Category Archives: Cinema and Television

Unstoppable

August 27, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa New Harvest Moon

Just watched a movie, Unstoppable, that featured Denzel Washington. This guy can act. He’s a lunch bucket worker, very able to project blue collar seriousness. The story concerns a real runaway train story, an Ohio train rather than one in Pennsylvania. Here’s a news clip on the actual incident.

“Like it or not, there are some things that movies do best. Movies do not generally do a great job with anything involving heavy-duty cogitation, but when it comes to runaway trains, the medium is peerless” line from a review on Rotten Tomatoes.

Cinema and Television, Family, Great Work, Politics, Writing

In A World Far Away

April 27, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Waning Bee Hiving Moon

Spent the day in the world I’ve created, Tailte, a sister world to earth, but separated by several thousand light years. It’s strange to spend time there, a place that exists only in my mind, yet populated with people, creatures, landscapes, mountain ranges, oceans, islands, gods and goddesses. Strange, but in a good way. It’s one of the joys I experience in writing fiction. It takes me to a place I can’t reach in any other aspect of my life.

I’m still typing in work I did at Blue Cloud Monastery though I’ve also advanced the word count by a few thousand words. Plugging away. Just have to keep at it.

We only have a month left to go in the 2011 session of the 2011-2012 legislature. The number of bad bills, outrageous legislation and outright strange bills (like cutting down walnut trees in State Parks to save the State Parks continues to pile up as the party out of legislative power for years flexes its muscle. The callous disregard for the future of our rivers and streams, lakes and forests, wildlife and prairie’s just doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t understand the political calculus that trades temporary economic gain for permanent disfigurement and toxification of wetlands, cutting down old growth forests, polluting the Minnesota, the Mississippi and wetlands around and possibly within the BWCA.

Mark and I watched Salt, an Angelina Jolie spy flick. Not bad, not great, but entertaining even with the cliches. We also started watching a three part made for tv movie called Archangel. It was good; we’re about half way through.

Aging, Cinema and Television, GeekWorld, Great Work, Memories, Politics, Travel

I Want To Like Nuclear Power

March 26, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Waning Bloodroot Moon

Japan. Nuclear power. Climate change. Not a pretty picture. I don’t know about others, but I want to like nuclear power. Its non-carbon emitting energy production has a potential role in staving off the worst effects of global warming. However. With no place to store the waste permanently, the waste gets stored temporarily near the reactor in which it was used. This seems safe. Look at Prairie Island. After all these years, still no trouble. Then again. How many years do we have to have in a row with no trouble? 25,000 or so, I believe. That’s a long run.

That’s not all. Situations develop, human error, mechanical failure, maintenance scrimping, natural disasters with unforseen confluences, say an F5 tornado and a once in a century flood. Could happen over the span of over 25,000 years. Probably will. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl had become objects in the rear view mirror, errors, mistakes, but over with. Until Fukushima.

Now, suddenly, they begin to look links in a chain, a nuclear chain. Remember Godzilla? Them? The 50 Foot Woman? Radiation. Now there’s radioactive iodine in the sea. I want to like nuclear power, but I’m having a hard time. The stakes of mistakes seem too high. At least for now.

Wish somebody would get a good fusion reactor goin’.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Politics, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Carpe diem

March 19, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Full Bloodroot Moon

Got my novel a boost by going out to Blue Cloud, got back and dove into the legcom, MIA, Latin sequence plus finishing my presentation, Redefining the Sacred, and have gotten little novel work done. The times. Now the air has begun to warm up and the snow to melt. That means more time outside, which I’m eager to get started, but that, of course, means less time inside and all of the winter work is desk bound or at the museum.

When I talked to Kate about my despair for human life on this planet (see yesterday’s post), I also commented on my zest for life. It’s never been higher, I told her. OK, yes, the sun shone, the sky was blue and it looked warmer, all boosts to the life zestometer, but it’s more than that. Kate’s retired and that’s removed a lot of stress from my life as well as hers. I know this for sure because I have a mild case of psoriasis and its gotten much, much better since her retirement in January.

I’ve also got two challenging volunteer roles, docent at the MIA and the legcom at the Sierra Club, each of them test different skill sets every week. The Latin work has given renewed confidence in my learning capacity, plus it’s fun in ways I hadn’t anticipated. We have two grandkids with birthdays coming up. The dogs are healthy. Our orchard should begin producing this year. I know what seeds I’m going to start and what I’m going to plant outside, early. There’s a novel underway. I’ve made new friends at Bluecloud and through the MIA and Sierra Club work. This will be my third year as a beekeeper. The Woolly’s are in our 25th year. Finally, Kate and I have started new physical routines.

Said another way I get to be around art, practice politics, create, grow, love, laugh, visit with friends and family. Life is full of matters that can keep us excited and eager to get up in the morning.

No matter what the world may be like tomorrow today is a day filled with promise. So, like my friend, Bill W., I’ll take my life one day at a time.

Aging, Asia, Cinema and Television, Commentary on the news, Great Work, Memories, US History, World History

Elemental

March 13, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Waxing Bloodroot Moon

August 6th. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rendering the friendly atom a deadly enemy. Since that time, mutations became a favorite meme of scary movie in the 50’s and early 60’s. Since that time movies like On the Beach, Fail Safe, Doctor Strange Love, the China Syndrome have dealt with one scenario or another based on the catastrophe inherent in nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, even in peacetime uses. Since that time Chernobyl and Three Mile Island became synonyms for danger, making even the nuclear generation of electricity scary. The cold war and the DEW line and the Strategic Air Command, missiles in silos and on submarines heightened our awareness by putting a continuing military face on the nuclear threat.

The grim possibility highlighted by the doomsday clock since 1947, the minutes to midnight decided by the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago. (Ironic like the photograph below because the first splitting of the atom occurred below Alonzo Stagg Stadium on the University of Chicago campus. Some jinn just won’t go back.)

Those of us born after the end of WWII have lived ever since with the threat of nuclear annihilation. That threat continues to this day. The most chilling photograph out of 8.9 earthquake and tsunami ravaged Japan was not the dramatic footage of the flood waters carrying burning buildings inland or the ships carried ashore or the fearful Japanese racing away from destruction, no, it was this one. Thick with irony, unintentional in its resonance with over 65 years of military, cinematic and domestic horror, this scene, a scientific response to a scientific disaster–not the natural one–chilled me the first time I saw it. It still does.

Aging, Cinema and Television, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Politics

Still Examining

February 16, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Waxing Bridgit Moon

Greg Membres, my Latin tutor, recommended a film, The Examined Life. You may have seen it already since it was made in 2008, but it’s a powerful introduction to some fundamental philosophical questions like ethics, the meaning of life, political theory.

One truth struck me more powerfully than any other while watching this movie. I imagined, when I was in high school and then in college, that there was an upward and onward nature to learning, a steady progression in which high school and college pushed me, and a progression that would give me enough momentum to take my life up the mountain, all the way to the top, that somehow learning and life would be a regular unfolding of answers and conclusions. After, maybe, my sophomore year I began to realize this was a mistaken view, not only mistaken but might have had reality actually inverted.

That is, I was never more certain of the truth than when I was in college and then, later, in seminary. Life since then has offered a sometime gradual, sometimes sudden degradation of both the things I know for sure and the things I know at all. An abstract thinker by nature and inclination, I found it logical, desirable to hunt for truth in the abstract systems of philosophy, theology, theoretical approaches to various disciplines. At one point, in fact, I wanted to study the theoretical foundations of anthropology in graduate school. Turns out not many graduate schools had much interest. In either the discipline or me studying it.

As life experience and longer thought has lead me to reconsider many of my core positions, I have abandoned Christianity, the liberal politics of my father, the traditional roles of men and women, boys and girls, the positive assumptions about capitalism with which I was acculturated, the metaphysics of Rene Descartes which still informs our unexamined ontology, a soul, an afterlife, respect for the government, though not for democracy itself. These are not trivial decisions, nor were any of them made lightly nor suddenly.

On some of the big questions like the meaning of life, I have chosen to abandon my search. Life is what we are, it is what we do and needs no abstract cover story for its purpose. This may be too minimalistic for many and I get that, but for me, I find my purpose in life itself, the living of it that includes marriage, family, friends and actions that press for greater justice, a sustainable future, a climate that will not kill us.

Though I’m not a complete cultural relativist, I’m pretty damn close. Murder, oppression, suppression, starvation, unchecked disease, poverty, racial and sexual discrimination of any kind are wrong, in my view, universally. In almost all other matters, I’m more than open to different cultural perspectives and practices, I expect them, celebrate them and would find the world shallower and morally impoverished without them.

Still working on this, noodling it.

Cinema and Television

The White Countess

January 23, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Waning Moon of the Cold Month

We finished an old movie, one I picked up in the abandoned movies bin at the supermarket, you know, where the poor dvds have prices like $4.99 and 6.99, coming down from their new price highs, now served up like, well, like a basket of oranges or a box of cereal. Must feel bad.

Anyhow the White Countess languished there, so I picked it up, saw Ralph Fiennes and three Redgraves. Enough for me. We watched it over two nights. A Merchant-Ivory film its depiction of late 1930’s Shanghai was marvelous. Fiennes and the now deceased Natasha Richardson carried the main plot line. It was slow in the first hour + but I’m a sucker for costume dramas with period settings and nobody does them better than Merchant-Ivory. In the last hour or so, the film gained momentum. A tender moment between Fiennes and Richardson had electricity.

Fiennes played Mr. Jackson, an American diplomat, a prime mover in the failed League of Nations. Richardson was a displaced countess from Russia, an aristocratic survivor of the Bolshevik revolution reduced to working a dance hall to earn money for the rest of her family. Mr. Matsuda, Hiroyuki Sanada, is a Japanese zealot who becomes friends with Fiennes while discussing Mr. Jackson’s past working on a “broad canvas.” Fiennes says there is no longer a broad canvas and that his dream is to open a special bar.

He succeeds and hires the Countess as his hostess. They become close and slowly fall in love.

Mr. Matsuda has a reputation as the frontman for Japanese invasions.

He succeeds. The last scenes of the movie, played out against the backdrop of the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, show Matsuda on a balcony, his carefully tended hair disturbed slightly by a bomb blast as he surveys the invasion from a safe, high spot. Meanwhile, Mr. Jackson has given up the bar of his dreams to seek the white countess and her daughter. They meet and he leaves Shanghai with them for Macau.

As I see it, Mr. Jackson began his life working on a broad canvas, the League of Nations, but became disillusioned, an idealist still, but now, perhaps, realist, too. His bar, his dream, dies in the invasion. He is left then with only the smallest and most intimate canvas of all, love and family.

Mr. Matsuda, on the other hand, has achieved, for the moment, a master brush stroke on his broad canvas.

I think it deserved better than its 51% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

–

Cinema and Television, Dreams, Family

Dream a Little Dream of

January 2, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Inception. Kate and I watched this last night here at Artemis Cinema. Kate, who doesn’t tolerate much fiddle-faddle when it comes to movies, said early and often that it wasn’t clear. Later on, perhaps around the time they’re navigating a well-defended ego, complete with snow camouflaged Hummers with tank tracks in place of tires, snow mobiles and white clad gunmen protecting a concrete gray fortress, we both decided that we had something of a grip on things.

A Russian nesting doll movie with plotlines and concepts connected but difficult to unravel, determining what was real or not became a challenge. Which was, I suppose, the whole point. Mol, Decaprio’s wife, kills herself because he convinced her the world they shared inside a dream was not real. She carries with her, back into waking life, the idea that the world she is in is a dream, an illusion, and that killing herself will cause her to wake up and be with her real husband and her real kids.

This is, of course, a neat cinematic version of solipsism turned inside out. A solipsistic thinker believes the world to be a creation of their own imagination. In this case the solipsist believes the world cannot be her creation and therefore must not be real.

This is a movie more about epistemology, how do we know what we know, than it is about psychology or ontology. In the end we’re left hanging, not sure whether the world Decaprio’s character has returned to is in fact the real world or only a figment of a dream, “A slight disorder of the stomach… You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” Scrooge faced the same epistemological problem with a strong dose of skepticism.

We’ll watch inception again. See how it fares on a second pass.

Aging, Cinema and Television, Family, Holidays, Literature, Retirement

A Visit From the Goon Squad

December 30, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

More time with Ovid. It went slower today, but I’m down to verse 60, at least with my rough draft translation. Tomorrow Greg and I will go over it, give me a lesson in Latin vocabulary and grammar, polish my work. We’ll also further refine my knowledge of ablative absolutes and the passive periphrastic. Which needs, I must say, refining.

Kate’s down to 8 days, 7 days after tonight. She’s almost giddy. We’re still putting the finishing touches on her party. It will be a lot of fun.

Started the HBO series, The Pacific, tonight. I know something about the European theatre of WWII, but almost nothing about the Pacific. This should be a good start, give me a way to guide some future reading.

I’m reading a holiday gift, A Visit From The Goon Squad. The goon squad is time. Jennifer Egan has taken material not very interesting to me, the music business, lives of socal punk era kids and made them into a combination medieval morality play and cinema verite. A good read. I recommend it.

Aging, Cinema and Television, Family, Garden, Our Land and Home

Chainsaw and Snowblower. Watch out.

December 17, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Samhain Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

An inside day today. Tomorrow outside. A little bit of chainsaw action on trees broken by the early wet snow in November. Some snowblower work on the sidewalk, clearing a wider path to the front door.

I also have some mulch to lay down. A bit late, not for mulching, but for the mulch which is in garden bags on our patio. Frozen I imagine. I might have to take a sledge hammer to it.

Maybe some soup making if I have any energy left in the afternoon.

The oldest cousin on my mother’s side, Ikey, has entered a nursing home for what sounds like hospice care. He was the oldest son of Uncle Ike and Aunt Marjorie, my mom’s oldest sister. When the sickle begins to bite into the generation of my family to which I belong, it has a frisson not there when my mother’s generation died off and eventually out. I was never close to Ikey, but to most of the rest of my cousins I have relationships nurtured by at least every two year visits. They’re mostly in Indiana, where I was raised. A note for Ike, for peace and calm.