On WKW

1. Faces. Presence. (Taken from Godard) (Blueberry)
2. Intuitive motifs. Seemed to be selected playfully. (Blueberry & Mood)
3. 2046: generating stories.
4. I saw some outtakes from Mood and they were very commonplace. The lighting was good, but the scenes themselves were the stuff of early still-uninspired improvisations. Herzog seeks ecstaticness in the spaces he visits. Wong builds a space (the most flattest and cliche), rides roughshod with ideas (many commonplace), and then sculpts something with unity in tone/mood. His shooting ratio must be 40:1.

IDeas

1. Do I come up with an idea because school asks me to? How do the ideas that traverse me naturally differ from those generated by a school requirement? Must I go through the process of discarding the act of generating ideas in order to detach myself from the forced-upon feeling (which causes stress and fear) of pressure?

Diary

March 24th 2007.
My favorite time of the day for the past week has been between 4:30PM and 7:00, when the sun is on his way to setting. The luminance in my appartment is incredible and at moments the reflection of the sun on my hardwood floor is blinding. It is around this time that I prepare dinner.

List of Books I Should Read

1. Shadow of The Wind

If you love A.S. Byatt’s Possession, García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the short stories of Borges, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas or Paul Auster’s “New York” trilogy, not to mention Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame and William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel, then you will love The Shadow of the Wind.

On La science des rêves

The Imdb boards. Here it is, from the mouth of the general populace. Good study of the way they register information. Most importantly, what type of information do they register more…

Also of note…the inclusion of statements that annotate the subjective nature of opinions. “This is just my thoughts. There could be more.” “This is not the truth, but an intepretation.” “Maybe I think too much? I elaborate too much?”

Also of note, stances. This one post in particular retells the telling of the man’s opinion as he related it to his wife. It seems that the consciousness of an audience is very strong in the way they write their posts.

I saw it differently than most. I didn’t see a cute, unrequited love art film, I saw a dark and twisted tail of mental illness, lack of self esteem and “clinging”. I didn’t see a happy ending, I saw a man refusing to let go of a fantasy. I don’t know. I need to watch it again.

ok, after the movie ended i had to actually sit there and talk out (to my cat lol) what i thought it meant at the end (it’s a good way of gathering your thoughts). i came to the conclusion that:
…
…
though im still not entirely sure whether stephane’s confusing of dreams and reality was an artistic metaphor or a sign that he was mentally troubled. mostly i dont think he needed mental help or anything, i think he was just a bit lost, and shaken up because of his father’s death. and now my brain hurts.

I had a different interpretation. After thinking on it a while, I went back to my wife and told her I thought it had a happy ending.

–Why does this guy talk about his wife????

OK..JUST MY INTERPRETATION. HAVE AN AWESOME DAY!!!

For example, when i dream about a tree i’m not really thinking of that tree but the tree could symbolise family or whatever. Well, this is Freud’s idea anyway.

As with all films, it’s just an interpretation, nobody can be right, nobody is wrong.

I think it’s a very surreal piece. It may even be benefitial to see this movie in the light of the surrealism movement. Certainly, the craft of the movie would allude to that art movement.

–Haha.

Truthfully, that right there is very much a slice of life.

but i have told my close friends before that i had no feelings for someone when in fact, i really did.

At these points I wish there were mention of pills, mention of fixing his “condition” as it were.
…
The problem I had with this film is that there is also no mention of doctors to help cure his condition, no mention of psychologists

Maybe I’m elaborating too much on this thought.

Nazi Germany and Cinema

The female stars in particular were supposed to lend some glamour to the dry and male-dominated NSDAP events. Adolf Hitler’s preferred dinner partners were the actresses Olga Tschechowa and Lil Dagover, and since 1935, Hermann Göring was married to the popular actress Emmy Sonnemann. The relationships of Joseph Goebbels to several female movie stars are notorious, too. The personal proximity to the political leaders became a determining factor for the career success of movie actors.

Roots

1. World rooted in hesitance, missed opportunities, lack of effort, trust in the invisible mechanisms of fate, resentment of those mechanisms, assessment of passivity, inner anguish.

The mistake would be to assess that nobody’s to blame for one’s condition, thus the wisest reaction being a passivity and detachment from the emotional core of the hurtful event or mindstate. Although the prospect of unashamed evasiveness and unself-conscious detachment seems appealing, it is counter-ideological to conclude a supposed serenity from a logic of accusation. The question is not ‘Who is to blame?’ and although the answer is in fact “Nobody.”, the question sustains a philosophy of life based on responsible and designable entities. It is unholistic to affix introspective states to external bodies. Even “nobody” is a body.

The aim is not detachment, but understanding of the mechanics of fate. Also, with any awareness must come the awareness of the limitations of awareness. So even if I understand the existence of the mechanics of fate, and even if I understand that these mechanics govern my emotional states, it is important to understand and acknowledge our incapicity to grasp its complete intricacies.

On Bela Tarr

Bela Tarr

When I was teaching in Berlin, this is what I always explained to the kids: you don’t just write a film-script, then the dialogue, and then select the actors from a photo-album. I suggested the following: you do not write a script, you do not write dialogue. When you have a synopsis, the next step is to see if you have the characters and the locations. And when you have all of that, you need to adjust the script anyway. So what they learned from me was to look for actors and locations as soon as they had a synopsis, and that only after having found them, should they start writing the dialogues and the scenes, knowing whether the camera would fit into the space and who would play the characters.

List of Jay-Z Luxuries

1. Audemar Piguet (wrists) off “Allure” and “Upgrade U (Remix)”
2. Mr Chow’s off “Success”
3.Breitling off “Dead Presidents”

On Jay-Z’s Gangsta

“Feelin’ It”

To all the girls I bought a girdle to conceal my bricks
No doubt, they can vouch my life is real as shit…

The ganstaness in this line comes from the originality of the gangsta motif. To speak of the act of smuggling by women friends/lovers, specifically the girdles they have to wear.

“Allure”

Say hooray to the bad guy, and all the broads
Putting cards in their name for the stars of the game
Putting ‘caine in their bras and their tomorrows on the train
All in the name of love
Just to see that love locked in chains and the family came
over the house to take back, everything that they claimed
Or even the worst pain is the distress
Learning you’re the mistress only after that love gets slain
And the anger and the sorrow mixed up, leads to mistrust
Now it gets tough to ever love a-gain

—Yet another reference to friends/lovers who transport cocaine across states. This time he goes deeper and describes the emotional ties, even drawing out a possibly dramatic situation (”Learning you’re the mistress only after that love gets slain” How dramatic!).

But the allure of the game, keeps callin your name
To all the Lauras of the world, I feel your pain
To all the Christies in every cities and Tiffany Lane’s
We all hustlers, in love with the same thang

–That mention of Charli Baltimore’s government name probably goes largely unoticed. But for those who notice, it further mythologizes Charli who was once rumoured to be Biggie’s ride-or-die chick.