train junkies

ok what is it with people in the train who talk really loudly on their phones and forget they're on the train? seriously, it's not like we actually need to know the intimate details of their lives - the horrible breakup with the boyfriend, the marketing campaign running on the new brand of tissues, the most recently waxed body part, the father-in-law chronically ill at the royal north shore hospital suffering from diseases definitely not meant to be heard by unsuspecting passengers....

then again it does provide great in-flight entertainment.

the sound of sound

i watched La Haine today at a free screening of it. i've seen it before but i wanted to watch it again - there's so much to take in that it deserves a second go at comprehension. it's just so emotionally draining and hectic that it takes so much out of you just to watch it. i feel the same way about a lot of Baz Luhrmann's films. but La Haine really hits me hard b/c i love france so much. spending 2 months in a town near the most notorious city of that country really opened my eyes to the situation that i dont see in my own city, well not the part that i'm from anyway, even though i hear about it all the time. and racism hits home as well being a halfie...even the language of the film (though there is subtitles) gets at something inside of me. i guess i link my friends from school over there to the characters in the film and it just kills me to ever think they could go through something that hard...

i was pretty drained coming home from uni actually. everything just sounded like noise to me. i tried to do work on the train but it didnt last very long. deciphering Barthes' writing on the death of the author is just pointless when the world around sounds like a constant blur of...well, sound. i think my mind was churning b/c of the sadness and futility of life that the film emphasised. and the racism. that people can hate others so much without knowing them scares me. and that the hated ones blindly hate those who hate them without knowing them either scares me. that really didnt make much sense - im trying to say that the judged are doing exactly what they fight against. by fighting blindly against those that hate them they continue an endless cycle of hate, anger, hurt and pain. if only the film was total fiction...