March 8th, 2003. I'm officially 20 years old. Happy Birthday to me.

When I told Karen I was turning 20 she said it sounded so "old", and "but you're Brendan.. you're ageless" ^_^;

Bluntly, I feel old. At least now I can complain about teenagers with impunity.

Last night (this morning) I was out again with Alex, Pat and Pat's friends. And no, we didn't record the last episode of Otaku no Radio. Why? Because Alex wanted to rush it to hang out with Pat's friends. I will not rush this episode. Sunday seems to be the last chance. If this episode is not recorded by Monday I *will* do it alone.

Grace, one of Pat's friends, apparently likes me and would like to date me. Ironic, isn't it? How some people are just out of our grasp, while we try to remain just out of the grasp of others? Grace is a nice girl, but I wouldn't date her. We're so fundamentally different that 'opposites attract' is ludicrous. She wants me to take her to her prom. That'd be my fifth prom I've attended. I'm just not up to that. It also happens to be the weekend of ACen. So frankly, there is no possible way I'd go to prom with her. I feel like such a bad person though for feeling that way. Like I should say "Yes" as a friend (well, acqaintance) and just do it. But by saying yes I'd just be leading her on more.

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to tonight. Japanese dinner with my mom, grandma and grandpa. Then cake and presents. Then I'm going out with the ladies :) It'll be nice to see all the girls together again, like old times.. like last summer.

Tonight, when all the action's died down, I'm going to buy a pack of cigars and lay on top of my car.. no matter how cold it is out there tonight.. look at the stars and just have a smoke. Just being alone to feel things, for myself.
- posted by Brendan @ 4:39 AM 0 comments

 
Writing to a blog is a very egocentric hobby. That is to say, it's almost exclusively about yourself and in doing so it's very easy to become very focused on your own ranting and raving. Not to the point of, well, ignoring people around you. But, in a certain respect, not paying as close attention - maybe. It's easy to become too focused on your own problems at the expense of those around you.

Hmm. I'm probably not articulating this well. So I'll state that tonight I stumbled across a reminder of sorts that the things I, and people in general, go through in day to day life are hardly exclusive. It's strange. Being alone becomes very lonely, and being with others becomes absurdly complex with feelings precariously dependant on the whims of the 'other(s)'. Theoretically, everyone's fucked.

Yes, we're all wounded. Just to varying degrees. Which is both a very depressing thought, and also very reassuring. There's a calmness and safety in being part of the whole, and being ordinary. Of being 'not alone'. When the teacher yelled at you as a child - what was the best defense? "He did it too!"

Unfortunately, that was never actually much of a defense.

Sooner or later it becomes necessary to go it alone for a while, and see what happens. To see if you can fly, or if you fall back to where you were and need to dust yourself off and make the even more difficult decision of retreating back to the comfort or trying again.

Try again. And never stop.
- posted by Brendan @ 4:13 AM 0 comments

 

Mood: Anxious
Music: Real Emotion - Koda Kumi

Weeee! I just bought an autographed picture of Kiefer Sutherland on eBay. On top of that, it's a '24' picture. Very cool.

Speaking of 24, tragedy befell me Tuesday. I have a class Tuesday nights from 6:30-9:15pm, and since 24 is on from 8-9pm that means I'm never home to watch it anymore. Usually this isn't a big deal because I just videotape it. Unfortunately this week I forgot to put a tape in the VCR! Arghhhh! And of all weeks to forget! This was one of the best episodes in both seasons of 24, and some say it was *the* best. Nooooo! It's not fair. I managed to see the last 10 minutes of the episode, which were the best 10mins of the episode as I understand it, but still... And now I have to wait another 3 weeks for the next episode as American Idol takes its place. *sigh*

Got my hotel room for ACen today. Cool. Someone on the animeonDVD.com forums scared me when she said the Hyatt was sold out and they were already doing an overflow hotel. I thought that I would have heard about that on the ACen ML or their website, but both said the Hyatt was still available. Sure enough, I got my room with no problem.

Speaking of AoDVD, last night I was poking around their BBS listening to the Noir opening theme, and I noticed something interesting. Well, it was amusing to me anyway :-\

Theoretically, I'm now on Easter Vacation. Er.. Spring Break. Sorry about that. It was only Easter Vacation when I was in Catholic grade and high school, now it's Spring Break :P I went out tonight and picked up a bunch of movies to keep me occupied. I've had a craving for foreign films recently, and I finally got a few. Bergman's Persona and Kurosawa's Yojimbo. There were more I wanted to get (Hollywood Video has the best selection of foreign films around her, I had a pile of 6 films before I decided I didn't need to rent them all at once - I need to see more Fellini and Bergman films...).

I hope this weekend goes well. Friday is the last episode of Otaku no Radio - hopefully. And Saturday night is shaping up nicely :)
- posted by Brendan @ 11:29 PM 0 comments

 

Mood: Resigned
Music: Kopperia no Hitsugi (Noir Opening theme) - Ali Project

So, what happened at the big film club meeting? Well, not much. About all we decided upon was that I'm doing the website for the club. Other than that, nothing new was decided. Amelie and Lola Rennte are still the front runners for the film screening, although Tie Me Up - Tie Me Down and Rebel Without A Cause have come into the mix as well. Now the hassle starts of doing licensing fees to show it to a large audience, as well as deciding if we should do a DVD video projection or do a 16mm film projection. Personally, the 16mm film rental sounds the best to me, but it also introduces a lot of variables. The video projection would be easiest.

Oh, remember the moron who was bitching at me for asking about the date of the meeting? Well, I had thought he was this big football player guy, but I was wrong. So wrong. He's a scrawny twit. And a stupid one at that. The aim of the club is to show foreign, independant or classic films to people who would otherwise not see them. But when we were recommending films, all he could come up with was Mission Impossible 2 and Lethal Weapon 4. Uh, yeah.. No. Try again please. He even directly said he had never heard of Amelie, Lola Rennte, Seven Samurai, In the Realm of the Senses, Pi, 8 1/2, etc. How can you be an officer in the film club and not be at least a little film literate? :-\

Well, whatever...

I'm feeling stressed out again. With the whole Alex mess, doing 3 design projects at once, the film club stuff and now I have an actual deadline to get most of the concept done for the Kazecon dating game. Where did all this stuff come from? :P All that means I should be doing something other than ranting here...

I was going to end here, but there's one more thing that I have to talk about that I think is pretty damn cool. Takashi Murakami, a Japanese pop-artist (think anime-esque), was drafted by Marc Jacobs over at Louis Vuitton to do some custom designs for them. And I have to say, I want one! The "character" silk screen over the standard LV canvas seems to be the best, but I also like the cherry blossom design.




For more of the line, you can go here

The change purse would be nice to have for a bit of Murakami's art *and* an LV change purse :P

Too bad this stuff is so ungodly expensive. And not only expensive, it's become super rare as there's already a waiting list for the Murakami line... Oh well, there's always eBay.
- posted by Brendan @ 12:57 AM 0 comments

 

Mood: Pissed off
Music: It Takes All Kinds - Aimee Mann

Why am I pissed off? Well - I'll tell you why. I don't think I ever mentioned it here but I'm a vice-president for the film club at school. I came on board as a last-minute addition because the other VP mysteriously disappeared. At any rate, this film club has got to be the most frustrating thing I've been involved with that the school . Everyone's schedule's conflicts with everyone else's and no one is willing to compromise. I utlimately said I could meet anywhere, at any time - and still it took a week to work out a day/time and location. Sunday at 2pm at Starbucks.

Then yesterday someone emailed the group asking directions and if we meant this Sunday or what. Someone replied with the directions, but conspicuously avoided answering what date was being discussed. I had always been under the impression we were talking about *this* Sunday (March 2), but then I wasn't sure since no one would confirm the date. So then I emailed them, directly asking if we were meeting this Sunday or what.

Some fucking self-righteous prick emails me back lecturing me. "This meeting should have been established by now as
far as when to meet. Nobody should be asking when. " - Fuck you. I mean, seriously, get off your fucking high horse and stop being such a fucking cunt. I think this is the same fucker from my class who complained about Rashamon, too. Goddamn. Woo. I'm *really* psyched about meeting these people tomorrow. Doss cunts, all ye (sorry, I've been reading Trainspotting lately).

Right about now and about ready to give the whole club a big middle finger and tell them to fuck off. I'm the one who's been overseeing this whole campus-wide foreign film screening. I'm the ONLY one recommending movies to show (and, sure enough, one of the two I strongly backed seems to have been decided on), dates, times. Everyone else does nothing besides complain about not being able to go that day/time. Goddamn, I've never heard such whining and bitching before. This is why I hate working in groups because 9 times out of 10, they're composed of incompetent morons.

Tomorrow's meeting should be very exciting. I'll be sure to check in telling how it went.

---

How about some more pleasant topics and less of my own bitching? :)

Today was a very good day (minus the Film Club issues, but those didn't come to a head till tonight).

This morning I headed off to the train station on 4 hours of sleep to meet my Humanities class and catch a train into Chicago to do more cultural events. As I was putting my parking ticket in the window I hear someone yell "Hi Brendan." - it was my teacher, Mr. Monokoski. I went over to him to apologize for missing two weeks of class in a row (= two classes, one class a week). I told him I had thought we had off last week and that's why I wasn't there. He looked at me perplexed for a moment before saying, "We did have off last week." with a smirk. Apparently I was looking at the outdated schedule. Score!

Anyhow, we got into Chicago and sort of went on an architectual survey at various historical buildings. We went into the.. Brooks Brothers' building (I don't know what it's really called, but the Brooks Brothers' store is in it...). The intererior had been revamped by Frank Lloyd Wright - and it was incredible. Beautiful design.

After we had looked several buildings and compared schools of design, we headed for the Chicago Cultural Museum which features the radio and television stuff. I would have liked to have spent more time there, because I recognized a lot of it from my childhood. The Bozo drums for the Grand Prize Game (which *still* had postcards from children inside - it was vaguely depressing), Garfield Goose.. good memories. They had a nice memorial for Fred Rogers playing that had been hastily constructed following his death a day ago.

After the Cultural Museum we split up for lunch. Or rather, I wish we had split up for lunch. Apparently I was the only one among us who knew my way around the city. I tried to get them away from me by pointing out restaurants and how to get to them from where we were, but they just stared at me for the most part. I told them I was going back to eat at Cosi's, like we did last time we were there. They all complained that it was too expensive then, but I liked the sandwiches and wanted another one. I had hoped that the price would spook them off to find something more to their tastes, but no - most of them just submitted and followed me to Cosi. Damn. When we got there 3 of them decided they really didn't want Cosi, and left. About 15mins later they returned and said that nothing else looked good. -_-

Once we finished we met back up with Mr. Monokoski at the Art Institute. We took a look at the new African American artists exhibit, which as quite a downer considering most of it had to do with the piss poor treatment of blacks over the years. But my favorites were the more surreal pieces. The work of Kara Walker in particular caught my fancy.

After the African American exhibit we hit the contemporary art. Last time I had spent the afternoon there by myself, but now Mr. Monokoski wanted to give us his commentary on various pieces. It was funny, because other people would stop by and listen, but pretend not to listen. I think Mr. Monokoski got a kick out of it ;)

We sort of flew through the contemporary stuff. But since we came on the train I had the option of staying behind as long as I wanted to and catching whatever time train I needed. So I did. I decided I wanted an extra hour to explore on my own, so while everyone left at 2:00, I stayed behind on my own. I went back to the contemporary exhibit because there was a new installation that I wanted to take a good look at. The work of Marlene Dumas. The installation was called "Time and again". The program reads, "This is an exhibition about images of the dead."

As we raced through the exhibit with Mr. Monokoski, it was the above image that intitally grabbed me. The bruised purple look of her face and mouth, the way the paint swirled around her face. The deep red on her clothes and dark purple of her hair. I had to go back and see it again.

The entire installation was very disturbing, but with a quiet feeling of rest, of ease. Her images are brutal and haunting, but eerily calming. The trip today was worth it to learn about her and to see her works up close, alone.

After I had sufficiently inspected all of Dumas' work, I made my way to the photography section. This was just icing on the cake as they had a great new exhibition with "form" as the theme, with photos collected from many different photographers. I saw some very famous photos there, which was very rewarding to me - to see those photos not printed on glossy paper in a magazine or book, but as an original print on photographic paper. The true exposure of the original negative. That meant a lot to me. The collection was large and diverse, with many different interpretations of "form", but I enjoyed it all very very much.

I left the Art Institute at 3 and caught the 3:30 train home. I fell asleep on the way, and one of the workers nudged me and warned me I'd miss my stop. I nodded, but assured him I would not miss it. The last stop, was mine.

- posted by Brendan @ 12:16 AM 0 comments