Watched Inception, was thoroughly unimpressed. Watched Dogtooth soon after, was thoroughy blown away. Any way you look at it, that filim is insanely well done. I particularly loved the muted palette, the pastel colours juxtaposed with the blue of the pool and the greens. For a movie about "dreams" Inception is nothing like a dream whatsoever - dreams are not constructed like that. Dogtooth is thoroughly a dream-nightmare. I really wish Baudrillard and Derrida and Marcuse were still around, so I could watch movies with them, and then we could all laugh and cry together at the good parts.

10 minutes and 2 cigarettes after arriving in St.Catharines my Mom took me along with her for manicures and pedicures - a "girl" tradition I am highly unfamiliar with. I don't "do" pedicures or manicures, I feel really childish and get very skittish. I felt like a ridiculous imposter, and accidently ruined by pedicure seconds after walking out of the salon. My mom rolled her eyes and said something about her failing at trying to make me more feminine. I felt a little bit better after that.
I felt like an imposter because when I walked in to the salon I felt like I had entered a secret sect of tired-looking white women, all staring like drones in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors, clutching their purses. But all eyes turned to me when I walked in, and there was a moment of appraisal that I haven't felt so strongly in a while - and then the awkward look away when I proved myself uninitiated. I think that the easiest way to fit in most places is to look bored. If you look a little bit bored, you look like you belong. I have learned how to do this in most bars, on the streets, sometimes - but when I am over-stimulated and interested, boredom is difficult to simulate. Which is why I always become a little clumsy in movie theatres, a little zoned out.
In the salon, there was this little mini shrine, one of those kitsch-chinese displays that I see all the time in mock-authentic chinatown restaurants, complete with lcd-lit incense sticks and scalloped mirrors. It was high up, close to the ceiling, not low enough that anything could have been placed haphazardly. Cheap red and gold plastic. But there was an empty styrofoam coffee cup sitting amongst all that paraphenalia. I looked at it for a long time.



ps. really enjoying tom wolfe - "yah! lower orders. The new sensibility - baby baby baby where did our love go? - the new world, submerged so long, invisible, and now arising, slippy, shiny, electric - out of the vinyl deep"