Category Archives: Holidays

Cinema and Television, Holidays

The Night After

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74  bar steady  29.73  0mph ENE dew-point 56  Summer night, too warm

Waxing Crescent of the Thunder Moon

This is the night after the fourth of July.  No bangs, pops, whistles, booms, showers of color, whirling fountains.  No patriotic music or patriotic festivals on the TV.  A night whose character takes its shape from the night it is not.

When I thought of this earlier, it made me reflect on all those night afters.   Each have their unique caste.  The night after Labor Day school begins for many, the serious, get-to-it season commences.  The night after Halloween the candy gets eaten or dumped, the costumes stowed, the lights taken down.  The Celts have begun their new year.  The night after Thanksgiving many of us groan and roll around on the bed or the couch, one too many turkey legs or dollops of mash potatoes or pieces of pecan pie still harbored somewhere in the digestive track.  The night after Christmas Santa has returned to the North Pole (where will he go if the ice melts?), no more presents and no more anticipation.  The night after Hanukkah the menorah goes back to it usual spot, the family gatherings end.  The night after New Year’s we settle into the next year, the hangover finished, the streamers and screamers and auld lang syne all put away until next year.

In each case we leave the sacred or festive time and return to what the Catholics call ordinary time, a phrase I love.  The value of ordinary time comes from the leavening, the spice that holidays bring to it.  On the night after the frisson between ordinary time and the festive, sacred time of holiday is at its most poignant, the memory still fresh, yet the moment has passed.  So, happy night after the fourth of July.  I hope the sense of patriotism embraced by the revolutionary generation seeped a little bit more into your bones.

While exercising today, I finished Lust,Caution by Ang Lee.  This film pushes boundaries like Brokeback Mountain, sexual boundaries and the question of love ignited in impossible situations.  It is a brave film, both for the director and for the two lead characters.  The context is the Japanese occupation of China.  Most of the film takes place in occupied Shanghai.  The struggle between the resistance and the Japanese, which forms the overall storyline, portrays the complex choices people make in situations that test loyalties at their core.

The technical skills in Asian cinema–Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Korean, Singaporean, Thai–has developed over many years.  We are now beginning to see films that push into the east/west osmotic filter from both directions.  This is a rich and interesting time for cinema from Asia and I feel lucky to participate.

Garden, Great Work, Holidays, Politics

Bozo the Clown and Jesse Helms Die

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77  bar falls 30.01 1mph SW  dew-point 50  Summer, pleasant

Waxing Crescent of the Thunder Moon

Sometimes coincidence says things that would have not occurred to me:

Larry Harmon, longtime Bozo the Clown, dead at 83.

Former Sen. Jesse Helms dies at age 86.

Mulch goes down today.  Old leaves and grass clippings from last year stored in plastic bags.  Straw baled on a farm.  Organic matter that will blend into the soil, enrich it and give it better composition.  Before it does that, it will suppress weeds and keep the soil beneath it cooler, helping plants fight the extremes of summer heat.  An all purpose good deal, mulch.

A columnist referred to the 4th as the happiest of holidays.  It has sparklers, band music, cookouts, fireworks and family gatherings.  As for me, a solid northern European intellectually, I find it a sober holiday.  Our government, at its least competent level in decades, has not made tiny, forgivable, do over mistakes; no, they have blundered on the world stage as well as the domestic.  They have tanked the economy, made citizens suspicious of Washington, politicized the judiciary and made WC Fields and Mark Twain look like optimistic boosters.  On the foreign affairs we have reversed and three upped Teddy Roosevelt.  Now we speak loudly and shoulder nuclear RPG’s.

In light of this July 4th is, for me, a time to redouble my own efforts to bring down these clowns (apologies to Larry Harmon, mentioned earlier) and to change policy at the national, state and local levels.  My own focus now is the natural world, the world that can go along on its own without human interference, if it does not have human interference, that is.  In times past issues of war and peace, civil rights and economic justice were stage front in my political world.  They remain critically important, but I choose to pass that torch to another generation of activists.

On a lighter note I look forward to charcoaled hamburgers, potato salad, corn on the cob and cold watermelon when Kate comes home.  We also have a cache of sparklers to set out in the yard and light.  Star spangledness will live on in our Andover backyard.