Pretty much everyone has seen the Jude Apatow films where the plot revolves around a group of male Gen Y slackers - dudes without careers or partners or anything resembling ‘adult’ normative behavior.

My question is: why is there no female equivalent to these films? Where are the groups of slacker girlfriends?

Apatow’s films are sexist, but the displays of male friendships outside of the normal gay/straight binary in these films is important - it doesn’t make up for all the rubbish in between, but it’s worth acknowledging.

I wonder: why does hollywood have so much difficulty imaging a female subculture that’s not about buying purses, shoes, and wedding dresses?

Discuss.

Before there was Scarlett Jo, there was Anna Karina. We first met when I was a romantically struggling undergraduate, and although other iconic film stars have seized hold of me since, I hold a special place for this particular muse of the french new wave.

Nearly all young men (and some old ones as well) have a kind of quasi-romantic fascination with some or other hollywood starlet (or starlets as the case may be). Although many men are loath to admit it, you can learn a lot about a guy by finding out who his favorite actresses are.

Why Anna, you might ask? Well, because she is beautiful obviously. But not the kind of over-stated, augmented beautiful that seems to be everywhere these days. Her beauty is cool, collected, intelligent, dark. Kind of dysphoric rather than euphoric. There is courage here, but also empathy, and whimsy, and perhaps even a little cruelty, certainly pain.

My first encounter with Anna Karenia was in Goddard’s Vivre sa Vie, a role in which she plays, as per Wikipedia:

a young Parisian woman who abandons her marriage and a child in order to pursue a career as an actress. Faced with financial troubles she drifts into prostitution. Nana believes she makes this choice of her own free will, but the film emphasizes the social structure that forces the poor into such situations, and builds to a tragic conclusion.

Obviously a difficult role, certainly a morally ambiguous role. So, I ask myself, “Could this kind of film be made today?”

And if it were, is there an actress who could hold such an unwieldy thing together by her sheer presence, through the movement of her lips and the tears from her eyes?

Why Anna Karina? Because her work nearly fifty years ago still seems as radically different as it does today? Because instead of the empathetic insinuation of the french “to live her life”, now we have only the infinitely banal american “sex and the city”? Is this where all the identity politics of the last four decades has gotten us?

I’m not sure. But when Anna watches the Passion of Joan of Arc - in one of Vivre’s crucial scenes - and the tears role down her face, I believe it. I believe it more than anything Carrie Bradshaw will ever tell me.

So I think my last post was a little dark…you know, that’s not me. I don’t hate anyone, I have no mortal enemies. I just don’t understand people sometimes, and I get frustrated.
I’m a compromiser, I want everyone to be happy and everyone to understand me and for me to understand them. And when that doesn’t happen I get frustrated and I loose focus.
Do you ever get the feeling that you want something to work out but you don’t know how to accomplish it? That’s how I feel. And it’s exhausting trying to just get through stuff like this.

You know, it’s funny I watched Goddard’s My Life To Live for film class, and in it, the beautiful Anna Karina has a conversation with a stranger about the nature of love and life. And this stranger philosopher talks about how when you’re young, you don’t know what you love and how you just run around making arbitrary decisions trying to figure out what you really care about and what makes you happy. I think people do that. Random arbitrary decisions to find happiness. And sometimes that randomness causes hurt.
But, the catch to the conversation is that we keep going, no matter what. The truth of life, according to the film, is to persevere, to stay interested.

If that’s true I can live with that. It’s a lot less depressing than the alternative.

i want to get a jump start on all my classes and prepare for them like i’ve never done before. i would make good grades and stuff if i did that. yeah. one day soon.

this weekend i played my guitar until my callouses were worn away and my fingernails eroded down to oddly-shaped nubs. sigh. where would i be without my instrument and my music. one day, after i make my good grades (or maybe while i’m making them), i will record something amazing.

also, i watched the first two Lord of The Rings. they are good. i can’t wait to see the third and final movie. good thing i have a free movie pass. all i need now is time (how typical).

i have but to wait 2 weeks until the anniversary of my birth. it’s about time, too; i feel like i’ve been nineteen since october. i should vote in the upcoming elections. but i promised myself that i wouldn’t vote unless i could actually make an informed decision. i haven’t exactly been keeping up with presidential candidates. i saw an interview with the democratic fellow. he seemed pretty cheesy. they always do.

stormy monday, here i come. i’m a comin’ to get ya.

yeah so here’s what i did this weekend: slept through class on friday, woke up in time to take a shower for the first time this week, but the shower dosen’t matter anyways because as soon as i left my dorm i lit up a cig and grabbed some munchies at the Fried Food Company. so that night i partied my face off and woke up later, around 7 am, head searing with pain, my clothes smelling like a dumpster, in a strange apartment. i found my way back to campus and decided to wait till my head heals, then drive off somewhere… spontaneous-like… hmm maybe florida for a night or two? oh by the way i lost my underwear and i cannot find them, perhaps they’re somewhere under the stanky pile of 3-weeks dirty clothes. i’m running out of cigarettes, i have 37 missed calls on my cell phone, and there’s empty greasy Krystal burger containers on every flat surface in my dorm room.

no no no! that’s not me! that’s the person who lives with me! here’s what i really did:

got to class on friday to discover that i SET THE FREAKIN CURVE on my calculus II test, scoring a 101% with the curve. that night i happened to catch the opening night showing of Matrix 3 with des, using the Free movie passes that i won as a perk from working so hard at my Phonathon job. woke up at 8 am saturday morning to go run that 5-k charity race i signed up for. Scored a free t-shirt and a pretty good race time for a no-training-inactive-college-bum. talked to poppa bear on the telephone for a good hour or so. washed my clothes AND scored 2 million points in my favorite-computer-game-of-the-moment, Chicken Invaders, both before lunch. Spent the afternoon with my beautiful girlfriend. decided to go see the weekend music concert on campus, a stunning and enlightening performance by a solo Marimba player. left that concert, carried des on my back across campus to see our soccer team meet their match (1-1, double overtime) at the game while sipping on some very chocolatey hot chocolate. now, having unglued my eyes from des’ television (stuck on late-night discovery channel programming), im updating my blog and planning to look at my homework sometime within the next 24 hours.

i love the weekend.
that’s when the important things happen anyways.
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