Thing of the Week: Vera Chytilova's Daisies & A Whole Bunch of Other Little Things

JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: Daisies

Daisies is one of the best movies of all time. It played at BAM this week so I went to see it on the big screen in all its glory. Is there a movie more beautiful than Daisies? No. If you care about images and women and food and causing trouble and existing AT ALL you should really see it. Vera Chytilova is a genius. The film follows two girls named Marie, who wear perfect matching shift dresses in perfect colors with a ton of eyeliner as they hang out and commit wonderfully weird acts of rebellion and pranks against the world. It's a giant "fuck you" to all patriarchal structures.
        I wore a dress with daisies on it to the movie. There was a woman in the row in front of me who was continually shocked and gasping the entire time. I found that really weird but also really cool. 
        There is a lot of really aggressive food-eating in Daisies. The first time I saw it I was deep in the middle of a truly awful roommate situation. Really bad. Joan, my other roommate/commonlaw wife at the time & I were stress-eating in the most major way. There was food everywhere. I think we already ate dinner and then we pulled out leftovers and snacks. Anyway, I don't want to spoil this perfect scene but there is a really fabulous feast sequence that was totally mirroring our lives. It was beautiful. I love Daisies. 


LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: It's A Tie

-Sitting on a streetcar in an unbearably terrible mood allowing myself to be as hateful as I wanted toward everything, playing this game where I looked out the window and told myself I HATED everything I saw: "I HATE the name Let it Rain for a roofing company and I HATE that someone thought of that name for their new roofing company and thought they were SO FUCKING CLEVER for thinking of it; I HATE that Frank Gehry designed our art gallery and that Toronto thinks it's so fucking cool and WORLD-CLASS for having a Frank Gehry-designed art gallery; I HATE that the restaurant inside the art gallery is named "FRANK," just in case you all forgot that FRANK GEHRY DESIGNED OUR ART GALLERY." Then we drove past a Tim Horton's with a sign out front advertising new Tim Horton's lattes and I thought "I HATE Tim Horton's lattes!" and then started laughing out loud at how dumb that sentence is, how silly it is to be miserable. 


-Powerman and Got To Be Free by the Kinks 


-Calling a dude drunk at 1 AM so I could go over to his house and cry which sounds like a recipe for disaster if ever there was one but it turned out to not be rife with self-loathing or even the tiniest bit regrettable at all! It was a very positive and well-thought-out decision. Good job, everybody.


-A text message from Liz Barker which read May your hate be transcendent


-A line from an email Jen May sent Liz & I which goes I said I didn't really trust cops and was more or less immediately dismissed from jury duty 


-Finding out that I'm So Bored With The USA by the Clash was originally entitled I'm So Bored With You (or something) when Mick Jones wrote it about his girlfriend but then Joe Strummer stepped in and was like "No- the USA. Duhhhhhhh" and then being out and taking the best "bar bathroom self-portrait" in the history of bar bathroom self-portraits (as seen above) and captioning it "I'm so bored with the USA" for no real reason except the song was in my head. Drinking a Dark & Stormy, which was so ridiculously heavy on the Galliano, waking up the next morning and feeling like the inside of my stomach was coated with a thick and glossy layer of vanilla bath product which wasn't really "good" by any means but at least it was a new take on having a hangover. I barely ate all day because I felt so gross but then after work I bought myself a squash & spinach roti and inhaled it while sitting on my floor listening to Vintage Violence by John Cale and it was easily one of my Top Ten Eating Experiences of 2012 thus far. 


-Drinking pink wine and watching Wet Hot American Summer in the park on a Thursday evening; the night ended with one of my best friends and I sitting on a curb trying to "hit on something," discussing all the different emotional breakdowns we've had this week, ultimately concluding that we're not sad, just shaken up. 


-Looking deeply into the deepest depths of my soul and discovering it's on fire.