You Can't Always Get etc etc.

Mick Jagger was so right. Registering for class for next quarter is annoying the shit out of everyone I know here. This school is suffering big time: less $ = less classes being offered + more students being accepted = sucks for everyone. Oh the many pains of a public university. But this is the class that's annoying me MOST:

Harrius Potter.

I'm so tempted to just enroll in it and fake my prerequisite one year of Latin knowledge. Are they seriously going to find 20 kids in this school who read Latin AND can fit that class into their schedule?? I don't think so.

Lazy Sunday (Gosling gosling gosling gosling)*

So of all the notable deaths that occurred over the past week, I'm saddest about Sally Menke (Quentin Tarantino's faithful editor), who died from heatwave-related causes in LA (fucking heatwave). I guess it's both gratifying and tragic to think that she died after making their best work, Basterds. Stop while you're ahead, right?



(I am still obsessed with La Laurent.)

In other movie related news, I've just been assigned the distribution companies I'll be working with** over this school year - Overture, the Weinstein Company, Magnolia Pictures and Th!nkFilm. When I first read that list yesterday (sitting by a tide pool with sand up my ass at Laguna Beach) I wasn't sure what to think but now that I've come home and educated myself a little on imdb I'm pretty satisfied. I guess perhaps my film director considered our personalities and tastes when she was assigning us the studios, because she gave me all these interesting independents that are right up my alley (albeit, uh, generally plagued with ongoing financial tribulations). I mean Blue fuckin' Valentine...! I will do anything to book that movie for us. Anything. I will crawl through mud and guts and blood.

*Too retarded to put on our page, but I can link
**Hah."Working with." That sounds so much better than it is but I don't know how else to say it.

Wednesday Website Write-Up: Old Hollywood

Good news everyone – yours truly has found herself gainful employment. Non-paying employment... but gainful all the same, you money-grubbing bastard. I have been hired by the Films Staff of the Campus Events Commission! It’s the organization on campus that puts up all the free preview movies and concerts and other cool events that I’ve been attending this whole year. I applied on a whim, had a pathetically bad interview ("I – uh – am very – uh – a very responsible – uh – person –") and was subsequently shocked to actually get the job, since hundreds of kids try to get into CEC every year. Bit of an ego-boost, that. They must have liked the “Lost”-themed haiku I wrote on my application (one lesson I’ve learned in life: writing a haiku will get you almost anywhere). Something I’m super excited about is that each person on the staff gets assigned to one or two studios a year, and from that studio's annual crop of releases gets to choose which movies they want to screen at UCLA and then negotiate with the studio people to let us have them... Did you hear that? Choose! I get to choose which films this school sees, bitches. That's power right there.

I’m glad I'm doing this. Makes me feel somewhat satisfied that I’m not the most useless person in the world and that the past 9 months haven’t been a complete waste of my freshman year at college - you know, typical end-of-year doubts. I don't usually get the cool job, probably because deep down I never feel like I really deserve it; but somehow I've stumbled my way into this and I'm excited.



Anyway, yes, this has all been a very long intro to this week's lovely lovely website, which is movie-related! Yay! Old Hollywood. I only discovered this blog fairly recently but it's just shot up my list of endlessly fascinating, beautiful, makes-the-internet-world-a-better-place blogs. Every time I click on it I feel like I've entered an excellently-curated museum - slightly chilly, elegant, tastefully dim, chock full of forgotten gems from the last hundred or so years of our collective movie culture. For someone like me, eager but intimidated by the vastness of classic movie history, it's a helpful way to find a place to begin; each post is an obsession waiting to happen. I mean just look at the pictures I've collected. (Still from Repulsion, Grace Kelly, still from Bonnie and Clyde, Sophia Loren in Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow, stills from Night of the Hunter - oh the macabre gorgeousness, Bogie and Bacall with soldiers.) If you're unfamiliar with any of these things you're probably already dying to know more.













And then there's all the great quotes, and songs, and interviews (my current favorite is this brilliantly candid Sean Connery interview which reveals so much about the man)... Old Hollywood is a real treasure trove. You'll thank me for this one. I know I would.

Oh Geez.

There was a UCLA student comedy improv show tonight in my dorm hall, and guess which of these random famous people was part of it, singing songs about tits? (Hint: my first reaction was, "Oh my god, it's really him?" and my second was, "Too bad I hate him!")



Wahaha! You'll never guess! And I promise never to post any more pictures of those three from here on out.
The comedy group was really quite good too. The Wait List - apparently they've shown a film at the Sundance Film Festival and been featured in Nylon and stuff. The show was basically Whose Line is it Anyway... with random, slightly unfunny interjections from the said celebrity. Kind of like Whose Line! They also showed some short films - these are the ones I like best, especially Slumdog Milli. Argh, I wish I was witty enough to be in a comedy troupe. I can't even come up with a good pun for my Shakespeare essay title.

Opinions, Please

Quick question: Should I double major in World Arts and Culture? It looks pretty damn cool, no? Kind of like anthropology... but without the science-yness of it (I'm imagining. Correct me if I'm wrong) and more artsy-crafts-yness.
I have a friend, Skye, who's a WAC major and she's always talking about how fun it is. Sounds like its just one big department of happiness and liberation and love. Her professors are always hugging her. She's taking a class with one of the preeminent voodoo experts in the world. Do you know, it's actually spelled vodou? Here's the list of classes available - obviously I won't be doing the Dance specialization though.
I'm already majoring in English and minoring in Italian and Film, so doing this too might be a bit of a strain on my unit maximum... but it seems to combine a lot of things, creative things, that I've been missing in my other subjects. A little bit of everything - theater, art, film, everything. I've been feeling somewhat dissatisfied with English right now, anyway - I love English, I love reading and analyzing and writing essays, really I do. But sometimes it feels a little too stultified even for me; a little stuffy, not real-world enough, and I'm not 100% sure if I'm really getting enough out of it.
The idea of WAC scares me some, but it'd really expand my horizons, to use cliche-speak. Skye's final assignment is to build a vodou sculpture out of wire hangers. I'm jealous.

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

So guess what, I went to a concert tonight! A proper concert (take that, Muse/YeahYeahYeahs/Cat Power/OK Go/Paolo Nutini-concert goers... OK, goddamn, that list just depressed me all over again). It was on campus (in "historic Royce Hall", as I always hear tour guides saying) and it was free for students, and all the tickets were gone in a flash so we thought we'd get in through the stand-by line, as the website suggested. We showed up and blithely inquired as to the location of said stand-by line, only to be told flat-out by a snotty ticket-man that "The site lied. There's no stand-by line." Bummed, we sat on the steps in front of Royce, glaring at the throngs of excited hipsters pouring into the concert hall... until this wonderful angel of a girl with extra tickets appeared in front of us like a knight in shining armour, and gave them to us, like manna in the path of starving men.

Actually I'd never heard of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros before this gig. Apparently they're quite popular now (she says, in a doddery old voice like somebody's grandmother). Then again I've been incredibly useless where new music is concerned for some time now. There's 10 people in the band and they're indie-folk-ish and they were supposedly one of the best acts at this year's Coachella. Having 10 people in your band makes everything a kind of exciting adventurous party, I imagine. Some people seemed kind of redundant, like the guy who stood around onstage clapping his hands and hugging the other members, but I guess they probably figured - if he wants to be in the band, why not?



They were really good, too. You guys would've enjoyed them. These were my 2 favourite songs.



You know, as stoked as I am to go to England and back home, I kind of am dreading the end of this school year. Just 3 more to go! One step closer to real responsibility and real life. 'Twas good to play the fresh-faced innocent ingenue in class with all the upper-classmen, too - everything I said sounded more impressive because I'm the baby of the group.
(Speaking of classes, I realise I haven't mentioned my wonderful amazing incredible Shakespeare TA this quarter yet. He's just the nicest, sweetest, smartest, funniest, loveliest person and I'm totally in love with him... I just wish he wasn't gay. I always fall for the gay ones. I was pretty surprised when he said it, too; I hate to stereotype but he's the least gay gay I've ever seen. My gaydar picks up nothing. But then anyway you figure if he wasn't gay, he wouldn't be half as awesome. Oh well, whatever, never mind. I just want to be his friend, really.)

Aiutatemi

(Erika Somogyi)

That's Italian for Help Me. If - hypothetically, mind you - one was going to start an Art Club in one's college, what would one name it?

We have some ideas so you can pick your favourite, but if you have any of your own... be my guest.

• Art-Shaped Box
• Eat Your Art Out
• The Definite Article
• Open Art Surgery
• Art Murmur
• Til Death Do Us Art
• Total Eclipse of the Art
• Bloc Arty
• Arty McFly

Aiutate!

the lady in red

Today was a very very very embarrassing day. As you guys know Thursday is my hell day - back to back classes from noon till eight thirty in the morning. The first class of the day is this (stupid) uni core course called Leadership and Team Building, which is pretty much like a more antagonising form of PW. Anyway, we had a presentation last week where we did a skit, and my group bough a bottle of fruity sparkly champagne (it wasn't even real champagne, just those cheap party drinks) from Cold Storage cos we needed it as a prop. Today after class we decided to pop it and share. They gave me a cup and I loved it, cos it was really really fruity and yummy and tasted like fizzy apple juice. So, without thinking about how I

a. had classes later;

b. was wearing a BRIGHT RED LONG SLEEVED DRESS

c. get SUPER RED immediately after drinking alcohol;

I took another cup, another full cup.

Needless to say it kicked in almost immediately, and the next thing I knew my face and neck and EARSSS were as red as my dress, and I wouldn't stop giggling and everything just felt so HOT. People stared at this girl wearing a red dress with a red face and a red laptop and who was grinning from ear to ear. I had to go everywhere with my friends because when I tried to go up to the next class myself I found it really hard to stop giggling. In the next class I stupidly raised my hands to comment on the discussion topic (pity I was stoned for this week, the topic was the legal education in Singapore and the fundamental ethics a lawyer needs to survive in practice, the most interesting so far), and I mashed up all my words and actually said out loud something like "Brr! I think I don't know what I'm saying" when I actually had a very good point to make ):

And after the alcohol induced mess died down I started sneezing non-stop (still am now) and you know how badly I blow my nose.

Embarrassing, embarrassing day.