I am slowly developing an unhealthy obsession with my film professor.

Who decided that mornings should be manic? There is not one morning radio show that is not devoted to comedy routines, funny noises on call and ridiculous circumstances. Personalities with varying levels of obnoxiosness and/or hilarity blare out from every single station in the pre-11am slot.

I'm not against this, really. I mean, certain choices still remain better than others. I'm speaking, of course, of Kevin and Bean vs. Mark and Brian (or, God forbid, Danny Bonaducci), where Kevin and Bean clearly are the victors. The point is this: why do I need wackiness at nine in the morning? Why didn't someone decide we need classical music when we first get up? If wake-up-factor is a consideration, why not speed metal or straight-ahead punk rock? For that matter, why can hilarity in a talk format only be explored before 10am? Why not during the drive-time?

Who makes these decisions?

Again, I'm not complaining. If all KROQ played was Kevin and Bean all damn day I wouldn't be complaining. They're hilarious. Throw in a little Loveline here and there, and I think you'd have a vast improvement over the current broadcasting they have going on. I can't listen to another Staind. I just can't. I'm just curious as to why they decided or who decided or why it was necessary to decide and then universalize the concept of the wacky morning show? It seems... arbitrary.

One of the pontificators at the ol' Alma Mater compared a scene in which a man was stalking this couple as seeing: "Bird... cat!" What he doesn't seem to realize, as vivid as the metaphor may be, is that any noun at all could work in place of bird and still, playing off the feline situation, make perfect sense. Bird... cat! Mouse... cat! Peice of string... cat! Human hand... cat! Entire person... cat! Shadow of a passing car... cat! The right to vote... cat! Cats don't care what ther hell it is in front of them. They'll attack anything they feel they should, which is everything. Cats are insane. They are hardly subject to any rules.

My film professor (I'm-a gonna call him Dr. Windrush, here) is not giving me the respect I attribute to myself. Let me be more specific. He's not lauding me as the most intelligent filmic genius he's ever met, and it's bothering me.

Let me explain, rather than be more specific.

I consider myself, horn being tooted, above the capabilities of and, infinitely more importantly, possessed of a greater passion than the average film student. Average, hell. I think I'm a better film scholar than most every film student I've met so far. True, I use it mainly in order to further my production, but my study and theory is so important to me, and I spend so much time on it and do so well with it and address it so earnestly that I think someone would notice and be impressed with my efforts. Perhaps even the person who is bestowing me with scholastic achievement, A after A, demonstrating for himself my more-than-average sensibility.

And yet, here I am, unrecognized to any extent by this professor whom I have come to admire to a great degree. Sure, I get great grades, sure he comments sparsely on the papers I read in class... but I require solidarity. I require the immediate acceptance by my peers, and I require recognition as a peer of a doctorate. Dammit.

In his class, recently (this doesn't necessarily involve him, as he wasn't there at the time and was already aware of the pertinent facts), we filled out evaluations for the term and, in filling out which course it was I was taking and subsequently which perspective I'd be evaluating from, I was ousted as an underclassman in a room full of graduate students. I had been flying well under the radar up until that point, avoiding the issue and holding my own with the big boys. I was accepted by them, even by the widely accepted genius among them. I was their equal and, in many-if-not-most cases, their superior. I was ecstatic.

But now this. They know my dark secret. Never again am I to be taken seriously (which, luckily, happened after I made my last actual presentation to the class), never again to be welcomed into the fold. I am an unaccomplished attemptee going for my abyssmal B.A.-don't-make-us-laugh.

I will show you, film students. I will become the greatest of you all. I will rise up and rule you, and when you look to me from your seats of attrition and compromise, you will crane and squint, for my chair will be high and well-built. My day will come. Yours will end. I will champion my cause and your own, for I am as merciful as I am powerful, and it is because of this that, once I assume my throne, you will beg for my mercy, lest you be offered the other attribute.

I have to wear a yellow film reel on my lapel. So they can SEE ME.

Time Return: Current

I've been watching a fuck-ton of films lately, enjoying them all so far and really just trying to round out the ol' lexicon of film vocabulary, and I'm having the best time with it. I have the Netflix circulatin' and the library check-outs coagulatin' and the weekly screenings pontaculatin' and the occasional trips to the cine with the Mrs. smick-smack-u-latin', so it's all going to plan.

Thing is, it's made me start thinking about why I'm studying film so damn much. Today my personal favorite professor was lecturing us (redundant-and-clarifying as it may be for me personally) about the subjects of camp, kitsch, and cult. Really, all film students (or at least all students of film) should be cultists. They should be obsessed with and reverent of film. They should worship it. Lord knows I do.

So why? I've been thinking about this, and I fall back on my old standard of film being the highest form of human achievement. Literally. I think the greatest thing a human being can do, the most important thing, is to create art, and the highest form of art is film. This is not to say that all films are great, or even good to any extent, but the medium of film is the American artform, it is the modern canvas, and it is the pinnacle of artistic achievement. So, to achieve greatness in film is to achieve greatness in existence as a human.

But why, I ask? Why should we even care? For me, as I see it, I think we can discern something about the human condition from the study of film, as I have chosen to devote my short time on this planet to. Much in the same way that Mendeleev noticed a progression in atomic weights while flipping through flashcards of the elements and saw the periodic table, I think great truths about the human situation can be gleaned from watching, analyzing, and understanding film. Not just film, but the reasons for film and the reactions to film. Lucky for us it's become such a popular entertainment, so gauging reactions is easily done. Lucky for us our answers are all there for us to discover, for us to extract.

On the other hand, one must look at the reality, objectively. I spend a good deal of my life alone in a dark room squinting at a screen. I've decided to commit myself to discerning truth and beauty and meaning from these art works, these reflections of life, but at the same time I have condemned myself to the life of sitting and watching. Watching and sitting. Like Plato's prisoners, my life has become, quite literally, the worship of shadows on a wall, and while I do love it so, I hope that one day it becomes validated when I'm able to break the chains.

...

The Day of the Bubbles (the special show we had going at the ol' Salt Mines) is over, and with it goes the Maker of the bubbles. I still carry around the small vial of solution with which to create the spherical, magical temporaries, and was entertaining the kittens upstairs with them eariler, only proving that the transparent transitories. It is a question of some wonder that such beautiful and fascinating creations are so, by their very nature, inherently ephemeral.

I was sad to see him and, subsequently, them go, but am happy and proud to say that the Mrs. was invited along by the God of Bubbles himself to become a part of his corporation, indeed, to go and work for him! To run the shows when he can't be there! To be his avatar of effervescence. In fact, I'm going to suggest her nametag read just that.

DAMN that's good.

To be completely honest, I'm more than a little jealous, but at the same time I know I wouldn't be able to devote the kind of time he requires to bubbles. I'm too busy focusing on my own waste of life to whittle months away on a totally separate one. Before he left though, I managed to teach myself to do quite a few of his bubble-ations... and even managed one rather difficult one that surpassed even he! Dare I reach higher than the gods? Dare I fly on these wings of bubbles, Dawn and Gatorade? YES I DARE!

I'm sincerely going to miss him, and I'll miss working in his show every day. Going back to the floor, to demonstration, is going to be a bit of a wrench in the cog factory. I didn't go in today, as my head really hurts and I'm beginning to get anxious about this film project I have due on Monday, but I wonder how much of it was my head hurting and not feeling up to it compared to not necessarily wanting to go back to what my job had been. I recieved a raise during the Parade of Bubbles... which was nice enough (at least I'm sure my employer thinks so) to tide me over until the next round of raises. Keep my there and quiet. But just the same, is there a better opportunity out there for me? Could I find a better-paying job, maybe a more stimulating job? Could I make a living editing?

Hell. Maybe I'll just stick it all out, man. Stick out the whole damn thing until I have some sort of kick-ass degree that I can walk into some place with, flash at the receptionist-a, and have him scuttle off like a frightened crab to tell whatever mucky-muck is going to be paying me enormous amounts of green to tell them what the hell to do from now on that I'm-the-fuck-HERE.

Niiiice.

I am so down with the Graduate Studies! Who's down?!

Crimson Adhesive

I thought I was mad when people were flooding me with requests to buy memberships... speaking unintelligibly or too quietly, not making eye contact, saying half their sentences while looking over their shoulders at nothing-in-particular solely to avoid looking directly at me. I thought I was mad.

I thought I was mad when these people were rude to me. When they snapped at me upon first walking up to the counter, when they acted as if I was mentally deficient for not being able to guess their zip code or how many were in their party. They growl and grimace and they look to me to continue being polite to them if only so they can feel, in their downtrodden and desperate lives, that they are at least momentarily superior to someone. Anyone. Even the person behind the counter trying to help them. I thought I was mad.

I thought I was mad when people were asking for refunds because they'd miss their showtimes by being complete and utter idiots. "I didn't know there were specific times," "No one told me I couldn't go in whenever I wanted," "I thought it was a show about Boob-les... not Bubbles. Y'all straight lied to my moron-ass!" Then, I thought I was mad.

And I even thought I was mad when people were paying for tickets, in dividends of three dollars and eight dollars with credit cards. Credit cards, wasting paper and wasting time, wasting energy and wasting the moments between the moment of purchase and the moment the show as about to start, which was invariably down to the last second because the fools had waited so damn long to buy tickets that a) they were in danger of attempting to buy tickets to a sold-out show or b) they were in danger of trying to buy tickets for a show that had already started, all the while arguing over Triple A discounts and Membership rewards and special circumstances and fuck all. I thought I was mad then. I thought I was furious.

I was wrong.

I was mad, truly mad, when a woman bought three tickets to a Laser Show, at a dollar a peice, and after asking for them, once I'd rung them up, informing me she was a member. I voided the sale, changed the price, and told her the new one, even less, and she winced at me. Winced. At. Me. She then asked if she could pay, for her $2.25 purchase, with a check. As she put away her membership card, I saw that, in her little pocketbook, she'd taken out a small wad of one-dollar bills.

No, you can't pay with a check.

Not that we don't let people pay with checks... but you, Madame, may not pay with a check.

Li-vid.

And then came the saga of the Pink Shawl. I've lost my baby's pink shawl in the show! Someone said they'd brought it up here to the Lost and Found! Whatever will I do?! I don't want to leave without my baby's pink shawl!

Well... ma'am... I don't see it up here.

He said he brought it up here! CHECK! Do you want me to go get him and bring him here to tell you?

Well, if you want to...

FINE! I don't BELIEVE you're making me go... (she trails off as she storms off into the Center)

I go through all of our logs, our lost and found items. I check the bin twice. We do not have any pink shawl on record.

Fifteen minutes later:

(She walks up to the counter) You need to have your employees bring lost items to the lost and found. They had it tucked away in some office...

Can you tell us which staff member it was?

I don't know who it was! It was in the show! It was tucked away!

(In my head) I understand that you're embarrassed for getting so snippy with me about the shawl when I quite honsestly told you I'd never seen it. I understand that you've now found the shawl and feel ashamed and probably pretty cowed that you were so rude to someone who didn't deserve it. What you do, in that situation, is not try to dig yourself out of the hole by being even ruder than you were before, but by apologizing, shutting the hell up, and then walking out the door directly behind you, because frankly, Bitch of the Day, I'm done dealing with you, and you're lucky the man to your left talking you down from your froth right now is there, because I wouldn't be half so nice as he, and I can be pretty fucking nasty when I get pushed too fucking far.

...

I always assume there to be this theoretical bureacracy around anything I want to take part in that I will have to penetrate or circumvent in order for my dreams and desires to be realized. As it turns out, the one thing I find myself extremely interested in, truly passionate about, is something that I am being welcomed into with open and enthusiastic arms, and it is evident to me that this is not a common occurence, but one I have justified on my own merit and mettle. This is the Order of the Film Scholar... and it's what I've always wanted.

I'm not saying this is any formal club or anything, but it is a brotherhood. An almagamate of those who study, appreciate, and truly understand film, and who look down on and villify those who do not. Today, for really the first time, I felt at home among my peers, and my peers they now truly are. I am on level with Master's students, people. I am in their curriculum, I am matching them review for witticism, surpassing them, even. I am now a force they recognize.

I wrote a review recently, one I'm rather proud of for its qualities of both...

I'll finish this later. Someone set off the damn fire alarm.

... 5-Days-Later...

Temporal happenstance aside, that was still a pretty annoying thing to happen. The Bubble Man at the ol' mill used a bit too much fog in his show and it set off the alarm. At least, that's the story I was given... but it seems to me (though my hypothesis has already been refuted) that fog wouldn't set off a fire alarm. What do I know, though?

Anyway, as I was saying before, I'm rather proud of the review I wrote recently not only because of the fact that it was well-recieved by so many people who I consider to be pretty savvy in the world of film scholasticism, but also because I discovered in myself the ability, or at least the consistent capacity, to discover. I set out to write about Tim Burton, and ended up (by finishing my viewing of his filmography) writing more about Ed Wood. The assignment needed to be edited back to focus more on Burton, but Wood fascinates me now, as I think I've seen something in him that most people (if not all people) haven't seen. The fact that I'm capable of this kind of thought process (or at least the fact that I can objectively notice it) is a real treat for me.

I finally feel as though I belong, that I am recognized and accepted, in the world of film study. My peers (if I can call them that, as they are all so-called higher-level students than I) have praised my work, I feel comfortable talking to them about our chosen medium, and I feel confident that my theories are well-thought-out and that I have something to contribute to the community of film scholars. For the first time (five days ago, when I began writing this) I felt like I had reached a place I had been trying to reach, or that I felt I hadn't yet been recognized for reaching, for a long time.

...

Today, making this the longest work-in-progress single-blog-entry in the history of blogs... lord I hate that word... I saw Jim Jarmush's "masterpeice" Dead Man. Allow me to explain. In the lexicon of films that don't explain themselves sufficiently not to make the audience question or to elicit any specific emotion, but to fool the inattentive into thinking that they should be emoting or should be asking questions (in short: films that act like they're mysterious, deeply thoughtful and poetic art-house peices but are not) Jarmush's romp through a progressively less-realistic wild west following the concept of an accountant becoming the concept of a bullet-riddled killer accompanied by his fat, fat Indian friend... doesn't even stand up to a good Lynch film. For varying values of the word "good."

At least Lynch displays some mastery of the bullshit art. At least he leaves enough open to really leave the audience guessing. People feel lost after his films, that they've missed out on something, and that if they don't try to fill that void with psycho-analytic explanation they'll be ridiculed by their friends, who obviously understood the movie because they're so prepared to delve into their own intepretations of the film, never realizing they're all bullshitting each other in a grand circle of bull.

Jarmush can't even give us that ambiguity. He can't, with Dead Man, resist putting Iggy Pop (an old friend from the days of the Coffee and Cigarettes shorts), Alfred Molina (same), and the ever-orthodontal Steve Buscemi (third verse, same as the I hate you Jim Jarmush) smack dab in the film's alterantely verbal and cameo-centric roles. We might not notice Steve, but Iggy Pop in a dress waxing religious to his two fur-trapping, somewhat hom-o-erotic/icidal pals? Are we not to notice Alfred Molina acting as a racist zealot in control of seemingly the only tobacco in the film up for grabs? Is this supposed to mean anything to us?

And the answer is no. God forbid it should mean anything to us. Jarmush might have to have an idea at that point, or an opinion. Oh no... god forbid.

...

I've got a lot of Lemon and a lot of Kubrick waiting for me, and I won't be able to watch any of it tonight, sadly, as I'll be... sleeping.

I won't be able to watch more than one tomorrow, either, as I'll be working, for the first time since... ever, on Underground, hopefully to finish by the end of next week. Wow... me and my fucking deadlines. Last time I tried to do a project that was longer than fifteen minutes, it ended up taking me five months. I owe it to the Mrs., though, for goading me on. I don't know if I ever would have motivated myself to do it otherwise. I'm still not motivating myself, she is. I've put the damn thing off for three weeks. Ass.

We'll see how it looks raw tomorrow, and we'll see how much there is to use.

Next time I take a break in the middle of a post, it'll be a fortnight, just to set a new record.

Springbok

Daylight saving's time has come and gone, and has brought with it more evidence toward my furthering assertion of "all people are idiots." Myself included.

In the glorious days of heaven, when wheat was plentiful and men were men, it became necessary (in the minds of all those not Arizona, Hawaii, and Indiana) to be able to work longer even when the days got shorter. Therefore, we imposed a system upon ourselves, dictated by no natural or outside force, that stipulated we would change our clocks twice a year in order to fool ourselves into thinking the actual daylight was lasting an hour longer than it should have been for half the year. That was that, we had our daylight to farm in, and everything was fantastic. In fact, the principle still largely stands to this day, giving us the aided benefit of being able to drive home from work while it's still light out.

The fact that we're the ones changing our own clocks does not stop us, however, from the very next day screaming, "Oh man, I can't believe it's so light out!"

Yeah, the sun's still out. You set the clock back.

I feel like an Aztec during a solar eclipse every time Daylight Savings Time rolls around. We're absolutely fascinated, delighted by how much more light there is. "Oh, I love that it's still light out at seven!" Of course you do! We all do! THAT'S WHY WE DO IT! IT'S BY CHOICE. Anyway, attributing so much attention to the sun without remotely discussing solar flares and/or the possibility of our own atmosphere suffocating us... well... it doesn't seem productive. In a nutshell: I'm not interested unless it concerns my immediate demise.

I took some time out of my day recently to go over to one of my more favorite and distinguished (academically, it's no manner-judgement) professors this week to discuss with him how I might become a Teaching Assistant, but more to the point, how I could become a Masters student. We talked for a good long while about it and basically what came out of the conversation was this: I should get my MA in the same place I'm going to get my Doctorate. He got his MA at the University of East Anglia (a place I know only as where the phony bishop in an episode of Monty Python was probably not from) and had already chosen the professor he wanted to get his Doctorate under, so it might be a good idea for me to do the same, as I'll be dealing with a professor on a one-on-one basis for my doctorate and will benefit from having chosen them and having become familiar with them during my Masters work.

He mentioned that, in the course of our discussion, an MA from NYU (which I attended briefly over the summer) would secure me a position as a doctorate student anywhere, what with their formidable reputation. Of course, having earned the MA there, I might have met a professor I'd like to study under for my PhD... or indeed might even dislike leaving, having become comfortable with it. This is all well and good... and a year ago would have been fine by me... but now there's the Mrs., and that's a complication.

Getting a Masters, getting a Doctorate, would take four years, at least. Four years to be away from home, and four years to be away from her... and I know myself well enough to know I don't want to do that. That I can't do that. I need to be with her... and no amount of waiting for each other or constant visits home during the holidays or letters or calls or 3-d generated facsimiles is going to help. Four years is just too long. So... perhaps two?

Perhaps my Masters at NYU, then my PhD wherever I want (reasonably)? Perhaps a long-distance PhD, as I'm sure I don't need to actually be there, as long as my ideas and experience are taking place. Perhaps the whole shebang, MA and PhD, at UCLA? That'd be a long-overdue victory, to be sure, and definitely much closer. I need a graph of some kind. Maybe I'll get lucky, start making movies in earnest, become rich and lose interest in education.

Maybe.

In the meantime, I have NetFlix, now, to keep me company. It's great. I've only had it for about a week, and already it's pretty much paid for itself. I don't know how Blockbuster is hoping to compete with them, but it's awesome. I get all the movies I can handle, and I can handle a ton of movies. The only downside is that, as far as I can see, the service is solely serving me, as the family doesn't really get to make the list like I do. I've told them to tell me whatever movies they want and I'd put them in the list, but I have no requests so far. Weak. I'm the only one with any passion around here for film. With this subscription and my PS2 hooked up in my room, these people may never see me again.

There's a lot of that going around.

He's not here... and so this goes... in my sack.