« November 2005 | Main | January 2006 »
Fri | December 30, 2005
geisha reviews
This is why I don't read reviews. These Geisha reviews (at least, the excerpts that I read just now) take a decidedly negative pov. If I had read these beforehand I would never have gone to see the movie. And if I had somehow wound up there anyway, I wouldn't have liked it, knowing that all these reviewers didn't like it.
Even if they are positive reviews I don't read them. I go and see it myself and find out what I think of it. Then I read reviews afterwards, if at all.
Reading reviews burdens you with all these thoughts. I bring enough to the movie on my own. The only exception to this might have been LOTR, which I totally did not get when I saw the first one years ago. This was partially influenced by the fact that I was sitting in the far left corner of the first row, and couldn't see very well. But that is the sort of movie that you must know a little bit about beforehand. And basically all of the old landmark film history films- there is no point in watching them unless you have the DVD commentary on, or if you have read about why they are significant beforehand.
I was thinking about that part where she goes off to the mountains and makes textiles. It reminded me of a film I saw in the Asian Studies class.
Geisha, though not the greatest ever, is a lot better than the crap I saw in the Asian Cinema class. Those movies were so wrong, I couldn't begin to explain. It would take forever. Better to just forget about them entirely.
Especially for a Hollywood film directed for the mainstream, I thought it was great. And it seemed to have vestiges of those earlier Asian films I saw in cinema studies, but to have gracefully moved beyond them, leaving only benign lingering remnants.
I guess I liked it because those other movies seemed to be about inexplicable senseless violence, which I had absolutely no sympathy with, and which actually seemed very anti-Asian, to me. I mean, all the Asians I know are nice (often, too indiscriminately nice). They are compassionate, considerate, gentle, and peaceful, and actively avoid conflict or violence. During the first scenes of Geisha I kind of thought it was going to be another one of those violent films, but then it went on to other things. Sibling rivalry, for one. And how people succeed ...and other stuff.
Livres, films, TV | Posted by Lily at 12:56 PM
Mon | December 26, 2005
geisha
Sony Pictures - Memoirs Of A Geisha
Saw this movie this weekend. I thought I wouldn't like it, but it turned out to be okay. It's the first Asian movie that I've liked. I saw several of them during an Asian film class I sat in on at Rutgers.
Livres, films, TV | Posted by Lily at 07:23 PM
Fri | December 23, 2005
bad Fridays
On Friday nights when I have no plans I waste more time than if I did have plans-- in which case I'd get stuff done until I had to leave. I wasted time all day today because I knew I wouldn't be doing anything later. I went shopping three times. And ate mint oreos and drank lime pepsi. I think the only productive thing I did was take out all the clothes in two of my drawers and refold them. I have no idea what else I did. I went to Starbucks and observed this white couple with their two adopted Asian children. I wondered what they all thought of themselves and of each other. I worried that the parents wouldn't really care. That it fed the sense of white superiority under the guise of goodwill. That the children would have massive identity issues. And worst of all I suspected they would be encouraged to be average and ambitionless.
Maybe I should try to be average and ambitionless. I might get more done that way. I wonder what I should do tomorrow night, or the next Saturday night, for New Year's.
journal | Posted by Lily at 10:47 PM
Thu | December 22, 2005
Penn Station
All this transportation brouhaha makes me want to revive my Penn Station blog. I had a blog on blogspot called Penn Station for the sole purpose of venting my commuter thoughts. Then I stopped going into Kaps for a few months and the blog died. I started freelancing again about a month ago, but the time off made me realize there is no reason to have a blog just for Penn Station. One blog (this one) is enough.
What is this compulsion to write about the train? There is something about the train ride that makes it more of an event than a subway ride. On the subway you don't feel as if you've gone anywhere else. I mean, you've gone on the subway, but you are in New York. The train feels like a place in and of itself, or at least it is not part of any particular place. It goes through places, it isn't part of them. I think a lot of my compulsion to write about the train is an attempt to stabilize something, in my mind, that is neither here nor there, in reality.
And then Penn Station itself-- it's not beautiful like Grand Central (or like the original Penn Station, which was destroyed in the 60's) but there is something intellectually compelling about its form. With the number of entrances and connections, there's an interplay of the obvious and the not so obvious. Even when Penn Station is mobbed with Rangers fans, there are places that remain relatively unpopulated. These are spots few people know about, even though they're right there. And I like it that way.
My knowledge of Penn Station proved helpful on Tuesday, the first day of the strike. The morning was not a problem- there were more people exiting onto the street, who would usually have been dispersed to the A/C/E or 1/2/3 subway stops, but this merely slowed things up a bit. Going back in the evening, things were at a standstill on Seventh Avenue at 33rd Street. An unmoving mass of people blocked the main entrance. On one side they had formed themselves into a neat queue along the wooden police barricades, and I thought, people are so tractable. I stayed there for about twenty seconds and realized no one was getting anywhere, so went looking for other ways in-- after a few attempts, finding one at the mid-block entrance on 31st. There was almost no one on the train, because no one had figured out how to get down there. I enjoyed a quiet ride home.
A lot of Penn Station remains, to me, undiscovered and unexplored. Like the entire office space above Penn Plaza, and like the hockey stadium-- which I think I've been in, for a basketball game, but I have never seen it as a hockey rink. or field. whatever it's called. I suppose that part is properly called Madison Square Garden. But the fact that it's all right there-- together, and yet separate-- there is something interesting about that.
I looked for a map of the layout of Penn Station just now but couldn't find it.
Écriture | Posted by Lily at 04:00 PM
Wed | December 21, 2005
Bostonians
I finished Bostonians last night. I think this must have been Henry James's green period. The main characters are named Olive, Basil, and Verena. I am not sure what their last names- Chancellor, Ransom, and Tarrant- might be meant to evoke.
There wasn't a false step in Bostonians, but I thought it lacked the psychological perspicacity of Portrait of a Lady and Washington Square. The palpation of people's minds. It's also possible, however, that I just didn't get it.
One of the things I admire about James is that he writes endings that make sense, whereas many other novelists drop the ball at the end. James is never afraid to say people lived unhappily ever after.
Again it's about love- this time, about the person in love (Olive) unable to compromise or give up (Verena), and the natural consequence of that (Verena, suffocated, finds freedom by escaping to Basil, who is, in the final sentence, acknowledged as not that great either). It's about letting go in relationships, and about trust and freedom. About how holding someone closer only makes them leave, in the end. And about confidence, really, which is what I meant by trust. If Olive had had confidence in her relationship with Verena then they would never have fallen apart.
There is a sense of inevitability in these novels-- set up the characters and play out their destinies. There is also a sense that things are mutually exclusive. Like in "Lesson of the Master," the feeling that one can have a life, or be a writer. And in Bostonians, Verena can be an activist, or get married. There is a sense that she could not do both, that one must be sacrificed for the other.
The novel has an intelligent side character in Mrs. Burrage.
Livres, films, TV | Posted by Lily at 12:54 PM
Tue | December 20, 2005
disjunctive syntax
I don't know what disjunctive syntax is. I tried to google it just now. I didn't get that job and I thought, what can I do? I will finally figure out what disjunctive syntax is. I should have done so long ago, but I was writing sentences for Kaplan. I was writing evaluations of other people's sentences and why they weren't GRE sentences, and now I am wondering why I did all that thinking for them. No one cares. No one even notices. I make it look too easy. Stuff that is well-thought out and clear always looks easy and obvious. Like the layout of invisible cube. It has a hundred customizations just to make it look like this, like it's nothing.
Syntax is the way words are arranged in a sentence; I know that much. "Disjunctive" means "marked by breaks or disunity," according to merriam webster.com-- I think it is this second definition that is used in the phrase disjunctive syntax. I suppose it just means a sentence in which the way the words are arranged is unconventional.
I'm going in the wrong direction. No one cares what disjunctive syntax is. I was just thinking, I wonder if any of the GRE sentences have disjunctive syntax. Then I realized it really doesn't matter.
It is probably things like when the subject and verb are far separated.
nonsense | Posted by Lily at 12:00 AM
Mon | December 19, 2005
rejection
Oh, I am bummed. Too many ups and downs recently. I didn't get the job. I am getting worn out. I have a very low tolerance for job rejection. There isn't any other job I want, this would have been the easiest for me to get. I am glad my computer is all the way over here, so I can be alone. Maybe I should leave, but I don't have anywhere to go and I don't want to go home right away... I just can't. I am just going to sit here until I feel calmer. I wish the people in the office across the street were staying late. They are mostly gone. I find it somewhat soothing to watch them at night. There is no one to watch now.
journal | Posted by Lily at 06:06 PM
Sun | December 18, 2005
work-life balance
I had a set of three interviews on Thursday. They weren't a big deal, but I made them into one. This of course had adverse effects on my performance-- except the last one. The Vice President greeted me with the widest grin I have ever seen and that I would never have expected from someone so high up. And finally I relaxed.
This job is soooo within reach-- not getting it would be like trying to kick a soccer ball into the goal from five feet away and missing. I think, sadly, that it has happened to me several times. There really isn't much hope for me.
Everything would be a lot better if I could just stop being paralyzed. I tend to put my life on hold if things are happening at work, and I shouldn't. I am a little better now than I was before, but I still do things like that, which isn't good for my life or my job.
I am wondering, if I started working at Kaps full time, whether I would become robotic.
journal | Posted by Lily at 09:58 AM
Mon | December 12, 2005
what I know about KGB from a season of occasional attendance
1. 7:00 is the worst time to show up. You won't get a seat but you will wait for it to start. Either go at 6:45 and get a seat, or go at 7:15 and stand, but save yourself the wait.
2. The reading about sex will be the worst one. It will be clumsy and uninsightful.
3. All the readings will be about sex anyway.
4. You won't die if you go alone.
5. The best seat in the house is the chair on the other side of the first table. However, you need to be with someone to sit there. If alone, sit on the bench by the door, or one of the stools.
6. Sunday night trains leave :11, not :39.
7. The bookless, awardless improv dudes upstairs are more creative than about half the readers I heard this season.
Things I have yet to accomplish:
1. Talking to the authors. I did exchange a half a dozen words with Josip Novakovich at my first reading. But that was about it.
What I know about improv from attending twice:
1. This doesn't start on time either.
2. If the door is closed, this means they are rehearsing, or something.
3. That girl in the audience is someone Porter is dating, or something.
4. No one in the audience is more than two degrees of separation from one of the performers.
5. They are writers.
Livres, films, TV | Posted by Lily at 10:12 AM
Fri | December 09, 2005
the presumptuous white man
I saw him again last night. I am not sure if he was the same person because he was wearing a different jacket-- a blue puffy vest, instead of the black wool coat. But he had the same slightly epileptic energy. He looks like an Aztec totem pole, tall and rectangular, with a solemn face and broad sagging cheeks. He is old, but not weak.
--
On Wednesday night I wanted to go to the Asian American Writers' Workshop for a panel on publishing short stories. However I missed the train by a full two minutes. I watched it glide across the overpass as I walked down Hillside.
As I stood in the cold, reading the train schedule and resenting myself for not putting on my shoes and getting out of the house more quickly, someone walked by behind me.
He didn't stop, but as he passed, he said, "where do you buy the tickets?" I didn't know whether he was talking to me or not-- the voice was a distance away, and not in my direction. I can tell whether sound is coming directly at me. I didn't turn around.
He walked by again seconds later and said, "where do you buy the tickets, I'm asking you nicely." As I turned my head he concluded, "you don't speak English, you're from China."
I do speak English, I half-muttered, the words staying mostly in my mouth.
At the same time he had continued without listening: "I'm from Mexico, I need to get to Penn Station."
"You don't buy the tickets here, you buy them on the train," I said. "The next train is at 6:10, you missed it."
He started to say something else but I walked away.
I thought how he irritated me: "I'm asking you nicely." He had taken on an adversarial tone. I had not done anything and he had escalated things to a confrontation. I wasn't ignoring you, I should have said. He should have said 'excuse me' and then waited for me to turn around. Instead he presumed it was my fault-- it was that I did not understand English. He just kept talking; he didn't wait for me to confirm or deny anything he had said.
When he said he was from Mexico I started to feel that he was just saying lines. That he was an actor and that he was delivering lines. I think I do this sometimes to convince myself that something isn't real, so I don't need to deal with it. "I'm from Mexico, I need to get to Penn Station." It sounded like he was just saying it. And it did not make sense- if he really thought I didn't speak English, why did he keep talking?
He didn't seem like he was from Mexico. He said "I'm asking you nicely" and who says that except white Americans and perhaps British people? It was in his manner- he just seemed like this societal white guy, who has supper and calls his basement the cellar. And it was in the capitalist way he situated himself in relation to me- the way he thought of himself and the way he thought of me. Unless Mexicans are capitalists, but I suspect they are not.
--
I saw him last night on the 10:39. He was wearing a blue puffy vest and he had a blue bag from the Met. He had gotten up as the train pulled into Chatham. There was a moment- a mental skip- when I saw him. He had just skipped himself and I skipped as his finished. I walked by and he went back a few seats to talk to another old white man. I don't know whether they knew each other or if he started the conversation just then. At any rate they talked to each other -mostly the Mexican to the second man, rather than vice versa- and I did not listen.
nonfiction | Posted by Lily at 02:18 PM
Thu | December 08, 2005
split ends
I am going to the Kaplan holiday party tonight. Crashing it, actually. I am not actually on the invitation list.
It has taken me til this week to figure out that I am sitting in an annex of the call center. The woman to the right of me just calls people and tells them they have auditions. She sounds like a recording. I have earplugs so that I do not go insane. I don't know what she has.
I have lots of split ends and I wish I had a pair of scissors. I am typing this because a few weeks ago I wrote that I wished I had IM, and my wish came true today.
journal | Posted by Lily at 04:36 PM
Mon | December 05, 2005
Forgotten Things
I have a tendency to become blissful and turn my brain off like I'm on the drop of a rollercoaster. Tao isn't like this. Jan is like this. I am going to go through everyone I know and think of whether or not or how much they are like this and try to detect any patterns.
I must be more mindful. Last night I hung out with Sharif and we were both kind of vacuous. We went to a bad kgb reading and then improv. I asked him what he thought the difference was between a story in which people have sex and porn. When is it just, this is porn. He said you know it when you see it. I have never seen it, so it doesn't help. I have an idea that it has something to do with vocabulary and emotion.
Whenever I make resolutions it's to do bad things. Like that I should lie more and watch porn. You're such a liar, he said. No, you are the liar, I should take some tips from you. I don't remember how we got to talking about lying. I might have written about it in this blog. I forget whether I've told him about this blog.
Last night I forgot that it was Sunday. I think this has happened before and I started to write about it and then I thought forget it, why do I write about such trivial things. But then it happened again and now I am thinking I must examine myself a little and figure out why I forget. Forgetting is fantasy, is disconnection with reality. Being in a writing state of mind involves disconnecting with this reality in order to more fully inhabit another. I have always been annoyed at writers who embrace their faults like some badge of their genius. I must be more mindful, that is all. I must be aware of how much I can forget before I start to miss trains.
I could not do anything after I realized I had been erroneously waiting for the 11:49, that I had not missed the 10:39-- it did not exist, there was nothing to miss-- I could have caught the 11:11, and was now waiting for the 12:34. I could not do anything after these revelations but I could not do anything before, either. I sat and wanted to go home. I observed the bums at Starbucks. I called Sharif and told him I missed my train. Well do you want to stay here? he asked. He meant his place in Fort Greene. He didn't mean anything else. No, I said, looking at my jeans with the rips and stitches and painted flowers. I might be able to get away with wearing them the next day at Kap, but I thought I had better not try.
I sat on the train until Orange and then had the inspiration to lie down on the three seater. At Millburn the conductor came by and called me Miss. He said I could lie down but that he didn't want me to miss my stop. Also there was a man coming around. By the way he said man I knew he meant creep. Write me a letter, the creep said, as we were leaving Summit.
This morning when I turned on the lamp it flashed and then expired. I remembered again how yesterday I sent that email to Jim but it went to the whole damn group. I forgot my cell phone. I left it in the pocket of my other jacket.
Improv is temporal. I forget what they said.
Sharif smells like dust. Last night I wanted nothing more than to go to the other side of the table and sit on his lap. Not in a provocative way, but in a cozy, intimate way. Instead I got up to leave, and he took a long time to put all his clothes on. A sweater and then a sweatshirt, and gloves, scarf and hat. I cannot believe you are the fussy one, I said. I put on my jacket and I'm done. While we were walking down 7th St. I borrowed his hat. When we got to the 8th St. N/R station we grinned at each other and said,
-bye!
-bye!
Last night when I called him from the Starbucks where I was surrounded by bums and crazy people, he told me that he left his wallet at the sushi place. Because I threw my fucking wallet in my fucking bag, and it fucking bounced off the edge of the bag instead of going in. He said this all good-naturedly. Over dinner he told me about this girl he slept with a few times and then told her it was turning into a relationship and he didn't want one of those. Oh, I said sympathetically. You probably hurt her feelings. No, he said, we hung out last week, for the first time in a month. I thought she must have been hurt anyway because when Eric broke up with me I was hurt but continued being friends anyway. I started to think of how to show him that she might be more hurt than she seemed, how to change the way he was thinking about her so that he would be nicer and more considerate. Oh what do I care about her, I said suddenly. I hope she gets hurt. Sharif laughed. I like him because I can say anything to him.
I told him about how I had to email ~~ recently to tell him I wasn't interested. That he had kept trying even though I kept brushing him off. That he had said thanks for the clarification, and I was surprised he didn't know. I wonder if I should email all the guys I know, I said, and tell them exactly what I think. I think they know, but maybe they don't. I tend to think everyone must know exactly what I think because I know exactly what they think. Still, after all these years, I don't know what I think of Sharif. And now that I'm thinking about it I don't know what anyone really thinks of me after all. Maybe I should instead email everyone and ask them what they think. But I am already forgetting my recent email disaster.
nonfiction | Posted by Lily at 12:07 PM
Fri | December 02, 2005
Mind Game
This morning on the train everyone reminded me of Jake. This was not difficult, since Jake is a white guy with brown hair and brown eyes and this pretty much describes half the men on the 8:06 Dover train. But I had never thought of it this way before; it was only in broadening my idea of him to that concept that I was able to see him in everyone. And I felt better because even though I never see him, I could look at the brown hair on the train and feel somehow closer to him.
Now I am at Kap and I am looking at everyone and changing them in my mind until they are Jake. I do this even with people who are very different from Jake. I start with the hair and then the body and always finish with the chin. There is something about Jake's chin-- or perhaps it's the angle of his jaw-- that is reminiscent of an old man. This doesn't sound appealing and it probably isn't, to a rational person. But I like him, and that's that.
Jeux | Posted by Lily at 12:41 PM
opium on wikipedia
So I got all excited when I wikipediaed Opium and it wasn't up there.
So I wrote an entry for Opium.
It's the only thing I've contributed to Opium, besides sitting at readings and making those around me feel awkward.
It's also the only thing I've contributed to the phenomenal Wikipedia.