I know I’ve been nonstop on a movies spree, writing reviews. I’ve been doing that since these blogs started, off and on. But in terms of frequency, I’d say the MMU chapter (recent) has been especially movie intensive.
However, I think I may have achieved enough interim objectives to change the pace. The other time I did a movie marathon with when a housemate was working at Laughing Horse, which long since exited stage left, and she’d bring home piles of documentaries about Ernest Hemingway trying to warn Franklin and Eleanor of what was coming.
So let me draw a line in the sand and say I’m gonna postpone any viewing of The Odyssey until maybe it goes second run or gets picked up by the colleges, which I understand are rallying around film studies more, although that might just be a rumor. Colleges often have nice enough auditoriums to be showing curated films with a purpose, meaning a curriculum focus.
Speaking of curated movies I was hoping to show at The Stanley back in the day: Koyaanisqatsi was chief among them you may remember. I was penniless with nothing but dreams for the 2nd largest (abandoned) movie auditorium east of the Mississippi or something along those lines, a few blocks from me in Jersey City, where I lived as a humble math teacher.
That’s why it takes me back to hang out with Bradford, like we did on Friday. He had a role in making that movie, getting some of those Google Street View type shots (this was all before Google of course) that were set to a soundtrack by Phillip Glass, who has figured into my graph theory recently in connection with the Thurman family.
Not to pick on The Odyssey, I plan to stay out of first run fantasies in general, as the less fictional Planet of the Apes world beckons, or should we call it Mad Max? Whatever we call it, it’s surreal.
I’m understanding Existentialism a little more maybe, even though I’ve long frequented those circuits (talking about some of the French stuff, coffee shop centric) like the nausea part. However it’s not trees in particular that turn me off.
But then I was born with a misanthropic streak. I’ve confessed to all that early childhood stuff elsewhere in my blogs, often in the context of building a philanthropy, called Coffee Shops Network. Think: gambling and/or winning at games of skill, but for others (very chivalrous), for reputation points more than for money (they get the money, to save the whales or whatever).
It’s not like I wish humans any harm (hey, I am one), quite the contrary. It’s more I find us distasteful in our aesthetic choices sometimes (we’re kinda cringe). But in my own defense, that form of aversion is a common enough personality trait, not a pathology per se. It’s a data point I’ve nudged along a well-known axis in a multi-axial phase space (I’m talking “personality test” language — the good ones are of course higher dimensional).
