"involves showing up at various people’s houses and places of work, accosting them with brusque questions and, when all else fails, punching them in the face.Ah, that's why I keep old papers: discovering a turn of phrase or revelation which makes it worthwhile reading. Worthwhile to whom? To me to satisfy my narcissistic need for knowledge and to see all the stuff I missed while it was happening and things to add to my list.
"All else fails quite a bit, which is of course why people buy tickets to a movie like this one."
The same issue had a number of article (Sundance Film Festival, a dance film festival, a performance at Joe's Pub) which left me with this to deal with:
- "The Last Train Home", a documentary about the great New Years' migration of 130 million Chinese trying to make it home for the Chinese New Year (and is available at my local library),
- a laudatory review of a performance by one time American Idol contestant, Jason Castro. (I got to check on his performance of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" on youtube, Not watching TV with any regularity makes me a cultural fish out of water. At the supermarket checkout I see that Laura is breaking up with Brad, Jennifer and Jason are back together, and see a teaser about revealing what start has cellulite. Who are these people? Should I know this or can I skip to an alternate section of the test without penalty?)
- an enthusiastic review of a "surreal short 'Beguine'" (2009) by Douwe Dijkstra for which there was no reference in IMDB.com or any of the library catalogs to which I have access.
A man who has been having a good time is suddenly tipped, as if by an earthquake, into a vast red lake, on whose floor he quickly arrives. He keeps on falling. We see him go to work at an office, take his place at a desk, but then, when he goes to the copy machine, he tumbles right into it and lies there, as if in some pit, unseen by the next worker to use the machine.
(This will now become something else to add to my list of obsessions. I've discovered that a local library has a video tape of "Carnival in Flanders" so that quest may be put to rest.) [Note added 10/8/2011 Beguine is online: http://vimeo.com/3435762. I was looking for "Douwe Dijkstra" when I stumbled across photographs by someone with the same name.] - "Night Catches Us" found in many local libraries, about Philadelphia Black Panthers years after their glory days. (I remember two things about attending an Angela Davis lecture about a year ago: 1) her cell phone went off in the middle of her talk, and 2) I couldn't understand what she was saying because of her casual use of coded words, meaningful to many in the audience, but not to me. My background leads me to expect a speaker to define their terms at the beginning of a presentation because the speaker is not addressing cognoscenti. Perhaps she expected she was. In my case she wasn't.)
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