I remember being in New York visiting a pair of friends who were visiting for the summer. We were watching television and came across a public access channel that was showing the end of a Bruce Conner film.

On Wednesday decidely jet lagged I decided to make corn bread for a friend's birthday potluck the next day. My brother and I go grocery shopping, I pick up the ingredients, I make corn bread. The plan for the next day is to go to work, come home, shower and take the corn bread to the party. I arrive home at 6:30, my one hour commute taking 90 minutes and open the fridge door to find that my brother has eaten most of the corn bread. He had not realized it was for the pot luck we were going to.
I don't remember the last time I was so angry.
Wait, yes I do.

He did say it was "really good" though.

Family vacation from the 12th to the 22nd.
I'm sure I already have yr address if you want a postcard.
So far all I've done is pick the books I want to bring (2 Norman Mailer books and Blonde. We're going to Hawaii so I feel the need to read something American).
No internet or phone the entire time. This is something I always look forward to the most.

This morning I dreamed that a witch had taken over my house and was enslaving young girls to work for her. I wandered through my house, now filled with garbage and when I got to my room I looked out of my window and saw piles of trash at my eye level. My brother came home and insisted on talking to me. I responded with excessive cruelty because I wanted him out, I wanted him not there. He fought back more than normally and we were furious at each other, at the point of hurting one another. I was so angry I wanted to vomit so I left unable to help the girls (this was his fault). I wandered down to in the dream is the lake shore but was rather a giant field with a train. I took the train with some classmates to a professor's house but hung back when we got to the station. I arrived at the house later and Wellbeck showed me in. Instead of catching up with my classmates we cuddled on the couch. I kissed him cautiously and he barely responded so I gave up. Then he began eating me out (with a comment about avoiding certain areas because I was mensturating). He ate me out like a pendulum, going up and down my legs until I came. I began to reciprocate but he realized that someone was coming in. We covered ourselves up quickly as the professor walked in with the rest of the class.

My mother told me recently that when I was a baby she and I would sit on the porch during thunder storms, I asleep in the stroller. This surprised me since my mother always seemed indifferent to concerned when it came to thunder storms. Still, I can picture it well. I have vivid memories of the porch at our old house. There is also the story of my parents pushing me in a stroller in the nearby park and a storm coming out of nowhere. Sherwood Park was only a few blocks away from my childhood home and is, for me, known for the massive hill one had to take to enter or leave it. I skinned a lot of arms and legs from falling off my bike, and a triumph of my brother and I’d childhood is biking all the way up without stopping. In this story I’m a few days old and my parents are pushing me up this hill after going on a walk. My father describes it as the sky turning green. He put my in his coat and he and my mother ran home. I can picture this so well sometimes I think I remember it, but I know that isn’t true. For most of my life I have always loved them, especially summer ones. We would spend weeks at our cottage like most middle class Ontarionians (if that’s a term) and a storm would inevitably come to break up a heat wave. This time my father and I would stand on the porch watching the sky change, the wind pick up and the rain roll across the lake. My brother would watch from inside and once it began to thunder my mother would beg us to come inside. Instead we’d sit in the screen in porch until the thunder left and it was just rain. On 20th birthday I was in Rome but in Toronto there was a massive storm. My mother thought they were going to die and that I would spend my life thinking about how my family died on my birthday while I was in Italy.

This morning I had a dream where my father and I were at our cottage but instead of it being surrounded by a forest it was rather a large barren tundra, a lot like a salt field. There was something about incest, but I've either forgotten or it was only alluded to. It changed into me having a sexual relationship with a much older man, and he bent me over the front of a car to fuck me from behind. He was wealthy and wanted to impress me. We were in the back seat of his limo and he instructed his driver to perform all these elaborate tasks so he would be away from the car and then he sealed everything up so we could have sex. A woman began berating him for sleeping with me, that I was too young and he was trying to impress me with his money. I ran away into a large clothing store as the woman followed me. The rich man and I were driving around an area of Toronto I always loved (sadly not a real one) and I noticed a bridge above the houses. As we drove past it I realized that a large set of stairs lead to two houses which were connected by the bridge. Later I sneaked away from the man to go to these houses. I walked up the large set of stairs to the two houses, one higher than the other and was chased by a crazy burly man with an axe as I ran in between the two houses. He chased me to a forested area where it was fall - the ground was covered by brown leaves and the trees were bare. It was very bright.

March
04 The Devil, Probably TH (Robert Bresson, 1977)
I thought this film was going to be about the apocalypse for some reason. I should probably look up what the films I'm about to watch are about. Anyways, Bresson is kind of astounding and I need to stop forgetting that.

06 Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh, 2011)
I liked this film a lot, but not for what it was but rather what I want it to be. I want it to be a feminist response to eurotrash so we have the story told from the anonymous female that is taken advantage by our cruel, wealthy male protagonists, except in this case they're all old so it ends up being a comment on masculinity. The protagonist is appropriately vapid and v pretty naked but this lacked the emotional resonance to be really poignant. Also I haven't seen The Bedroom.

09 Les Demoiselles de Rocherfort TH (Jacques Demy, 1967)
There are few things more joyful.

19 Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970)
Well made but dull. Good ending though.

24 Gothic (Ken Russell, 1986)
Eh. English major porn.

Crimes of Passion (Ken Russell, 1984)
This wasn't very good and made me really sad for Anthony Perkins. I'm so sad that he was typecast into playing psychos. That he wasn't able to be open about his homosexuality. That he died of AIDS. That he was beautiful and talented and was eaten alive by Hollywood. He was my first celebrity crush and I'm just so sad thing turned out the way they did for him.

The Key (Tinto Brass, 1983)
I'm fan of the novel and subject matter wise this is my jam, but this just fell flat.

The Howl (Tinto Brass, 1969)
I don't really like things that are related to May 68. Great aesthetically though.

25 The Saragossa Manuscript (Wojciech Has, 1965)
Over long, but I wasn't in the mood.

26 A Separation TH (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)
This and Take Shelter are my favourite from 2011. Absolutely perfect. A really striking discourse on the failures of the family law and the captial-L law both when they interact and when challenged. The fate was a little heavy handed but that's never bothered me before. Reminded me a lot of Hegel's writings on Antigone.
 
30 The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder, 1955)
Charmant.

31 Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011)
Vapid to the point where I've already forgotten it. It would have been more interesting if the Driver had more responsibility with the husband's death, that maybe he took longer than the five minutes given and the Driver abandoned him or something. Also halfway through my mother announced that she was going to the emergency room because she kept seeing flashing lights so I was somewhat distracted. My mother's fine, it ends up it was a migrane. There are only two other instances in my life where I can remember a family member doing to the emergency room. Actually three but the third happened when I was a month old so I remember the story instead.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (Göran Olsson, 2011)
Fantastic. Ran the risk of being a white perspective on a black discourse (the footage was from a Swedish news team) but with the commentary it managed to keep it a film about the Black Power movement that kept the appropriate voice.

Another Earth (Mike Cahill, 2011)
I was really taken by this when I first saw it, but a week later my opinion changed. The cinematography was awful (close ups as a means of indicating something important happening is just as bad as heavy handed film scores imo) and the script was too indulgent (the love story was very juvenile). I'm really interested in The Sound of My Voice though and Brit Marling is someone I will probably follow from now on.


In other news I'm 32% of the way through In Search of Lost Time.

I think I'll write up my film logs for April & March and then start using lj primarily as a way of documenting dreams and doing autoportraits.
So, apologies.

I'm boring
got a twitter https://twitter.com/#!/Fallbenning
who are you/who should I follow?
love
Madeleine

"let's eat pizza 3 times a day forever and hunt ghosts"

vs.

"hey lets meet up to talk about psychoanalysis sometime"