SEAN

I've watched this movie twice now, in as many days.  The first time, and even the second time, its affect wasn't immediately felt--there's nothing really in the strict narrative of the movie that is, in itself, noteworthy.  The story is interesting and the general conceit of tracking down individuals in a family 30 years after and making two films about them 30 years apart is neat in a "7 Up's" kind of way.

There was something else that was haunting me.  Something less tangible and in the end I think something that even the filmmaker didn't quite have a handle on himself.  He said he had discovered similarities between his own story and the life-story of his subject, Sean.  And so he wove into the film footage of his own family and elements of his own story - the generations of his life; his sons, his wife, his parents.  In doing so I think, for me, he tapped into something universal in the human experience.  The line from the Steve Winwood song - "how the endless road unwinds you."  And maybe Steve was talking about touring but I always took it as a metaphor for life.  And maybe with regard to this movie, and life itself, I mean it in a slightly less sinister way.

Life on display in this movie is unrelenting.  It goes on and on and because the director is using footage from his own life we see the effects of it close up.  People stay the same as they age.  The look older and fatter (in some cases) but they are who they are, only more so.  But at the same time the march of the years softens them, like a stone under a waterfall.  They become less angry maybe.  Life becomes less urgent.  Sean's hippie Dad is still a hippie but the weight of old age threatens his joy.  Sean goes from 4 year old baby, to grown man (but still a son) to married man to father himself.  We see his grandparents go from earnest communists disrupting a congressional hearing to smiling, laughing, whimsical romantics.  The directors relationship with his wife is shown first in a interview between the two of them where the romance and happiness is palpable but they age.  They don't split up, they don't grow apart, they just grow into themselves as individuals, in on themselves like separate in-grown toenails, even as their bond between them is just as intense a fact as it was in the beginning in their early romance.  She goes off to live in Paris, her home country, for three years without him.  It's not the end for them.  It's not all tears and tearing of garments.  Their life is between them.  Their history together is an unbreakable bond that the marriage certificate can barely sniff at.  When she comes back to America where else is she going to go?

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say even still.  I'm trying to grasp at it.  The urgency of life drops away even as life becomes more serious as you age toward the inevitable end.

http://www.lensculture.com/tonningsen.html?thisPic=3

http://www.overthinkingit.com/2010/10/14/think-tank-star-wars-storm-troopers-vader/

BRUCE SAYS "HAH!"

This is an excellent DFW article, not just about him but even more from him about the nature of writing and its mission in the modern era:

You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us…that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need, I think—and I’m not saying I’m the person to do it…is serious engaged art, that can teach again that we’re smart.

Clean Louis CK

The little Record

Earl King

This is a really nice piece of fiction printed in the NewYorker.  It's based on what I know to be a classic story of the Earl King which was one side of the tiny record we had as kids in the Wixted family - the other side being the Velvet Ribbon.  The writer captures the strange unnerving beauty of the story, the loss and the helplessness and adapts it in a really nice way.  A must read, I feel...

I love Matt Taibbi.  And now he's blogging for Rolling Stone which I just discovered today.  He's got this great post about Sarah Palin.  Here's a fab. Taibbian piece from it:

Bush was sincere in his respect for the citizen’s right to craft important opinions about the world while drinking beer and watching baseball, and that came across in his speeches — it was a big reason for his success.

But Bush couldn’t have spent more than ten minutes in a dirty trailer in Arkansas before signaling for the helicopter. The guy was just too used to being around rich people, nice houses, cigarette boats full of sheiks and oil executives, etc. Sarah Palin on the other hand really is the kind of person who you can picture eating egg salad off a ping-pong table. That and her utterly genuine stupidity and meanness can take her a long way — all by themselves, I think these things can win the White House for her — and it seems like she senses this on an animal/reptilian level. Hence the renewed emphasis on jacking off her audiences of late.

Fantastic....

SPOILER ALERT - HE POOPS JABBA!!!!

AT-AT day afternoon from Patrick Boivin on Vimeo.

JOY...FOSSE

When Politics Becomes Religion ... - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

When Politics Becomes Religion ... - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Truly shocking and disgusting. Where does it end?

I Love Wildlife-Right Next to My Mashed Pertators

Sarah Palin does it again. The blame for the oil spill rests with the environmentalists. Right.

Identity

What if we're all Jesus?

Newport Home

Mom & Dad's house...

INVICTUS

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

Monkey Love

Blood Monkey website.

SLOTHS

Lovely, sweet, love...

Meet the sloths from Amphibian Avenger on Vimeo.

Crazy, right? Well I guess it's hard to tell unless you live here and have to shovel all this shit out.

Back in NY

I was so happy to get off the plane at Newark Airport yesterday. I guess it showed--or maybe I was actually saying those words--and I had to explain that it wasn't specifically Newark that I was talking about but the whole tri-state area. It all just feels a little bit more lived-in than the rest of the country, or what I've seen of it. And I'd had my fill of overheard business conversations and cool rolling suitcases and frequent one-pass flying privileges and "Mariott Courtyard Check-ins."

The hotel we stayed at in downtown Atlanta, the Westin Peachtree Plaza, was this massive 73-story building with over 1,000 rooms apparently and it really felt that large. It was not a comfortable, warm place at all. There seemed to be a perpetual cold breeze blowing in the lobby which maybe would have been nice in the summer but in the winter was nasty. And AGAIN, the room that we got, the first time around, was really crappy. I feel like if you try to save any money on your hotel they give you the worst room you can find. Either way I've now learned that you almost always have to ask for something different/better. Our first room was on the 67th floor which meant that it took a long elevator ride to get to. And the door was dirty and they were renovating the room next door and the view was of a crane attached to the outside of the building and the toilet would start running every hour or so and then stop again. It was all just creepy. So after a night we asked to change to a room with a king-sized bed (after a night of switching to accommodate Lizzie and Georgia's moods we decided we should all just sleep together) and the new room was on the 38th floor and was much nicer.

February Vacation

Hopefully I've successfully thrown off anyone who's reading this "blog" and now I can write in anonymity. yeah that makes sense but who cares?

The girls and I are off from work and school and we're headed to Atlanta for a few days on a film making adventure: Daddy and Daughters in the Old South.