- Meetings about the dissertation proposal last week were encouraging and fruitful, though I got contradictory responses to my use of Kracauer's Theory of Film as a critical framework. One advisor thought it worked, the other didn't. Both agreed, however, that I need to more explicitly broach the issue of race, which I am working on now. One advisor also suggested that ideas of realism might be hindering to me. He suggested instead that I look to Jakobson's "Metaphor and Metonymy" and a way of understanding disparate aesthetic impulses involved in constructing/imagining worlds. Metaphor having more to do with a classically Romantic impulse, and metonymy having to do with the idea of contiguity, which in my project would parallel the idea I have about the story of urban mystery as a "stretching out" across the city, connecting disparate spaces. Still have to read Jakobson to figure out how this might work.

- These past few days, in an effort to get back to "first principles," as well as to possibly understand the historical "philosophy" and parameters of my project, I have been reading Susan Buck-Morss' The Dialectics of Seeing. Not sure exactly if Benjamin or the idea of dialectical images will be helpful to me for understanding the the imagery of the city in the the 1970s, but it's good to read nonetheless. 

-Interesting quote from a Martin Scorsese interview in Scenes from the City (a photographic book about filmmaking in NYC) wherein (to paraphrase) the interviewer (James Sanders) and Scorsese talk about the difference between his and Woody Allen's films. Scorsese says they're fascinating to him precisely because they reference an intellectual milieu that is totally alien to him (he grows up in a house with no books, no New Yorker magazine) and that it's kind of funny that Allen's films never involve experiences of urban danger or violence - his New York is safe. Possibly good quotes for entering into a discussion on how Allen's films involve anticipating NY gentrification (a point Sanders makes in Celluloid Skyline).  If so, what do Scorese's films represent the anticipation of? Or do they concern forms of urban experience no longer relevant?