Pasithea

Hmm. Today was the 22nd. Stacey's birthday. Doh! I knew when her birthday was but I thought today was the 20th.

Um. So... For Stacey's birthday (she wasn't home when I got here, she was off shopping with Jeff) I got home from work and ran off to get Ashy for dinner at an italian place that I'd tried and liked to get her opinion of it and celebrate splut day.

After that, I plugged my laserdisc player into her TV and we watched Dr. Caligari (not the silent german impressionist film. Late 80's Avant Garde)

It was.... Um...

Well, let me back in time a moment here. In 1992 I moved to Santa Cruz, and I had the good fortune to have some really awsome housemates. I was basically still a hillbilly at that point in my life. The most deeply profound and exotic film I'd seen would have probably been something like 2001 and Twice Upon a Time. My housemates were a bunch of really awsome kooks and made me watch all kinds of weird and deeply disturbing films. Most of which, I loved. Amoung them was Dr. Caligari Over time, I'd forgotten most of this film except that it was bizarre in the same sense as VideoDrome, and that at moments I found Dr. Caligari strangely sexy. Flash forward 14 years. Jon and Ashy and I are wandering around SF and we see some medical implements in a fetish shop. We talk a little about Dr. Wednesday and this reminds me of this film. (In retrospect, I hope she's not offended by that). For the sack of novelty, I hit e-bay and find a copy of it on Laser Disc for a whopping $6.50. Now I should mention that other films I saw in this time in my life and thought were exciting, interesting, and different turned out to be slow, plodding, and just plain annoying, but what the heck. What are friends for if not suffering through a bad film so they can ridicule you on it later.

So.. Did Dr. Caligari hold up? ... It was better than Suburbia but... Umm... I can't think of anything that really describes this film in an adequate way. It looks like a student film based on a play but I think it's supposed to. Most of the talent are porn stars, I think the music was composed on a Cassio 100, and perhaps it was the cannoli and espresso I had before the movie but I had this weird giddy not-quite-laughing sensation through the whole movie and when it was over, I broke down and giggled hyesterically for about twenty minutes. I'm not sure how I feel about it but it is definetely 'art' with a capital H in the middle of it. It was definetely mind-bending. Maybe just not in the way I recall. At a bare minimum, I'll have to get some framegrabs from it and some quotes. It had a lot of quotable moments.