More Camera Whoring!

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Since I've apparently become something of a camera whore over the course of the past few months, and apparently have no shame in promoting my appearances in front of a camera (feel free to let me know if any of you think this is a worrying trend), here are a couple more videos in which yours truly is present:



That organization Pro8mm which offered me and others a chance to shoot a bit of footage on Super 8mm film at South by Southwest finally released an edited video compilation of all of that footage. For about a few seconds, from 0:18 on, I'm seen being shown how to use a film camera.

Not impressed by that? Then...how about footage of me eating dinner before a screening of João Pedro Rodrigues's latest film To Die Like a Man on Thursday night? Captured by one of my roommates?



My presence is spreading all over the Internet! Mwahahahaha!

All right, I'm done with this kind of thing for now. One day, My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second will become a blog of serious arts criticism again (if it ever was that). One day.

Finding My Inner Punk, With the Help of The Clash

NEW YORK—Despite having my one umbrella destroyed by the heavy winds yesterday afternoon, leaving me vulnerable to getting heavily rained on by Mother Nature last night, I had an excellent weekend.

But the highlight of my weekend was not the spate of Japanese films I saw for the first time on Friday and Saturday at Film Forum: two black-and-white masterpieces—Mikio Naruse's Floating Clouds (1955) and Kenji Mizoguchi's final film Street of Shame (1956)—and one fairly amusing color musical-comedy, Keisuke Kinoshita's Carmen Comes Home (1951), featuring Hideko Takamine in an exuberant singing-and-dancing role—as a stripper, to make things that much hotter—that is as far as possible from the quietly suffering heroines she played for Naruse in her collaborations with him. And no, it wasn't even Jacques Tourneur's fascinatingly dense 1946 Technicolor Western Canyon Passage, seen at Anthology Film Archives—though that experience was marred by a supposedly restored print that was plagued by terribly flawed audio, making some of the dialogue barely comprehensible.

No, the highlight of my weekend was this:



A co-worker of mine at The Wall Street Journal fronts this punk-rock band on the side; the group recently released their first album and celebrated that release on Friday at Fontana's Bar in New York's Lower East Side. Afterwards, Fontana's hosted a session of "Punk Rock Heavy Metal Karaoke," with a live band providing the musical accompaniment as people got up to sing a song of their choice—or, at least, of their choice based on a long list of selections. I decided to take a stab at it with The Clash's "I Fought the Law"...and what you see above is the result of that experiment.(Believe it or not, I was not feeling drunk at all before doing this, despite the one-and-a-half pint of beers I had consumed; over the years, I've developed a pretty good tolerance for beer, at least.)

I'll leave it to you all to be the judge of how successful I was at this endeavor. All I can report is that, against all odds, I actually left the stage feeling like an honest-to-God rock star—for the moment, at least. And isn't that what karaoke is at least partly about?

P.S. As I was getting my ears blown to bits as a spectator and as a performer at Fontana's, many of my fellow cinephile friends and acquaintances were apparently getting their minds blown at Walter Reade Theater by this old film by some French dude I've never heard of. Maybe some of those cinephile friends/acquaintances can tell me if I truly missed something special. I, for one, regret nothing. (Not yet, anyway.)

Look At Me, Ma! I'm in a YouTube Video!

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—On Friday night, I was in Brooklyn celebrating the birthday of a friend of mine who lived just around the corner from me in East Brunswick, N.J. back in the day. We hadn't seen each other in many years, so this was a reunion of sorts.

Since I last saw her, in high school, she has, it seems, become a pretty well-known celebrity on YouTube, with a comedy/vlogging channel she maintains with a dear friend from her college years. And on Friday night, she was filming her birthday party from her computer's webcam and live-streaming it on Ustream.

This partly explains how I found myself making a brief cameo in their latest video (see 1:16 onward):



I know, I know: big deal, right? I'm in it for about five seconds, if that, and am not really doing anything special other than just standing around. But hey, if being active on social media like Facebook and Twitter have taught me anything, it's that any kind of exposure—well, maybe more positive than negative—helps, and that you might as well promote it as much as possible.

Plus, this might give some of you faithful My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second readers an idea of where I've been the past few days, and why I haven't been as prolific with the blog posts as I usually am. I guess you could call what I've been doing "living it up." In any case, I've been doing things other than sitting alone in the dark watching movies all day long...and honestly, I've never been happier. (I still managed to squeeze in two films this past weekend, though—Zhao Liang's sprawling but effective and enraging documentary Petition; and The White Meadows, the wondrous recent feature by Mohammad Rasoulof, aka the other Iranian filmmaker to be jailed recently, along with Jafar Panahi—so it's not like I'm in the process of swearing off the cinema or anything. Far from it!)

Oh, and speaking of promotion: By all means (and take with a grain of salt, perhaps), feel free to check out the rest of the 200-some videos on the GracenMichelle YouTube channel. Their personalities are bubbly, and their videos generally quite enjoyable. I guess you could say, to borrow their parlance, it's "totally t1tz." (They even have their own website, here, for further exploration.)