Shoot! The Piano Tuner?

When the phone rang 15 minutes ago, I picked it up expecting another telemarketer or friend who forgot her homework (or God forbid, a college). The first hesitate syllables of “Is Mr. [insert horribly mangled version of my dad's name] there?” seemed to confirm that it was indeed a telemarketer.

The next words to tumble out of the caller’s mouth were, “I’m the piano tuner.” With the word “piano,” I winced as my stomach rang with a pang of guilt. I, who have not touched a piano for well over a year, did not want to think about it.

My history with the piano was a long and tortured affair. And a love affair it was not. In the days when I played piano, practicing was something I did with rote procedure and utter reluctance. Let me get it clear that I was never a musical child; the little musical talent I possessed was forced into me as a tube is forced down a windpipe. Whenever I think of piano, I think of that inestimable expanse of time when I could have been doing something I liked, rather than something I had to do. I just never had the enthusiasm.

I think that my thorough aversion to piano—perhaps partly borne out of rebellion against my parents’ wishes—has unfortunately spilled into a general aversion toward music. I used to listen to classical tracks in a hopeless attempt to imitate. Consequently, I now hear music and am often reminded of that dissatisfaction with piano practice.

I am putting my feelings too strongly. My active dislike of the piano has generally mellowed out a passive indifference. Sometimes, I’m even compelled to dabble and finger out a tune or two. I, however, do not hope to ever achieve that virtuoso ability of being one with the music.

Inconvenience Store

After realizing that all the cards in my house were either splattered with girly flowers or wishing people "Merry Christmas," I hopped into the car to buy some Thank You notes for my English homework. My dear mum took me to CVS, where I spent 2 minutes picking out cards, and she spent 20 minutes looking for coupons.

My mom is notorious for being able to spend more than an hour at CVS. I can only marvel at this feat for I could never bring myself to stand this frankly boring store for more than a few minutes. This is a convenience store, no? It's supposed to be in 'n out, not browse 'n linger.

Anyways, my mom first spent her time picking out the exact brand and type of Aquafresh toothpaste that was on sale. The sheer number of different types of toothpaste is pretty mindboggling, as it managed to cover an entire aisle, but it did not warrant the time it took my mom to find her toothpaste. As my mom took her time, I turned to the other aisle and ruminated on whether to get more tampons, but seeing that none were on sale, decided otherwise.

The next item of purchase was some Dentyne gum. While I deplored her to think altruistically and save the world from my bad breath, my mom rummaged through her purse, saying, "I must have a coupon!" Finding a coupon becomes a rather Herculean task when it involves looking for a 2x3 in slip of paper in a very large 5-pocket bag. Following that Asian cliche, I cringed as my mom eagerly dug through her bag in the middle of the aisle, in full view of the entire store.

At last, it was time to check out. Our cashier was elderly and foreign, not a good combination when your customer is the exact same thing. So my mom argued loudly over a 99 cent coupon while I subtly edged away from her figure. Thank god I decided against the tampons.

The Hit List 5/29/30

Everyone has their prom pictures up. Squee! Everyone is so pretty. So I randomly clicked through facebook and looked at all the pretty pictures. Aww! It seems that everyone else is already excited for prom next year, but despite all the gauzy dresses and perfectly-permed hair, I'm still not that excited. Perhaps it's because of those things rather than in spite of them.

My mom bought a bag of ridiculously delicious dried mango from Costo yesterday. This bag, as of now, is already half empty. (Keep in mind its a Costo bag.) The dried mango is perfectly sweet and tangy and chewy and soft and mangoey. If only there weren't so many calories.

Last Friday, I got my Amazon shipment of Kingdom of Heaven: Director's Cut and Ane Brun's A Temporary Dive. Guess what's occupying my computer right now.

Last Friday, we also hung out around Alice's/my house. A complete list of activities: ate cheese fries, watched 20 min of Big Fish, ate pizza, made a fire, made s'mores, ate marshmallows, burned napkins, blasted the radio, danced pseuo-sluttily, annoyed the neighbors, burned old papers, played BS, watched the battle scenes in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, drank water, annoyed my family. A note of this FFVII thing, why are all the Japanese guys effeminate and lithe, while the American men are butch and muscled? The Japanese anime guys are so much hotter.

The Festival de Cannes wrapped up yesterday with the award ceremony. Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes the Barley surprisingly (or not, since this is Cannes) won the Palme d'Or. Comment? Got nothing. I did get a good chuckle when people compared its title to Ghost World's The Flower that Drank the Moon.

A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan, 1951)

Marlon Brando is sexy. He's sexy while strutting down the street in a grease-stained wifebeater. He's sexy in a suit. He's sexy in a sweat-soaked T-shirt. He's sexy in the silk pajamas. He's sexy. Period.

Lest you think I watched this movie to jerk off, A Streetcar Named Desire is actually a vital part of my history project. I would have certainly breezed right by its ratty DVD case in the library if it were not for this project. But to my great fortune, I picked up this film.

A Streetcar Named Desire is fraught with tension, explosion, and passion anchored by its magnetic performances. Understatement may be the newest vogue, but Streetcar rarely seems dated in its outbursts of raw, and honest, emotion.

I spent a paragraph drooling over Brando, but one should not forget that it is truly Vivien Leigh's film. As the disturbed and shunned Blanche Dubois, Leigh paints a portrait of a Southern belle vastly superior to any work she did in all 4 hours of Gone With the Wind. Although some may argue Blanche to be an intentionally outrageous character, I feel that she is very real indeed. Blanche's passive-aggressiveness and her eager facade gave me strong impressions of people I have met in real life.

I don't have much to say about Streetcar except that it is one of the few "classics" I do not feel disappointed in. On a slight tangent, it is interesting to return to A Streetcar Named Desire after watching Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother, which references the former film heavily.

Degrees of Separation

It's kind of sad that I am staying at home thinking about this instead of going to prom. But alas, I'd probably find this much more amusing anyways. So follow the below logic to see what I figured out today:

Wes Anderson directed The Royal Tenenbaums.
The Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack features singer-model Nico (who has a really cool man-voice).
Nico plays herself in La Dolce Vita.
La Dolce Vita is directed by Federico Fellini.
La Dolce Vita was shot at Cinecitta.
Cinecitta is Fellini's personal movie studio.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (an American movie) was the last film shot at Cincecitta.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is directed by Wes Anderson.

Isn't that a fascinating circle of esoteric connections? But wait, there's more!

In my last post about La Dolce Vita, I mentioned that my feelings toward the film exactly mirrored my feelings toward another film. And guess which one that would be? Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums! I disliked both films upon my initial viewing, but then grew to like them more with time. I also felt that they both had strong individual scenes but weaker overall structure. But wait, there's still more!

Well, I'm guessing here, but I'm most likely right. Wes Anderson, being the type of director he is, probably has countless references to Fellini in his own films.

Who knows? Perhaps I will one day grow to love and adore Fellini as I much as I do Anderson. But on a purely superficial scale, Anderson is much more handsome than Fellini will ever be (considering he's dead).

La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960)

La Dolce Vita is a film enshrined in the pantheon of the best of the best. Widely deemed Italian master Federico Fellini’s masterpiece, its influence on pop culture is found everywhere from People magazine to Lost in Translation. Oh how I hungered to finally see this film.

But in my humble opinion, La Dolce Vita did not turn out to be the full course Italian dinner I expected; it was more like a slice of Domino’s pizza—passable but hardly exciting.

Most likely, I have simply not understood the complexities of La Dolce Vita, and I do not feel like sitting through a 3 hour commentary at this moment. It is certainly a film I will have to revisit after watching Fellini’s earlier works.
La Dolce Vita’s structure is high episodic, and the film itself is nearly 3 hours long. To sum it up, the film is a series of episodes about journalist Marcello’s encounters with his jaded lover (Anouk Aimee), a ditzy American startlet (Anita Eckberg), his suicidal fiancée, his irresponsible father, various prostitutes, his inwardly troubled friend, his photographer colleagues, and his ridiculously rich friends. The disjointed structure is obviously intentional, but it seems to fracture the film into installments too sporadic to gel into one unified film. Even as I type this, I realize that the last scene with the café girl does pull together many thematic and narrative strands.

At its core, La Dolce Vita is a satire and condemnation of the moral debauchery of the upper class. Under a glamorous exterior, the rich are revealed as shallow, corrupted, ignorant, and immoral. This is no profound realization, but La Dolce Vita does provide an intriguing portrait of Via Valento’s glitterati. The problem is, as Marcello himself says of the rich, “You’re really not that interesting.” Marcello views the world of the rich as both a cynical outsider and an eager admirer, and as fascinating as the glitterati may seem, it isn’t long before their lives—and the film—become tedious.

La Dolce Vita is more coldly cynical and emotionally distraught than I had expected. This is not a point of criticism, but an observation on how the film is remembered as whole. I was always under the impression that it was a playful romp—in the vein of Moulin Rouge!—through the lives of the rich and famous.

The dark tone of La Dolce Vita does give it moments of cold, seductive beauty. The scene where Maddalena asks Marcello to marry her through a stone speaker while simultaneously making love to another man is one of the most fascinating sequences I have ever seen. The miscommunication evident throughout the film is most clearly represented in Maddalena’s disembodied voice floating down to Marcello sitting in an empty room. As Marcello replies that he loves her, Maddalena is passionately wrapped in the arms another man.

I don’t think that Fellini is remembered as a particularly political filmmaker, but he does throw in many jabs at the Catholic Church in La Dolce Vita. While I found the Madonna sequence intrusive (mainly because his deranged fiancée Emma spent so much time in it), the opening scene with “Jesus” flying through the sky is justly remembered as ingenious.

I guess my final opinion toward La Dolce Vita is one of indifference toward it as a whole, but awe at certain scenes in the movie. (I have yet to mention the famous dip in the fountain portrayed in the above picture). My feelings, however, seem to be tipping to a more favorable opinion the more I think about it. This last paragraph reminds me an awful lot about another review I wrote…

A Thing Called Privacy

As someone who prides herself on being reasonably informed and observant, I can't believe I missed it. In deciding whether or not to shut down/protect my xanga (yes, the one that I have neglected forever), I came across a frightening thing: footprints.

I have no idea why I didn't pick up on this earlier, but apparently my browsing activity in xanga is easily tracked through virtual "footprints." While looking through my log of the last few days, I was freaked and flattered by the fact that some anonymous user has read every entry and subscribed to my xanga.

It's an interesting double standard that I apply, as I myself am very intrigued in seeing who has read my xanga. Yet when the ball is in the other court, I don't want people knowing I have read theirs. Either way, I think that I have been permanently scared from ever posting on xanga again.

Rereading the scant few entries on my own xanga, I saw it as an interesting time capsule of my life about two years ago. It was a brisk and slightly amusing read, nothing more.

Xanga is one of those words that is memorable and has no appropriate synonyms. It sounds so awkward to use it that many times in a paragraph.

Recs and Other Dreck

A few days ago, during another useless English class, Anthony implored us to write in a journal everyday. I struggled to stifle a chuckle (and half a sneer) as Nina quite earnestly asked, "Does xanga count?" But following my esteemed pedagogue's advice, I am here writing--on a blog no less.

I also spent another hour aimlessly browsing the social network of various friends, acquaintances, and nonacquaintances. There is something simultaneously depressing and amusing when someone starts every xanga entry with a variation of "Wow, I haven't posted for a long time." Then why do you bother? I am wary of the measure of dishonesty that arises when a personal blog becomes just another mask we present to the world.

I also think I am an idiot for being so scared to ask for recommendations. Any steely resolve just melts into a puddle of goo when the minute comes to actually asking. Unless I want to feel like an idiot for the rest of my life, I will do it tomorrow. No more idiotic cowardice. Okay.

The Hit List 5/20/06

When I started this blog, I made a promise to myself to never let my posts to degenerate into schizophrenic lists of random miscellania. But alas, I realized it was a futile limitation as there are so many debatedly trivial details in my life that deserve a mention but not 500 words of mention. The Hit List is my flighty recap of (brilliant) highlights and (sultry) lowlights of my life.

As Levine's Spectrum article so cheesily but accurately reminded me, high school is about hanging out with your friends. And what better place to hang out with your friends than at Spectrum layout? So layout was amazingly fun and even more amazingly, it was efficient. During certain times at layout, the estrogen level spiked and the (very small) male population became visibly annoyed, but what do we care? SPECTRUM RULES!

After layout, we got some food at Sorrento's--an impossibly good and impossibly greasy chicken fajita--and crashed Maya's place for our second weekly Friday Night Dinner. Gossip was spewed and dirt was dished as the DVD player refused to work for us despite incessant bribing. It ended up more like a therapy session than a dinner, but I guess that's...therapeutic? Still way better than sitting at home with homework.

There is nothing more annoying than being forced to watch a hated commercial over and over again. This usually happens when I try to watch a some sports and end up seeing Maria Sharapova relentlessly mugging the screen with her Canon camera in a short pink skirt. My usually active annoyance toward ads makes it all the more remarkable that I have watched Wes Anderson's AmEx Commercial at least 20 times in the last 3 weeks. The ad is rife with insider jokes and references to Truffaut's Day for Night (I won't pretend I picked up any of that until somewhere around the 10th time), and Wes Anderson is utterably..um adorable? Anderson's signature is all over the ad--and not just because his real signature appears at the end. The blogsphere, being hip, has drooled all over Anderson's commercial, but anyone unfamiliar with his style will merely be perplexed for 2 minutes. Perhaps that is the charm of Wes Anderson.

Speaking of Anderson, his The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou writing buddy Noah Baumbach is pretty cool too. Kicking and Screaming is coming out on Criterion and I'm tracking down a copy of The Squid and the Whale. Anderson and Baumbach would make a nice intellectual threesome, no?

Who says downloading illegal software of seedy websites is bad? That's how I discovered DVD Shrink--the fast and easy way to rip DVDs. Of course, being an utterly moral person, I do not plan to use this powerful resource for anything other than my own personal amusement. The first thing I ripped was Band of Outsider's jazzy opening sequence. See? No commercial motive at all.

Band of Outsiders (Godard, 1964)

I feel utterly deficient in attempting to write anything on Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders. The best I can do is put down some of my immediate, disjointed thoughts and disregard the “scholarly discussion” that a film with such a lofty reputation often inspires.

The only other reference point I have toward Godard is Breathless, a somewhat adequate comparison as both are spoofs of B-movies and the crime caper genre. Godard once famously decreed, “ All you need to make a movie is a gun and a girl,” and both films are pay heed to that declaration.

If Breathless and Band of Outsiders are cut of similar cloths, Band is a more expertly and elegantly crafted film. While Breathless was Godard’s first film, shot on a shoestring budget and with the no-name actors, Band is sleek and crisp, the work of an experienced director. It has fewer of those distractingly hectic jump cuts—I’m aware that statement may amount to blasphemy, but it’s an honest opinion—and a much better story.

Band is less ephemeral, but Godard keeps his signature sense of improvisation, of freshness stemming from the off-the-cuff quality of his dialogue. Our trio of thieves is a hapless gang, neither they or the audience is fully aware of what should be happening as they stumble through the film. Godard’s capriciousness is a proverbial breath of fresh air; the spontaneity with which the trio decides to run through the Louvre in record time is inspiring as a portrait of youth and whim. (Oh god, I really do sound like a pedantic 40-year-old critic here.)

Band of Outsiders has been described as Godard’s most accessible film, maybe because it has been paid tribute to by none other than American Cinematic God Quentin Tarantino himself. (Yes, that was tongue in cheek there.) Bandeis perhaps most accessible because it functions as the ultimate tugger of heartstringers—a love story.

Godard presents a very hackneyed story—guy likes girl who likes other guy—amidst another very hackneyed story—the planning of a robbery. It works because his three lead actors find a perfect balance among each other. I must admit, however, that I never cared much for Arthur (Claude Brasseur), who always struck me as a scoundrel. Sami Frey’s dark brooding Franz seemed a much better fit with the awkward, naïve Odile. I mentioned before being captivated by Anna Karina even before ever watching her in a film, and she does not fail me here either. Odile is not the most romantic girl (despite what the narration may say), nor is she the most beautiful, nor is she even witty or intelligent. Yet Karina manages to captivate on screen because Odile is Odile and Karina is Karina.

The Hit List 5/8/06

I don't know how it happened, but somewhere down the road I turned into a long, rambling writer. Where I once found it hard to embellish my sentences, literary rosettes and florid references have blossomed. This is a very bad thing. Only skilled writers can keep these embellishments from becoming gaudy jewels pinned on tweed. Take that how ever you will.

But more to the point, this post is just some random stuff I want to put down, and have decided to throw together:

Allow me to indulge in a witticism that probably isn't that witty and probably is unconsciously "internalized" or stolen from someone else: APs are like running a marathon through the crevices of your brain for 3 hours. I have 2 more marathons left.

Think of a waifish, Scandanavian, woman-child songstress. Got Björk? No, I'm not here to talk about Björk whom I've sincerely tried to like and could not. With less grunge and more elegance, Ane Brun has managed to linger in my mind like no other music since Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. The fluid piano tracks fuse with a twang of guitar to create a melancholy and languidness that simply drifts on...

I've read 10 pages of Everything is Illuminated and have absolutely fallen in love with Jonathan Safran Foer's prose. Actually, to give credit where it's due, I should say I have fallen in love with Alexander Petrov's "sublimely butchered English."

Yesterday night, I also found a new limerant object in Anna Karina. Those kohl-lined eyes, the patrician cheekbones, the straight black bob that Uma Thurman paid homage to in Pulp Fiction convey a beguiling and striking persona. Her collaborations with Godard are jumping to the top of my Netflix queue (if I ever get it of course).

My brother seems to really like jelly beans for some reason. Despite being repulsed by jelly beans since eating a boogie-flavored Harry Potter one, I decided to steal one from my brother. I picked a pure, clean white one--how gross can it be, I thought? White just means marshmallow or vanilla right? As it turns out, "very" and "no" are the respective answers. The flavor was so foul that the best I can surmise is a pina colada gone horribly wrong. I promptly spit it out.

Surfin' Acton USA

I was randomly clicking through the blogs of everyone in Acton, Massachusetts (dismally few, but more than one would expect). It's kind of funny that the list was littered with half-dead blogs dutifully updated for a week, then gradually less and less until they withered away. Actually, I'm not sure that's funny because I'm talking about death--in an electronic, metaphorical way--but still talking death.

Anyways, I encountered a blog by a fellow female teenage Actonian, who said this:

So, recently my LJ and Xanga have been
populated by people who I don't neccisarily want to be visiting them. Because of
this, I decided I needed to create a private blog- a small one, a discreet one,
with no memories or attachments to other things. No school, no camp, no silly
feuds or desperate attempts to make myself seem credible. No vain, emotionless
ramblings about the series of my day-to-day events, no silly polls. Just me.
Pure, white, clean, and effortless me. Every single note I sing or think or
scream will be for you to decipher. Be my friends, be my confidantes, be silent
if you wish. But please just try and understand these nonsensical mumblings that
tumble from these lips. I have the worst intentions and the best of ideas. Love
me.

That pretty much sums up why I am here too--more elegantly than I could. I think that afterwards she rambled on about drugs and shit in school, which is so far removed from my end of the scholastic spectrum. Alas, my safe, boring sheltered world, where my biggest worry is a grade on a exam. AP Mic and Mac in two days. Boy am I not excited.

[Explicative Deleted]

With my naiveté, I was shocked by the proliferation of profanity among my classmates when I first entered high school. I was similarly surprised by the liberal application of "fucking" to describe just about any noun, verb, and adjective.

So I was a sheltered child, who believed that swears were only used by big, bad, ugly men. However, within these few years, "fuck" was evolved into a valuable part of my vocabulary along with many slightly milder swears. I use these words with discretion, of course, never shouting it down the halls or using it in front of my parents. In the vocabulary of my mind, on the other hand, uncensored by the politeness of society, "fuck" takes a much for dominant position.

On the bus back to school from the US history AP, a fellow student described his reaction to the essays with a string of loudly enunciated "fucks," complete with hand gestures reminiscent of a strangling. This utter lack of discretion for profanity led me to think about the profusion of foul language that has sprung up in writing.

As with anything in this Internet age, the influence of the internet is undeniable. It has provided a forum for debate with no codified rules or threshold of intelligence. As a result, profanity is often substituted for the ability to fully articulate, or even form, an argument. I don't mean to broadly generalize every corner of the Internet, as there are many pockets of intelligent discussion folded in the general mess, but the vast majority of so-called debate is nothing more than a few rounds of name-calling.

I'm not saying that people on the Internet are stupid; it's merely that the anonymity of the Internet shields us from shame should we say something that truly is stupid. It often takes less than 10 posts in a forum before the debate has degenerated into something like, "It's so fucking stupid." While I'm certain that "stupid" is not engaging in sexual intercourse with anyone or any word for that matter, profanity only distracts from the actual argument, provided there is one.

I am always irked when "fucking" is used to describe a word when another adjective would be a much better substitute. There's no the denying the crude power of such a explicit word, though that power has been declining with its increasingly frequent usage. In any event, using "fucking" to describe a word is like using a grenade to assassinate a president when a sniper could do the job much more cleanly and neatly. There's a reason it's called the F-bomb.

TtDBID # 1: Go to Cannes

Today, I'm starting a new series of Things to Do Before I Die. As for my personal view of death, I have never seen it as morbid, partly because I have easily accepted death as the natural end. But at the age of 16, I probably still have most of my life laying before me and I have no idea what to do with the rest of it. This is to point myself in a direction--any direction, right or wrong--for those years down the road. There is no order to this list other than the order they come into my head. Without further ado:

1. Cannes Countdown: 10 days! Le festival de Cannes 2006 commence le mai 17 et je peux pas attendre. The pathetic thing is that I will probably not be seeing any of the films screening at Cannes until this time next year, when they are released on DVD.

Given that statement, it's obvious that I am not going to Cannes this year, or any time soon. But my goal is to go at least once in my life. Experience that glamour, that glitz, that dizziness at least once. For serious cinephiles (I am still far from being one), going to Cannes is their holy pilgrimage. It's a Mecca for Mastroianni fans, a Jerusalem for Jarmush devotees. Oh Muse! Ground me before I get carried away with these silly spiritual metaphors.

Cannes treads the fine line between the crassness of commercialism and the pretentions of high art. Even as Paris Hilton prances her way down the French Rivera, the Croissant is (mostly) dominated by films that will never see the dark of a theater in the US. Cannes represents a precious opportunity to watch these films surrounded by the energy and enthusiasm of fellow film-lovers. What better bonding experience than sitting for 3 hours in a darkened theater watching a tedious diatribe on the evils of modern humans who lounge around doing nothing, have sex out of boredom, and then kill each other out of boredom? Enjoy the collective bonding that ensues as we all express our wishes to kill the director out of boredom.

That was I little tongue in cheek there, but I am seriously psyched for Cannes. There are so many films I cannot wait to watch (ie obsessively find reviews of) starting May 17. And no more APs to ruin my day either!

Love It or Hate It, It Ain't Going Away

Like any average American, I have a unhealthy obsession with celebrity. Gawker, Defamer, Fametracker, Snarkfest, and Crown Princess Marie Chantal are my regular Internet haunts for the latest drippingly juicy bit of celeb gossip. The people who run or post on these sites are on the snarky side, but rarely venemously hateful.

In a world where celeb-bashing is a national sport second to only celeb-worshipping, I must confess that I have another unhealthy obsession in my irrational dislike of Natalie Portman. By all accounts, Portman seems like a nice enough girl, has a Harvard education, is praised to hell and highwater for her looks, and is a good actress. And I dislike her intensely. Of course, this isn't something I lose sleep over (having to even make that statement perhaps reveals the depth of my obsession), and I am consciously aware that my dislike for her stems from plain ol' jealously.

I like to believe that the majority of the American population is as rational as me. I don't mean to sound self-righteous, but I have recently realized that small minorities of the population are just stupid. While browsing a forum about Natalie Portman (I know, shut up), there was one poster who went to great lengths to express his adamant, vitriolic hatred for Gael Garcia Bernal. The poster ranted on and on in multiple 500+ word posters about the supposed hypocrisy, shallowness, and homosexuality that is Bernal.

Okay, so Bernal was my first real celebrity crush, and I have a special obligation to defend him against such nonsense. This is not that hard of a task as he is an almost universally beloved actor by those who know him and there are legions of critics and fans alike to aid my cause.

I was however, struck by the absolute abandon with which the poster attacked Bernal, someone he knew only as the supposed boyfriend of Portman. Never had I seen such bitterness and animosity leap from the screen as the sharpened daggers of his words cut across cyberspace. He attacked Bernal for his choice of socially-conscious and sexually-explicit roles in Y tu mama tambien, Bad Education, The Motorcycle Diaries, and Amores Perros. Anyone who follows art-house films will immediately recognize those titles as some of the most claimed foreign language films of the last few years, yet the poster derided them as pandering to a liberally-biased critical establishment.

The issue here is not whether the poster's argument held any water, but the shocking acrimony with which he delivered it. Despite my patent dislike for Portman, I have never crossed, or even gone anywhere close to this line of total hatred. I cannot even bring myself to say I hate Portman because I do not know her personally in any way, shape or form. In fact, I cannot say I hate anyone even in real life or at least I have not sustained hatred toward anyone for longer than 24 hours. I want to say something witty about hate here, but I cannot, because I have not truly experienced it in my life. I am at once intrigued and alarmed with the poster's utter hatred of someone so far removed from his real life.

Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control

While surfing the 'net with the hated AOL explorer today, I discovered yet another reason to detest AOL: AIM Fight.

AOL is the company that brought the Internet, along with all its good and evils, into the mainstream with its irritatingly effervescent quips of "You've got mail" and "Hello [insert mangled pronunciation of Asian name]." It also popularized the now preferred mode of communication among teens: instant messaging. With its promise of "instant" gratification and a short hip abbreviation (IM, as in "I am cool because I IM"), IM quickly caught on with the technologically-inclined generation of youngsters.

Bear with me here as I sound like a sociology textbook, but I am trying to understand the mass appeal of IM. As someone who has stubbornly labeled herself as uncool, I have long resisted the lures of instant messaging. Alas, even I fell prey to its benefits as I strove to maintain contact with my friends from summer camp.

IM is fast, cheap and easy. Fast as it's instant, cheap as it's free, and easy as it doesn't ask anything of you. Conversations on IM demand no commitment from you more than a few typo-riddled phrases littered with "lol" and "lmao." In fact, how can it? These few words in their uniform font look the same on the screen no matter what you actually mean or intend; no wonder IM communication is just as often miscommunication. Take a word like "so," which can be sarcastic, complimentary, angry, humorous, confused, questioning, manipulative, amused, or tired all depending on how you say it. Intonation, facial expressions, volume, hand gestures; these communication cues are totally lost when transcribed through the keyboard.

What I'm trying to get at here is that IM has created vast but impersonal social networks. Of course, IM is not the only factor, xanga, myspace, livejournal, facebook and other such websites have all contributed to better connected, but oddly enough, worse tied webs of contact.

It would have pleased the Social Darwinists that our culture has managed to marry the principles of competition with the Internet and its social networks as well. As oversensitive teenagers would have it, it is no longer about not who you know, but how many you know. This new round of competition is all about how many people you are friends with, and thus your perceived popularity.

What drew my indignation toward AIM Fight is how easy it makes comparing people's "popularity." By facilitating such comparisons and calling them "fights" with all due fanfare, AOL has only exacerbated the competitive woes of our culture. The program allows you to compare your "popularity" (its exact word) with others through the number of active buddies to the third degree. You are now only a click of the mouse away from self-gratification or a steep drop in self-esteem.

While I have often simultaneously chided and praised the anonymity of the internet, I find this is be a disgusting violation of privacy. It is too intimate just as it is discreet and uncontrollable. Equally disgustingly, I found myself fascinated with this program and proceeded to "fight" with a number of buddies.

One feature of AOL mail that has always caused me to fear using it is how it alerts you when a recipient has read your email. As with AIM Fight, I have realized that willful ignorance is perhaps the key. While this may run countercurrent to my nature, sometimes it is simply better not to know.