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Nothing's Gonna Harm You
Apr. 10th, 2011 11:12 pmPossibly even more entertaining than seeing representations of the internet on television from the mid-nineties: reading art/film theory about the internet from the mid-nineties. Fascinating stuff, but it is really weird to see a vision of the future projected forward from AOL and geocities, and the changes they talk about never happened, or happened in completely different ways. Web 2.0 and the social networking boom must have blown their minds. And I don't know if I'll ever quite be able to grasp what it was like, because this technology grew up with me and I've never entirely lived without it. I don't always like new developments (still not sold on Twitter, even if Jack_Wilshere and Cesc are adorable on it), but it all makes sense to me.
Apologies for muddled extemporizing, it's been that kind of weekend.
Last night I went to see Sweeney Todd - quite a good show, even if several of the actors mistook "faking a British accent" for "mumbling all their lines" and several others mistook "acting" for "shouting." But while I couldn't understand any of the lines in the slower songs, when the leads got to let loose and really chew the scenery they were delightful. "Epiphany" gave me shivers down my spine, it was so well-staged/lit and the actor was so intense. And then on the way home I got Freshman Guy to spill the details about an incident earlier in the week he had hinted about on facebook where he tried to hook up with a guy for anonymous bathroom sex in the history building, but instead ended up sitting on the floor of the bathroom stall hugging this semi-undressed guy and talking him through a sexual identity crisis. Just for the record, I am never touching anything in the history building again.
Today I was reminded why I don't read more literary fiction than I do. Out of the six stories we have to read for tomorrow's class, we had: a woman whose abusive husband murdered their three children, a woman trying to keep her nursing client's daughter from stealing his ashes after he dies of dementia, a man who is literally crucified while his pregnant teenage daughter watches, an old man reliving his divorce and his neighbor's death, and a man who is murdered and dismembered by his coworker so he can't turn him in for killing several other people. Isn't that cheerful and upbeat? Last week's book was all rape, stalking, and child abuse, but at least it had a tiger. I suspect my professors of being in a conspiracy with my uterus to make me overly introspective and melancholy. That seems like a good word for it, melancholy, because it's not an active sadness. Just the vague, misanthropic unhappiness that comes from reading a lot of sad stories at once, some of them uncomfortably personal.
At least Arsenal finally won a match today. And I will watch some cartoons and go to bed and tomorrow there will be entirely less moping, I swear.
Apologies for muddled extemporizing, it's been that kind of weekend.
Last night I went to see Sweeney Todd - quite a good show, even if several of the actors mistook "faking a British accent" for "mumbling all their lines" and several others mistook "acting" for "shouting." But while I couldn't understand any of the lines in the slower songs, when the leads got to let loose and really chew the scenery they were delightful. "Epiphany" gave me shivers down my spine, it was so well-staged/lit and the actor was so intense. And then on the way home I got Freshman Guy to spill the details about an incident earlier in the week he had hinted about on facebook where he tried to hook up with a guy for anonymous bathroom sex in the history building, but instead ended up sitting on the floor of the bathroom stall hugging this semi-undressed guy and talking him through a sexual identity crisis. Just for the record, I am never touching anything in the history building again.
Today I was reminded why I don't read more literary fiction than I do. Out of the six stories we have to read for tomorrow's class, we had: a woman whose abusive husband murdered their three children, a woman trying to keep her nursing client's daughter from stealing his ashes after he dies of dementia, a man who is literally crucified while his pregnant teenage daughter watches, an old man reliving his divorce and his neighbor's death, and a man who is murdered and dismembered by his coworker so he can't turn him in for killing several other people. Isn't that cheerful and upbeat? Last week's book was all rape, stalking, and child abuse, but at least it had a tiger. I suspect my professors of being in a conspiracy with my uterus to make me overly introspective and melancholy. That seems like a good word for it, melancholy, because it's not an active sadness. Just the vague, misanthropic unhappiness that comes from reading a lot of sad stories at once, some of them uncomfortably personal.
At least Arsenal finally won a match today. And I will watch some cartoons and go to bed and tomorrow there will be entirely less moping, I swear.