sussex

On Being Hateful

2009-05-28T10:12:00.003-04:00

For the last couple of weeks I've been impossible. I've had trouble being around anyone, and everything has made me unhappy or unsatisfied.
When I'm somewhere, I want desperately to escape. When I'm alone, I'm lonely and introspective.
I went to an event alone the other night after work, an event full of people schmoozing, with some lectures and musical entertainment scheduled. I stood around for 40 minutes, drank a beer, and then went home. I had absolutely nothing to do to keep myself entertained. There was nowhere to sit, no one to talk to or even make eye contact with, and nothing to look at after I finished endlessly surveying the audience from the stairs. The bartender served 5 other people and ignored me while I stood at the bar. I saw people secretly smoking and I wanted to rat them out to the bouncer. I overheard a boy telling his girl he'd never cheated in his life and I believed him. I saw seemingly underage girls in ugg boots and backpacks pooling their money to buy a drink. I felt tired and angry.
Why did I buy a ticket to this stupid thing? If this was my idea of the kind of cultural event I would enjoy, why was I miserable? Why was what I thought I'd enjoy so boring and unpleasant? What do I really want to do with my time?
Which leads me to the problem. Everything seems to be unpleasant these days.
There's too much stuff on the desk in the living room and my blood starts to boil. Someone asks me for help at work and I instantly go from zero to fifty on the aggro scale. Someone makes a comment about my home or appearance and I want to keep them from ever seeing, or hearing anything to do with me again. I work really hard to be alone so that I avoid having these intense feelings, but they're still here even when everyone else is gone. I get into fights when I'm trying to express my opinion. I'm afraid I might crack, and I've gone from one of the most helpful people around to someone who shuns social contact. All I do is complain. And now I have to do write a paper.
Something has to change. Fucked if I know what.

Movie week

2009-05-06T22:06:00.003-04:00

I'm at day 5 of this unplanned week of movies.

I went to the theatre on Saturday night to see Adrift in Tokyo, which turned out to be a cute, but not exceptional movie. It was nostalgic, and conveyed mood well. It was full of walking, talking and eating (three of my favourite things) and the young male character had no love interest, which is a choice I respected.

Day Two - Rented 'In the Realm of the Senses' based on a positive dvd review in NOW Magazine. The review, which I scanned, made it clear that the movie revolved around lust and sex, and was explicit. I did not realize how explicit.
I should have known when one clerk at Queen video gave me the dvd (which I'd called ahead for) and said to the other clerk "This is the person who's renting it." I had no idea a movie could depict what this movie did and get an NC-17 rating (I later learned that NC 17 is not the last rating before X, but replaces the X rating).

Day Three - Went back to Queen video (was hoping to see the same employees so I could give back the dvd and go "bleckhh!", just to prove that I'm not a perv)
and picked up Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together. It was satisfying (although, not very happy-I should have known it was a somewhat ironic title) in that is was very moody, colours were used or not used symbolically, and the sets and plot were a great contrast to the personalities of the characters. I'm amazed at how convincingly gay Tony Leung is, and how passionate and emotional both of the actors were. I feel like this is the first portrayal of a gay relationship I've seen that really felt authentic. And painful.

Day 4
No, not another asian movie. Watched 'For Your Consideration' (I may be the last person in Toronto to see this film). The most interesting part of the film, for me was watching older people play youthful characters, or characters striving to be youthful. I found myself thinking of the actors a lot, wondering whether they felt awkward about being old and playing people fighting their age, being old and playing people desperate to be cool and hip. It wasn't hilarious, but there were a couple of lol moments. And I think I could listen to Harry Shearer all day.

Day 5 . . .

Toying With Designs

2009-04-27T20:08:00.005-04:00

I liked the images that I found related to the last post so much, I played around with them and turned one into a pattern. It's been my ambition for awhile to find a picture (preferably from archive.org, but perhaps not) and turn it into a pattern to print on fabric. Then I'd like to make it into a skirt.

My sewing skills are pretty bad. I'm getting better, but it doesn't come naturally to me. Also my sewing machine came from the garbage :)
This is what i have so far. It seemed to need something more, so I added a dot in the middle. Also, making it only two per pattern allows me to print it on standard paper at a higher resolution. I'm working on another cat one now.

Porno Comedy Show

2009-04-26T11:44:00.007-04:00

I read about this night on BlogTo, and by the end I was sad to learn that it would be the last one of its kind. It was a blast.
The premise: the internet has killed the porn industry. The video store is closing its porno basement and selling everything off for 5 bucks. Come see a sexy comedy show and perhaps take home a souvenir.
I enjoyed every act.

The whole room was pink-tinted. We ended up near the bj section, just behind the gay pr0n area. The bum stuff was on our right. Strangely, it managed to not be that awkward. But I have to admit, that when I picked up the movie on the top row, far left, I covered the penis on the cover before reading the info. I didn't even realize that I did it.

All the comedy was sex-themed. I am clueless enough that this was not obvious to me. One of the first acts was a girl group, sort of a musical acting comedy troupe. When they walked on stage chanting about 'yoni power' I knew I was going to love them. They need to come up with a long-form of their act and turn it into a 'Best in Show' type movie. They did some great bits about their first sexual experience, complete with chanting in unison and grand, wavy vaginal gestures. Good girls!
I didn't get a picture of all of the performers, but the opener was great as well. She was incredibly crass, and made a great joke about preferring the taste of vegetarians.
Next up was Jimmy Hogg, who I imagined would be a 200lb trucker. Instead he was a musical brit who sang about his platonic love for children. The sentiment I remember liking most was
'We'll play a game and the winner gets ice cream. Unless I win, and then we'll both get ice cream, but I won't win, I'll let you win. But I won't let you know that I let you win'. I yelled something while he was on stage, instinctively tried to contribute to his joke (yes, it's possible to forget that comedians really don't like it when you do that) but he took it in stride.
The most memorable acts of the evening came at the end. First, a woman with her 'dance partner' Gerard - A dummy with her hand under it. She did an incredible job of using her right hand to seduce herself, and ended up getting herself drunk and passing out 'in his arms' (after showing a fair bit of garter-clad thigh).
The grand finale - the adorable and hilarious host did a dance to what he proclaimed to be his 'coming out' song from the nineties - the most glorious of dance tracks, 'I'm gonna get you' by Bizarre Inc. He did this dance in shorts, totally balls-out.
Combined with drinks with Deb, a stellar night.

Is there any better reason to be full of joy

2009-04-22T23:05:00.002-04:00

Than the sight of cats jumping through hoops?
This is a shot in the Inle Lake Monastary in Burma-Myanmar, where they train cats to jump through hoops. Let's go?

Eating for two?

2009-04-19T21:31:00.003-04:00

No, not that kind of eating for two. I ordered from New Generation Sushi after a long day of disassembling furniture, cleaning and moving mattresses in preparation for the new roommate. When I got my order home, I noticed that it had two pair of chopsticks in the bag. They must have assumed that due to the volume of food I ordered, I must be two people.
All of this home preparation is strange and new for me. Up until now, no one else here gave a crap about the apartment, and I was the last one in. I wasn't about to take responsibility for making the place look better or keeping it super tidy if I was going to be doing it all alone.
But now that I'm the senior roommate (wtf...am I in goddamned college or something) I feel more of a sense of responsibility for the place. Now I do things like buy tablecloths and clean baseboards instead of wake up hungover and crawl to brunch.
On a related note, I got very down after going out with people from my faculty. Not only was I terrible at making conversation, but I found only one or two of them remotely interesting or friendly. I biked home drunk, huffing and puffing and feeling like a big boner.
Should've gone to a movie instead.

Grownups Read Things they Wrote as Kids

2009-04-07T22:58:00.002-04:00

Lives Here.
What a wonderful night.

Who'd have known little you would be so hilarious, seemingly without effort.
Have a look at the most tender, naive, selfish, unadulterated part of yourself by looking at your childhood writings.
Some of the readers seemed to treat the evening as a sort of therapy. Others laughed at their young selves and played to the audience. Each presented a slightly painful, completely deluded and understandable view of reality. One more memorable moment-two versions of a young girl's autobiography, written two years apart. In the first "the most important person in my life...is my mother"
in the second
"the most useful person in my life is my mother"
I'd love to contribute next time...off to my mother's house to dig up some 'treasure'

Must be the Season of the Witch

2009-03-18T10:21:00.003-04:00

A gang swarmed several people last night in my neighborhood, attacking them with a knife and some kind of metal object and robbing them. I wonder if it had anything to do with the few recent warm days, or with St. Patrick's day. I guess not wonder--hope. In my heart I'm hoping that they're drunken revelers from the suburbs come downtown on St. Patrick's day.
As an evening worker and a fan of late night walks in my hood (and taking the back roads) this worries me.
Also in the news, our friend Joseph Fritzl is in court. According to wikipedia, he is charged with: "rape, incest, kidnap, false imprisonment and slavery, which carry a maximum 20-year term."
Reading up on a similar case in Britain which did not involve imprisonment but did result in 19 pregnancies, I was puzzled. In the latter case, the defendant received 25 consecutive life sentences and must serve a minimum of 19.5 years in prison. Why do the charges against Fritzl only amount to a maximum of 20 years? He imprisoned his daughter and their children for 24 years. It will likely be impossible for some of them to have a normal life after what has happened to them. In some ways I think that several decades of rape and enslavement are worse crimes than murder. I know that life can't be returned once it's taken, but in essence, these lives were taken as well.

It's not a tumour

2009-03-17T18:38:00.002-04:00

Or perhaps it is.
Fauna got out of the cage recently, and began acting strange shortly after.
The vet thinks she might have a tumor of the pituitary gland. From what I've read online of symptoms, I would tend to agree.

She's acting confused and very affectionate. Poorly coordinated. She presses her head against the wall and against my hand.

Prognosis: wait and see for now. And don't chastise me for getting attached. They are my first adult pets and so far it seems a lot like a first love situation. Gimme gimme gimme---ow ow ow...

Happy International Women's Day!

2009-03-08T19:48:00.004-04:00

I hope you've taken a moment to think about your womanhood--about what you love and hate about being a woman, about how you enact your ladiness (or don't) and about the plight of your fellow double x-ers.

On such an important day, this woman is contemplating her vagina. It's not necessary to do this in order to fully enjoy I.W.D.

Seriously, though. This is a painting by one of my favourite Canadian artists, Alex Colville. It is a picture of his wife when they were younger, and it hangs in the AGO beside a more contemporary picture of her.
Her hair is grey. She is rounder in the belly, and looks to be retirement age. But you can feel her strong presence through the tempera on particle board (or whatever it is). It's quite obvious that he loves her and that she loves him.
But heterosexual romantic love is also not mandatory in order to enjoy this day. Have a good one!

I has a bored.

2009-03-07T00:40:00.003-05:00

It's Friday night.
I'm removing old paint from my bedroom floor with nail polish remover. What the hell is going on.
How did I forget how to amuse myself? All I can think about is the schoolwork I have to do tomorrow.

Touch me

2009-02-26T10:58:00.002-05:00

I'm sad that the friendly man representing a Muslim association at the university wouldn't shake my hand.
I listened to his speech. He seemed nice. I had some doubts about his message, but we left on friendly terms.
When I left and bid him a good day and tried to shake his hand. He put it across his heart and mumbled that he couldn't shake my hand.
I had to get back to class, and walked away.
I don't dislike him, but feel confused. Should I make myself angry over this, or am I being a self-centred ass?

Dear February

2009-02-26T09:40:00.002-05:00

I'm done with ye.

You make me want to eat cheese and hide, neither of which are at the top of my list of priorities right now.
You make me want to skip school and spend all morning changing my gmail colour scheme.
You make me want to call in sick and scrape old paint off the floor with a razor blade.

Spring. PLEASE!

You asked me where he was,

2009-02-10T20:16:00.002-05:00

and I couldn't help but think:
you wish he were here instead of me. You prefer to be supervised by a man. To chat and gain experience with a man. To fraternize with a man.
You don't like the way I do things..or you prefer the way he does things? Or you don't like the fact that I'm a woman, or that I'm younger than you?

Good luck to you anyway,

love

liz

Cataloguing is Boring

2009-02-03T22:50:00.006-05:00

What I learned: mouth closer to eyes=cuter. Mouth closer to fat part=cuter. Wide-set eyes=cuter. Smaller mouth=cuter.

Putting faces on avocadoes. Far superior to doing homework.

I was the mother last time

2009-01-30T14:40:00.005-05:00

Why don't you have the baby?

I will be upwardly mobile.

I'll take my fancy education,

and bring us home a hundred grand.

We'll get ourselves a big 'ol house,

we'll care for junior in style, and you

can do your thing until you're satisfied.

Leggo

2009-01-06T17:29:00.005-05:00

How cliche are symbolic gestures? They're so much a part of our culture, they've become so tired that any personal meaning they might have had has been sapped.

I've found myself too often lately dwelling on resentments and unresolved feelings from my recent past. The problem with these kind of feelings, for me, is that time doesn't necessarily make them easier to handle or duller.
It sometimes takes me a very long time to process things-that's a problem I have.
It seems that I find events too complicated or to dangerous to process and my mind holds onto them for later. Either that, or I look back on them with new eyes as I grow and change.

I'm not an unlucky or an unhappy person. Just the opposite, I feel better about my life than I have in a long time. I'm stimulated by work and school, and have a partner who I love and am very proud of. A domestic but generally happy life, and the best I can do for right now.
I wish I could pack up all of the things that I feel resentment, hurt, and anger for and throw them into the sea or crush them like a car in a wrecking yard. Appropriately, every earthly analogy I can think of for what to do with how I feel highlights the fact that these feelings don't actually go away.
I started this post thinking that I could compose an exorcism, but now I'm not so sure.

Take Your Bags and Shove 'em

2008-12-30T22:54:00.010-05:00

Now that things have come to a stop, however briefly, I'd like to take the opportunity to express my dislike for the term 'unpacking'. I've only started hearing this term used to describe taking apart and analyzing an idea or text since I started grad school.

Whenever I hear it, I think of people on airplanes with rolling luggage, removing items one by one to reveal whatever looked suspicious on the x-ray.

I think of something roughly and rudely rammed into a too-small container.

Worst of all, I think of...of business school. Is that what I'm doing with myself now? Am I in business school? This type of jargon makes me fear that I am.

High school was all about juxtaposing and
simulacra. University was about context and worldview, meta- and post-.

Information studies borrows from other fields or makes due with combined words: access, informatics, and closure. Unpacking seems to have been borrowed from linguistics?

Dear teach,
examine, explain, analyze, interpret or pick apart, but don't unpack because I won't be joining you.

Growth...or Regression?

2008-12-08T14:04:00.004-05:00

5 years ago I saw this place peeking out from behind several other hideous buildings.
I found out that it was a love hotel decorated as though it were X-mas every day.
I thought it was one of the silliest things I had ever heard. What kind of weirdo wants to f%&k in such a tacky, wasteful place?
I thought "The Japanese are a very strange people that I will never understand."
Now I'm beginning to see the appeal. The problem is, I don't feel that I've changed that much. What's different? Do I take myself less seriously and therefore have a more playful and wondering attitude about everything?
Am I developing a fetish?
Are they just way ahead of me on the curve (as they are with many other things) or have I fallen behind?

A Poem

2008-12-05T01:04:00.004-05:00

Come find me,
I'm lonely.
I live in
The Li'bry

There's nothing
To hold me
Except for
The ivy

Procrastination. I does it.

2008-11-22T13:31:00.004-05:00

I'm in the library, and up until this moment I've been trying hard not to be distracted by everything around me.
First there was the miniskirt with the bangles, jingling.
Then there was my discovery that I had access to two strangers' itunes libraries.
Then my t.a. came and sat nearby.
In a few minutes I'll go downstairs to sit in on a Microsoft Access tutorial...mostly for moral support. As I imagine going down there and spending an hour or more listening to my stuffy but kind professor discuss the attributes of a program I don't understand, I think of pregnant women and their partners. I liken myself to the one that's not pregnant--unable to completely relate, not as feverishly invested as the one carrying the child, but trying.
Trying to make the issue as relevant for me as it is for you.

love

liz

Did we talk about this?

2008-11-14T21:02:00.005-05:00

About 14 months ago I read a Boingboing post about Kohei Yoshiyuki's 1970's photos of peeping toms. It was one of the most interesting groups of photographs I'd ever seen, and I looked through them and thought upon what I thought I knew about Japanese sex culture and what I felt or thought I felt about it.
Man, that was a mouthful.
Here are Yoshiyuki's images of voyeurism...
And here they're imagined for a fashion photo shoot. They get much, much racier than this one. I think that they're interesting for a whole different set of reasons than the originals.
I really enjoy that these images came back into the ~~pubic~~ public consciousness. They have stuck with me for a long time, and I've looked at them a few times over the last year. They're not exactly arousing, or fully disturbing. The originals seem so incredibly honest to me, stolen shots of animals straining against their sweltering, boxed-in city lives. I am uncomfortable with the general situation in the original series--after all, neither of the partners are consenting to be viewed by others...or are they? I lack the knowledge of context for this place and time. Would this be like making love at Hanlan's point? Or in Queen's Park?

The new versions of these pictures seem flat to me because of their staged-ness. They do a great job of capturing the light and style of the originals, but feel dirty because of how the models are portrayed. The women are on the bottom, they're prone, and they're often portrayed with more than one man in scenarios that make me nervous. Also I'm not a fan of their 'outfits'.

Call me a prude if you like, but I like old fashioned fashion photography...

Hockey Haute Couture

2008-11-02T09:18:00.000-05:00

TJSFF 6 - Short-Short Reviews

2008-10-10T00:12:00.007-04:00

I've been going to the Toronto Japanese Short Film Festival for a few years now. The festival comes in 4 or more programs shown at different times over three or four days.
I usually select the program based on a glance at the stills and the titles on the festival website. 90 percent of the time this works, but be warned: it can also be very dangerous.
I spent an entire Saturday night once at the Images Festival watching people suffocate themselves with saran wrap, call for their mommy, get their faces stepped on and punch themselves. Even worse, I dragged a friend with me.
Last night's program was generally very good.

'The Milky Audition"
Directed by Yumi Yoshiyuki, a former 'Pink Film' actress. The video appears to be a remake of an eighties video for a racy song with some minor sexual content. It was a video from that frantic workout genre of 80's music.
I didn't quite get this one. We saw Yumi Yoshiyuki imitating the video on stage, saw her play a callgirl, dressing up in fantasy costumes and being sent to jobs to sleep with men, and saw her almost nude, tied in japanese rope-bondage style, dancing and singing all the while.
What struck me most about this video was seeing her act thirty years younger than her age. I'm still not used to seeing an older woman positioning herself as the sex object in a film, showing her naked body shamelessly. I wonder if this speaks to western ideas about aging and sexuality, or if there's a whole other layer of satire to this video that I didn't get.
"The Swimming Restricted Area"
Couldn't find much info on this one. It was a bit disturbing for me...but perhaps I'm a bit of a prude. 6 young people drag themselves out of a love hotel in the hot summer morning sun, hung-over and grumpy.
As they slouch down the street, the two females and 4 males have a series of short exchanges which indicate to the audience that they've had a lot of drunken sex the night before, and that not all of them are too clear on what happened with whom.
We learn that the girls were told there would be three girls and three boys.
We also learn that one of the girls canceled, leaving the other two to 'date' on their own.
There was so much to be disturbed by in this film. When one of the girls goes into the bathroom of a park to puke, one of the guys who likes her follows her in.
The men ask each other about the women, sexually, when they're not around.
One of the last statements made is "If you get pregnant, I think it was me. I will handle the expense, so please call me if you are."
A very strange statement that I can't possibly judge from this side of the world.
"Woman of Golden Fish"
A very socially awkward 40 year old man named Sato is profiled. His life is boring and a little sad. He regularly frequents a brothel, and is a little bit in love with an escort he's been seeing for over 3 years.
The director convinces him to ask her on a date, and we follow their awkward trip to a fishing pond and a Karaoke room. We later discover that she's not the real escort, but an actress they got instead.
Sato is a frustrating character to me because my feelings for him are so complex. I want to be disgusted with him for frequenting escorts, for fetishizing his date by buying her a schoolgirl uniform. But he's so pathetic. His life was so dull it made me want to cry.
This film made me wonder about the differences between the Japanese and Canadian traditions/laws regarding prostitution. When I was in Osaka, I was told that there were no street prostitutes because they all worked indoors in an organized manner in gentlemen's clubs. Part of me wants to believe that Japan is 'worse' than here because prostitution is such a well-established, organized and accepted part of society, and another part of me wonders why most of the sex industry workers here are cowering on street corners.
"Fujica Single-Date"
A filmmaker learns that Fuji has stopped producing Super 8 film, and becomes nostalgic for the style and content of films he made as a younger man.
He is unhappily married with a young son. He decides to make more super 8 films before he loses the chance. His subject matter is a series of affairs that he either has or wants to have while his wife and son are away for the weekend. He sees the end of the stock of film and the absence of his wife as his 'last chance' to recapture the young, free, sexy life that he had when he first began using the film. He turns on the camera and begs it: "Make my dreams come true!"
We follow him through a series of encounters with women in their mid-twenties. I found it to be honest and disturbing at the same time. I think I understood what he was striving for with those real or imaginary encounters...freedom, randomness, playfulness, and impermanence. I hated him for being so detached from his family, and so 'adolescent' in his desires, but I respected his brutal honesty. I wondered what his son would think if he ever grew up and saw this film.

Wish I could take a picture

2008-10-08T18:38:00.001-04:00

Surprise! Your class has moved to a computer resources room.

How the hell are you supposed to pay attention to the screen with a computer in front of you?!

love

liz