Archive for February, 2008
32 items.
I’m feeling out of sorts. I think I’ve a touch of the flu that’s been going around. Ended up sleeping most of the day, thus H.o.p. had a day off. I took a nap this morning and was surprised to wake up and found how long I napped. Then I took a nap this afternoon, again, and woke up to H.o.p. jostling me, telling me that he and his dad had decided as I wasn’t feeling well, I needed a day off and so any school for the rest of the day was out of the question. “Isn’t that nice,” H.o.p. said, “giving you a day off?”
Think what you will of that. He was smiling and thought he was being really magnanimous.
I pulled myself up out of bed and not for him but because I was suddenly feeling a big craving for something sweet, blearily I took out a packet of dry potential cookie dough he’d had us pick up, he having thought it was a great idea to make cookies out of a packet of dry potential cookie dough.
I blearily added the butter and egg.
It was weird.
I’ve rarely met an inedible cookie dough.
This wasn’t the stuff of cookies.
I tried making one pan.
The result was truly loathsome bad cookies, not fit for consumption.
Truly, I’ve never seen such a cookie dough. It was bizarre. H.o.p. took one spoonful of the dough and his excitement faded but he kept a brave and stiff upper lip. When he was done grimacing he gave me a thumbs up and a smile and said, “That’s great!”
I said, “You grimaced.”
He said, smiling, “No, it’s great.”
He put the spoon down in the sink.
“You want any more?” I asked.
“No, thanks,” he said, backing out of the kitchen.
I ask you, have you ever met a child who would refuse cookie dough?
It was like sawdust! It looked like sawdust. It tasted like sawdust. The few cookies I made of it looked like sawdust that was trying to figure the hell out what it was doing in the oven and not coming up with a clue.
8Comment
A couple of wonderful whimsical offerings. H.o.p. loves the animations of Yannick Puig, such as the below “I Lived on the Moon”.
Another is the delightful “Krapooyo”.
I like Puig’s animations as well.
P.S. “I Lived on the Moon” was replayed over and over here today and probably will be for a while. I showed it to Marty when he got home and even he was anxious to see a larger version.
So I’ve viewed the animation I don’t know how many times and I’m still getting goosebumps when the giant bulb creature starts walking. Well, not just goosebumps. It lifts me out of my chair each time with me appreciatively whooping and thrashing the air and exclaiming, “Look! Look! Look! Isn’t that wonderful??!!!”
P.P.S. I’m back watching the movie again. (We’ve purchased the music CD from Kwoon, by the way. Overseas. Not available in America yet, it seems, except by individual Amazon mp3 download of each song. So, we went with buying the CD from Kwoon.) Amazing how expressive the child and the adult are when their only facial features showing are the eyes and eyebrows.
Wonderful, the mountains, the clouds, the way the stars light up in the sky. Then the appearance of the mask of a threatening blood red sun and the adult plunges down into the frame, the child looking down after him and suddenly there is the adult floating up in the distance, beside the threatening sun (beautiful shadows), seemingly overwhelmed, helpless. He is gone. Gone. What has happened? The boy left alone now in this landscape of pebble moon rocks. A remarkable impression of loss. The single small tree squeaks at him as he walks away. He goes to it and sits at its base.
When VROOM, up into the air, perfectly complementing the music, this whatever, we don’t know what yet, shoots into the sky. The first time H.o.p. and I saw that we did seriously yell in excitement, swept up ourselves. The tree now revealed to be this amazing bulb, soaring up to the moon, the boy propelled through the clouds like an astronaut, you can feel the physical and emotional forces exerted upon him are enormous as he rides the bulb up, ah, through the watery clouds.
The bulb stops. In the rays of the moon he explores what little surface there is. And is taken off guard as the bulb again begins to move. Its one seeming tether separating to reveal they are two breathtakingly, impossibly long legs. The bulb is quite large on these long spindly legs, and as it moves you see and feel the effort to stabilize its walk, reaching out that first leg with also a wonderful earth grappling sense of surety. We watch from afar as it finds its bearings.
There is nothing at all frightening about this marvelous bulb.
Then the boy takes off on the leafed stem of the bulb, flying above the clouds, tries as best he can to cover his head with his short arms as a wave of ocean sky cloud swallows them and WOW what a transition to his riding the flying stingray up up up and over the clouds, through the floating jellyfish.
Suddenly there appears the ship of the blood red sun. “Look at them throw their spears at him,” H.o.p. says. And they shoot at him that blood red sun cannonball on its tether. The boy is powerless to fight it, to do anything but simply ride the sting ray.
For a moment it looks as if he won’t make it, but indeed he escapes that blood red rage, the sting ray ferrying him out of reach just by a hair in the nick of time, and the boy sails on while the ship behind him, split by its own tethered cannonball, breaks in two and descends into the clouds.
* * * * * *
Just last night, after watching the eclipse, when I came back inside with my failed pictures. I looked at Saturn and Regulus (?) on either side of the moon, their spirals of light, and I thought, “Ah, jelly fish in the ocean sky.” So after having watched the eclipse I then took H.o.p. on a web journey looking for which deep sea self-illumining creature most looked like those stars in that deep sea sky ocean. (I am now reminded of the Light Eel we made last year.)
We were well primed for “I Lived on the Moon”.
Netflix has some Sundance Film Festival animated shorts from 2007.
H.o.p. and I watched “Ask the Insects”, “Der Ostwind”, “In Passing” and “One Rat Short”.
“Ask the Insects” was the only one he asked to see again, the effects having sparked his interest, and then before I even began to replay it he had changed his mind and wanted to move on.
“One Rat Short” had cute animated rats but again H.o.p. was uninvolved by either animation or story.
“Der Ostwind”, about two fighter pilots facing off in WWI, also left him cold. Though I’d watched it first and told him it was OK (not bloody), he was too worried by the fighting, wondering if it was going to turn gross, to enjoy it. And, honestly, there wasn’t much to enjoy.
I’d not previewed “The Tragic Story of Nling” and as the others had been kid friendly we jumped in. But it began with a man saying things had gotten so bad he had eaten two friends and drunk the alcohol from their veins, which sent H.o.p. jumping up from my chair and running from the room. Perhaps I’ll return later to see if there’s anything to recommend it to adults.
All in all, we were unenthused by these selections.
While H.o.p. did some language arts, I did a search at Youtube for Sundance animation, hoping for better things. The result was the 2006 Sundance winner for Best Short Animation, “Fifty Percent Gray”. And H.o.p. will not be watching that film as the basic story concerns a dead warrior who, faced with a television for revelatory company in the afterlife, keeps blowing his brains out. The trace amount of philosophical content didn’t warrant the unnecessarily graphic violence, brains splurting out the back of the head and blood spraying everywhere. The resolution, intended to be dark comedy, was about as surprising and unimaginative as finally stubbing your toe on a protruding leg of a piano stand that you’d passed twenty times earlier and kept thinking that you’d better push the piano stand further out of the walkway but you didn’t and ouch.
We went on to better things, a couple of which I’ll post later.
If you happen to have one of those children who’s fascinated with knights in shining armor (as have I), and also subscribe to Netflix, may I suggest the Sundance Short Comedy, “Motion Studies: Inertia”.
A man decked out in full armor attempts to move as quickly as he can as long as he can.
The film is two minutes long. That includes credits.
Lo and behold the clouds cleared up and after watching for a while from the window we stepped outside for around 20 minutes of eclipse viewing with the binoculars.
“Wasn’t that exciting?” H.o.p. said.
It was pretty. I tried taking pictures but not having brought along the tripod the moon came out looking like a celestial slinky.
Google will never spit me up in the first 500,000 pages of search results for “Valley of the Dolls” so there’s really no reason for me to write on it and if I do I can write whatever I want and not worry about coherency or having any point to make, though it’s not like I worry that much anyway. Or I do but I I’m then able to ignore the impulse to worry.
I’ve got great huge black holes in my education that drag me damn close to cultural illiteracy. Such as I’d not seen “Valley of the Dolls” until recently. Which is not as much fun as Russ Meyer’s “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” which I only stumbled upon–I’m ashamed to admit–just a few short months ago. And having seen “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”, I decided I should watch what inspired that incredible film, and having now seen “Valley of the Dolls”, well, I can say that “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” is even better than I thought, and I already thought it a work of pure genius and there’s every reason that Russ Meyer should have considered it the highlight of his career.
I’ve not read “Valley of the Dolls” except for trying to make sense out of a few chapters of it when I was nine years of age and came across it in our basement. The cover had brightly colored pills on it, I think. And I was very confused, at first, by the love of these women for their dolls. Dolls, dolls and more dolls. Sex and dolls. I visualized scantily clad women on heart-shaped beds with gold or pink satin sheets and in their naughty little nothing negligees they were surrounded by dolls, clasping dolls, weeping over their dolls, nightly falling asleep with their dolls. Because there was something odd about this, I was forced to start at the beginning of the book and my reading comprehension abilities probably took a leap that summer.
My favorite book when I was eight was “Bambi”. I think I must have read it 50 times.
Big difference between “Bambi” and “Valley of the Dolls”.
I had thought well this will give me an introduction to the real world of adult literature (as in for adults, not pornographic) and so it’s kind of sad that way, that Jacqueline Susann was perhaps the first adult author that I read. Seriously, I had thought of this as personal growth. I stood in the basement looking at this book which I happened to find either on top of the black spinet piano or in the seat of the spinet piano (what happened to that spinet, anyway) and the paperback had small print which meant it was adult and it had pills on the front which meant it was adult and I thought to myself well I’m a good enough reader that it’s time to exercise those reading skills with a step into adult fiction.
How did I make it to 2008 without having seen “Valley of the Dolls”?
Do I feel any more complete for having seen “Valley of the Dolls”?
Is my world a little fuller?
Will the songs of the birds in the morning be brighter?
Will spring be fresher?
Will the Easter chick be fluffier?
Will the Spring Peepers sound peepier?
A year from now will I look back on this time with gratitude for this little pebble tossed into my big black hole of cultural negligence, which doesn’t make for a bridge across but leaves one less rock to trip me up on the sidewalk?
I’d thought I’d take fun notes of the film but then I saw it opened with snow and Radcliffe and haven’t not long before seen “Love Story” I got sidetracked with wondering instead about just what American fantasy was being addressed, in the 60s and 70s, with snow and Radcliffe and doe-legged young women stepping out into the big world, such that between when “Valley of the Dolls” was released and “Love Story” hit the theaters, those women had gone from surviving the heady, trashy bite-of-the-apple world to protesting from their youthful deathbeds that it was better to have loved and lost their careers than to have thrown away Ryan O’Neal for Paris and Bach.
I lie. The reality is I was too startled to write anything that first trip around the Valley.
No, the reality is I just wasn’t that inspired.
…because I checked the hour by hour weather forecast and it looks like we’re gonna be all clouds.
Drat.
I started to write a post and was several paragraphs in when WordPress suddenly freaked out and ate it, which I take as meaning that I’m not to post tonight.
P.S. Which is all right. Really. The world can live without knowing how I feel about being in 4th grade again.
Mummy of Artimedora
Metropolitan Museum of Art 2007
I like the way the mummy is reflected in the figure of my brother-in-law.
I love Pistolera’s “Cazador”.
I got IPOD! I can buy the song and port it around now.
Will probably end up getting the album later.
Hungry IPOD says, “Feed me!”
This is good for it. Lots of protein, vitamins, minerals, what have you.
