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Sunday Rhaspody in Blue...or pardon me while I download my brain
[Ugh. Finally - haven't been able to get on my livejournal all weekend. Partly due to being busy. Partly due to the damn internet being screwy - and the slowness of my computer (which I hope I speeded up by deleting all of my internet temporary files). And partly due to my lack of patience with said internet connection and computer (I have a dial-up). ]
At any rate...feel the need to download random thoughts from the old brain. Not sure if anyone is reading this, but if so? My apologies for anything that seems incoherent, random, rambling, or non-sequitor ahead of time. Hey, you can't complain if I warn you can you? (Ah, my modus operandi in a nutshell - I will criticize my writing before any one else gets the chance, that way whatever they say just can't come close to my own criticism. Heh. Beat yah to it! Wait did I use modus operandi in the right manner there? Ponders. Nope.
Oh well, can't come up with another word at the moment, will have to do.)
This week has been a comedy of minor errors of judgment on my part or bad assumptions. Teaching me once again, since I obviously forgot, that the most honest sentence in the English language may actually be "I do not have a bloody clue" or "I don't know." Not to mention safest. To give myself credit, I have not been alone. Others have equally done this. Reassuring that.
Don't worry, won't bore you with a list of the errors, can't remember all of them anyway. The ones I do remeber? Let's see - I assumed Burlington Coat Factory would have a down jacket in my size, when it just had jackets that fit people between 4ft-5'6, I internally ranted about how easy it was for short people to find clothes. Assuming if I were say 5ft, I could find whatever I wanted. Mid-rant, who should show up? Wales. Wales is five foot by the way. I'm six foot. She has tiny size 6 feet. And she was hunting desperately for two things "pants" and "socks", she couldn't find either. Also despises shopping. We left the store, both partially satisfied. Me with a new wool coat. Wales with a pair of fuzzy pink socks. Commiserating about shopping.
Assumption number 2 - at work I assumed a co-worker was on vacation, was going on about how great a week it was weather wise because he'd picked that for vacation, only to discover mid-week that the co-worker was out sick with kidney stones, which co-worker was being quiet about. Those are just two.
Would take me forever to list all of them. Besides...more interested in writing about this DVD I rented.
On Sat, I rented two DVD's, both of which had been recommended to me. The first was Mean Girls, the second In The Cut. I assumed I wouldn't like either movie. In both cases, I was pleasantly surprised. Also both movies dealt with "assumptions" and how making assumptions about people can hurt you. Mean Girls - is sort of a soft, child-friendly 21st Century version of the dark, nilhilistic 1990s high school satire Heathers.
I prefer Heathers, but then I've managed to forget or rather repress my high school years. From what little I do remember? Mean Girls is pretty damn close.
But Heathers - well, let's just say when it comes to high school, I've got a suppressed homicidal streak. (I considered putting down as my senior year book quote - "I'M MAD AS HELL AND I"M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE" from Network, but decided no one would appreciate the humor and went with something much safer. Do I recommend the DVD? Nah. Rent the video. Or just watch the movie.
The extras are a wast of time. Well, except for the bit about costuming, that actually was fascinating. And the revealation that the actress who plays the Queen Bee, Regina, (Rachel McAdams) is apparently bald in real life and was wearing a very realistic but unmanageable blond wig. See? I assumed it was her real hair. Nope a wig. Also enjoyed the revelation that the actress who plays the cool math teacher is also the writer of the film. Guess they had a tight budget?
Jane Campion's In The Cut, which stars Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, is a femme noire. Which may or may not explain why so many male critics seemed to despise it at the time. Not sure. Femme Noire is a tough field apparently.
Very controversial. Here's a few others: "Love Crimes" by Lizzie Borden,
"Blue Steele", and "Black Widow"(Debra Winger). In each case the protagonist is a woman, we're in her point of view, and she is living in a gritty dark lanscape. Like "male" pov noire, the opposite sex are seen from a somewhat skewed lense. The protagonist is making assumptions about them based on her/his own mythology, insecurities, wants and desires. Often the protagonist is a tragic hero, or a hero who falls into the depths of despair. The book, In The Cut, is based on, by Susannah Moore (who co-wrote the screenplay with Jane Campion) is actually true noire. The writer in one of the Behind the Scene's featurettes explains why she chose to write what she calls an erotic female noire novel and how she went about it. (I highly recommend the DVD featurettes on this one - they are amazing, actually as good if not better than some of the Mutant Enemy ones. In fact I actually found myself appreciating and enjoying the movie more after watching them. Very odd.) I read the book when I first moved to NYC in 1997, borrowed it from Wales, who recommended the movie.
(Wales didn't like the commentary as much - partly because she assumed that it was between Jane Campion (the director) and Susannah Moore (the writer) and she grew annoyed with Campion for interrupting Ms. Moore and doing all the talking. Her assumption turns out to be false by the way - the commentary is between Jane Campion and Laurie Parker (the producer), which is why Campion does most of the talking. Although surprisingly, Ms. Parker had a lot to add.
Made me reassess my assumptions about producers. Want to learn about film-making, listen to some of that commentary. Moore is in the Behind the Scenes' featurette which is different.) At any rate - the book is darker than the movie in some places, much more erotic, and much harder to follow. The ending
is also very dark. They changed it. So much, that I honestly was suprised.
They don't say in the commentary that they did, but through the commentary they justify the ending they chose quite well, so well in fact, that I found myself changing my mind.
The most eye-opening bit about listening to the commentary is the difference between what I got from the film and what the creators intended. I made assumptions about the creators watching the film that I realized were completely off listening to the commentary.
One assumption I made was that there was an anti-male thread going on. Nope.
Jane Campion explains in her commentary what she's going for, the disarticulation between the characters and the sexes - with this line:
"We wanted to capture the women's sense of collasping into a relationship - how overwhelming that sense is to a man, so that he really just wants to run away, and he should..." When I thought over what she said and what I saw on screen, I realized that I'd misread the text, projecting my own interpretation upon it, through my own lense. Flipping it a different way - I could see it differently.
The movie is in some ways, quite lovely, it is about an internal character as opposed to external - so slow going. Quiet. Not loud. There are several scenes of Meg Ryan's character reading quotes on the New York Subway walls. (Called Poetry in Motion - it's on the ads at the rim of the walls.) Here's one:
Midway along the journey of our life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, I wandered off from the straight path...
In the commentary - Campion mentions how they deliberately reference fairy tales. And how annoyed she was at Disney for sanitzing them. That the Grimm stories were supposed to be nightmarish. Little children have nightmares. The fairy tales were how you got through your fears by example. And Parker agrees, stating "in the past we got through horrible times through the use of horrible tales that gave us examples of how to get through, now our tales are about the perfect housewife, the perfect body, the perfect woman, and perfect sex...and as a result we need psychiatrists..."
The character Meg Ryan plays in this story is very different than her usual roles. Frannie is an internal character. She has few lines. Rarely laughs out loud. Smiles a lot. Is thoughtful. She is a quiet character. Ryan normally plays external characters and up until seeing this film they were all I thought she was capable of playing. In fact, I assumned Ryan was more or less playing herself. Turns out - from the featurette, that actually this character is closer to who Ryan truly is, and the other characters less so. Made my appreciation for an actress that has slowly grown on me over the years increase a bit. The character is described by the director as a single woman warrior - a woman who cares not how the world sees her, has long ago lost interest in her external image, and lives her life the way she wishes, yet longs for the male companion, the love. (I strongly identified with Frannie, since I too am a single woman warrior living in a huge city longing for the male companion, love interest, yet unable to quite find one.)
The story is also one about sisters and the romantic mythology our mother's give us about their loves, lost and gained and how that mythology affects our own way of looking at life.
But the central theme, the commentators stated is the "misreading of things" or
"the faulty assumptions" we make about something that leads us down the wrong road or path. I found myself thinking about that a lot this week. The number of faulty assumptions I make. About myself. About the outside world. About others.
Also reminded me of a short story I wrote ages ago for a creative writing course. The story was told in first person pov, first person voice. I never veered from it. Filled with slang and curse words. I basically entered my Kidbrother's head completely. Everyone who read the story came up with a different theory about what it was about. I was not aloud to speak until they finished discussing. The rule was you wait until they've thoroughly discussed and torn your story apart before you can say a word. Actually you have to wait until the teacher asks you to speak. So I waited. Amazed at some of the theories. At the end, when the teacher asked me to tell them what my intent was - I did, and I remember him getting angry at me. Because the story I'd told was not the one he'd figured out. He had invariably projected his own experience on it. He made a series of assumptions based on what he knew about life. There were people in the class that did know what the tale was about with little difficulty. Others who read far more into it than was there.
It was eye-opening. Just as another experience in the same class was - I'd written a story about my Grandfather who had had three brain tumors over a lengthy period of time, which had been successfully removed by chemotherapy, but unfortunately so was a good portion of his mental capacity. One of the people in the class was furious with me for stating three brain tumors. She accused me of exaggerating. Because her grandfather or father had died of one and it was inoperable and she believed it was impossible to have more than one. The teacher agreed with her - said I had to change the story, change what had really happened to reflect the usual reality or experience. She made the assumption that her experience was the *only* experience possible. Could not accept an alternate one. I've had the same experience oddly enough discussing learning disabilities, and have begun to realize that it may be impossible to discuss them without getting hurt. Without people projecting their own experience or me projecting mine onto them - forgetting something very important in the process - we may all be human, part of the same family, but that does not mean we think the same, our bodies are the same, or that we experience things in a similar manner.
There's a game I used to play in school - you were shown a movie, an event, a photo - everyone had to write down their first impressions within say five minutes. Then each person had to read them to the class. Not allowed to alter anything. Each time I played this game - no one, absolutely no one, came up with the same impressions. We all saw the same thing. But we all interpreted it differently. We aren't computers. Computers all process information the same way. Human brains? Not at all. It may seem like we all enter and leave the world the same way, but if you look at the details, you'll note that isn't the case.
Went to a friend's baby shower today. We were discussing babies. Her's was born very quickly. 30 minutes. Tiny child. 3 pds, 5 ounces at birth. 9 weeks premature. My sisinlaw? 30 hours of labor. 8 pds 11 ounces at birth. Almost a week late. Long and skinny. No woman gives birth the same way. And if you listen to women discuss pregnancy or the children they've had, no two births or pregnancies are alike. Some women have great pregnancies, some throw-up the whole time, some are bed-ridden. Same with death. One person goes quietly in their sleep. Another takes hours, long gut-wrenching hours. We want to put people into boxes. Make neat little syllogisms about them. ie. All Canadians hate rice pudding, x is Canadian, so x hates rice pudding. Sorry, no. All People have free will. All are individual. You can't predict what someone else will do based on another person with similar attributes. You can't make assumptions. I've learned this. You cannot predict behavior. All you can do is admit, I don't know. I don't know what you are experiencing, I can just share my own experiences and similar responses, and maybe we can figure out a way of understanding each other enough to learn, love, and grow with each other?
Okay word rhaspody or word vomit is beginning to dwindle, this is good. Download complete, I think...will cut tag to so doesn't take up space on people's friends list, which I haven't read this week...sorry. Been meaning to. Been wanting to. Also haven't made it to the atpo board to read latest in their fanfic project - again I blame my internet connection and my printer.
At any rate...feel the need to download random thoughts from the old brain. Not sure if anyone is reading this, but if so? My apologies for anything that seems incoherent, random, rambling, or non-sequitor ahead of time. Hey, you can't complain if I warn you can you? (Ah, my modus operandi in a nutshell - I will criticize my writing before any one else gets the chance, that way whatever they say just can't come close to my own criticism. Heh. Beat yah to it! Wait did I use modus operandi in the right manner there? Ponders. Nope.
Oh well, can't come up with another word at the moment, will have to do.)
This week has been a comedy of minor errors of judgment on my part or bad assumptions. Teaching me once again, since I obviously forgot, that the most honest sentence in the English language may actually be "I do not have a bloody clue" or "I don't know." Not to mention safest. To give myself credit, I have not been alone. Others have equally done this. Reassuring that.
Don't worry, won't bore you with a list of the errors, can't remember all of them anyway. The ones I do remeber? Let's see - I assumed Burlington Coat Factory would have a down jacket in my size, when it just had jackets that fit people between 4ft-5'6, I internally ranted about how easy it was for short people to find clothes. Assuming if I were say 5ft, I could find whatever I wanted. Mid-rant, who should show up? Wales. Wales is five foot by the way. I'm six foot. She has tiny size 6 feet. And she was hunting desperately for two things "pants" and "socks", she couldn't find either. Also despises shopping. We left the store, both partially satisfied. Me with a new wool coat. Wales with a pair of fuzzy pink socks. Commiserating about shopping.
Assumption number 2 - at work I assumed a co-worker was on vacation, was going on about how great a week it was weather wise because he'd picked that for vacation, only to discover mid-week that the co-worker was out sick with kidney stones, which co-worker was being quiet about. Those are just two.
Would take me forever to list all of them. Besides...more interested in writing about this DVD I rented.
On Sat, I rented two DVD's, both of which had been recommended to me. The first was Mean Girls, the second In The Cut. I assumed I wouldn't like either movie. In both cases, I was pleasantly surprised. Also both movies dealt with "assumptions" and how making assumptions about people can hurt you. Mean Girls - is sort of a soft, child-friendly 21st Century version of the dark, nilhilistic 1990s high school satire Heathers.
I prefer Heathers, but then I've managed to forget or rather repress my high school years. From what little I do remember? Mean Girls is pretty damn close.
But Heathers - well, let's just say when it comes to high school, I've got a suppressed homicidal streak. (I considered putting down as my senior year book quote - "I'M MAD AS HELL AND I"M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE" from Network, but decided no one would appreciate the humor and went with something much safer. Do I recommend the DVD? Nah. Rent the video. Or just watch the movie.
The extras are a wast of time. Well, except for the bit about costuming, that actually was fascinating. And the revealation that the actress who plays the Queen Bee, Regina, (Rachel McAdams) is apparently bald in real life and was wearing a very realistic but unmanageable blond wig. See? I assumed it was her real hair. Nope a wig. Also enjoyed the revelation that the actress who plays the cool math teacher is also the writer of the film. Guess they had a tight budget?
Jane Campion's In The Cut, which stars Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, is a femme noire. Which may or may not explain why so many male critics seemed to despise it at the time. Not sure. Femme Noire is a tough field apparently.
Very controversial. Here's a few others: "Love Crimes" by Lizzie Borden,
"Blue Steele", and "Black Widow"(Debra Winger). In each case the protagonist is a woman, we're in her point of view, and she is living in a gritty dark lanscape. Like "male" pov noire, the opposite sex are seen from a somewhat skewed lense. The protagonist is making assumptions about them based on her/his own mythology, insecurities, wants and desires. Often the protagonist is a tragic hero, or a hero who falls into the depths of despair. The book, In The Cut, is based on, by Susannah Moore (who co-wrote the screenplay with Jane Campion) is actually true noire. The writer in one of the Behind the Scene's featurettes explains why she chose to write what she calls an erotic female noire novel and how she went about it. (I highly recommend the DVD featurettes on this one - they are amazing, actually as good if not better than some of the Mutant Enemy ones. In fact I actually found myself appreciating and enjoying the movie more after watching them. Very odd.) I read the book when I first moved to NYC in 1997, borrowed it from Wales, who recommended the movie.
(Wales didn't like the commentary as much - partly because she assumed that it was between Jane Campion (the director) and Susannah Moore (the writer) and she grew annoyed with Campion for interrupting Ms. Moore and doing all the talking. Her assumption turns out to be false by the way - the commentary is between Jane Campion and Laurie Parker (the producer), which is why Campion does most of the talking. Although surprisingly, Ms. Parker had a lot to add.
Made me reassess my assumptions about producers. Want to learn about film-making, listen to some of that commentary. Moore is in the Behind the Scenes' featurette which is different.) At any rate - the book is darker than the movie in some places, much more erotic, and much harder to follow. The ending
is also very dark. They changed it. So much, that I honestly was suprised.
They don't say in the commentary that they did, but through the commentary they justify the ending they chose quite well, so well in fact, that I found myself changing my mind.
The most eye-opening bit about listening to the commentary is the difference between what I got from the film and what the creators intended. I made assumptions about the creators watching the film that I realized were completely off listening to the commentary.
One assumption I made was that there was an anti-male thread going on. Nope.
Jane Campion explains in her commentary what she's going for, the disarticulation between the characters and the sexes - with this line:
"We wanted to capture the women's sense of collasping into a relationship - how overwhelming that sense is to a man, so that he really just wants to run away, and he should..." When I thought over what she said and what I saw on screen, I realized that I'd misread the text, projecting my own interpretation upon it, through my own lense. Flipping it a different way - I could see it differently.
The movie is in some ways, quite lovely, it is about an internal character as opposed to external - so slow going. Quiet. Not loud. There are several scenes of Meg Ryan's character reading quotes on the New York Subway walls. (Called Poetry in Motion - it's on the ads at the rim of the walls.) Here's one:
Midway along the journey of our life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, I wandered off from the straight path...
In the commentary - Campion mentions how they deliberately reference fairy tales. And how annoyed she was at Disney for sanitzing them. That the Grimm stories were supposed to be nightmarish. Little children have nightmares. The fairy tales were how you got through your fears by example. And Parker agrees, stating "in the past we got through horrible times through the use of horrible tales that gave us examples of how to get through, now our tales are about the perfect housewife, the perfect body, the perfect woman, and perfect sex...and as a result we need psychiatrists..."
The character Meg Ryan plays in this story is very different than her usual roles. Frannie is an internal character. She has few lines. Rarely laughs out loud. Smiles a lot. Is thoughtful. She is a quiet character. Ryan normally plays external characters and up until seeing this film they were all I thought she was capable of playing. In fact, I assumned Ryan was more or less playing herself. Turns out - from the featurette, that actually this character is closer to who Ryan truly is, and the other characters less so. Made my appreciation for an actress that has slowly grown on me over the years increase a bit. The character is described by the director as a single woman warrior - a woman who cares not how the world sees her, has long ago lost interest in her external image, and lives her life the way she wishes, yet longs for the male companion, the love. (I strongly identified with Frannie, since I too am a single woman warrior living in a huge city longing for the male companion, love interest, yet unable to quite find one.)
The story is also one about sisters and the romantic mythology our mother's give us about their loves, lost and gained and how that mythology affects our own way of looking at life.
But the central theme, the commentators stated is the "misreading of things" or
"the faulty assumptions" we make about something that leads us down the wrong road or path. I found myself thinking about that a lot this week. The number of faulty assumptions I make. About myself. About the outside world. About others.
Also reminded me of a short story I wrote ages ago for a creative writing course. The story was told in first person pov, first person voice. I never veered from it. Filled with slang and curse words. I basically entered my Kidbrother's head completely. Everyone who read the story came up with a different theory about what it was about. I was not aloud to speak until they finished discussing. The rule was you wait until they've thoroughly discussed and torn your story apart before you can say a word. Actually you have to wait until the teacher asks you to speak. So I waited. Amazed at some of the theories. At the end, when the teacher asked me to tell them what my intent was - I did, and I remember him getting angry at me. Because the story I'd told was not the one he'd figured out. He had invariably projected his own experience on it. He made a series of assumptions based on what he knew about life. There were people in the class that did know what the tale was about with little difficulty. Others who read far more into it than was there.
It was eye-opening. Just as another experience in the same class was - I'd written a story about my Grandfather who had had three brain tumors over a lengthy period of time, which had been successfully removed by chemotherapy, but unfortunately so was a good portion of his mental capacity. One of the people in the class was furious with me for stating three brain tumors. She accused me of exaggerating. Because her grandfather or father had died of one and it was inoperable and she believed it was impossible to have more than one. The teacher agreed with her - said I had to change the story, change what had really happened to reflect the usual reality or experience. She made the assumption that her experience was the *only* experience possible. Could not accept an alternate one. I've had the same experience oddly enough discussing learning disabilities, and have begun to realize that it may be impossible to discuss them without getting hurt. Without people projecting their own experience or me projecting mine onto them - forgetting something very important in the process - we may all be human, part of the same family, but that does not mean we think the same, our bodies are the same, or that we experience things in a similar manner.
There's a game I used to play in school - you were shown a movie, an event, a photo - everyone had to write down their first impressions within say five minutes. Then each person had to read them to the class. Not allowed to alter anything. Each time I played this game - no one, absolutely no one, came up with the same impressions. We all saw the same thing. But we all interpreted it differently. We aren't computers. Computers all process information the same way. Human brains? Not at all. It may seem like we all enter and leave the world the same way, but if you look at the details, you'll note that isn't the case.
Went to a friend's baby shower today. We were discussing babies. Her's was born very quickly. 30 minutes. Tiny child. 3 pds, 5 ounces at birth. 9 weeks premature. My sisinlaw? 30 hours of labor. 8 pds 11 ounces at birth. Almost a week late. Long and skinny. No woman gives birth the same way. And if you listen to women discuss pregnancy or the children they've had, no two births or pregnancies are alike. Some women have great pregnancies, some throw-up the whole time, some are bed-ridden. Same with death. One person goes quietly in their sleep. Another takes hours, long gut-wrenching hours. We want to put people into boxes. Make neat little syllogisms about them. ie. All Canadians hate rice pudding, x is Canadian, so x hates rice pudding. Sorry, no. All People have free will. All are individual. You can't predict what someone else will do based on another person with similar attributes. You can't make assumptions. I've learned this. You cannot predict behavior. All you can do is admit, I don't know. I don't know what you are experiencing, I can just share my own experiences and similar responses, and maybe we can figure out a way of understanding each other enough to learn, love, and grow with each other?
Okay word rhaspody or word vomit is beginning to dwindle, this is good. Download complete, I think...will cut tag to so doesn't take up space on people's friends list, which I haven't read this week...sorry. Been meaning to. Been wanting to. Also haven't made it to the atpo board to read latest in their fanfic project - again I blame my internet connection and my printer.