May 14, 2004

Jared's New Digs

Well, most of my blog-related energies of late have been focused on putting together the journals for my Film class (they'll all be posted here, of course, as I complete them to my satisfaction). Meanwhile, however, life goes on and events transpire and it is clearly high time that some of those events found their way here.

This evening I am quite pleased as Scholl and I have successfully completed the bulk of the really strenuous manual labor required for moving into Apartment 12A (soon to be the LeTourneau headquarters for most Shadow Council activities, both subversive and otherwise).

-We wrestled The Moore's couch and various extraneous objects (namely, a lamp, a small table, and a hatstand) down two flights of stairs from Flooders and stashed them safely away . . . And let me just note here that The Moore owes us, big time.

-We hauled two large couches out of the empty rooms they had been stashed in on Bandits (wondering all the while at how we had managed to get them into the frigging rooms in the first place) and successfully installed one in the girls' apartment and one in ours. And also sprayed everything down with much febreze, because . . . wow.

-We dragged the couch out of temporary storage on Pennitentiary and, also after much spraying of febreze, gave it a new place of honor.

-And, speaking of places of honor, we transported and carefully selected an appropriate location, (with an attitude of reverence becoming such an august occasion, of course), for TOKAR. It now occupies a prime spot in our new living room. For the uninitiated, TOKAR is The Orange Kick-Ass Recliner that we picked up somewhere . . . good stuff.

Once all of these items had been physically placed inside the door of the apartment, it simply remained for us to make room to walk. I don't suppose I mentioned that our limited space was already partially taken up by the dining room table with its four chairs, two more of the standard LeTourneau "lounge chairs" and a standard LeTourneau fornication-proof couch.

So, as we took a brief inventory in assessing the situation, we realized that we had to arrange four couches, two lounge chairs, one dining room table, four dining room chairs, and a very orange recliner in such a way that we would actually be able to navigate successfully from the front door to the bedroom of the apartment without a) engaging in the pursuit of various and sundry track & field events or b) using the communicating door and entering through Apartment 12D.

After much sweat from Scholl and myself, much lounging on the furniture that we were attempting to move from Anna, much belated placement advice from Anna, and much general chuckling from Anna, we were successful in placing every piece of furniture up against some wall, thereby leaving the entire center portion of the room free for walking and frantic pacing and working jigsaw puzzles and certainly not for dancing of any kind. Or keggers. Can't have keggers in that open space at all. You might get in the way of the people who aren't dancing.

Anyway, at this point we both decided that all movement of stuff to the apartments was pretty much done for the day and went to eat supper at Taco Bueno. This was at 9:00. We were tired.

To backtrack just a bit, I suppose I ought to say a few words about our film class. It has been great good fun thus far, despite that whole part where I get up by 7:30. That part sucks, but I can live with it. Anyway, let's give a quick list of the films we'll be/have been watching:

Schindler's List
The Birth of a Nation
Citizen Kane
Casablanca
High Noon
Dr. Strangelove
North by Northwest
The Majestic
Troy

That last movie is an educated guess. On the final day of class we will go out together and watch a recent release in the theater, then discuss it over dinner. Troy is pretty much the only thing that's out right now and there have been a few rumblings in that direction. Aside from that, the only movie on that list that I haven't seen is High Noon. But they're all good movies, and I've only seen most of them once, so I look forward to the remainder of the class.

This being the third day, we have already watched the first three movies on the list, and had stimulating discussions about the first two. I am also getting quite a bit of enjoyment out of our textbook, as I've never really read through any in-depth descriptions of film technique. It has really helped me to appreciate the movies we've watched so far, and also to read between the lines a bit. It has also provided me with a number of noteworthy titles which we'll be acquiring from Netflix for the purposes of further edification.

I should mention here that, as with all Watson classes, we are required to participate in a 30-45 minute group presentation. Scholl and myself are in a group with Wayco Beckman, Ricky Morley, Alex Pereira, and Charlie Perez. We will be doing a presentation on Dr. Strangelove. It will be very fun, and very special . . . I mean, what could Dr. Watson have been thinking? He gave us a Stanley Kubrick movie to present on! Scholl and I very much wish that we had Martinez here to play Dr. Strangelove for us, but we'll see what we can come up with in his absence . . .

In honor of this new appreciation for movie-making, our extra free time to watch lots of movies, and the opportunities to watch lots of really good movies, Scholl and I have started Movielists. This is something I have wanted to do for quite some time, but somehow it just never came about. On the list we catalogue title, year, rating, runtime, a 50-point scale rating of the movie based on technique (done as objectively as we can . . . we try to collaborate on coming up with what we think it should be rated, to keep it as balanced as possible), a 50-point scale rating of the movie based on how much we enjoyed it (quite subjective, of course), and the date we watched it on. Today is day three, and we have just added the sixth movie to the list. Schindler's List was the first one to go up, on the 12th, and I have made it my benchmark movie, with a rating of 50 in each category for a total of 100.

Anyway, that's the bulk of what is important from the past few days . . . I must now get myself some sleep, clearly. There are journals to write this weekend, not to mention a shiny new apartment to move into . . . Good night.

Posted by Jared at May 14, 2004 11:59 PM | TrackBack