Author: Sysadmin

On a movie and an original poem

Watched an interesting movie last night called Population 436 (2006). It is one of these movies that is like an extended Twilight Zone episode. It is about a Chicago-based census taker played by Jeremy Sisto (whom I kind of like; he was in the first Wrong Turn movie, which I thought was good as horror films go).

Anyway, the premise is the main character is visiting a small town called Rockwell Falls in the Midwest to take a census, and the town turns out to have had a population of 436 for more than a century because there is kind of religious cult there that kills people if the population goes over that number and forcibly includes people like the census taker if it goes under that number. They also accuse people of “fever” and sometimes lobotomize them, if they want to leave.

I won’t call this a “B” movie but rather an independent. It seems to be about a town that has achieved what we called in college economics “autarky” meaning near total independence from the rest of the world, like North Korea in reality or the fictional rural village in the film The Village by M. Night Shyamalan. It also reminded me of formal population control in China.

“Underway” by yours truly

Underway:

‘Nother day.

What can I say?

More to play.

 

On a book review and an original poem

From The Irish Times review  of a new book called No One Around Here Reads Tolstoy:

“Still, there remains reading: Hodkinson considers himself ‘one third of well-read’; a victim of BABLE (‘Books Accumulated Beyond Life Expectancy’), piles of them tower throughout his home. A therapist described his relationship to books as ‘a fantastic expression of hope.’ We need people capable of that more than ever.”

Some thoughts

• Modern society makes it more difficult to focus on long literary works because there are so many electronic distractions.
• I am guilty of BABLE and have bought many more books than ever likely to read.
• I dated a woman who questioned why people buy books when they can borrow them from the library. I disagreed with her but could not really explain myself well. I said people are irrational about books, that they offer some hope of self-improvement. We only went on one real date, maybe two. Certainly not three.

“7-Eleven” by yours truly

7-Eleven to 9/11.

“Hey, shouldn’t the seven and nine be spelled out?”

Convenience stores. They hate us for our…

Perhaps they hate us for our s’mores,

And we should instead eat hors d’oeuvres.

 

 

On a new novel and an original poem

From Tana French’s The Searcher, a novel about a U.S. police officer who retires to rural Ireland and who gets involved in a missing persons case that local police don’t care much about. A lot of Americans are sentimental about Ireland, and I suppose that may be part of the impetus for my dissertation and first published book.

Here are the first two paragraphs:

“When Cal comes out of the house, the rooks have got hold of something. Six of them are clustered on the back lawn, amid the long wet grass and the yellow-flowered weeds, jabbing and hopping. Whatever the thing is, it’s on the small side and still moving.

Cal sets down his garbage bag of wallpaper. He considers getting his hunting knife and putting the creature out of its suffering, but the rooks have been here a lot longer than he has. It would be pretty impertinent of him to waltz in and start interfering with their ways. Instead he eases himself down to sit on the mossy step next to the trash bag.”

Thoughts

Fictional starts are important. I don’t know this author, but she is a very accomplished thriller writer. And this opening conveys the sense of being a newcomer in an area that has some violent elements (I suppose all areas do). It may be foreshadowing of the human drama to come.

And it conveys some of the sense of being an interloper in a new area and being reluctant to intervene in local events. I have felt that often in life. “First do no harm.”

“Birth” by yours truly

Giving birth to art or idea?

Quite a hurdle, like a turtle.

The animal can be beautiful

But very slow.

 

On Shakespeare and two original poems

From Scene III by Friar Laurence addressing Romeo in Romeo and Juliet:

“Hast thou slain Tybalt? wilt thou slay thyself?
And stay thy lady too that lives in thee,
By doing damned hate upon thyself?
Why rail’st thou on thy birth, the heaven, and earth?
Since birth, and heaven, and earth, all three do meet
In thee at once; which thou at once wouldst lose.
Fie, fie, thou shamest thy shape, thy love, thy wit;
Which, like a usurer, abound’st in all,
And usest none in that true use indeed
Which should bedeck thy shape, thy love, thy wit:
Thy noble shape is but a form of wax,

…

What, rouse thee, man! thy Juliet is alive,
For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead;
There art thou happy: Tybalt would kill thee,
But thou slew’st Tybalt; there are thou happy too:
The law that threaten’d death becomes thy friend
And turns it to exile; there art thou happy:
A pack of blessings lights up upon thy back;”

Two thoughts

Baz Luhrmann’s movie version of the play did a really good job with the casting, performance, and visuals of the Friar Laurence character. The actor is Pete Postlewaite, and he seems to have the gravitas to counter-balance the youth and over-enthusiasm of Romeo.

The other thing is the Friar’s speech to Romeo at this point of the play, which is longer in the text than it is in Luhrmann’s film, seems to deal with the issue of gratitude and what one of my grad school teacher’s described as the idea “you’re happy but you don’t know it.” How do you realize you are happy and fortunate?

I think one of the reasons the play is so famous, other than young romance, is it involves a combination of hostile environment and individuals’ choices, fate and free will. Tragedy.

“Math Lesson”  by yours truly

“What’s poor times poor?”

“Even less money.”

“What’s s’more times s’more?”

“Maybe too much sugar.”

“What’s gore times gore?”

“More blood and guts.”

“What’s snore times snore?”

“A good night’s sleep.”

“What’s tore times tore?”

“Methinks a sewing machine is needed,”

“What’s more times more?”

“Don’t ignore. And take it easy, pal.”

“What’s floor times floor?”

“I don’t really drink that much and didn’t fall on the floor 16 times.”

“What’s or times or?”

“Don’t be ambiguous despite tales of yore.”

“Okay, back to math. What’s four times for?”

“(She was only) 16.”

“A Reversal” by yours truly

“Better sorry than safe,” said the…

On a movie and a joke

Watched the horror movie The Apparition (2012) yesterday, a mild horror movie that I can’t really recommend. But a few thoughts.

1. The movie was critically panned, But one professor when I was looking at colleges my last year of high school had an entire course in the English department of his college focused on what you can learn from bad poetry.
2. The main part of this movie’s plot is a rather plodding haunted house story, but the start and ending are more interesting. The start is about three college students trying to contact the supernatural, but mistakenly the experiment ends up killing the female member of the group.
3. The movie could be an oblique allegory for sexual assault and/or other violence and its haunting effects. It begins with a woman dying and ends with  one of the main characters, a young woman, being groped by anonymous male hands and possibly suffocated.
4. This film reminds me of the decades-old novel Ghost Story, adapted into a movie, about a deceased woman whose spirit haunts a group of older men many years after her death.

A joke

“I identify as a billionaire. Why isn’t the money in my bank account?”

On a movie and original poem

Yesterday re-watched Wish Upon, which you might consider a B-class teen horror/thriller, but I rather like. It involves a high-school woman who is poor but is given an ancient Chinese musical box that permits her to make seven wishes that will come true but cost others she knows through death or serious health damage.

I think the idea of the movie is the seven wishes the lead character makes are supposed to represent almost all the seven deadly sins. Interestingly, she seems to start with “wrath” by wishing disease and pain on a high school rival, but she also starts getting into “pride,” “greed,” and “vanity,” It is kind of the reverse order of the movie Se7en, which ends with the sin of wrath as a police officer murders a psychotic, murderous weirdo who has killed the police officer’s wife.

Wish Upon ends rather oddly with the main character wishing to erase her past and that her mother had never committed suicide but then losing her father and herself. In psychiatry, this may be called disassociation, when you block memories too painful to live with. Interestingly, the movie implies the main character flaw for the woman was excessive nostalgia/regret in wanting her mother back.

“Poem” by yours truly

Poem

Home

Gnome.

Boom

Doom

‘Shroom

Room

Tomb.

On a movie and two original poems

Will try to keep blog posts simpler and briefer, but this weekend led to a backlog.

On  the recent remake of Robocop (2014), an homage to the late 1980s original, the more recent one I first watched yesterday. It stars a young actor I did not know of before but also a lot of accomplished secondary actors like  Abbie Cornish ,Jennifer Ehle, Michael Keaton, and Gary Oldman.

In reality there is a problem of overly emotional police who of course have superior physical force in most cases over civilians. The main character in this film is not evil, but technology and his personality make him superior to the hardened criminals he pursues. The movie also made me remember a college classmate, who seemed smart and said he usually innately trusted technology.

The movie is a bit disturbing because the main character is a police officer who is attacked by a criminal gang and loses almost his entire body except his head, upper torso, and one hand. A cutting-edge doctor repairs him with robotic humanoid parts. It reminded me of the novel/movie Johnny Got His Gun about a soldier who loses all his limbs in war but survives.  I have not read it or seen the full film myself, but one of my college students wrote a long essay about  it.

Two poems

“Juvenal” by yours truly

Been juvenile quite a while.

Maybe just spasm of satire.

Juvenal/juvenile: quite a trial.

Not really my style.

“Gone Away” by yours truly

The beautiful foothills

On the horizon

Seemed to have gone away.

“Put your eyes in.”

Then realized:

It is only heavy fog,

Blurring vision.

On a news column and recent news

From the first paragraph of a recent The Irish Times column by Hugh Linehah:

“The Gaiety Theatre was abuzz on Tuesday night for the premiere of Gabriel Byrne’s one-man show Walking with Ghosts. The old Victorian auditorium was jammed and there was a sort of electricity in the air. Of course, much of this was down to Byrne’s own star power and charisma. But there was also a palpable sense that Tuesday represented a significant marker on the road to recovery for Irish theatre. After almost 23 months, it felt like a definitive reopening, unlike the false dawn last autumn during which full attendances were only permitted for a few short weeks before the reintroduction of capacity limits and the imposition of an 8pm curfew.”

Have written about Byrne a bit before; I like his movie acting. The thing that really appealed to me about this column though was it focuses on the draw of theatre in hard times, whether that is a national famine, a war with an imperial country, partial disintegration of national identity into globalization, or a closure of much socio-economic interaction from recent viruses. Ireland has been through a lot, and I think one reason it has such a vibrant theatre sector is that textual and performed drama offer some release.

On another topic…

Illegal immigration from countries around the world into the U.S. southern border has been getting a lot of news coverage. It makes me wonder because the U.S. has problems too. It is not a “crystal palace.” As T.S. Eliot said in a poem, “Place is only place.” Or as Dido said in a song, “Don’t Leave Home.” Dido’s song is very pretty and seems to be about a woman asking a beau not to move away. But it could apply to illegal immigrants.

My view on illegal immigration is it is somewhat permissible, if the people are willing to work and don’t break any other laws. But the death of Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco late  last decade was preventable, and the man who did it had broken multiple laws.

 

On  two songs and two jokes

“Sunglasses at Night.” This 80s pop song was apparently a “one-hit wonder” (at least to me) for its author/singer, Corey Hart. The video for it shows him being jailed and tortured by a totalitarian government while wearing sunglasses. Once dated a woman who really did wear sunglasses at night while driving once when we went out. It may not have been safe for us. Was she just ashamed to be with me and wanted anonymity? She could have also worn a burqa.

“Save It for Later.” This was another pop song from the 80s that I like. It was by The English Beat. Used the title words of the song with the same woman who was driving at night wearing sunglasses, when she said she had purchased a book but not read it yet (done that a lot myself). The song also reminds me of the phrase “delaying gratification” from a book by a pastor.  One of song’s lines is, “you run away, you let me down.”

“Joke” by yours truly

Had a pretty good joke but then forgot it.

Probably best: may have been misbegotten.

“Hey, is that Miss Be Got In?”

“She’s a tease, so don’t put a lot  in… of effort, that is.”

“Secret” by yours truly

“What is the secret to life?”

“Learning to walk and chew dumb at the same time.”

On three songs and a brief poem

I am trying to finish a new novel and don’t seem to have the concentration for serious analytical writing.

“The Ghost in You.” This is by the Psychedelic Furs, an English pop group I liked a lot as a teenager. I think it is about being haunted by a past romantic involvement. My first year of college, I was rather lost and would just go back to my dorm after classes and listen to songs like this one.

“Orange Crush,” This song by R.E.M. is not pleasant but evocative. Michael Stipe, the writer and singer, is the son of a U.S. military officer and must have heard military war stories from his Dad, including napalm use in the Vietnam War. I think “orange crush” was the military slang for dropping napalm on violent villages.

“You Just Don’t Move Me Anymore.” This was a song by Keith Richards as a solo performer after The Rolling Stones suspended their group for a while. Richards interests me because he doesn’t seem to have behaved in a healthy way but has been a survivor.

Anyway, these were three songs I listened to a lot during my difficult first year of college.

A poem

‘”Cant” by yours truly

Ever eaten only cant food?

(The words can be a bit fluffy.)

Can be rude. Only from a can?

Sometimes  like just watching news.

Anyway, don’t turn to booze.