weekend doings

[lobelia321]

This weekend

I saw two films, Shrek 2 and Motorcycle Diaries. The latter contains the gorgeous Gael Garcia Bernal who just gets better with every movie I see him in. He is so wonderfully understated in his acting; he's the most subsuming-his-own-person-in-the-role actor on the screen I know. And one of the most versatile. And also one of the hunkiest! If you haven't seen it: it's a film by Walter Salles (who's Brazilian I believe), based on the diaries kept by Ernesto 'Che' Guevara when he went on a trip through America (Argentina to Chile to Peru) with a friend in 1952. It's a sort of coming-to-political-age, and set in absolutely beautiful countryside. It's the first film that's made me want to go to South America. Shrek featured MY DUDLEY, OMG. If you've seen it you'll know whom I mean! No images on the web, for some reason. Or at least ungooglable.

I wrote two lectures, Intro to Visual Theories and Intro to Film Form and Aesthetics plus the seminars to go with them (devising exercises, rewinding videos, making photocopies). In Film Form, they'll have to analyse Run Lola Run (the first 5 minutes) and in Visual Theories they will have to sort postcards in chronological order and draw an imaginative map of their own version of art history. Much of what I wrote was, ahem, culled from Elkins's brilliant Stories of Art and from websites on Kant and Clive Bell... Films we're focusing on in Film Form: Rashomon, Bicycle Thieves, Pierrot le fou, Wavelength by Michael Snow, Run Lola Run and I shall be foisting Kuch Kuch Hota Hai on them as well, also bits of Triumph of the Will which always elicits problematic enthusiasm.

I read 3 1/2 plays, three by Ibsen -- A Doll's House, which I'd read before and seen performed but it really is a very impressive and involving play, Ghosts which is apparently very popular and was hugely controversial in teh 1880s but I think it has dated; and The Wild Duck which is totally weird and intense but which I'd love to see performed; it is almost unbearably tense. I'm 1/2 way through Strindberg's Miss Julie - a rather shocking play from 1888 which contains the lines, spoken by a servant to the mistress of the house: You smalltime whore, you conniving bitch... (I can't remember the exact lines but very in-your-face for 1888!). The good thing about plays is that you can get through a lot of them in a short time. :-) They can also teach writers a lot about dialogue!

I bought an indoor guinea pig hutch because the nights are gettin' cold (and the days)

I cooked ratatouille twice.

I wanked twice but had no sexual intercourse (marriage, eh!!!).

I did not:
Write any HP fic
Read any fanfic
Write any of my article
Do any washing (so have nothing to wear for my lectures tomorrow, aargh!)
Look at LJ until now
Answer any emails
Nor even read any emails!
Feel bad

In fact, I feel quite cheerful these days. More on that later, perhaps.

Comments

[lazulus]

Does the remaining piggie have a new friend?

Have seen Shrek 2 but sadly not yet seen Motorcycle Diaries, although I mean to. Maybe when I have some time. I did, however, go to see Wimbledon on Friday night, which I thorougholy enjoyed. Paul Bettany is just lovely!

Film Form sounds fun!

Don't feel bad, be joyful that you have a life outside of the net!

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Yes!! We have a new pig! Got it 2 weeks ago. She's called Truffle and is a Peruvian, which means she looks like a miniature mop and you can hardly tell her bum from her face.

[msilverstar]

go you! I am so glad that you're productive and feeling well.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thanks, sweetie. You can go through and come out the other side.

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

Oh, Motorcycle Diaries! I was so in love with Gael GB in this. I think he's brilliant and lovely. And it made me want to go to South America, too.

Heheh. I am reminded that I once wrote fic featuring Clive Bell. Not that I'd heard of 'fic' then. I fear it was merely a way to distract myself from the fact that I didn't really understand the lecture I was in at the time.

Ha, I just found it. It was called:

Art-War

The nastines had got out of hand. It had been looking bad for some time but this was really something else. Vanessa was encamped on the sideboard now and had been since the Vorticists invaded the drawing room in early March. Things were getting desperate - they were down to half a bottle of claret and the pate was all but gone.

"I don't know how long we can hold out," she whispered hoarsely to Clive. "It looks like the end for our Mattisse-influenced and somewhat derivative painting."

Clive grunted and absent-mindedly punched Duncan in the stomach. Duncan was used to this now - ever since he had begun his affair with Vanessa, Clive had been assaulting him almost subconsciously. When questioned about his behaviour, he seemed perplexed and disturbed - as a conscientious objector, he would never mean to physically abuse anyone, let alone a man who had done him the good turn of taking the terminally annoying Vanessa off his hands. Still, this was quite irrelevant. They were losing the war. Their time had passed and they knew it. Anyway, as pacifists, they couldn't fight back, which is always something of a disadvantage in a war and made everything a little too easy for the Vorticists, who had taken to beating up pensioners as a hobby whilst waiting for the Bloomsbury Group to give in. Wyndham-Lewis had suggested cutting the old people up into strangley shaped pieces. He thought it might be a 'really Cubist thing to do'. Picasso would like it, he said. The others told him to shut up.


Blimey, what a load of rubbish. How on earth did I get a degree?

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

*cackles and goes off to turn lecture course on modernism into a fight between DH Lawrence and Everyone Else*

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

111111111111

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That's put paid to my ability ever to say serious during a lecture on significant form.

"Ooh, Dunk, I think I'm having an aesthetic experience!"

"Is that what they're calling it these days, Bellsie?"

"Your, er, form is certainly significant."

[fivil.livejournal.com]

I remember you posting to bollywood about you showing your class a bit of Dil Se and them not liking it. Well, I hope this class will like KKHH. And when you run out of great Bollywood films to show, then you can officially say their generation is doomed. ;]

And ooh, Gael Garcia Bernal! I want to see the new Pedro Almodovar-film, La mala educacion (not sure how you write that), he's in it.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Gael Garcia Bernal is brilliant in Mala Educacion. That's when I first realised how versatile he is, and how understated. He plays about four different roles in that film; it's a very clever nested narrative with twists within twists. And for slash fans? Heaven.

I've given up on making the class like Bollywood. I'm content if they just watch it. I played KKHH for laughs. I told them it was about the most flamboyant piece of escapism I knew and showed them the Divanna song. Heh, this means they're actually going to have to defend it now. Because escapism? Nobody does it better.