Durant & Bohemian cave artists

Once upon a time, 2009, I think it was, when I was still writing the fictions, I came up with a story for the origin of the 7 Dwarves. It fit into a poem thing, like a ballad or a really long story-song only fit for performance by Arlo Guthrie, you know? It was not long after that I found that I had been preceded in telling that story (not entirely the same, but close enough) by someone much more well known that I ever hope to want to be. (also, dead, so, yeah) Unintentionally derivative. There were feverish texts to a friend (it warranted that level of immediate attention) and finally it occurred to me that it is no shameful thing to have found a similar narrative question answerable in a similar way. Storytellers do not have the luxury of copyright on asking and answering narrative questions - we come and go, the stories last.

I read of young scholars consulting texts at random as part of a kind of prophetic parlor game with much the same sense of wonder at connection. It pleased me more than sherbet. I picked up the habit from Next Stop Wonderland, although it struck me as an entirely correct thing to do when I saw it happen in Career Girls, a movie I saw while I was trying 'dating' after my first divorce. The movie was delightful, even though the company was a bit, um, dull.

Prophecy bores me. I can never see the point of caring much how the story claims to end as eventually all books must be closed and life continues regardless. I am much more interested in the turning of the tides and the pages and all the wonderful things that get in the way while the writer is desperately trying to make an end viable or at least less contrived than the one she knows will win her an audience. Turning the pages of a book to wherever they will open allows me to delve quite briefly into something I may or may not want to pursue - it is how I decide which of two novels to purchase, whether I will commit to all of the poems in a collection or exactly how well decorated 5 or 10 minutes of my life will be in someone else's words.

All of my books thus far have one slight disadvantage: someone else wrote them or arranged them. There is this pervasive sense of order in things that gets a bit chafing. I see no reason not to discuss Egyptian philosophy and romantic capers from the 1970's in the same breath (provided a random and suspect connection). As I haven't got around to making myself a book of my own words (that I'm willing to flip through at will without the aid of tequila and King Arthur - i.e. journals don't count), I've turned one of my blank books into a quotation and bibliography collection.

This is not an academic sort of thing; there is no consistent style of bibliography and the passages I've written down are not the stuff of papers or presentations, they just make me happy.

Also, I can open the book almost (as it is not yet full) anywhere and read something like this:
Bogin, Meg. "The Women Troubadours: An Introduction to the Women Poets of the 12th-century Provence and a Collection of their Poems." WW Norton & Co. 1980 - Someone wrote this book, and it can be bought and read. What joy!

I've begun Volume I of Durant's The Story of Civilization and while there are 80 very meaningful years between him and me, I get to find and save little (some less little than others) nuggets for future random inspiration.

The whole interpretation of history as progress falters when we consider that these statues, bas-reliefs and paintings, numerous though they are, may be but an infinitesimal fraction of the art that expressed or adorned the life of primeval man. What remains is found in caves, where the elements were in some measure kept at bay; it does not follow that pre-historic men were artists only when they were in caves. They may have carved as sedulously and ubiquitously as the Japanese, and may have fashioned statuary as abundantly as the Greeks; they may have painted not only the rock in their caverns, but textiles, wood, everything - not excepting themselves. They may have created masterpieces far superior to the fragments that survive. In one grotto a tube was discovered, made from the bones of a reindeer, and filled with pigment*; in another a stone palette was picked up still thick with red ochre paint despite the transit of two hundred centuries**. Apparently the arts were highly developed and widely practised eighteen thousand years ago. Perhaps there was a class of professional artists among paleolithic men; perhaps there were Bohemians starving in the less respectable caves, denouncing the commercial bourgeoisie, plotting the death of academies and forging antiques. (97-98)

 * see page 17
** see page 45

Open Library: I love that you exist.

Molly Crabapple puts elephants on the door.

Geeks are made of win at Dragon Con.

Be well, beloveds.
I have more date with learning.

Ah, summer. Ah, summer chick flicks ...

Okay, that's not entirely true. Or fair. For two reasons: 1) Not all buddy road trip moves are chick flicks, and 2) that is not the blog I'm writing right now. I will write it (the one about how 'chick flick' as a referenced genre needs to be redefined to include those of us 'chicks' who would rather soak in lime than watch yet another normative romantic comedy with deeply troubled stereotypes and predictably bad plot turns, and who choose to enjoy their celluloid porn in the form of men getting sweaty and trying to kill each other with swords, or dusty and deeply angry about something, or, you know, well written assassins being flawed and more flexible than me (damn you, George Clooney!!!). You know, that blog) eventually, but not right now. And probably not until I've seen Cowboys & Aliens. Because you know they made that movie just for me, right? I mean, it's all over the trailer: The silent punchy type with odd jewelry as Daniel Craig and the very interesting Olivia Wilde (too thin, but then again, aren't they all?) and Harrison Ford. AND ALIENS.

*sigh*

This is one of the many reasons why I really enjoy science fiction movies. There are some issues (metal bikini, anyone?) that are not, I repeat, NOT omnipresent (Miss Piggy in Space, folks, come on) and they are mostly buddy movies. With ships and guns and muppets and things, and that is always a good way to fill in the necessary back drop for the standard buddy movie plot.

Humans love buddy road trip stories: Gilgamesh and Enkidu travel around and fight each other and then become besties and then fight other people and then *AACK, No Spoilers* Sorry. Right. Moses and Aaron and all of their friends wander around the desert for a really long time and they got a movie. Jesus and his friends got super famous for being really good friends and also really good storytellers (re-read The Gospels and then tell me I am wrong). Star Wars is a brilliant buddy road trip movie. The Muppet Movie: one of the best movies ever made, again, same thing. Galaxy Quest, Star Trek(s), Lord of the Rings, Erik The Viking, Condorman, RED: all of them, buddy road trip movies. (Side note: RED also happens to be a wonderful movie about a really fucked up first date. But, hey, it's Bruce Willis.)

We make friends and we walk around. It's kind of a thing with humans. We always look for these grand differences between humans and every other life form ever and sometimes, I think that the simple things are the most beautiful and to be encouraged: the ability to be friend; the physical freedom to change geographical location (a thing which ought not be taken for granted as it has not always been, and is still not always a right that is available to every human being).

I tend to compare my very favorite novels with very long walks during which you meet everyone on the road and get to know them really really well. It's a form of buddy road trip story, just fewer buddies. The quest thing tends to get a bit grating after a while, but I love the way that groups build during stories. Blazing Saddles has one of the best making-of-a-friend-groups ever. It's straightforward and believable.

And here's where I get all torqued - I despise buddy movies where I don't believe that there is anything like friendship between the characters, or where I believe the friendship is toxic. I do not want to see that. I do not care about it, and more importantly, at the happy ending, I am not happy. I invent story lines where Shirtless Jason Statham shows up, pissed off and drenched in motor oil and goes all River Tam focused and homicidal on everyone. Sometimes, this is my happy ending. (see why I choose to redefine 'chick flick' to fit into a different paradigm?)

So, I'm in a new town, and I'm finally getting around to making some friends. It's not a short process and not one that I take lightly. As you might have noticed. Tonight, I went with two of my new friends to see the movie Paul.

And I remembered why I love The Movies. I love trailers on the big screen. I love pre-show chatter in the seats. I love movie theater popcorn. I love that I get the kid's size snack thing with an Icee and a bag of M&M's and that's exactly enough. I love the dimming of the lights and the sense that I always get of being four years old and knowing that not long after the lights go dark, the world will be filled with Star Wars and John Williams and that I can relax and escape into such wonder as we humans have in it us to create and to share. The older I get, the more I notice the four year old swinging her feet and losing herself in the screen, and I am beyond content. Especially when I am watching a buddy road trip movie where one of the buddies is not a human. I love that I got to share that with two people who enjoyed it as much as I did. This is making friends.

I will not review the movie here. Except to say that I enjoyed it. I enjoyed watching a movie written by people who really sold it - the friendship, the travel, the adventure, the silliness, the dialogue (oh, the dialogue), and the respect for all of the movies that came before. It is often attempted and rarely accomplished - the well-done homage, the awareness of your cultural foundation, I believe we have a bad habit of calling it post-modern because we are pretentious fucks who think that all we will ever be is what we have now.

The future gave me tonight. And I laughed at it. Lots.

Also, I would like to apologize again to the 6 other people in the theater for the roller-coaster arms + scream. it was undignified. i will probably do it again. it was totally worth it.

Cities and their films that I love

I grew up in a city that I knew almost nothing about until years after I'd left it. I lived in a neighborhood of Irish Catholic Democrats, which meant that even though I'm a WASP by genetics and a Nebraskan by default, I'm still an Irish Catholic Democrat from Beverly. I even sang in the choir of a local Catholic church (outside of the parish where I lived).

The neighborhood we lived in, and the church my family and I attended were formed after the Great Fire in 1871. Since everyone blamed an Irish cow, and all of the homes of the Irish workers were destroyed (seeing as how they were made of wood), it was, um, prudent for them to get out of the city as quickly as possible. Social violence is one of those urban constants that we just haven't quite evolved out of. I should make this clear: my neighborhood wasn't actually established by those Irish workers and their families, but its extremely specific character was made by that influx of people. It had previously been German Presbyterian, or so my The Papa tells me, and he does never tell me wrong. Even the Northern Migration of the early 20th century didn't seem to phase anyone much in my neighborhood. The music was different, there were more churches, and the food had more flavor (sorry, but really? Irish potato salad from the South Side of Chicago is about the least flavorful food ever. EVER.) but everyone came out on Saint Patrick's Day and everyone was Irish.

At least, that's how it seemed to me.
Before I learned.

The Blues Brothers is one of those films that I didn't get for a long time. My father loved pointing out landmarks from the movie as we drove places in town or out of town. He loved Ferris Bueller's Day Off because it allowed him to point out exactly how impossible the movie really is. Which it is, and not because of Charlie Sheen, but because of the geography of the city and the timing of events and how long it takes to get places from other places and practical things like that. It is, in every way, a love story to Chicago - it has little to do with Bueller, and everything to do with a vision of a perfect day in the city. The Blues Brothers has been given the nod of the Catholic Church. This proves that it is, indeed, from the South Side. Even though Calumet City isn't technically in the city, it is still part of my home.

Paris, Je T'Aime and New York, I Love You are movies that are billed as short films made by amazing directors with stellar casts showcasing different parts of the named cities using love stories as the framework - the familiar way in to something unfamiliar (I love this device and must find a time to talk about ad nauseum). I have been to both cities and find them wonderful, and will not pretend to any special knowledge of either one of them. That said, I found that the New York pieces had more to do with the people of the city, and the Paris pieces were very grounded in the ground, even though many/most of the directors in the featurettes said that they were telling stories of the people of the city, not of the city itself. (I am, of course, slightly biased: my heart was lost to literature when I read Les Miserables when I was 15, and then again when I was 16 and 17. Hugo loved Paris. And he went on about it and its architecture. And on. And on. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a more diluted example of the sort of detail and exposition and social complexity Hugo runs with in Les Mis. In case you're ever interested in 19th century French Literature. Hunchback is also a fairly quick read. Quicker than Les Mis (The Battle of Waterloo)(Just sayin'))

Now that I've been to Delhi, and had some time to process what little of the city I saw, Monsoon Wedding and Rang de Basanti, both set in that very alive place, seem much more dependent on place than they did before. I've long said that Monsoon Wedding is a love story to Delhi, and that PK and Alice are the main characters, which is the basis of my central argument, because their relationship relies on their meeting, which is specific to urban life, and lives in an overlap of times which is specific to Delhi. Rang de Basanti, shamelessly nationalistic and heartbreaking (it is my go to movie when I need to bawl), shows a completely different set of areas of the city, we even saw one of them - and it was kind of odd, really. Challenged me very quietly to reconsider myself in places. Always a good thing, I think.

So much of any urban area that exists within the walls and behind doors and under sidewalks. Holes in the wall, as we call them - those restaurants with tiny store fronts tucked away down impossible lanes; bookstores with sagging shelves; a movie theater tucked above a bar. Something shifts in your vision when you learn to see the names of places, the quality of the light behind glass doors, the air that leaves the front door and how it changes the world around it.

My favorite city scenes in movies are the ones that rely on old European cities to be relatively incomprehensible to traveler's through. In Condorman, I'm never entirely certain that they will find the church. The Pink Panther turns a quiet round about into the middle ring of circus. The American finds his way around a town that I am convinced could not exist outside of an Escher print. Even The Illusionist turns Edinburgh into an incomprehensible system of surface tunnels - part of the feel of the movie is in the sense of displacement, so it works.

Felines surround me, faces upturned, meows growing louder: it is time for dinner.

For next time: How I learned to love webcomics.

All our humble opinions

I finished a book yesterday, Books by Larry McMurtry, and did it knowing that I would write a review before sending the copy back to the home of a friend of mine, where it lives. I wrote the review, rated the book, and then delighted myself by reading other people's reviews. Most of them were from people who really didn't know what they were gong to get and found it insulting. I love those people. They make very easy targets for practice and very easily defined sets of ways Not-To-Be.

Reviews are one of my most favorite form of literature. I love literary criticism. Fuck that, I love criticism. So much. It is awful and pointless and pointed and relevant and self-serving. It is clear and specific and timely and vapid and wandering and uncertain. It makes me laugh and cry and throw things and want to bake a cake. For everyone. I read criticism and want to explode into anything but a thinking human being. I read criticism and bask in the glorious ability of human brains to find and pursue connections in the most unrelated entities, to find the poetry in anything, to make of a pile of shit something that might actually be fertilizer instead of just a fucking mess.

I don't write many of them, though. Well, not to share. Not written anyway.

As super-powers go, I'd really love to be able to purr. There are few other things that I find compelling or likely to not get out of hand somehow or make going out for a nice evening relatively impossible. I mean, really, laser vision? flying? power boobs? (Hovering, like a Star Wars Hovercraft? That would be cool. (In my dreams, I occasionally travel that way from room to room or down stairs or well - so I sometimes dream that I'm in a mall (why? who knows) and I get around by just sort of lifting up about 4 inches and floating with Segue-speed to my next destination. Sometimes when I wake up, I can still do it. Invisible Segue Power. That would rock.))

My actual super-power, as I've recently discovered, is that I can bore anyone. Really. It's a gift. My friends are really good at not being bored by me, but then again, I do tend to shut up when I'm around them. Usually because one of them has just interrupted me, but that's not the point! (Full disclosure: We interrupt each other. There are a few of us who are still in the middle of conversations we began 3 years ago and will never finish because it's way more fun to keep things going by butting in with something else really interesting and immediate. Also, we have to, otherwise we would all never quit yapping at each other.)

I. Can Talk. A Lot. Impressively. With no need to stop. Or make sense. Or even really know what I'm talking about sometimes, although that doesn't happen all that much anymore, I've read a lot of books, also, I revel in being right about stuff especially when I'm talking at someone because I want that person to stop talking to me and go away.

Boring people is an extremely useful skill. Being not-interesting can come in incredibly handy and allows me to not participate in any number of accepted social events ranging from oo-ing and coo-ing over 'boys' to relying entirely (and by entirely, I mean 100% entirely, not the occasional giggle-fest because someone said "I believe it is a matter of great doctrinal import!" Different things.) on movie or TV show quotes.

And yet, I am somehow reluctant to put all of the thoughts I've had over the years about stereotyping in romantic comedies to why Brigadoon needs to be remade, but set in South Asia with better songs and huger dance numbers to my conviction that a really good study would be one that compares the Mrs. Collins's from the four major film productions of Pride & Prejudice to their contemporary cultures. I will talk about how silence in film is way too underused. I can go on about the delights of seeing a movie in a theatre on a huge ass screen with many other people who would really rather not hear me react to that movie.

Just not online. I will work to change that. Opinions do change, and I respect that. My opinions change less often than I'd like to admit, but I give them time. First responses are not always reliable. Particularly when it comes to movies. Books on the other hand, well, The Great Gatsby can still suck my lint and Les Miserables is easily the book that convinced me that I love cities.

You really don't want to be around for that conversation.

Really.

Next time: I will write y'all a review. Just for kicks.