(no subject)

Reasons it was worth getting up today:

--Free brownies at the U.C. as part of some sort of special event week thingy. Everything is scheduled for times when I already have shit to do...but free brownies! Also "ornamental" grapes. Mmm, overlooked vitamins.

--"F1 boss Max Mosley has sick Nazi orgy with 5 hookers!
Son of fascist Hitler lover in sex shame!" There's a video. They drink tea.

Reasons it was not worth getting up today:

--It's fucking snowing again. Just a little, but it is snowing.

--I'm sneakily watching old spy shows on AOL video while I have two hours between classes to kill, and I just realized that the classy main character keeps inserting these little vocal pauses into all his sentences, and I had a boyfriend that used to do that all the time too and it drove me fucking insane, and now not only can I not un-hear it, but every time I look at this suave spy with a cleft in his chin I will identify him with a 300-lb. Jewish redhead who thinks he has the soul of a grizzly bear.

bang, bang, my baby shot me down

I watched Kill Bill Vol. 1 last night because it was on TV, because I only have Vol. 2 because I lost the first DVD. So I had this dream where I found out by messing around with Wikipedia that it was actually based on an old Japanese legend about a demon who owned a bunch of snakes that he sent out to do his evil bidding, and one of them fell in love with a sleeping man and asked some god of mercy or other to turn her into a woman, and then the demon found out and sent all his snakes to kill her at the wedding...yeah. It was a pretty awesome dream.

Which is amusing, because I decided last night that the reason it's partially animated and partially B&W and cut very weirdly in some places is that it's actually kind of a visual representation of an ongoing dream, or of a continuing daydream. Most of Tarantino's movies that I've seen have this surreal quality about them anyway, like they're taking place in a universe that's removed from reality by a layer of other movies, as opposed to movies which try to be more realistic, or at least suggest that they are based on basic reality. I don't even think it's one of those simulacra which try to hide the illusory nature of what it's trying to simulate in the first place, it's more highlighting the surreal and non-realistic nature of movies, or at least of that kind of over-the-top grindhouse movie, in the first place.

Not that I think this is necessarily on purpose. Things can be very clever and postmodern just through being very cleverly done and fun to watch. Stuff like Wayne’s World is very wink-wink-nudge-nudge postmodern, and I’m fairly sure Mike Myers was thinking more about how many jokes he could squeeze into a movie than about illustrating the artificially constructed nature of a narrative. Theory describes culture first, anyway, culture just starts to follow as theory trickles down.

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We had a little class discussion in my Po-Mo seminar today about how what we learned had affected us. A lot of kids talked about how they kept thinking about The Matrix and wished they could just take the blue pill and pretend they'd never read Baudrillard. A lot of kids talked about how they totally looked at everything in a different light now and they were so glad they had taken the class! I told the prof that the class had given me the proper terms and a structured way to think about things I'd thought about but hadn't had the words for before the class. He changed the subject really quickly. I sometimes think I am not on the same page as everybody else, or perhaps we are using different translations.