I'm not going to comment on the situation with Matt R. here - if you really care about what's going on with that "issue", check out the next episode of Stray Radio on Monday. It won't be anything extraordinary, and I refuse to devote more than 5 minutes, if that, to this topic. But I'll say my piece there and that will be the end of the matter, as far as I'm concerned.

---

I'm sorry I've been MIA since Monday. This has just been something of a long, rough, week riddled with lack of sleep and pre-finals tests in a couple classes. Nothing very exciting, but enough to keep me off line for most of the day and behind in many emails. I often got on relatively late at night and chatted with Michael into the wee, wee, hours of the morning.

Anyhow, I'll jump ahead to Thursday because that's the day I almost lost the tip of my finger (and there's a pic involved!)

Let me explain. Thursday was my final Graphic Design class. The class that made me develop a profound hatred for all things Photoshop and Illustrator. The class that bummed me out completely and turned me off to graphic design, forever. All thanks to the inane teaching and design philosophy of Mr. Fu.

Hmmm, I'll back up a second and give you an example of why I question Mr. Fu's design taste. I was designing a book cover for, of all things, a design book. He suggested I put a computer in the center of the cover with a ruler, a camera, computer disks, CDs, etc. - flying out of the monitor. Well, I didn't. I did something different and got a B+. About two weeks later he was talking to the rest of the class and said something like, "Yeah - there aren't many good book cover designs. Like you see every cover have a computer with stuff coming out of the monitor. Like, CDs, disks, rulers, pictures, etc. It's too ordinary, everyone does it. You need to do something different." --- so while he's encouraging me to do it for my independant design project, he's telling the general class not to do it. That's encouraging.

Anyway, back to the heart of the story! Almost cutting off my finger tip!

Well, we need to cut out and mount our projects on black matte board. Matte board is like poster board but.. thicker. In order to cut it, we use xacto knives and a 17" metal ruler. Now having cut through my share of matte board in the 2 years of art classes I've had there, I knew that things were a lot easier when you use a fresh, nice and sharp, xacto blade. So I replaced the blade on mine and went to work.

As I cut the board, using the ruler as a guide, I noticed that - as I was afraid of - I hadn't cut it completely. So I went back, applied a lot more pressure to the blade and began cutting.

About two thirds of the way down the board, the blade hopped the metal ruler and ran its way down the metal and through my left index finger that had been holding the ruler in place.

I looked down and saw the blade slicing off a hunk of flesh from my finger like a piece of ham, and made a small gasp before dropping the knife and backing up to inspect the damage.

At first I didn't know what had happened. There was a significantly thick piece of flesh barely still attached to my finger, but I didn't feel any pain and my finger had gone completely white. At first I thought I had sliced off a chunk of dead skin and was kind of creeped out that I had *that* much dead skin on my finger tip. About 2 seconds later though, the color came back to my finger and blood began to pour out. No, not pour... ooze. It was oozing out of my finger. So I calmly, and subtley, ran from the room to the bathroom to stop the bleeding before it made a mess.

Once in the bathroom I took another look at the my finger and pulled a bit on the almsost detatched chunk on the side of my finger. At first I considered pulling it completely off, but as I touched it all the nerve endings turned back on and it sent a shock down my spine. But worse than that, as soon as I spread the flesh on my finger it started bleeding even worse. Aside from the paper towels there was nothing in the bathroom to help me, and I wasn't about to go to Mr. Fu or someone to say part of my hand was about to fall off, so I wrapped my finger in paper towerls and once again, calmly and subtley ran to my car.

Opening my trunk I tore through my road side emergency kit till I found the first aid supplied and proceeded to wrap my wound in no less than 8 bandaids. I was more concerned about stopping the bleeding than anything else, so the building mound of bandaids on my index finger didn't bother me as long as it kept the blood from dripping on my keyboard.

So, having hopefully salvaged a Chunk of Brendan, I returned to the classroom. The most cruelly ironic part of this story though, is that I still had much work to do with the same xacto knife that had inflicted such harm on me. And so, all I could to was go back to cutting the matte board. More carefully this time, though.



Ouch.
- posted by Brendan @ 4:29 AM 0 comments

 
No-Name Sci-Fi is talking about Stray Radio.

Go listen.
- posted by Brendan @ 12:53 AM 0 comments

 

Mood: Content
Music: Jurassic 5 (feat. Nelly Furtado) - Thin Line

Breakfast with girls Friday morning was a lot of fun. It was nice to see Katie again and, really, it seemed like the 4 of us were able to hang out without missing a beat. I picked up Karen and Alyssa and met the elusive Katie at IHOP for breakfast. I haven't gone to breakfast in a long, long time so such a thing was quite a special experience for me :P I'd forgotten what morning felt like. All we were missing was Marisa and we'd have all been there.

Speaking of Marisa (seeing as how I haven't mentioned her here for a long time), I still talk to her a bit but not nearly as much as I used to. However, last week I did get a voicemail from her, asking me to call back because she had a "big" favor to ask of me. Turns out she's coming home for summer on May 8th. Her mom's driving down to pick her up and help her move out of the dorm and to do so is renting a larger vehicle to accomodate all the boxes they'll need to transport. Well, the big favor was asking if I'd giver her mom a ride to the rental car place to drop her off so her mom wouldn't have to leave her car at the rental place all night... sure, I'll do that.

Annnyway, after breakfast I went off with Alyssa and Karen (Katie had to go to class) to the mall. Originally we were going to try to see The Real Cancun (heh, yes I know..) but in the end we spent all morning at the mall. Karen's prom date, Kevin, showed up and I helped them pick out a tux (black 2-button standard coat, black vest, black bow tie, black square toe lace shoes --- I have very traditional taste when it comes to tuxedos. A white tux? A hat? How hideous is that? *faints*). After that was all finalized we went to Gap because I had a gift certificate that was buring a whole in my wallet. Apparently Kevin thought my search for a nice pink spring shirt was odd. Fuck you, chode. Get some taste before you start questioning mine.

Um, the rest of the time at the mall was spent buying clothes at Abercrombie & Fitch and getting eye-brow waxings (and no, I wasn't doing those things ^_^;) before heading to Best Buy. I decided I'd put off buying Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me for way too long and having just re-watched some of my favorite Twin Peaks TV series episodes (ie: any episode with The Red Room involved) I was dying to get my hands on it. There was one copy left and at only $18, I thought it was worth the risk and went ahead and bought it.

Which brings me to Mini Movie Review Corner (I saw 3 movies this weekend)!

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me - 3.5/4 stars
Considering all the negative talk I've heard of this film I was thrilled to find that not only is this a good movie, but it's a fucking great movie. It's easily one of Lynch's best and most coherent films. Yes, viewing the TV series is necessary to understand (or begin to understand) what occurs in the film, but with only a single viewing of the TV series I was able to grasp the most important points included in the movie (heh, does this sound familiar?). I was also very pleased to see that even though the film is a prequel and takes place before the first TV episode, it does indeed address events that occured in the cliffhanger series finale and while it doesn't provide a definite completely satisfactory finale, the final scene of the film does offer a lot of closure to to TV series.

Lynch is able to balance the narrative of Laura Palmer's final days with his usual surreal imagery and weirdness - and actually, I'd have to say Fire Walk With Me almost wasn't as off-beat and confusing as I was hoping it to be ^_^; Not nearly enough time was spent in the Lodge(s) with The Little Man From Another Place. The scenes in the movie that do take place there are easily the most fascinating and fun to watch in the entire film, so it's a pity we couldn't have spent more time there.

So yes, Fire Walk With Me is a great motion picture that has moments of brilliance. Lynch was able to present the Beginning and the End of Twin Peaks in the confines of something that is officially called a "prequel", but that label doesn't do the contents of the film justice. Having researched the movie a bit now that I've seen it, I find that it's been said Fire Walk With Me weeds out the "real" fans from the people who liked a few episodes from the TV series. Fire Walk With Me is Twin Peaks in it's true raw form, without the filter of TV and multiple writers and directors. It's David Lynch's vision of what Twin Peaks was really about.

I'm more anxious than ever to see Mulholland Drive back on the bigscreen on May 9th. It's screening at a small theater near here for one night, one screening, only.
 
 
I was going to talk about 'Identity' too but.. hmm.. I'll slightly edit what I posted to the RottenTomatoes.com forum thread about this stupid movie:

Identity - 1.5/4 stars
Quite frankly, I thought this was a very bad movie. The "twist(s)" effectively killed the film for me and as soon as the major revelation was made I leaned over to the person I was with (which was actually my mom... ^^;) and said, "Well, I've stopped caring." And I did. From that moment on I had absolutely no interest in what happened to anyone in the film or the film itself, and ironically from that moment on the film did nothing but go through the motions. Before the twist it's a suitably suspenseful murder mystery/horror film. Not exactly orignial, but down well and effectively. After the twist it just rushes to an ending, almost as if the writer lost interest as well. The twist is a cheap cop-out and I hated it.

Pumpkin - 4/4 stars
Oh my God. I love this movie. I'm afraid to call it brilliant because that's so trite and cliche. But it really is just that. It's a uniquely dark and hilarious film that has a sly humor that only the best satire can evoke. It's constantly asking the audience to question the motivations of everyone in the film, including the audience itself. Christina Ricci does a great job portraying a sickeningly happy and preppy sorority girl who suddenly has to confront the nastiness of the world and her friends, as well as her own prejudices, as she begins to fall in love with a mentally retarded boy she's supposed to be mentoring. The film is both strikingly irrevrent and truly heatfelt.

Hmm, I need to write more about this movie but I'm going to watch it again first. Right now, actually :P
 
 
Karen wants me to re-post pics from last year's 'Katie's parents aren't home this weekend so lets party all night!" pics. I'll select some and put them up tomorrow. ^_^
- posted by Brendan @ 3:34 PM 0 comments