short bloggery from work

after my two days at the temple of israel, taping a middle east conference, running down the secret passageways and copying the tapes before the speakers themselves had gotten downstairs with the dodgy elevator, the return to class felt strange. our reading list was particularly insane this week, as it included most of t.s. eliot’s major poems. i compared the intense layers of religious references to the wild layering on buffy, meaning to say that one could make annotated editions of every major text, but they should at least be enjoyable on their own. my professor thankfully pulled the rug from under my feet, saying that not every text is as ridulously referency as eliot or buffy. we ended up mainly talking about the shortest, the hollow men (the “this is the way the world ends” one) and my ‘huddle of praying zombies’ interpretation was surprisingly popular, even though my awful pun ‘the hum of humanity’ was way too pretentious to even repeat here. more poetry next week; wallace stevens who apparently wrote his crazy poems on the way to work as an insurance person in hartford, connecticut.
my other professor, who used to write for rolling stone, the one i still owe two papers (even though we’ve been avoiding the subject), really liked the flaky mix me and g. put together for our twice-semesterly, mainly gin-oriented cocktail party, but then again who can resist petula clark singing “downtown” in german, or a tragic tango version of “smells like teen spirit.” the weirdest thing about this internship is the soundtrack, for weeks now i have spent two days a week listening to mid-nineties alternative music (today is massive attack and portishead, yesterday brought radiohead and placebo, last week it was the verve and depeche mode.) songs i only purposely put on to flashback and reminisce, never to concentrate when i’m writing a four page synopsis on an epic young adult novel about flooding and cloning.

the gates three

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Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

i didn't see showercurtains or a waste of money, just the sudden sense of happening on a yang zimou filmset, daggers about to fly through the branches, snowflakes landing on eyebrows in close up.

gates two

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Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

some short parables written while watching a french film about french people:

12. the day it started to rain bullets was the day the father told his children it was not safe for them to go outside. the children wore their ponchos and filled balloons with water. they walked into the bathroom, threw the balloons at the ceiling, and complained about the weather.

15. a new brand of terrorists uses high definition video technology to re-edit james bond movies to include intricate plot twists concerning his multi-racial bastard children and their increasingly violent demands for child support.

24. after a tsunami washes away part of the continent, the father explained to his son what a tidal wave is. he asked the boy how he felt about this. the boy answered: good. confused, the father asked again and the child said: bad. the father told the boy to draw a picture of the tsunami. when the father came to take a look, the boy was gone and the drawing completely erased. he called for the boy and found him on his father's bed. standing on his head, his feet cycling in the air. the father thought, this would be a good time to take a picture of his son. he could print it out and hang it upside down; the boy would be walking on air.

gates one

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Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

this is what happens when you end up in central park before eight am after a heavy snowfall

howard hughes and diane lane

after tuesday's lackluster post, some short, and hopefully more eventful, facts about my existence. yesterday brought tiny raindrops and a morning filled with editing other people's responses to a new ludovine sagnier and sure dutch hit for natalie portman and amos gitai about multicultural women bonding in the middle east. after that, the new york premiere of cannes winners, oldboy and assayas' clean. i can't believe i forgot about the twist ending to oldboy, but i guess that makes it such a powerful film (i've spent quite alot of time now finding synonyms for 'powerful' and also, strangely, 'distraught'). clean, however, was underwhelming, boring even.
today i managed to quite viciously review a new horror film in the ring vein: "its cheap gory thrills are a disgrace to what could have been an interesting vehicle for an underused actress." (a short and cheesy description: "a bored housewife spends the scariest week in her life trying to prevent her husband's death from happening, thereby disturbing the laws of cause and effect, and changing the future of her family forever.") the other script was a very wonderful, confessions of a dangerous mind-style, comic drama, apparently based on a true story, about a man who got a million dollar advance for the autobiography of the original aviator, howard hughes. tonight will bring a new and revised edition of my writing worksop, now if only i had written something that didn't involve "obvious plot beats" or "very marketable to a female audience"...

snippets of waiting

so i'm sitting in the computerlab with some defrosting quails in my bag waiting to meet my roommate and his friend, both precursors of mine at the internship. just a very short post as i'm already being hunted out for a computer class. my class on kafka was suitably disturbing and anti-climactic: you think you understand what he's saying and then he turns it right around: "in the fight between you and the world back the world." there really is no comma there. should there be? is that the point?
tomorrow brings the brighter weather back again, i hope, and a few hours of internship, some more of administration and naipaul and unamuno's mist (apparently a pre-post-modern masterpiece), and i almost forgot i'm going to be seeing oldboy (again) and assayas's clean at the lincoln center. (i have no idea what this class is about, surveys? john kerry?)
thursday more interning, maybe synopsizing gregg araki's hilariously gruesome new script, crEEEps, filled with scantily clad teenagers exploding into bugs and setting each other on fire while playing with their ipods. this weekend i'm finally going to see christo's work in the park with karen's deliciously british ex-landlady and friday i'm going out to lunch with a fellow dutch expat, seeing nobody knows later in the day i hope.

some bits of my new job: pre-movie criticism

Burrows, a neurotic ex-cop, and Siri, a jaded insurance investigator, try to get to the bottom of a series of unfortunate and improbable incidents while trailed by a documentary filmmaker. A road trip brings them closer together and gives the profiling genius a chance to catch the killer he failed to catch before.
Cosmological references abound and chronology is eschewed as the lives of Michael, an awkward astronomer, and Caroline, a mysterious French photographer, are twisted apart by fate and coincidence. A strong twist ending reveals a ghostly overlap between two lovers at the same place but at a different time.
Sadie Blake, a nosy reporter, vows revenge after a gang of vampires turns her into one of their own. She tracks them down and kills them one by one with the help of a policeman mourning his daughter's death by fangs.

my friend jack, fled into the bathroom

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Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

b/w version of roommate portrait

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Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

some shots of last weekend's party in my suite

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Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

the sun is out and i'm at work

i started my internship last week and it is honestly the best job in the world: a lovely twenty minute walk through the village (today just in a suit and scarf, free fulbright concert at the lincoln center tonight), with the essential addition of the many squirrels on washington square. an actual lunchbreak, which i haven't had in years, not since my days at virgin megatore at least. the first day i got a ghostly lovestory, filled with cosmological science facts and a plot structure that looped in on itself, the second a quasi lesbionic vampire tale of revenge and redemption. because my boss is leaving for berlin on wednesday, i was called in on monday morning on this new winona ryder movie about the darwin awards, which i am now merrily commenting on before my class on nigerian literature (winona, nigeria, winona, nigeria, winona). more pictures of my newly debaucherous roomates and that lovely morning walk will follow, as well as haunting snippets of my reports before they are sent to tokyo and all my silly references vanish in translation. love f.