E.C. Walsh Blogsphere

Just on the “Halloween” movie franchise ahead of Halloween

I thought the first movie was pretty good. It is basically a horror movie about a homicidal and incestuous stalker. The sequels were stupid, in my opinion,

Apparently Hollywood has made a new one with Jamie Lee Curtis in her 60s. She is beautiful still, but this is getting ridiculous. I guess the horror genre has to do with how your body can turn against you when you are young or just fail when you are old.

I have not seen all of JL Curtis’ movies, but she is a good actress and pretty. She is the the daughter of a male actor who turned out to be gay and a beautiful actress.

On Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

From the novel, page 224: “As much I loved the spectacle of the dance and the drama. I also loved to be able to see the sets afterward, to meet the artists Gerald spoke of with admirartion and high regard.”

Just a few thoughts.

Zelda appeared to aspire to be a great dancer, and  I think one of the reasons for her spiraling into insanity was she was jealous of her husband’s success as a fiction writer. I think the novel also conveys the greater importance of in-person conversation in the early 20th century compared with now when so much is online or through automation,

Also, it must be challenging to write historical or biographical novels like this one. How can you be sure you are being relatively accurate? The poet Eavan Boland remarked there is a differrence between the past and recorded history. How can you know for sure?

Just on three more pop songs (will return to textual comments soon)

“She’s Gone” by Hall and Oates. This one of the more beautiful songs from my youth, Based on an interview I read a few years back, it was inspired by a brief meeting that I think Oates had with woman that did not work out romantically.  I have found this group one of the most mellow and calming but also intelligent ones recently. Their “Best of,,,” collection is very good.

“Lucky” by Aurora. She is one of my favorite current pop singers. She is Norwegian, and I have never been to Scandinavia. But this song expresses the simple satisfaction of life, even if it is not going well for you. Norwegians interest me because they seem so Christianly religious in a way but different in other ways.

“Dreams” by The Cranberries and Faye Wong in cover version. This song was originally written and sung by Dolores O’Riordan  of the aforementioned group, who died prematurely in the past few years. I think Wong’s cover version from the film Chungking Express actually sounds better, even though it is in Chinese, and I don’t speak the language.

 

 

On a few pop songs

“Save a Prayer” by Duran Duran. This is a gentle pop song from the 1980s. This band has been criticized by some for being too effeminate, but I don’t think they are. Some of their songs like this one are profound. I think it is about how you might feel after a one-night stand with someone you cared about.

“The Ghost in You” by The Psychedelic Furs. This was one of my favorite bands as a late teenager. You can feel  haunted by ruined romance. “She don’t fade”  is the main line of the song, I think. I got to hear the band at a free outdoor concert in DC in the 1990s. The lead singer has an interesting voice, a bit rough but also gentle and She.

“Running up That Hill” by Kate Bush. I think this song has to do with the romantic tension and sometimes even anger that can occur between a man and woman even when attracted. I had a poster of Kate Bush on my dorm wall third year of college. Haha. She seems to be  a good dancer too.

“Funny Little Frog” by Belle and Sebastian. I think this song is about romantic fantasy. A lot of romance is fantasy. The song seems to be about a man in his apartment thinking of a woman who does not really want him. ” You’re  my girl, and you don’t even know it, and you’re the funny little frog in my throat.” There is video of the song on YouTube.

 

“Born in the USA” by Bruce Springsteen. I  think this song’s lyrics are mainly ironic and angry. So it is weird that Ronald Reagan used it for a campaign in the 1980s. Everybody can make mistakes, and I am pretty sure the US war with Vietnam was one. But the communists were also wrong. Life is complicated.

Just a few more silly/stupid joke poems

“Day” by yours truly

“Is today Saturday?”

“What does it matter day?”

“Tired of Monday-through-Friday fray.”

“Maybe you just need ‘roll in the hay.'”

“Okay.”

“Rocks” by yours truly

“I kept the Himalayan-light rocks.”

“Through the ticks and the tocks?”

“Hoya saxa! Aka, what rocks! And not just because I like young women.”

“Ode to Deodorant” by yours truly

Oh, deodorant, deodorant!

You make me smell less repellant.

Some may still smell it and tell it.

“I have deodorant”: that’s what I told her.

But she still left; so I am bereft.

 

Heard on TV media

“They can do whatever they want,” regarding childhood gender affiliation on a mainstream-media roundtable today. Outrageous ideas can be listened to in public, but child abuse is wrong and should be called  out and not just publicly tolerated in silence.

Before 16 or 18, people are too young to decide on gender identity or ideally even have sex at all, even though I know many sexualize  a lot younger.

People are stupid about this. Wiling-fully permitting sex or gender change before 16 is child abuse.

I should go back to not watching cable news at all. It makes me too angry.

 

On social media and censorship

Had been planning on writing about a book today but just saw a TV media roundtable about social media and censorship. Last winter, I was censored for a few days, blocked, from social media for satirical expressions that were meant to be artistic but admittedly very angry poems.

Yes, poems and and other art can cause violence if audiences are already mentally ill. Witness the suicides that resulted from Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young  Werther and the violence that can result from porn and heavy metal music. Some time back, Ozzy Osbourne had to defend himself for a song that a family blamed him for causing their son’s suicide.

Social media is only a platform, and if people online don’t like what you are saying they can block you or disconnect from you. I am a bit cynical now and believe freedom of speech is over-restricted in this country. I know it is in other countries too.

On a Daniel Defoe novel

Picked up a Norton edition of Defoe’s Moll Flanders, a rather long novel published in 1722 in England about a woman who is basically a tough prostitute.

Haven’t really read it yet but plan to. The 18th century seems to be the time of the birth of the novel for literary professors, and the concept of prostitution interests me. There is a huge pornography business in the US if we are honest, and that is akin to prostitution.

Morally, I think both prostitution and  porn are wrong, but, in my opinion, they can help some socially awkward men. Porn is embarrassing but legal in the US. Prostitution is formally illegal and I think rare, but how would vice police ever really know unless it was blatant?

Of course, the main issue is whether prostitution is spreading venereal disease. Real romance is better too. But again some men are socially awkward.

Yet another movie review

Just re-watched The Replacement Killers from 1998. It is a violent action thriller about a hired assassin played by an Eastwood-like actor named Chow Yun-Fat who is trying to extract himself from a drug cartel in L.A. and meets a woman played by Mira Sorvino who can give him the passport he  needs to get home.

It is interesting because Chow and Sorvino seem to have some on-screen chemistry (I understand Sorvino is almost fluent in Chinese in reality),  but their relationship on screen is Platonic, and Chow’s character just smiles and says, “I’ll miss you,'” as he gets on his air-flight at the end of the movie. Sorvino is the daughter of Paul Sorvino, who I thought did a good job as the head of the Capulet household in Romeo + Juliet.

Action movies are not for everyone, and I am getting old for them. But violence is a fact of life, and this one is directed by Antoine Fuqua, who has seemed to excel at them prolifically.

I have been doing a lot of posts on re-watched films lately. The former The Washington Post literary critic Jonathan Yardley (the newspaper used to have a full book-review section) published a collection of textual fiction reviews called Second Reading a few years back where he returned to works he liked a lot when younger to decide if he still liked them. That is how I feel about these films.

 

Comments on the opening paragraphs of a recent column in The Irish Times by Áine Ryan and three original joke/poems

“It is a sunny Sunday afternoon and I’ve just parked up at Westport Quay for my daily foray into fresh air. I call these constitutionals my “mental health walks”, with any benefit to my aging body a bonus. On this particular occasion though there is an existential crisis even before I’ve exited my car.

.Goddammit’ I’m suddenly saying, as I rifle through my handbag. ‘I’ve forgotten my mobile phone.’

‘I can’t go for my walk,’ I utter to the distressed person in my vanity mirror.

‘You could drive home and get it,’ she says back, helpfully.”

This article made me think of my own conflicted relationship with technology. Of course, I rely on it like almost everyone in the modern world, but it is often a source of frustration as much as support. Sometimes silence and nature are better than the Internet, movies, TV, and music.

I have two phones, a flip phone and a smart phone, but have not really used the smart phone in some time. Of course we have all seen some people in public using smart phones almost compulsively.

“Mandates” by yours truly

“Do you agree with the mandates?”

“I prefer dates with women. Everyone is different.”

“Advice” by yours truly

“Instead of contracting syphilis, suffer less. Don’t digress.”

“Yes…yes.”

“Choice” by yours truly

“You have been given a choice: priest or pariah. What is your desire?”

“Just let me out of this mire.”

“First, control your fire.”

“Do you think someone would hire?”

“Ehh.”