March 2021
Spring just
keeps creeping closer. Soon it will be the one-year anniversary of starting to
work from home. Tempus fugit! I am eagerly awaiting the return of the robins
and red-winged blackbirds. And any other migratory birds too.
I know that
I am not alone in wanting spring to arrive. My neighbor's chickens are also
keen on its arrival.
********
I don't make
proper new year's resolutions like vowing to lose weight and the like but I do
try to convince myself to do things that I'd been meaning to do but haven't yet
done, generally because of procrastination/laziness. Although it's only early
March as I type, I have accomplished something I've been putting off for nearly
20 years:
I have
finally read House of Leaves by Mark Z.
Danielewski.
It came out
in 2000 and, if memory serves, I heard about and bought it not too long
afterwards. But I never read it until this year. Better late than never, right?
It's
described as a piece of ergodic literature which, as far as I can tell, simply means
that it's difficult to read. Another way to think of it is that it requires
more effort to read than your average text.
House
of Leaves (every
instance of the word "house" in any language is blue in the book) is
difficult to describe. It's presented as the writings of one Johnny Truant who
came upon a manuscript written by his deceased neighbor, a guy named Zampano. Truant
annotates the manuscript and adds his own tale to the mix. For its part, the
manuscript is an exegesis on a movie called The Navidson Record which
documents the mysterious events experienced by the Navidison family, namely
dealing with the entrance to an eldritch labyrinth that appears in their house
one day.
At first,
they notice that rooms in their home are slightly larger than they were previously.
Then a doorway appears which leads to a cold, dark hallway and in turn to various room
and a grand staircase that takes days to descend. Something apparently lives in
the labyrinth as growls are heard coming out of the dark as the rooms are being
explored.
While the plot/structure of the story is convoluted, apparently what makes the book ergodic is the layout. For instance, you have text that isn't justified and is instead strewn about the page to reflect events in the plot.
There is text that offset from the rest and some of that mirror imaged.
I surely
missed a lot of meaning when I read it. References here and there, reasons why
text is mirror imaged, and so on. But the storyline of people exploring the
labyrinth is creepy as all get out. Not scary horror but really unsettling. BBC
Radio 4 dramatized this part of the novel to great effect. I listened to it at
night and got pretty scared. I made sure I was tucked in tight.
Perhaps not
my favorite book of all-time but I enjoyed it and finally got it under my belt.
********
I really
miss going to the theater. A couple weeks ago I watched Ice Station Zebra and
the opening credits noted it was shot in Super Panavision 70 and was presented
in Cinerama. I sat there thinking about how good it must have looked up on the
big screen. Thinking about the theatrical experience led me to becoming a bit
sad at not being able to go to the cinema. Safely, anyway.
Instead, I
have been taking advantage of the library's DVD/Bluray collection. My local
branch is about a mile from home so I get in some good walking before and after
sitting on the couch for a couple hours. You see, in addition to reading things
I should have read years ago, I have also been catching up on my movie
watching.
I admit to
being a bit nerdy and keeping a list of films to see and have been maintaining
it for a while now. Probably just shy of 20 years, in fact. It began life as a
way to track new movies that I wanted to see but had never made it to Madison cinemas
(and I didn't find the time to see them in Chicago or Milwaukee). Thusly it was fairly
modest to start. Then I began adding other movies to it.
Sometimes
they were older films recommended to me. Other films made the list because of
their reputation. For instance, I learned that the lyrics to one of my favorite
albums, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis, were partly inspired
by a viewing of Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo so it was added. I saw A
Field in England by Ben Wheatley in the theater and immediately added the
rest of his oeuvre. And of course there are films that are just part of the
cinematic canon that any cinephile should see.
My list is
organized largely by genre the way our local video rental store, Four Star,
does it. Slightly tangentially, Roger Ebert was a big fan of Four Star and would stop in whenever he was in
town, usually as part of the Wisconsin Film Festival. I've been donating money
to Four Star over the winter and plan on renting from them once again soon now
that the weather makes heading downtown a bit more palatable. It is a treasure
that no number of streaming services can compete with.
With the
list having grown too large, I decided to spend this winter doing some serious
movie watching from my couch and pare it down before I started adding a lot of pandemic-era
titles. I started at the top with animation, moved on to documentaries,
followed by silent films, westerns, short films, movies with folkloric stories,
the two most recent James Bond films, horror, and, finally, war movies. Auteurs
are next but they may wait until the fall when the weather is worse as I hope
to get out and about as much as I can during the spring and summer.
There is one movie I regret having watched this winter and that is Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, a documentary made by a Russian fellow named Dmitry Vasyukov and Werner Herzog, one of my favorite documentarians. It chronicles the life of trappers from a small village in Siberia. I found it really interesting to learn about these guys and their lives spent trapping sable. There are themes of isolation, man vs. nature, rural vs. urban, et al. It was a wonderful film. But a lot of it takes place during the winter and I felt really, really cold on my couch watching it. I shivered.
I have also
watched several silent films this winter, a cinematic blind spot for me. It's
not that I haven't seen any – hey, I own The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari –
but there were just a lot of classics on my to-watch list. And so I finally got
around to watching Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Similarly, I
watched Safety Last! for the first time.
I watched my first Oscar Micheaux film, Within Our Gates.
Wikipedia
says it took 2 months in 1920 to get the OK from the Board of Censors in
Chicago, who were apparently nervous that scenes depicting a lynching and
attempted rape would inflame violence in the city which was still reeling from
the race riots of the previous year.
It was
definitely a whole different ball of wax after watching a few F.W. Murnau films
which had no black people in them and the Keaton & Lloyd films where they
were basically simpletons or fools in the background playing bit parts. Here black
people were just people, not stereotypes. There were good ones and bad ones;
some were successful, other failed; they fell in and out of love.
I look
forward to seeing more Micheaux.
There aren't many westerns on my list but Tombstone Rashomon was one of them and it was a lot of fun.
One last
film: Lucifer Rising by Kenneth Anger. I first heard of it while I was
in high school as I'd read that Jimmy Page, he of Led Zeppelin fame, had composed and recorded a soundtrack for it that went unused. Anger is really into the occult and the likes of Aleister
Crowley and I guess this is considered his masterwork in that vein.
Bonus photo: On a recent walk I saw a crane in the distance. Spring is so close…
2 comments:
While you cocooned at home during the main part of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had to take things a little differently.
To begin with, I had a total media blackout to the extent that I did not hear about the LEA murder of George Floyd until days after it, and the subsequent urban riots, occurred. What astounded me about this was that it occurred in Minneapolis, MN., a city I had been in as recently as June 2017, and which I still have the alternate weekly newspaper of that week in a stack on the dining room table. (Underneath the menu of the ___ Gnome, which has since bitten the dust.)
{What do you mean; this isn't Mississippi, Oklahoma, North Carolina, or some putrid state still fighting the Civil War?}
So I recovered by going to Black-owned restaurants during Juneteenth on the Chicago Transit Authority. In a vivid example, I ate a Jamaican Jerk chicken main course in a vacant lot on west 71st St. (The two-block walk south from the nearest bus stop garnered a few photographs of a luscious cat who did not care that I was Caucasian and wearing a face mask, who was fine with me stroking and petting him(?).)
I never caught COVID-19. I learned just four days ago that any number of people who paid for and attended the Chicago Beer Society's "Day of the Living Ales" on 29 February 2021 probably contracted the virus there. (A person attending the first "thurst firsday" in-person assemblage since March 2020 uttered he probably got COVID-19 from his girlfriend who had recently been in San Francisco, CA.; and he was circulating at DotLA. He got the symptoms three days later.)(If the Society had to cancel [although it would have uttered 'postponed'] DotLA, I think it would no longer exist. Because it would lost so much money between the beers it could not serve - could not return - and could not offload to open venues, and people asking for a refund on their ticket.)
I did not buy a ticket to it because I was uncertain which session I should attend(!), as the Society was offering a lower price for 2nd session attendees. Ultimately I decided, "Screw it. It'll sell enough tickets without me."
So incredibly, there was another life trap I did not fall into.
Anyhow, to go back to the main point of your weblog post; I spent a substantial amount of my quarantine time watching the Japanese Adult Videos I have been bringing back here since 2005. I have viewed a good number of them, but with a library as large as mine, there were still hundreds I had not yet gotten around to. I do not have (and still do not) a broadband connection from the abode; so staying off the Internet and watching these videos were enriching on two aspects. One: Some of these DVDs are four hours long. Every minute I watch them means I am not on the Internet.
Two: One of the underreported articles during the quarantine cited that orgasms enhance your immune system. It was dumbfounding how religious-based healthcare providers did not mention this peer-founded study. But of course you and I know why. Summarize that viewing these DVDs enabled many life-refreshing orgasms. Such that when I forayed out of the abode here to obtain meals from small, independent restaurants I could reach on a CTA bus on either Cicero or Belmont Aves., wearing a surgical mask prescribed for my dad [R.I.P.](when there was still question about mask-wearing), I felt OK, even when the bus was somewhat above capacity.
That's a lot of restaurants. We didn't frequent anywhere near that number.
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