My Class with Guy Maddin or Superior Time Saving Prowess

Wednesday night I have an evening class at the U of M taught by semi-world-famous film director Guy Maddin. He's a super nice and down to earth guy who just happens to be weird enough to make the class interesting. He always seems to feel the need to tell us all about how he came to like the film he screens which is usually a story about his personal life at the time. Stories about being dumped, having some dude put a finger in his bum under the assumption that he was gay (he's not), stories about crawling through hair chutes in his parents beauty parlor, etc. It's pretty entertaining stuff. Well anyway, tonight he screened for us his new movie called "Cowards Bend the Knee." It was a really weird little ditty about a guy who thinks that his hands were replaced with those of his girlfriend's dead father. He then starts to murder people and whatnot... oh yeah... at one point he commands an army of wax hockey players to come to life! The whole thing was silent and shot in really old black and white style. It was definitely one of those movies that makes you say what the fuck? But in a good way. Watching it, I was kinda blase about it, but the more I thought about it and the more Guy told us about how a lot of it was fucked up stuff from his dreams and intuition, the more I liked it. It is not something that I would ever think to make, as I am more in the goofy comedy genre, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy it for what it was.
The best part of the evening was how I was able to go to the library and photo copy some notes for Animated Film. I figured that I would have to do it tomorrow after yoga ends at 8pm, which conflicted with my wanting to party down after class. Getting it done tonight was a time saver! I rule!
I also finished reading "Affluenza: The All Consuming Epidemic" today and I totally recommend it. I probably bookmarked more pages of that book with interesting quotes and facts than any book that I have read in a long time (with the exception of "The Vanishing Country" by Mel Hurtig). The past year and a half or so I have been trying to do, what I call "purging the excess" or getting rid of all the crap that I have amassed over the years. Thus far I got rid of all my old video game magazines (of which I had a LOT from circa 1990-1998), paired down my toy collection considerably (man did I have a lot...), trimmed my comic, movie and video game collections down to the essentials, gotten rid of old clothes that I did not need to save, old notes, etc. While I have done a great deal of paring down of all the useless "stuff" that I had accumulated over the years, I still have a long way to go. There is so much more I need to do to become a "simpler" person. I need to continue to evaluate my life and my life choices. I think that I am on the right track, however. Must purge the affluenza bug...