Category: Uncategorized

Was going to deal with more serious text, but it is late in the day here and only want to comment on a pop song now.

I like the pop group Evanescence even though they are kind of heavy metal, and some of their lyrics are a bit crude. I consider the lead singer like a female version of Trent Reznor.

The song is called ” Call Me When You’re Sober.” It is true that men drink more alcohol than women, and it can ruin romantic relationships. It is an interesting song because the female singer seems both sympathetic and punitive but ultimately punitive.

On a media column and a joke

This is from The Wall Street Journal recently from a namesake entertainer. I thought Farley was really funny, but his real life seemed to be tragically and self-destructively sad:

“I’m the real Chris Farley.

No, I’m not the dead guy from ‘Saturday Night Live.’ I don’t live in ‘a van down by the river,’ the catchphrase from that other Farley’s breakout ‘SNL’ sketch. I’ve never danced shirtless with Patrick Swayze, something the other Farley famously did on ‘SNL’ in 1990 and which helped put him on the comedy map.”

I have said in a previous post that I liked Farley a lot, but you have to be careful with his brand of self-deprecatory humor because it can become self-destructive. Have to watch for it myself.

Two jokes

“Vaccine” by yours truly

Va-nessa (-accine) has been a bit seen. You know what I mean. Don’t be to her mean. Don’t make a mess-a.

 

 

 

On Sunflower and residential environment

From the book of essays on forgiveness for the Holocaust and other atrocities: this is from the introduction.

The book is a series of essays about how to forgive but oddly does not include an essay from Simon Wiesenthal, who may be the most famous Jewish writer about the Holocaust in history and actually collected and published the book.

From the preface to a new edition of the book originally published in 1969:

“On the one hand time blunts memory; on the other time and awareness of the Holocaust has increased through education.” Sometimes you should not just “move on.” You have to deal with memory but put it in its place too.

On new residence

Sometimes I sit on a chair to relax on an outdoor porch area just outside my rental apartment to relax and get air. There are foothills nearby, so the air is cool (sometimes a bit cold) but the apartment complex is really big, has lots of cars, and seems a bit like a big hotel. My next-door neighbor is so far friendly.

 

On a movie

Recently re-watched most of the 2013 action-thriller The Numbers Station about a US agent for some organization like the CIA or NSA who is assigned to protect a woman based in rural England who sends out numbers to international agents that are really codes giving them orders.

A few thoughts

• I could not re-watch the whole thing because the DVD kept skipping and freezing. DVDs and CDs are too fragile.
• I had an idea when younger that men are ethical (sometimes) through codes of honor, while women are ethical through sensitivity, but this film makes a woman the expert in codes.
• Breaking codes, especially by the British analyst Alan Turing, contributed to the Allies’ success defeating the Nazis in World War II,
• The lead actor, John Cusack, seems to have started out in teen comedies but later turned to more serious films, similar to the way Bill Murray has toggled between comedies and more serious stuff.
• There is a certain appeal to action movies. I don’t like guns in reality, but they can be thrilling in movies. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley had the science-fiction idea of “violent-passion surrogate,” and it seems to me sometimes that the loud, aggressive driving in my current neighborhood and some violent sports represent this.

“Two Amendments” by yours truly

The US Second Amendment can get you killed, if the people holding guns are exceedingly violent or very stupid.

The First Amendment can get you tortured or killed, if people don’t like what you say.

On another matter:

Listened to an online Mass today. I know abortion is a controversial issue for a man to speak of because we can’t give birth or be involuntarily impregnated or impregnated at all. But the pastor brought up the issue briefly. My opinion is if a woman has been mistreated by a man or otherwise in a dire situation, she she should be able to abort in the first trimester but not after that. If it takes more than three months to realize pregnancy, it seems to me there is something wrong with you.

On Sondheim and two brief jokes

Stephen Sondheim died this week at 91. Musicals are not my thing, but he was considered one of the best writers of them, and one critic proposed get a Nobel Prize for his work. From an obituary in The Washington Post:

Waiting for Yet More (Anti-virus Vaccine) by Samuel Beckett, Jr.

Doesn’t Omicron sound like a villain from science fiction (maybe Flash Gordon)? Be careful; it could be (Ming the) merciless.

 

On three pop songs

“Friday I’m in Love” by The Cure. It is Friday today, and I think this song conveys the basic feeling of relief about reaching the weekend, especially when the week has been difficult. What are weekends about? When you are young, they can be about partying; when older, they are mainly about resting and maybe religious worship.

“Charlotte Sometimes” also by The Cure. I got a bit obsessed with this song as a late teenager. I was going through a difficult time and thought the song had to do profoundly with being lonely but treating every person, especially in romantic situations, as if they are everyone, almost in a spiritual way. From what I read, the lead singer/writer got into legal trouble because he took the title from a novel by someone else, The lyrics seem to be his own.

“I Went Too Far” by Aurora. She is one of my favorite current singers. I like almost all the songs I have heard by her, and her native language is not even English; she is Norwegian. I think in life everyone goes too far, whether it is romance or something else. There is a good, kind of abstract video for the song on YouTube, and she is very pretty.

 

Some thoughts on This Side of Paradise and realist plays

Apparently one of the better things Zelda did in their relationship was to compel Scott to write this first novel, which was very successful. I read it when young and got a new edition recently. As I recall, it is basically a fictionalized version of number of dating experiences FSF had when young. Here is from the text:

“Next day they rode up through Jersey country, had luncheon in New York, and in the afternoon went to see a problem play at which Isabelle wept all through the second act, rather to Amory’s embarrassment — though it filled him with tenderness to watch her…”

The paragraph goes on, but this part brings to mind an essay about two “problem plays” I wrote a few years back and published in my latest book Natural Light on page 36. It is the longest entry (still less than ten pages) in this book of usually brief journal entries.

The thesis is about the problem play A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen and how it may have affected the rise of no-fault divorce law around the world. The second play it deals with is a sequel to Ibsen’s late 19th-century play written much more recently by a U.S. author. I may want to write on an August Strindberg play or two now because male-female tensions and realism fascinate me now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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On Robert Bly and two jokes

Read an obituary article in The Washington Post about Bly’s recent death. It remarks that he oddly (to some) wrote about male problems at a time when feminism was ascendant. I think the problem for men is just surviving, being moral, and frankly making enough money. He was also a poet.

From the obituary:

A final comment  on Doom 

From the the last paragraph of Niall Ferguson’s text:

“History tells us to expect the great punctuation marks of disaster in no predictable order.  The four horseman of the Book of Revelation–Conquest. War. Famine, and the pale rider Death–gallop out at seemingly random  intervals to remind us that no amount of technological innovation can make mankind invulnerable,,,”

The last paragraph goes on longer, but you get the gist. It ends with a quote from Daniel DeFoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, which is of course relevant to the past two years.

I think this has to do with the fate of death. The Bible seems to end with it but in a supernatural way. I have been told I am self-destructive but don’t think suicidal. I love things about life and want to stay alive.