Friday, April 01, 2011

An April Shower of Activity! Plus, "The Mysterious Light"

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Today is April 1, the first day of what is looking to be an unusually busy month for me.

Among the many things on my plate this month:

  • Another month, another film festival—two actually (as I will explain below)! New York's own Tribeca Film Festival runs throughout the second half of this month, and for the first time ever, I will be helping to cover it for The House Next Door.
  • In the last week of April, I will be heading off to Champaign, Ill., to attend Roger Ebert's annual film festival, Ebertfest. I'm attending this one mostly for my own personal enjoyment. The lineup, frankly, doesn't excite me all that much (I've already seen, like, half the films scheduled, though I do like all of them to varying degrees), so I'll mostly be there to try to meet up with people I only know from online interactions (people like elite blogger Jim Emerson and some of Ebert's very fine Far-Flung Correspondents). Hopefully I'll be more successful at the networking thing there than I was at South by Southwest.
  • In between all this festival-going and -dispatching...well, this month New York seems to have exploded in intriguing repertory-cinema programming. The ones I'm most interested in hitting up as frequently as possible are Museum of Modern Art's Charles Burnett retrospective (finally, I can see his not-available-on-Region 1-DVD 1990 film To Sleep With Anger!), Brooklyn Academy of Music's series of Brian De Palma thrillers (The Fury on a big screen!) and Film Forum's "5 Japanese Divas" series, featuring films with five of the most famous actresses in Japanese-cinema history—including Mikio Naruse's muse, the late Hideko Takamine (who was so luminous in Yearning, the only Naruse film I've seen so far).
  • I hope to be able to fit in at least a little bit of non-cinema culture as well. I already have a ticket to see the indie-rock band TV on the Radio in concert at Radio City Music Hall in a couple of weeks (I'm not necessarily even the biggest fan of Tunde Adebimpe & co., but one of my roommates convinced me to tag along with him, and the venue is a mere three blocks away from my workplace!). Other possibilities: Alban Berg's Wozzeck at the Metropolitan Opera, and maybe even the hot new Broadway ticket, Trey Parker & Matt Stone's The Book of Mormon.

So, once again, if you notice blogging is light here at My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second (though it's not like I've been super-productive in the blogging department recently, I admit), all of those above are reasons for that paucity. Juggling all this and my day job? Maybe one day I'll actually get paid for all this writing and festival-going I'm aiming to do this month...

In the meantime, speaking of my day job: Thanks to my new iPhone, I guess this is the kind of meaningless crap I capture with it when I'm bored:



Meaningless? Well, maybe you can find some kind of wholly unintended meaning in this mysterious light hovering on one area of the ceiling at my place of employment. In fact, if any of you want to contribute any, um, interpretations of his mysterious hovering light, feel free to offer some up in the comments section of this blog!

3 comments:

gadfly said...

I think you will find a child with a small mirror is the culprit

Laura Marijan said...

That is so cool that you get to go to all these film festivals! Love them too! And believe the strange light is somebody sending SOS signals to another in the office via the ceiling.

Kenji Fujishima said...

And believe the strange light is somebody sending SOS signals to another in the office via the ceiling.

I like that one! What kind of an SOS, though? "Help me, I need more ink for this printer!" Or, "help me, I need help cutting this story down to fit!" The possibilities are endless...

Oh, and re: the film festivals: The only snag with the ones I've attended so far is that I don't get paid for my coverage, and I don't my expenses covered for them either—mostly because I'm doing this outside of my usual journalistic place of employment. (That's fine with me with Ebertfest, though, because, like I said in my post, I'm mostly going there for my own enjoyment.) Maybe one day I will, though...