New Rules and Film Propaganda
Best Halloween in a long time. Earlier this week, I agreed to go to a lecture followed by a dinner for P. Adams Sitney, the leading film scholar on avant-garde film in America who has a teaching post at Princeton. The lecture was on Stan Brakhage and modernist elements from Pound and Stein (a little obtuse, but structural film tends to be). The location for the dinner had to be changed at the last minute, so I found myself with Professors Perry, Donnadio, some woman from the French department, Adams and another student at the shi-shi (by Middlebury standards) Storm Cafe. Such a lovely lovely time I just had, I laughed, spoke about new media, the gugg, and when not talking I was endlessly smiling and entertained... too many events like this with film scholars have proven to be convincing propaganda and might just push me out of media into cinema exclusively. The evening was truly without fault and I just had the most wonderful time. P. Adams says that after college kids should convince their parents to finance a year of living in a hammock in Guatemala and he thoroughly discouraged graduate school, but thankfully others at the table advised otherwise.
New life rule. Every Halloween I want to have an indulgent dinner with a man from Princeton, embracing arrogance, over-the-top-ism, a kind of broadly spread authoratative intellectualism, someone who executes the "this is how you should live your life" speech with a great baratone laugh. This combination & halloween seems to work out - anymore than that, historically I've learned that this leads to problems, but for a night it is all kinds of perfect.
Perhaps my mind has been biased by one too many strange film characters - these idiosyncratic professors, museum personalities, and strange research projects - and such great dinners & lunches, anecdotes, and even hours spent at MoMA and Anthology Film Archives. But me in Chicago or Madison? I don't know, me as a film professor, it suddenly doesn't seem like such a leap of the imagination.
posted by lmjasinski at 7:46 PM
