ANGEL, ANGEL, DOWN WE GO TOGETHER

I turned all four of my calendars. I like calendars, and I like turning them. The Audrey Hepburn one has a rather sombre, autumnal photo for June. Audrey with her hair down, in a forest, in a white shirt and black sweater. Kylie probably wins for best of the month, though, for a cut-up collage that actually resembles Faye Wong's To Love album cover.

This also means new picks for the video store. This month, I started with a desire to do Breakfast At Tiffany's and Party Girl, and used that as a theme to pick movies with central female characters that somehow go against the norm or buck convention. Here are my five:

Bay of Angels starring Jeanne Moreau, directed by Jacques Demy

Breakfast At Tiffany's starring Audrey Hepburn, directed by Blake Edwards

Contempt starring Brigitte Bardot, directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Gilda starring Rita Hayworth, directed by Charles Vidor

Party Girl starring Parker Posey, directed by Daisy Von Scherler Mayer

Lessons Learned Working In A Video Store: Pearls of wisdom gleamed from fellow employees--namely, male video store workers with big opinions on movies, and my reactions against said opinions.
(1) They think "sentimental" is a bad word, but I call this bad semantics. All films should be sentimental, as they should express some kind of sentiment. It's schmaltz that is the problem, overdoing it or expressing false sentiment.
(2) Films are manipulative by nature, so once again, branding them "manipulative" as a way to say they are not good is another failure of semantics. What they may be reacting to is when the cracks show, but all films must be edited in order to manipulate, in order to inspire the correct sentiment (see (1) above). This applies to all art; similar points are to be made for the term "self-indulgent."

Jeanne Moreau can manipulate my self-indulgence any day.

Still feeling my way through the new schedule. Did some writing in the wee hours last night, got up around 8 a.m., hit the gym first thing. Not sure if that's the best plan, as it's taking me a bit to get going after that. Maybe a late afternoon gym visit, just before the video store, would be better. I don't know yet.

My favorite bit from the 1:00 am session: "There was something to her smile when she said it, something different when there weren’t skyscrapers in the background behind her, when the air smelled like strange meat and pungent mustard. Lance liked seeing Ashley this way. He liked her free of her responsibilities, the stress that dragged her face down. He often rubbed her shoulders and he could feel it back there, between her shoulder blades, and it would crunch like flakes of cereal underneath his fingers."

Current Soundtrack: Pet Shop Boys, "Flamboyant" mixes; The Pretty Things, SF Sorrow

golightly@confessions123.com * The Website