Mad Linkage

Happy Saturday!! :]

Planet Terror Soundtrack at Gimmie Back My Head


Clash doing Roadrunner & Baby Please Don't Go from Berkeley Place


I Have Forgiven Jesus B-sides from McCrank's Juke

Blah blah blah
Lessee, my sleeping schedule is wacky wacky fucked. Was up late on Thursday night cos some friends decided to call and sit in a bar for an hour continuing a fight they had over whether Planet Terror or Death Proof was better. I think they finally decided that the former is a better film but the latter is more Grindhouse-esque. Kkkkk kids. Then they tried to pick a fight with some little kids in an effort, I think, to channel the tension that has been building up between the two of them (displacement?), didn't manage to provoke the little kids properly, though. Then they celebrated by playing pool til odd hours and arguing some more and pissing people off and finally getting caught by the security guard with our "Bass brand soda." He was cool about it though, just said to finish it up, even though the dorm we were in is dry. In general though, what's the lesson? Boys are dumb. You betcha. Went to a birthday party last night filled with skinny little artsy-musicky fucks and PBR and boob camp and people from acting school yay and pot and well that means we should listen to the Beatles and daaaance so it was completely what you'd expect, which is lame but not painful but not something you want to stay for. Nice apartment though, up in Harlem, lots of space and apparently a low monthly rent. Left and waited for the 1 for like 20 minutes then fell asleep reading Absalom Absalom! which is actually very very very good though I'm not sure what's going on. . . Much fun to be had. Now I hafta focus on all the shit I'm supposed to be doing. Back to "real life" as it were, if college counts as real life.

I've got a paper for a history class due on Monday for which I am required to watch two Soviet Union/Eastern Europe films and compare them. Not too bad, but what's proving to be a bitch is getting to the films. You hafta go to the reserves desk and check out a DVD or VHS; you cannot take it out of the library, but must either use the "Butler Media Center" or bring your own lap top. I saw the first film on Tuesday, Kanal, a spectacular little downer that follows members of the Warsaw Resistance crawling through the sewers in an effort to escape the Nazis.

Wajda's unrelentingly intense, claustrophobic portrait of courage in adversity offers a harrowing window on war that (along with its hellish, subterranean setting) earned the film favorable comparisons to Dante's INFERNO (ibid).

A real fun watch. Everyone either dies or is about to die by the end, not a surprise because the film tells you at the beginning that you should listen up kids, since these folks are gonna be dead real soon. Okay, great. For the last three days I've been trying to watch the second film, Come and See, which promises to be even more depressing.

Elem Klimov's stunning COME AND SEE is a relentlessly brutal condemnation of war hidden in the guise of a surrealistic coming-of-age nightmare. A physically and emotionally draining viewing experience, the film follows Florya (played brilliantly by Alexei Kravchenko), a 12-year-old boy living in 1943 Byelorussia.

Yeah, I can't wait to be physically and emotional drained. The problem is that the only copy the library has is a VHS, since the DVD copy apparently "disappeared" in November 2004 and nobody did anything about it. I've managed to get the VHS every time, but seeing as how I can't bring my lap top in and watch the VHS on it, I'm completely dependent on the media center, which was recently refurbished with snazzy new screens and fancy new DVD players. This means that they got rid of the old machines and there are now only four VCRs available, none of which have been available for use each time I've gone. Mostly taken up by kids working on the same paper. So still no movie. I'll be going in tomorrow again, as soon as the fucken place opens, but one would think that the school with one of the largest endowments in its league could buy a few more VCRs seeing as how they're all of five bucks on e-bay.