Me and You and Everyone We Know

What an amazing movie I saw tonight. Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know is a quirky and enjoyable indie film that satisfies like nothing else. Usually, the special screenings at UCLA are indie films that are dark and brooding and utterly depressing (ie. Mysterious Skin, The Ballad of Jack and Rose). So I went into this movie knowing very little about except it has roots in experimental and performance art. How delightfully surprised I was at this comedic gem that examines love, attachment and connection in the digital age. I laughed out loud at one particular scene. Laughed so hard that I didn't make out the dialogue for the next minute. Miranda July plays an experimental artist in this movie, and captures so much innocence that it's spellbinding. Elliot said the movie was like Ghost World meets Benny and Joon. I say the movie was Garden State meets Harold and Maude.

After the movie, the director, the writer and the lead actress, Miranda July, gave to a Q+A. One of the questions about the movie, "What themes were you trying to explore?", obviously upset her because she became defensive. I would understand that, because you'd want the audience to digest the movie for themselves, rather than have the director pre-chew and spoon-feed it. Anyways, I highly recommend this little gem, and it has fast burrowed into my heart like a flesh-eating tapeworm.

After I went home, I did some googling about Miranda July and her other projects. Turns out, we have crossed paths before. I once visited the website, Learning to love you more, where they give you little performance/ installation art projects to do, and you deliver the results. Projects are like, take a picture of your parents kissing, or drawing a scene from a movie that made you cry. Artsy, bohemian stuff like that.

Tullycraft

In a recent turn of events, I am well on my way to acquiring the entire discography of Seattle based Twee band Tullycraft. Their latest album, Disenchanted Hearts Unite, was really good times on a disc. While I was looking through their liner notes, I noticed that their email address was there. So I wrote tullycraft@gmail.com an unsolicited email of adulation, telling them how much I enjoyed their music in general and how their latest album really was good times. Anyways, in the email I also mentioned I enjoyed arranging their songs for ukulele, which was the truth because their songs transposed quite well to that instrument.

Weeks later, Sean Tollefson, front man for Tullycraft, actually wrote me back! In addition to thanking me for my support, he asked if I ever recorded these covers, because he would like to hear them. I was quite surprised, and immediately went ahead and recorded two covers from their older catalog: Bee Sting Stings and First String Teenage High

Anyways, you can now download and listen to these songs that I arranged for uke, by Tullycraft, for Tullcraft!

Crash into Me

I saw the provocative and utterly stressful film Crash tonight. This movie embraces without subtlety the topic of racial tension in America, to the point where everything boils over in yelling, screaming, name-calling, fighting and shooting. While I am not impressed with the cinematic technique the film used, which is in the style of multiple interweaved storyline that combine with serendipity and coincidence, I am very disturbed by the effective social commentary. This is similar to the genre of films like Magnolia, Pulp Fiction, Lock Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels, Go!, Short Cuts etc., where coincidences occur as often as Stephen King uses italics. You'd imagine from watching this movie that the population of LA is around the mid-twenties and everyone hates each other, and they all drive black SUV's. The movie is both manipulative and realistic at the same time, dealing with issues that seem implausible but short reflection will find occurs too often. Black people get shot, Arabs are harassed, Asians are racially slurred, LAPD police profile minorities etc. All you need in this movie, is two people of different ethnicities and a gun, and the stress reaches an unbearable crescendo. I was stressed beyond belief at multiple points of this movie because I was so emotionally invested (both as viewer and a race researcher). While I am surprised at the frank and in-your-face displays of racism because it is an issue that is tiptoed around in cinema in general, I am also confronted with the thought that not ALL inter-racial contact is in the context of racism, as the film portrays. I can be wrong. The recurring theme is that racism is caused by fear of the unknown, self-anger and hubris. In one situation, one person might have power over another of a different race, but these can be quickly reversed. Regardless, the theme of the movie is straightforward. We're all victims of racism. We're all perpetrators of racism. There is good racism. There is bad racism. There is racism that destroys, that alienate, that kill. There is racism that leads to redemption, to epiphanies and to unity. This is a tale of one city where racial diversity is its strength and its own undoing at the same time.

Investigative Journalism

As I was googling myself out of boredom again, I found this trio of curiosity that was part of my Wesleyan past. This was, I think, the only article I wrote for the Argus during my Wesleyan tenure. This was the context, it was during the whole Asian/ Asian-American conflict during my sophomore year, and I was eating dinner with Bobby Zelliger, the editor for the Argus, and he broached the subject of me writing an article. I asked if I can write about anything, and he dais as long as it's well written. I think he was hoping I'd write a piece about the A/AA scandal, but I jokingly suggested a few unrelated topics. One of which was the garish green new plastic cups the dininghall recently adopted. He said, if I write a good article, he'll print it. So I guess another joke turned into a realistic challenge, and I did some investigative reporting about these new cups. As I read the original article, I was surprised what great lengths I went to, including interviewing actual campus managers and representatives about the topic, as well as quoting friends and acquaintances. I must have asked Bobby what he thought of the cups at the time, and even quoted him right there. Regardless, the article was surprisingly funny: Campus Center Rejoices in Reusable Cups. Well, the joke didn't end there, and there were two articles of aftermath. First was a letter to the editor I wrote in response to the editing done to my story. Two non-sequitors were added to the piece in jest, and I responded in mock indignity: Letter to the Editor. The other was even more unbelievable because someone actually wrote a response to my piece, condemning the very same garish cups. Whoever this David Harvey is, he indeed was a worthy archnemesis. Campus Cups Badly Designed. Anyway, I never met or ran into David Harvey, but there is an epilogue to this story, in that a month or two after these articles, the campus center stopped using these cups. Aaron Gilary would often quip that it was because of my articles, but I doubt that was the truth.