Some Things I Am Grateful For

1. Everything going wrong

2. Flirting

3. Men w/British accents (see #2)

4. Creative inspiration

5. Hope

Pickin’ Up Chicks

Interesting way to meet girls: Set up a telescope at the corner of Bedford and N.7th in Brooklyn and show passersby a view of Saturn.

Worst line I ever heard that actually worked (not on me): “You don’t betray your quantitativeness in your demeanor.”

I Am Not Obsessed

I would like to declare a moratorium on the overuse–or just the imprecise use–of the word “obsession.” I heard an interview with the authors of The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession recently and this title is a prime example. I am American, and I can assure you I am not obsessed with the Lie Detector test. Nor do I know anyone who is. Nor would I even agree that anyone in law enforcement who actually uses lie detectors is “obsessed” with them. It’s the wrong word. I would bet that there is not one law enforcement officer alive who wakes up every morning thinking about lie detector machines, can’t get the machines out of his head. Perhaps people today have too much faith in them, and perhaps there is a particularly American reason for that; I don’t disagree with the thesis necessarily. Just the use of that word. A word everyone now overuses. Please stop. If you discover some new kind of candy or shoes or cardboard boxes and you really really like them, you are not obsessed. Find a new word.

p.s. this goes for the use of “addicted to” as well.

IFFBoston Here I Come

Look out Davis Square, I’ll be back April 25-30 to cover the Independent Film Festival of Boston. The lineup is looking good, and seems very doc-heavy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Here are a few of the narrative features I’m looking forward to:

Hanna Takes the Stairs. I really liked Joe Swanberg’s LOL, which I saw at last year’s IFFBoston, and I also very much liked his Young American Bodies series for Nerve.com. So I’m looking forward to his new film, though am wondering if he’s going to break any new ground with this one…the other two projects are good, but mostly cut from the same cloth, and this one looks to be as well, so making something fresh out of that cloth is the challenge he’s facing. Although perhaps it’s a vast enough cloth that there’s still material to be mined. At the very least the film has plenty of cameos by indie film darlings to check out–Andrew Bujalski, Mark Duplass, and Todd Rohal. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Congorama. A Belgian finds out he was born in Canada and travels there to find his biological parents, but “all he finds in the Canadian countryside is bad fries and bad beer.” I look forward to someone making a movie that slams Canada for a change. Move over America, there’s a new asshole on the map!
(Full disclosure: I stole that line from The Kids In the Hall. And I have a grudge against Canadians.)

Day Night Day Night. The description of this film sounds very Jeanne Dielman: “A 19-year-old girl prepares and waits. Though what she is waiting for is not immediately clear, we are caught up in the minutiae of her preparation. When hooded handlers arrive, what follows is the suspenseful and emotional outcome of someone who has not only chosen when and how she will die, but also why.” But if that film description just totally ruined the film I’m going to be pissed.

Year of the Fish. And indie film fest usually specializes in films that are trying hard to be ‘quirky’. It can get to be annoying because all the films start to seem the same. But this one just sounds loopy enough to be interesting: “A modern-day Cinderella travels to New York’s Chinatown to earn to money help her father. Before she knows it, she’s working as a servant for an evil massage parlor madam. Her only companion is a fish that acts as narrator to our trip through this painted fairy tale.”

And this festival is no exception from the quirky-as-genre rule–there are several which seem to fit the profile, but could be good: Eagle vs. Shark, GoodTimesKid, Gretchen, Quiet City, Low and Behold, Monkey Warfare, The Sensation of Flight. There are also several films in the fest which are, as usual, questionably “indie”–there’s Brooklyn Rules, a gangster film starring Alec Baldwin and Freddy Prinze Jr., Away from Her, an alzheimer’s drama starring Julie Christie, and On Broadway, a Boston Irish funeral drama starring former NKOTB Joey McIntyre and Eliza Dushku. But hey, every festival needs a little starpower, no?
As for docs, there are so many I’m looking forward to but I’ll name just a few–A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar, about lawyers and lawsuits and America’s fascination with both, The Paper, about modern journalism and its problems, including declining circulation, and Strange Culture, about an artist who was interrogated post 9/11 but who can’t speak about the case, so actors such as Tilda Swinton tell the story.

Me, My New Hair, and the Flu

Thanks, D.C.

For gentrifying so rapidly and pushing all your criminals over the border to us. I don’t think crime ever goes down, it just gets pushed around to different areas.

I Hate Flowers. And Trees.

The pollen must be freakishly aggressive right now. I have never had such a severe allergy fit in my life. Even drugs don’t seem to affect it much.

Meanwhile I went to the store to get some Sudafed cuz the non-pseudoephedrine stuff is useless, and I had to go to the counter, show my ID, write my address, and sign for it. And the guy was kind of a jerk about it so I felt like a criminal just asking for it. Just for that I think I’ll cook it into whatever the kids are cooking it into these days.

And today the weather is gray and rainy and I LOVE IT. Drown that damn pollen.