the groundhog day project

Then again , who am I to tell anyone to shut up (not that what I did yesterday was that , exactly? And, who am I to preach about being creative when my only real creative outlet lately is this blog (with barely any audience) or Dungeons & Dragons , where my audience is a whole 6-9 players depending on the week? I had considered getting out a few of my unpublished manuscripts--the good ones--and re-editing them this summer to make available as ebooks, but then I got some summer classes to teach. Great news for the bank account but taking up a lot of my time for several weeks. Maybe I'll still get to the manuscripts. Knowing me, probably not. One little roadblock and I'll put it off, do something else. Story of my creative life. This blog--not strictly speaking an entirely creative exercise--is the one thing in recent years I have been able to stick with for a particularly long time. When I started actively trying to write fiction for the purpose of getting published--with ...

I gotta come back to David Fishkind's piece at HTMLGiant . " Frances Ha comes so close to being a movie I needed, my generation needed, this world needed," he writes. The time has never been riper than [now] to cut down any encouragement among our youth to pursue a creative lifestyle." And, I think I might just stop quoting him there, because, why would a movie--a piece of art, mind you, want to tell anyone to stop making art? Sure, a piece of art could do that, I'm sure many pieces of art do do that. But, isn't it so much more enjoyable when it doesn't? For that matter, what feels like a better solution to me is to do more art, be more creative, and get the fucking capitalist sell outs who can't be bothered to be creative to maybe pay for a theater ticket now and again to make themselves better cultured, as it were, and support the artists that are inspired to actually do something with their lives even as the momentum of the modern world presses ...

I don't know New York. Never been there, though I would love to sometime. But, Frances Ha feels like it is invoking a very specific time and place. This is when Frances is 27. This is New York City. And, the film offers establishing shots of existing locations and also specific addresses in the same typeface as the title of the film. Like chapter divisions in any other indie film that has chapter divisions. 682 VANDERBILT AVE Brooklyn, NY 11238 That's the first one. By this point, we've seen Frances and Sophie in their apartment. We saw it in the opening montage, but the address oops up as they get home from their night in Chinatown (for a party that may or may not have been near somewhere called Dumpling House). This is where the film settles into the apartment a little more. The inclusion of the zip code amuses me. This isn't just Frances' and Sophie's apartment. This is one particular apartment out of all the apartments, unique in this time and place,...

Early in France's Ha , France's quotes Sincerity and Authenticity by Lionel Trilling (1972): "To praise a work of literature by calling it sincere is now, at best, a way of saying that although it need be given no aesthetic or intellectual admiration..." and the sequence of France's and Sophie moves on to another interaction, part of a series that establishes a) their sisterly closeness--Frances compares them to a lesbian couple that no longer has sex--and b) their lack, of a sort, of real maturity. That line from Trilling continues: "it was at least conceived in innocent of heart." And, I think, sincerely, that the choice of this quotation by Baumbach was deliberate. See, in context (of Trilling, not the film, though I'll get to that), Trilling has gone over the origin (latin sincerus meaning "clean, or sound, or pure" and really meaning that whatever is being modified has "not been tampered with." He has covered a sort of his...

France's Ha is not feminist. It just happens to be centered around a woman, France's (Greta Gerwig). A woman of 27 who isn't quite managing to, in the modern parlance, adult.           And, I've never seen it before (though I have liked other Baumbach films, I never got around to this one), and I think I'm rather enjoying it. Its description on Netflix is odd: Determined to make it as a modern dancer in New York, a young woman pursues her unlikely goal with more enthusiasm than natural talent. Now, to be fair, the film is not quite over as I'm writing this. But, 1) France's definitely does not do anything with notable enthusiasm. She explicitly has trouble leaving places, getting up, getting out of her apartment. She wants to be a dancer, sure, and hell, maybe she's got more enthusiasm than talent there, but 2) the film is just not about that. That's just one tiny aspect of Frances' life. More of the film deals with her increasingly d...