Look with your eyes, not with your hands.


Such a minute fraction of this life do we live: so much is sleep, tooth-brushing, waiting for mail, for metamorphosis, for those sudden moments of incandescence: unexpected, but once one knows them, one can live life in the light of their past and the hope of their future.



A grad student muses on her life, film, friends, politics, reality televizzle, and music.

 
minor sleep deprivation, but nothing close to Jack's 4am "disaster" where the lab PC went into self-cleaning mode and just cleaned his dingy spot of 14 page seminar paper, he lost everything and had to start again before successfully turning it in today. I think he had a clever retort to the situation, and yes, he said this... "Professor, I was writing my "disaster film paper last night and a disaster happened. I should have written about porno."

Just watched Zoolander, in its entirety after getting a taste last week. I laughed a few times, but it's hard to find a movie that really has you laughing out loud, a lot, crying even, these days. In terms of the Chinese Cinema paper I could have been writing, so much for watching Vive L'Amour or any more of these depressing Tawianese films that are nearly silent in their approach to "detached voyeurism" about the anonymous urban landscape and loss of personal cultural identity in Taiwan... yeah, blah blah... I decided to write about Tsai Ming-Liang, not the cheeriest of subjects, but it should make for a more interesting paper. His films have very little dialogue and follow characters throughout the misery of their monotonous, depressing, and meaningless lives. His most recent film is - What time is it there? (obvi translated into English). I am curious if I can get my hands on this, I don't know how widely it was distributed in the States, but I think there was a Tsai series at Lincoln Center last summer, so it seems possible to get.

What time is it there? I think that's a charming notion. I guess in the past few years I have actually come in contact with that phrase pretty frequently as my group of friends has swelled while it geographically expanded. Granted that my email program tells me exactly when a message was sent and my voicemail (for both school and my cell) records the time when a message is received, how thoughtful. If I really wanted to know when someone called, it's translated for me in �my� time. For those of you that don't know me well, or at all, (even though you're privy to my innermost desires), you might know that I have a condition that my father calls "date & time retarded." I am lousy with dates / times / and constantly messing these things up. I really have never grasped the whole idea of time zones - and when I try to call a friend in Paris, I know it's later there, and I try to keep in mind that it's generally "earlier" on the West Coast. But as usual, my friends provide me with a service and kind of support that I can't do for myself, and whenever they call or leave me a message, it always starts like this

Lisa's Voice Mail: Hi, this is Lisa, I am not here. beep.
Far away caller: "Hey Lis, I guess you're not there, damn. Well, it's X:XX your time, X:XX my time..."

I love to get messages like that, perhaps because right off the bat it signals that a friend adds something to my life that I am incapable of doing myself (like simple addition / subtraction in time). Maybe because there's an element of a meaningful person telling you the time rather than the cyberbot voice service that announces the message in the first place, that helps, or elicits a smile� But it also fringes on 'experiential' questions I find so interesting - about place, time, nostalgia, memory, and perhaps the impossibility of communication despite our technological advancements that should facilitate its easy occurrence. (There you go, MIT Media Studies - there's my Master's Dissertation in outline form).

I have no idea if Tsai's film what time is there has anything to do with the scenario I just described, but if it does, it's already my favorite movie ever. Well, I guess what I just described could easy be misconstrued as You've Got Mail - only that story, a bleak ending, no Meg & Tom, and instead of New York we're set in the ultimate anonymous culturally suffering locale, Taiwan. Something to think about for sure, when I watch the film, I'll let you know how it lives up to my expectations.


after reading that over - question of the day - am I a sap or postmodern?

posted by lmjasinski at 11:46 PM