CONSPIRACY THEORY EPISODE 5

I got an unwelcome email from my ex-girlfriend on our 3 year anniversary saying that we could never be friends, and that she has a boyfriend now, and that they are getting married.
I received this mail while getting a haircut from my friend Tsukiyama, at his store, and he was describing the plot to Lars Von Trier's "Dogville" to me.

I went home and read up on Lars Von Trier and came across this sentence on wikipedia: "His parents considered themselves both communists and committed nudists". I suddenly wanted to get back together with my ex. I told a female friend about this and she said that my ex had sent me that message on purpose to either fuck with me or make me jealous.

Also I figure if you call yourself a "nudist" you have to be pretty committed. Are there levels of demarcation? Do committed nudists not wear shoes? Socks? If you walk around naked to the waist are you a noncommittal nudist?

Later in the week I slept with a girl, and it was late and there were no trains home, so I invited her back to my place, which was an hour walk or so away. She said "I'm not that kind of girl". I'm not joking about this. I think I offended her because I thought she was joking, and laughed very hard. I think I am really interested in her because of this incident.

I asked a friend who knows her why this happened, and his response is that this happened because this girl is Korean and they have a strange and strict culture.

I went home and tried to watch Dogville online through some pirate sites. I found it with Chinese subtitles, but it would stop loading after the first fifteen minutes. What is more off-putting than the minimalism of the set design, is fake americanisms spoken by obvious Europeans. Like the narrator, John Hurt, saying "U S of A".

I read a little about Dogville on the internet and they compared the staging of the film to Brecht's theory. I was thinking about Brecht recently, and I am of the opinion that other than "Threepenny Opera" and "Mother Courage", I really don't care for him or his pedantic theory.

One thing I respect about Brecht is his performance when he was called before the House Un-American Committe. Brecht was a committed communist, but at that time he was, for whatever reason, getting screenwriting credits in Hollywood. When they called him up to testify he pretended to not speak English. When they got a German interpreter he spoke only in gibberish. When someone spoke up and said he had to speak English if he was a Hollywood screenwriter, he started speaking English. When they broke for lunch he got on a plane to Switzerland and never went back to the US of A.

An old Professor of mine told me a story about seeing Brecht's "The Good Woman of Szechuan" staged in China, wherein the plot and all of the dialogue had been completely re-written to be totally different from the original play. My Professor was Chinese, and a visiting professor of European literature. After the play he was supposed to give a lecture on "The Good Woman of Szechuan". He panicked while watching the play because his prepared lecture was on a topic that wasn't even addressed in this revised play he was watching. He forced himself to vomit so he could plead sickness and get out of the lecture.

Next week is "Golden Week", a series of holidays, all in a row. My ex is going to Switzerland to stay with a guy she met some months ago. I don't know if this is the guy she plans to marry or not but wouldn't give her the satisfaction of asking. Also I feel foolish caring about any of this considering I broke up with her.

All afternoon I have been working on helping a friend with a translation of a television show about "tearjerkers", emotional songs and the stories that led to their creation. The first song is by a ventriloquist who was bullied as a child and contemplated suicide, but who through the model of his favorite TV actor became a positive person. The second one is by a woman who was a popular singer in the seventies, who fell madly in love with a socialist activist who was imprisoned for his activities. He proposed to her while she was visiting him in jail. Later they had three children, but fought about whether to live in the countryside or the city. He suddenly died one day some decades later, and she found she could no longer write music. Then she planted a lemon tree and watched it grow. It reminded her of him so she wrote a song about it.

It has been raining all day. Maybe the rainy season has started. I have been listening to Missisippi John Hurt's "goodnight Irene" on repeat.