That's the phrase used at the big software company our homie E works at for layoffs. Happily, said company did most of its pruning for growth before the financial crisis reached crisis status, meaning she's still cooking along and getting paid.
The visit to the moms and co. has gone well so far. We had cake at Sweet Life (I'd walk a mile for raspberry cheesecake), we tromped about town, I made risotto for dinner, we played Ticket to Ride, and we watched yet another French movie with Audrey Tautou.
A note on that: why are the male leads in so many French movies unconvincingly good-looking, by which I mean, they aren't good-looking enough to justify their status as the objects of lust? It makes the willing suspension of disbelief that much more difficult. See also L'Auberge Espagnol and its follow-up, Russian Dolls (which was stupid, BTW.)
Just found an article praising clickity-clackity keyboards, of which I am a relentless partisan. Once B and I move to a place larger than a dresser, I might get to get a new clackity keyboard. In the meantime, there is a unilateral ban, in the name of her sanity.
I just submitted my first-ever panel proposal to a real-deal academic conference. Fingers crossed.
On the docket for the next little while: a walk around the old Alma Mater, then dinner with family friends. Somewhere in there I'm supposed to really start the endless Dostoevsky novel assigned in the class I'm TA'ing next term. Groan.
3.27.2009
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2 comments:
RE: French Male Leads.
Where to start? First, there is the cultural difference: French Men are judged by different standards of beauty (by other men as well as women) than American Men are, which is probably off-putting (and confusing) for yanks. Even more likely is the use the Male Gaze (http://imlportfolio.usc.edu/ctcs505/mulveyVisualPleasureNarrativeCinema.pdf) to convey narrative in cinema, meaning that a film would never be able to focus on something attractive to women (or to anyone with a Female Gaze). This is, of course, complicated by which decade we're talking about: the Female Gaze IS very prevalent in '50's American Cinema (according to Susan Bordo), because of the equivalently repressive culture that displaced pre-WWII virtues in favor of male machismo, which became the dominant representation of masculinity.
It could also be that French Men are just not hot, too. There's definitely enough evidence to point to that theory, too.
Russian Dolls (Les Poupees Russes) might quite possibly be the worst movie I've ever seen. L'Auberge Espagnole has re-watch value like no other French movie I have ever seen (of course, it's my all-time favorite movie so I'm biased) but the sequel sucked beyond belief. In fact, I've seen it a total of one time, and I can't even remember if I made it all the way through or not.
As for French men... there are plenty of hot ones to add to the not-so-hot ones, but that's generally true in most countries. Of course, I stopped dating non-European men several years ago, so I'm biased on that front too.
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