I hope that things are well with you.  Things here are as crazy (ha HA!) as always.  The last few weeks have presented me with the opportunity to travel and do some things that I actually enjoy (sing, drink, flirt, smoke, “smoke,” make an ass out of myself in public/private, meet new people, try not to think) so it’s been an okay time.  For this packet, my work has once again centered on acquiring new video images for the Stillness project, this time from the top of a silo and the depths of a basement.  I’ve continued reading Delany, writing journal entries, and watching downloaded films.  I also had the great opportunity to attend the first video screening of the year at the Spark gallery downstairs, which definitely exposed me to some interesting and innovative video art from around the world (along with some mediocre local student work), which made me feel more confident about my own place in this particular artistic community.

 It’s been a year of death.  I’ve had to return to my parents’ farm many times recently as my father deals with my grandfather’s failing health; prostate cancer has progressed into his lymphatic system.  No one expects it to be much longer before he is gone.  There has been nothing more difficult than watching my father deal with his father’s cancer and Alzheimer’s, something that I hope someday I will never have to deal with with my own father or myself, although the family history presents strong cases for each.  Dealing with this has forced me deeper into intro- and retrospection.

 Nights are without sleep, hang-up phone calls persist, but I’m okay.  It is an odd life to live without the entire spectrum of emotion, but I’m slowly rebuilding, and in that process I hope that the Stillness project is the best thing that I’ve ever created.

 Talk to you soon.  Take care.

Paul.
05 October 2002.
 

Video:
http://www.thestillness.com/stills.html
The link above includes my next round of still images from the Stillness project.  Again, these are low-quality preview images captured in Pinnacle Video Studio 7 from the original DV-quality video segments.

Shots for this packet included a death-defying climb of the silo where Jacob used to sit (I never used to be afraid to climb it, but god damn, now it’s terrifying.  Is that the pills talking?) and a re-creation of his final moments, stripping guitar strings, nailing them to a cellar ceiling, and making a noose.  I wanted to create an opening that was visceral and shocking, and I believe this is the right track.

I now have enough material to begin preliminary assembly of “The Stillness” by the next packet.  I’ve also begun work on a smaller separate video called “Fluffy Kitten Jamboree,” which will juxtapose images of fluffy happy kittens with an unexpected somber soundtrack.  Expect completion by next packet deadline.

Audio:
I’ve begun modifying one of Jacob’s songs, “Almost There,” for use as the main soundtrack piece for the Stillness project.  Alteration includes the segmenting and re-arrangement of the intro section, lengthening it through looping and layering.  I expect an mp3 preview to be ready by Packet Three.

Webdesign:
http://www.resurrender.com
Portfolio updated, artist’s statement added.

http://www.paulevanhughes.com
Link to journal added (bringing it out of secrecy), new photos and links added.

http://www.thestillness.com/stills.html
More stills from video project and descriptions added.  Link will go live on thestillness.com soon, as more project material is finalized.

Reading:
I’ve been trying to complete Delany’s “The Motion of Light In Water.”  I’m about thirty pages from the end of the book.  Analysis follows in resource list section below.

Writing:
Included with this packet are two journal entries for my Stillness journal on dyingdays.com.  I’ve begun preliminary work on the third novel in my Silverthought trilogy, and all broken tomorrows.  I’ve also begun revision of my first science fiction novel, enemy, because it was recently chosen as a Booksurge.com “Editor’s Choice” selection for Fall 2002.  http://booksurge.com/editorschoice/
 

There are times I feel so fucking OLD, as if I've been around getting 
leathery like some ancient turtle, while the rest of the world gets younger 
and younger, their skin gets smoother and smoother, their hair gets shinier 
and shiner.  Reading your stuff is one of those times.  We're on opposite 
ends of something, Paul.    You think about dying, and you toy with it and 
maybe you actually want to.  I'm closer to dying, in a natural sort of way 
(if, I suppose, one counts cancer as natural) and I don't want to.  Every 
second seems precious-even if it's spent at various bureaucratic offices 
reconstructing my identity.  Have you ever read the Tibetan Book of Living 
and Dying?   At least it talks about how and why to move from one side to the 
other, about preparing, and about resignation.   It's not at all about how to 
kill yourself, but it is an extremely wise book about dying.  And living. I 
do know how it feels to be in so much psychological pain that every part of 
your body hurts.  Please:   take your pills, write/play/photograph the pain 
out of your body and mind, howl, bay, scream, give yourself a chance to fall 
apart and put it all back together, or enough, anyway, and have more time on 
this earth.   I assume you're seeing a drug shrink to get your meds, but are 
you seeing anyone else shrink-wise?   Smart ones do exist.   They do help.

Sometimes I feel that I’ve been a petulant child these last few months, that others have experienced so much more suffering and loss than I have, yet I persist in living without wanting to, in existing without appreciating what I have.  I’ve been struggling with this for so long now.  I feel sometimes that I don’t deserve to feel the way I do, but I don’t know what to do about it.  I am seeing a doctor to acquire the pills, but as yet I’ve not seen anyone else to discuss these things.  I guess that I’ve always just expressed what I feel through my creations, and that’s how I deal with it, instead of talking it through with a therapist.  I now know that I most likely won’t be able to work through the events of the last half year by myself.  I still need to work up the courage to seek help other than just pills.  I’m confident that I’m over the worst of it now, that I let myself fall dangerously apart, and now I’m picking the pieces up and arranging them in a semblance of the way things were before the traumae.  I think my next book will be a giant leap in the re-assembly process, as it will deal with the subjectivity of identity, memory and reality.

Since you asked, Banff and parts north were beautiful:   one long road 
cutting through mountain ranges, driving by glacier after glacier after 
glacier, standing on one, tasting ice, in awe at how old the water is by the 
time it slowly arrives at a place where I can stand on it, and how strange it 
is to think of frozen water as old.   High altitude:  small plants hundreds 
of years old.   Lower down:  all blueberry plants stripped clean by bears.  
Hot springs.  Very ugly blue bathing suits, constructed in the fifities from 
some sort of petroleum by product, or so I infer,  rented by the Canadian 
government so that no naked pink bodies are seen.  (No, there are no black 
people in rural Canada.)  Besides that, no telephone to answer.  The company 
of a woman I love.  Gentleness.  Just the feeling of being able to take a 
deep breath in the morning.

Your beautiful description brings to mind memories that I’ve attempted to bury; it won’t work, though.  There is nothing quite like being in the incomprehensible beauty of nature with the woman you love…  I’m a big sappy romantic when it comes to sitting under stars, etc.  Oh well.

And LA:   feeling lucky to be here, even if I have to go to my real 
bureaucratic very non-Goddard teaching job on Monday.

I’ve recently been approached by the heads of the fine arts and music departments at my alma mater St. Lawrence University about the possibility of a visiting instructor position in new media/interdisciplinary arts.  The school has had one digital graphics course and three computer science courses for a few years now, but nothing that has ever attempted to meld creativity in the digital medium with a solid theory background.  I’m hoping to be given the opportunity to bring my knowledge of new media and the work that I do to a special topics course where students of a similar mindset would explore the history of hypermediation and be able to express themselves in a merging of text, video, audio, and life experience online.  I’m hoping that SLU wouldn’t impress too many bureaucratic restraints on my teaching style, since Goddard has of course forever broken me.  Ha!

So:  you rent tapes, you write all day long as far as I can tell, and when 
you're not writing, you read.  What will it be next:   more Delaney?...Times 
Square Red, Times Square Blue?.  In that book, I was, and still am, struck by 
the delirious utopian theory about sex with strangers as a way to have a 
perfect classless city, a way to cut through all the other barriers between 
people.  I am completely fascinated by Delaney's descriptions of public sex, 
and of the safety in a culture where that is created and condoned, even 
though his descriptions push my buttons sometimes, and I think big yuck.      
He makes me see New York in a way I never have, to think about urban 
geography in a way  I never have.  Anyway, yes, he's using sci fi to carve 
his own space for his own narrative, and using the genre to pull his life 
through, to reframe his life through writiing, to live better through 
writing.   He doesn't actually get to much in the way of serious long essays 
or books until he's moved through a lot of the issues in sci fi.  

I have been watching a wide array of popular and independent films, now that Time Warner has given me three free months of digital cable, and the independent video series in the Spark Gallery downstairs has begun.  I will soon be revising my first science fiction novel and writing my third, while continuing my journaling online.  In terms of reading, for the next packet I will finish reading “The Motion” and begin reading either “1984” or “Times Square.”

I agree that Delany’s graphic depictions of his sexual encounters sometimes push my buttons.  I’ve never read anything like this (in terms of non-fiction…  Dhalgren did include many graphic sexual scenes.) but I am struck by the immensity of the gap between that culture and the own within which I grew up, where sex was a terrifying union, held in secret, even between heterosexual partners.  Having sexually come of age in the post-grunge world of the mid-nineties, I’m just really in awe of the openness and experimentation that took place in the sixties, albeit still in secret, decentralized communities inaccessible to mainstream culture.  My friends and I grew up scared to fuck.  AIDS, pregnancy, STDs, rape, Ruffies, etc…  We were taught to fear sex.  What’s the pill?  Whereas there has been an increasing acceptance into mainstream culture of homo- and bi-sexuality in the past decade, it is still hard for me to imagine the kind of sexual abandon that Delany describes in vivid detail in “The Motion.”  Was there a cultural counterpart in the heterosexual community at the same time?  Do these communities still exist?

Do you take the stillness journal into other stories  (will you send me the new book and 
let me know what I owe you?;  then perhaps I can answer that question.)?  I 
suppose I'm asking-and perhaps you don't know the answer yet-about what means 
you've found as a writer or as a video maker or as a web designer to 
structure the pain and so as to contain it partly, or to transform it, or to 
let the pain teach you.  Are there parts of what you've made as an artist 
that make a change in what you feel as a man?  Or make that change because 
they allow you do see your effect on others.  Don't know how else to ask this.

I’ve sent a copy of my To Wound video project and the novel An End to you, so it should get there soon.  I’ll admit that in AE I borrowed frequently from prior journals (the stillness journal began just a few weeks after AE was completed.) on dyingdays.com and resurrender.livejournal.com.  Because Paul and Susan were characters in AE, I felt free to incorporate entire journal entries as expository segments in what is overall a science fiction novel.  In the next novel, I will do much the same but even more conscientiously, since I’ve decided to become the main character interacting with fictional characters from the previous two books of the trilogy.  Thematically, the same elements resonated in both my fiction and non-fiction writing, so I integrated them into a single form: loss, desire, memory, struggle for identity, suicide, smoke, smoking, silver, stars, fire.  I’ve found that sometimes it is just easier to translate the events of real life into a fictional paradigm in order to deal with them more directly.  There are some things I just can’t write in my journal that I feel safer confronting through the guise of a fictional character.  I do at times feel that my creations help me express and deal with those innermost fears, allowing the world to read the progress or the precipitous lack thereof.

I am struck by the sheer beauty of your descriptions of Jacob, of the history 
of your relationship with him, and of your love for him.  I am struck by the 
love that you give to him in preserving his memory, in keeping him 
circulating, in cherishing the scraps, in preserving him, in giving him to 
other people.  It's an homage, a memorial, a monument.  It's an archive of 
tenderness.   I imagine the passages used as extraordinary voiceovers, slow, 
against very tight and tightly edited images.  Here, I like the trope of 
wobble against stillness.   Also the bonfire image in connection.   I like 
idea of making an inventory of places and things that are charged, somehow, 
with the relationship between you.   

His parting gift to me was a soundtrack that he’d composed for a film project I never got the chance to make while he was still here.  While I’d like to create that project this semester, I know logistically it would be impossible for me to make a valuable and heartfelt project of that magnitude (fourteen songs coming in just over an hour in length) in this timeframe.  In one sense, the project that I’m creating this semester might be a preview of what I intend to make for him someday.  Sometimes I feel that I’m the only person doing anything to preserve him…  First reactions in the NNY punk community to my thestillness.com project were very supportive, with promises of pictures, memories, tributes, but now that support has fallen silent.  It’s like the kids need to retreat for a while to repair the damage, and they don’t feel like sharing the abject pain yet, so I am left alone to document and pay homage to his life, even if it is a loose collection of wobbly images of places we were, songs we wrote, times we shared.

That loss is in such contrast to the particular kind of torment you write 
about over Susan, which reads as someone whom you long for but not, weirdly, 
as an expression of love.  You don't honor her as you honor Jacob, basically, 
if that's not overstepping a bound.  She haunts you, and you're too angry to 
honor her.   They're very different modes.   To me, it's as if the anger at 
her erupts in potshots, in an internalized bitterness, in short sharp 
moments.  (I think this is a visual residue, an afterimage, from the the tape 
you showed.

Torment is a good word for it, and it continues in the form of late-night phone calls with no one on the line, instant messages while I’m away from her account that I hadn’t blocked that are just a punctuation mark: . , as if she’s telling me that she’s still thinking about me, wants to talk, needs to talk, that things fell apart on the west coast and maybe, just maybe she wants to come back.  But I hang up, I block IM accounts, I don’t respond because I need something a little more substantial than a punctuation mark before I’ll re-initiate contact.  The cruelest thing that anyone has ever done to me was send me an email saying that she was moving three thousand miles away with a drummer who wants to be my friend.  There is intense anger and fury coupled with a loss beyond words, which erupts from time to time while I’m writing, because I need to let her know that what she did was not okay, that I’m not okay, and perhaps she made the greatest mistake of her life by pushing away the person who loved her the most, who didn’t beat her like past boyfriends, who never raped her, who quit drinking because he knew she was an alcoholic, who was a genuinely better person when she was here than he ever had been before in his life.

It's hard, for me, at least, to wonder about making this more explicit in the 
video, but maybe my guess is wrong and maybe that's another video.   Two 
series of things and places, placed in relation to each other.   I'm also 
thinking of the kind of memory you have, of the way you can tell a story 
almost the same way twice, of the way you can retrieve dates and events and 
coincidences instantly.  I'm thinking of the way you imagine time as forever.

Susan won’t be a part of the Stillness video, unless I decide to incorporate text about the last time I saw Jacob.  I don’t know if I can make another video (or write another book) for her.  I think it would go against the spirit of this project to bring her loss into this project, since it deals with stillness and resignation, something I do feel about Jacob at this point, whereas I feel no stillness at all towards losing her.  Hers is the open wound.  Jacob’s wound is now a beautiful scar.

My mind seems to be hard-wired for the recall of dates and events and coincidences.  My friends and family are always amazed at how I can connect a seemingly-trivial piece of knowledge to an entire collection of memory.  It’s a character flaw to be constantly reminded of things that bring so much pain by innocent facts and figures.

This is my favorite  phrase:   wished on a falling star, but it turned out to 
be a butterfly.  Wow.  Do you care about one phrase?  No.

I don’t care about writing one phrase, nor do I even remember it most of the time, but I do care about how a simple phrase can become a reader’s favorite.  Much of my work is done while drugged, while sleep-deprived, and sometimes reading it makes me smile at my sometimes-instinctual way of creating images and phrases that stay with the reader, actually mean something to someone.

There is a quality in your work of an enormous energy being contained, 
focused down to one small flash, one point of light, one small phrase.   It's 
as if the structure and barely contain what's going on inside.    more than 
what you present.  .I'm pretty sure most other people see it, but I think it 
takes you longer to see yourself.   I smiled at your  Goddard descriptions, 
partly because it was a description of you deciding actually to show what you 
do in front of living humans beings and to see the effect that you have in 
real time.   Maybe if Jacob and Susan took that knowledge from you, you can 
use your work, and the Goddard audience, to see your effect and to enjoy it.  

It consumes…  I don’t know how to contain what screams behind my eyes sometimes.  Sometimes I think I become so wrapped up in the creation process and my own troubles that I don’t consider how the audience will perceive the end product, or if they’ll understand what I’m trying to do at all.  I guess there’s always been a divergence between how the audience perceives my art and me as an artist and what I see myself.  Hell, there was much evidence of the perception divide when I went back to SLU and young women were actually talking to me…  I don’t consider myself to be attractive or interesting at all, yet they seemed to.  I hate people.

You're a stunning writer.  You could be an awesome video maker.  I hope you 
decide to stay around to keep that going.   I don't want any more big losses 
in my life:  consider that.  

I really appreciate your kind words.  I still have my moments, but I honestly feel I’ve passed through the worse of my self-destructive phase for the moment.  This project and the new novel give me a sense of purpose and a desire to continue.

Possibilities:

Franzen/The Corrections
Dick Hebdige/Subculture:  The Meaning of Style  (there's theory, but it's a 
classic)
The Anatomy of Melancholy/Burton
William Styron/Lie Down in Darkness

An odd and scattered mix.   
Also, have you ever seen The Sweet Hereafter?    Afterlife?   Linda 
Montano/Mitchell's Death (independent video).  Shoah.   (Now there's a 
meditation on death.)  Lantana.   

I am trying to send you meditations on what you are thinking about.   I don't 
know if that's wise, but I think you're much too smart for me to do 
otherwise.  

Hang on big guy.  There are people out there for you.

Catherine

I will check out the suggested resources and I’ll continue to sort my shit out.  Thanks for the feedback; it’s great to see how others see what I’m creating.
 

L’hotel des vies Reproductibles
Pierre-Yves Cruaud, 2000, France.
An abstract, motion-filled grid gradually increases in size until we become aware that each segment is a shot of a person in a hotel room, laying on the bed, looking in the mirror, etc.  Jarring visuals.

Apartment Theory
Yudi Sewraj, 2001 Canada.
A young couple comes home, stops up all the sinks, tapes the windows shut, and turns on all the faucets, filling the apartment with water.  An interesting statement, just not sure about what.

Ice
Kyra Garrigue, 2002, USA.
A short, succinct look at something many people do daily: remove ice from a freezer and place it in a drink.  Beautifully-shot, great camera angles (freezer and glass interior, melting ice sending tiny bubbles into the drink).

_raum.7
son:DA, 2002, Slovenia.
A documentation of an installation involving shifting lights in a room.  Repetitive voiceover in foreign language.  Hypnotic interplay of light and sound.

Christina’s World
Rosemarie Fiore, 2000, USA.
Somewhat comedic interpretation of the Wyeth painting.  Camera mounted on an industrial belt sander as it tears apart things in a bathroom, bumping into walls.  Disconcerting, random motion.

Automobilization
James Jack, 2000, USA.
Supposedly a statement about the effects of industrialization on an unnamed tropical area.  Monotonous shots of cars driving by on a highway juxtaposed with images of running water.  Unsuccessful in that the juxtaposition was incoherent until I read the accompanying literature about the work.  Not particularly aesthetically-interesting.

Vertige
Isabelle Hayeur, 2000, Canada.
Another work exploring the effects of industrialization and urbanization on nature, this time in the pristine forested areas of Canada.  Quite successful visually; beginning of film depicts ambiguous line that could be the marking of a pencil that eventually fills with color and depth and resolves to the landscape shot of the forest through a slow pan.

Mantis Deployment
Jeff Chabot, 2002, USA.
Instead of pesticides, a gardener recruits a canister of two hundred baby praying mantises to guard his garden.  This work documents his deployment of said insects, gently placing them one-by-one on leaves and branches.  Audience laughed at the almost-human personalities of the bugs as they crawled to each plant.

10
Philippe Hamelin, 2001, Canada.
Through digital manipulation, a man appears to be ice skating without ice or skates.  Great stop-motion.

Untitled (Betty)
Candrillon Belanger, 2002, France.
A study of a woman’s face, extreme close-up.  She is obviously concentrating on something, but we don’t find out that she is standing on a tightrope until the last pan-down shot.  Unsuccessful because of pacing.  Focus on the face for far too long to make the payoff of the tightrope truly satisfying.

Ch. 3
Gino Sum/Pak Fai, 2002, Hong Kong.
An interesting combination of stop-motion and traditional shooting in three distinct segments.

And I Feel Like I Just Got Home
Sharon Paz, 2001, USA.
A camera rotating on and under a table during a family meal at a restaurant gives us insight to the family itself.  Faces merge through the generations.

Le Silence est en Marche…
Pierre Yves-Cruaud, 2001, France.
Study of motion and stillness: black banners through which digitally-altered people walk to the beat of the music.

 
Spark Home Video: September 27, 2002.
Curators: Joshua Katcher and Sarah Skapin.
a collection of Syracuse home-grown video art, mostly from SU undergrad students.

Segment #1
Sarah Skapin, 2002.
Definitely produced as an assignment dealing with the merging of voiceover text with unexpected visuals…  The “Segment” pieces of the evening were a procession of female characters from “Sex and the City” made to recite passages from various feminist and spiritual texts.  The concept was interesting; the execution became monotonous and annoying.  There is only so much novelty in seeing Britney Spears or Anna Nicole Smith read Gloria Steinem.

The Beatles In The Road
John Berardi, 2002.
Self-indulgent, cliché.  Student lip-synchs to Beatles tunes while standing with his camera in the middle of a country road, avoiding traffic.  The audience laughed a lot, I would guess because most of them knew the filmmaker.  I didn’t laugh at all.

Segment #2
Sarah Skapin, 2002.

Excerpts from “Walk on the Wild Side”
Lara Mennella, 2002.
The piece I felt was the most-successful of those that merged text from various sources with video.  Artist took pieces of Dennis Rodman’s book “Walk on the Wild Side” and used them as voiceovers over footage from his basketball career.  Memorable quotes include: “Everyone had dreamed of having anal sex and everyone loves America.”

Nails
unknown, 2002.
I didn’t catch the name of the artist.  This was a moderately-funny mockumentary about the drinking game “nails,” and the deep meaning it has for those who play it every weekend.  Well done interview-style segments and comedic nails gameplay.

Untitled
Sarah Abbott, 2001.
An abstract work made from depictions of what looked like human hair placed over a multi-colored strobe light.  Each frame was a different arrangement of hair and light, a striking aesthetic at first, but after twelve minutes, the effect had become annoying, disconcerting, nauseating.  I suspect this was the artist’s intention, to dismay the audience with twelve minutes of flashing, shifting images.

Segment #3
Sarah Skapin, 2002.

Say It To My Face
Joshua Katcher, 2001.
On the left side of the screen, scrolling text matches the voiceover, a message recorded on an answering machine, left by a former employer distraught that the artist has supposedly been spreading rumors about the juice bar where he once worked.  On the right side of the screen, we see an image of the answering machine and footage taken from outside the bar, looking in.  Successful in its merging of voiceover and images.  An audience favorite, and certainly one of mine.

Everything In Its Right Place
Jared Novack, 2002.
A music video produced for the Radiohead song “Everything In Its Right Place” from album Kid A.  A mesmerizing series of digitally-constructed landscapes and arrangements of geometric transformations.

Segment #4
Sarah Skapin, 2002.

The Camera Has Been Drinking
Matthew Vollono, 2002.
A drunk student talks to a photograph of Marilyn Monroe at a party.  Not especially innovative or interesting.  Audience approval once again depended on knowing the artist.

The War On Communism
Mike Celona, 2002.
A mock public-service announcement about the dangers of Communism in McCarthy-era America.  Mixture of live action and animation.  Juvenile humor.  I prefer more-sophisticated parody.

Segment #5
Sarah Skapin, 2002.

They Airbrushed My Face
Robin Enrico-Selvin, 2002.
The work that most-closely mirrored my own unique genre.  Artist incorporated voiceover drawn from emails sent to an ex-lover with images of places they’d been, people they’d known.  Haunting and touching…  My favorite kind of work: heartbreak, loss, struggle for stillness and making sense of events beyond one’s control.

Segment #6
Sarah Skapin, 2002.

The following is an alphabetized list of the films I’ve downloaded and viewed so far this semester, with brief commentary on each.  I was also offered three free months of digital cable from Time Warner, which included HBO, Cinemax and Showtime, so I’ve been trying to watch as many films as possible.

I’ve also become an addict of www.imdb.com, the Internet Movie Database.  It provides an extensive database of film-related materials, cross-referencing thousands of films, actors, directors, etc.  It makes life easier and better.

Almost Famous
(good)  Having been on tour many times with an infamous collegiate a cappella group, the Singing Saints of St. Lawrence University, I can honestly say that it was nothing like the debauchery depicted in this film, which I thought was a compelling statement about rock and role culture, encompassing the sexuality and politics of the seventies.

Artificial Intelligence
(good)  It is not often that I can find a science fiction movie that doesn’t immediately remind me of another.  AI had enough unique and innovative storylines going to keep me mesmerized.  Spielberg/Kubrick’s (posthumous) collaboration brought to mind the issues of identity formation and reality versus illusion with which I’ve been dealing this year.  What constitutes life?  Does the Turing test hold when the line between mechanical and biological blurs?  Could a human love a machine as another human?

Battlefield Earth
(not just ugly.. hideous.)  Ever since this film came out, I’ve wanted to watch it to see just why it has been deemed one of the worst films of all time by a majority of viewers and critics.  I can’t disagree that it’s a bad film: the plot (if any) is shoddy, the acting is unintentionally laughable, and Travolta may be the most horribly-miscast actor ever.  This film falls prey to the “cover it all up in splashy special effects and no one will notice that it’s a shitty story” syndrome.  The gigantic Hubbard book should never have been compressed into a two-hour film.  I’m a firm believer that stories of such depth need the leeway to unfold at a sensible pace if they are going to make the transition to a visual medium.  While some might say movies like Magnolia are too long and self-indulgent at that length, if pacing problems can be remedied, the film can be successful.  Battlefield Earth never set a pace..  It set a death march to Bataan.

Bully
(good)  Depiction of the brutal murder of a high school bully by a group of his best friends, based on a true story.  Larry Clark brings the same disturbing view of American adolescence that he depicted in Kids to an account of an actual murder.  Not as visceral or vivid as his prior work, perhaps because of the constraints of reality versus fiction.

Bum Fights 
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/2295053.stm)
(http://my.netscape.com/corewidgets/news/story.psp?cat=50900&id=200209251101000288104)

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
(good)  The dark and disturbing “prequel” to the other films, showing how exactly the apes took over human civilization.  Very disturbing sequence where the escaped apes, now armed with axes, knives, etc. engage in battle in a public square with heavily-armed humans.

Driven
(ugly)  Star power =/= good film.  Neither do fast cars, women in swimming pools, or explosions, all of which this film has a LOT of.

Escape from the Planet of the Apes
(bad) Corny, corny, corny.  The apes who’ve escaped from the POTA find themselves in sixties-era America.  Then, of course, they’re killed by the military.  Fun film, but awful.

Game of Death
(bad enough to be good)  The unfinished-yet-released-with-doubles Bruce Lee swansong.  Seen on AMC in documentary style with footage arranged as Lee had intended, not as released in the theatre.  Considered a travesty by most Bruce Lee fans as the released version contains footage from Lee’s actual funeral and half-assed attempts at using body doubles to take the dead star’s place in the 40% of the film he never completed.  Favorite moment had to be an intense battle between Bruce Lee and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, an avid martial artist and one of Lee’s most-talented students.

Ghosts of Mars
(ugly.)  Inasmuch as I’m very attracted to Natasha Henstridge because of her eerie resemblance to a certain ex-fiancée, it was not enough to distract me from the awful premise of evil ghosts infesting miners and destroying the cities of Mars.  This is why people hate science fiction.

Hannibal
(good)  I’ve not read the book.  I’ve not read The Silence of the Lambs.  I’ve not yet seen Red Dragon (although I tried downloading it but could only find fakes so far.)  While Hannibal had nowhere near as much shock-value or suspense as SOTL, I think critics and audiences alike did not give it a fair chance, since Jodie Foster did not reprise her role as Clarice Starling.  I enjoyed the film, although I thought it leaned a little too-heavily on the gross-out value of particular gimmicky scenes.  My friend Bradley actually met Sir Hopkins while he was shooting in Venice for this film.  I appreciated the deeper exploration of the psychological and possibly-romantic bond between Lecter and Starling that this film presented.  It was thought-food.

Hart’s War
(bad)  I enjoyed the film and was impressed that it wasn’t just another “escape from the Nazi prison camp by digging out” film.  The racial element and trial of a black officer accused of killing a white soldier had some nice unexpected moments.  All in all, I’ll watch it again, but it was nothing spectacular.

Lalee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton (Susan Froemke)
(good)  Better than good.  Heartbreaking documentary that delves into the lives of Mississippi Delta residents kept in poverty by the legacy of the cotton industry.  Film is a brilliant study of the cycle of poverty, when people don’t care about education and rely on criminal activity to further themselves in life.  Story centers around matriarch Lalee, caring for her seven daughters and thirty-five grandchildren and her refusal to allow forces beyond her control to tear her family apart in the face of tragedy and adversity.

The Man Who Wasn’t There
(good) Noir comedy by the Coen brothers.  I’ve never liked Billy Bob Thornton’s work especially, but this film proved to me beyond a doubt that he is an actor of considerable talent.  His emotionless depiction of a chain-smoking barber involved in an extortion and murder was flawless.  He provided the perfect sympathetic antagonist to a film filled with memorable performances.

Mission Impossible 2
(bad)  Whereas the original relied on a good mix of intelligent cloak-and-dagger spy intrigue and action sequences, the intelligence was lobotomized for the sequel and replaced with flashy explosions.  Disappointing.  Of course, they’re in production for MI:3 right now.  Bleh.

The Mexican
(bad) Proof that big-name star power does not translate into coherent plots or good acting.  As somewhat of a crime film connoisseur, I appreciated some aspects of the film, but thought it was too watered-down at points with wishy-washy love segments and comedy.  Pitt was much better in Snatch.

Shadow of the Vampire
(good)  Beautiful film about the film Nosferatu.  Film-within-a-film.  I absolutely love films that deal with the behind-the-scenes action on a movie set.  I usually dislike vampires, but Dafoe was impressive as the Count.

Traffic
(good)  An intelligent statement about the current drug war situation in the United States.  I found the depictions of drug use and the effects on family life quite provocative.  What would really happen if the nation’s drug czar was an addict?  Will we ever have sensible drug laws in this nation?

The Virgin Suicides
(good)  Given my near-obsession with suicide etc. this semester, I found this movie to be both beautiful and disturbing.  The comedy helped broach a delicate topic.  The family’s reaction to the suicide of the first daughter was heartbreaking, then to have the same pain magnified again and again was almost unbearable to watch.  I’m still too close to the subject matter.  Kirsten Dunst has one dimple, and it made me very sad.

Waiting for Guffman
(good)  Finally got around to seeing one of Susan’s favorite films.  This mockumentary of a small-town production of a play about its history had me laughing out loud at the pretension of “artists,” the way art is viewed by the common man, and the dashing of hopes through a simple miscommunication. 

The Whole Nine Yards
(good)  Didn’t expect much from this crime film/comedy, but the ensemble cast worked well and there were a few plot twists that I hadn’t expected.

Zebrahead
(good)  A straight-forward confrontation with the issue of “reverse” racism (a term I hate, since it denotes that all racism is perpetuated against blacks by whites.  Isn’t “reverse” racism denotationally “acceptance”?).  A white teen who goes to a predominantly-black school falls in love with a young black woman.  Chaos ensues as he deals with racist friends, neighbors, family members who assume he is using the young woman because he is white and wealthy.

Delany, Samuel R. The Motion of Light In Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965. New York: Arbor House/W. Morrow, 1988.
• The most striking aspect of the sections of this book that I’ve read since the last packet is Delany’s willingness to candidly and explicitly discuss his sexual relations during this tumultuous time in American history.  His words have transported me into a world I never even suspected existed: the secret homosexual culture of NYC in the fifties and sixties, a world where according to Delany, within fifteen minutes of leaving his apartment, he could acquire any form of sexual satisfaction that he desired for free, without commitment, without immediate consequence, with little fear of disease or danger.  It is difficult for me to imagine a world where trucks park down by the docks each night where hundreds of men could go for hours of free sexual abandon, a world where a simple smile or gesture invited strangers for sexual pleasure, immediate, sometimes satisfactory for both parties, but without a doubt without emotion consequences or the difficulty of a relationship.  This stands in stark contrast to the sexual politics of the world within which I grew up, a world filled with abject fear of AIDS and sexually-transmitted diseases, a world where teenage pregnancy and the evils of pre-marital sex were drilled into my demographic’s heads from elementary school on.  I suspect that is why many of us rebelled in college, racking up as many notches on the bed post as we could, one-night stands, open relationships, experimentation with bisexuality.  My generation was taught to fear sex, the act, the consequences, the entire concept.  Delany’s world seems impossible to me, yet there it is in black and white text, spilled across the page in all the cum-filled glory of a different time.