I'm writing this down, this is good stuff

Well, drworm has just taken her leave of my dorm room and is on her merry way back to Kent--we got back at about 6 in the morning and slept until 12. Actually, she hasn't just left, and is probably somewhere around the Michigan/Ohio border by now, because right before she left, Ashley came barging into my room demanding that she be allowed to take her loft down. GREAT TIMING, ASHLEY! Eat salty death! So I got kicked out of my room for a few hours and hung out on the front steps, soaking up the sun. I don't know whether it's just because I've spent all winter indoors, but I wilt on exposure to direct sunlight.

Anyway. I've got a ton of notes copied down in my little Oscar Wilde notebook (butch Oscar, who wrote the essay "Why I Like To Sleep With Women!"), and to begin with...I'm going to talk.

We got to Ann Arbor early, and hung out in Border's for a few minutes; Stephanie worked on a drawing of Jules from "Fast Sofa" to give to Crispin while I wandered around and tried to find cousin Marcia, who wasn't working there that day. Will call tickets went up at seven. We wandered around in the theater for a bit (it's a nice theater...I found a piano that Philip Glass had played, and noodled around on it for a few seconds) and Stephanie bought some books. I had not had the foresight to withdraw much money from my school account, and so had to content myself with attemping to steal a laminated "WHAT IS IT?" poster from the bathroom wall. (I did not succeed in this mission; by the time I got to the bathroom, many other people had had the same idea.)
So we eventually migrated towards the actual auditorium, which is lovely, all red velvet and fake gold. I perused "Oak-Mot" and tried not to get my fingerprints all over the expensive, glossy pages while Stephanie worked on her drawing some more. It's an awesome drawing, by the way, and she and I and Crispin are the ooooonly ones who have seen it. (I believe she took pictures of it, so yay for that.)
I then realized that I'd LEFT MY CAMERA IN MY DORM ROOM. (headthwap headthwap headthwap) Because I am an idiot. So no pictures. Sorry, people.
Anyway...the slide show. Was awesome. Ten books. I particularly liked "Concrete Inspection", which is...it has pictures of a zoo in it. And someone's mom. And "Son Of Mother," which had some childbirth drawings that made me go "Ew," and which is actually the third section of "What It Is And How It Is Done."
And "The Big Swing," or possibly "The Backwards Swing," because I have both of these titles crossed out. It starts off as a Victorian fairytale about this little girl named Milly who is discontent, oh dear me no, and then apparently gets captured by a pedophile, gets some kind of disease (it burns...she can't get rid of it...) and then builds a shrine to him. Or at least that's what I got out of it. Crispin said that he was thinking of making a movie out of it. I WANT TO SEE THAT SO BAD.
The other one that I particularly liked was "Round My House." I do not have the words to describe the creepy awesomeness of this book. It did involve Crispin saying "I love you" to the audience several times, to which I said, "I love you too." (Apparently I was not the only one who said this.) It also involved a Negroid slave named...Lou. Oh, and a witch hunt. And the author being treated with his own..."solution." Oh god I need to get this book please let him publish it.
I want to make a font out of the letters in these books. I don't think it's his normal handwriting, but it's just...wow.
The film! WHAT IS IT?
fucking amazing. the snails. the women in monkey masks. the minstrel. shirley temple as a nazi. (Crispin's interpretation of this was that it was a blending of "good" and "bad"; I saw it more as the way "good" can turn into "bad" i.e. Christianity --> Inquisition, America --> Communist witchhunts...the longing for purity/sweetness and light, which is not so bad in itself, turning into a purge of all elements that are not sweetness and light. But that's just me.)
Crispin as a haughty, stern...racist hubristic inner psyche who wants his "outer body" to die. Yes. Mmm. Especially in the fur coat and long hair.
Dialogue from the film:
"What do you call me?"
"Lover?"
"No."
"McFly?"
"No!" (Ed. note: !?!?!?!?)
"God? Shirley Temple?"
"...maybe. Maybe."
Which kind of brings up all sorts of metatextual questions in my mind about...hold on, I've got this written down..."The egotistical artist attempting to break free from a weak/uncooperative shell (mind, body, emotion)." My notes also reference Jhonen Vasquez and the line from "Dead Man" about "poetry written in blood." (People die in the film...because Shirley Temple/Hitler ordered them to?) Huh, I don't remember writing that. I definitely don't think the film was meant to represent what I think it did, but he did mention that you were supposed to make your own interpretation. Anyway, it's inspiring and is giving me lots and lots of ideas, some of which may even come to fruition.
Also...he used the original Charles Manson version of "Never Say Never To Always." Which I've got on my laptop and is seriously creepy as hell, especially if you listen to it in the dark while you're trying to go to sleep. Oh, and the credits. Were interesting. He used organ music played by Anton Szandor LaVey.
Any Spielberg fans will be relieved to know that the film does not in any way support the assassination of Steven Spielberg. It said so right in the credits. Yup. (I died laughing. Almost choked.)
The Q & A! I was sweating bullets because I couldn't think of a coherent question besides "What's up with the snails?" which somebody asked anyway, so I was let off the hook. (The answer was that the snails were meant to symbolize whatever you thought they were meant to symbolize, and then Crispin told a story about how when he was a kid, he was putting salt on snails and stopped after he realized that they were beings that could feel pain, like humans. This story was surprisingly meaningful to me, coming from him, for reasons that will not ever make sense to anyone else except for me.)
There were some good questions, though...most of what Crispin said was basically what he's already said in various interviews, so I won't transcribe it all. However, there were some points that I thought were unusually interesting...
Apparently, Steven C. Stewart (who wrote "It is Fine! Everything is Fine!" which was advertised at the end of the movie in pink letters with hearts around them) didn't like the way the disabled were "cutified" in movies (very quiet "Word, yo" from me here). Parallels were drawn between white people putting on blackface and playing black people in movies and non-disabled people playing disabled people in movies.
He touched upon the idea of "good" and "bad" in movies as well, talking about movies where the story was so clear-cut between good and bad that you weren't allowed to think about it, and you went home and forgot about it...and he did not like that American mainstream media made movies like that. He wants people to think about movies, look at the different sides. (I think we have an unofficial mandate to write subversive fanfiction, folks. Be inspired.)
He also mentioned that he wasn't using the phrase "counterculture" anymore because he felt it implied just another demographic (like hippies!) that could be sold to. Which led to a very stupid guy sitting a few rows back to get all indignant because he thought Crispin had insulted Ann Arbor. (Stupid hippie you go shush now.) Another girl asked a very stoned, rambling question which started out "Have you, like, ever shown your movie in an old theater, one that allowed smoking?" and then went on to mention smoking therapy, Nazi symbols, some old law about movies that I think she made up on the spot, and ended up asking "So, like, man, what's the answer? To "What Is It?" To, like, CREATION?" She asked this several times. The answer, of course, is..."FORTY-TWO!" Nope, no loud teenage girl Douglas Adams fans who hate stupid people in the audience over here, no sirree.
Eventually, Crispin decided to wind it up and asked if anyone had any really important questions. Stephanie very kindly facilitated my question by very nearly dislocating my shoulder in her enthusiasm to get my hand up in the air. As Crispin pointed at me, some asshole in the back yelled "HEY DUDE WHO IS YOUR TAILOR?!" and I shrank. Crispin did not answer the stupid tailor question, and said something along the lines of "It's okay, you can ask" to me. :melts: I asked him whether he had plans to write a biography of himself. (Autobiography, duh Rachel.) He said that he was planning to write some more text-based books, and maybe not a biography.
Then we got to meet him.
Not right away, of course. The line was insanely long, and we got in at the back. There was some guy doing a videotape of peoples' reactions to the movie, and I babbled something about how I thought my life would make sense for the next few hours. I took notes for the RPS I'm still working on and re-read "Oak-Mot" while Stephanie showed me proto-drawings and re-read "Shadow of the Thin Man" and told me a little about Adrian Mayhew's Amazing Backstory. It got very very late, and as we got to the front of the line, there was a very drunk woman yelling about the regime and the fifty-first state and how amazing it was that somebody had come from Brighton and I really wanted to hit her with my notebook. She was so annoying that she made everyone in line twitch.
The meeting...
I MET CRISPIN GLOVER. AND I GOT TO SEE HIM. AND HE IS REALLY CUTE IN PERSON. AND I SHOOK HIS HAND. TWICE. (warm and dry and soft for those who care) I spazzed out. This is why if I ever become a famous journalist, I should not ever be allowed to interview celebrities that I like, because I got so nervous and excited that I was actually shaking and I could barely talk. Stephanie had to take the folder containg "Shadow" and "Terrier" and her nifty drawings out of my hands to give it to him. She was composed and cute and said intelligent things about bugs while I babbled on about metatextual implications of things. She also had the presence of mind to kick me before I said anything about slash. (I would really love to see what his reaction would be to the George/Marty love. But...yeah.) He was very polite and nice and interested and really liked the drawings and said that he'd already seen clips of "Shadow Of The Thin Man" other places. (I wish I'd written something good enough to print out for Crispin. Geh.) He signed my copy of "The Big Problem" and I am never going to put that CD in a CD player again. It shall remain pristine, so it's a good thing I have it copied onto my laptop. Also, dr_ninjapants, I have a piece of paper for you; send me your address so I can send it to you (kleenexwoman42@yahoo.com). And ghostgecko also has something cool coming to him. It's not Crispin, because I didn't bring enough rope to tie him up and put him in Stephanie's trunk, and there were other people behind us so it really wouldn't have been fair to them. But it's still a cool thing. Also, he said that he was thinking of showing "WHAT IS IT?" in Maryland, if he got people that E-mailed him or wrote letters who wanted to see it there.

:sigh:

Still happy. Even though Ashley rearranged my entire room and threw my things all over the place and now I have to put them all back in order and there are things under the bed. Still happy.