Ampersands and Semi-Colons

Here’s the deal: I’m rethinking the blog. I’m trying to come up with a custom interface, if wordpress will allow me, and kind of rethink what I want to do with this thing.

In the meanwhile, my roommate and I have embarked on a (not so) grand adventure. I always want to see something at the movies, and never actually make it out there. So, we’ve decided that no matter what, Sunday is movie day. We alternate who gets to choose, and each of us get one veto per month if we really don’t want to see anything. Since the end of January or beginning of Feb., we’ve seen:

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
Let the Right One In
Milk
Waltz With Bashir
The Wrestler
Tokyo!

There may have been others, I wish I remembered. At any rate, it’s been great and I highly recommend doing this. Even if you don’t love all the movies you see, there’s something about just going.

I haven’t had the good fortune to see them live yet, but I adore Iceland’s Sigur Rós. They played a show at the MoMA recently, which you can watch here: http://stereogum.com/archives/video/watch-sigur-ross-set-from-moma_012861.html

I am working today on updating my readings page so that it’s a little more user-friendly: adding categories, things like that.

And yeah, I know, the snow’s a little cheesy but that’s too bad. I’m from Miami, so I’m enamored with it right now.

Czech author Milan Kundera writes really, really well. This is from the beginning of his book, The Curtain on the art of the novel. I thought maybe someone would enjoy it as much as I did.

“The Consciousness of Continuity

They used to tell a story about my father, who was a musician. He is out with his friends someplace when, from a radio or a phonograph, they hear the strains of a symphony. The friends, all of them music buffs, immediately recognize Beethoven’s Ninth. They ask my father, “What’s that playing?” After a long thought he says, “It sounds like Beethoven.” They all stifle a laugh: my father doesn’t recognize the Ninth Symphony! “Are you sure?” “Yes,” says my father, “Late Beethoven.” “How do you know it’s late?” He points out a certain harmonic shift that the younger Beethoven could never have used.

The anecdote is probably just a mischievous little invention, but it does illustrate the consciousness of continuity, one of the distinguishing marks of a person belonging to the civilization that is (or was) ours. Everything, in our eyes, took on the quality of a history, seemed a more or less logical sequence of events, of attitudes, of works. From my early youth I knew the exact chronology of my favorite writers’ works. Impossible to think Appolinaire could have written Alcools after Calligrammes, because if that were the case he would have been a different poet, his whole work would have a different meaning. I love each of Picasso’s paintings for itself, but I also love the whole course of his work understood as a long journey whose succession of stages I know by heart. In art, the classic metaphysical questions- Where do we come from? Where are we going?- have a clear, concrete meaning, and are not at all unanswerable.”

I have updated the writings section of the blog; it now includes a literature review as well as my midterm for my Media Studies: Ideas class.

Came across this video doing some homework. It’s pretty relevant to what I’m thinking about a lot these days. If anyone had any questions about media studies (what exactly IS she doing?), this might help to answer. Of course, there’s the traditional cinema theory, but media studies is much much MUCH more than that.

as it were: in a way; so to speak. (from dictionary.com)

I have long been fascinated with strange grammatical relics. There is something imperfect and nostalgic in them that makes me want to read Romantic poetry (era, not genre!) in a window with a steaming mug of something delicious. The very archaic-ness of these kinds of expressions is something that appeals to me, a vestige of a time long gone where words were carefully crafted. Maybe it’s because I studied Literature, maybe it was the linguistics classes. I don’t really know.

As it were is an expression that describes a certain kind of likeness- it is almost like something. It is not quite like that thing, but one could see the similarities between them, metaphorically. There is this threshhold that is almost, but not quite broken. A simile, is, in comparison, so much more crass. The direct comparison lacks art, in a way. The almost comparison leaves so much more to the imagination- while it may not be exact, the similarities are somehow deeper. Cased between commas, it is its own little island in a sentence.

This tiny little turn of phrase reminds me of Keats’s theory of negative capability: “At once it struck me, what quality went to form a man of achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean negative capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason,” he wrote, in a letter. This expression is, as it were, Shakespeare, living in uncertainty, confident without grasping.

No. 16 (Red, Brown, and Black), 1958

Something about Mark Rothko’s paintings make me so happy. I remember the first time I saw his work- my sister took me to see it in London, at the Tate Modern. We walk into this dimly lit room, with these enormous paintings on the wall, all dark rectangles of color and smooth transitions. I just stood there. It was almost as if they breathed.

He, with Adolph Gottlieb, had this to say about his work: “We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.”

These paintings make me feel. They make me emotional. They are fantastic. Should you ever get a chance to sit in front of one for a little bit, take it. Images on the internet can in no way compare.

Well, it was a tremendous learning experience, recording my own voice (and HATING IT, of course), but all in all I am satisified with my first project. Hopefully moving on to film won’t be so bad.

My intellectual autobiography is now available in the writings section. If you’re too lazy to go to the page, here you go.