Forget it

I can’t remember what my new ideas for the blog were. I would come back with ideas, I thought, and I did have them. Though of course they had been sprouting at odd moments, when I couldn't get them down in writing and not now, when I can. But in wait, I might as well talk about other things, for instance. 

I lost some paint tubes, expensive ones, walking around, and spent yesterday, the next morning—after a blood draw, always a pleasure (I mean it, really one of my favorite activities)—retracing my steps, going to all seven stores I had visited with the tubes in tow, of course to no avail, and finishing up that failed but not as miserable as I might have once let it be investigation with only a couple hours left before my flight, it occurred to me that a fine final act would be to see A Confucian Confusion (1994), playing uptown, I hadn’t gone to any of the retrospective screenings the previous week, though I find the works by Yang I have seen quite affecting: so the hesitancy was really only out of laze, conflated with insufficient desire. But now this was my last chance, also because seeing movies in New York is a different thing from doing so here (tertiary mediation again). I still wasn’t sold though, being generally discombobulated, texting my mother an update as if for approval (regressing…that’s when you know) but I got on the subway at 8th St anyway, where I listened in on a nurse confessing her complex politics to a could-be patient and read a disheartening email correspondence, also medical-related, over someone’s shoulder and after switching to the 1, got off one stop early, stupid, before the theatre, again, uncertain, and at a public transit choice point, too. These circumstances made necessary what is perhaps best publicized as an "experiment". I do these things often but when in a solid place that creates a clean (albeit internally messy) sense of juncture, I can actually remember them as adhering to a kind of procedure.  

Body fixed to the platform and face slightly pained, I began to run through the full film, drawing on snatches of dialogue and title cards and internet images and descriptors also pieced together from similar works and then my familiarity with the screening room itself, having been in its chairs often, not that they are so memorable but nonetheless remembering the texture of their armrests, deciding on, or peering into, the makeup of the audience, the whole endeavor, very novelistic—I raced through the experience sparing no detail, even, or I should say, crucially, covering the emotional valences of what it would feel like—yes, mainly conducting feeling—to be sat before a film's projection of moods and figures, women and men, all the way to its credit finish. And because I completed that experience in two, three minutes, because the movie was done in an extended breath, as if I was there and knew the extent of it, while knowing that I wasn’t and didn’t, but could have, and what would be the differences between the many possible versions, I transferred to the B and went back downtown, pleased with having only spent $2.90 for the day, on the metro ticket: the film was free. Not long after there was a derailment with that same train line that had deposited me at 59th deciding by trance and I was happy with my decision and with the chaotic means by which I had arrived again at some shade of method.