Archive for March, 2007
29 items.
1) Brush teeth with mint toothpaste
2) Immediately thereafter pop a Flintstones Gummies vitamin…
3) While your son is getting cabbage-filled pot stickers out of the microwave
What happens is intense, but not a treat for the senses.
Another tastebud curiosity. Explain to me how it is that H.o.p., who is about the finickiest eater in the world, recoiling from extreme tastes like apples (yet loves cabbage filled pot stickers) is able to, for sake of entertaining mom (his idea of entertainment sometimes diverging from mine) fill his mouth with watermelon scented bubble bath water and gleeful spurt like a fountain, suffering no YECH BLAH YUCK repercussions?
”Comment
My sinuses are exploding, I’m fuzzed with heavy duty Benadryl but can’t sleep, can’t think to do anything marginally useful or productive, and so here I am ready to talk about George Alec Effinger’s “What Entropy Means to Me”. Jennifer at Saying Yes picked it up as I’d good things to say about it and because it features giant people-terrorizing vegetables.
No, I’m actually up to read it again. I just read the first chapter. It’s been at least 15 years since I last read this book, maybe longer. I was probably 17 when I first read it. And I still love it.
She was Our Mother, so she cried. She used to sit out there, under that micha tree, all day as we worked cursing in her field. She sat there during the freezing nights, and we pretended that we could see her through the windows in the house, by the light of the moons and the hard, fast stars. She sat there before most of us were born; she sat there until she died. And all that time she shed her tears. She was Our Mother, so she cried.
She cried from our yard, and the chairs that had been put there. We had many chairs on the scrubby lawn between the house and the chata fields. Some of the other estates have iron and stone statues placed around, but none of them have chairs. We have quite a few. Our Mother taught us that she got the idea from reading one of the plays that Our Father brought with him from Earth. We still have many of those books. Sometimes we thrown them into the River when it looks like it might flood. But we still have most of them.
How can you not love a book that begins like that?
What a remarkable title for a film.
Spoilers galore follow. Stop reading if you ever plan on seeing it.
The story is post-apocalyptic. The film, made in Czechoslovakia about 1967, advances us 15 to 20 years after a day that the last newspaper reported there was unrest in the Middle East (I forget the exact wording), then the next day everything was gone, civilization as it was known had ended.
For much of the film we follow an older woman leading a pack of young women through this post-apocalyptic wilderness, their journey’s purpose being to look for other survivors (none have been found). They call the older woman only “Old Woman”. Nothing happens for a long while except to show their scavenging life style and the peculiar relationship these young adults have with their guide and caretaker who has been left with the task of leadership to the extreme degree that she is not only the head of this body but their struggling heart, very nearly the only one capable of acting above base survivalist impulse, or willing to respond to others and what remains of the world with interest and intelligent compassion. The young women are as reliant on her as children, but also rebellious and alarmingly, violently unpredictable. None of them are predisposed to talking; about all they seem to have to vent is frustration and rage, done so spontaneously, physically. Old Woman spends a good deal of her time just trying to keep them from fracturing altogether.
By the rings of a tree trunk as a calendar, she shows them when the Event occurred and when the last boy died, not through disease but pulled apart by wild dogs.
Any surprise that a dog which has been following them, one girl tosses food to it, as if attracted to having a dog, but another eventually shoots it. There is no discussion. No sharing of what one or the other may want, or their feelings about what the others do, no attempt at mediation. The dog is shot. That is all there is to it.
They exhibit little restraint, pulling dangerous, literally explosive stunts that could hurt them and their valuable horses, not much there in the way of critical thought. The old woman chastises but it seems to draw no remorse or inspire reflection. But then they’ve lived impossible lives, their childhoods filled with only death and decay. Their pessimistic, nihilistic entertainments seem not so outrageous if you believe you’ve no future at all and are young.
What moral and emotional frame do you build your life on when it seems you may be the last pocket of survivors of the human race, and you’ve grown up knowing there was something previous to you but nothing may be following?
There’s a curious stretch in the film where Old Woman believes she may have found someone alive, noticing fresh chalk marks on the walls of buildings in a town. She follows the marks but ultimately discovers, in a church ruin, it is one of the girls who has been making the marks. Eva. She is stranded on the margin of what was an upper floor, it having collapsed. Old Woman coaxes her into jumping to her and thus saving herself.
The troupe comes across a cow and slaughters it. While they are butchering the cow, one of the young women screams and Old Woman looks up to see running towards them an elderly man. The girls are terrified. One of them starts shooting at the man though the old woman tells her no, no. Still, the man, despite the gun being fired at him, continues running toward them, waving his arms. Old Woman stands between the gun and the oncoming man. It’s all right! Only then is the gun put down.
Old Man, ecstatic, leads the group back to the Hotel Ozone where he has been waiting all these years for survivors, caretaking remnants of the Old World. He sets up an umbrella for the women to rest under. He is obviously especially pleased to have with him now this older woman who shares with him a link to what was, and regards the young women as children, calling them such and bringing them milk. Old Woman is just as pleased to have not only these tastes of civilization but to be around a sympathetic soul.
Overcome, Old Woman becomes ill with a fever. She goes to bed. In the morning Old Man brings her flowers and introduces himself properly, they exchanging names, and Old Woman has Martha, the young woman who was staying with her, leave the room. After Martha has gone, the woman questions the man, learning he is the only one at the Hotel and knows of no other survivors. She reveals she has no hope for the girls, that there is no one else out there. The man insists there is, that they will find them, there will be some men somewhere and the girls will have children and they will be the new Adam and Eve. The old woman, despite having traveled continually with the girls, seeking, says no, no. She says nothing grows, and all the tin is rusting. She repeats it several times, that all the tin is rusting, the land has rejected them.
That evening Old Man serves a sit down dinner with he and the old woman at either end of the table and the young women between. They have been nothing but perplexed and ultimately disinterested in all that he shows them, but Old Woman appreciates the accouterments, she enjoys being called by her name again. The old man toasts them and their future. He pulls out an old wind-up gramophone and entertains the girls with a recording of the “Beer Barrel Polka”. It is the first exhibit which captures their imagination.
While the girls listen to the one recording the old man owns, fascinated by these voices of people from a past world, Old Woman dies.
She is buried on a hill where rest the others who’d come to Hotel Ozone with Old Man but not survived. Martha, the girl who will now take Old Woman’s place as leader, calls the others to prepare to leave. They return to the hotel and pack up their horses. Old Man, having preserved these vestiges of civilization to share with someone, Old Woman now dead, is unable to face that the girls will now be moving on. The disaster for him is that the Old Woman has died, for there’s no doubt she would have been his companion, and having lost that companion, he can’t comprehend going without human company.
The girls have no idea that Old Woman had confessed to the man that she believed there was no one out there. As Old Woman had set their mission for searching for survivors, whether or not the young women may have believed before that survivors existed, with Old Woman dead they pick up her task now as their inheritance. They say they must go on and find the men for whom they’d been looking with the old woman. Perhaps Old Man only felt hope other individuals were out there as long as Old Woman was there, perhaps he is simply this desperate to have company, but he insists now that no one else is out there. They don’t believe him and point out that they’d found him after all. He entreats them to at least stay for the winter at the Hotel where they’ll be warm and have all the food they’ll need, then move on in the Spring. The girls instead tell him that if he wants he can accompany them. But he is too old to start such a journey, and his job all these years has been to preserve the Hotel Ozone. He was the one who showed the girls the last newspaper. He attempted to explain to them what Italy was. He showed them where he had played chess against himself…
One of the young women remembers the gramophone and demands it. The man resists. The women won’t be denied. Sensing a time to exhibit authority and re-establish their unity, Martha leads the other women in pursuing him. When they bully and attempt to force him to give up the gramophone, he calls them animals. And they act as they’ve always done. Without discussion or consensus, one of the girls ends her frustration by simply raising her gun and shooting the man.
And that is pretty much the end of the film.
There are some problems with the story. Considering the mobility of the troupe, it seems odd that the girls would never have seen a television before coming to the Hotel Ozone. It seems with their ramblings that they would have been introduced to nearly every artifact the old world had to offer in scavenged homes and shops. They’re not in rags and tatters so they’ve been finding those jeans they’re wearing somewhere approximating civilization. That they are plump with ammo and hand grenades, are familiar with alcohol, but medicine and chess sets and pictures of foreign places and glassware and crockery would be completely alien to them takes some suspension of disbelief, and you just kind of have to make a decision to accept the movie on its terms and go with it.
Another nit-picking problem is their going the off-the-beaten path route in search of survivors. They frequent woods, fields and rivers without bridges. If you were looking for post-nuke survivors wouldn’t you take to the highways or follow the railroad? Wouldn’t you want to go where your best chance was finding people not trees?
Wouldn’t a ham radio be your best friend? Never mind the logistics. It’d happen.
My biggest nit-picky problem. They have no can opener. They blithely stab open cans. Bullets and hand grenades and guns but no can opener. I don’t believe it.
The movie seems to be one of impressions. I’ve read some of the few commentaries there are of it on the internet. The New York Times states it’s about a group of wandering, sterile women. But there’d not be much point in their looking for men with whom to have children if they were sterile. Someone else gives the old man as impotent and near dementia. Perhaps they draw that conclusion from the fact it seems the old man doesn’t present himself as a possible father for a new generation (except in terms of he and the old woman being the new Adam and Eve to the young women and potential mates) and that the women obviously don’t consider him a possible mate. But, unless the translation has problems, impotency is never mentioned, and though the old man may be agitated with all kinds of emotions upon meeting these other survivors, he doesn’t seem senile. In fact, one of the film’s curiosities is why do the women so readily prepare to abandon then shoot this man if their primary goal is looking for men with whom to have children. The keeper of Hotel Ozone may not be the best candidate, but remains a possibility. Perhaps it’s the film’s intention that we puzzle over this, or perhaps it’s another problem with the story. I don’t know. The film is open-ended this way and so one is left to draw upon impressions.
I’ve the feeling the director gives several nods to Bergman’s “Seventh Seal”, one being the chess set and the other being the film’s final shot, which is of the women continuing on their journey, walking a high ridge, which is reminiscent of the Dance Macabre at “Seventh Seal’s” end. And that may be some clue to what’s happening here. When they reach this part of the countryside, the Old Woman is excited, she knows this place but it looks entirely different (if I remember correctly). She appears healthy but falls ill upon reaching the hotel. The women are introduced to the chess set with which the man has played against himself, one of them notices a book on the theory of chess, and that night the old woman dies at dinner. I’m sketchily reminded of the knight in the Seventh Seal returning from the crusades to find the land devastated by plague and his buying time with Death’s chess match to be reunited with his wife. But is the old man and the civilization he wants to preserve Death? Or is it the young women? If there are parallels to be drawn, things become murkier when, after the burial, the women ask the old man, almost accusingly, “How did you survive?”, a question he doesn’t answer, then demand the gramophone, give chase and kill him. Because the women have so little to say, this question, “How did you survive?” stands out. Are they slaying the last of the old order which to them is Death? Or, considering how they are frequently highlighted in the film (most times pretty gruesomely) as killing whatever’s alive that they come across, are they Death ridding the world of survivors? If parallels are to be drawn, they become murkier still with the women in the last shot walking the ridge. But I can’t help but feel when we see them walking that ridge, we’re intended to recall the “Seventh Seal”.
The chess set and the man playing against himself all these years nagged me during the end altercation. “Seems he didn’t learn much about strategy,” I thought.
It may help to know the original Czech lyrics for the “Beer Barrel Polka”, which was composed by Czech musician Jaromír Vejvoda in 1927 and the lyrics written by Václav Zeman in 1934. They’re quite a bit different from “There’s a garden, what a garden, only happy faces bloom there…” and the good cheer, blues on the run refrain.
The title was Škoda lásky, Wasted Love.
The roses bloom, who is responsible for it?
Nobody helps you today anymore.
They bloom, fade, leaflets fall from it
like those your tears on the cold grass.
Chorus:
Wasted love, which I gave you.
I would cry my eyes today out,
my youth ran away as a dream.
Only a memory remained
in my heart for all of this.
Does it help to know this? Probably not. I just keep running the film over in my mind wondering what is intentional and what questions arise from problems with the story.
One of the more peculiar things about this film is it was a Czech Army production. The director was a new wave Czech director, Jan Schmidt. There are several trained actors in it, but a number of the young women were apparently from the Czech Army.
A Czech Army production? I’m very curious about this, their producing a post-apocalyptic anti-nuke film.
I remember the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Eastern Bloc in August of 1968. We were visiting my father’s parents in Missouri and they had rented a small cabin for us to vacation at on a little river, I don’t recall where exactly, but I don’t recollect much being there except for some other cabins. One morning, my grandfather taking my brothers fishing (but not me) I settled down in the kitchen/dinette area with my mother and grandmother. The Today Show was on. They were playing footage of the invasion and discussing it.
The film is nicely shot. The subject doesn’t descend to Hollywood Amazonian Women Thirsting for Men…which it easily could have. The individuals look surprisingly contemporary which gives it a sense of immediacy. I mentioned earlier there are some gruesome moments with the slaying of some animals. No one seems to know if the killing of the dog was faked or not. A cow is butchered on screen. These scenes are designed to be disturbing, they are disturbing, and may be too much for some. What is real and what is story is blurred during these scenes, removing the viewer from their “safe” seat, disorienting the viewer as they struggle to determine whether at those points the film has become documentary, and this may be one of the more profound problems with the film.
Swedish people, for whatever reason, are very interested in whether or not the rock they found on their last hike could be a meteorite. Don’t believe me? Follow the link.
And Washington University in St. Louis is sick of it. They don’t want you contacting them any more and asking if you have a meteorite, especially a lunar meteorite. Don’t believe me? Follow the link.
Now you can guess something of what we’ve been up to today. We *do* have meteorites! Two little chips. We bought them at Meteor Crater in Arizona. They had more impressive size chips but we thought $2 a piece was enough for an almost but not quite, sort of 1/2 inch chip.
H.o.p. is determined to make rust. Thus an assortment of nails and screws in a jar of water. He couldn’t care less the whys of it all. He just wants a rusty creature for his animation that won’t be like George Pal’s “Tulips Shall Bloom”. “My movie will be different!” No doubt.
“It’s gonna be a while before you see the kind of rust you want,” I tell him. He continues carrying the jar around, peering inside now and then, waiting for rust to bloom.
“You could paint some nails so they look like they’ve rusted,” I tell him. This is, after all, for an animation.
“No, I want real rust!”
Go for it. But I think in a day or two he’s going to be asking for the paint, which will be good, because I don’t want him handling rusty nails.
He just bought me a ball bearing to inform me it didn’t have iron because the magnet’s not sticking to it. Nor did it earlier stick to any of the rocks we’ve collected over the years. Then I brought out the meteorite chips. Zing. Sticko.
“Wow! Can I keep it?”
“No. They stay in their bag so they don’t get lost.”
Now he’s back to animating dice.
I’m wondering why Swedes are so interested in finding meteors.
Witness the kitchen of our apartment. Most of the time, on blogs, people show pics of really cool looking kitchens which, if not bodaciously spacious, are aesthetically pleasing. They show pics of their new tiled floors or new ceramic tiled backsplashes. Not many people put up pics of ugly kitchens which don’t have a title of “We are remodeling!” We aren’t remodeling. We live in an apartment. Yes, I know some people remodel their apartment. Not us. Our cash must go elsewhere and besides we never know when the building might be sold out from under us, though no one wanted it the last time the landlord’s brothers attempted to sell it. His brothers do the real estate buy and sell end. He acts as handyman and manager, keeping things rented and looked after and fixing what needs to be fixed imperatively.
Our kitchen, as you can see, is decidedly Ungreen, except for the fact most of it is second hand and has been in use a very long time. To make myself feel better, I count that.
Well, our glassware and dishes aren’t secondhand. We got them at Ikea this year when most of our old second-hand stuff had broken and we decided to go ahead and get stuff that matched. But all our oven crockery is secondhand and our storage containers and you can’t see it but my traveling coffee mug may not be secondhand but I’ve managed to keep ahold of it for eleven years, even once dashing back to the middle of a 6 point intersection, in which 6 lanes of traffic had started moving again, to retrieve the cup I’d accidentally dropped when running across said intersection. At night. Not too bright, I know, but I’m sentimental about that mug.
Anyway, recently our last microwave bit the dust at about eight years of age and the replacement we purchased turned out to be slightly larger than our last microwave and ate up a couple of inches more of food prep counter space, the only food prep counter space we have.
Exhibit A
Ignore the colonial chair, which I hate. I deplore that chair, which my MIL didn’t want and my husband tends to accept second hand goods indiscriminately. Such as that chair. Which she didn’t want because the finish didn’t quite match her other chairs so she was needing some new chairs with a matching finish. We don’t worry about things like matching finish because I paint all our second-hand furniture. I planned to paint that chair bright red and yellow and green but it turned out to have a weird poly finish on it and wouldn’t be easily painted so I didn’t even try. That chair will soon be out on the sidewalk waiting to be picked up by someone else in the apartment building, trust me. Because I hate hate hate colonial and am now committed to getting rid of that chair.
We always land in places where people snatch up anything that can be possibly recycled. That’s one reason we landed at This Old Apartment Building. Because the landlord used to work hard (volunteer) for water conservation and because he recycles everything. I liked this, that he had worked for water conservation and that so much around here had been preserved or recycled, yes, in the interest of saving money, but whatever. He’s always saving furniture and crap and finding other uses or people who would like to have it. There are times when this can be annoying because the kitchen door opens onto an urban junkman’s holler and so we only open it to take out the trash and to ventilate the kitchen when cooking. I imagine this is very annoying to the people living in the pricey higher-rise behind us, but then I imagine there isn’t anything about this old building that isn’t annoying to them. I too would prefer we had a New Orleans style courtyard alley out back of that door and that the junkman’s thing was confined to the areas around the storage portions of the building. Ain’t gonna happen though.
I’m not very bright in some ways. When we moved in here we had narrowed the choices down to here and an apartment in a house that had been completely refurbished. Beautifully refurbished. The floors were gorgeous. The kitchen was gorgeous. It had a fireplace. It was small but gorgeous and had a back yard. I mean it was awesome and barely within our price range. But it wasn’t near public transportation and wasn’t within walking distance of a grocery store. We would also have been second floor tenants and I worried about this with a child, that H.o.p. would drive the downstairs neighbors crazy, especially in a house which hadn’t been originally designed for dual family occupancy and to absorb sound. So I opted for here. Plus as I said I figured a landlord who’d worked for water conservation and spent hundreds of hours raising money for the public library was our kind of landlord.
Our refrigerator is not remotely green. The refrigerator and the oven were supplied and the landlord isn’t so green as to get an energy-saving frig. I’m just glad the refrigerator works and that the landlord promptly replaced the old one when it needed to be replaced. You can’t see the oven but it is an old model in what used to be called a dijon mustard color. It is beyond the refrigerator on the left. It is second hand because our landlord used it in his house before moving it here. Inbetween the frig and oven I’ve shoved a needle thin shelving unit which serves as our pantry. There are a couple of shelves over the oven for storage of pasta and spices and rice but with the exception of the bottom one they’re too high to conveniently reach.
The needle thin shelving unit stores mostly beans. We eat lots of beans.
I like our water purifier, which is sitting on top of the microwave. That’s second hand, acquired from a sister of mine. Still works beautifully.
Anyway, there, in front of the microwave, take a gander of our food preparation area. That’s it. Please don’t suggest that we try to hoist the microwave up and hang it from the wall. Won’t work. We put in a shelf above the microwave (which you can’t see here) and that ancient wall is made so well and is so hard that it was almost impossible to install that shelf even with the use of a battery-powered drill bit.
We can’t put anything else beside the rear door as we need to get in and out of it. Our kitchen garbage can is between the door and the derelict cabinet upon which is the microwave and there is simply no way to put anything else back there.
Exhibit B
Exhibit B of our lack of counter room. I suppose we could dispense with the dishrack and get a folding one. That would be one way of helping with the counter space issue, except when we’re cooking on the range we store our two big pots in the dishrack because there’s no where else to put them. Other pots, as you can see, we hang on the wall. Y’know how kitchens look wonderful in the Ikea catalogue pages with pots and other things hanging in wondrous gleaming organized glory from the wall? Did I even begin to fantasize our kitchen would gleam? No.
Indeedy, those are paper towels up above the sink. They are recycled. The plastic packaging in which they come says Green, 100% Recycled. Every so often I try using cut up bath towels and then return to being a bad person again, but I do have stored under the sink several old bath towels should the urge hit again. They are like twenty year old bath towels. Second hand. That’s because until six months ago all our bath towels used to be everyone else’s rejects. When others got rid of their bath towels because they were too old, we’d take ‘em and use them for another ten years. But now we have Ikea bath towels because finally, in our long long marriage, we decided to treat ourselves to some new bath towels. Because some times it’s just plain nice to have new things. Especially new things like bath towels. And because six months ago we accidentally left a load of our old bath towels at the laundromat, which demanded we get new ones.
“How do they wash dishes with that roll around storage thingy in front of the sink?”
Yeah, it’s a pain, but we needed somewhere to have a crock pot and other general storage for water and dishes that don’t fit in the cabinet above the sink and because we keep some dishes down there so H.o.p. can easily reach them.
How perceptive of you! Yes, above the kitchen sink is a small picture of the Last Supper in front of a blown-up image of police advancing on a citizen during a 60s protest (we’ve had that protest pic for years because it looks like my MIL being advanced upon by the riot squad, except she would never have been anywhere near a protest, for which reason it’s funny, and lest you think I was being mean in treasuring this, my BIL was the one who found and gave this to us). Lots of postcards of the desert, because I like the desert. They keep falling down and I keep taping them back.
As for the Last Supper, a one-time neighbor saw it and knew we’d appreciate its weird mirrored finish. The kitchen seemed like a great place to put the Last Supper. It had once been in the bathroom but I was worried about offending some people who were coming to visit, thinking they might not like seeing the Last Supper in the bathroom. And being a sensitive sort, I moved it.
Exhibit C
I suppose some people don’t understand that I have a sense of humor. Especially on days like today. Maybe the past several months (years) in general. But I do. I’ve got a sense of humor.
There you have it. Our kitchen. If you have any cheap cheap ideas for how we can get some food prep counter space, I’d appreciate it.
For many years now I’ve been trying to impress on H.o.p. an attitude of being somewhat content with not pursuing, in the name of Green, superconsumerism. This has fallen on deaf ears with respect to toys…and when he first saw the large houses in which his friends live, and their expansive backyards, I worried that one day he was going to start complaining about our small urban apartment.
H.o.p. now likes doing things like the Hungersite click to donate. He incorporates global warming into his stories. He is a big time treehugger and calls trees his friends. But his affection for trees and water has, to date, very little effect on his decisions as far as desires. And, being nine, what he desires are toys. Legos and dragons. Lots of plastic with lots of cardboard and plastic packaging. He gets his fair share of toys (gobs of them, buckets of Legos and dinos and dragons) often now using his allowance (well, kind of often) but I’ve hoped to get him to understand one day the concepts of sustainability and resources.
I was at least able to talk him out of, prior last Christmas, supporting McDonalds and Burger King purely for their plastic toys. He didn’t like it that many of the goods he gets are produced by what I told him was virtually slave labor. I couldn’t tell him it was only the cheap stuff as I don’t know that. More expensive goods come out of the labor mills as well. But overnight he gave up, at least, the “free” plastic toys. Which meant also giving up his french fries, which was a good thing, and was, I confess, my main worry about his asking for fast food so much, but he didn’t care about how lots of french fries aren’t a good thing.
After doing his daily donation clicking Monday before last, H.o.p. turned to me and he said he could do without a lot of things but he would like a Big House. With a nice big yard. Like some of the people we know. He really likes how they live. He likes it a lot better than our small apartment.
Gack.
“Yeah, all that room is nice, isn’t it.” Then I took him online and I showed him newer, smaller designs for sustainable living houses. I talked to him about how much energy and resources many of those houses he visits use and how if you can afford a house it’s best now not to think big but think of sustainable living. It helped that the houses I was showing him looked pretty cool. “Hey, I like those!” H.o.p. said and stopped complaining about not having the big house. I asked him today if he still wanted a large house. He said, “No, it’s bad for the environment. It doesn’t matter how big your house is, it matters how big your heart is.”
I hadn’t said that to him, I’d told him that big houses detrimentally impact the environment, but he’s saying things like this recently, talking about things like clothing prejudices and how life is bigger than clothes.
A little over a month ago, I forget what H.o.p. said about toys but his attitude really got under my skin. Seemed every day there was a new Lego toy he wanted or something else. What exactly he said is lost to memory but I do recollect that I thought if he was going to say that, with the attitude with which he said it, then he could afford to think a little deeper about some things. Which is when I did what was perhaps a not very nice thing. He’s grown up around the homeless, they’re everywhere around here, but what he sees on the streets are men and women, not kids, his peers. I said come here and I felt bad doing it but I showed him a picture of a starving child, one that might make an impression without being too traumatic. I asked him what he saw. A starving child, he said, and that it was terrible. We talked about how there is a difference between wants and needs and many of the things he had were a matter of wants, not needs, which I didn’t want him to feel guilty about, but that many people didn’t even have what they needed, and too many people were taking more than they needed without thinking about it. I’ve talked to him about this before but he was younger, and for some reason I now felt that a picture like this might make a difference whereas before it would have been just confusing and to no good purpose. Now, I knew this wouldn’t impact his wanting toys. He’s going to want all these toys regardless. I just was hoping to expand his vision a bit.
Immediately, I then told him that I wasn’t showing him this picture to make him feel bad, that I wasn’t doing it to make him feel guilty, and that I wouldn’t have done it if there wasn’t something he could do. Which is when I took him to the Hungersite and and I pressed the click to donate button and I told him that little action alone had donated some food to an individual. He was genuinely excited about this. I then showed him some other click to donate sites and put links to them on his blog so that he could easily go to those sites daily and make individual donations. I didn’t want him doing a one click thing that donated to multiple sites. He was obviously interested, he liked going through and reading about what he was helping, so I put individual links so he could go through and take time making those clicks and really feeling like he was helping, but I made it all easy to access. I figured that little bit of time took him outside of preoccupation with self which was in itself a good thing.
Though he is just doing the freebie things like Hungersite clicks, he does it religiously and I think it’s contributing to what may become an environmentally and socially conscientious mindset. He clicks to help pets in need. He clicks to save rain forest. He clicks to help the fight in breast cancer. He clicks to help tigers. “Let’s help the rain forest! I’m going to help save the rain forest now because of all the animals that live there and because they’re the lungs of the planet. What shall I do next. Marine lands? I want to save the oceans. Look, I just fed a hungry primate! I’m so glad I was able to help that primate, it might have been in need without me. What next? Look, I just helped a child in need!” With each click, he reads what he helped to save and takes it all to heart. And he doesn’t tire of it. He believes he has done something worthwhile and positive.
I don’t tell him he’ll get something out of it. There’s something terribly unhealthy about American wants when in the 70s and 80s a huge business was built out of the positive thinking mold of telling Middle American individuals that if they gave this or that it would serve as a magnet for getting all that they desired, both in religion and the self-help market. The message wasn’t geared any longer for people in desperate need; these were often people with nice homes, clothing, their physical needs certainly met. But they wanted more. A lot more…
Anyway, he still wants most every Lego toy he sees, most of which are discontinued. I tell him the expense adds up and he’ll have to use his allowance if he really wants that and that. He’s fine with it but dismayed over the shipping prices on Ebay.
(P.S. Reminder to self. Proofreading is good before posting. Proofreading two times is better and still usually not good enough.)
Spring is damn sprung. Already it’s approaching being beastly hot in this apartment which knows neither Autumn nor Spring. Upstairs neighbor climbs their way home up the steps and is tromping about. I have been sitting here with tears streaming down my face because allergies to what’s Springy about Spring are in full gear. Finally I realize, oh, my eyes are really really pouring so I take two Benadryl and now they’ve dried up and are no longer ferociously itching but the inside of my head still feels like it’s been turned inside out and scraped across a parking lot.
What I did this morning was I spent a little while wondering what it would be like to have $13 million dollars to drop on a residence in Sedona. Why I did that was partly because I was working on more photos from Sedona (see the Flickr account) but mainly because I spent some time last night reading up on No Impact Man and Family who live in nice digs on 5th Avenue, NYC, until recently had the 52 inch television screen etc., but decided to Go Ultra Green As An Experiment For A Year and are now eating food only grown in a 250 mile (or so) radius and using cool energy-saving bulbs and blogging about how to get along without restaurant food and new Diesel jeans as they’re not supposed to buy things like new clothes except for utilitarian undergarments.
He is blogging about not using paper products like no toilet paper for instance but he did find some recycled paper notebooks from Japan that he gets at MOMA (but he was down on his wife for wanting to drink juice from a juicery because the juice drinks are made from fruits shipped from overseas). And he has a book deal in the works for this project when the year is over.
And though he’s using energy saving bulbs etc. and not using the dishwasher or food processor etc. and is not using transport, there is also a movie in the works chronicling this and a film crew following him and his wife about.
Now how I went from reading about this to looking up those audaciously-priced villas at Sedona and wondering about that kind of lifestyle, I’m not sure, but it happened. One extreme went boing to another. And also because he’s relatively well-off and I’d read that before they went Green Very Green his wife had a splurge to help her through this time and bought two pairs of Chloe boots which cost two weeks of salary and her mother’s Bingo winnings (perhaps not these boots but Chloe boots cost a fairly steep dollar), I suppose that’s another reason I started thinking of What Its Like To Have More Money Than That Person On The Not Green Bus In Not Green Clothes. Thinking too about the Full Spectrum Fluorescent lightbulbs No Impact Man was touting that only cost $475 for a case of 40 and really reduce energy use but you have to be careful if you break them because they have mercury in them, which some say makes them not so good while others say no no you’re wrong they are better.
Yeah, I believe in Green. But reading No Impact Man made me feel fairly cynical, and this morning I found myself looking at the several million dollar residences in Sedona with their prime real estate gorgeous views backed up to national park land and which are no doubt second or third or fourth homes for those desiring to escape the city. I was thinking about how beautiful Sedona was and wondering what prices Those With Money pay for quality residences with grand views. I was thinking about how No Impact Man is going to want everyone to buy his book but during this year he won’t be buying anyone else’s book and won’t be buying any DVDs so slobs like us who have Not Green careers (Marty produces, plays and engineers music and me, well, I have no career) won’t be making any part of our living off No Impact Man…who wants us all to buy his book and go see his movie and invest in it. Feeling more and more cynical, and working on a couple of pics of Sedona, I thought I’d entertain myself by seeing what the rich pay for grand views from wonderful houses in a place that is beautiful and nice because it hasn’t been bulldozed and covered with city sprawl, which everyone wants to stay very Green looking, of course, so they don’t want you moving there (unless they are real estate developers) because though it’s all right that they are there, it’s not all right if you want to be. Kind of like No Impact Man wanting you to buy his book and go see his movie but not wanting to buy yours or go see your movie as your book and your movie don’t fit into the No Impact plan.
One could say though that No Impact Man is as dandy as all that because of everyone who’s going to read his blog and read his book and see his movie and so he might make an impression of some sort on some peers. Right?
Me, I’m wondering what his stock portfolio looks like and what his investment funds are supporting. Which, yes, I know, is really cynical of me.
Except for this. Yeah, baby steps. But then it comes down to the making money thing. And I think that’s where this really bothers me. What bothers me is the I’m Greener Than You Though I Make My Living Being Not Green With My Not Green Book Deal and The Film And Am Funding My Future With Not Green Investments But Buy Me Anyway Even Though I Won’t Be Buying Your Stuff This Year Because You Are So Not Green.
“Well, you do what you can do. It’s best to do what you can do.”
Yeah, sure. But something there seems so not right. Sure, we need to revamp how we live but the above model is kind of problematic. Isn’t it?
Easter Lilies
Digital Painting J Kearns 2007
Click on the above to see larger and larger larger at my website.
Thanks to Gilraen-stock at Deviantart whose Witch 10 stock image I used as reference for the model. The stock photo is here.
The Child Experiments with Dripping Water from One Hand to Another, 2007
Bizarre how this week went flying by, and then I realize it’s because of the movies. Spent Thursday night watching “Salome” and spent Wednesday night watching “Nights of Cabiria” (twice) and spent all Tuesday night watching George Pal shorts with H.o.p. plus the documentary and discussing it all at length.
