the site’s more-or-less the same.

13 March 2011

justin, film

Posted by admin @ 15:02 pm    categories: film/movies

Every so often I try to write down, with brief reviews perhaps, the films I’ve seen in the preceding weeks/months. Seeing as how I don’t watch movies all that often these days, this is not a regular occurrence, although I likewise have been lax at posting on the blog, and therefore I last did this not so long ago.

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.

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