wired cafe

I was at Wired café today with my old high school pals and one of them, my friend Sam who goes to Bard, remarked that people in Bethlehem are starting to look and dress more like Bard students. Yeah, I said, they’re starting to look like Hampshire students, too.

And it’s true. When I go back home, I’m supposed to feel cooler than the other people I see, except maybe my friends. We go to schools like Bard and Hampshire. We’re articulate and clever, we talk about things like Klaus Kinski and our frustrations with irony, and we wear interesting-looking glasses. We have complexes.

But the locals are catching on, and quick. It wasn’t so long ago that I could walk in the street and get harassed by middle school-aged kids. But pretty soon in Bethlehem it’ll be just like up at school, and when I’m there I’ll be busy making sure I’m out post-cooling those upstarts, drinking their coffee at Wired. What is Bethlehem coming to?

The post-cool grind at media services/arm-chair sociology

Today at media services a young, impressionable first year came in and took out Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. I can’t take Bergman seriously, especially his post-Persona cinema, it’s too metaphysical and earnest. I thought about making a remark to this fresh-faced girl, but I didn’t. I guess it’s an important movie to have seen, but I just hope that she doesn’t like it too much.
Right after this, my co-worker Abe and some other similar looking dude came in and started listening to George Benson, a much maligned smooth jazz guitarist. The whole thing is emblematic of the postmodern’s appropriation of low culture for its own purposes, usually ironic ones. Anyway, I feel as if they’re just making sure that we all know that they’re more post-cool than we are, because that girl for instance just took out a Bergman film…and even me, I’m guilty, I like some French art cinema sometimes…

A little later this girl Sarah Marshal that I actually kind of dated in my first year (I had to forget Sarah Marshal, ha ha) came in with a guy that was probably her bf. I realized that in addition to the people that come in and talk about post-cool shit like George Benson or animé, there is also this kind hipster, Sarah’s bf. He’s the kind of guy that probably has the same interests as us (I guess I ambivalently include myself in that category…), with a few important differences. These types look more earthy…they’re granola hipsters. They look more natural and less ironic in flannel, and maybe they wear boots. They definitely have a full beard, like this dude at media services.

I suppose that in my boredom at work, I start to get thoughtful, and more cynical. But if you smile and say hello, you’ll leave nothing but a good impression!

adventures at cooley dickenson hospital

I had surgery at cooley dick yesterday (turns out I had a second hernia to have repaired…). They were backed up, so I had to lie in bed for a good three hours before they got started. Despite the long wait, they still put the I.V. in first thing, and all that fluid was coming in the whole time, and I had to get up and pee constantly.

I tried to banter and make conversation with my surgeon Dr. Miller and the anesthesiologist. The latter told me about how he and my surgeon went biking in France together (this was why I couldn’t get in for the operation sooner…) when I told him that I was a French major. I asked Dr. Miller if he was ready. ‘We’ll see,’ he said. One of the nurses asked if I had taken off my underwear. ‘Why would you have him do that?’ Dr. Miller asked. I appreciated his sense of humor. In the operating room, once I was on the various drugs, they started talking about some show one of them watched on discovery channel the other day.

I woke up in a haze, still in the operating room. It seemed to me like they were still talking about the show on the discovery channel. I tried to make conversation again. Then I realized they were in the middle of cutting into me. That was weird. Eventually, I realized that they weren’t paying attention to me. Well, I guess that was for the best, I wouldn’t have wanted them to make a mistake.

thanksgiving dinner at hampshire

Well, I finally saw Antichrist last night at the Pleasant Street Theater in Northampton. It was well shot. The way the forest is filmed, it seemed like it could swallow the characters up. I appreciated that, but I didn’t like how charged with meaning the film was. One can only take so much meaning before it gets to be too much. I guess it was shocking at moments, but I wasn’t especially moved to think about the thematic significance of the torture…my mind started to drift to more practical questions, like what the trial would be like if Willem Dafoe were charged with murdering his wife. Hopefully that will be in part 2.

Today Dave, Paolo, and I went to the Thanksgiving dinner at the dining hall. All those people milling about getting their food and talking, the harsh lighting, familiar faces that I don’t want to see…it provokes a mild disgust.

As we were eating, all of the sudden a wad of squash appeared in my cup of orange juice, and than on the sleeve of my sweater. I turned around, and a group of first-years were about to start a food fight at the table next to us. Dave and I, without any hesitation, stood up and reamed them out. That put an end to it. We felt good about ourselves. I rarely yell at people. It’s nice.

the daily grind

I’m sitting here, working on my resumé, because my other work bores the hell out of me and I can’t bring myself to look at another article. I certainly don’t want to start writing. I’m technically working on a thesis—a ‘Division III’ as Hampshire calls this year-long project—but both of these terms are just a euphemism for a big homework project, and homework is the worst.

At media services today motherfuckers were annoying. Sometimes I enjoy talking to customers, if they smile, or crack a joke, or something like that. A professor came in and didn’t get it that we didn’t have the film she wanted, and she started to get short with me. Then some guy came in and just walked past the desks and started collecting the microphones he had reserved. ‘Just help yourself,’ I said. I guess he didn’t get it because while I was doing something else I heard Matt tell him that we would get his things for him.

The other day I screened Claire Denis’ L’intrus. Three people showed up; one of them left twenty minutes before it finished. One of them said that she came because she had been in France for a year and wanted to hear French. That was a shame, because the movie has almost no dialogue and much of it is in Russian or Korean.

adventures in scholarship

I have found that, for the most part, scholarship is pretty dull. I’m writing a thesis about some things related to film noir. The only thing enjoyable is that I get to watch a lot of movies. The secondary literature is tiresome and makes me depressed because I have to look at so much of it. What really gets me is when some scholar starts to think that he or she is clever, and writes in the first person and invokes more than necessary people like Derrida or some other shit like that. I just looked at this article by David Wills about Breathless and its remake. (I googled the guy: he got his doctorate from the Sorbonne Nouvelle, where I can only imagine that they’re jerking off to critical theory).
He begins the article: “I am not, it seems, in the cinema. Not even in the video. This all comes at a complicated series of removes. At some point I could have said ‘I am in the cinema’ and left the ambiguity at play between the theater room and the film on the screen.” I don’t know what he’s talking about, but I know it’s annoying. Later he says, talking about the subtitles that appear in the English version: “they show the film ‘in process,’ in production if you will: in the process of being exported the film explicitly reveals its supplementary structure, its iterability, its (de)recontextualization.” It is times like these that I’m ashamed to be a student, and I just want to go to the bar and shoot billiards.