Miranda July's Blog, page 8

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Here are some kids activity pages I made for a magazine called Apartamento. Apartamento means "apartment" in the spanish language. A child living in an apartment might get bored, as children everywhere do, and might therefore need an activity to do. Please print out these pages and give them to the bored child immediately, before he gets into any more trouble.

note: this last page was not actually included in the magazine. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and surmise that there was a space issue.

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You will be able to see my favorite movie in June. It's called BEGINNERS; some guy named Mike Mills made it. Between now and then you must prepare yourself, get ready for it, week by week, by reading this blog

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SOME THINGS THAT HAPPENED AT SUNDANCE

My dad lost his glasses.

Our shuttle driver told us he was in a reality show in which he had to run through an obstacle course to win a million dollars. But he couldn't tell us any more about it because he'd signed a confidentiality agreement.

I accidentally squeezed Elizabeth Arden 8-Hour Cream on to my toothbrush.

I paced around a parking lot practicing my introduction, talking into my fist as if it were a microphone.

On the way to the premiere we got stuck in traffic behind a van with the letters MEL on the license plate. MEL MEL MEL MEL MEL.

I stood in the wings and watched John Cooper introduce me to 1200 people. Then I walked onstage.

My legs shook for 91 minutes.

My dad found his glasses.

I posed next to a fake tree for a photograph.

A man in his underwear banged on his hotel window while I was being interviewed outside. When I looked up he pressed his whole body against the glass.

I posed next to a real tree for a photograph.

I listened to a very long, loving description of the movie "The Mill and The Cross."

I watched 15 minutes of the episode of the Simpsons where Homer is wrongly accused of murder and arrested and about to be electrocuted, he's strapped in to the chair, the big switch is thrown, and then…. it turns out to be a reality game show called Frame Up and he's SO relieved, he almost cries with relief. And then he flies home to L.A., over the salt lakes and mountains, goes to bed early, and sleeps better than he has in more than a year.

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This is the ticket you are given after you've seen the movie and before you step back into the world.

(It's useless, but so many things you want are.)

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As it turns out, we can't anticipate the movie premiere every single second of the day. In fact, that's a pretty good way to get a stomach ache. Lets turn instead to some things I didn't have time to show you before.

I wrote a new book! No, just kidding, it's only a book cover. This was part of a series of bookcovers made by artists for Opening Ceremony in celebration of the NY Art Book Fair. You can still get them here. Marcel Dzama and Spike Jonze collaborated on one that involves sleepy penises. I was in a kind of dark place when I made mine, so it's possible you should not use it to cover a high school text book (or the sleepy penises for that matter.) This one is covering Maurice, by E.M. Forster, which just happened to be the exact right size. But is also a really good book.

Spine:

Front:

Back:

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My first car was a white Plymouth Sundance. It cost $800. I didn't know how to drive very well when I bought it, so my friend Julia came with me to do the test drive. The two of us drove around Portland with the middle-aged woman selling it. Julia tested the horn and it worked, but it never worked again after I bought it. We speculated that the middle-aged woman had a horn in her pocket that she squeezed at the exact moment Julia pressed on the steering wheel. In the end I could have bought a new Prius for what I spent fixing that car over the years. But Priuses hadn't been invented yet. Eventually neither of the two doors worked so the only way I could get in was through the trunk, which didn't stay up by itself, so I had to lift it all the way up and then dive in before it slammed shut. When winter hit it was covered in snow and I could barely lift it, I had to kind of flatten myself and roll in sideways. This finally got to be too much for Julia and even though she didn't have any money either, she paid $300 and had the doors fixed. That $300 still seems like the largest amount of money anyone has ever spent. All this comes to mind because I've been thinking about another Sundance, not the car but the film festival. My new movie, The Future, will premiere there on Friday January 21st at 6:15pm. Please come.

If you live in Berlin or thereabouts, please come to the european premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, in February.

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I know I was already kind of a questionable website-updater, so I'm pretty sure not posting any news for more than six months sent me right over the edge. What could a person possibly be doing that wouldn't allow them even tiny little second to write a post? What? What could it be? Here are the options that I can think of:

a) Hostage situation where person is tied up with ropes.

b) Person falls down and gets paralyzed and can't figure out how to write with eyeball like Diving Bell and Butterfly.

c) Person has on the kind of mittens on that bunch all the fingers together in one pouch and thumb in another, for six months.

d) Person is finishing her movie and so has to step away from the world in order to be sure she gets it right, and when she's done, she comes back again, oh look here she comes, hobbling over the hill, wearing a sweater we've never before, she doesn't see us, now she sees us, she smiles, almost shouts, and runs the rest of the way down the hill, as she nears we can see there's something different about her, maybe it's just the sweater, we're smiling too, and running towards her, we come together, hugging, then apart - looking at each other - then hugging again, just like in the movies. 'we have so much to talk about!', she says, and then 'did you cut your hair?'

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Planning on posing this summer? A little recreational posing? Why not do it with the support of props designed just for this purpose. It might be a relief to have a some help in this department, after years of free-form (and let's face it, often inaccurate) posing. For your convenience, eleven professional props will be installed in Union Square Park in New York, all summer. If you fill a little posing coming on, hurry over.

Eleven Heavy Things
Miranda July
May 29 - October 3, 2010
Center Lawn, ...

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I'm sure you have read about Carl Jung's Red Book. Jung (who invented Jungian psychology) wrote it 100 years ago, but think of it less like a book and more like your diary during the part of your life when you were going through such darkness you thought it would never end. Remember that?! You wrote in your diary a lot during that time because on some level you knew that each demon, each nightmare you survived was transforming you in a way that would always matter. The book is about how Jung ...

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Does Everyone Know About Crap Hound?

It's a magazine made by Sean Tejaratchi. Each page of each issue is filled with high-contrast, public-domain images on a theme, like, for example, sex, or death, or telphones, or scissors. Sean's home is filled with intricate file systems of all his amazing original source materials - ancient catalogs, obscure books, found things, etc . This stuff isn't on the web; craphound both pre-dates and post-dates the internet. It's larger and more profound than...