Daily Archives: June 28, 2008

Aging, Cinema and Television, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Literature

An Instant Classic

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63  bar steep rise 29.64 6mph N dew-point 58  Summer night

Last Quarter of the Flower Moon

As always, the movies come later up here above 694, inside the pick-up section of the Minneapolis metro.  Tonight it was “No Country For Old Men.”  This movie is an instant classic according to many reviews.

Talk about an oxymoron.  An instant classic.  That’s where the frisson is, yes, but I have a suspicion that just beyond the irony of such a juxtaposition lies a realm in which critics believe in their capacity to know a classic when they see one, even if it has only six months of theatre runs under its belt.  I don’t believe in such a capacity; but, I do believe it is of the nature of criticism to imagine its existence.

This is a fine movie.  It has a story line that takes you by misdirection.  As the movie unwinds into its fullness, the obvious assumption is that it is a mystery, a how will they catch him yarn.  Anton Chigurh and his compressed air weapon, used in stock-yards for killing live stock, cuts a wide lane of violence down the center of the screen.  The opening scene shows the remains of a drug deal that has killed at least eight people.

The plot seems to follow the results of this shoot out when it really follows Sheriff Bell, Sheriff of Terrel County in west Texas.  His story is a meditation on aging and on the violent criminal action that follows in the wake of the international drug trade.   He is an intelligent, compassionate man bewildered by crime he no longer understands.  In the final scene, which took me by surprise, he recount two dreams about his father.

A classic?  Hell, I don’t know.  I’m not even sure the movies that film historians claim are classics are classics.  I feel more confident in defining literary classics.  There I feel I know one when I see one.  With movies?  Difficult.  Casablanca?  Yes.  Singing in the Rain?  No.  Wizard of Oz?  Maybe.  Birds?  No.  Why?  Too sleepy to explain.  This movie a classic?  Probably not.  But it is a damned fine movie anyhow.

Garden, Politics, Travel

Where to Buy Japanese Gardening Tools? Home Depot!

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69  bar falls 29.56  5mph WNW dew-point 53   Summer, pleasant with fluffy cumulus gathering

Last Quarter Flower Moon

When in Hawai’i I noticed the Filipino gardeners at the Hyatt had small, sickle like tools.  One of them had a serrated edge down and a cutting edge up.  The other had a slightly curved blade and a very sharp edge facing down.  They used them to easily uproot weeds, edge grass and other plants.  I asked the guy where I could buy them, “Home Depot.”  Of course, where else?

In fact, Home Depot did not have them, but Ace Hardware did.  It was your next guess was it not?  The ones I found were $8 and had a bamboo shaft.  When I packed them in my checked luggage, I felt like I might get stopped at security.  First, box cutters.  Now, Japanese gardening tools.

Yesterday I discovered the the second of these tools was a whiz at cutting back perennials whose leaves had died back.  By putting the blade just into the soil and cutting back toward myself, the leaves came off with ease, leaving the bulbs in mother earth where they belong.  Today I finished the daffodils.  I have a lot of daffodils so their leaft behinds are voluminous.   Into the red plastic tub and then out to the discard pile.  The plastic tubs are also great gardening tools.  Cheap and capacious, they are also light and indestructible.

Read an interesting article about Singapore in the Smithsonian magazine.  It says Singapore has become fun city.  Well, not quite.  But, compared to the authors first visit 37 years ago during r&r from Vietnam War coverage it was “Laissez bon temps roulez.” Bars in entertainment zones can stay open until dawn.  Theatre has begun to pop up and traveling musicians now include Singapore on their itinerary.

When I visited in 2004, one of the things that amazed me was seeing women, unescorted, walking the streets well after midnight.  My hunch is that relaxation of the puritan, or rather, Confucian value system may endanger that.

This “Asian values” idea, promoted by Singaporean political leaders, and rooted in Confucianism veers away from Master K’ung-fu-tzi in one very salient area.  In the Confucian world there was a distinct hierarchy of professions.  The emperor and courtiers, mandarins and nobles were at the top.  Then came landowners, farmers, woodcutters and fisherfolk.  After these, artisans.  At the very bottom, consigned to almost a pariah role, were merchants.  Merchants, Confucius believed, created nothing, adding nothing to the culture, rather they made money moving around the goods and food-stuffs created by the labor of others.

Singapore, much of Southeast Asia and certainly Taiwan, Japan and China are, in that wise, far removed from the core values of Confucius.

Off for a nap.  More gardening tomorrow morning.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work
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63  bar falls 29.57  3mph WNW dew-point 56  Summer, sunny and cool

Last Quarter Flower Moon

Mid-summer has come and gone.  This means that Lughnasa, a cross-quarter holiday lies only a few weeks ahead.  Lughnasa is a cross-quarter holiday; it comes between the Summer Solstice (mid-summer) and the Fall Equinox (Mabon).  The Celts divided their festival year first in halves, Beltane and Samhain, Summer and Winter, then in fourths, adding Lughnasa and Imbolc (Candlemas).  At some point they added in the solstice and equinox celebrations that were more common in the rest of Europe.  This created the current eight part Celtic year which begins at Samhain on October 31st and runs, successively, through Winter Solstice (Yule), Imbolc on February 1st, Spring Equinox (Ostra), Beltane on May 1st, Summer Solstice (Mid-Summer), Lughnasa on August 1st, and the Fall Equinox (Mabon).

This means that New Years for Celts occurs on what the US celebrates as Halloween.  The creative part of me has found the Celtic year a perfect fit for my writing life.  I try to start writing projects on or around Samhain since the late fall, winter and early spring seasons are inside times in the northern latitudes, at least for those who don’t ski.

Following the Celtic Year, or the Great Wheel of the Year, has proved faith and spirituality enough for me since late in the last millennium. We move in response to nature’s deep rhythms whether we acknowledge them or not, just consider the beating of your heart and the breath in your lungs right now.  Eating, sexuality, exercise and play are all intrinsic aspects of the body and DNA we have inherited from millions of years of evolution.  That evolution has focused on those functionalities necessary to survive in Earth’s specific environment:  its seasons, its other animals both predator and prey, its plants and mountains, rivers and streams, lakes and grasslands.

We are not only animals, our mind gives us self-awareness, a precious and difficult gift.  We are, however, never less than animals and the self-awareness and agency we so cherish vanishes if we lose the vessel given to us by those millions of years of evolution.  This is why death is such a difficult barrier for us.  We flail around when confronted with the loss of our body’s elegant functionality.  Perhaps this body is a chrysalis and death the trigger for our imaginal cells to begin a process of subtle transformation so that we emerge after death a resurrected or transmigrated entity, as different from the earth bound us as the butterfly is from the caterpillar.

Until that great drifting up morning however, we walk here, feet bound to alma mater and hearts beating without conscious help.