Orphan was actually kind of boring, which is amazing, because how in God's name can any movie with this plot description be boring?
( The SHOCKING TWIST ENDING... )

This movie fell into that terrible trap of contemporary "horror", which attempts so much to avoid veering into exploitation and over-the-topness that even the most outlandish concepts still come across very flatly. If they had amped up the cheese level a little more it would have been more worthwhile. Although, the fine New Yorkers I shared a theatre with last night found it to be a laugh riot, so who can say?

I had a dream last night about an old flame that tangentially involved Livejournal, and so I thought, maybe I'll dust off the old place. My dreams have been weirdly nostalgic and vaguely sexual lately....there has been a little parade of old acquaintances making out with my subconscious dream self.

Right now I live in a small, but lovely light blue apartment in Northern New Jersey, where I accrue books and boyfriends at an alarming rate. I'm in love, in an agonizing, dramatic, wonderful way. I once burned a hole in his living room carpet and I was secretly glad I did it because now he has to think about me every time he looks at it. In a few weeks I start library science school at Pratt. I still sell books at a Major Chain Bookstore and I also make copies and e-mail things at Major Pharmaceutical Company library. I do a lot of yoga.

I think this summer's movie selection has been shit, but then I haven't seen Orphan yet. I really love Fake Nick Cave's Twitter. My ex-fiancee sent me a drunken letter that said that she was glad I broke up with her because it saved her from being with someone, in her words, "bourgeois and boring". I got back in touch with my best friend from high school, the Loeb to my Leopold, and I realized my sidekick days are over. Mad Men owns my heart, mind and soul.

So life is pretty damn good.

My assessment of Dollhouse: Boring. What's the point of a Whedon show without Whedonesque dialouge? I suppose time will tell, but it seems to episodic for me. Also, I hope the King of the Feminists is enjoying all the naked Eliza Dushku promo shots.

Oh, and Eliza Dushku has no range, so this is really going to be a fun ride.

It's not all snark and misery over here. I also saw Coraline last night, and I have to say, that was amazing. I'm so, so glad that Henry Selick did it and not Tim Burton, because Tim Burton has to impose his pop goth aesthetic on all his material and that tone would have been all wrong for this story. It was such a beautiful film, an amazing use of the stop-motion art form. Naturally, they didn't need to add a boy to what is a girl's story, but what are you going to do?

Incidentally, one day, I will reproduce the Other Mother's bug themed living room in my own home, so help me god.

- I am taking this class on the anthropology of the Middle East, and three weeks of the semester, most of my fellow classmates still seem to think that India is a middle eastern nation. The only ones who do not believe this, apparently, are the ones of middle eastern or Indian origin. And me, of course, but really, I'm a Citizen of the World.

- Pandora Radio keeps trying to get me to listen to Kraftwerk. Enough! I'm too old to get into that game.

- The Office has become an utter nightmare. Even if you still enjoy the show, you have to concede that it has gone off the rails.

- Lately I've been inadvertently waking up at 6 in the morning everyday. I am too tired to get up, but I can not get back to sleep. So I lie in bed and think about how I'm not going to get into grad school and Sagi (that's my current boyfriend) won't let me live with him and I'll have to go back and live with my mother. It's worse then any nightmare I've ever had.

Hello there, Livejournal. It's good to see you again. My life had turned to bullshit around October, but recently, it's reverted back to it's usual pleasant state of mild anxiety.

Basically, the unbearable news that Mick Harvey left the Bad Seeds came out, and I've already told everyone I know who cares (IE- no one), so I felt that I should share my feelings with you, my neglected LJ friends. I find this incredibly upsetting. Mick was the best of them, we all know that. Idolator really hit the nail on the head with this one. Ugh. Warren Ellis. I guess we can look forward to a lot of violin and more of Nick's guitar stylings in the future. How bleak.

Well, it's a new year, I am beginning my last semester of college, I have a new boyfriend who is only semi-fluent in English, and a whole truckload of guilt over the ex-boyfriend, who likes to text me in the middle of night to tell me about Hell and how I'm going there.

Welcome back to my life!!

I think I am happy with the casualness of my current relationships, platonic and otherwise, and then it's late at night and David Foster Wallace is dead and I have no one to talk to except the Livejournal.

- When I was England, I was a regular patron at a wonderful basement after-hours bar in the London 'burbs, which played a truly delightful combination of indie, britpop and 80's nonsense. One of my fondest memories is utterly losing my shit with the Boy in the Leather Jacket to some amazingly peppy, very English sounding guitar song and feeling as fantastic as I have ever felt in my life. Although I could remember the sound of the song, the only lyrics I could recall were "Liverpool" and "happy", which in spite of some Googling, did not yield any results.
Then today, I was flipping through the channels and I passed by the generally shitty MTV University station and what should be playing but that very song, which turns out to be Let's Dance to Joy Division" by the Wombats. I will not lie to you, friends: I teared up. It just sounds like England and I'm a sentimental fool.

- Speaking of the Boy with the Leather Jacket, he maintains still that if I come back to England next year for grad school, he'll be waiting for me. That's hilarious.

- Also while flipping through the channels I saw a commercial for what will soon become your favorite band: Blackmore's Night. They are like the freakish love child of Stevie Nicks and Nightwish conceived in the middle of the Ren Faire.

One of the greatest joys in my life is the Independent Film Channel. Today Total Eclipse was on, which I hadn't seen in a million years. For those of you who aren't big into homoerotic literary bio-pics, it's a movie where a young Leonardo DiCaprio plays Arthur Rimbaud and David Thewlis plays Paul Verlaine. If that sounds really fantastic, let me assure you that it is not. It's badly paced and melodramatic, but so was I when I was 16, so I didn't notice at the time.

Fun Fact: The only piece of fiction I've ever had published was a story about going to high school with Arthur Rimbaud. It was not very good.

I still like Rimbaud, although ever since I started reading Catullus in Latin I've been very wart of translated poetry. I feel somehow cheated. I've never really read Rimbaud's words; just something that some English speaker thinks Rimbaud might have written if he wrote in English. French is pretty low on my list of languages to learn, however, so I doubt I will ever get to level of reading him in the original.

Most poets I like are male, Western, dead and total assholes, from Catullus down to Larkin. Sappho, Rumi, Dickinson, Stein and Auden (not an asshole) are the only exceptions I can think of at the moment. I'm not proud.

Yesterday I went back to work, which was a blessing a curse. It was a blessing, because my job is actually one of my favorite aspects of my current life, and a curse because I am not entirely recovered from having an organ removed. Being on my feet for eight plus hours has left a pain that I suspect will linger.

It was also a curse because I missed Mad Men and I am addicted.

I've noticed in the past couple years my approach to TV shows has changed considerably. I'm less obsessive then I used to be, which can only be a good thing, but it's more then that. I used to focus on one aspect of a show, almost to the exclusion of all the other elements. Usually it was a character or a couple, and my obsessive devotion to this aspect caused me to miss the wider show in general. Usually I didn't even stop to think about whether or not it was any good.

If I'm not mentioning specific examples, that is because they are generally too embarrassing to repeat, although I will say The X-files was probably a fine example of this phenomenon. I was particularly obsessed with Fox Mulder, and it wasn't until I started revisiting the show in the past few years that I really come to understand exactly how much gobbleygook that series really consisted of. I admired Mulder because of what I thought of as his crusade for truth (although, honestly, it probably had more to do with my vested interest in romanticizing obsession), but of course, the great let down was that he was never going to find this truth, because Chris Carter himself clearly had no idea what it was. If a creator of fictional characters is a god to those characters, Carter was (and recent evidence proves still remains) pretty shit at it.

Anyway, these days, I tend to take a show as a whole. I invest more equally in every character, and as a result, less obsessively overall. I think more about the writing and the structure and (something that is extremely important to me) whether or not I can sense that the writers are invested in the lives of the characters. The big turning point was probably Buffy. I got into the show for a narrow, obsessive reason, namely the character of Spike (and this was back when that was a narrow interest indeed, before he was in every episode, ever). However, as I watched and absorbed more of the show, I became more interested in the broader story, what Joss Whedon and the writers were trying to say and both the good and bad ways which they approached the narratives. So Buffy grew me up as a television watcher, weirdly enough.

I'm glad for all this, because I wouldn't be able to appreciate Mad Men without it. There's no one I identify with nor any couples I care one way or another about, but I am still absorbed by it. All the characters need untangling and I'm enjoying the process of watching it happen.

Although, if you love obsessives (and I still do), I highly recommend reading or listening to an interview with creator Matt Weiner. As even a glance at the show would probably reveal, the man loves his details. I once heard him say that the fact that the shots of the office show the ceiling, and that the ceiling is the same kind of ceiling still used in office buildings, is the thing that makes the entire office set, and therefore the show, work. Amazing! Chris Carter never thought about ceilings, I'm sure.

My beloved World/Inferno Friendship Society are going to stage a production of their concept album Addicted to Bad Ideas, based upon the life of Peter Lorre. And where are they choosing to stage this, exactly? Oh, only at the very university which I happen to attend! This is truly a wonder. For instance, I wonder why they would chose this university, possibly the least hip place in all of metro New York (unless beer pong and loutishness are suddenly hip, which I certainly hope not)?

What a mystery. I will not waste time contemplating when I should be celebrating, however. It's not everyday one can take the intercampus shuttle to see one of one's top ten favorite bands, now is it?

I was no great fan of the ending of The Dark Knight, but then I read this article, and now I'm not so sure.

The more I think about it, this movie really isn't even about Batman as a person. It's about Gotham. And in that regard, the ending is a-ok. It's only when I consider it as a BATMAN MOVIE about MY BATMAN that it's problematic.

And it's pretty rare that something insightful shows up on Fandom Secrets, but today I saw this:



It is horrible and yet so very true.

I started classes again today, so hopefully a large portion of my brain will stop thinking about Batman and return to thinking about practical matters. Like Latin verb tenses.

So, within a week of my return to this fine nation, I had to have one of my organs removed (it was one of the ones you don't need). This has proved to be a painful and unpleasant experience, but now that I'm not in the hospital anymore, it's also incredibly boring. I have all this excess energy, both mental and physical, and nowhere to put it.

I can't drink. I can't have sex. I can't walk very far or swim. Not that these are the only things in my life, but honestly, they are pretty important things. I like my calm solitude, but I also like variety. Things will hopefully improve once I'm off the percs. Then I will hopefully be motivated to do something more mentally strenuous then watching Full House repeats. I will also be able to drive and drink, although, you know, at different times.

My new hobby is looking up exciting service opportunities that would allow me to delay grad school another year. Because I want to be at least 30 before I start my career, apparently. Adult life is for squares.

Like all geeks throughout the world this summer, a large portion of my mind has temporarily been taken over by The Dark Knight. I didn't even like it at first viewing, but it wormed its way into my brain. The movie came at an odd time; my interest in Batman and comics in general was at possibly an all time low. Add to that my general apathy towards the Nolan Batman franchise, and my utter dislike of Bale's stupid Batman voice. I was expecting to see the movie, dislike it and move along.

Not so, of course, and the reason is pretty obvious. Heath Ledger's Joker is pretty damn compelling. In man, many ways he is much different from my usual view of the Joker (which is largely informed by Batman: The Animated Series, so it was, uh, lacking in grit, shall we say). However, even I must admit that the particular aspects of the character the film emphasized, including those that are different from his more traditional incarnations, really serve to bring out the most interesting aspects of the character.

I could blah blah blah about this for a long time, but I'll spare myself the energy it would take to type something no one wants to read. Frankly, psychologically analyzing the Joker would really just be a lot of fancy talk in order to convince myself that I'm not just continually charmed and fascinated by on-screen sociopaths. There has always been an element of perverseness in my fondness for the Joker, but it's been around since I was like 12, so there's really no use in fighting it at this point. That shit is imprinted.

You know, I never seem to post when I am actually doing something interesting with my life. I just got back from the UK (with a slight detour to Paris as well) last week. It was intense and wonderful. I saw five million paintings, lots of old buildings, God's own public transport system, Oxford!!!!, and a bunch of plays and shit. I drank my own liquid volume in Pimm's and walked many a drunken mile through the streets of suburban London. I bought a lot of vinyl and got really into scarves. I fell madly in love with a boy in a leather jacket I met in a shitty electro nightclub, but it was all just because I was American and he was English.

Now I am back, recovering from emergency surgery and in a total daze. Classes start again on Monday. This has been the weirdest summer ever.

David and I have been in the process of unfighting for the past few days. This morning, he sent me an e-mail saying that he saw a video the other day that perfectly expresses his feelings for me.

That video? "Iran So Far"

Consider us unbroken up.

I love it when I get my Classics news from the Yahoo! homepage. No really. I fucking love it. Apparently, someone found the "oldest" representation of Caesar (that's Gaius Julius, by the by, although the AP doesn't feel the need to clarify that for reasons known only to themselves). Older clearly means "more accurate", so I guess we can all settle the hot-or-not debate once and for all: NOT. Serious case of squash-face.
It could be noted both that this is a ridiculous assumption and the that claim of this bust being the oldest representation of old JC was made by a culture minister. As far as I understand the job of being a culture minister for a European nation entirely involves inflating claims about archaeological finds discovered in that country.
Maybe if I blow the lid off this scandal, I'll get into UPenn!!

Good Lord. What could be more distracting when one is trying to study for a final in a class on Roman urban life then fucking Gladiator being on TV? Honestly. What a cruel trick HBO is playing on me. Luckily I have all of tomorrow to study as well. If not, the only thing I would be able to recall would be inane details like "haha, the Romans never had stirrups!!"

Every time I watch this movie, though, I am thrilled to see Derek Jacobi. But then, I am always thrilled to see Derek Jacobi. I am not thrilled, however, with the shitty digital reconstructions of Rome.

I've never been to Italy, or Greece for that matter, but I can only assume it must be very warm there, or else the ancient peoples would have invented pants. I can't imagine going through life without pants. That, aside from the fact that I probably wouldn't have been a citizen and would have died of an infection in some horrible insula somewhere, is what flummoxes me when I imagine actually living in the ancient world.

A quick list:

Things I Would Possibly Like About the Ancient Western World:
1. bisexuality!!
2. garish paintings everywhere
3. weird, amoral religious practices
4. oration

Things I Would Possibly Dislike:
1. highly structured bisexuality/sexual life in general
2. no pants
3. the high likelihood of not being able to read and/or write
4. bloodsports
5. slavery

I just finished the best paper I have ever written. It may, in fact, be the best paper ever written in the history of my university's undergraduate classics program. My professor is going to burst into tears of hysterical joy when she reads it. She will regret that she decided to spend the next semester on maternity leave instead of mentoring me as God intended.

I would let you read it, but somehow I doubt you appreciate Hellenistic mosaics on the deep level that I do.

My ticket for the New York Bad Seeds show is for the 200 level. Center stage, but still! No amount of emoticons can express my grief.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are TOURING AMERCIA!!!

My plan at the moment is to the New York and Washington shows. Why he must eschew Philadelphia, I have no idea, but whatever. I am just glad that he is setting foot in this nation once more. There better be fucking General Admission at the WaMu theater, though.

I'm so excited that I am seriously worried I am going to die before October rolls around.