It’s that time of year again. The Urban Nomad Film…
It’s that time of year again. The Urban Nomad Film Festival is just around the corner. This will be the third year I’ve had a submission, and this time it will of course be the final final edition of Lady X: Clay Soldiers, on the big screen for the first time (provided I can get it into an acceptable format; Premiere is rendering it as I type this). It will be interesting to see how it looks up there, particularly since it looks a lot better even on a TV screen than on the Internet. UB is on about the same time as the Taipei Film Festival, so if you’re not all festivaled out after Golden Horse, and you’re into either deep abstract brooding film festival pieces or light amateur expat stuff, I imagine there’s going to be something for you somewhere around here.
Thursday is New Year’s day, the first of the lunar new year, and I’ll be in Xinzhu. In the meantime I have to clean up my place, not just in accordance with custom, but also because my place is a mess and could use a good cleaning. It’s been raining all day, with temperatures hovering in the low teens, and the weather forecast calls for it getting down to 6 degrees over the next few days. Definitely indoor-activity weather.
The phone guy came around this morning and hooked up my new old phone. He was impressed with the workmanship of the thing. “See that dial plate?” he enthused. “That’s a porcelain dial plate, with a brass dial! Man, they sure knew how to make them back then.” However, there might be something wrong with the handset connection, as it sounds scratchy with static cutting in and out. I have no idea who would be interested in fixing such an antique, so I’ll probably just take it apart myself some time and clean it up. It does everything I want it to do already, and dialing long cell phone numbers on the slow click-click-click dial should be listed as a Zen patience exercise.
I had a really disturbing dream last night. I dreamt that I was in a house in southern California, and after a long period of arduous research, I had discovered that I wasn’t actually related to Ice Cube. Big surprise there, I know. But here’s the disturbing part: In the dream, the fact that he was in love with me did nothing to alleviate my intense feelings of distress over the discovery that we weren’t related. ‘Cause, you know, you’d think it would at least cheer me up a little, hypothetically speaking.
