Dude!

I am so there.

Poem in Your Pocket

In honor of the end of National Poetry Month, I offer up Boris Pasternak's "Defintion of Poetry" translated by Tatiana Tulchinsky, Gwenan Wilbur, and Andrew Wachtel:

A perfectly ripened trill,
The cackling of crushed ice,
Night, frosting a leaf,
A duel between nightingales.

A sweet pea-vine grown wild,
God's tears upon a peapod,
Figaro from flutes and conductors' stands
Crashing down like hail on a flower bed.

The crucial discovery of night
In the depths of swimming holes,
And the star it must bring to the garden
On trembling wet palms.

The heat is flatter than planks on water.
Heaven is felled like an alder.
It would become these stars to laugh -
Too bad the world is a wilderness.

For more Russian poetry, I highly recommend the site where I found this translation, which features all poems in the original and in excellent translations and sound files of many of the poems being recited. -Zh.

Metaphysics 101

The Habs were swept. There is something seriously wrong in a world where I may find myself rooting for two teams I normally despise. Although to be fair to the Leafs, I could find it in my heart to cheer for them. That said, if Detroit doesn't make it into the next round, I'm going to stop following the play-offs, unless my lovely neighbors down the street invite me to drink beer and watch the game on the front porch again. I only discovered last week that Anahiem and New Jersey were in the Stanley Cup finals last year. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. -Zh.

Silence

...for now, at least. I'm not feeling very motivated at the moment. My mind is focused on other things, mainly on E. F. Burian and K. H. Mácha with random thoughts about The Daily Show ("Why is it on so late here?" "Why are there interviews?") and figuring out tables so that the blog looks nice again sneaking in when my concentration lapses. Once I get part of my reconstruction of May down on paper, I'll return with some thoughts on the Juráček retrospective, which ends on Saturday and perhaps I'll be able to spin something deeper out of the games I'm playing with the Czechoslovak Avant-Garde at the moment. Count on the former, don't expect the latter, because I'm tired of humanist lingo; it says nothing anymore. -Zh.

Things to Ponder

Life without Don Cherry
Porn and the Novel
Life in a Medieval English Town (via lii)
Is a cup of Chicha really enough?
Why does John Harkness still have a job? Does he work for free?

Randomness

With the way my luck's going maybe I should drop out now.

Randomness

Stupid Anglo-American Biases, or Puppets Rock.
The headline reminds me of this guy studying at the area studies center at the university who was in a course I taught. I was participating in a roundtable on animation and puppets in Russian and Czech culture at one of the big North American conferences. When he found out, he scoffed. It seems that he'd never heard of Petrushka. Nitwit. -Zh.

JS Bonbons

For Easter K. bought me four chocolates and an egg from JS Bonbons, an independent Toronto chocolate shop. I have since consumed everything I received. The results:

The egg: The milk chocolate half was smooth, creamy, if a tad too sweet. The dark chocolate half tasted waxy and cheap.

The mille feuille bonbon: Too sweet. The crunchy bits were nice, like eating a Kit Kat.

The mocha bonbon: Too sweet.

The hazelnut log: There were nuts in that? All I tasted was the sugar.

Sea salt caramel: The caramel was really soft and a nice dark brown. The taste was salty and sweet with a toffee aftertaste. It reminded me of a Skor bar.

The final verdict: most things tasted like sugar, not like chocolate. This is acceptable when I'm shelling out under a buck for a Cadbury Dairy Milk, but I don't think it's acceptable in a gourmet chocolate shop. Unless of course I'm someone who wants to dress up my lack of taste with an excessive price tag. That seems to be a common occurrence here in Toronto. To be fair, K. and I have a chicken guy, a sausage guy, the French bakery down the street, which incidentally kicks Clafouti's North-Americanized butt (Since when does the biggest croissant in town = good?), cheese people, organic fruit/vegetable delivery, so the city isn't a total wasteland, I just don't understand why no one makes good chocolates in this town. Oh well, Go Leafs! -Zh.

The Straw

Our local Blockbuster has finally driven us into the arms of an on-line DVD-rental site. We had been talking about opening a membership at an indie video shop that stocked a better variety of movies for ages. The problem was always convenience: Queen Video, either location, required a major detour and Bay Video, while slightly more convenient for me, sentenced me to riding the subway home. I don't like going underground. As for on-line sources, although convienent, they tended have uninspiring movies and bad reputations.

On Friday, we went to rent some fluff but wound up with The House of Sand and Fog in addition to Kill Bill Vol. 1. The copy of House of Sand and Fog that we had in our possession was labeled a full-week rental. When we got to cash we were informed that the movie was only a two-day rental by both the clerk and the manager. There was no offer to let us have it for a week because the staff there had made a mistake. Nothing. Admittedly, there's probably some Blockbuster version of Big Brother that doesn't permit tampering with the length of rentals and renders the employees helpless in the face of costumer service demands. This provides the surly employees with some slack and us with another reason to try something different. There were other reasons not to rent at our particular Blockbuster: the subtle racism, the poor selection, the lack of organization, the rudeness, the censorship from above. We opted not to rent it and vowed to do some research on on-line rental places.

After checking out several sites, we opted for the geekiest of the bunch: Rent a DVD, which is based right here in Toronto. Our queue of one hundred movies features a chunk of the foreign section, random other artsy movies, and a slew of guilty pleasures.

Now we're waiting patiently for our first shipment, which includes: House of Sand and Fog, This is Spinal Tap, and Spirited Away. It goes out tomorrow and will hopefully be in our grubby little hands come Tuesday. Here's hoping that we never feel the urge to set foot in our local Blockbuster again. -Zh.

Twenty Down...

Five left to go. I suppose that missing the Juráček movie on Thursday was a good thing because, as I had suspected, nothing was accomplished yesterday. The two-hour make-up session for Czech fiction lasted four hours. At least Doctor Cz. fed us cake and asparagus. I now have five papers to mark for Monday and except for one that I know is going to hurt, I saved the "A" papers for this weekend. Instead of wringing my brain to comment on the upteen-gazillionth okay paper, which gets to be harder and harder as time passes, (I start sounding like a broken record: "More summary than analysis," "the examples chosen to prove your point were questionable," etc.) I get to write things like, "A. Excellent paper. Your analysis is intelligent and the aspects of each film that you choose to compare are relevant to your argument. Have you ever thought about looking at X, Y, and Z?" Marking should be relatively blissful.

In other news, K. and I rented Kill Bill Vol. 1 last night, because Master and Commander was out. Feel free to now disregard any of my remarks on the Tarantino because I am so obviously not cool.

Kill Bill Vol 1 was fun, it was okay, parts of it were beautiful, i.e. the final sword fight between The Bride and O-Ren, parts of it were undeniably ice cold as soundtrack and on-screen action combined into a music video so cool, MTV would never show it, and I was introduced to a J-pop band I really like, but I don't think I care enough about the movie to give it some thought. Except for some neat tricks, good shots, and sly winks, it's instantly forgettable. Come to think of it, that's not such a bad thing. Two hours of guiltless pleasure are difficult to come by these days. -Zh.

If You're Free Next Thursday...

and feel like participating in what will likely be a futile protest, please come to a rally in support of freezing tuition fees for international students at the University of Toronto. Tuition fees for Canadian students were frozen recently, but the Board of Governors is contemplating hiking international-student tuition by 20%. Before you argue that international students don't pay taxes, etc. etc. etc., well, we do. I pay federal and provincial taxes on my fellowships, which pay my stipend and tuition. I also pay GST and PST. In return for that I have access to the most minimal of social services: water, roads, transportation. I am required to purchase health insurance that is the equivalent of Ontario health insurance so that I am not a burden on the Canadian medical system. I also speak three languages, read two more, am highly educated, young, and exactly the type of person you'd want to settle here. Most international students, simply because they can be international students, tend to be exactly like me: bilingual at least, young, well-educated. We'll be difficult to attract to Canada if we can't afford to study here. We may just go to the States instead.

So, the details:
Where: Simcoe Hall, King's College Circle
When: Thursday April 29th, 4pm

I'll be there because I don't like people taking advantage of the fact that I can't vote and in this one instance, I'm too impatient to wait for karma. -Zh.

I'll be Quiet until the Animated Film.

Tonight is the last installment of the Pavel Juráček retrospective at the Cinematheque Ontario that Juráček directed: Every Young Man After this, it's films for which he wrote the screenplay, one of which shares tonight's screening. Make me happy. Go. Please. -Zh.

May

I'm going to limit myself to this one post today or else I'll avoid marking all day by posting about anything and everything that catches my eye. I've been mentioning K. H. Mácha's poem May quite a bit lately. Click on the link in the previous sentence and the original text along with James Naughton's excellent translation shall appear on your screen. Like all good poetry, this one loses a fair bit in translation. Unlike some good poetry, the whole plot is on the tawdry side, but I can't get enough of it. Everyone all together now:
Byl pozdní večer - první máj -
večerní máj - byl lásky čas.
-Zh.

Looking at the program for the Russian Nights Festival I was excited for a minute, when I thought that there would be a screening of a Dovzhenko film that I haven't seen, but then I realized that I know it by its Russian title. So I won't be cursing the fact that I don't live in L.A., because the rest of the program looks lackluster. When are people going to stop trotting out Andrei Voznesenskii for poetry readings? He is better than his contemporary Evgenii Evtushenko, but that's not difficult. Really. But if anyone goes to the film on closing night, could you please report back? I'd like to know if it's as bad as it sounds. -Zh. (via Cinema Minima)

Related Links

Somebody saw Sokurov.

Fleur de sel

To answer a question about fleur de sel, which I mentioned in my post yesterday, it's a salt cultivated off the coast of France, in Guérande. It's considered the best salt you can buy, and is used as a seasoning sprinkled on food when serving, and not to cook with. You can go here if you want to read more about it.


Tonight, we're having it sprinkled on some black radishes we got in our organic box delivery. I can't wait. -K.

Haul II: Easter Candy

This is over a week late, but I still had to share my amazing candy haul from Easter. Since this post is late, two items that have been consumed: a Wonderbar Egg (for my American readers who live in a country devoid of one of the best bad chocolate bars ever, think Cadbury's Cream Egg, but with peanut butter and caramel inside) and a packet of Cadbury's Mini-Eggs. The other stuff collected on my egg hunt is more exotic.

The four individual chocolates are all from JS Bonbons, which is the next installment of our hunt for decent non-chain chocolate in Toronto. Please, please, please let them be good.

The wrapped hard candies are Japanese cinnamon candy. I've already consumed most of these and will be heading out to Sanko to purchase some more.

The little boxes of Meiji candy are an assortment of odd things from Japan. I ate all of these this weekend. The candies that look like M&Ms taste like chocolate-flavored Skittles. The Choco Baby box held little nuggets of chocolatey goodness, and the Coffee Beat tasted and looked like chocolate-covered coffee beans, only more chocolatey. The box on the very bottom with pink-capped mountains contained chocolate that tasted identical to the M&M/Skittles hybrid.

Last, but not least, is the black box of Amedei chocolate from Tuscany. The packaging is gorgeous and the label promises bitter chocolate that tastes of flowers and tobacco. Supposedly Amedei treats their chocolate much like wine. Each batch is a vintage and uses the cocoa harvested from a single harvest of a single region. K. and I split one of the pieces on Easter morning and the chocolate was everything the package promised: bitter without a hint of sweetness, winy, and with a note of tobacco. I'm saving these bad boys.

As I eat my way through my Easter candy, I'll post the results. I have high hopes for JS Bonbons, but I am subconsciously prepared for them to be overrated, as is most stuff in Toronto.

Back to marking and reading. I have actual deadlines to meet now. I promise to post about the Pavel Juráček Retrospective this weekend. Thursday, the Cinematheque Ontario will be screening the last of the two and a half films he directed. I will make one comment now, though. Watching The Key for Determining Dwarfs, or The Last Travel of Lemuel Gulliver and listening to Juráček discuss the work and fates of his colleagues Jan Nemec and Evald Schorm, I realized that all the Anglo-American world really knows about Czech cinema is Forman, Menzel, and Svěrak. That is the type of shame that I would normally describe with the adjectival form of a four-letter word. Goddamn Soviets. -Zh.

Green!

Since the green blog is gone (I swear, it looked really really good on our Apple!) I decided to mourn its loss by making green food. And no, I don't mean eggs and ham. I spent the weekend with my Aunt C., who lives just outside of Toronto, and she sent me home with a huge wad of parsley that she'd bought and couldn't possibly use. Combine that with the weird bland-fish cravings I've been having lately, and I found myself at the Whole Foods (land o' crazy upscale shopping) buying a beautiful piece of halibut to serve with my green food. Back home, I sauteed the fish in a little olive oil, cooked up some organic brown rice (also courtesy of Whole Foods), and reduced the giant pile of parsley to a small bowl of salsa verde. Want to make some of your very own? Here's what you do: In a food processor, combine one bunch parsley, a minced or chopped garlic clove, juice of one lemon, and a few spoonfuls of capers. Whizz with enough olive oil for the mixture to form a thick, pesto-like sauce. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve with almost anything (especially anything bland). You can add anchovies or a little mustard if you'd like.

Whole Foods, by the way, is a minefield of "I've been meaning to get some of this!" Which is why I came home with not only halibut and rice, but also with some fleur de sel, some real vanilla, and some organic tahini. oops. -K.

Remont

Although I'm fairly sure that "remont" comes from French, I learned it from the Russians. They would close entire metro stations and not provide alternative routes when I was there in 1996. You simply had to stay home.

Anywho, I would like to thank everyone for their suggestions, keep them coming. I'm going to play with the template tonight and see about keeping with the green because green is cool. If that doesn't work, you'll probably get stuck with pink even though pink is no where near as cool.

I'm really tired. -Zh.

Announcements

I realized this morning that one of my links on Saturday wasn't working. Sorry. If you were in Toronto yesterday, you missed this movie. Will you regret it? You probably will the next time you try to pick up a member of the intelligentsia in a seedy little cafe. More for me, I suppose.

We've received complaints about the green. My first response is: buy an Apple. My second response is: suggestions? Only, purple is not an option. -Zh.

I'll be reading:

On authors and translators (via Chicha)

If you're in Toronto, you should go see this movie tomorrow. -Zh.

Haul I: Ideas, Information...Ow!

I stopped by the department yesterday to see if Doctor S. was in his office, thinking, "If he's there, then I'll return around five to pick up the essays. If he isn't, then I can wait until Monday." I was counting on him not being there. He was, however in his office. I returned at quarter to five to pick up the papers and wound up granting a couple of extensions (me! extensions! power!) and running into Doctor Cz. My backpack, which was already what most people would call "full," gradually stuffed itself with more books until it was ready to burst: laptop, full water bottle, dinner, fifteen 10-15-page papers, the three books I had checked out of the library on Thursday intending to read them at home, four books on Mácha that Doctor Cz. gave me, and every photocopy that she had in her office on E. F. Burian. To give you an idea of the scope of that last item, Doctor Cz. is a specialist in Czech drama and theatre of the 1930s who has been at it for a long time and is currently working on the links between Alfred Radok's superb Holocaust movie, The Long Journey and Burian's productions of May.

My brain is also full for the moment. I was naive when I started writing my dissertation, but at the same time worried. How could I possibly write fifty pages on Burian's productions of May? I am someone who has a problem writing a twenty-page paper. As the topic spirals to include larger swathes of culture, history, and theatre, I'm beginning to wonder how I'll manage with only fifty pages. Here's the stuff Doctor Cz. and I have decided I need to look at (the list is more for me at this point, but enjoy it anyway):

Levý on translation

Everything on Brecht's Three-Penny Opera on which I can lay hands.

Either Tynianov or Shklovskii on adaptations of Gogol's "The Overcoat." Both Doctor Cz. and I forgot exactly who wrote it.

A volume of Poetics Today from 1981. I don't remember why.

Anything on the German Dramatizerung, which I probably just spelled incorrectly. This will prove to be a problem during my database searches.

Find out when the first adaptations/dramatizations of poetry and prose occurred in the Czech context.

Find everything I can on Kundera's dramatization of Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist and his Master. (I've linked to Powell's because it is a really, really good book.)

Find everything I can on everyone's dramatization of Hašek's Good Soldier Svejk, whose last name merits a diacritic that I am unable to program at the moment.

Check out Burian's production of Nezval's Manon Lescaut because it's a dramatization too.

Look at Meierkhol'd's collaborations with Eisenstein.

Look at Meierkhol'd in general.

Read Szondi's book on lyrical drama. It's in German. Eep.

And I know that this is only the beginning. There are quite a few people out there who are more than willing to discuss the hard slog that is a dissertation, but they always seem to forget about the joy involved. This thing is beginning to look like more and more fun as time progresses. -Zh.

Definer or Defender

This is late but the Minneapolis Institute of Art would like to sell a painting in order to purchase another painting. An arts organization is upset. I tried to find a more neutral link about this, but nothing really popped up. So read it, enjoy the amateurish rhetoric about modernist ideologues and try to piece together what is going on while you skip from loaded word to loaded word and evaluate attempts to discredit the MIA in order to show the world that they are fools with poor judgment. When are people going to learn that poor writing and cheap shots, i.e. "$hamefully," are a sure way to undermine the point being made? Frankly, I was willing to give article's author the benefit of the doubt until she claimed that William Bouguereau is one of the best artists of the nineteenth century. Uh, sure.

Before I actually looked at the link and was horrified by the writing, I thought that this raised some issues worth considering, such as the role of arts institutions in society, especially as definers/defenders of cultural heritage. Who's cultural heritage do they define/defend? What role does public opinion play in the administration of the an arts organization outside of the if-you-exhibit-Monets-or-perform-The-Nutcracker-they-will-come mentality. Ponder. This is going to play a large role in my dissertation, which is making me wish that I had gone to the conference on redefining museums in the twenty-first century. The Arts Journal (see sidebar for link) blogs include a couple on art, but none on museum management. Too bad.

The link that started all this blathering was discovered at MeFi. -Zh.

Vienna, Austria

Apologies

So, once again, I played around with the template. The blog looks pretty good on our iBook, but I just took a look at it on campus and gracious, it's garish. I guess that lime green, no matter how much I love it, is ever a good choice for things I will be sharing with other people.

Now, back to editing so that I can work on my own stuff again, since come Friday evening I will have in my possession fifteen undergraduate essays on Russian and Soviet film. I am not looking forward to the essays on any aspect of Tarkovskii's oeuvre because I've noticed that he has a way of tripping up even the best students. Instead of focusing on all of those mundane details like narrative structure, editing, cinematography, and mise-en-scene (which, surprisingly, many movie reviewers ignore, which in turn leads to a lot of whining about the "unexpectedness" of a film's ending. I'm thinking of a review I read of The Son in particular, where if the author had known his Bible just a bit more, the ending wouldn't have seemed like such a shock...but, I've digressed), they tend to entangle themselves in answering the "big questions." I will admit that it is fun to use big words from critical discourse, especially since most of them signify nothing, but, frankly, if you can't justify your argument with examples from the film being discussed, I'm not interested.

Back to work now. Really. -Zh.

Coming Soon: Bake Sales

For those of you who remember reading about the big, traumatic grant application that consumed my life and an acre of old-growth timber this January, the title of this post should give you a pretty good idea as to what their reply said. Even though I received the answer I expected, it still blows. To add insult to injury, they addressed me by my first name. I'd prefer some formality with my rejection. I'll be moping for the next twenty-four hours. -Zh.

I'll be reading:

A New Yorker article about Aaron McGruder, who writes the only comic strip I read on a regular basis. (via bookslut)

Michael Haneke (via Cinema Minima)

I Love ILL

I hate almost every aspect of the main library here. It is, in true Toronto fashion, the antithesis of all things good and user-friendly in architecture. Everything from the over-worked and under-funded staff to the numerous bottlenecks scattered throughout the building seems to work against the efficient conduct of research and higher learning. One exception to the rule is Interlibrary Loans (ILL), which brings the academic capital, i.e. books, of other institutions of higher learning to this one, which lacks a decent Slavic section. Without them, I wouldn't be able to write my dissertation. Currently in my carrel:

Zuzana Kočová. Kronika Armádního uměleckého divadla [Chronicle of the Naval Artistic Theater]. Prague: Naše vojsko, 1955.

Lola Skrbková. E. F. Burianova voicebandová kompozice Máchova Máje [E. F. Burian's Voiceband Composition: Mácha's May]. Brno: Městské kulturní středisko S. K. Neumanna, 1976.

Ukazatel' periodicheskikh izdanii emigratsii iz Rossii i SSSR za 1919-1952 gg [Guide to the Periodical Publishing of the Emigration from Russia and the USSR, 1919-1952]. Munich: Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of the USSR, 1953.

Beautiful and useful books, all of them. -Zh.

28 Days Later

K. and I stayed in last night and watched 28 Days Later, which did exactly what it was supposed to: scared the pants off both of us. This demonstrates the kind of extreme wooses we are. If you had been standing outside the bedroom, you would have heard our girlish shrieks, even though we knew what was going to happen because the film abides by the rules of genre:

1. If you go into a dark place alone, there will be a baddie waiting for you.
2. Never trust anyone who lives in an isolated manor.
3. The one who does the most philosophizing on screen is a baddie.
4. Fire/light at night is always a bad idea.
5. Once a good guy enters some sort of reverie, a baddie will appear.
6. The oldest member of the good-guy gang has to be killed off, while the youngest member always lives. Hello future of humanity!

I don't really have much more to say. I'd like to think that 28 Days Later was smarter than most horror films, but I don't watch horror films on a regular basis, so I have nothing against which to compare it. Aspects of the mise-en-scène were smarter than I had expected, i.e. the Laocoon statue, which not only symbolizes the end of traditional civilization (I'm assuming that this is a common motif in these types of movies), but also signals that the army platoon living in the house is doomed once our heroes enter.

Another reason I'd like to think that Boyle made a more-intelligent-than-average horror movie is the original theatrical-release ending, which K. and I both preferred, is included on the DVD, and was obviously too smart for most audiences because (spoiler) people thought that Hannah and Selina were walking off to their doom. Hello! What do you think the significance of the plane is? Do you need the ramifications of it handed to you on a silver platter? There will be procreation (end spoiler). Really.

There should be a conclusion here, but I'm hungry and K.'s cooking, therefore I'm a too distracted. Insert your own. -Zh.

Related links

More on being an utter pussy when it comes to watching horror movies.

Randomness

Thank God we don't own a television.

How to bribe your way into Balthazar. (via kottke)

The Son

The Son by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne was everything the negative reviews promised: slow, not like the Dardenne brothers' earlier movie Rosetta (Although, what kind of a criticism is that? Isn't it a good thing when filmmakers do something different?), and intelligent.

The handful of negative reviews that I found on Rotten Tomatoes also accused the film of not being emotionally engaging and I am having a problem with that particular criticism, probably because I don't use it as a criterion for judging works of art.

The demand for emotional engagement reminds me of a seminar session spent discussing the Russian civic poet Nadson back when I was an M.A. student because the professor thought that reading bad poetry could help us figure out why good poetry is good. Nadson was, even with a Mandel'shtam essays dedicated to him, a horrible poet. The particular poem we examined was written, I think, in iambic pentameter, using archaic vocabulary to describe the social woes of the day and the need for civic action. There were a fair number of allusions to classical literature too. And then, amid all of this pomp and high-flown diction came the image that undid the poem: the lyric I stuck his finger in poor Russia's wound and wiggled it around a bit. Now, not only is this gross, it is also at odds with the rest of the poem. No amount of defamiliarization could improve poor Nadson's poem. A Russian woman in the class, however, tried to defend him because he was sincere. She valued sincerity over a flawless poem.

Although I realize that sincerity and emotional engagement are not the same thing, the expectation that one or the other will exist in a good work of art is, in my opinion, baseless. A bad poem is a bad poem even if it is sincere. A bad film is a bad film even if it engages the viewer's emotions. Everything about The Son creates distance between the characters and the audience. The pacing is slow. There is no extra-diegetic sound, not even a crappy Céline Dion song over the closing credits. The shots are predominantly extreme close ones creating a sense of claustrophobia so that the viewer wants to push the film away. These shots also tend to be of the back of the protagonist's head or just over his shoulder. The narrative provides only the bare minimum in terms of back story for all of the characters. The narrative also relies on a network of mainly biblical allusions to move itself along. There is no closure.

This all adds up to a film that is well-crafted and intelligent, if not engaging, probably because the whole endeavor requires too much thought. So what? It's not a bad thing. When I want something that is emotionally engaging, I'll see some Hollywood-produced movie that has a soundtrack, a trailer featuring platitudes spoken in that deep, male movie voice, and a poster featuring characters looking skyward. That type of movie can, I will admit, be well-crafted and, in rare, rare instances, intelligent. If, however, I simply want to see something good, I'll take my chances with movie sans soundtrack, sans moving-guaranteeing trailer, and sans great-and-shining-future poster. I also promise not be upset if the only thing engaged is my brain. -Zh. (edited on 12 April because Zh. is so out of the pop culture loop that she spelt Céline Dion's last name incorrectly.)

Randomness

Paris Metro Map from 1937 (via kottke)

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's plane found

Chocolate Cake for Breakfast! It's the last downloadable mp3 listed under "Lenlow." (via fluxblog)

The Memespread Project

...because smoking only hurts the smoker. Yeah, right.

There are five campus libraries that I visit on a regular basis: one for the computer lab, one for material on Russian/Eastern European stuff when it's checked out from the main library, one for books about film, one for monographs on literary theory when they've been checked out from the main library, and one for my carrel. Today, however, I am going to visit a new (to me) library: the music library. The book of Burian articles that I now need is housed there, even though the title is Nejen o hudbě (Not Only About Music). I wonder if the human being with whom I'll interact there will remind me about my fines... -Zh. (Edited by Zh. 8/4 because she's been having problems with her tenses.)

Surprise!

Watching television is bad for kids.

Everyone (my dad excluded) likes iPods.

University students should lighten up. I wonder if premed and engineering students qualify? -Zh.

Library: 1; Zh.: 0

Perhaps the library merits two points today as I didn't even make it to the main campus library and it still got me. Instead of cloistering myself in my carrel, I spent several hours in a small, windowless, smelly room that passes for a computer lab at one of the college libraries. Digression: Never guest edit a web-based publication whose webmaster is 1. not paid and 2. afraid of Apples. There are a bunch of other things I could say about this particular webmaster but they're just plain mean, albeit accurate. Before I left this particular library, I decided to check out a book for my dissertation: Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, which I determined to be only marginally useful on the bus ride home. Unlike the main library, you have to deal with an actual human being at the college libraries. The particular human being with whom I dealt reminded me about my twenty dollars worth of fines and the fact that only I had four dollars more leeway before my borrowing privileges were suspended. Sigh. I am ashamed of my fines, their existence is a sign that I am more irresponsible than I'd like to be. So, I came home and took a nap and now it's late. Stupid library.

In other news, my review of Le fils will be appearing shortly. -Zh.

I'll be reading:

Special Effects = No Charm?

I'm not the biggest fan of the whole Lord of the Rings thing, but I don't know if special effects are really the problem here. I'd venture that a bigger problem is the source material. Yawn! I also don't know why he's going on about Hollywood destroying "film art." First it was film destroying theatre, then sound was destroying cinema, and now special effects are in on sound's kamikaze mission? I may not like most Hollywood movies, but there's way more to their crappiness than special effects. -Zh.

It's not about you.

K. and I went to see Renée Fleming in recital today. We were surrounded by people over thirty, nay, over fifty and the ushers eyed us suspiciously. They probably suspected us of bashing some tiny blue-haired woman over the head with her Chanel bag and then swapping our crappy second-balcony tickets for her posh mezzanine seats in her ensuing daze. I don't have much to say about the performance itself. Of course it was good and of course the Schubert was the highlight, even though Berg fought fiercely for the honor.

I do, however, have a couple of things to say about classical-music audiences in Toronto. I'll begin by summing up: they suck except for those at the Jane Mallett Theatre, probably because it's so small that it would be easy to mob any party guilty of poor etiquette after the performance. The stairs are steep too, making a quick get-away almost impossible. Roy Thomson hall, on the other hand, provides a sense of anonymity, which in turns allows some individuals to give in to their inner jackasses. So, although the program asked very nicely that the audience hold its applause until the end of each song grouping, there was, of course, applause between every frickin' song. Ms. Fleming actually asked the audience before Berg's Seven Happy Songs to hold its applause until the end of the seventh song. People applauded after the fifth because the page had to be turned to see the lyrics for the final two songs. Upon realizing that there were two more songs, members of the audience began to race to see who could clap first. It's a sign of intelligence and respect to rustle your program with increasing vigor as the end approaches and to applaud before the pianist has taken his hands off the keyboard and the singer has visibly relaxed her posture. Cripes.

I'll be reading:

A new type of citizen

Heaven

Some day I will go back to posting extensively about the evil that is the main campus library (although ILL there is always efficient, if sometimes cranky) and literature, but as long as I'm T.A.-ing film, which is completely new to me outside of the well-it-sucked and well-it-had-Owen-Wilson-in-it-so-I-saw-it comments, you're stuck with my posts about feeeelm. I'm fascinated and contemplating leaving grad school for film school. I would direct, K. would be my editor, and we'd see if Owen Wilson would help out with writing scripts. Lord knows, I can't write. Together we would make cool, cool movies.

Last night after entry three in the Polish animation series at the Cinematheque Ontario, some of which was good and most of which I can live without, I was sucked into watching Heaven with Cate Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi. The back story of the film is that Krzysztof Kieslowski wrote the script before he died and Tom Twyker of Run Lola Run fame then made the film. It felt like a Kieslowski script, but there was no weight to the film. While the title Heaven suggests that this lack was intended, I was reminded of the private viola instructors and youth symphony conductors of my past, who insisted that even the quietest most ethereal pianissimo required a solid core. There was no core to Twyker's movie.

What was missing? I don't know. Part of the problem may have been Giovanni Ribisi (Filippo). Superficially, his eyes are too close together so all of the intense staring he did during the opening of the film made him look specially abled instead of ardent. Also, although I am fairly certain that he is a fine actor, he is burdened with being the punk adopted kid from Davis Rules, which was rather funny until he appeared. That is a hard thing to overcome. A definite problem was the use of non-diegetic music. By placing emotional cues outside of the film's narrative, it feels as though Twyker sucked the soul of out the story. Everytime Arvo Part's music started up, I disengaged myself from the film. In light of the fact that Part's music is playing almost constantly, I wasn't engaged for about three-quarters of the film.

On the good side, the cinematography is gorgeous. Of course when one is filming in Tuscany there isn't much one can do to hurt it. All of the urban and interior shots were beautifully composed, however. The take that forced me to sit down and watch the rest of the film was of Blanchett's character descending on an escalator in the foreground while an elevator attached to the outside of an office building ascends in the background. Separating them is a large concrete square. I watched that take again this morning. Remo Girone was also excellent as Filippo's father. In fact, we watched the deleted scenes between Filippo and his father and although we understood why they had been cut, we still wished that they had been included.

Overall, it's a beautiful film and while not wholly satisfying, it is more rewarding than nine-tenths of the garbage Hollywood attempts to pawn off on us. -Zh.

Coming Attractions:

April Fool's!

I hope.

We Now Return You

Yes, it's back to my regularly scheduled life, which includes the following activities:
1. Frantically reading everything I can lay hands on about adaptations, even though most of the stuff out there deals with turning novels into film. It's a start, I suppose. I did download a couple of dissertations that discuss adaptations. I love other people's bibliographies. Don't worry, these dissertations have a home in my bibliography.
2. Attempting to re-create E.F. Burian's stagings of Mácha out of vague words like "surrealist," "dramatic," and "moving," although I think that in the mid-1930s "surrealist" meant something definite.
3. Battling with the library as it hides everything connected with émigré literature. The poor Herald has not been found yet.
4. Going to the movies. It's a Polish animation weekend and I'm going to go on the hunt for Aleksei Balabanov's oeuvre. I saw Brat (Brother) and it was cool. Cinematic manifesto, blah, blah, blah. It also happened to be an exceptionally well-done action/gangster movie with the obligatory nods to Scorsese. On one hand, it can be watched for its entertainment value (It has several of those cheesy time elapsed sequences to music that show the protagonist getting ready for his next hit. I love those.) and on the other, as a frightening indication of what is/was happening in Russia.
5. Making some mail art. It's been too long.
6. Spending some time with K. It feels as though we haven't seen each other in ages.
7. Dreaming a little.
-Zh.