Thursday, January 13, 2011
Underindulgence
So, how many Candy Cane chocolate sandwich cookies in one sitting would be considered excessive? Not eleven, right? Particularly with skim milk. I mean, if you exercised today.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Ghost World
There's a new cult film in our house. I found it accidentally in the bargain bin at Best Buy right after Thanksgiving, only unwrapping it and popping it into the dvd player last week. It was at that point, my life was transformed.
I'm totally serious. I glom onto movies I like, as a dog to a bone, ending in but a saliva spot on the linoleum. I watch them over and over and of my loved ones, require the same. I watched the thing twice that day and ordered the soundtrack before the credits were over on the second viewing. It arrived today! Perfect timing as I'm snowed in and needed something to focus upon other than the new Candy Cane Twist sandwich cookies a neighbor left here last night to get them out of her own house. (I now understand why she carried them half a block, trudging through the snow in the dark last night.)
Listening to tracks such as Skip James' Devil Got My Woman, Little Hat Jones' Bye Bye Baby Blues, Dallas String Band's So Tired and Lionel Balasco's Venezuela I feel I'm again 4-years-old watching those jerky old WWII cartoons in the tv room at Merry Manor Nursery School in Lincoln, Nebraska. I have entered Ghost World.
Ghost World, and this is just my interpretation, is that place, a parallel universe, where people like me and my people (as Enid refers to them) live with the sights and sounds and memories of things dying away; holding them closely, revering them, mourning their passing.
And then there's this fucking thing.
A film clip from an Indian movie, Gumnaam (yes, I already ordered it for my collection) in which an interestingly edentated Indian male clutches a 1940's-style microphone with a bony dark complected, hand and emits a mesmerizing auditory funk to a roomful of fringed, masked young Indian men and women in shiny dresses and gold lame' flats twisting and gyrating unnaturally for a particularly extended period of time. Enid (played by Thora Birch) watches this in her bedroom in the opening scene of Ghost World on an old tv set, shaking her head and outstretched hands to the rhythm as I, too, have done since first viewing it. What's not to love about this clip? From the crazy smile on the female choreographer's face to her chubby knees, I am smitten. If loving this dance sequence is wrong, I tell you, I don't wanna be right. I have to learn how to do this. I suspect I'll be on muscle relaxants before it's mastered but it's gotta be attempted. Can you imagine the shape you'd be in if you did this once a day? Eeeeeeiiiiiiiiiii ei ei ei!!!!
Listening to tracks such as Skip James' Devil Got My Woman, Little Hat Jones' Bye Bye Baby Blues, Dallas String Band's So Tired and Lionel Balasco's Venezuela I feel I'm again 4-years-old watching those jerky old WWII cartoons in the tv room at Merry Manor Nursery School in Lincoln, Nebraska. I have entered Ghost World.
Ghost World, and this is just my interpretation, is that place, a parallel universe, where people like me and my people (as Enid refers to them) live with the sights and sounds and memories of things dying away; holding them closely, revering them, mourning their passing.
A film clip from an Indian movie, Gumnaam (yes, I already ordered it for my collection) in which an interestingly edentated Indian male clutches a 1940's-style microphone with a bony dark complected, hand and emits a mesmerizing auditory funk to a roomful of fringed, masked young Indian men and women in shiny dresses and gold lame' flats twisting and gyrating unnaturally for a particularly extended period of time. Enid (played by Thora Birch) watches this in her bedroom in the opening scene of Ghost World on an old tv set, shaking her head and outstretched hands to the rhythm as I, too, have done since first viewing it. What's not to love about this clip? From the crazy smile on the female choreographer's face to her chubby knees, I am smitten. If loving this dance sequence is wrong, I tell you, I don't wanna be right. I have to learn how to do this. I suspect I'll be on muscle relaxants before it's mastered but it's gotta be attempted. Can you imagine the shape you'd be in if you did this once a day? Eeeeeeiiiiiiiiiii ei ei ei!!!!
Sunday, January 2, 2011
new year
I relish in the realization that I love January. I like to hear myself say it, and I hear it a lot. And see myself write it. I'm not sure what happened to change things. I used to abhor Winter, especially January. Still a victim of seasonal affective disorder, I've transitioned into one who holds winter closely, clutched as a treasure in a tight fist against her chest.
It may have begun with the painting. One winter, a friend and I decided to paint a picture for my husband's Christmas gift. Bea is an artist and I am a person who wants to create but cannot quite manage to organize the pencils or brushes or light enough to get started. So every Saturday, I went to Bea's and we worked on the painting, her coaching my every brush stroke. It was as I said, winter, and Bea lives in the country. And not just a country home but in the small bedroom of an essentially gutted old house. Doing much of the refurbishing herself, it has been a slow undertaking, often neglected in favor of art or seafood alfredo or the stroking of a particularly affectionate and needy Dachshund named "Cricket". It was in this room we created the painting that brought tears to my husband's eyes on Christmas Eve when he tore away the wrapping and saw it for the first time.
But for me, the magic was in those long, quiet Saturday afternoons in Bea's room; dark, leafless trees and miniscule flitting birds through wavy glass. I would have preferred to have left the painting to her, lying instead on her twin bed, sleeping for hours then slowly awakening to drink coffee from a hot mug while staring dumbly at the show in her yard and front porch. But I was there to paint and paint I did.
The act of painting rewired me mentally and I later found myself involuntarily wondering how to paint anything I looked at; trees outside my bathroom window; brittle, lustless pastures in Janurary; a dry oak leaf stuck in a cluster of pine needles. And not just that but I began to view the world differently, more gently, reverently. And with it came an appreciation of the bleakness of late Fall and Winter. The starkness of January, in particular. The quiet, darkness.
It was a breakthrough, a passage, a healing of some invisible psychic wound. I now see Winter as the natural cycle it always has been, me having been out of sync, not seeing it as it was, having cheated myself fifty Winters of awe and inspiration and peace. The painting that Winter brought to me a gift, as well, allowing me the capacity this day, years after that season of magic and change, to revel in a fire in the fireplace, and on it's hearth, two kittens outstretched on the warming firewood awaiting its turn.
It may have begun with the painting. One winter, a friend and I decided to paint a picture for my husband's Christmas gift. Bea is an artist and I am a person who wants to create but cannot quite manage to organize the pencils or brushes or light enough to get started. So every Saturday, I went to Bea's and we worked on the painting, her coaching my every brush stroke. It was as I said, winter, and Bea lives in the country. And not just a country home but in the small bedroom of an essentially gutted old house. Doing much of the refurbishing herself, it has been a slow undertaking, often neglected in favor of art or seafood alfredo or the stroking of a particularly affectionate and needy Dachshund named "Cricket". It was in this room we created the painting that brought tears to my husband's eyes on Christmas Eve when he tore away the wrapping and saw it for the first time.
But for me, the magic was in those long, quiet Saturday afternoons in Bea's room; dark, leafless trees and miniscule flitting birds through wavy glass. I would have preferred to have left the painting to her, lying instead on her twin bed, sleeping for hours then slowly awakening to drink coffee from a hot mug while staring dumbly at the show in her yard and front porch. But I was there to paint and paint I did.
The act of painting rewired me mentally and I later found myself involuntarily wondering how to paint anything I looked at; trees outside my bathroom window; brittle, lustless pastures in Janurary; a dry oak leaf stuck in a cluster of pine needles. And not just that but I began to view the world differently, more gently, reverently. And with it came an appreciation of the bleakness of late Fall and Winter. The starkness of January, in particular. The quiet, darkness.
It was a breakthrough, a passage, a healing of some invisible psychic wound. I now see Winter as the natural cycle it always has been, me having been out of sync, not seeing it as it was, having cheated myself fifty Winters of awe and inspiration and peace. The painting that Winter brought to me a gift, as well, allowing me the capacity this day, years after that season of magic and change, to revel in a fire in the fireplace, and on it's hearth, two kittens outstretched on the warming firewood awaiting its turn.
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