morning sundries

The mere use of the phrase "flash mob" makes me shudder in memory of Internet industry era coolness bullshit. However, this is the coolest.

My eShakti suit came and is more decorated and therefore more traditionally Indian looking than I expected. However, it looks very cool on me, and just wearing the top without hte full assemblage with black pants and my high boots works very very nicely with the current obsessions. Also, it was made to my measurements and that's always a damn joy.

Today I have a SAG screening, and then I'm coming home from work and trying to finish at least some of the half-finished fic on my computer. I will also take a nap, as I am behind on sleep, and then do fencing practice. I am currently trying to ascertain if I'm not pushing myself hard enouhg or if my recovery time is getting better. I know, I hear someone thinking "how could you possibly not be pushing yourself hard enough? you've gone insane again."

Fur also comes out tonight, I think, but I can't quite see my way to bothering to find out if my ass is three feet wide and luminous in it. Which is lame, as I should go.

Breaking and Entering

Today I saw an advance preview of Breaking and Entering (It will be released limited in December, with national release in January). It was very well done certainly, and its themes were Minghella's usual in the sense that he uses landscape to frame stories about adult (in)fidelity. The film left me in an odd place, however, and I will be curious to see how others of you react when and if you do go see it for I cannot figure out if I found the film and its steadfastly enduring women, who beg and dissolve and persist, distasteful on some level because I have so removed myself from the world of these types of quandries or because something in me has merely gotten broken along the way. Maybe that's a question for a different film -- what's the difference between freedom and damage.

Jude Law plays cowards like no one else and as pretty as he was young, now that he's starting to grow out of his angelic looks a bit, it's becoming clear that he's going to be a devastatingly attractive older man.

The film is very deft and moving about Bosnia without focusing on it at all.

The young actors in the film are amazing. As are several essentially irrelevant supporting performers (there's some really funny stuff involving a whore that manages to be consistently surprising).

There's a gluten-free/autism scene!

Imperfect sexy bodies but lots of weird blurring in sex scenes and I found itimpossible to ascertain if this was a stylistic or rating related choice.

Some of the dialogue is a bit heavy-handed and unfortunately lacks the poetry that made up for that in The English Patient.

I was wearing a dupatta today and kept wanting to pull it over my head. The film made me angry, and sad, but I wanted to be angry and sad in private. I also wanted it to be a better film for eliciting such feelings. A couple hours later though, it's faded to nothing. I am unsure whether to recommend it or not.

on matters of theme

One of my keen interests is the obsessions of creative people -- that is, the stories they tell over and over again whether they mean to or not. Peter Jackson, for instance, seems to have an obsession with romantic friendship; Baz Luhrmann with prostitution; Sofia Coppola with the results of the absence of force; Minghella with matters of (in)fidelity; Steve Erickson with the idea that sound awakens us to impossible choices; and so on.

These same sorts of patterns are often in evidence in fandom as well. Certainly, we all know about the Mary Sues (e.g. "Draco is a cutter") or people who write dozens of stories in multple fandoms all about one particular and not all that common sexual kink. But those are the obvious, and to me, rather uninteresting examples.

What I'm curious about, oh fanfiction (and other) writers on my friends list, is what your thematic obsessions are? What story is it that you seem to tell over and over again without meaning to? What wounds hide in your work? What graces?

When I look at the themes in my own written work -- both fannish and not -- I think of reading 1,001 Cranes when I was little. I could never do that particular orgiami figure, and after I read that book, it terified me more than a little that I could not. But each time I tell the story I never meant to tell once, much less over and over, I think it's like one of those cranes, like a little prayer that maybe adds up to one big one. So what I want to know is, what is the story of your life, regardless of whether it has anything to do with your life at all? And why? Where did it come from? And what would it take to drive it off?

I'll write about mine later/in the next couple of days. I have to eat dinner and write and work on the fencing and all that. But I really want to know. I love the drive for theme and the ways in which it propells us.

Law & Order

Hey the L&O on right now? I'm on the jury.