Category Archives: Cinema and Television

Bees, Cinema and Television, Family

Pain and Work

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Lughnasa                         Waxing Harvest Moon

Kate came home early from work.  Not working, not pulling her load is hard for her to bear, psychically much harder to bear than the physical pain.  She goes to work when she is in pain, partly because that’s how doctors have been socialized, but also partly because she wants to do her share, or pick up another person’s, if necessary.

This is not a fun way to live her last full year of work.  My hope is that we can find a way, with the help, perhaps, of the two surgeons and the PM&R doc.  She is, as a co-worker told her, a strong woman.

Just watched the Secret Life of Bees.  A fine movie, feelings popping out all over the place and at unexpected moments.  “Just send out love to the bees,” Queen Latifah’s character says.  Yeah.

Bees, Cinema and Television

I’m Not There

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Lughnasa                               Waning Green Corn Moon

Once again a movie arrived late in the pick-up zone.  I’m Not There, the movie about Bob Dylan, was on view here at the Seven Oaks Family Theatre.  It took a while for the dizzying shifts and the multiple actors to make sense, but they did at last.  Cate Blanchett amazed me, as she often does.  She is one of the finest actors working right now.  I found Christian Bale’s performance less compelling, but good, too.  Richard Gere made an interesting Billy the Kid and the young black kid, Marcus Carl Franklin, in a difficult role, performed with great skill.   Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw, who played an enigmatic, trenchant Dylan giving an interview, also appeared.  I’d give it 3.5 stars.  But you saw it years ago, I suppose.

There was a 7.1 magnitude earthquake in the Izu islands about 100 miles from Tokyo.  It shook buildings in Japan’s capital city, but there was no tsunami.

The bees have been busy, but there is little  honey in either of the supers.  I checked the top hive box and there is comb honey there.  Some of the frames had a long dark streak through the honey cells.  It didn’t look right, but I really don’t know.  I need some help.  I did taste the honey and it was delicious.

Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Sport

Wish They All Could Be California…Wines

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Lughnasa                                 Waxing Green Corn Moon (99% illuminated)

Kate and I watched Bottle Shock, a movie about the U.S. Bicentennial year taste test between French and American wines.  California’s Napa Valley wines won.  The British oenologist who created the test redid it in 2006 anticipating that the French wines would win.  They did not.  Napa again.

It’s a bit difficult for me to tell whether I don’t get it because I don’t drink alcohol, but the whole veneration of vinculture and its products seems overblown.  Just sayin’.

Tonight the almost full Green Corn Moon is a yellow orb hanging high in the southeast sky.  It makes the evening enchanted.  The Japanese have moon viewing platforms.  Seems like a good idea to me.

More medical visits tomorrow with Kate, trying to track down the elusive next and hopefully better treatment.

Not sure whether I wrote anything about the whole Favre who-ha, but here it is:  thank god it didn’t happen.  Any superbowl won by the Vikings with Brett Favre at the helm would have tainted the experience and us long suffering Viking’s fans deserve a clean win, straight up with no cross state retired quarterback in the mix.  That said, it does not appear to me that either Tavaris Jackson or Rosenfels have the stuff, but I hope I’m wrong.

Cinema and Television

OMG!

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Summer                  Waxing Summer Moon

I’m a sucker for sci-fi catastrophe movies.  Well, ok, for a lot of other kinds of movies, too, but the sci-fi catastrophe so often get made for tv.   The scenario is pretty straightforward:  an unsolvable problem emerges much to the surprise of the scientific establishment.  A renegade scientist, long ago discredited and/or fired by the VERY AGENCY now wanting him or her back resists, then with reluctance agrees to try to save the world.  Once they’re back in the good graces of the system, that is, people have begun to listen to them, a military expert comes up with a solution to the problem–no matter what it is–that involves an atom bomb.  After much hooing and hahing, the chief decision maker decides against the renegade scientist becauses atom bombs always seem so damned convincing.

The bombs go out or in or over depending on the source of the problem:  the moon, the earth’s core, the magnetic field, an incoming asteroid or alien invader.  They fail.  The chief decision maker, chastened by experience returns humbly to the renegade asking again for their help.  Well, you see where this goes.  There are no On The Beach endings on TV, nor in a lot of movies either.

Tonight, in the strange way TV has of reshuffling actors, the old JAG leading man joined up with the female lead of a new show about lawyers, and built a machine that electro-hemishpherically supercharged the whizzidizigit, thereby expelling the brown star that had collided with the moon.  This, trumpets and then a sappy romantic flourish, saves the earth.  Again.

I know.  So why do I watch them?  Because I find the notion of uber competent scientists who have our back as compelling as the next guy.  THre’s always something to cheer for and a romance seen through to completion.  What’s not to like?  Oh, all right.  A decent script, maybe.  Often the technical affects are cheesy.  Sometimes, well, usually, the acting is atrocious.  Oh, hell, I don’t know why I watch’em.  I just do.

Reminds me of that song: I don’t know why I love you, I just do.

Cinema and Television

Slumdog

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Beltane                   Full Flower Moon

It takes longer for films to make it up here north of 694, the transition point where pick-up trucks begin to out number SUV’s and mini-vans.  It should be no surprise then that Kate and I just saw Slumdog Millionaire.  This is a wonderful movie.  At least at first the most engrossing aspect of the film was its sheer cinematic beauty, somehow Danny Boyle made the famed Mumbai slums glow while not romanticizing them.

Dev Patel and Freida Pinto  (what kind of name is that?)  made the film with their tenderness in the midst of horrific circumstances.  Dev Patel’s slumdog had a nobility and purity that put the police, the corrupt game show host and his own brother in such a bind that they all ended up supporting him, even if reluctantly.

Freida managed a tough girl staying on her feet in spite of the curse of beauty.  Dev never gave up on her; he pursued in a Quixotic manner, eventually making it on the game show because he knew she would be watching.

Worth its Oscars.  In fact, it was good in spite of them.

Asia, Cinema and Television, GeekWorld

Indian Princes and Japanese Peasants

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Spring               Waxing Flower Moon

Another computer problem averted by cyber wizard William Schmidt.  If you had tried to access the files from February 2005 to October 2007 in ancientrails, you would have been met with a not found error message.  An e-mail to Bill and he not only had the problem managed, but helped me relocate the files on my own computer.  I knew they were here somewhere.  Thanks again, techno-mage.

Morning workout, a bit of legislative blogging for the Sierra Club and lunch.   My movie of the moment for my workouts is the continuing saga, the Maharbarata.  I’m on disc 7 of a lot more.  Each disc has six episodes.  This is one long story.  It interweaves gods and humans, demi-gods and demons with the history of India, providing along the way morals and folkways.  Just today, for example, Dhorydan, a contested crown prince, got this wisdom from Bhisma, “No.  Just because you are elder does not mean you will become king.  In India merit is most important.”

Yesterday I finished an early Kurosawa film, The Hidden Fortress.  It featured a running gag with two peasants who act almost as clowns.  It was crisp, the copy, a Criterion Collection dvd, pops.  The story involves a period when Japan consisted of warring kingdoms.  A princess of a defeated people escapes with a loyal general.  Their adventures as they try to leave their home territory for shelter elsewhere constitute the movie.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Weather +Climate

Another Day in Andover

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Spring            Waning Seed Moon

It’s dry here.  We need rain for the crops and for the flowers and the trees.  I don’t care about the lawn.

The tours this morning shoud be fun.  I’m going in a new direction with the calligraphy and it’s one I can pursue for a while.  In fact, I’m sending for a few books on calligraphy.  I already have ink stick, ink stone, brushes and rice (mulberry) paper.  These are the four treasures of the literati study, but I’ve never used them.   Now I will.

Watched a touching  movie on the Independent Film Channel last night, The Syrian Bride.  A woman, a Druze Syrian, lives in the Golan Heights, formerly part of Syria, or, still part of Syria depending on whether you’re Israeli or Syrian.  Therein lies the story line as the bride has a match with a television personality in Syria.  She has to cross the border to get married but many problems ensue, both within the family and at the border.

In the end Mona, the bride, solves the problem by walking across the border with no one’s permission.  Her sister Alma, likewise, walks away from her husband, presumably toward a long-denied university education. Worth a watch.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Literature, Travel

Each Time I Go To Sleep

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Spring                   Waning Seed Moon

I have been playing a game before I go to sleep.  It soothes me, helps me relax.

It began when I wondered what my five favorite movies were.  Seventh Seal jumped into my mind immediately.  2001:  A Space Odyssey.  The Day The Earth Stood Still. (1951)  Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (1956)  Seven Samurai.  Sleep would come because I knew this was not the list, it was a list, a list I could come up at night as I drifted off to sleep.

Later, five novels:  Glass Bead Game.  The Trial.  Steppenwolf.  Moby Dick.  Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy.

Five favorite paintings at the MIA: Goya’s Dr. Arrieta, the Bonnard, the virgin by the master of the mille fleurs, Poet by A Waterfall,  The Cardinal.  again, a list, not the list.

Five pieces of music:  Unanswered Questions by Ives, Messaein’s symphony for the end of time, Coltrane’s A Train,  Drift Away.    definitely a list, not the list.

Five favorite classical sites I’ve visited:  Ephesus, Delphi, Delos, Angkor, Conwy castle in Conwy, Wales.

So on.  Works for me.

Cinema and Television, Garden

Let The Right One In

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Spring          Waxing Seed Moon

Took mulch off this afternoon, off all the beds except the shade bed where some tender mosses lie.   Mulch taken off at this time of year has to remain close to the beds in case it has to go back on due to cold nights.  There are green shoots all round tulips, daylilies, daffodils.  Not much, just above the soil surface, but they are on their way.

A movie Saturday, too.  Last night and this afternoon I watched Let the Right One In, the Swedish vampire movie.  It differs from most vampire movies in its neo-realist style, careful cinematography yet natural compositions.  There is little vampire lore here and what there is seems to run against the grain of the traditional.  Eli, the vampire who is no longer a girl (her pubis has closed, whether sewed or fused is not clear) has remained 12, as she says, “a long time.”  Yet the movie presents her as a twelve year old girl emotionally, not the precocious maturity of young vampires as in Anne Rice’s work.  She has also gathered little in the way of riches or success from her state.

She and Oskar, the lead and also a 12 year old, become friends in an awkward courting ritual that has familiar missteps.  In the end Eli protects Oskar, then Oskar protects her.  A touching story in a gory, blood-dripping way.

Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Great Wheel, Our Land and Home

Chop Wood, Carry Fencing

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After years in urban ministry, economic development, affordable housing and responsbility for urban congregations spread throughout the metro area I thought I knew Minneapolis.

Not so.  When I drove over to ecological gardens, Paula’s home at 4105 Washburn Avenue I discovered north Minneapolis, the one that includes Shingle Creek, the Humboldt Greenway, Victory Memorial Drive.  This is a quiet leafy chunk of the city that seems somehow separate, another urban entity, neither suburb nor city. 

Delightful.  I love to drive around in the city, on city streets, to places I’ve never been.  That chance came to me today and I had a great time.

Back home in time for the nap, but no sleep.  A family I know has a terrible weight on them right now and I couldn’t get it off my mind.  What can I do.  What will they do. 

So I got up and moved old wire fencing Continue reading Chop Wood, Carry Fencing →