rebecca. san francisco, ca. freshly stale out of university. communications coordinator at patchworks films.
It's been a while since the White Elephant Sale in Oakland happened and I finally found some free time to take pictures of half of my purchases! Ignoring the clothes I've bought for now (80s red power suit, flanel jacket...), though all are free to take a peek at the questionable purchase of the year: Bill Cosby style flower sweater, which was $2.50 if I remember correctly.
| All photos unedited, untouched. |
I'm back to blogspot after a summer and a third of fall's worth of abandonment. Was originally going to post my 1/4-review-3/4-screencaps-thing onto my livejournal but it got so out of hand with my other updates that I decided that it was time to return to 'joining forces with superman.' Not that anyone knows this exists lol!
Finally watched Luschino Visconti's Rocco e i suoi fratell (1960)--out of guilt that it's been sitting on my hard drive since who knows when and my need for some attractive Alain Delon. Typical Visconti; long, melodramatic, theatrical, and long. Many describe it as neo-realist but the only aspect I find neorealistic in this film is the focus on a poor, migrant farming family from southern Italy, trying to make a living in the cold, aloof northern industrial city of Milan (the cinematography though is stunning--especially the touches of film noir lighting and the barren landscape of working class housing). Beyond a family's struggle to survive, Visconti takes the audience through a multi-character study of three different individuals' descending path towards the act of 'selling their soul' as a 'sacrifice,' means of surviving, or sheer lust for power and recognition. The human condition's susceptibility to jealousy and pettiness proves as dramatic approaches to consequential demise and further disintegration of a family. Perhaps touching another (neorealist) social commentary, the film addresses the change in times, in mentality, especially in regards of traditional spiritually-inspired acts of sainthood versus reality-oriented pragmatism.
It's like a bittersweet frothy milkshake of a bit Rocky, a bit of Italian diaspora, lots of family drama, and yummy bits of Alain Delon... There's nothing more I can say about Delon...the fact I had to wean out so many screencaps of Delon CUs says it all.
Trivia: One of Visconti's lovers was Helmut Berger, who played Ludwig in the really, really long film called Ludwig with Romy Schneider, Delon's ex. Berger was also in De Sica's last film, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, in which I recall him being blonde, beautiful, and anemic.
Three months ago, I collaborated with Chinatown Community Development Center in San Francisco to make a video for them--for them to use something fun and interactive and interesting for their fundraising kick-offs or special events. I screened this on Chinatown CDC's Fundraising Kick-Off on April 28th:
Three years back, three of my girlfriends and I went backpacking through France and Spain. One of our stops was the little town of Sevilla in southern Spain. Quaint, wonderfully saturated warm yellows and reds, contrasted against blue skies--it was undeniably a relaxing escape into an early summery, lackadaisical atmosphere.
(Note: I had a bad case of over-exposing my photos back in the day...)
As it is commonly heard among all enthusiast young student travelers, "if I had more money, I would go all over the world." Luckily endowed with the opportunity to study abroad for the first four months of 2010 and then work abroad the summer of the same year, I was by no means moseying around with pockets full of cash and wealth. But to the best of my ability and stringent budgeting, I managed to visit several places, cities, and towns that have left a lasting, memorable impression in my life.
It is now 2011 and the only place I've gone to is England to visit my lovely boyfriend, given that I'm still financially recovering from last year's adventures. So here's a visual return, a nostalgic sigh and toast, to those past visits!
Simply put: I adore Vintage Classics. What is being sold on American bookshelves--I believe and witness--are an older line of production; recent but not the latest, which can be previewed on their website, linked above. But I'm positively in love with the cover designs; here are two themes:
| Fyodor Dostoevsky: Minimalism |
| F. Scott Fitzgerald: Lackadaisical |
Last night, I watched Le Clan des Siciliens (1969), directed by Henri Verneuil, with Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura, and the ever-handsome Alain Delon, and was subsequently going to follow-up with a post about the possibly worst score written by Ennio Morricone, mainly because of repetitive, obnoxious 'boings.' Legitimate boings.
But instead of whining about something I didn't enjoy, I decide to turn to the BBC production. I've only read two Austen novels: Pride and Prejudice and Emma, which was the book that pretty much stopped me from reading anymore of her work. But BBC's Sense and Sensibility has done the almost-impossible: convince me to read more Jane Austen. Not to mention, I actually like it. So far. We'll see what reactions it will yield in the next two parts.
Michelangelo Antonioni is popularly known for his trilogy of L'Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse, all which I watched but ended up passing out on (though, I managed to keep the eyelids open for Alain Delon in L'Eclisse). Why I decided to give Blowup a try, beats me. Antonioni takes us into the beautiful but lifeless world of mod fashion and art of "Swinging London" and succeeds in truly making a period piece that detaches itself firmly within the 60s. It captures the views of blossoming preoccupation with post-modernism, existentialism and ideals of that time period very well: self-reference, loss of personal identity, emptiness of glamour, the repetition of the mundane, and the uncertainty and questioning of experience and purpose within life. Blowup can alos serve as a bigger, more abstract metaphor for Antonioni's perception of filmmaking, the whole concept of dream versus reality and seeking objective truth and if it exists or not and so on. While it was beautifully and aesthetically shot, David Hemmings as a pretentious photographer manho, a tall, young, elegant but spazzy Vanessa Redgrave, and the rest of the cast...just not my type of people at all.
Le Petit Soldat has the famous popular quote: "Photography is truth...and cinema is truth 24 times a second" but I was more taken with character Forestier's monologue post-torture scene, beginning with:
"Today, everyone hates the French. I'm very proud to be French. But I'm also against nationalism. One defends ideas, not territories. I love France because I love the films of du Bellay...and louis aragon. I love Germany because I love Beethoven. I don't love Barcelona because of Spain but I like Spain because Barcelona exists and America because I like their cars..." - Bruno Forestier
A little preparation for Euro’s 2012 led me to this.
Last year, Brian Phillips wrote a short essay at Run of Play (my go-to football blog, now exiled to tumblr) about stupid rage in football world. While it caters specifically to football fans, rage-tap behavior is inherent in every fandom. People get butt-hurt. Sometimes for valid reasons, which authorizes anger as response. But other times for stupid, idiotic reasons, undeserving of time or attention, yet people give it their time and attention.
It’s a precarious balance between commitment, love, and righteous anger that occupies a fan’s feelings towards what they care and support. But so many times, metamorphosis takes place and commitment, love, and righteous anger becomes delusional, unrighteous, petty, toilet talk.
Phillips breaks it down:
The problem is (and again, I’m not the first person to notice this) that for a lot of people, that rage-tap is getting harder and harder to shut off. Anger is increasingly becoming a default element in how people interact with the games they follow, and that’s true for soccer fans to a much greater extent than most sports fans. It’s becoming a constant…
This is just one way of looking at the issue, and again, it might sound overblown. But it seems persuasive to me that the insane digital-age fragmentation of the experience of being a soccer fan—endless replication, endless mediation, endless interpretation—has meant that fans are no longer in a position to define the meaning of what they see: there’s always another angle, another opinion, another giant voice from the media echoing in your head. Something is always slightly wrong with your perceptions. And when meanings come unmoored in that way, hyperpartisanship becomes extremely attractive. Hyperpartisanship promises to give everything a clear meaning, because it gives you a single, simple principle to test all meanings against. Your club itself becomes the index of all meaning in the game. But hyperpartisanship is always running up against the limits of its own efficacy, both because the games still have to be played on the pitch and because it’s incapable of triumphing over either other people’s competing hyperpartisanship or the displaced media narratives that hyperpartisanship was an alternative to in the first place. There’s still reality, and there are still other explanations. Reality and other explanations are both irritants to the hyperpartisan worldview, but hyperpartisanship can never admit this without admitting that it’s basically delusional. The result is that mysterious, low-grade rage.
…the truth about hyperpartisanship is that it is an absolutely miserable and unpleasant way to be a sports fan. No one talks about this, because (a)people who complain about rage in sports tend to want to mourn some lost standard of politeness, which has nothing to do with anything, and (b)because hyperpartisan fans are the most outwardly invested in their clubs, so there’s a presumption that they’re the most authentic or admirable supporters, even if they’re also, everyone knows, unbearably obnoxious.
The problem is that by doing so, you condemn yourself to a life of always being at least a little angry about a thing you supposedly love, a life of storing up slights and spinning them into bitter little stories, a life of basically hostile, suspicious, and un-fun commitment to a thing that only exists to give you joy. The sole and entire point of sports is to enjoy sports; even if you think athletic competition has a deeper purpose, that it helps with moral instruction or enforcing community ties or whatever else, it’s only able to serve that purpose because it’s fun in the first place. If your love of soccer has brought you to a point where you’re no longer really able to see the game as something wonderful and amazing except in narrow moments of unequivocal triumph, then you are doing it wrong, no matter how many kills you rack up on the internet.
So look: don’t be like this. There’s no reason to. It’s really, really easy not to be, once you decide you don’t want to. The secret is to care, I mean really care, about something other than your club. That thing can be the game itself, or the truth, or just being a reasonable person. You can care about something other than your club and still be totally super committed to your club. It doesn’t mean not supporting your team through thick and thin; it just means being able to tell the difference between thick and thin, and not thinking that your favorite forum, or your group of like-minded supporters, is so important that it throws reality on the wrong end of a greater-than sign. It means doing this for fun, and not for revenge or for a sense of deep-down defining identity, even if you’re a crazy tattooed ultra. You can be a crazy tattooed ultra and still be fine, for that matter. You just can’t be an idiot.
Simple story short: Don’t let your stupid rage run your life. Read the entire essay here.
True, you most likely won’t find Deborah Kerr labeled a sex goddess anywhere, but that’s merely because her sexual allure, apart from the beach scene in From Here to Eternity, was hardly obvious.
Unlike overgrown little girls such as Marilyn Monroe, Clara Bow, Jean Harlow, Jayne Mansfield, or Brigitte Bardot, Kerr looked and acted like a mature woman even in her 20s. In other words, there was nothing kittenish about Deborah Kerr; she didn’t pout.
If you drink too much green tea, will your pee turn green too?
Takes picture of wrong order. Extra cheese toasty anyone? (Taken with Instagram at Julie’s Coffee & Tea Shop)
Copy of the Farnese Hercules
Jean Cornu, 1684-1686
The King’s Garden, Palace of Versailles
(alternate view)
Hercules fighting Achelous
Francoise-Joseph Bosio, 1824
Musée du Louvre, Paris
bronze(via antonio-m)
Once again, oh, hello friend has another reader appreciation giveaway. This time with the Instax Mini 7s by Fuji, an instant mobile printer, some film for the camera, and a camera bag to hold everything. Click here to enter.