Coldplay makes you gay, Chaucer makes you stupid

So I'd agreed to go out with my friend and do whatever she wanted to do last night, but upon finding out it meant being 5th-wheel at a gay club I opted out. Her and the three guys she went with came back and told me that it was too "underground" and "grimy" and basically ended up saying that it looked like the product of an actual subculture and not a place that was trying to look like the product of a subculture. I think I'd much rather find myself in a place that caters to an actual subculture than one that caters with the idea of a subculture to bourgeois people intent on "slumming it." But maybe that's an elitist, "slumming it" attitude to take itself.
Either way, I would've been pretty out of place, though a girl basically told me the other day that I was gay because I told her I liked Coldplay. That's cool; I'm secure enough in my heterosexuality to rep Rush of Blood to the Head 4 lif - Lord knows I listen to gayer music. But you'll never find me repping X&Y. That record's for pussies.

I was going to watch Play Time and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul this weekend but, even after downloading the supposedly all-region VLC Media Player I still can't watch Region 2 DVDs. It's weird because it let me watch Pasolini's Arabian Nights the other week, which you can't get on DVD in America. Why? Maybe because a guy shoots a girl's vagina with a penis-arrow. Or, more likely, because it's long and draggy, the acting's bad and it looks like it was dubbed into Italian by a 5th-grader.



I don't mind the dragginess and all that because over-all, I really love how Pasolini adapts classic texts in a way that is true to the gritty, unsanitised realism of the time they were written. He finds romanticism in the actual grime and dirt of the era, which is really refreshing to me. It feels truer to the stories. He also purely seems to be interested in the stories from the classics that deal with sex, which can be fun when it's done right (The Decameron), disturbing when it's done right (Salo) or just kind of boring (Arabian Nights). Apparently his Canterbury Tales adaptation is nothing to write home about, either, but, after I finish reading it I'm going to rent it (on VHS in the States, unfortunately).
Even if the rest is boring, this scene from Hell is pretty promisingly bonkers:




Thank you, Pierre Paulo Pasolini, Now I've seen it ALL! Wah wah. Ba dum dum.

For similar entertainment of a more painful nature, a bunch of high school English classes put up video adaptations of noted slag "The Wife of Bath's Tale." They're all bizarre, but I'm not going to post them here because I know almost no one else cares. If you're a video masochist like me, though, and you want to see exactly what's wrong with the youth of the nation you might enjoy:

• The version shot in night-vision where a guy tells the young filmmakers that women in the ghetto most desire crack (1:50)
  
• The vulgar Southern students version feat. flying Bush and Kerry heads, armored basebal caps, general misogyny
• The version with a kid beating a girl with a baseball bat for calling him a "silly goose" to "When a Man Loves a Woman."
• The version with a "Hey Ya" dance scene. PS - please go to 1:48 to see mom make an appearance; it's the best part. I'm serious, you won't regret it.
• The version where a girl on a broomstick rapes another girl and literally tears up her "V-card." Also a girl says she desires a man that will let her fart in bed without judging her. Go to 4:35 to see marital discord at it's most harrowing.
  
• Or might I interest you a boy raping a dog in a wig that talks like Betty Boop.

It really just keeps going and going. It's funny how simultaneously amusing and depressing this kind of thing is.
You know what's more depressing? The fact that I have 350 pages of The Way We Live Now to read by Tuesday morning and I spent over half and hour watching films by high school kids. My priorities are all messed up.