sunday i effectively killed off the last of that pesky weekend, riding once again into furukawa, checking out an alternative video store to the one in which i have a membership (has a better selection, especially of newer material, but kaiser (the store i belong to) has a quirkier inventory...there are a couple of vids i kind of want to see at the bigger store, though... in particular _the gingerbread man_ and _the spanish prisoner_). then i ate at another family style restaurant, this one with a menu composed about half and half of japanese cuisine and western cuisine. no unlimited drinks, though, so i just had water with my yakiniku and mixed pizza. after that, i headed over to kaiser and returned my vids, and picked up _stranger than paradise_ and _scream_ (no, i still haven't seen any movies in the series. sue me. ironically enough, before the whole thing got huge, there was a free sneak preview screening at tech when i was a freshman or a sophomore...) they had one copy of _pi_ left, but it was dubbed in japanese. grrr....upon coming home, i pretty much conked out until after seven, then picked up some dinner at the convinience store. some delicious spicy instant ramen. so much better than the crap they sell back in the states. oh, i also watched part of the rockies-expos game than yoshii won. then i spent the rest of the night ronking at kung fu master. lots of excitement. whee.
as part of my self-improvement plan, i've brought a bunch of books over with me to try to read... dunno how many i can get through, but hopefully i'll stay dedicated enough to get through some of the bigger ones. i'm *still* working on part 2 of the civil war narrative i started in georgia, but i'm over two-thirds of the way through. i've also restarted the tcp/ip network book from o'reilly in hopes of getting through a chapter a day. in other news, my mom should be sending my lan card for my laptop today. woohoo! i sure hope it gets here soon; other jets at the orientation reported success in hooking up to their school's lan, so i'm crossing my fingers and praying...if i am able to hook up, my online presence should increase dramatically, as well as the amount of e-mail i can write. there's a pretty long queue of stuff i need to reply to right now...*gulp*. anyway...
shyness is nice...just watched _stranger than paradise_, the jarmusch film i rented. kind of interesting look at american malaise. it's a sort of road movie, beginning in nyc, shifting to cleveland, and then ending in florida, with three main characters, willie, his cousin eva, and his friend eddie. filmed in black and white, jarmusch has this habit of ending his scenes about 20 to 30 seconds later than they would normally end. it seems bizarre at first, but really serves to drive home the ennui that saturates the film. along those lines, the characters are extremely static, as are the camera shots. very few closeups, and, with the exception of the scenes involving the borrowed car, almost all movement is initiated by the actors, never by the camera. although the film was released in 1986, the depressive overtones of the film scream gen x. also, no matter what the situation, the characters never really display a particularly cheerful disposition; there always seems to be a burr in the saddle. the film also features very little of the outdoors, or rather, only enough of the outdoors to emphasize how little difference there is between new yawk, cleveland, and florida (when the characters visit lake erie, for example, eddie remarks how beautiful it is (his comments about cleveland are limited to "a beautiful town" with a "nice lake"...humorous, considering that among the non-ohian american population, eddie's opinion is unique), which is ironic, considering that the audience's view of the lake is limited to a blur of white, not unlike a blizzard). otherwise, jarmusch attempts to induce claustrophobia, confining scenes to the interior of a car, a motel room, and assorted small rooms. for a road movie, there is very little scenery. overall, an interesting film, though somewhat monotonous. not all that exciting, more along the lines of food for thought for a film student.
before watching the film, i walked with f-san over to the local festival that was held today about 500 feet from my apartment. there was a famous japanese singer who gave a mini-concert, but it was pretty much karaoke. (by that i mean that she had a dat for accompaniment instead of a band, not that she sang various cheesy cover songs). after the concert, there were fireworks ("hanabi"), which were pretty cool, as far as fireworks go. no real finale, just random outbursts of a bunch of fireworks every couple of minutes or so. they did do this super cool sparkler type thing that looked sort of like a waterfall. produced a *lot* of smoke, and continued for about a minute and a half, i think. it was pretty fun, i guess, but i'm not really a festival person unless i'm with very good friends with whom i can make snotty comments and cut up.
i'm sort of half watching this japanese show where a couple of nihonjin explore hawaii. one of them is taken, for some bizarre reason, to a hooters. good to see that a representative sample of american culture is being shown to japan. guh. btw, i found "half bitter" kit-kats today in the supaa. rawk.
been listening to: sunny day real estate, garbage, stavesacre, and the echoing green