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verbminxWell, I assembled furniture, more or less. I did four drawers on Saturday night and will finish their cabinet, and put it in place, tonight. But it is really the worst crap I've ever seen in the flat-pack furniture market; it's made from balsa wood! When I ordered it 5 years ago, it was on the strength of similar items that had been ordered 5 years earlier than that, which were made of heavy MDF with a formica surface. Argh. At least one screw-hole stripped itself on every single drawer, most of the drawer sides warped a little, and at some point I may have to take everything apart and GLUE it back together. They have no appreciable weight. I'll use them as dressers for a bit, and then they will return to their presumably intended life as closet modules.
I also watched Tagebuch Einer Verlorenen the other day - Diary of a Lost Girl, one of the movies that Louise Brooks did with G.W. Pabst. I'd never seen it, and I liked it a lot. There's a certain quality that movies from the late 20s and early 30s have, and that is that in most of them, the people look like real people, avoiding a quality of unreality visible in both earlier and later films (for example, the people in almost any Technicolor movie from the 40s or 50s look bizarrely made from plastic and paint).
The story is interesting, the ending is happy, and it has possibly the best (and maybe earliest, in film) creepy reform-school setting with the "mädchen in uniform" fetish that such a thing implies. My favorite and most suggestively unsettling bit is when the head of the school catches Thymiane and Erika playing with lipstick, takes the lipstick from Erika, sits down and applies some of the lipstick to his own mouth, and then uses the stick to write "PUNISH ERIKA" with a little heart beside it on his calendar. What the heck is the implication there? Why oh why would Erika and Thymiane want to run away? I wonder. Anyway, if you like silent films, it's one of the very best.
Last night, Tom was over; we watched most of Nausicaä. So far my advice is to watch Princess Mononoke instead, since the stories are kind of similar with different settings. (It's Miyazaki's ecological obsession, but I like it better in the late-Feudal-Japan setting.) I didn't realize that Nausicaä would have so many gigantic bugs in it.
I have mentioned before that I sleep on a platform futon with no headboard, and that at some point in the last year, the platform had pushed away from the wall - it sits on two long folding rails, which functioned like sleigh glides or something. This happened because of the way Tom sits on the bed to watch TV. His weight creates the needed pressure in a way that mine alone never has, and for the same reason, I couldn't manage to push it back myself.
At any rate, for a while now I've had a stack of pillows set behind the front of the bed to cover the TWO FOOT GAP between the bed and the wall. Before we watched the movie last night, we managed to push the damn thing back to where it belongs! It took more time and effort than you'd think. The effect was remarkable, though: my bed looks so much smaller (with the pillows now ON it instead of BEHIND it) and my room feels so much bigger.
Low point of my night: grocery shopping, and finding that my food budget was cut short by like $13 because I had to buy toilet paper and trash collection stickers. This irks me partly because my budget is so tight, but mostly because it was all for stuff that just gets thrown away anyway. Trash collection stickers in general piss me off; I live in the only district in town that requires them; I could rant on about upper-middle-class eco-geeks ignoring the economic realities of others while trying to force recycling on the community, but why bother? I do recycle, regardless of whether I'm being charged for trash collection or not. I'd prefer that my landlord were paying for trash collection.
Quite a lengthy![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
minxbot entry this morning, too.
I also watched Tagebuch Einer Verlorenen the other day - Diary of a Lost Girl, one of the movies that Louise Brooks did with G.W. Pabst. I'd never seen it, and I liked it a lot. There's a certain quality that movies from the late 20s and early 30s have, and that is that in most of them, the people look like real people, avoiding a quality of unreality visible in both earlier and later films (for example, the people in almost any Technicolor movie from the 40s or 50s look bizarrely made from plastic and paint).
The story is interesting, the ending is happy, and it has possibly the best (and maybe earliest, in film) creepy reform-school setting with the "mädchen in uniform" fetish that such a thing implies. My favorite and most suggestively unsettling bit is when the head of the school catches Thymiane and Erika playing with lipstick, takes the lipstick from Erika, sits down and applies some of the lipstick to his own mouth, and then uses the stick to write "PUNISH ERIKA" with a little heart beside it on his calendar. What the heck is the implication there? Why oh why would Erika and Thymiane want to run away? I wonder. Anyway, if you like silent films, it's one of the very best.
Last night, Tom was over; we watched most of Nausicaä. So far my advice is to watch Princess Mononoke instead, since the stories are kind of similar with different settings. (It's Miyazaki's ecological obsession, but I like it better in the late-Feudal-Japan setting.) I didn't realize that Nausicaä would have so many gigantic bugs in it.
I have mentioned before that I sleep on a platform futon with no headboard, and that at some point in the last year, the platform had pushed away from the wall - it sits on two long folding rails, which functioned like sleigh glides or something. This happened because of the way Tom sits on the bed to watch TV. His weight creates the needed pressure in a way that mine alone never has, and for the same reason, I couldn't manage to push it back myself.
At any rate, for a while now I've had a stack of pillows set behind the front of the bed to cover the TWO FOOT GAP between the bed and the wall. Before we watched the movie last night, we managed to push the damn thing back to where it belongs! It took more time and effort than you'd think. The effect was remarkable, though: my bed looks so much smaller (with the pillows now ON it instead of BEHIND it) and my room feels so much bigger.
Low point of my night: grocery shopping, and finding that my food budget was cut short by like $13 because I had to buy toilet paper and trash collection stickers. This irks me partly because my budget is so tight, but mostly because it was all for stuff that just gets thrown away anyway. Trash collection stickers in general piss me off; I live in the only district in town that requires them; I could rant on about upper-middle-class eco-geeks ignoring the economic realities of others while trying to force recycling on the community, but why bother? I do recycle, regardless of whether I'm being charged for trash collection or not. I'd prefer that my landlord were paying for trash collection.
Quite a lengthy
minxbot entry this morning, too.
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no subject
Date: 2005-09-13 03:44 am (UTC)See, I like Nausicaä, so much more than Mononoke Hime. It's one of his more, I guess, adventurous films, but it's a lot more...tender than Mononoke Hime, and I got into Miyazaki (and Anime) through totoro, so there are a lot of ways in which I prefer his more tender work.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-13 04:43 am (UTC)And yes, two feet of pillows. I have two "body pillows" that I use as bolsters, and something like 5 regular pillows. The body pillows are the perfect length to stretch across the top of a queen-size bed, and when it pushed away from the wall, they sort of fell into the gap and filled it a bit. But I was at the point where I was constantly losing the edges of other pillows under the bed, and needing more and more pillows, so I roped Tom into making it happen. We'd been talking about it for months, but not doing it. We are both people who tend to procrastinate about any bit of housework that seems like it's going to be much of a pain in the ass. ;)
no subject
Date: 2005-09-13 05:07 am (UTC)See...I'm a big fan of Miyazaki the psychological realist, and while all his movies are "realist" to some extent (e.g. no "evil" characters, and even if there are some, as in Laputa, other supposedly "evil" characters are sure to be reformed), and Totoro goes a lot of places, but to understand where it goes, you have to realize that so much of the "play" that the children are engaging is is their projecting their worries about their invalid mother. That bit made perfect sense to me as a kid (I think I was like 9 or 10 when I first saw it) because the kids were acting, more or less, like I would in that situation. So, yeah, there's a lot of plot, but it's like really--I dunno--more Portrait of a Lady plot than Castle of Cagliostro (though Castle of Cagliastro is a wonderful work in its own right).
Also, I should have you know, I'm
no subject
Date: 2005-09-13 05:33 am (UTC)I'm just bad at reading ANYONE else's journal, even, like, friends who I've asked to be bridesmaids. I appreciate that you comment!
That's an interesting (& valid) way of looking at Totoro, and like I said, I saw it very passively about 4 years ago. My main issue with it was that it just ENDS, very sweetly but abruptly. (Which, I think, may suggest that the mother eventually dies: that's really the only reason to end the story where it ends.) I guess plot isn't the complaint I'd make so far as structure, and I wasn't really the intended audience at age 24. I'd be willing to watch it again, but I'd have to be in the mood.
Next up is Porco Rosso, which is the first Miyazaki I saw, in 1994. I haven't seen it since but it's been high on my wish list for a US release. Now that it has one, I'm eager to see it again... I'll be picking up the DVD from the library in the next two days.