Besides seeing all those damn Asian flicks this week, I also got fucked out of a free advance screening of the HULK. I was a very cranky girl. We discovered an hour before the show that C had accidentally deleted the email that disclosed the secret location. We rode the motorcycle all over town with me dashing into over a dozen theaters to ask "Hey, are you doing a super-secret, AMMI members only screening of The HULK?" They all said no.

Fifteen minutes after the movie was scheduled to start, we gave up and as we cruised through Times Square I asked C if we could go to an arcade. He said he thought they had all been closed down and I whined in my head about how 42nd Street was so damn wholesome I couldn't even play graphic violent VIDEO GAMES! But then...he parked the bike by Port Authority because just outside the bowling alley there are still VIDEO GAMES! We did NOT play Dance Dance Revolution, but I did play a boxing game where you put on these huge rubber mitts and supposedly it tracks your ducking and blocking and you actually make punching movements to score. I knocked my guy out, but my heart was beating so fast after one round, I gave up the gloves to C. I promise I'm done babbling, but one of the BEST parts of this week is that I got a digital camera!!! Nikon coolpix 2500. I love it! here is a shot of someone playing that boxing game:

Movie Overdose? Never!

In the midst of attending Asian Films Are GO!2003 C and I are also managing to attend some of the Czech Horror fest at
AMMI and last night we hit Sunshine's midnight show of
The Apple. A disco-opera from 1980 envisioning 1994, it was a complete box-office bomb...this tidbit from stinkers says it all:

When this awful film played at the Paramount Theater (now the El Capitan) in Hollywood for one week in November 1980, the film's distributor, Cannon Films, offered souvenir soundtrack records to moviegoers on their way in (albums to the first 100 and 45 RPM singles to the next 1,000). After the first showing ushers had to stop giving the records out because the few customers that paid to see this disaster started throwing their 12" vinyl LPs at the movie screen and around the theater like Frisbees during the film. No rips in the screen, thank goodness, just big dents.

However, we loved it.

This past week I watched the following films (in reverse chronological order):

THE APPLE

RESURRECTION OF THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL (124 minutes)

THE PHONE (102 minutes)

BOUNCE KO GALS (109 minutes)


VERSUS (119 minutes)


DOUBLE VISION (110 minutes)


COMPANY (155 minutes)

RUNAWAY PISTOL (84 minutes)


BREAK OUT (105 minutes)

SO CLOSE (111 minutes)

TOO YOUNG TO DIE (67 minutes)


THE MATRIX (not reloaded)

AUDITION

HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS

THE PIED PIPER 1986, 55 mins. Directed by Jirí Bárta.

THE PIT ,THE PENDULUM ,AND HOPE 1983, 15 mins. Jan Svankmajer.

THE EAR 1970, 94 mins. Directed by Karel Kachyna.





Still to come:

ICHI THE KILLER (124 minutes)
PING PONG (114 minutes)

So, my boyfriend and I continue to cheat on our couples therapist with our other couples therapist. Yes, we have two and yes, we see both of them weekly and no, neither of them know about the other. They serve entirely different purposes. Or, rather they meet different needs toward the same purpose. She is very focused on the practicalities of living and working together and gives us homework assignments like be honest every time I smoke or clean the cat litter every day. He tends to be more analytical and focus on the why rather than the how of us being together.

I continue to sabotage this attempt to fix/figure out/resolve/improve our relationship by managing to forget to take my antidepressants for a week and subjecting my loved one to severe mood swings and general abuse. I love him, so you would think this wouldn't be so damn hard, right?

We continue to see more movies weekly than any other people I've ever met. This week we put our Pioneer membership to good use and saw Willard (which disappeared from the regular movie theaters less than 3 weeks after its release) as well as Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl, which met his needs as foreign, preferably japanese with much violence and mine for gangster slickness, even though we both know it was a Tarrantino rip off. I also saw my first Hitchcock films ever over at AMMI a few weeks ago. For the record they were 39 steps and North by Northwest.

I missed the media maelstrom about this ad, I stumbled upon it in the current issue of V (no, that isn't typical potty reading for me). Gucci coochy! Since I felt the need to share it with my entire staff, I thought I'd share it with you. How soon before half the upper east side has their pubes waxed like this? Even worse/better(?) is that the photographer calls the shot "pubic enemy."

OK, so I've been a bad blogger. It is so much like the journals I kept when I was younger. If nothing was actually happening in my life, I would pontificate on nothing at all for pages and hours. However when life got exciting three months would get reduced to two pages of outline/notes that I figured would get filled in later.

Today I may have overcome a significant phobia. Horror movies. I am nearly 28 and until the last year had successfully avoided anything even vaguely resembling a "scary movie". However C loves them and has repeatedly begged me to get over it. We have pinpointed the why and what of my fear. When I was about 4 or 5 I somehow watched Karen Black's Trilogy of Terror. In the house I grew up in there actually was a stone tribalesque warrior statue brandishing a spear. Fast forward 5 or 6 years and two of my cousins are holding me down on the couch trying to force me to watch Nightmare on Elm Street. All I recollect from this trauma is a guy (who I later found out was Johnny Depp) getting swallowed by his bed and it belching up blood. That was enough to make me break free and run upstairs screaming. Thus a psychotic aversion to horror was born. C has figured out that I am particularly adverse to any movie with a boogie man. So in a moment of weakness I agreed that the time to get over it had come and I agreed to watch Friday the 13th parts 1 through 3 in preparation for next week's midnight showing at Sunshine of part IV. Truth be told, I have been getting my feet wet over the last year by watching Carrie, Jaws and The Shining. All movies I would never have agreed to watch without C's prodding and all movies I even enjoyed. Last week when we went to the Museum of Natural History with my high school best friend and her amazing, adorable 3 year old son, she and C proposed watching the Jason movies at her house, a neutral territory. Guess what? It worked, I wasn't freaked out and even found them amusing in their ridiculousness. We took the bike up to the bronx, she made lunch on the grill and we had a great time.

Reasons to be cheerful, part 17. Instant Karma. Background info: The lines at the Peter Stuyvestant Post Office on 14th Street are legendary and obscene on a daily basis, the secret to a short wait is to be there at 8am, when they open or on Thursdays after 6pm (it's their official late day, but no one ever knows or remembers, so the place is usually nearly empty). Due to the length of the lines, the frequency that we mail stuff out and the war our shop has been waging with their staff (they want us to get a postage meter, we think it is too expensive), I have developed a system for whenever I end up being the person to bring the mail order to the post office. [HELLO, run-on-sentence!!] Basically, I come in, drop my bag on the line and proceed to weigh my packages at the scale. I go back and forth between wherever my spot is on the line and the scale area, so that if it takes me half an hour to weigh the packages, I've also spent that half hour moving the bag forward in the line. Dual time use. Clever, I know. Until today. An ASSHOLE joined the line behind me (or rather my bag) and when the line moved forward, he stepped around my bag. I then came over and with a smile, moved my bag ahead of him and explained. After I had moved the bag about three times, he made a fuss and told me that I was either on the line or off of it and some other shit. I started to argue with him and then decided it just wasn't worth it. He was an idiot and the line wasn't that long anyway. I was annoyed and had thought about saying "FINE, fuck you. I was here first, so I'll just keep my place on the line. I will NOT weigh and sort my packages. It will take the clerk 3 or 4 times as long to help me and you will just have to WAIT, asshole." But as I said I didn't. I'm sure part of his anxiety about me being served before him was because of the number of packages I had and he was worried about ME taking too much of his precious time. So I went back to the scale, weighed everything and joined the line. About 12 or 15 people had gotten on in the meantime. I waited. He was so inept and took SO long at the window, that I ended up being the next customer at the window he had used. As the clerk was finishing up with my stuff, he came back and put a stack of manila envelopes with one priority mail envelope on the bottom into her window. She actually said to him, "Did you put a stamp on the priority mailer?" He said yes and left the post office. She finished with me and flipped through his stuff. Guess what? He didn't put a stamp on it! I don't know if he was trying to get over, thinking they would just send it through, or if he honestly made a mistake. Two other postal employees had sort of gathered around her and they strated talking about him, how he had treated me on the line and the fact that his package would just have to go back to him. Heh heh heh. A tad ironic don't you think? Got interrupted by a call from Tibbie, who is currently in the hospital. Steam lost and WAAAAAY too much work time wasted.

This rant will be brief. After an all Aussie brunch at 8-Mile Creek E (our resident convict), her husband M, their visitor G, C and I headed over to Agent Provocateur at E's request. I was mildly interested. I own my share of gear, mostly vestigial from a life I am no longer living. Their stuff is beautiful, totally creative, however, they do not carry my size. I asked what size they go up to...36F. Basically Barbie only! GRRRRRRR!!!! Honestly if I had been told the basic 38C or D I might have not been offended (my 40DD, is not all that typical) but the fact that they are catering to bodies only possible with severe distortion, really annoyed me. Can a 36inch back even support that much boob?

My friend Snee recently had to give up her $20 tweezerman tweezers at JFK due to new security measures. As if TWEEZERS?!?!?! were a suitable weapon to hijack an airplane with! Well, here is where they all end up, in case you ever were wondering.

feeling voyueristic today. Check out Other People's Stories. Reminds me of the Moth's events. Growing up I never participated in the storytelling contests at school. They were very popular and kind of a big deal, my class always had a citywide finalist or winner. I may have dismissed it as a drama person thing, which I was not. I was a poet/goth/geek/whatever you call a teenager who wears all black all the time girl. That is not to say that I was quiet. I had much to say and there are hundreds of pages yellowing away in the closet at my mother's house to attest to that. I was not any more or less alienated than anyone else. I just didn't know it then.

The first thing C told me when I woke up today was that Mr. Rogers had died. This is sad, sure there'll always be syndication but unless they find kiddie porn on his computer, a little bit of sunshine and joy is just gone from this world. The cnn obituary seems to confirm that he was as impossibly good as he appeared. Honestly, I sort of doubted it, especially with the ordained minister part, but then I learned he was originally from Canada and as stereotypical and potentially wrong this is, I could completely believe in him. In my experience, Canadians are just nice and "whitebread" all around.

OK, here's the deal. I work in an extremely overcrowded used entertainment shop. Think Collyer brothers. Now envision the rain we had last weekend, monsoon should come to mind. Now put them together and you might be able to understand that I have spent most of the last 4 days drying the 100 gallons of water that fell through the ceiling off of CDs and videos. Beyond the tremendous amount of merch that we lost, my keyboard got fried. All week I had notes in my brain about things I wanted to blahblahblog about. Like, C shot 60 buck. A perfect score on Big Buck Hunter. Of course, knowing him, he will now need to get all 60 with only one shot each! We were so socially active last week! In one 24 hour period, we went to a taping of
Last Call with Carson Daly (Luke Wilson from that movie Old School that we saw and loved last week was on along with
Ben Lee), then we hopped in a cab like in the movies and somehow made it from Rockefeller Center to Mercer Street in about 12 minutes, and made it to our seats before the house lights even went down for Lost Highway: the Hank Williams Story and the next night we saw the final installment of the Ben Lee & Friends series at
Fez. Which may or may not have been recorded. Busy, eh? I am sleepy and cranky and still have an hours worth of cleaning to do before I can go home.

So the word of the day is typical. and maybe pretentious. What was I thinking when I named and described this blog? The brain bleed thing was probably an infantile idea about seepage and these entries just dribbling out of my mind and across the web. Snotty but possibly acceptable, however this french phrase that I learned in high school from reading Death, couldn't remember, got the spelling correctly from a google search and have NEVER even used in a sentence is really going too far.

I'm feeling dissatisfied and incomplete. Of course everyone (or at least every 16 year old girl and 35 year old housewife) does. I'm afraid that the lack of time I spend on my art/self/anything not related to my significant other will cause me to lose it, whatever it is. Since this syndrome is boring and pathetic, I only feel worse about it. Damn it, if I have to suddenly have a late twenties crisis, couldn't it be in reference to something unsual and interesting? No, it can't and it isn't. Same old shit, feeling unloved and at the same time afraid that any "I" or "self" has been eclipsed by the "we" and maybe even the "he" of our relationship. There is some major breakdown between my synapses. We had a huge talk last night/this morning trying to hash this out. I hear everything as critical and as a personal attack. I am smarter than this. I know I can be introspective and perceptive and --tive my way out of this funk.