Current mood:	awake
Current music:	Damien Rice - Elephant

Starry, starry night.
"Kailangan mo lang mag-let go."

Says Om, while we walked around the surprisingly cool academic oval around 8 tonight. Unfortunately, we weren't talking about love and one of the many ill-worded cliches it has spawned. I told him I sort of hope I get to learn how to ride a bike before I die - something I quickly took back when the requirement was presented. "So walang mga baggage ang mga bikers?" I asked, trying to be cute.

Mel and I saw Van Gogh earlier at the UP Film Institute, as part of the French Film Festival that went to UP after Shang. The first thing I said when I saw the near empty theater: "Wala na bang kultura ang mga taga-UP?" Politically incorrect and culturally naive, but you have to wonder what better way to spend an idle Saturday afternoon than buy a stick of karyoka and a bottle of C2 and glint your eyes to read sketchy subtitles on purported art films, which you can later boast to friends. And all for the hefty price of nothing.

I slept through similar films in film class: Citizen Kane, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Vertigo, Ladri di Biciclette, Battleship Potemkin. Of all the supposedly amazing films we screened, films that withstood the decades I only enjoyed Bonnie and Clyde. I hardly enjoyed Van Gogh, because my eyes are bad and the tiny subtitles brought a fleeting but not so subtle headache. Imperviously, I didn't think I got anything new: tortured artist, belligerent capitalist world, a gunshot to end it all; the story of Van Gogh, the story of thousands more artists, brilliant, starved and anonymous until death.

Yey, world!