Category Archives: Cinema and Television

Cinema and Television, GeekWorld, Great Work, Health, Latin, Our Land and Home, Translating Metamorphoses

95%

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Imbolc                                                                                Cold Moon

So the parade of salesmen has begun.  First up was Reliant heat and cooling.  They sent out a really good guy.  Told us what would fit, how much it would cost.  Very reasonable price.  Good furnace.  If I hadn’t had the others scheduled, I would have bought this one.  Still, we’ll hear the others out, too.  You never know.

This furnace runs at 95% efficiency.  As opposed to our current 80%.  Think about a difference of 15% less gas used.  Then multiply it by hundreds and thousands of homes.  Hard to believe.  Of all the strategies to combat global warming, the easiest and most immediate ones involve conservation.  More fuel efficient cars, furnaces.  Better insulation in homes.  Switching from coal-burning electricity generation.  Having cleaning crews in large buildings clean during the day.  Strategies that have broad application yet involve relatively straightforward choices and proven technologies.

Finally wrenched myself away from the image moving to work on the Edda’s some more.  Brunhild today.  A sad story.  Sigurd jumped into that burning ring of fire, but boy it really didn’t work out for him or Brunhild.

Also back to my one sentence of Latin.  Again, it seemed to flow today.  Based on past experience I’ll hit an impossible head-slapper tomorrow, but today.  All right.

I’m in my second week of rest for my patella-femoral syndrome.  I’ll start back on the workouts on Monday.  I’ll see how, or whether, this helped.

Been watching House of Cards on Netflix.  As the brave new face of television, I like it.  13 episodes up all at once.  We can watch it as we like it.  Cool.

 

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Our Land and Home

Scattered Images

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Imbolc                                                                                 Cold Moon

Reorganizing my fragmented collection of images.  I have a method, it works, but there are a whole lot of images.  This may take a very long time.  Worth it in the end though because I will have a well organized image resource, collected by me and easily usable.

Watched Wim Wender’s “The End of Violence” last night.  Kate likes her narrative served straight up with no sides.  This  film had oblique angels and sudden turns.  She wasn’t crazy about it, but I liked it.  It was an early post-modern film.  A film about a film about violence in which the resolution of the film destroys the protagonist’s career and liberates him at the same time.  Clever, beautiful.  Well acted.  Bill Pullman.  Andie MacDowell.  Gabriel Byrne.

Looks like the critics on Rotten Tomatoes agreed with Kate for the most part.  I write these critiques before I look up the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.  Sort of like translating Latin before checking with an English version.

I’m in full inside mode at the moment, not moving outside for much though I do plan to visit the grocery store this afternoon.  Cold.  And our furnace is out.  Fortunately I have my own gas stove in the study.  Centerpoint is coming today.  Could be the end for the furnace; it’s 18 years old and their life-span is 15-20 years.  Sigh.

 

Cinema and Television

Shirley Valentine

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Winter                                                                          Cold Moon

We’ve lost 33 degrees since noon.  Now 3, headed lower.

Just watched Shirley Valentine, a British coming of age movie featuring a 42 year old housewife whose friend wins a trip to Greece and invites her along.  It’s a bold move for her; she’s never left England.

On the island (Mykonos) she begins to enjoy just being Shirley Valentine.  She meets a Greek guy.  Eventually, not because of the guy, she decides to stay.  To live her life; her Shirley Valentine life, not her wife life or her mum life.

This is a funny movie, a sad movie, a hopeful movie.  Just right for a rapid temperature fall.

Cinema and Television, Family

Going to the Movies

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Winter                                                                   Moon of the Winter Solstice

Kate and I saw Les Miserables and Django Unchained today, our new year’s party.  Afterward we had dinner at Tanner’s, a restaurant near the theatre.  A fun start to the new year.

You’ve probably read the reviews, but if you haven’t, both of these movies are worth seeing.  Les Mis is a known tear jerker and this one lived up to that reputation at several spots.  I found Valjean’s doggedness as a father and the revolutionary French youth at the barricades especially moving.

Funny, angry, sensitive, homage and satirical at turns Django shows Tarantino for the great director that he is. Django Unchained is a swipe at the Western, the fate of black actors in movies and the bounty hunting trade.  Christopher Waltz as Dr. King Schulz and Jamie Foxx as Django have great chemistry, forming an unlikely team.

 

 

Cinema and Television

The Joy Luck Club

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Winter                                                              Moon of the Winter Solstice

Did you see the full moon last night with Jupiter atop it?  Here a mist clothed both in a gentle gauze.  It was a Christmas present from the universe.

Kate and I just watched the Joy Luck Club.  An old movie, yes, but a good one.  I read the novel, too, but a very long time ago.  And liked it a lot.  I remember that.

This one, like Lincoln, had me in tears at the end though for very different reasons.   The four mothers had stories of being daughters in China and raising daughters in America.  The daughters had an American heritage with the Chinese overhang effecting their lives in multiple ways, good and bad.

If you haven’t seen it and like family dramas, this is a good one.

Cinema and Television, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Friday, Friday

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Fall                                                                    Fallowturn Moon

Sometimes Latin lessons leave me feeling further advanced, more knowledgeable, other times, like today they leave me with my brain tied in knots.  Tight knots.  I’m sure that means I’ve spent extra hard energy learning.  I keep telling myself.  Learned a new way to diagram sentences, using Noam Chomsky’s now passe transformational grammar.  I’m not sure why it’s passe, but it looks useful to me.

Keep reading.  That’s what Greg says.  It all becomes clearer if you keep reading.  I believe him; it’s worked that way for me so far.  It’s just that it’s harder stuff now that needs to become clearer.

I’m continuing to plug away at revising Missing.  As I go, things unravel and have to be rethreaded or dropped altogether.  Yesterday I cut the initial scene and it all flows much better in the first chapter now.  The story itself continues to emerge as I revise.  Funny, that’s what they say happens, but I’m experiencing it now.  So, if I can get that first chapter humming, then there’s the second one.  And so on.  BTW:  I’m a bit over half way through on the revision, but as I work sometimes I get lead to other parts of the book that need help.

Kate and I just watched 127 hours.  A gritty, intense movie made more so by its factual base.  When I lifted the DVD out of the player, I turned to Kate and said, “This is as close as I want to come to this experience.”  Since cutting the cable, we’ve watched more movies together.

Back on the treadmill today, cranking it up a bit, trying to shake off the detraining the last three weeks or so have accumulated.

Cinema and Television, Garden, Great Work

Off Mission

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Fall                                                                  New (Fallowturn) Moon

Was gonna plant lilies and iris but got stuck on the computers, shifting stuff around, getting a new computer setup, then into writing my essay for the mythology class.  Discovered after creating a 500 word piece that I’d read the instructions wrong, 250-350 words.  Condensing is another matter.  Will take some time tomorrow.

Then I went into the Sierra Club for the Legislative Awards.  Each year we give awards to our champions, up to 4, in the last session.  This year we gave them to Frank Hornstein, Alice Hausman and Bill Hiltey. Hiltey, who retired this year, gave a downbeat assessment of our odds in the future unless “reasonable” people get elected.  He sighted corporate control of legislators and the anti-science attitudes as difficult barriers to advances in environmental legislation.  The environment is, he said, and I believe, too, collateral damage of the economic and political culture we now have.

Cutting the cable news:  right now Kate and I are watching the Poirot series on Netflix.  There are 55 episodes and we can go through them at our own pace.  Never regretted the decision to bounce Comcast TV.  Well, with one exception.  Sometimes the picture quality suffers because of non-HD transmissions.  That’s too bad when we have a good HD setup.

Cinema and Television, Sport

Vikings. Then, Vikings.

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Lugnasa                                                  Garlic Planting Moon

Thank you Vikings for continuing to free up time on Sundays later this fall.  I think I might take that online course on mythology.  Don’t know why, but as a fair weather fan, I’m willing to come back if you show me some winning football.

Guess in the end I’m a transplant when it comes to football, even though I’ve been here over 40 years.  The Vikes are just not enough my team to keep me interested in the rebuilding years.

Friday workouts are intense.  My back, my legs, my shoulders and chest all feeling it this morning.

Today’s a cooking day, so I’m off to the grocery store.

Oh.  One more thing.  Kate and I did watch Vikings last night, the Vikings in How To Train Your Dragon.  Much more entertaining than the football bunch.

Cinema and Television

At Night

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Summer                              New (Hiroshima) Moon

Let the kids and the grandkids decompress from grandpop’s visit.  We wore ourselves out riding the train, eating pizza, driving a long ways.

I took the night off and saw a movie.  Dark Knight Rises.  Weird, I know.  The 6:05 time though.  Not the late one.

The Harkins Theaters are a multi-plex (what’s the plex mean?) not far from the hotel.  I settled into a seat, the theatre was not crowded.  As the previews began to roll, I looked around, imagining a similar scene, only the night before, only a suburb away.  Gas rolling in.  A masked gunman shooting.

As the movie started, a strange thing happened.  A man in a dark shirt walked in, looked around, went to the back of the theatre, pressed the exit door open, light spilled in from the outside.  He pulled it shut, turned around and walked out.  Gave me a moment.

After the movie, around 9:00 pm, this is a long one, I went over to a yogurt shop and had a dish of cookies and cream, sitting outside in a cool Colorado night.  No bugs.

There are odd reverberations in the movie given the Aurora event.  In it a man with a mask-like device over his face locks people in a room and shoots at them with an automatic weapon.

Bees, Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work

Tigers and Bees and The Great Mesh of Being

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Summer                                                   Under the Lily Moon

Thursday night Kate and I watched Conflict Tiger, a movie by Sasha Snow that followed the same story retold in the book, Tiger.  It’s a powerful, gritty movie about the reality of life in the taiga.  The characters in the movie, especially Yuri Trush and Ivan Dunkai, have a powerful presence, Trush as the hard-bitten but compassionate eco-policeman and Dunkai as a shamanic character with intuitive grasp of the tiger and taiga learned practical wisdom.

(Ivan Dunkai, Sasha Snow)

Today I did bee business.  Moved six honey supers, put two on the south colony and took the remaining four into the third garage bay.  The trailer on our lawn tractor is a handy piece of equipment.

Two colonies:  the south, filled with bees, boiling up out of it like angry vengeance, not wanting a stranger pawing around in their home; the other, docile and less populated.  When the south colony residents went into their angry buzz and started slamming against the veil and gathering on my right glove, my body zoomed back to last fall when I made a mistake.  You may recall that I decided to replace a honey super on a hive without veiling up?  OMG.  WTF.  OUCH.  My heart rate went up today.

Since I use nine frames in ten frame hive boxes, the bees often construct comb in the empty spaces and they had done this in the south colony.  Since I had to reverse the hive boxes on that colony today–this forces the bees to fill up both hive boxes with brood which makes for a better crew to harvest and make honey–one of the chunks of non-frame comb fell off.  It had honey it.

It’s now on the kitchen table.  Fresh honey in the comb.  Worth that bit of pit-a-pat.

Bee keeping is a collegial activity.  I keep the frames clean and coming while the colony builds up, adding sugar syrup if necessary.  Once the honey flow starts, if the colonies are strong enough, I put on honey supers and harvest the honey they make that is in excess of what they need to survive over the winter.

In other words I provide a home and its maintenance, they pay the rent with honey.  It is nothing less than a partnership with both parties putting in their own labor and each party getting benefit.

It is, in that way, a very tangible micro-instance of the relationship we have with our mother, the earth.  In that macro relationship we are the dependent party, yet we have work we put into the relationship, too.  It can be constructive work or destructive work, we choose, but the feedback systems in play make destructive work dangerous, too often causing mother to remind us of our place in the order of things, the great chain of being.

In fact the great chain of being does not run from earth to heaven, rather it runs around the skin of the earth, more like a great mesh.