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New York, New York, It's a wonderful town!
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Having a small addiction can be quite pleasant.
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You can turn on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report on any random night and see one of the best, smartest, funniest, and most creative half-hours of television you will ever see.
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It is impossible to be depressed whilst jet-skiing.
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#1
The genre of film that is most consistently excellent is children's movies.
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Jay and I got up uncharacteristically early this morning. Since it was 27 degrees out, Jay built a fire and we sat reading for a while. When I finished my book (Aquinas in 90 Minutes), he started asking me questions. There is no one else in the world, no one, who wants me to talk about what I've learned from my medieval reading for a half hour. Someone else might ask out of politeness and let me go on for one or two minutes, tops. But he not only listens and questions but is excited about it.

My man = the bomb.

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A whole passel of spot-on performances here, wonder after wonder. And the director, Lone Scherfig, is female, which probably accounts for the main character (played by Carey Mulligan) being so intelligent. Scherfig is also an adherent to Dogme 95, which eschews special effects of any kind (e.g., no sets, no lighting). It seems like most practitioners are not strict adherents, though, so it's hard to tell where the line is drawn in individual films. Hell of a beautiful shot below, special lighting or no.

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Jay has managed to convey to me what the Macro setting on my camera does.

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With this Matt Haig thing. I'm heading right to the Kindle store to get another of his novels. Plus I highly recommend his website, http://www.matthaig.com/. Plus I downloaded these drawings from his website.

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Get.
Read.
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It's always been a dream of mine to have a beautiful house with a wonderful fireplace, where my ideal soul mate and I would read, write, and make art on cold winter days, with chili on the stovetop and bread rising on the counter. And I actually have most of the elements on hand now to bring this mental diorama to life. Dream house? Well, a really nice house. Fireplace? Pretty good one. Soul mate? Ideal.

And yet, in the nine years we've lived here, we very seldom done this. NINE YEARS. What do we do with ourselves? We get up, hang around, do laundry, think about all the work that needs done on the house, bemoan the amount of dog hair that's everywhere . . . in essence, I spend my house-hours thinking about enjoying my house. Later. When everything is, you know, fixed.

This is what snowstorms are good for. During the snow season this winter, Jay and I got in the habit of spending every Sunday in our front room (not the tv room). I'd put on the coffee to brew, Jay'd start the fire. I'd get my Kindle, he'd get his latest drawing. He'd bring our armchairs together, I'd situate Rocky on the ottoman between them. SWEET.

Those Sundays really affected me. I have to remind myself that life doesn't stretch on forever. "Later" is only an option for so long. Now, I'm more likely to make plans with a friend or cook a meal or spend time writing than I was even this fall. To get out of my head and wed my brain waves to my reality.
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Look at this craziness Alyssa photographed at the beach (in Texas):

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ficwZQYmRLE
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1. Seeing "Rango" with Ryan,
2. First robin of spring.
3. Mini shopping spree at Target.
4. Nathan Fillion on the cover of Entertainment Weekly!
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Just like the great Jersey triumvirate of Gym, Tanning, Laundry, my friend Eve and I came up with a three-prong approach to marriage: Sex, Steak, Apple Pie.

(Cable TV is in there too, but it just didn't fit the rhythm of the text.)


*Reasons why this is NOT as sexist and reactionary as it sounds: 1. It's partly ironic. 2. It's deliberately reductive. 3. Although both of the authoresses of this philosophy are aware of and repulsed by the 1950s mentality whose rhetoric it mimics, we also do believe that, in marriage, both parties should give enduring attention to the happiness of the other. I posit a mirror triumvirate for keeping your woman happy:  Sex, Chocolate, Housework.

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Let's gender-switch this Natalie Portman thing for a minute, and consider this: After watching The Ghostwriter last night, I conclude that Ewan McGregor is not that good an actor. He can be good in the right role, but he's shaky in others---variable at best. Also: John Travolta. And George Clooney. And a handful of others who have star power and the ability to shine in just the right vehicle but aren't subjected to this public Portmaning and are admired for what they do right rather than disdained for their limits.

Take that, blogosphere!

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Yikes.

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A failure by Catherine Hardwicke is twice as interesting as most filmmakers' successes.

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Memoirs or essays about living the country life can sometimes seem self-congratulatory, as the authors smugly detail their arcane knowledge of farm living and their simultaneously lofty and grounded connectedness to the earth (*cough*BarbaraKingsolver*cough*). So I had to temper my knee-jerk reaction to Klinkenborg's early paeans to baling twine. And I'm glad I did. After all, if I was living the very unusual life that he is, I'd want to write about it too, and there's nothing wrong with taking pleasure and pride in one's life, even if it's sometimes received by others as self-satisfaction.

Klinkenborg is on the board of the New York Times, but he bought a farm in rural New York some time ago and is fully engaged in its working. He's a beautiful stylist, a careful observer, and a lovely philosopher. His style is modest on the surface, but full of great vocabulary and turns of phrases. It's full of words like puddle, ditch, tree wrack, slush, woodchuck, soggy, crackle. He likes the construction noun-adjective as a modifier: the snow is "fox deep," the ice is "iron hard," and the colors of winter are white and "junco gray." His observations are true, like the way he describes the effect of a massive snowstorm: "As always when a storm of this dimension crosses the Northeast, what it brings in greatest abundance is a muffled hush, the sound of doing nothing." Having very recently experienced such massive blizzards, I can well remember the absolute quiet of the outside during those days, where no traffic sounds and few animal sounds pierced the air. He goes on to describe its effect on the residents: "Many seeds require a period of cold, called stratification, before they'll germinate. Thanks to this storm, residents of the Northeast can consider themselves properly stratified."

Klinkenborg tends toward metaphor more than simile, and his analogies are often extended but never feel forced. I like this one, from the March chapter: "In every ditch, every hollow, a cold, sepia brew of last year's leaves was steeping in a basin of discolored ice." And when he writes "the smell of rain is the catalyzed smell of the local earth and everything on it," you see that "catalyzed" is the perfect adjective, acknowledging that you have the earth containing the potential smells and the rain that activates them.

I'm also a sucker for sentences that aren't particularly clever or complex but simply lovely to read and vocalize in your head, like "Red-winged blackbirds crackled to themselves down along the boggy edge of a snow-covered field."

His philosophizing often centers on the past, parents and grandparents gone from the earth, and the experience of loss. He writes about how dialects are not just geographical but temporal: the way our grandparents spoke, for example, is gone, and "When a phrase becomes archaic [. . .] an echo from the past vanishes." He expresses his yearning for his childhood and his grandparents now gone from the world like this:  "Sometimes I wish I owned a weekend cottage in the country of the old-time tongue---a little cabin near my grandma's lexicon." "I'd like to go back to the past for a time [. . .] not to meet Mr. Abraham Lincoln or to interview the Buddha. I'd like to go to a small Congregational church in Iowa on a Saturday afternoon in May. Outside, my grandfather is mowing the lawn. Inside, my grandmother is practicing the Sunday organ, and my mom is sitting in the front pew with her children." In addition to the poignancy of this thought, I admire the way he slips in "Mr. Abraham Lincoln," a usage no one would use today but his grandparents surely did.

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My dad's favorite film as a boy was Captain Blood starring Errol Flynn. I had the opportunity to see it for the first time this week, and I was pretty impressed. The storytelling was lively, and the cinematic qualities were strong. Here's the first shot that really caught my eye, a view of the sailors pulling on an oar or rod together but shot from behind and center.

The second shot below, taken from the big battle scene, reminds me of the "Raft of the Medusa" with its strong triangle composition.

This third shot is taken from the point of view of the top of the mast, looking down at the deck just as the French flag is cut down and falls to the men fighting below.

The fourth through seventh shots show the nice mix of shots throughout the battle scene, closeups, mid-shots, long shots, a single drummer, and the French ship sinking in front of Blood's pirate ship, the two of them together almost reminiscent of a Frank Gehry builidng.

 

A close-up of Errol Flynn in the eighth shot. I kept trying to think of who he reminded me of, and I came up with a cross between Christian Bale and Ryan Reynolds.

I also liked the title graphics and the way some of the early scenes looked influenced by German expressionism. Note that director Michael Curtiz also directed Casablanca, another black-and-white beauty.

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I continue to be amazed at the beautiful artwork on covers these days. Although I'm devoted to my Kindle, there is definitely room on my bookshelf for hard copies like these.

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The Vampire Diaries is a show on the CW about brothers who are vampires. Stefan is the evolved, selfless one dating pretty high-schooler Elena. Damon is the more nasty, cynical brother alternately ennobled and tormented by his love for Elena. Natch, Damon is the heartthrob, with those mesmerizing blue eyes, dark hair, and jaded wisecracks.

The re-run this week was one of my favorite episodes, called "The Descent." A vampire named Rose, who blew into town a few episodes ago and shacked up with Damon, has been bitten by a werewolf and is slowly dying, in constant pain and increasingly erratic behavior. When Rose runs off while Elena is nursing her and kills a security guard (those poor security guards), Damon brings her back to his bedroom. She's grief-stricken that she's killed a human and in agony from the pain. Damon holds her, wrapping her arms around her from behind as they lie in bed. The scene suddenly goes into a dream, where Rose is a young maiden in an older time, with long hair smiling in the sun of a rural meadow. Damon is there on the hill waiting for her. They talk of the things that were, the people she knew, how much she misses the sunshine and all the other things about being human. Rose invites him to race her in the grass, and he responds that he'll win, since he's directing the dream. "Come on," she says, and they count to three: one, two, and then the camera cuts back to the real world, where Damon plunges the stake in her heart on three, tears running down his face and her pale, bloodied faced going paler still.

Just like the first time it aired, this scene had me crying as hard as I've ever cried at a movie in my life. Heaving gulps of sadness. The scene is so well done, so well acted and conceived, and it touches on that hardest of human facts: saying goodbye to everything we've known, everyone we loved, going into the unknown.

There's something here, a clue to the strength of the vampire story: beauty, longing, the hope of escaping the hardest goodbye, the poignancy of trading the griefs of mortality for the griefs of immortality.
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Another attempt to contextualize the Myers-Briggs attributes.  It has always seemed to me that E, S, F, and J have something in common, as do I, N, T, and P.  I am thinking of that shared quality as high and low immediacy, respectively.  So,

Are you naturally more:

     Gregarious (E) = immediate focus or
     Introspective (I) = indirect focus

     Concrete (S) = immediate experience or
     Imaginative (N) = indirect experience

     Passionate (F) = immediate interpretation or
     Analytical (T) = indirect interpretation

     Decisive (J) = immediate execution or
     Creative (P) = indirect execution

Not everyone would agree with my choice of descriptors above, but this is the best I have been able to come up with to date.  Feel free to suggest alternatives.  For summaries of the various types, go here.

Later post on this subject here.
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The longer I look at this Givenchy gown, the more I fall in love with it. And there's something about Cate's hair, how blunt and short it is, that absolutely makes the outfit.

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Lies about Childhood

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Here's one: Children have a sense of wonder that disappears as they grow.

Untrue. When I was a kid, I took for granted zebras and giraffes and all sorts of things.

Now I look at this

and think, WTF? That's the craziest thing I've ever seen!
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