Regular Sleep is More Important than Making Friends

I don’t like my upstairs neighbours. I don’t want to be friends with them. I’m sick of listening to the goings-on in their lives at all hours of the morning and night.

I hung out with one of them once and she actually seemed pretty cool. And every time I’ve talked to the other one he’s been really nice. But I still don’t want to be friends with them. I imagine that if we all were to become friendly they would worry less about whether or not they were disturbing us and I would feel less comfortable complaining about their noise. As it stands now, I can be the grumpy bitch downstairs. I’m okay with being that neighbour.

Perhaps I’d feel more inclined to be their friend if they had better taste in music. Perhaps I’d be less annoyed if I woke up in the middle of the night to the sweet sounds of Neko Case, or some rockin tunes from the Stones. The previous neighbours sometimes woke me up with Simon and Garfunkel, which would then promptly lull me back to sleep. But waking up as frequently as I do to thumping techno is the most annoying thing in the world. It’s not even good techno — it’s that shitty trance that one can only listen to every day if one does a lot of drugs. That may sound judgemental, but it’s a judgement that direct experience, both my own and that of the people I know, has taught me is probably true. If I had to listen to techno all day every day I would want to shove a screwdriver through my skull. There’s a time and a place for techno. Throw me into a club or a party on a Saturday night, put on some good techno, and I will contentedly dance all night. The only other appropriate places may be in the car every now and again or during a workout. Not at 7 in the morning when you’re getting ready for work. Not in the middle of the afternoon when you’re gardening or doing housework. And not at 2 o’clock on Monday morning when your downstairs neighbours are asleep. Last night, it was so loud that it woke me up. It came through my bedroom as clear as crystal. I could hear the conversation they were having over the music in great detail because they had to shout to hear each other. When I finally went upstairs in a daze in my pajamas they didn’t even hear me knocking on their door because the music was too loud. I couldn’t believe how sheepishly he looked at me when he finally opened the door. “Is the music too loud?” Are you retarded buddy? You can’t even hear yourself speak. What makes you think it’s not too loud? We don’t even play our music that loud in the middle of the day. We don’t even play our music that loud on the rare occasions when we have parties.

That is just one reason why I don’t want to be friends with my upstairs neighbours.

Donations Anyone?

I like Victoria. The weather is great, life is chill, the pace is slow, the people rock. But I have one very big beef about living here — it is fucking ridiculously expensive. Seriously, it is practically unliveable for most people. It seems the only people who can really make a decent go of it here are those who are older and already well-established in a career or those who have money in their family. If you’re young and trying to get a start on life, you might as well move to Manitoba because it isn’t going to happen in Victoria. I know a small handful of people my age who own their own places and either their parents put up a significant portion of the downpayment, their monthly mortgage payments are astronomical, and/or they live in tiny little shoebox-sized condos. Most of the rest of us rent, and rent is almost unaffordable.

Now granted, I am a student and students are expected to live meagerly. But I’m also working on a Ph.D., for which I have a fellowship from the University, and I work as many hours as I possibly can in my department for a really good hourly wage. I worked so many hours this past year that my supervisor gave me a hard time for taking on too much and sacrificing my study time. So why am I broke? I haven’t been going out hardly at all, I haven’t bought anything new in ages, I haven’t been eating out, I haven’t been drinking, I live with roommates, and I don’t even have enough money left this month to buy any more groceries. When I say I can’t go out because I’m broke people say things like ‘it won’t be that expensive’ or ‘it’s only going to be a few dollars to get in’. What they don’t get is I don’t have any money at all. It’s not that I shouldn’t be spending, it’s that there is quite literally nothing to spend. I guess I have done a few small things of late — I went to a show last week (which was only $20 and for which I bought the ticket a month previously), I went to a couple of film fest movies the week before ($9 each), I went for dinner the other night with my sister while she was visiting (another $20), and that’s really about it. Oh yes, I went snowboarding on the weekend, which cost me $100. There may have been a few other small things here or there but, when you break it down, that’s really all I’ve done this month. On the flipside, if I hadn’t spent that two-hundred or so dollars on activities in the past month, I’d be going stir-crazy. I guess that’s what I have to do — not just less, but nothing at all.

The only way that living in this city is affordable for me is if I live at my parents’ house, as I did for the 6 months in between moving out of my last place and moving into my current one. But I’m 30 years old. I’ve lived on my own since I was 19. Living with my family again was fine at first, but it started to drive me completely insane. Last summer and fall I went through some tough times and only by moving back into my own space did I begin to feel like I was actually getting my life back on track and finding some stability. I guess that’s the toss-up: either I can afford to eat and occasionally go out, or I can live away from home. My point here though is that shouldn’t be the choice.

Epiphany of the Day

Today I realized something very important about myself. I can forgive all kinds of character flaws in people. I don’t necessarily allow glaring issues to deter me from having someone in my life. What I have a hard time letting go of is when someone’s everyday habits don’t mesh with mine. It’s the littlest things that drive me up the wall. Maybe it’s just where I’m at in my life now, maybe it’s the way I’ve always been and always will be, I don’t know. All I know for sure is that I like things in my day-to-day routine to be done my way. That might be selfish but, you know, fuck it.

Save Humanity, Eat a Cheeseburger!

America’s Next Top Model is evil. So is Cosmopolitan magazine. And so are mannequins that are molded to look like their ribs are sticking out. If I talk to one more girl today who is starving herself I will cry. What is wrong with the world?

The Winter of our Discontent

So lately I’ve been reading loads of feminist theory and am slightly shocked to discover that many of these works from the 1970s still speak an undeniable truth. I’m definitely not a feminist type, at least not in the conventional sense of the word, but some of what I’ve read has roused unexpected and passionate feelings in me. Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray both take Freud to town on his portrait of femininity and it is truly a joy to watch them do it. But it’s interesting too, to see how some of the things they are deconstructing are stigma about women that still hang around. Freud talks about woman’s sexuality as a “dark continent,” he talks about “the riddle of the nature of femininity,” men as “active” and women as “passive,” masochism as “truly feminine,” women as naturally hysterical, and he essentially implies that women’s function in society is to be men’s objects of desire. And then there’s the one that makes me blindly crazy whenever I read it: “Women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization.” Except, of course, plaiting and weaving, which he argues is somehow an imitation of our natural shame about being women. You can certainly dismiss much of what Freud says by recognizing that he was a man borne of a particular time in history, which is what I’ve always done. But let’s face it, the discourse of psychoanalysis is so deeply embedded in our culture now that we have sustained many of these views without even acknowledging it. How many of us women out there have been brushed off as “crazy” or labeled as incomprehensible. Femininity as a “riddle,” feminine sexuality as a “dark continent,” still seems to me to be the dominant discourse about women on an everyday level. Sure some of our material conditions have drastically improved in the past hundred years, but as far as I’m concerned we’ve got a long way left to go. And it’s not about having more rights necessarily — it’s about how we are talked about, how we talk about ourselves, and how we talk about each other.

Cixous says that men have pitted women against each other. And isn’t that still true? Even still, in my adulthood, in the 21st century, I find it difficult to avoid competition and bitterness amongst groups of girls. She also talks about the limitlessness of women’s desire. But don’t many of the women you know still find satisfaction by simply subjecting passively to sex? I know that’s a gross generalization, but I am constantly amazed that so many of the women I’ve spoken to about it over the past few years experience desire under totally masculine terms.

All I’m saying ladies is that we have a long way to go. And it amazes me that the concerns of 30 years ago are still around to such an extent.

My Rant on Bad Film-Making

One of my biggest annoyances in film is voice-over narration. Sure it’s a useful tool, but the problem is that filmmakers use it in the absence of other, more effective, modes of visual story-telling. It’s like an easy escape for someone who can’t work out how to tell a story on film. If you need to tell us what’s going on then write a book about it!

It seems to me that voice-over narration is a prominent feature in war movies. I just turned on the television and they were playing The Great Raid, a movie about a rescue mission to get WWII American POWs out of the Philippines. I kind of wanted to see it but it started with the main character writing in his journal with a voice-over for like 3 minutes (which is quite a long time in the world of a movie). That was it, I had to turn it off. I’d rather watch Sponge Bob (which is genius by the way). I don’t need to read over a soldier’s shoulder that he has deep feelings and higher than average intelligence to be moved by the story. And if that’s what you need to do to move people with your story, I think you’ve failed as a filmmaker. I’m not saying voice-over is all bad, I’m just saying it gets misused much of the time to cover up other deficiencies.

But let’s consider Mean Girls for a moment — probably not the best example, but the one that first came to my mind. There is voice-over in that one, but it’s not necessary to our understanding of the story. It adds humour, but if you took the voice-over out the movie would still be effective. Take the voice-over out of Platoon? The movie loses all its power. For the record, I love Platoon. That and Apocalypse Now are the only two movies I forgive for excessive misuse of voice-over (which is strange if you think about it since they’re both narrated by Sheens).

On a closely related topic, my other beef is flashback. Again, flashback in film can be very useful, and very artfully done. But flashback à la Saving Private Ryan is all wrong. It’s only there because Spielberg and his crew couldn’t figure out how to start and end the story. Not to mention, it provides the necessary emotional manipulation to ensure that the audience will be moved no matter what. It killed any chance that I would appreciate the movie. To be more specific, I’d say flashback is generally good, but when a film is framed as a flashback, generally bad. There are definitely exceptions but for the most part that’s my rule.

Feel free to argue with me.

My Rant on Swearing

WARNING: Explicit Content not suitable for young children (if, for some reason, there are young children on the site and they would actually heed such a warning).

I like to swear. I do plenty of it. So, for the record, this is not a rant about the improprieties of 4-letter words. Rather, I think in the art of conversation we owe it to our listeners to choose the best possible words to communicate our thoughts. If adding “fucking” before whatever adjective I’m using is most effective at conveying the depth of my feeling, then I will do so without shame. But it drives me frickin’ bananas when people swear just for the sake of doing it without consideration for the actual meaning of their words. When every single thing you say is “motherfucking this” or “motherfucking that,” not only do your words lose the weight of their meaning (like the little boy who swore wolf), but you also sound like a complete moron. I get it, you thought Snakes on a Plane was funny. Congratulations, you’re awfully clever. Here’s an idea: give Samuel L his line back and say something a little more succinct for a change. Motherfucking got it?

Adaptation

The plenary panel for this recent conference I went to was about film adaptation. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the plenary was like the panel of keynote speakers — 3 individuals, this year from 3 different fields. One was a literary critic, one was a biologist, and one was a natural philosopher. Being the film buff that I am, and having done a ton of academic work on film adaptation, I was really looking forward to the presentation.

Right. So their big plan was to develop a new theory of adaptation in response to the problem that everyone is still caught up in fidelity discourse. What this means is that people generally judge the success of an adaptation based on its degree of faithfulness to the textual original. This is problematic for a number of reasons — not least of which, it privileges the ‘original’ just by virtue of it coming first; it doesn’t account for differences in media; it doesn’t acknowledge other influences; and it’s a really stupid way of judging a work of art. These are all excellent observations. They are also observations that were being made by academic film critics more than 10 years ago.

As an alternative, the panel was proposing a theory that uses scientific discourse to explain the nature of cultural adaptations. They wanted to make a “homology” (or analogy) between biological adaptation and film adaptation. So rather than looking at the adaptation as a derivative of its original, we should instead trace its genealogy. As in nature, when one feature of a species adapts to its environment, the story being told adapts to another medium or a slightly different retelling in order to talk to a contemporary audience. The success of an adaptation, just as in nature, is thus measured on two things — the longevity of the story and whether it interacts well with its environment (i.e. how widely it is received by the intended audience).

I have a number of issues with this. First, to measure the success of an adaptation by how well it is received reduces the adaptation to a commodity. It is successful if lots of people buy it, pay to watch it, buy the memorabilia, etc. This is not my own take on it — the speakers were actually saying these things. Now, it may be the case that culture has been almost completely commodified anyway, but this is a problem and I can’t believe that they would talk so plainly about it without acknowledging it as a problem.

Second, to measure the success of adaptations based on how long a story persists completely ignores the power structures that are at work in culture. Whether or not something is widely read or watched in schools and in the public depends a great deal on what those in power would like us to read or watch. Would we still study Shakespeare so diligently if a few dead white academics hadn’t decided it would be so?

Third, part of what they wanted to do was get out of the temporality of fidelity discourse, i.e. evaluating adaptations based on their sequence. But developing a history of the retellings of a particular story still does just that. It still becomes a myth of origins.

Fourth, by talking about stories in the way they are, they are essentially saying what the French Structuralists said 50 years ago: There are only so many stories, with a wide range of shifting details based on cultural moments, etc. It was like having Levi-Strauss’ “The Structural Study of Myth” read back to me in a different context. The panel even suggested that it would be interesting to chart the history of a story, i.e. to map out all the variations of the Romeo and Juliet story and all of its influences. Didn’t someone do that already? Isn’t that what structuralism was all about? And didn’t it not work? Remember when Barthes tried to map out all the textual and cultural influences that went into each phrase of Balzac’s “Sarrasine” in S/Z? It all fell apart. That’s why S/Z is so interesting, because he shows us the whole system unravelling and thus opens the door for a different way of thinking about stories.

And I have saved my biggest question for last. Does anyone care? Adaptation is not a really hot topic right now. Not to mention, I don’t think that we even have a problem with fidelity discourse. Critics have been taking that apart and proposing new approaches for like 10 years. Very little of the recent stuff I’ve read on adaptation falls into that trap anymore. It’s like they’re a decade late. And even if they’d been on time, the theory is so flawed anyway that it doesn’t really matter.

My last comment is not so much a question I had about the material, but a problem I had with the speakers themselves. Or one particular speaker — the literary critic. The delivery of the presentation was fantastic, it was clear, exciting, well-paced, and with multi-media. But the Q&A period was abysmal. There were many questions and comments after the presentation, and several challenges put forth to the theory, some of them similar to my own issues. But the one speaker monopolized the floor and responded to almost all of the questions. Or rather, didn’t respond. She was so arrogant and dismissive that she refused to answer to many of the challenges, refused to respond to some questions, and even told a few people that they were flat out wrong and didn’t even add as to why. One girl asked a very astute question and, rather than answering, she turned to the panel organizer and said “I think you can just move on to the next one”! It was a very good reminder that we should always be humble and never get too smart. There’s always more to learn and if you can’t accept the advice or perspective of others then you risk losing your way. I can certainly say that, even though this literary critic is the queen bee of Canadian academia, her new book on adaptation is not going to make waves. And when your work stops mattering, people stop reading it.

My Issue With Time Travel

This has been bothering me for a few days now…

Time travel. I know it’s not possible, not yet anyway, so you’ll have to just go with me on this one and suspend your disbelief for a few moments. Let’s say a character in a movie or a tv show or a book travels back in time to stop some horrible event from happening — a narrative that we have seen many times. And let’s say the hero succeeds in changing the future. So if there is no horrible event to stop anymore, then the hero doesn’t need to go back again, thus he would not have been present in the past to change it. Are you still with me? What I’m trying to say is that, logically, the whole system breaks down.

I saw the movie Deja Vu last week (it was horrible, don’t ask me why I watched it) and was struck by the logical impossibility of the conclusion. Denzel Washington goes back in time to stop a terrorist bombing and save a woman’s life. Of course, he and the woman fall in love but he dies while saving the day. Keep in mind that this is Future Denzel operating in the past. At the end, after Future Denzel has died, the woman meets Present Denzel and is oh so relieved. They live happily ever after. The thing is, because the bombing was stopped and the woman was saved, Present Denzel has no idea of this alternate progression of events. So of course, he won’t be going back into the past to stop these things that never happened. But if he doesn’t go back, he won’t be there to stop them from happening. You feeling me? It doesn’t work.

There is a similar logical gap in so many of our time travel stories. What about Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Don’t you think if Freud had been picked up by two guys in a phone booth and transported through time that his later works would have been much different? Then why weren’t Bill and Ted up on stage talking about Freud’s contributions to the science of time travel?

Everything falls apart.

Let’s hope we never actually make time travel possible. The whole world would just implode.

Playsuits

If these catch on, I’m going to stop leaving the house.