Lackadaisacalllismenicious

My schedule got all fucked up these last couple days and as a result my head is all displaced and be-googled. Joan canceled my Wednesday afternoon course and rescheduled it for Thursday afternoon evening, ie: 3:30. I mean, this isn't horrible or anything, but it means that I have literally jack, entirely fucking jack to do on Wednesday. I mean, I read some shitty that I need to read and stuff but I didn't get out of my pyjamas from Tuesday at about 6:30 until this morning when I jumped in the shower. Today, when I usually just teach, then coast through my pointless office hours (since I think I have had 10 total students drop by my office hours over the past two years) I instead had to wait at school for an extra hour after that before going to a seminar. I can handle that type of a schedule, my Tuesdays are worse than that, but twice a week it is straining. Yes, I am a complete and total wuss. I understand that. I am spoiled by this Buffalo schedule, my comfy couch, DVR, coming home to a damn fine quiche today, made by the lovely Ms. Kauf. Nonetheless, I feel like its Tuesday now and its messed up.

I don't want to just provide reports of interesting things that I experience, but I will briefly comment on two growing trends that have captured my interests. The first one is the general philosophy of time, one of the areas I was considering doing one of my orals lists on. Time has been fertile material for literature and "experimental" arts for quite a while, but most notably so since Einstein and the possibilities of time travel. Obviously then there are alot of films that deal with the concept, in more or less philosophical terms, since the medium is born about the same time as the idea. You've got a couple films that play around with in different ways a couple times a year. Right now there is the number one movie in America, for instance: Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart's "The Butterfly Effect." I haven't seen it yet so I would feel a little bad completely trashing this potential piece of atrocious-ass-shit but from what I have heard its pretty much just a bad film version of the Simpson's Halloween special where Homer turns the toaster into a time machine and goes back to fuck with the whole donuts thing. Then when he comes back it rains donuts and they don't know what they are or there are dinosaurs instead of people or whatever. You should know which one I am talking about, he crushes a buttefly in the past and it fucks el futuro. Maybe it is actually a reference to or based off that Simpson's episode, in which case it would be less fuckydickshit, but I sort of doubt it. Then again, I just made that butterfly connection right now so you never know. Why the fuck else would time travel be the "butterfly" effect. Whatev. I will come back to this film later, but back to time travel.

I finally watched Donnie Darko the whole way through, and while I was ashamed to have not seen it up until now I really fucking dug it. It starts out a little freaky, but its well done, as odd as the info description may be (something like "A troubled boy is saved from certain death by a 6 foot tall bunny rabbit") by the end it bears no relation to the horror stuff that appears early on. If you havent seen it (see it, definately, categorically, you should see it, I haven't really emphasized that it is quite well done) I don't want to spoil too much, but I would imagine you will figure out that this is involved in the whole story. You've got a bunch of Hollywood films that are similar, 12 Monkeys comes to mind, and some others like Memento which don't deal specifically with time travel but definately fuck around with time in similar ways. Anyway, the long and the short of it was that I think I need to write a paper about contemporary cinematic depictions of time travel.

I realize now that this whole entry is especially dorky because both the trendy things that I am discussing are being considered as areas (or related to areas) that I intend to write on. Tbe second is a class of literature I am not yet quite sure how to clarify. I thought it might have something to do with violence or violence and the imagination, but I am no longer sure that is the case. I know it has something to do with anti-capitalism, but its more specific than that. Bret Easton Ellis, the author of American Psycho and Glamorama, and Chuck Paliunuk, author of Fight Club, are the primary founders of this group though in some ways I find the same in a book I recently read by Kathy Acker. I am also reading Pahlaniuk's newest book, Diary, and for some reason, even though it is missing most of the thematic characteristics in Fight Club, AmPsych, Glamorama, etc. I can't help but keep it in that group. Those things may show up because there are a number of elements to this novel that aren't exactly brand spanking new. I mean, no one says "I am jack's..." in diary, but if you can't pick up its replacement in the first 10 pages you aren't reading closely enough. I have a suspicion, at exactly page 100 in the book, that it may eventually tie both of these themes together but I will wait and see.

The final thing which I hadn't thought to mention until I got into the whole Butterfly discussion, but the past two days have allowed me to see two different clips of "The Butterfly Effect" on the Ellen show featuring either Amy Smart (yesterday) or Ashton Kutcher (today) and the clips were uniformly awful, I mean terrible fucking acting. In all actuality it is probably about exactly what you would expect from Kelso's groundbreaking work as a time-traveling vigilante but still. On the bright side I have seen both of these brief exerpts on Ellen, which is definitively the second best talk show I have ever seen on television and give some time could receive some favorable comparisons to Conan. I mean, at no point during Ellen's show have I ever issued the groundshaking laughter that overtook me the first time I saw Triumph or the Masturbating Bear, but its routinely enjoyable. The woman is quite funny and people love her. I totally understand it largely because of her incredible redemption in my eyes from the night we saw the Disney Triple feature, led off by Finding Nemo. Regardless, Ellen's obsession with the Butterfly Effect really does have to end, and luckily it will, because coming soon, not next week but soon, very very soon, Britney Spears is on Ellen's show. It is going to be swe-eet. I would imagine that the episode of Sex and the City that Britney was going to make before it came to such an abrupt halt (as you could learn from watching the Crossroads DVD extras, Britney and Kim Catrall became pretty close while shooting the brief scenes that Kim appeared in as Britney's biological mother, they were going to switch off but there was no chance to do it) would have been cooler. But this will be a hella stunt.

Alright, thats all. I am going to end the run of bad Thursday television by actually paying attention to The Apprentice and then watching Without a Trace, since while it looks awful it is getting mad critical props.

Peace,

MB-K