Panic! at the Dean's Office

12 Hours to NUS' own Doomsay Device and everyone is panicking. I've printed out a 26-page "cheat sheet" of memorable quotes, the directors, year of release, actors, character names of every film in the syllabus but what scares me the most is that i haven't exactly watched all of them. Let me tell you, reading a film and watching a film are two completely different things.
Sunday saw us running to school to print out notes at the library. The only catch(es):

1) We could only borrow one book at a time to photocopy
2) We had to run to the photocopying room each time
3) We had only one cash card between us
4) We had about 25 books to do
5) We had an hour to do all these books before the library closed.

Of course, by some stroke of magic we finished everything- but that just brought us to the sad, difficult, then-unforseen part.. reading the readings. I sat with Nick at his poolside for a good 3 hours going through Deleuze, Woody Allen, Bahktin, Hutcheon, Capra and Althusser until words like "parody", "image-text" and "ideology" all ended up looking the same and triggering nightmares/jarring French noir-esque dislocating moments during unexpected times.

That was Sunday. This is Tuesday wee morning and i am officially freaking out. Monday (which was a mere "just now"), i watched 3 movies (Dr. Strangelove, Modern Times and Annie Hall), the end of Brazil (disturbing), a bit of Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, sped through like 12 readings, compiled aforementioned cheatsheet, wikipedia-ed and IMDb-ed like EVERYTHING, and i STILL feel like nothing short of a miracle will pull me through later. I call upon the spirit of Deleuze and Charlie Chaplin. Help. Please.

And i can't get over how comedy can simply be so un-funny.

S/U is my friend

This is for Lilly-

-last night-
Steph: okay on this page we have the diagram of the steam distillation thing..
Me: let's skip it la there's NO WAY this will ever be tested.

-cut to exam page 17/26 featuring diagram of steam distillation with 10 blanks for labelling-

Machina

Pop tart, can you envision
A free world
A clear division..

[Smashing Pumpkins]

DeKonstruct with a capital K

I think it's safe to say that Andrew Lloyd Webber week was a disaster for Brooke and Jason (he sang Memory, which was cute. But cute does not do it for ALW songs). Sorry bryan, but i think your beloved is out this week- a song from Evita? Come on. I was so excited for ALW week because, well, i love all musicals so i was so glad that Carly did Jesus Christ Superstar, and David Archuleta was heartbreaking and sweet with his Think of Me, one of the best from Phantom. I'm still a bit undecided about David Cook- I mean okay he was largely in tune and he did capture a bit of the creepy Michael Crawford thing, but it was nowhere near the orginal Music of the Night.. He just seemed so unconvinced of it himself. And Syesha, what can i say? No matter how in tune she is, her days are numbered. She's just so boring; oh but while normally her hair bothers me to no small extent, this week she just looked like Rihana (I'm still not entirely sure if that's a good or bad thing though).

Quote of the day (from my Perfumes and Cosmetics notes):

"Some people think that a tan means good health and looks. Dermatologists know that a tan is a sign of skin damage. A tan does not prevent sun damage, it is sun damage." [emphasis not my own]

"He goes doily down the street"

I swear i've found perfect timing and an uncanny knack for jinxing myself everytime i make claims of peace. Life is simply ladden with epiphanic moments that only prove to be short-lived, i tell you that. oh, fun.

Quotes (in the spirit of the Surviving NUS Guide):

-in group presentation discussion-

Iliyas (aka Lilly): okay. okay. we need a game plan.
Me: I think our best bet is to just have ONE major point and harp on it with conviction!
Rohai: I think our major point is that we're all fucked.

-in group presentation for film-

Rohai: okay if the class will now turn to the screen, we will be showing the videos from youtube.
Me: PSST.. the internet's not working!
Rohai: what?!
Me: The fucking internet is DOWNNNN.
Rohai: (to class) OK. There are no videos. Lilly will now act out the scenes for us.
Lilly: I have to act out FOUR scenes?
Us: FOUR scenes.

Lilly: Okay what if we have nothing else to say for our presentation?
Me: Ah. that's where we turn the discussion over to the class.. FOR A DEBATE.
Lilly: That is brilliance.

-in our group presentation for Lit and the other Arts-

Rohai: OKAY. So the ESSENCE of my presentation is this- the idea that there is no signified, only signifiers is countered in the FACT that all signifiers point eventually to a final signified where signifiers have to signifiy something, so therefore.. there is always a signified and this is signified by the signifiers that AIM to signify!

Lilly: Okay you know what. How bad can it be? If this were a film, we'd just cut to a scene of us getting kicked out of NUS.

Lilly: ARE YOU DEATH?

Lilly: I have the number for argument and words as zero.

Rohai: Let's just do the post-structuralist thing la.. How bad can it be?
Lilly: CUT TO.. getting our paper back- the camera continuously edits between close ups of your face and the big red "F" on your paper

Me: What if our American Comedy paper is about auteurship! THEN WE'RE FORCED TO DO ALLEN OR CHAPLIN
Lilly: OMG. DISASTER. WE ARE DEATH WITH A CAPITAL D.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

Valuable Lessons that have come from an NUS Literature Education:

HOW TO:

1) Find your way around wikipedia swiftly and effectively-

For auteurs, click on filmography.
For films, click on "plot synopsis"
For year of release/director/producer/performers, go to Imdb movies.com
For quick "insightful details", go to production details

2) Cite references

3) Play with margins/font size/paragraph spacing to fit essay requirements

4) Decipher a 50 page essay in mere minutes

Find essay online
Copy and paste anything in bold/italics/quotations into Microsoft Word
Discard the rest forever

5) "Watch" films without really watching them

Google film
Look at film stills for cinematography
Check out characters/plot on wikipedia
Read a minimum of 1 related theory/genre/period/tendency (eg. satire/parody/meta-narrative/renaissance/post-modernism)

WHAT IS IT ALL REALLY ABOUT:

6) Age of Enlightenment --> Renaissance (big period in art too) --> Romanticism (Gothic Lit, Sublime, etc etc) --> Modernism (stream of consciousness/ T. S Elliot) --> Post-Modernism (Samuel Beckett / Big time for film industry)

7) Literature/ Arts = Self-reflexivity, classic genre-establishing moments, meta-narrative, self-consciousness, and some kind of discourse (political, social, satirical).

HOW TO SURVIVE:

8) Disguise messy essays by slyly coining a snazzy title to thereby signal cohesiveness.

9) READ FAST + scan things that seem important + discard the rest and DON'T EVER LOOK BACK.

10) Personal insights always trump research/regurgitation (Sometimes not reading the notes helps because you're more "original" without the taint of the lecturer's thoughts).

11) "Group discussions" on MSN are key. Save all MSN conversations that have occured pre-essay panic mode. (Read: infamous "construction of the "real" in documentary and CHN / the use of diegetic and exegetic space in parody / the exchange of critical essays in point form / plot summaries)

12) Most importantly, learn to decipher lecture notes that occur in varied modes of stream of consciousness + de-codify the pages dotted with incessant acronyms (Read DT's shameless name-dropping of WA- Woody Allen, OW- Orson Welles, and MB- Mel Brookes)

13) Watch films in fast-forward mode (pertains especially to foreign films with dubbing and silent films with corny captions). Proved very successful with films like Run, Lola Run / The Battleship Potemkin / Shoot the Piano Player / Anything by DW Griffith

PERSONAL LESSONS:

14) Soviet cinema is horrible.

15) Dr. Ryan Bishop is a dead-ringer for David Thewlis (bad guy in Dragonheart)

16) Some rooms boil like saunas and lit lecturers are BAD at anything technical

17) Never, ever , EVER write an essay claiming the uselessness of ekphrasis (especially in a course on ekphrasis)

18) Dr. Strangelove is in black-and-white and is very tedious indeed.

19) Woody Allen is seriously overrated.

20) Scary Movie is clever and underrated.

21) No one who is depressed should EVER read anything by Beckett.

22) Frankenstein is not the creature, it refers to the man who created the creature.

23) If you can't write fast, don't bother writing at all.

24) "Genius" cinema tends to go over our heads (Read: Brazil and Zelig)

25) Open-book exams just means that you can bring in your books, but you're going to leave them at the side of the table never to be touched again anyway because the whole paper's on "personal response".

26) "The cinematic style of Tarantino makes for the desentisation of violence in a comic book-like depiction of gore" does NOT constitute an argument.

27) Studying a few days before the exam is the way to go because you won't remember anything else otherwise.

Midnight in a Perfect World

Week 13 of Year 2 Semester 2..
"The Ouroboros Effect" we're going to get discovered for..



I don't want to speak too soon, lest we encounter another "and cut to..." senarios, but I think I finally see more than one kind of indication and it's not too shabby at all.