I just spent the past half an hour or so reading old journal entries and I feel so stupid. How embarrassing...

I'm tempted (as a summer project) to print out all the entries and bind them so I can keep them until I'm old and actually laugh about them one day instead of just being embarrassed by them.

I found some cool things as well, such as when I first saw Band of Outsiders and Hiroshima Mon Amour both moments that were highly influential in making me who I am today and also the time I saw a woman get hit by a car and the time I walked past Harrison Ford.

Tomorrow I'm going to the Whitney Biennial with Alex.

Had pizza at Grimaldi's today, amazing as usual.

Bedtime.

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NYU housing is evil and claims that I haven't reapplied for housing next year... bastards...

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I've been working on my website and have redesigned it completely.

MYNAMEISBEN.COM

To give you an idea of how long I've been working on it:

So far, I've listened to 5 albums in their entirety.

A Promise
Fabulous Muscles
Fag Patrol
Knife Play

all by Xiu Xiu

and Radiohead's Hail to the Thief

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I'm back from my trip!

Washington D.C. was fun, the National Gallery is huge and full of amazing art. Drool... We visited some other art museums as well and basically had an art overload. I saw so much stuff that I'm not even going to bother trying to write about any of it but it was great.

The National Aquarium is hella weak. HELLA WEAK. First of all, they charge admission. Second: it's hella weak. Third: it's small.

The National Zoo was all right, all the indoor exhibits were cool but it was cold so a lot of the outdoor ones weren't very excited. We did see a lion walking around marking its territory.

We saw lots of other stuff too, 3-D Bugs on an Imax screen, dinosaur bones, elephants, monkeys hugging, etc. Cool.

At a deli there I tried to order bagels but then the lady told me breakfast was over. She then asked if I was Korean and when I said yes and started talking to her in Korean she took the bagels out and even gave me a discount! She was impressed by my Korean and started asking me a bunch of questions. Exciting stuff! First time that's happened since I've come to the east coast... very odd considering the amount of stores I go to run by Koreans. Happens all the time at home, it's weird that it took a year and a half for it to happen here.

Alex is arriving at 9am tomorrow. Woohoo.

I'm going to see Xiu Xiu Saturday night. Woohoo.

No Fun Fest is in Brooklyn Sunday night. I might go. Woo.

I've been looking at a lot of photos taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson lately, he was a French photojournalist and is considered one of the greatest photographers ever. His work is amazing, he focuses a lot on capturing "decisive moments" and he only used a normal lens in his photography because he felt that wide angle lenses and telephoto lenses distorted the truth of the images. It's making me want to run out into the city with my FE2 and a 50mm lens and just start snapping photos... Soon...

That's about it for now. Later

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It's been a week since I wrote in my journal! OMG! AGH!

...

Anyway, the past week went by pretty well. My film that I shot got some good reactions, including:

*stunned silence*
*uncomfortable shifting in seats*
"uh..."
"oh my god..."
"the psychiatrists office is on the 12th floor..."

That was for the scene involving an eye being gouged out with a corkscrew. It was fun.

The first part which took place outside my teacher described as gorgeous and I even got a nod of approval from the cinematography professor. :)

I haven't been watching much lately :(

I think I only watched two movies this week...

One was Gaspar Noe's Irreversible. I didn't like it. It had some interesting camera work but I don't think it had the emotional impact on me that it was trying to get. Yes the revenge scene and the rape scene were INCREDIBLY disturbing but everything that followed failed to resonate... I didn't find the backwards storytelling very gimmicky though which I must applaud since it could've ended up being just a gimmick but it was pulled off very creatively and it served a purpose other than just being "neat."

Another film I saw was Alain Resnais' Last Year At Marienbad. Soooo cool. Resnais is an incredible filmmaker and of all the films I've seen, his are the films that I would show someone who feels that film, as an art form, takes a back seat to literature. His films show that a film can be just as ambitious emotionally and intellectually as literature can and that it can pull it off using images just as beautiful as the words of great writers.

The editing of the film and the cinematography were fantastic and the writing was very good as well. Resnais apparently worked with famous French writers, Marguerite Duras for Hiroshima Mon Amour and Alain Robbe-Grillet (who wrote The Voyeur which I read last year in my Cinema and Literature class) for this film.

I think Hiroshima Mon Amour is better but this one was definitely worth viewing as well.

So anyway, spring break has started and I haven't really done much. Lots of sleeping in. Tomorrow morning I'm leaving for Washington D.C. where I'll be visiting all the art museums there and hopefully the spy museum as well. The bus leaves at 8:30am though, ewwww.

Oh yeah, the fifth season of The Sopranos started last Sunday! I love this show to death, it's the only thing I watch on T.V. A very close second to Twin Peaks in terms of my favorite T.V. shows. I must admit though if I had to make a list of my favorite shows it wouldn't be very long since only three shows come to mind as being essential viewing... the third being The Simpsons...

Tonight's the second episode of the season and Steve Buscemi is going to make his big entrance. He's directed episodes in the past (including one of the best ever) and now he's going to star in it as Tony's cousin. Very cool.

Okay, that's about it for now, I will write again when I get back from D.C.

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Thursday night I had a really great conversation for about an hour with two homeless people in Washington Square Park. The guy originally was trying to hustle me and Jimmy but then Jimmy told him he knew who he was and the guy apologized, we then just talked and he told us about what it was like being homeless. Both of them were pretty intelligent and his friend was great. This is a quote from her (from my memory):

"So like back in the old days people lived like seven or eight hundred years right? So the world was way more overpopulated then it is now and of all those people only eight survived the flood, that's including Noah. You know, they say many are called, few are chosen, and you're worried about your fuckin Louis Vuitton bag? What the fuck is that? It's fake anyway!"

She was also rather disturbed by the Starsky and Hutch posters she's seen around the city. She also had this to say about popular music:

"Fifty Cent!? What the fuck is that!?"

It was really great getting to talk to them and to listen to what they had to say since they came from such a different background and had such different experiences from me.

After that I went to Italian Cinema and watched Orchestra Rehearsal by Fellini. It was an interesting film and was his most political by far. Worth a viewing...

Yesterday I watched Bonnie and Clyde, it was all right, not spectacular though. I enjoyed it.

I shot my project today, it took a little over five hours and was kind of disastrous thanks to crappy weather. I'll see if I can make it decent in the editing room. There's some interesting and violent footage, it's a weird film...

My sheets are covered in chocolate sauce and I had to toss out one of my pillows :( Hopefully the footage looks good and it was all worth it. As for the pillow: I need a new one anyway...

For spring break I'm going to Washington D.C. and will be visiting all the museums there including the Spy Museum!

I'm sure there's other stuff to write about but I forget... My copy of Carrie was supposed to arrive via NetFlix earlier this week and didn't... Hmmm...

The end

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Well I just finished season 4 of the Sopranos in time to catch the season premier on Sunday.

Season four was a relatively weak one (that's not bad considering how great the first three were) but it had a couple really great moments including a great season finale (albeit one of the most depressing Sopranos episodes...). I'm dying with anticipation for Sunday now...

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I just stuck my head out the window to see if it had rained it reminded me of Korea. Upon feeling that 'in Korea sensation' I suddenly remembered that I had a dream I was in Korea. It's crazy how things work sometimes.

Yesterday I showed the chase scene that I had to direct for my class and my teacher liked it. There were some issues with one shot that was too long and the ending was awkward but otherwise it was good.

One of the guys in my group also showed his (which I had shot) and again my instructor told me my shooting was beautiful. He uses that word maybe once a class so I was happy. I'm three for three now.

This Saturday I have to shoot a short involving close ups, I have no idea what it's going to be about but I've got images from Persona, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Repulsion running through my head. Hopefully I can translate just 1% of the brilliance of those films into mine... I might settle for .5% as well...

I went to go talk to my boss yesterday (for those of you that don't know, I work for a photographer that looks like Julliane Moore) and we were supposed to meet at the Trump tower somewhere around 60th St. but instead the plans got changed and I had to go to her place at 185th! AGH!

It wasn't too bad though, long subway rides are nice sometimes. Work was fun, I showed her the stuff I've been working on and recommended about ten gazillion films to her.

On the subway I had Eisenstein's Film Form with me so I just read that. So far I'm really enjoying the book. Much of it deals with the idea of montage which he explains in a really interesting manner.

His theory is that the basic elements of cinema are shots and montage. One typically thinks of montage as a series of shots, one after another. Eisenstein prefers to think of the images as being on top of one another because as the next image appears you're laying it on top of the previous image you just saw in your head and creating a new idea that can't be expressed through just one image. Basically, by combining images you're creating ideas and feelings that can't be conveyed in just a picture.

He compares cinema to Chinese writing which is representational, meaning the characters somewhat look like what they're representing. By combining characters you get ideograms which are a combination of two "depictables" that "achieve the representation of something that is graphically undepictable."

examples.

knife + heart = sorrow
mouth + child = scream
mouth + bird = sing
mouth + dog = bark
etc.

Eisenstein hails this use of shots and montage as the beginning of "intellectual cinema" and a big step in being able to visually represent abstract concepts.

He also goes into other things such as Kabuki theatre and "the filmic fourth dimension" which maybe I'll try to write about later. This stuff is fun, it makes watching films more academic but also more enjoyable. (the quote at the top is from his essay on "A Dialectic Approach to Film Form" which I'm stumbled through and need to read one more time)

Next up on my film theory reading list are two essays by Adorno, one by Benjamin then stuff by Christian Metz who was recommended to me by my friend, Rufus, who's in Cinema Studies.

Eventually, both of us hope to be able to write something that would get published in Senses of Cinema which is a really great online film journal. One of the recommended topics right now is on Lee Chang-dong and auteur theory. I might be able to tackle that but it's been awhile since I've seen his work...

Anyway, so I looked outside my window this morning and it hadn't rained like it was supposed to. Hopefully it won't rain later. It's 57 degrees outside which is awesome. It feels really nice in my room right now and I have the window thrown wide upon.

It's time for me to shower and enjoy the nice weather. Paz.

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There was a very short period in my life during which I confused Chuck Close and Chuck Jones. Chuck Jones is a famous animator, Chuck Close is a famous painter and he's in a wheelchair.

Anyway, I saw the Chuck Close exhibit at the MET yesterday, the work was interesting but frankly I'm not a huge fan or anything. The rest of the museum was great of course. It'd been awhile since I'd been there so it was nice to be back.

Afterwards, I saw The Thin Red Line at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. AGH! So amazing! I feel in love with that film all over again, it's so amazing. It really does have to be seen on the big screen to truly appreciate it. Although it's slightly under three hours it felt like a very short period of time and I was slightly disappointed when it ended.
I think I might have to shake up my top ten list again...

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