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.

 
Pass College, Fail Life

So my week of deep scholarly reflection � already a slave to blogging, some debate bullshit, and updating my webpage of all things. Once I graduate in two months I am going to take some web-design classes, so this should get better. For the time being however, it's a nice photo album and I added a few shots from my recent honor code travel-excursion to Davidson College. Fun stuff, check it out.

Spent this evening lapsing into exhaustion and fighting to stay in tune with my biblicious art class, tonight was creation myths and the first nine books of Genesis. This afternoon was given over to smartin' up the old Fluxus paper for the NYU application and half-watching Wes Anderson�s The Royal Tenenbaums, the treat of the day. Since I originally saw the film in July, I have absorbed the soundtrack into my regular MP3 rotation. This is a very strange phenomenon, taking the music out of the cinematic context and giving it a new identity in my room, in my car, or in the computer lab with headphones. Come to think of it, I had the same, somewhat surreal experience, twice this weekend - bringing my own baggage and heightened awareness to music that might be intended otherwise as a background factor to a film scene. I watched Moulin Rouge for the first time in its entirety since I saw it in the theater last January in New York. That soundtrack figures prominently into my life and working habits so seeing the film has a strange, expectedness to it, it essentially removes the spontaneous factor from viewing. It�s ironic, you gain a new appreciation for the music through constant listening, but something is lost in the visual exchange. On Sunday night I convinced my mother to watch Monsoon Wedding with me, under the pretense that it might be called �My Big Fat Indian Wedding.� Not exactly truthful, but how else are you going to convince your Mom to watch a movie in Hindi with subtitles for fun? Well, I think she liked it and I have been listening to the soundtrack since I saw the film in late September. Specifically, the last scene really stuck with me. I ended up watching this sequence no fewer than five times because it�s so beautifully executed: the rain, the humble marigold exchange between Alice and Dubey in the rain, the marching band, and then 50 crazy Indians dancing and the whole party erupts into a pathos of arms, swirling flowers and dyed silks. This won�t resonate with people who haven�t seen the film, but download Aaj Nachle when you have a chance and imagine it again. I don�t think I have ever seen a scene where the sense of release and celebration are as effectively simultaneously expressed. You watch Ria run out into the monsoon, heels sinking into the mud, she laughs and dances, catches the eye of a handsome admirer, and you get the sense that everyone is carried away by the promise of the moment. It is worth watching the entire film for the last ten minutes. Again, to take the song and divorce it from that scene is disingenuous and a selfishly-motivated (yet forgivable) sin. Articulated in three cinematic anecdotes, my point is that something very strange happens when you appropriate a movie soundtrack and give it significance in your day to day happenings. Not that I ever advocated carelessly blending the real and the pretend, I guess I just had no idea what I was getting myself into until I sat down to watch these films with my tainted, and soundtrack enlightened, mind.

So anyway, pass college, fail life - or - time to do math problems in bed. Doesn�t that sound sexy?? Oh wait, it's algebra and geometry, that's considered pedophila in most states.


posted by lmjasinski at 10:26 PM