wheres the cheese?

I just watched Throwdown with Bobby Flay and he competed against some champ in Georgia. They made shrimp and grits. Now I'm hungry.

Tbc

earth hour in 10 minutes. i'm probably going to reread twilight amongst a plethora of candles.
all my friends have returned to their respective schools. i'm bored, lonely, and probably going to go watch monsters vs. aliens by myself. HAHA.

Breathe in, Breath out

I was at the gas station when the 5+ cop cars sped by. It's pretty rare that this town gets that much action and I didn't even consider...

RIP Connie...one of the sweetest gents I've ever met here in Union City.

Hunger by Steve McQueen

This trailer kinda sucks because of the visible quality, but you actually get an idea of what the film is about.


Here's the OFFICIAL trailer (with bragging rights), beautiful clarity and close ups

MNM's

I swear, I love L and M. My soul sistaaahs!

A: "omg, being single is so fun, even if i've only been talking to girls"
M: "WHAT?!"
L: "HAHAHA"
A: "what?"
L: "HAHAHA"


What's brown and rhymes with Snoop?
Dr. Dre!

SpringtimeB

I am finally done with school. Hoorah! Finally going to hang out with my MNM's...I can't believe L already has to go back to school on Saturday and I haven't gone on my real vacation yet!

I have no idea what I'm going to do once I grad this September. My initial idea was to go to Ohlone but I can't bc I graduate two weeks after the Fall semester starts. I guess I can do the makeup program at Kryolan for a bit. Maybe find some work...haha.

Tonight, causing ruckus with T. Tomorrow, lunch with MNM and watching Tokyo! at the Lumiere with R and co.This weekend, possibly zip-lining in Reno or bbq with S. Once I get home I need to post the trailer for this film "Hunger", about the last 6 weeks of Bobby Sands and the hunger strike in Ireland. Stunning cinematography. That's what happens when an artist turns over to film. Steve McQueen is the man; his directorial debut as well.

K I'm in UC now, bye!

I just have one more effing dreadful day of school...I've been sitting here for 4 hours trying to magically conjure a bull essay. There's too many things running through my head.

I had a wonderful time seeing all my family and friends in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It's absurd that TWICE already our little family reunions happened due to funerals. My dad said that Uncle Don and Rodney brought us all together in the first place. So many people were happy to see my dad. So many people said to me, "I remember seeing you when you were this big". I'm still in shock, you see, when I went to L.A., I could come home and Union City would all be the same. Union City was my rock. My dad's hometown was my second rock. I would visit once every 2-3 years and things would stay the same. The faces grew older but the memories stayed the same; I nearly forgot about death. I'm really sad that my dad lost his second father and one of the biggest parts of his childhood, but he's not sad himself. Just like when my cousin Rodney passed away he explained, "he wouldn't want your tears." Just be happy.

Being single is really weird. I've become a little reckless. I've been trying to supplement my happiness with actions that are out-of-the-ordinary. Being single is supposed to fun and a time for self-growth and awareness but I felt like I did that and more even when in a relationship. This other thing has been stifled and swept under the rug for nearly 7+ years and it still makes me feel so alive and so nervous. Everyone I care about would be involved in this; it's not something I can hide and keep to myself. Where will this go...I'll never know but for now I'll enjoy the ride. 

love more

It's all over now. Time flies so fast...lives change just as fast...people pass on just as fast.I hope to spend as much time with all my family and friends and love them as much as I can for as long as I can.

And so...life continues on. Last time reminiscing and sharing stories at Uncle Don's house, caught up with my Filipino grandparents and now I'm on my way to New Jersey to see my Italian family :) We're going to have a serious feast. Mangia mangia!!!

Philly Day 1

Right when we got off the plane my uncle picked up my parents and I from the airport and we headed to Uncle Don's wake. It's heartwarming to see how many people were excited to see my dad fly in "all the way from California". The entire neighborhood showed up for Uncle Don and like Mr. Atkinson said (twice, he's 87 with bad memory)"Blondo (Uncle Don) was just like my wife; he had no enemies. Now he will get to see her Upstairs."

Mr. Atkinson was a very kind man that lived in Willow Grove. My dad would often go to his house for dinner because of its 24/7 abundance of food; him and his wife had plenty of kids and mouths to feed. He truly loved his wife right til the very end. You can still feel how much he loves her to this day; the topic of his repetitive stories due to his bad memory often revolve around her. Two years ago, before she passed he told me how they met and he said, "Darling, how old are you now? 21?" (She was really 70-something)

Uncle Don was an amazing guy.He was in the Peace Corps and went to Thailand for 2 years which was how he met my uncle and dad. Back in Willow Grove his house was the kick-it spot; every kid in the neighborhood could be found at his house. Dad and his old friends shared stories of hosing down the bridge across the street and watching speeding cars slip and slide, making homemade bottle bombs which exploded and shattered every window of Uncle Don's garage...

I only just saw him like, 3 years ago and he was healthy as a horse. Time flies...tomorrow is his actual funeral and I hope I don't cry. I've become such a weeper!

Less SEX I want more clothes!!!! I don't know what to think about this trailer, esp. because I can't understand it. No English subtitles yet...I told my mom I needed to take French for a reason.

 

As much as I want to see this film (which doesn't come out until effing July), I've come to understand that I will never have another boyfriend until I am as gorgeous, quirky, and cool as Zooey Deschanel.

FAIL.

Freedom Tease

I just got out of my Collection Development class yee! My teacher was kind enough to bump my fully-lined jacket to an A-. Yesss...

I finally have time to clean up the house AND my bedroom! Nastaay. Really my room is just littered with articles of clothing but just recently I've noticed a funkay smell. Gross right?

I also must pack for Philly!

My classmate has access to a MAC PRO card thru her mom so I just ordered some makeup! Hah not really, I got a brush belt, 15 color palatte, and two colors.I think I'll order more since my tax returns are coming soon :)I also wrote to MAC to include FIDM as an eligible school in their Student Program so we can get 20 percent off :) yummay

Man, such a heavy weight gets lifted off my shoulders once the toughest part of finals ends.Happiness!

Moving On

I think I owned my Dadaism project; described the absence of women on Wall Street, related it to a whisk, and tossed it in the trash once class got out. =)

Gossip Girl was truly amazing today. No obvious clashing of colors...it was pure CLASSINESS. Because today's episode revolved around a play, the gowns were especially gorgeous and because the school is loaded with $$$, the set design was gorgeous as well. I really thought I could give up tv but right now I'm hooked on Gossip Girl, Mark and Olly: Living with the Machigenga, and Dhani Tackles the Globe. Dhani is HILARIOUS! He kicked off his show with a trip to Thailand where he participated in Muay Thai match, played soccer with elephants, rode a Tuk Tuk "They don't even pick up black people here!", walked through the Red Light District "I think that was a lady boy!" Really fun show.

Friends, no matter how effing far away they are from Union City, still make me smile. =) 

M: Castle's on!
M: you're 2nd priority now

A: youre lucky you im'd me after gossip girl

K, GG pictures. =)

To Be Apart

People say your life is over when you get married.

I think mine ended when you left.

Blogger happy trip

I don't think I had a conversation with any human being today that lasted over 5 minutes in its entirety which is why I'm blogging myself to death. My mom had dad. My sister had her soon-to-be-new-boyfriend. My grandma had her Thai soap operas. And Nikko has Ryan.

I went and did some homework at the Fremont library today. I love it. Union City's is sooo old and ancient. I don't mind the drive either because A.) Thrift Town is in the area and B.) Gas is down to $1.99 there as opposed to $2.05 here.

I checked out 7 Criterion Collection films from the library, after getting myself a new card. The computer system actually had my old information from like..1997(?) so my new card counted as a "renewal" and I had to pay a dollar. 

The DVD collection isn't very impressive. There's a substantial amount of Criterions which was indeed very impressive, a handful of films I've actually heard of, and random others that I haven't. The loan period is one week and there's no dvd limit, but seriously, how many dvd's could you possible watch and mentally process in a week? I was surprised that they had an entire row on the shelf dedicated to Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (ancient show with Jane Seymore) on dvd. First, I had no idea that people would continue to watch the show once it stopped airing on tv which was most definitely before the invention of dvd's, nor did I think any sort of production company would go through all the effort and money spent to reproduce all seasons of Dr. Quinn on dvd. You would think that they would at least have Sailor Moon on dvd. Even Spice World was reserved on VHS. Balls.

Today I watched Short Cuts (1993) by Robert Altman. Amaaaazing film. Over 20 featured characters sooo well-developed that you don't get confused/mixed up. Naturalistic acting set in a dull, suburban Los Angeles. Some films with 4 or 5 characters you get jumbled so this is character developement at its best. Very young and handsome Robert Downey Jr. as a cinematic makeup student, Julianne Moore as a painter, Jennifer Jason Leigh as a young mom/phone sex prostitute (she was amazing, if I was any sort of actress I could NEVER play her part seriously), and my ultimate favorite was Annie Ross as the moody, smooth-talkin' Jazz Club singer. My two favorite lines came from her character.

"I hate LA. All they do is snort coke and talk."
I kinda have to improvise this one, I forgot...
"This song is dedicated to the man that lost his mind through the little hole in his arm."

P.S. I went to Thrift Town and bought this chair for $20. It's pretty clean, just dusty. It's giving me allergies.

I used to get GQ's for free from FIDM LA's scholarship store...boo..not anymore.

Robert Effing Pattinson for GQ!

HE’S HOT, HE’S SEXY, HE’S UNDEAD
Two years ago, Robert Pattinson was a forgotten extra in a ‘Harry Potter’ movie. Then he got cast as a blue-balled vampire in ‘Twilight,’ the year’s kazillion-dollar movie franchise, and every woman in America over 14 wants him. Too bad he’s not sure he wants them
It’s December; Twilight, in which Pattinson, 22, plays an adorably tortured perma-teenage vampire too principled to drink human blood, has been in theaters for about a month. Long enough for it to gross more than $150 million, long enough for the studio to pull the trigger on the first of three potential sequels by replacing director Catherine Hardwicke with one of the guys responsible for the American Pie franchise, not long enough for Pattinson to grasp what any of these developments mean for him, or the importance of dissembling in the presence of reporters.

He slides into his chair, dressed all in black, with a weeks-old beard, hair crammed under a wool cap, looking like Justin Timberlake researching an off-Broadway turn as Terry Malloy. His clothes smell like he has recently purchased them off the back of someone less fortunate than he. He’s just come from a big-time meeting with a director and can’t wait to tell us how weird it was. Some guy offering him a part, maybe, in a movie so double top secret he couldn’t tell Pattinson what it was about. “He wouldn’t say anything,” Pattinson says, “and he also wouldn’t leave,” so Pattinson sat there and talked about himself for three hours and drank enough coffee to make a rhino’s heart explode.

“God, I don’t remember the last time I ate,” Pattinson says.

In a vampire movie, he’d have said this with a suggestive eyebrow-wiggle, and then they’d cut to our pallid corpse tumbling out of a Dumpster. Stupid journalist. Instead, Pattinson goes on, filling dead air. He explains that the place he’s staying at in L.A. has a microwave, and that he’s never had a microwave before, and that he spends a lot of time looking for new things you can microwave. Those frozen cheeseburgers, from the store. A carrot. Did we mention that he’s had about nineteen cups of coffee? He asks the waiter about the soup. It’s chicken vegetable. He orders a Coke.

*****

HERE IS WHAT Pattinson says about getting the part of Edward the vampire in Twilight:

“I took half a Valium and then went into this thing—and all this stuff happened.”

Okay—to be fair, that’s not all he tells us. He was on the verge of quitting acting, he says. He’d followed up what was, back then, the biggest role of his career—in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, as Cedric Diggory, sort of the haughty blond Iceman to Harry’s Maverick—by getting fired from a play in London, where he grew up. He was in Los Angeles, crashing on his agent’s couch, looking for an American job.

That’s all Twilight was to Pattinson, at first: an American job. He didn’t know about the cult, about the fans who’d followed Edward and Bella, his perpetually imperiled mortal lady friend, from the first book—which turned author Stephenie Meyer, a Mormon stay-at-home mom from Arizona, into the biggest publishing-industry phenomenon since Potter’s J. K. Rowling—through three increasingly thick-as-a-brick sequels. He didn’t know that as soon as the movie adaptation was announced, those Twilight fans—about 98.999 percent female and 100 percent fervent—started burning up Internet message boards with deeply felt opinions about which actors were right (and wrong, wrong, wr0ng!!!!) for the male lead. All he knew was that he couldn’t remember how to do an American accent. He was freaking out. Hence the pill.

“It was the first time I’ve ever taken Valium,” he says after a second, perhaps realizing how this sounds. “A quarter. A quarter of a Valium. I tried to do it for another audition, and it just completely backfired—I was passing out.” (Don’t do drugs, kids.)

He auditioned in Hardwicke’s bedroom; Hardwicke videotaped him and Stewart performing one of the movie’s big love scenes. By then, Hardwicke had already met with hundreds of potential Edwards. “I’d seen a zillion really cute guys,” she says. “But that was the problem. They all looked like the super-cute kid in your high school. The prom king, or the captain of the football team. They didn’t look like they were from another world and time.”

They did the scene. There was a vibe. Hardwicke waited a day to decide—“No matter how much I fall in love with the person, I make myself review the tape, to make sure I wasn’t just overwhelmed by something in the air”—but says Stewart told her, right there in the room, “It has to be Rob.”

“Everybody came in doing something empty and shallow and thoughtless,” Stewart says. “I know that’s a fucking great thing to say about all the other actors—but Rob understood that it wasn’t a frivolous role.”

Hardwicke still had to convince Summit Entertainment, the studio bankrolling Twilight, that Pattinson was the guy.

“There was a call from the head of the studio,” Hardwicke says. “ ‘Are you sure you can make this guy handsome?’ ”

They sent him to a trainer, dyed his hair and cut it. Pattinson immersed himself in the lore—the novels and Midnight Sun, Meyer’s unpublished, unfinished retelling of Twilight from Edward’s point of view. (“I was a vampire, and she had the sweetest blood I’d smelled in eighty years.”) He showed up to shoot the movie with a lot of ideas about how it could be more than a horror-tinged tween romance. How Edward could be less like the turtlenecked Prince Charming from the novels—“If you met a guy like that in real life,” he says, “you’d think he was kind of dorky”—and more like the edgy dude burning himself with cigarettes in the corner at the high school party. Less hottie, more monster. He thought that at the end of the movie, when Edward and Bella slow-dance to Iron & Wine on prom night, they shouldn’t kiss. “I thought that would be interesting,” he says, “for a teen thing.”

In the books, Edward refuses to go all the way with Bella, fearing he’ll vamp out in the heat of passion, but because he’s a 107-year-old vampire, he’s got seduction game like no 17-year-old alive. The story fuses the bodice-ripping True Love Never Dies sensuality of the vampire mythos with the True Love Waits ethos of Bush-era abstinence education; it’s a heavy-breathing romance in which all physical affection represents a slippery slope to horrible undeath.

The movie amps up the lust. Bella and Edward’s relationship plays out like a goth remix of Splendor in the Grass, and Pattinson seethes like Warren Beatty driven—forgive us—batshit by a hundred-year case of blue balls.

Twilight got mixed reviews but opened huge anyway, pulling down $70 million in three days. By then the screaming had started. Girls who’d been in love with Edward on the page suddenly had a real-live human to focus their passion on. The cast’s public appearances occasioned Hard Day’s Night hysteria. In London, Pattinson’s friends watched in horror as the crowd swallowed him. At a mall in San Francisco, Pattinson was supposed to sign autographs for about 500 fans at a Hot Topic store; a few thousand showed up. Pattinson claims not to remember the chaos that resulted, although he says it in a shaky voice, like someone claiming not to remember shit that went down in Nam.

Pattinson says he’s always been hypersensitive about being looked at, that when he was a kid and somebody’d make eye contact with him on the bus or something, he’d freak out. He’s one of those tall people who hunch, trying to disappear. Then all this stuff happened. He wasn’t ready. His first thought, whenever he finds himself in one of these crowds, is always, Someone could very easily stab me.

*****

HE ISN’T COMPLAINING. We don’t want to make it sound like he’s complaining. But he can feel all of it making him crazy. It’s like being a fugitive in your own backyard. The other day, he went out, shook off three paparazzi-mobiles, hit the drive-thru at the In-N-Out. He was going to eat a burger in the car. He drove around and found a gas-station parking lot a few blocks away, intending to sit there and eat, “just hidden, in the darkness.

“And I turn around,” he says, “and in the car next to me, there’s a woman giving a man a blow job! Right there, in the car park!”

This is what this kind of attention does to you; to do the things that normal people do, you have to go where normal people go to do furtive things.

Somebody got pictures of him anyway. Hidden in the darkness! Like some kind of Hamburglar!

He tries not to go out if he can avoid it. Stays home, watches movies, microwaves. Mostly, though, he reads about himself on the Internet. According to the Internet, there is another Robert Pattinson out there, living a very different life. A creature of the night, eager to sink his fangs into anything with boobs and a pulse. All bullshit, Pattinson says, but he reads the stories anyway, out of a kind of masochistic narcissism.

And he admits to reading it, which is the really weird part. He reads the gossip blogs and the Twilight fan fiction (“It’s surprisingly hard-core. And very well written”). He knows what the fake Robert Pattinson said on the fake Robert Pattinson Facebook page. (The fake Robert Pattinson claimed to have nailed Kristen Stewart. The fake Robert Pattinson was kind of like Chuck Bass, if Chuck Bass were uncouth enough to trumpet his conquests on somebody’s Wall.)

Part of the problem is that gossip abhors a vacuum, and for all intents and purposes, Pattinson didn’t exist as a public figure until he was cast in Twilight; his celebrity is a movie tie-in product, like the Edward action figure or Twilight, the perfume (smells like “lavender and freesia”—as for what freesia smells like, you’re on your own).

For what it’s worth: He grew up in London. His mom worked for a modeling agency, his dad was a luxury-car importer. He did some modeling as a kid, some amateur theater, some British TV, took a break from a fancy prep school to do Harry Potter. There’s so little to know about him that everything he says now becomes hyperimportant, data to be gospelized. A reporter asks him something stupid about his hair, he makes a dumb joke about never washing it, and suddenly his clip file grows fat with stories about his deplorable personal hygiene. Sometimes he doesn’t even have to say anything. People make stuff up.

“There’s literally not a single [true] story that could be written about me,” he says. “I never do anything.”

We ask him to cite an example of something untrue that’s been written about him.

“There’s this thing about my supposed girlfriend,” he says. “There’s this one girl who’s consistently mentioned. It’s like, ‘He’s dating this Brazilian model.’ ”

Go on.

“Yes,” he says. “What’s her name—Annelyse. I’ve never met her.”

Annelyse’s last name is Schoenberger; after she was spotted with Pattinson at a Kings of Leon concert last October, aggrieved R-Patts fans accused her, on the Internet, of having an “alien face.”

But c’mon, we say to Pattinson. We ask you to deny something and you give us the Brazilian model? That’s the celebrity-relationship-denial equivalent of claiming you have a girlfriend in Canada. Did you really propose to Kristen Stewart every day while shooting Twilight?

“I said that in some interview, as a joke—‘Oh, I proposed to her multiple times.’ And then it gets printed: ‘On the set, he proposed multiple times.’ ”

(Later we ask Stewart about this: “He probably proposes to several girls a day,” she says, bone-drily. “It’s sort of his thing. He thinks it’s cute.”)

Okay. What about the love triangle between you, Camilla Belle, and Joe Jonas from the Jonas Brothers?

“That’s the funniest one,” Pattinson says. “No. I mean, yeah, yeah, I’m friends with Camilla.”

He starts to explain how Belle, best known for playing a cavegirl in 10,000 BC, dated, or is supposed to have once dated—we have trouble following the thread—his friend, an actor named Tom Sturridge. So you’re supposed to have stolen her from your best friend, we ask, before you stole her from the other dude?

“From the Jonas brother, yeah,” Pattinson says. “I’m completely out of control. It’s funny, though, because I met her at her place the other day, and there’s a security gate, and even the security woman—I guess she knows that Camilla lives there, and she was like, ‘Oooh!’ ”

Okay, we say. So you’re picking her up at her apartment?

“Like, once,” he says. “But it’s like—they always say ‘A source said,’ and I don’t know a single person that could be a source.”

But we’ve seen pictures. You guys were walking in Venice Beach, after lunch.

“That’s the extent of it,” Pattinson says. “I mean, Camilla’s the nicest—she’s a saint. And it’s funny that she’s being portrayed as this home wrecker. She’s literally the most unlikely person to be a home wrecker. It’s just ridiculous.”

So it’s a friendship, we ask him, that’s been misinterpreted?

“I mean—yeah,” he says. “I don’t see people. I don’t even have people’s phone numbers. I almost don’t want to have a girlfriend, in this environment.”

This is maybe the most poorly executed denial we’ve ever heard. This is, in fact, how we would deny dating Camilla Belle if we wanted as many people as possible to believe that we were totally hitting that, while still coming off as an untruthful person. Either Pattinson can’t lie, or he can’t lie very well.

It’s funny, because Pattinson worships Jack Nicholson, who’s legendary for giving interviewers less than the time of day. And he loves Brando, citing a YouTube clip of the actor giving a characteristically performance-arty and uncooperative press conference in the mid-'60s. Brando could do that, of course, because he was Marlon fucking Brando. Brando could show up, burp the alphabet in front of a couple of Associated Press guys, and catch the next plane back to Tahiti. Pattinson understands that this isn’t an option for him.

“The only way to establish any kind of mystique,” he says, “is to completely shut up and never talk to anyone. And I’m contractually obligated not to shut up.”

*****

PATTINSON HASN’T SHOT anything new since Twilight wrapped. He won’t be in front of the camera again until this spring, when he starts shooting the next Twilight movie, New Moon, due out in November. But in the meantime, he’ll show up as young Salvador Dalí in a period drama called Little Ashes, about the pre-fame bromance between Dalí, director Luis Buñuel, and poet Federico García Lorca.

Pattinson auditioned for the movie two years ago, during a post–Harry Potter, pre-Twilight career lull. He’d been thinking about putting acting aside to focus on music. (Two of his songs, including the Jeff Buckley–ish ballad “Never Think,” appear on the Twilight soundtrack.)

He’d read for the Lorca part, but when they asked him to play Dalí, he said yes. “I wanted to have a vacation in Spain,” he says. “But it became just—really, really hard. I’d never done a job that was so hard.”

There was no budget. Most of the crew spoke Spanish; Pattinson didn’t. He spent a lot of time by himself, trying to figure out how to play the part, worried he’d look like an idiot. (For what it’s worth, all that effort is up there on the screen. Pattinson’s Dalí starts out as a walleyed, puffy-shirted Simple Jack type before morphing into the twirly-mustachioed culture-hero Dalí of dorm-room-poster fame. It’s one of those movies in which you can tell Dalí’s having an aesthetic breakthrough because he starts pressing really hard when he paints.)

“In a lot of ways,” Pattinson says, “I was kind of crossing lines of what I thought I was comfortable doing. I had to do all this naked stuff.”

See, Little Ashes contains a fair amount of homoerotic activity, some of which is portrayed artfully and obliquely (Dalí and Lorca dive together in a moonlit sea) and some of which is, y’know, not (Lorca makes athletic, spiteful love to a woman while Dalí masturbates gloomily in a corner). It’s the kind of project you could imagine a guy in Pattinson’s place taking on post-Twilight as a way of telling the world he’s versatile and/or fearless. Except it wasn’t.

“I thought I’d never get another acting job again,” Pattinson says. “So I was like, ‘Yeah—why not try to do something weird?’ There’s all these gay sex scenes. And y’know, I haven’t even done a sex scene with a girl, in my whole career.”

(While he says this, he’s pinching the skin on the back of his left hand and sort of twisting it clockwise with his right.)

“And here I am, with Javier [Beltrán], who plays Lorca, doing an extremely hard-core sex scene, where I have a nervous breakdown afterward. And because we’re both straight, what we were doing seemed kind of ridiculous.”

(Now he’s sort of laughing.)

“Trying to do it doggie-style. Trying to have a nervous breakdown while doing it doggie-style. And it wasn’t even a closed set. There were all these Spanish electricians giggling to themselves.”

He’s pretty sure the only reason Little Ashes is getting any kind of promotional push is that he’s in it.

“It’s nothing,” he says. “It would never have been released. I mean, that’s a terrible thing to say, but this was a movie where we didn’t even have stand-ins! We were scrambling, the entire time. We didn’t even have trailers.”

He hasn’t actually seen the finished film. He says he hasn’t seen any movie he’s been in since the Potter movies—not even Twilight. He took his mom to the American Twilight premiere, squirmed through the first ten minutes, then bolted. “I went out and sat in the car,” he says, “having a full-blown panic attack.” Ten minutes in, he looked up and realized someone was videotaping him.

He doesn’t want to watch himself on film because he’s worried he’ll look like a fraud. Even before he started acting, he says, “I was constantly thinking that I was faking my emotions. I was constantly attacking myself: You’re a fake, you’re a fraud.”

“I remember when I was a teenager thinking my girlfriend was cheating on me, and going around riling myself up. Pretending to cry. It was totally illegitimate—I actually didn’t feel anything. I went to some pub and then went crying all the way home. And I got into my dog’s bed. I was crying and holding on to the dog. I woke up in the morning, and the dog was looking at me like, ‘You’re a fake.’ ”

Was she actually cheating on you?

“No,” Pattinson says, laughing. “I thought I’d seen her with another guy, but she wasn’t even there. I spent three days apologizing to the dog.”

*****

THEN THERE ARE GIRLS, interrupting. Two of them—young, dark-haired, apologetic yet googly-eyed—approach the table to ask for an autograph. One of them hands him a Victoria’s Secret shopping bag to sign.

“Victoria’s Secret!” he says, brow arched. “What did you get?”

“I work there!” the girl says.

Pattinson asks whom he should make the autograph out to.

“Well,” the girl says, indicating her friend, “it’s her bag, so—Patty. Her name’s Patty.”

Patty’s bag is made out of that stiff, slippery, possibly-suitable-for-use-as-heat-shield-tiling-on-the-Space-Shuttle shopping-bag paper, and Pattinson can’t make a mark on it. Realizing there’s a crisis, Patty—who’s been sort of hanging back—steps up, suddenly emboldened, and says, “I have another pen. The movie was really good.”

“And you look just like you do on film,” the first girl says. “Which is a compliment. Because some people don’t. Like, Heidi Klum comes into our store all the time—”

“She looks different,” Patty says.

“She looks different,” the first girl says, then adds, softly, dreamily, “You look exactly the same.”

“Really?” Pattinson says, frowning. “People always say the opposite. What’s your name, sorry?”

“My name’s Eva,” the girl says. “E-V-A.”

“I always thought I could hide,” he says. He poses for a couple of pictures with the girls. The wallpaper on Patty’s cameraphone is a picture of Pattinson as Edward.

“Did you have that on there before?” Pattinson says. “That’s hilarious.”

*****

PATTINSON DOESN’T KNOW what his first real post-Twilight project is going to be. When we ask him about Parts Per Billion, an indie drama he was supposed to star in with Dennis Hopper and Rosario Dawson, he says he doesn’t know, that the start date kept moving—“That’s the annoying thing about doing little films”—and sure enough, a couple of weeks after we talk, it is announced that he’s dropping out of the movie to focus on prepping for the Twilight sequel, New Moon, about which he knows very little, because he’s “never told shit about anything.”

“I’m completely in the dark,” he says. “No one will even give me the script.”

They’re keeping you in a box.

“Yes,” Pattinson says. He mimes opening the lid of a coffin. “Shut up, Edward!”

He has a hard time even thinking of New Moon as a sequel, because it’s so unlike the first book. “I don’t know how they’re going to make a movie out of it,” he says, “because Twilight’s a love story, and New Moon is just—Bella’s manic-depressive throughout the entire book. There’s very, very little happiness, and there’s nothing teen-y about it.”

This may be the best-case scenario, that the Twilight movies will get darker and Pattinson will have a chance to throw some real heat, performance-wise. Hardwicke says that back on the Twilight set, before the movie’s franchise future was a sure thing, she and Pattinson “talked about a lot of other projects. He’s obviously ridiculously photogenic, but he’s also so talented and has so much insight. I see him creating stylized, odd, wild, fantastical characters, like what Johnny Depp does.”

Which would be great. But the worst-case scenario is that after four vampire movies—or, depending on how they carve up the 754-page behemoth that is Breaking Dawn, the last book in the series, five—no one will ever take him seriously as a mortal. There’s a chance that Twilight will go down as his 21 Jump Street, and there’s a chance he’ll be doomed to stalk the Twilight-convention circuit forever like some undead Mark Hamill, signing pictures of his 22-year-old self for an endless line of Pattys and Evas grown plump with age. We try to gently raise this issue by asking him if he’s got a post-Twilight game plan. He talks about starting a production company, maybe putting out his musician friends’ records. We note that he hasn’t mentioned any goals that involve acting.

“I’m not massively concerned about doing lots of acting jobs,” he says. “If it all just went, right now, I’d be like, ‘All right. I don’t really care.’ That’s probably a stupid thing to say. But I don’t, really. I think it’d be much worse to do a load of stuff that’s really bad. Because then you can’t go into another career. If you’ve made an idiot out of yourself, you’re never going to be taken seriously, as a lawyer or something, if you’re, like, a joke actor. The only thing I want from anything is to not be embarrassed.”

Still, we say. You didn’t talk about your acting. We totally gave you the window to James Lipton it up. (Or to try to convince us that you’re More Than Just the Sexy Vampire, we think but don’t say.)

“I literally have nothing to say,” he says. “So I don’t think, Oh, I wish they’d asked me about my craft instead of my hair.”

Is there anything you wish you’d gotten to talk about in this interview?

“Okay,” he says. Deep breath. “I fucked Joe Jonas.”

We knew it!

“I love him.”

*****

Maybe he’s lying when he talks about the future, when he acts like he doesn’t care. But maybe he really isn’t massively concerned about what he’s going to do. If you don’t commit to a goal, you don’t have to worry about what you’re doing, or not doing, to make it come true. About what having your name on four or five vampire movies will do to keep you from getting there. About the choices you’re making and the ones you’re letting time and inertia and other people make for you. Maybe hanging back and reading about your life in the tabloids is less scary than committing, at 22, to something that might turn out to be beyond you. Or maybe he really does think about becoming a lawyer. Who knows.

Pattinson checks his phone. He has no new messages.

“Not a single person calls me,” he says. Not long ago, he says, he turned on his English cell phone for the first time in six months; he had two missed calls, from giggling teenage girls asking to speak with Edward.

We ask him what he has on tap for tonight; he mumbles something about “somebody’s birthday,” then talks about the social circle he’s developed in this city. “It’s so weird,” he says. “It’s like, ‘You were just my L.A. friend. I didn’t intend to have any responsibility for you whatsoever.’ ”

(“Somebody’s birthday,” incidentally, turns out to be a quasi-star-studded dinner at Il Sole on Sunset Boulevard; “L.A. friends” in attendance include girl-kissing pop temptress Katy Perry.)

Pattinson offers us a ride to our hotel. As we’re getting up to leave, he glances out the window behind him. “Well,” he says, “you’ll be encountering the other end of it now.”

Pardon?

“The 14-year-old paparazzo is outside,” Pattinson says.

Sure enough—when we get outside, there’s this kid, a scowling Dennis the Menace type in baggy jeans, blasting away with a giant camera.

“You look really young,” Pattinson says to the kid, who’s backing out into oncoming traffic, still shooting. “How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” the kid says. He looks 14. The moment couldn’t be more Felliniesque unless we were being pap'd by a dwarf in a loincloth. For a moment, following Pattinson across the street to his car, we recoil, trying to hide in our sweatshirt hood; then we remember that we’re nobody, that the kid could not give less of a crap about us, that if we walk away from Pattinson, out of the kid’s field of vision, he’ll leave us alone. We imagine what it would be like if this were our life, all the time. It would drive us mad, and we would probably live in fear of it ever stopping, because of what that would mean.

A few days later, the pictures show up on the Internet. It is breathlessly reported that Pattinson was enjoying a late-night snack (it was actually about six o’clock) with a “mystery male” (us) on Thursday (it was Wednesday). We’re in a few of the pictures with him. Pattinson looks goofy, possibly stoned, but still handsome, whereas we look sweaty, guilty, and possibly inbred.

We make it to the car and speed off. Pattinson’s old ’89 BMW finally died a few weeks ago, so he’s been driving this rented Audi S4. It’s a total junior-Endeavor-agent-on-the-make ride. We point this out. “I think my agent does have this car, actually,” Pattinson says. Before we’ve gone fifty feet, the windshield steams up and Pattinson can’t see a damn thing. He hasn’t driven the car on a cold day before, and he doesn’t know where the defogger button is.

He turns on the heat—“That’s supposed to do something, right?”—and then merges into traffic, still blind, cursing his way into the left lane. “I think I’m better off on Melrose, because there aren’t any pedestrian crossings,” he says. “You’re going to regret accepting this lift.”

Then he hits another button. Success. The windshield starts to clear and at last Pattinson can see where he’s going.

I don’t feel the suns comin’ out today
It’s staying in, it’s gonna find another way.
As I sit here in this misery,
I don’t think I’ll ever (no Lord) see the sun from here.
And oh as I fade away,
They’ll all look at me and say, and they’ll say,
“Hey look at him! I’ll never live that way.”
But that’s okay, they’re just afraid to change.
And when you feel life ain’t worth living
You’ve got to stand up and
Take a look around you look up way to the sky.
And when your deepest thoughts are broken,
Keep on dreaming boy, cause when you stop dreamin’ it’s time to die.
And as we all play parts of tomorrow,
some ways we’ll work and other ways we’ll play.
But I know we can’t all stay here forever,
So I want to write my words on the face of today.
And then they’ll paint it
And oh as I fade away,
They’ll all look at me and say, they’ll say,
“Hey look at him and where he is these days.”
When life is hard, you have to change.

- Blind Melon, Change

Really tired. 

I had 3 hours of sleep last night, woke up at 6am, caught BART at 6:45, had class from 8:30 to 2:45, got home, and now it's finally hit me how tired I am. 

In class my paper-bag waist skirt was a hit, which was extremely fortunate because my pants bombed. Haha, they fit me, they don't fit the dress form. It's stupid. What kind of person that wears size 12 (the dress form) that would have thighs that DON'T touch?!?! It's alien.

I WILL NOT SLEEP. I wrote out a plan of what I need to accomplish today =)

2 out of 4 pages of my Dada paper

Complete my art notebook

2 out 4 pages of my SFMOMA paper

Cut out all my blouse pattern pieces on muslin.

Let's see how far I get!

Oh, and my Juno van makes funky noises like when I'm at a red light there's some sort of sputtering noise, as if the poor car is gasping for air. It's terrifying. I just turn up my music extra loud so I can't hear how terribly broken the car is.

non scents.

Albino peacock feathers! Gorge!

I love ballet pink and black.

This is so "townie" but gotta rep the good cause. I look like fat lard.

How adorable is this? This is the origin of Uggs. Jk.

And itty bitty Frida.

And hooowwww tragic would this be?!?! I would die in an America without burritos.

RIP

Martha Stewart's chow chow, Genghis Khan was killed in a freak propane accident. RIP cutie. 

Here I Go Again

How many times have I exclaimed, "I hate school!"?!?!

I finish up at FIDM this summer. And with no money in my pocket complete with a shitty economy..I'm staying in school. I can't leave the country to travel/work like I wanted with my monthly braces checkups...

I think I might go to Ohlone for costuming or theater production...too bad you only get a "Certificate of Completion". Oh well, it's a start. I'm tired of having my parents pay for school or using fake money like financial aid, or loans. I'm not going to attend any sort of school unless I can pay for it by myself.

Messy Bedroom = Messy Mind.

khfsklfhgkdfjg i hate homework! It's finally hit me that I do enjoy school, I just HATE homework. At 6am on Friday, I register for next quarter's classes. I also have a strong urge to avoid that and go on a trip with Nikko. He's going to teach English to little kiddies in Thailand, India, and Nepal in May through Julyish.

I'M REALLY JEALOUS!

Now that I let that out of my system somewhat, I'm going to force myself to do homework and leave you this video. Glory Box by Portishead. Complete with a violin section and a dj. Brill.The lead singer Beth tucks a stoge between her fingers, taking drags between vocal breaks. Smoking really sucks but Beth Gibbons from Portishead makes it look so damn sexy.

Here's my suggestion especially to you ladies that want to quit the cancer sticks. Splurge on some fabulous perfume. Not that I would smoke anyway, but hypothetically speaking..."Why would I want to smell like a $5 pack of nicotine, tar, and rat poison when I just bought and sprayed myself with a bottle of the most divine $70 perfume?"

I'm not a big designer/brand person and I only like sharing my special purchases with very close, trusted friends...but for the sake and prevention of your black lungs, prune lips, and hacking-witch cough: Versace Bright Crystal. Now you know.

Da Da Dumb

For my Survey of Western Art II class, we have an assignment due next Monday where we create an art piece in the style of Dadaism. Dadaism is a joke, literally. It was created by those hardcore dudes who believed in anti-art, that art shouldn't have to follow all the classic, traditional styles, that it's kind of a "laugh at your face" kinda thing. It's hard to explain, so here are some pictures of works by Marcel Duchamp.

"The Fountain". It's actually a urinal. (Haha.)

He also took a copy of the Mona Lisa and drew a mustache and goatee on her. Since the big mystery of the Mona Lisa is her curious smile/frown, Duchamp wanted to reveal that "duh, she's actually a man."

I have no idea what to do. I have a feeling I may need to turn to drugs to dumb myself down in order to create something clever. Or I could just play this video for my class...

Anne Hathaway looking smashing on the cover of Russian GQ.

I have precisely 3 weeks of school left. And I am getting major lazy. I have a pretty big project due on Wednesday that I haven't really started. Usually, I finish my homework on Saturday. Whomp, Whomp. I'm going to sleep. 

Ahh.. George Clooney

I'm so comfy on the couch with the rain outside...I will do anything to not have to do homework.

This is an old episode of the Ellen show. For a long, long time she has been trying to get George Clooney as a guest. She set up a cage above his office, she sent Deal or No Deal girls, she sent all Miss America contestants, the Rockettes complete with a snow machine, a marching band, a public announcement from Barack Obama, and George's best buddy Brad Pitt suggested Chippendales. Finally, she sent two Cincinnati Reds to lure him out of his office.





On Brad Pitt sending the Chippendales:

George: "Nothing in your life is safe."
Brad: "Don't harm the children."
George: "They're not even safe."