Cindy Goes To A Party

2008-01-31T22:19:00.000-08:00

Poor Cindy! After her best friend postpones a b-ball rematch because of a party the next day, Cindy is feeling insecure about being a tomboy. Assuming that she did not get an invite because other may have thought that she would prefer fishing instead, Cindy tries to keep a brave face and denies in her best southern accent that she even wants to go.

But fret not Cindy, for your Fairy Godmother looks something like Audrey Tautou and she is here to teach you the social graces necessary to pass...behave as a young girl. So the transformation begins with getting our tomboy into a dress, Cindy rebels a bit but Amelie sets her straight. Poor Cindy's b-ball friend is brought into this social engineering scheme and together the two friends are bombarded with a series of rules to follow so as to not ruin the festivities.

The rules are reasonable but the scenes in which they are presented tends to skew the message. Dennis is clearly the more aggressive and clumsy of the two kids and yet why did he receive an invitation when Cindy did not? Was it to even out the number of boys or is this a message that butchiness is not becoming in a young lady. Then while playing musical chairs, Cindy is admonished not to tease people and to be a good winner but both the victim of Cindy's teasing and the loser of the game are both boys. So Cindy concedes to a tie and learns that she has to be mindful of the feelings of boys should they lose to her.

The party appears to proceed swimmingly; the games they play cannot be as fun as the soundtrack makes it out to be even if these were simpler times. What I cannot figure out is how old Cindy, Forrest Gump and co are. Cindy might be as tall as Fairy Amelie but doesn't look as mature and the games change from wholesome cup-chasing to the dreaded spin-the-bottle. We never find out what happened after the bottle twirled to Dennis....

Lots of oral action at this party don't you think? Still, I wonder if this Mary lives with any Parents or Guardians since she is the one passing out cake! I don't think I've attended a b-day party where a child did that and I know that is not the entitled Gen Yer in me saying that.

So the party winds down and Cindy has developed a Stockholm Syndrome-like attachment to her Fairy Godmother. When she finally awakes, there is the Fairy in real life. Apparently, she is actually Mary's sister Nancy and she had forgotten to deliver the invitation 3 days previous. Cindy is ever so thankful and leave open for interpretation why Cindy fantasized about Nancy in the first place. The assumption is that this is Disney magic on the cheap and that Nancy is too busy parking in cars with boys in real life to have ever met her younger sister's tomboy acquaintance. Of course, my version is more interesting as this event serves as the foundation of Cindy's future involvement with the Daughters of Bilitus

Cindy Goes to a Party

Film 101: Intro to American Non-Feature Films

2008-01-31T21:19:00.000-08:00

One of the drawbacks to using Blogger is that you can't write an introduction that won't one day be banished to the netherworld of blogging archives.

I am a Postgraduate with interests that are not at all constructive to my thesis work. So, rather than letting my opinions on gender and ethnicity incrouch on my work in Greek Number Theory, this blog is my happy compromise.

Asides from the kitsch value, I love these films because of what many of them unintentionally reveal about life in the mid-twentieth century. Because, honestly, why would these mental hygiene films be needed if Americans were not "parking in cars with boys" in the first place? Then, on the other hand, there is still the blatant attitudes and confused messages about gender and race that still shock, dismay and amuse as well as error-filled science films distributed by the US Goverment and Educational Film providers.

When it comes to these collections, the impasse is this; we are watching these films out of context but what the original context was is obscure. Poverty is betrayed under visions of prosperity; discontent beneath conformity; ignorance hidden by bright, beeping machines.

Below is a short primer on the archives and figures I am indebted to for their efforts in collecting and making available all of the films that will be presented on this blog.
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Rick Prelinger: Beginning what would come to be the Prelinger Archive in 1982, he set out to preserve films of cultural significance which were not feature films or television shows. At this point, the collection (including what has since been acquired by the Library of Congress) exceeds 60,000 educational, amateur, government, and industrial films.

Skip Elsheimer: A hobby that began more than ten years ago has become a collection of over 20,000 films, a portion of which can be downloaded and viewed around the web, much like The Prelinger Archive films. However, through AV Geeks, Elsheimer also produces DVD collections of films that are not widely or freely available.

The Internet Archive (IA): These people think that your Myspace/BeBo page is a digital artefact. Well, kindof. IA is a non-profit based in San Francisco, Californiaestablished in 1996. Despite all of the information that is available on the web, we are living in a time that may be called a "Digital Dark Age"; as much asinformation is never lost on the web, we are hardly ever shown the means to find that information. The IA, which is recognized as an actual library in the stateof California, provides two types of service. The first, in the form of the Wayback Machine, confronts the problem listed above by keeping snapshot copiesof websites over the years. As of 2006, that collection consisted of 2 petabytes of data. The second service is an archive of digital media, audio, and printfrom all eras. Unlike a regular library, there is no late fees and no returns.

The Prelinger Phile

Cindy Goes To A Party

Film 101: Intro to American Non-Feature Films