Moot Point

New Purse:



The straps are made of seatbelt.

I can think of at least 6 Starbucks within easy walking distance of my house. (We’re talking about something like a 5-block radius here.) I must live in one of the most Starbucks-saturated areas in the country.

So, you can see, even though I’ve read No Logo and know they’re really awful and destroy local business and such, I can’t help but be cajoled.

We used to have eggnog around the office kitchen at my old job and I’d always put it in coffee. After all: eggnog is sweet and creamy and slightly spicy (with the nutmeg). These things all go really well with coffee. I bet this will be delicious! And it was. Well, sort of odd, but strangely, unstoppably, addictively delicious. In conclusion: I INVENTED THE EGGNOG LATTE.

Starbucks just made it expeneive.

And foamy.

And oh so creamy and warm and full of contrasting flavour sensations…

Best coffee-chain seasonal beverage ever. I can’t stop with these things. I always go up to the counter and think “I’m going to get something different this time, something that’s less overpriced and patently horrible for me.” But I always wind up standing there saying “Can I have a grande eggnog latte?”

What is wrong with me?

Set me free, why don’t you, eggnog latte.

My CD exchange thingy was really fun.
I think the guy who got my CD will like it. I really went for a combination of excellent and bizarre.

Here is the track listing:

1. Much Finer: Le Tigre
2. The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me): Tom Waits
3. A Better Son/Daughter: Rilo Kiley
4. Deep Red Bells: Neko Case & Her Boyfriends
5. Kiss Me Like You Mean It: The Magnetic Fields
6. Family Happiness: The Mountain Goats
7. The Man That Got Away: Judy Garland
8. Only Straight Girls Wear Dresses: CWA
9. Have Mercy: Loretta Lynn
10. Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis: Neko Case
11. Saint Hubert: Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir
12. Everything Is Everything: Phoenix
13. Patches: Clarence Carter
14. I Can’t Get Behind That: William Shatner (feat. Henry Rollins)
15. Wake Up: The Arcade Fire

Everyone played a track from their mix and talked about why they liked it.
Everyone else played like, really awesome hip songs and stuff. I chose to play “Patches,” which seemed to go over well. I also got points for admitting that my biggest difficulty was being torn between sharing songs I really really liked and the desire to impress people. (I impressed people through admitting my desire to impress them? Oooh. Two points for honesty.)
It was a lot of fun to hear people play songs they treasure/think will impress people. Also? People have good taste.
The CD I got has some of my favourites on it, but it also has stuff that I don’t know at all, which will therefore probably be good by association. Also, I know the girl who made it has good taste, so it will probably be good.
Also, there was cheesecake. Which may or may not have been my dinner. (Sssh.)

I haven’t been blogging about non-OC-related things, because it’s all school (which I try not to bore people with), work, and stuff that doesn’t really seem exciting enough to actually write out in internet form.

Nonetheless, random headings and relevant information:

Annoying People

It is like the theme of my week. Saturday at EIGHT IN THE MORNING I wake up to my phone ringing, I crawl out of bed to answer it, because who would be calling at EIGHT IN THE MORNING ON A SATURDAY it must be urgent. I miss the call so I check my messages. Someone, after the part my message where I clearly state “Hi, this is BRENDA, I can’t take your call right now, please leave a message,” says “Hi [name which is not Brenda], I’m returning your call.” I looked at the number after and found out that it was a NEW YORK area code. It is still EIGHT IN THE MORNING in New York. (I’m still mad because Saturday was one of my only sleep-in days and I really wanted to actually get eight full hours of uninterrupted sleep. I don’t ask for much here people.)

Then, I went back to sleep and then woke up again to eventually discover my first comment spam. Guess which post it was on? (I’m paying the price for keeping it real,* I guess.)

Then, on the subway home from work last night, which was like, at 8:30, because I work too much for a week I have an essay due, I saw these high schoolish punk kids who were obviously drinking on the train. They did the worst concealing job ever. There was a water bottle full of red-brown liquid that two dudes were passing back and forth and one dude just had an actual can of beer. ON THE SUBWAY people.
As the (long, long) ride progressed, they got louder and more annoyling rowdy. I think they’d started to sing in unison by the time they got off.
High school boys are so lame.

I was watching a Spike Lee movie today.

Saint’s

So, I went to a Trin ball on Saturday. It wasn’t that big a deal because I didn’t really know anyone except the people we came with, but on the upside I got to wear my new dress that I thought had been totally frivolously purchased, but turns out to have come in handy (not that I didn’t have other dresses I could have worn, but whatevs.)
Nonetheless, there were free drinks(!). And boyfriend in a tux(!!!). And baba ganouj (funnest food to say ever).

I am a slacker

I have this essay due I really should be working on. I skipped out on this one class because we were just watching a movie I’d seen two weeks earlier in another class, which I didn’t especially want to see again, and I didn’t really want to come back for like, 1 hour of lecture for which the slides, but I justified it by saying I would use the time to work on my essay. All I got accomplished was going to the video store and renting the movie my paper’s on.
(The video store is not even a whole block away.)

I am a slacker.
Seriously, I suck.

Music is Good

Indie Christmas! It’s weird that there’s indie Christmas. It seems like indierock guys would just all be so sad and ironic and cynical, what with the messy hair and the tshirts and the not caring about material things.
Also, that The Arcade Fire deal at CBC Radio 3 is totally worth the patience of loading it and waiting for music to come out. I probably say this with the hype band every year, but The Arcade Fire totally live up to and deserve all their hype. I wasn’t going to put them on my mix CD that I’m making because they’re the hot band right now and putting the hot band right now that everyone’s talking about on your mix CD seems kind of lame. But now I am reconsidering because they are awesome and everyone loves them. We’ll see, I guess.
I am making aforementioned mix CD for a thing I’m going to tomorrow with exchanges of mix CDs at the end of the night. Right now it includes “The Man That Got Away” (classic Judy Garland version)** followed by my mix CD standard “Only Straight Girls Wear Dresses” by CWA (which stands for Cunts*** With Attitude). This pleases me to no end. I think I’m a terrible person.

Yes, making a mix CD qualifies is an excuse to procrastinate.

Shut up. I know a lot of people who were into anime in high school. I was into Judy Garland.
One more vagina colloquialism for google.

I think this week’s OC was awesome: lots of highjinks, hip band, etc.

First of all I feel the need to say that Zack seems to be a little too perfect, if you know what I mean. The hypothesis I’m most in support of is that he’s gay, but other suggestions included that he could also lose his shit and start beating Summer up (giving Seth opportunity to save her). I think he should have at least been a little more sad when he told her that she should go work her shit out with Seth, and they had a great time over break this summer, but if that’s all it was supposed to be, that’s fine.

While we’re talking about Summer, did anyone else notice that she had magically-appearing bangs? In the scene where she’s talking to Zack before the concert there are no bangs. When she goes to meet Seth: bangs! V. strange.

Also, Ryan and Lindsay’s meet-cute was a little too cute. I might get to like her (I usually like the smart girl), but for now, she reminds me of when they brought that blonde Republican in on The West Wing and no one liked her but Rob Lowe or whoever, possibly just because he wanted to bone her, I don’t know, I stopped watching the show around then. I’m sure Ryan will reveal her softer side. (Or something. So dirty-sounding.)
She seems very Anna-ish though, not so much in personality, but in fellow-outsider position on the show. I guess they couldn’t have that wacky double-date plot next week if it was Anna though.

The new girl who works at the club with the tattoos (whose name I don’t remember at all) is totally going to whip Seth into shape. She seems like she won’t take any of Seth’s shit. Go new girl!

What else? Oooh! Julie Cooper! (I know her name is Julie Nichols now, but it doesn’t have the same ring.) Okay, why is she suddenly “standing by” Caleb when she wouldn’t stand by Jimmy when the EXACT SAME THING happened, only I guess the whole town isn’t really turning their backs on Caleb the way they did with Jimmy.
Also, what’s with Jimmy and Julie being friendly now? She’s a hobag! And he knows it!
Also, what’s with Caleb making Julie the CEO? Why does Julie even want to be the CEO? She doesn’t even know anything about CEOing! She probably won’t even like it!
Also, what’s with Kirsten being like, “Oh, Dad, I’m mad but somehow I can forgive you for making my hobag stepmother/former friend the CEO of the company I’ve been running for you and saving your ass”?
Also, what’s with Sandy quitting his job to help Caleb? He doesn’t like Caleb that much! I guess that Sandy doesn’t like his job that much either. And he has that whole “root-for-the-underdog” deal going.

I have used the words “hobag” and “bone” as a verb. I think my work here is done.

Plus I have to go shave my legs! I’m going to a ball tonight!

Today I had hot chocolate with marshmallows.

And a butter tart. And tea.

And a fruit roll-up.

Life is good.

Note: This is a response to a post that is a response to a post about a blog comment argument Dan and I had last week. It’s in the comments for the post marked November 9, and is reproduced in Dan’s invective against scholarship that I link to below. I posted an additional comment to it before I saw Dan’s post, but I think I re-say all the stuff in it here, and better. If you don’t want to read it, and you’re not Dan, I won’t mind. It’s very long. I would have put most of this behind a “Read more”-style link if Blogdrive supported such a thing.
(You kids should just all go watch Shatner “sing” “Rocket Man”. Rock. It. Man. It is wholly the best thing on the internet and way less self-important than what follows.)

As a person who imagines himself as being creative, I take an offense to a group of non-artists (or failed, frustrated artists) standing back and wrestling interpretive clout and the right to define from me simply because they’ve spent their life “studying” the medium rather than actually building it. It’s really quite a new phenomenon in all accounting, and it’s not limited to just film. Essentially they help prove that the best works are those that defy classification i.e. cause the most arguments in classrooms.

Dear Dan,

You’ve taken an argument about the definition of “documentary” and turned into a wholesale dismissal of film scholarship and academia in general.

It made me sad when you wrote this, the same way it makes me sad every time I read that liberals are latte-drinking intellectuals. It’s the same sort of knee-jerk response. What do you have against academia? What is so execrable about espresso and steamed milk? An unexamined life is not worth living and an unexamined world is not worth living in. Interrogating culture is as important as creating it.

I was never arguing for a hard-and-fast definition of documentary. It’s a really broad umbrella term, not a genre. It is also value-neutral. It includes experimental documentary, poetic documentary, interview films, compilation films, etc. etc. But any definition will include films using footage the filmmaker shot as current events.

Just to clarify, the blurring of the line between documentary and truth is a lot older than Blair Witch and Survivor. Even the Lumiere’s actualities weren’t always all that actual. (There’s one of an Arab woman praying, which apparently isn’t an actual prayer, for instance.) The first films to be called documentary were Robert Flaherty’s, which arguably got even faker after Nanook. Back when they had them, newsreels were regularly staged.) A lot of what defines a documentary is indexical, which is to say, how it is presented to the public. I don’t know how you could make an animated film and still have be considered a documentary under any definition, but if you can, good on you.

Also, films that take found footage and use it to construct narratives that in no way relate to the actual context of the images have not only been done before, they’ve been canonized, especially in avant-garde circles. In first year we watched a film called A Movie that did this, with stock footage that obviously came from. It’s from 1958 and it’s in my Intro textbook. Lev Kuleshov did his experiments, which work on the same principles, much much earlier than this

What I was originally upset about was narrowing the definition of documentary to disclude certain points of view. Also, it undermines the value of Triumph now. It isn’t shown in classrooms to promote Hitler as the future of Germany but rather to interrogate the ways documentary footage can be used. That the film is beautiful makes it even more interesting to talk about in those terms.
This is why it’s on the syllabus of not one but two of my courses this semester.

As someone who considers themselves critical, I take offense to being told that I’m just a non-artist (or failed, frustrated artist) sitting around putting the creative people like you into boxes because I lack the talent to actually work in the medium.
(Why is an artist the only person qualified to talk about art? Especially film and literature, which are usually considered to be mass art, given their easy reproducibiliity and small cost to the spectator/reader. What the work does for the spectator/reader is as important as the work itself. “Standing back,” as you put it, is a big part of being a critic and it’s something that’s inherently very hard for an artist to do. Everyone can’t be right there up front. Not everyone wants to be. Films need people to watch them.)
What critics do, and it’s something filmmakers don’t (and I think probably shouldn’t) do is they study the experience of watching films, and the influence of films on the culture.
For one, criticism and theorisation of art by people not actually working within it is not new. It is ancient. Aristotle wrote Poetics, I don’t know exactly when, but you know, before Christ.
It is also important to note that modern criticism is descriptive, not prescriptive, as you seem to think it is. Critics, as a rule, love films that challenge convention. That’s why we watch them in classrooms. That’s why they write about them.
Criticism excites me the way art excites you. Talking about all the things a film is saying without really saying them matters, because you can’t understate how important film has become to culture in general in the last 100 years. It goes beyond catch phrases. It’s the way we see ourselves. (For instance, it is interesting how many presidents love High Noon.)

Just because I talk about the symptomatic meaning of the film doesn’t mean that I don’t respect the filmmaker (or his or her creative process). But when that filmmaker makes their film and releases it, it doesn’t really matter what they intended. It matters what people see in it. (Obviously, I think what filmmakers do is important and worthy. Otherwise I wouldn’t be studying it.)

Critics aren’t perfect. They get things wrong, they have crazy theories, they leave things out. But so do artists. In our society, where art and commerce and politics are so closely interwoven, we can’t make the artists untouchable deities. We can’t make art untouchable or unpolitical. We can’t hide from truths we don’t like about people and the power of film by saying “propaganda doesn’t count.” (Which was the initial thing we were actually arguing about, but you shifted the terms of the argument instead of actually responding to my points, which is why this is 1,000 words long.)

It seems kind of funny for exes to be playing out a theory-practice debate on the Internet.
I was also, I admit, kind of mad on a personal level because you misinterpreted what I was trying to say (possibly because I wasn’t explaining myself as well as I could be) and then used me to represent a group you call “critics,” about whom you then seem to have a lot of prejudice and not a lot of actual information, which makes them really easy to dismiss.
I’m less mad now, because it’s been a few days, and ultimately, I know you’re not going to look at this and say “Oh, you’re right.” And we’re still going to be friends, and we’re still going to argue and be stubborn.
I just had to say what I had to say.

Britney news:
“She wants to start a family, but sees combining that and studying a perfect way to spend married life.”

Yah-huh, going to school will give you lots of time to take care of your child.

A few months ago, I reported* that O.C. dreamboat Adam Brody shared my birthday. Seth Cohen having my birthday? Hot stuff. But now there are conflicting reports. IMDb says 15 December, 1979. This other site says April 8, 1981, which is precisely two years before me and what I had initially read on IMDb.

What’s the deal, Adam Brody? What is the deal?

*Note also the post above it, in which I describe Alex (then still referred to as “Alex Wrenkin” to differentiate him from other Alexes and because it is adorable) as “my new hero” because he fixed my computer. We had lunch at Ginger afterwards, leading it to become “our place” even though we almost never go there anymore because I got sick of it and it pales in comparison to Ginger 2, which has a waterfall.

My Review of This Week’s O.C.

Okay, so Zack seems like a good guy. A little too good, if you know what I mean. I dunno. They can’t do the Oliver thing where he seems perfect but turns out crazy, because they just did that. The obvious place to go with it is that Summer is just using him to get over Cohen, but he’s taking it more seriously and will get hurt.
Buut, that really looks like what Marissa’s doing with DJ the lawn guy. So I dunno where they’re going.

I love how when Marissa was like “We were never friends.” and Ryan was just like “Okay, bye.” Ryan’s emerging as one of my new favourites, which I never thought would happen because broody guys aren’t my style. Ryan seems to have grown up a lot; he’s a good guy and so much less willing to put up with shit from Marissa.
I like that they’re bringing back his interest in architecture from the first few episodes, and having moments where they make him actually sound smart again, since he is supposed to be totally smart. A+ for consistency.

Hailey’s going to Japan? Meh. I totally forgot she was even on this show. They need to give Jimmy something to do. He was just kind of skulking around last week and alluding to her.

Alex called after the show and said he thought that the whole Seth climbing the hot dog stand was overdone. I patiently explained that the whole show is overdone. That’s its thing.

My favourite scene was when Summer tells Seth off for being a self-centred dick. Which he totally deserved. Seth is cuter than pie, but he’s worn on my patience a lot. (The way he treated Anna, his whole “running off all summer and then coming back and hoping he could fix it all with a grand gesture” deal.) Summer, on the other hand, I’m liking more and more. She’s coming out as the voice of reason which is totally bizarre and in fitting with show.

I loved the moment when they make Caleb put his hands behind his head. It’s totally wordless and everyone’s embarrassed and the reality of the situation totally hits them.

The IMDb user comments page for Triumph of the Will.

People don’t understand film!
They don’t understand anything about documentary!
They think they understand film because they go to the movies a lot, but they don’t!

I don’t pretend I know more about whatever you spend your life doing than you do, why do you have to do it to me, IMDb users?

…Fuck this noise, I’m going to watch Sex and the City.