Mirandom’s Blog

As I am interested in all media, I will try, occasionally, to post Wikipedia articles I find endearing, interesting, or humorous. I love Wikipedia. I think it’s an important resource. I believe strongly in it. However, I also find it often unintentionally hilarious. I will try to update this weekly, although the use of the term “weekly” reflects more on my affinity for alliteration than it does my punctuality with respect to updating this.

So, here we go.

Instead of writing about the many films I see lately, I’m going to write about formative experiences I had at the cinema that led me to where I am today. The years refer to when I saw them, not when they were released (n.b.: I grew up in a bland, pasteurized, 100% culture-free suburb; it took a long time for things to get there). These may not be great movies, and it is not my goal to argue for them one way or the other. But seeing them led me to great movie epiphanies, and to me, that is far more important.

1. 101 Dalmatians, 1986:
   On my third birthday, my father took me to see a Movie. I only remember this very vaguely, and I wish I could say something poetic or even theoretically interesting about it, like that I dove under the seats because I thought a train was coming at me, or something. But I think it says a lot that this is a very clear memory of my very early childhood: the smell of popcorn; the Hershey’s bar my father rationed and gave me bits of whenever I got too fidgety; the feeling of watching something alone, but with other people, too; the PUPPIES!; my all-encompassing interest in whether or not the bad, bad lady would win. I will not spoil the ending for you. But I do remember my complete and utter involvement and strong emotional investment in the Good Guys winning.
   For many months after, we collected stickers in the sticker book about the film. Each one was a part of the story. It was not the same as the movie, it was just the pictures, and even though (I know now) movies are just series of pictures, and most of what you see is darkness – but anyway, it was an important exercise in building an awareness of the power of images and the power of story, and the limitations each has. Not that I said stuff like that when I was three years old, but you know.
2. American Beauty, 2000:
   As a misanthropic teenager, I was eager for any kind of culture that slandered the bland, pasteurized, 100% Culture-Free living that my town represented (for the record, my town did not even have a bookstore until after I went away to college!). I remember walking out of the movie theatre and just feeling absolutely destroyed, in that really good, enlightening way.
   Further, that was the first time in my adolescence in which I saw a movie and didn’t immediately dismiss it as a relic of popular culture. I had enjoyed movies, but only knew the mainstream blockbuster crap that had come to our small-town theatre (which had closed by then; for the record, I did not live in Anarene, Texas, but I might as well have. We had to drive quite a ways on the highway to go to a Mega-googleplex or whatever). Anyway, I think the film’s opposition to the mainstream allowed me to begin to think of films as texts, rather than just something everyone did, somewhere kids went on Fridays & Saturdays to make out, in the dark.
   I remember talking about the film’s symbolism with a friend shortly thereafter, and I remember very clearly thinking (and being certain I was the first to have ever thought of it, I’m sure): You can talk about films just like you can with books! And it seemed so much more multi-dimensional. I could talk about books and Symbolism and rhyme schemes and so forth and I usually got 100%’s on quizzes in which I spat out the bold-faced textbook word of the week with respect to a poem. But suddenly, with films each second had thousands of dimensions to be examined. With books, in school they only wanted you to talk about what happened and define terms from a book using their example, but with the cinema, you could talk about camera angles and color and photography and music and also all those things they wanted us to talk about in the literature classes, too. There was so much to think about, and it was overwhelming. It was beautiful. I started renting everything in the “foreign” section of the Blockbuster in the next town over.
3. Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run), 2000/2002:
   My German teacher showed a lot of films in class. Of the many we watched (Die Dreigroschen Oper, Himmel Ueber Berlin, etc) Lola Rennt was the one that made an impression on me, and not just because of the trendy music. Someone in the class “didn’t get it” and I remember Herr E— saying, “Well, there’s truth in each story.” And my mind was just, you know, blown. This idea of concurrent valid truths was just very powerful to me. It formed a lot of my late adolescent thinking.
   And I thought that was it, but during my first year of college, I took a German cinema class. The last film on the syllabus was Lola Rennt. Since I had seen it before, I did a presentation on it. Someone in the class said that the film was about filmmaking, about editing and redoing until you get what you want. And yet again, my little brain was just blown. Away. Suddenly a world of analogy and metaphor opened up, and it opened up this whole new way of seeing. I’m being corny, but that’s exactly how I felt, and that’s exactly what it did to me. Suddenly films worked on a self-referential, theoretical level, not just a textual or story-only level. Films were greater than the story, or the characters, or even the camera angles or symbolism: Films were Things unto themselves, and I wanted to spend as much of my time as I could figuring out the puzzle. And that’s when I began, as seriously as I could at New College, to study film.

I see probably at least one film a day; I read plenty; I exist in a cloud of music. So why so few posts? I’ve been thinking about it more than posting, and my analysis indicates two reasons for the lack of posts.

Reasons for the lack of Posting
1. Graduate school. It’s been kind of time consuming.
2. I really am a bad critic, because there’s very few things I dislike; I tend to turn off music or stop reading books with which I do not engage.
As for film, the totality of the experience just suckers me in, always. I often initially love films and then later, with perspective, with enlightenment, with less popcorn, realize that they suck. But, pathetically, I even love movies that suck. They are cultural objects. As a butchering of Frederick Jameson, “The thing that is bad about it is the thing that is good about it.” Certainly I’m not equating, say, Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death with, oh, I don’t know, Rashomon, but it’s the same thing, for me. If I cannot love a film aesthetically I love it for what it represents about the culture that made it.
For instance, I was trying to defend my enjoyment of Juno the other night. Since I was in a noisy bar & rather tipsy, it didn’t work too well. However, I think I can do it here. You ready? You ready? Right! Okay, so I went into that film very prepared to hate it.

Tangent: Juno
I. before the film.
I hate the malaise in contemporary American mainstream independent films, even when I enjoy said films (There was an article tangentially related to this in L Magazine this week; in fact, they basically say most of the things in there that I wanted to say here, and with fewer parentheticals. Dear L Magazine: sorry). It’s not about daringness or actual independent risk-taking, it’s about Quirky characters spewing clever dialogue and getting into acceptable, but Quirky, situations. While I can enjoy this, it irritates me that films like Napoleon Dynamite & Little Miss Sunshine are held up as actual examples of FILM ART. I was subjected to inordinate amounts of preliminary advertising for Juno, which included a mildly scary flock of very tall young men dressed as track team members, handing out info for the movie, in character, when I was just trying to go to class. I was sort of horrified, and anyway, a few weeks went by, I got sick and bored. So I went to see Juno.

II. During

I was very uncomfortable in the film. Yet, it was exactly as expected: a nonstop Quirk fest. For some reason, I enjoyed it. This does not mean it’s a good film. It’s not. However, I enjoyed it. Perhaps it is because I am a “pre-pregnant” young woman (as defined by the Bush administration) who finds babies significantly less repulsive than she used to, perhaps because I really do love Belle & Sebastian, perhaps because there were subliminal messages of ENJOYMENT in the air in the theatre. I do not know. One cannot well explain emotion.
III. After having exited the theatre.

So, with perspective, I can reconcile the fact that this is a really bad movie, but I liked it. Its absolute excess of cleverness & ridiculousness situated it as more a cartoon. To me, the repulsiveness of the Jason Bateman character signaled a very subtle critique of “Indie” culture. Yeah, you read your McSweeney’s, listen to your Belle & Sebastian, and you will end up married to a frigid, upwardly aspirant yuppie, writing jingles for corporate America. Were you ever really subversive? In a way I could see the main characters ending up like that. Reference the scene in which Juno talks about herself (in the third person), saying that popular boys really do love Mcsweeney’s-reading children librarians with big glasses. Is this dynamic not repeated or reflected in some sense in the Loring marriage? There’s a lot of horror in it to me. The pregnancy was just a Quirk Situation through which the characters would wisecrack; their destiny seemed assured. In a way, the film seemed dark and cynical about those who engage in the mainstream “subcultures.” Considering the film was distributed by a branch of News Corporation, it created an interesting (to me) mental conundrum. And I enjoy those. Hence: Q.E.D. Enjoyment.
/end tangent. /end excuses!

Begin: Analysis of Solutions

***

So, there was the preliminary analysis. Now I will present some solutions, in an orderly, organized list.
Some Solutions
1. I’m done with M.A. coursework. I have a mini “retirement” going on for the next few months, as I wait to hear back from PhD programs or otherwise figure out my next move(s). So - you can look forward to so many more posts! Especially if I am not admitted anywhere, and cannot find a job, there will be SO MANY more posts.
2. I am now okay with having a blog that isn’t critical writing. I’d rather analyze things and talk about them in the only way I know how, and I do not know how to pigeonhole that into a category. So rather than saying THIS FILM/BOOK/MUSIC IS GOOD HERE IS WHY, which anyone can do, and most can do better than me, I’ll get all pseudo-intellectual about it. After all, I have so many diplomas saying I can. So - I’ll go in that direction.
***

My basic recommendation to you is: I recommend media. Go see films, listen to music, read books; especially see, listen to, and read good books, films, music.

My memories of the internet are inextricably tied to Phil Ochs, so it is fitting that I should begin this blog with a post about him, recommending his music to you. I was maybe 15 or 16 years old – the world was, according to the Gregorian calendar, approximately 1,999 years old and young enough so that mp2 was still a valid compression format. Downloading mp3’s was something that you did all night, it was real work, so much so you hardly cared what it was you downloaded so much as you had something to show for it, and the idea of “stealing” music that way was patently absurd. So because I was a good kid, I showed my dad that you could use the internet to get music. He took to it like a duck to water, and rewarded me the next day with a bunch of songs he thought I’d like, including “Miranda” by Phil Ochs. Since my name was (and is) MIRANDA and not, say, Jennifer, anything with my name on it is very special. I was curious about someone who’d write a song about me, as I thought of it, and spent the next few years downloading everything he had ever recorded. Because of, I believe, Phil’s mindset and that of his fans, his music was frequently shared and relatively easy to find. I amassed a huge collection, and memorized the lyrics.
For years and years, his music was what I turned to whenever I was unhappy with the general injustice of the world. It seemed incredible to me that someone had been so prescient, foreseeing the terrible present-day post-apocalyptic world in which I felt doomed to fail. Once my (beloved) German teacher pulled me aside and said that if I didn’t watch out, I’d end up just like Phil Ochs; I remember a queer smile sliding across my face. I didn’t want to get sent to the guidance office, so I did not mention that I had every single one of his songs, including his last, rare recordings in Africa at home, on my computer. It was Tape to California I listened to for the 1200 mile drive back home to New Jersey in 2002. In college, after a particularly terrible breakup, I spent several days doing literally nothing but listening to “Doesn’t Lenny Live Here Anymore,” like a vision quest, listening until I saw and heard things in it nobody’d ever thought of before. At protests in New Jersey, singing Sad and Silent Song of a Soldier and I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore. In short, Phil’s music radicalized me, and I’m thankful every day for this.

In a few weeks, it will have been 31 years since his suicide. I hope you do something to remember him, even if it’s just listening to his music. I never knew him, but I remember him every day. His music remains as topical and brilliant as ever, which is why I hope it will change your worldview, too.

It’s not like I don’t have enough online blogs, but this will be the one where, when I feel like it, I will recommend things to you, ostensibly because my taste is infinitely better than yours.