"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
Not a particularly exciting day. We put up Christmas lights this afternoon, and this evening I watched Paris, Texas. It’s really good, but kind of an odd movie — one that, as Scott Tobias puts it, “[makes] a familiar landscape seem like uncharted territory.”
And honestly, that’s about it as far as Saturday goes.
Is this what the book is about? No, not really. But even my canooter agreed that there was a glimmer of something just underneath the surface — a subtext of what happens when you turn to a life of reality TV and high profile media. And when you finish reading the book — when you finish with McCarthy’s tale of how she has turned to Buddhism to try to find peace and acceptance in her life — you’re left with a vague, nauseous feeling. A feeling that if you want to be like Jenny McCarthy, you’re buying into a view of the world that is tough, jaded, and incredibly cynical. It’s a fleeting feeling, though. Give a moment, and then you’ll be back to laughing about the silly things you can do with your canooter. Hahahahahah. Seriously. I’m not making this up. Hahahahaha.
When dancing is going well, time does funny things. Sometimes it feels like the most perfect special effect. The suspended water drops. The muffled pause inside an explosion, with every piece of debris hanging still in midair. The only other time I’ve felt the same endless expansion was one evening when I drove down the freeway and a car in front of me lost control, spectacularly and ridiculously. It spun the way cars do in movies, actual elliptical twirls that carried it across the entire spread of lanes, first one way and then the other. It struck the central divider and pinwheeled off again, and everything looked so gentle and so inevitable that when it swung towards me, it seemed to drift along an obvious curve and I had all the time in the world to twitch my own car the smallest degree to the side and watch it slide past. Time suddenly opened up, every edge of it unfolding, like some sort of weird, reversed version of origami. [via]
Let’s not call physical comedy falling down and pratfalls. All humor is physical, no matter how you dish it out. It’s timing, like a dancer or an athlete would have. The raising of an eyebrow, how you do it; when you look, how you look. All those little things are physical. [via]
If you are on a desert island and Legion is the only movie available in the island-proof DVD player, use the reflective surface of the DVD to angle sunlight onto some dry grass and start a fire; do not use it for any other purpose. I am serious.
It’s part of a writer’s training, in a sense, to experience as much as possible and to store what is experienced away, not as though doing research, but storing it in the mind so that what is most important is retained. The sheen on a particular piece of glass, for example. Because we create a sense of reality by describing our fantasies as though they were real, and in order to do that we need to draw from what is real, from our experiences. That’s why monsters are hybrids: we always draw from and recombine reality, and so our fantastical creatures are recombinations.
I woke up pretty late this morning, ran some errands — post office, haircut, bank — and then spent the rest of the day not doing a whole lot of anything. I mean, I filled the bird feeders in the yard — it’s quite chilly outside, but they don’t all fly south for the winter — and I watched a little television. (Fringe and a British show called Misfits.) I did a little writing — the story I’m working on proved surprisingly easy to get back into, after too long a hiatus — and did a little reading. And then this evening I watched Ondine, which was really quite lovely. Every now and then a movie like that — or In Bruges — comes along and reminds me that that Colin Farrell fellow can certainly act.
I watched two movies today, Rashomon and The Brood, and I don’t think you could ask for an odder double feature than that. Rashomon is pretty remarkable, well deserving of its reputation as a classic, and it’s one of the few movies I felt comfortable buying sight-unseen when I recently picked up some half-priced Criterion Collection discs. The Brood, on the other hand, is quintessential (but still fairly early) David Cronenberg, and as such concerned ultimately with the uncanny, the grotesque, and the horrors of our own psyches. Like Shivers before it, it’s deeply unsettling at times, but it’s also clearly a deeply personal film. It’s not always scary, or even necessarily comprehensible, but it’s intriguing nonetheless.
Other than that? I helped my father and brother-in-law clean the gutters and put the covers on the air conditioners. (Although Brian did most of the heavy lifting, and the climbing up on rooftops.) And this evening, we had a lovely dinner out, just the five of us.
And that’s about it.