Posted in Movies, Writing, tagged Amour, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Michael Haneke, movie review on 26 Jan 2015| 5 Comments »
Last night, after watching Amour (2012), I was positively knackered.
I’d just spent two hours reeling from the blows inflicted by this unflinching story of an elderly couple dealing with the inevitable. I’d wept sharp, stinging tears of grief and had the air punched from my lungs. It left me weakened by a powerful catharsis, spent of all emotional reserves. I was a raw, flayed thing.
And I was exceedingly glad of it all.
Posted in Culture, tagged car repair, classic cars, Triumph TR3 on 22 Jan 2015| 10 Comments »
There have been times in my life–and I bet in yours, too–when I’ve found myself in a While-You’re-Up death spiral.
You know…you rise from the sofa during a commercial break and before you’ve had a chance to lock your knees your Significant Other says, “While you’re up, would you mind…?” That dot-dot-dot is always a small thing, like getting a can of soda, something you can’t legitimately refuse, not in polite society, and so you agree, except when you get to the kitchen, you find that there isn’t any soda in the fridge. You go to the pantry and find another pack of soda, only it’s warm. A quick peek in the freezer shows that you’re also out of ice. So you go down to the garage and get a bag of ice from the deep-freeze. Then, back upstairs, you bring back a can of soda and a glass of ice, only to be met with a smile and a “And maybe some chips? While you’re up?”
These are the moments that test marriages.
An example: one Thanksgiving, not too long ago, I got While-You’re-Upped from simply attending the feast to acting as sous chef to doing most of the cooking to actually setting the entire menu and creating the shopping list. While-You’re-Up-ism is a combination of slippery slopes and thin-edged wedges, often difficult to identify until you’re already hip-deep in trouble.
Such has been our experience with Pepper, the classic 1962 Triumph TR3-B we purchased a little over a year ago.
Posted in Culture, tagged barter exchanges, BNP, buy nothing project, gifting circles, struggling middle class on 12 Jan 2015| Leave a Comment »
Something’s been going on amongst my neighbors and friends that I find remarkable. Unfortunately, I don’t know what to call it. I do, however, know what it isn’t.
It isn’t a gifting circle, in which a small group of people pool their money either to crowdfund one of their own or to build a large donation for a charity. This isn’t that.
Nor is it a community exchange or barter group, where individuals or businesses directly exchange of goods and services in a quid pro quo manner. Again, this isn’t that.
So, what is it? It’s called the Buy Nothing Project, and it is changing lives, neighbor to neighbor, in small groups around the world. (more…)
Posted in Culture, Politics, Writing, tagged charlie hebdo, comedy, daily show, jon stewart, pogo, satire, walt kelly on 09 Jan 2015| 2 Comments »
Wednesday, in the wake of the terrorist massacre at France’s Charlie Hebdo, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show said that comedy “shouldn’t be an act of courage.”
I’m not so sure he’s right. Comedy, it seems to me, often is, and more so than we might think.
A week before Wednesday’s murders, in an example of pure coincidence, I found myself pondering this very idea while reading one of the books I received. I was reading Through the Wild Blue Wonder, Volume I of the complete collection of Walt Kelly’s classic, brilliant comic strip, Pogo, which ran in daily and Sunday form for a quarter century during my youth.
Originally, I was simply going to review the book and wax nostalgic about what is without doubt my favorite comic of all time, but after the senseless stupidity that played out this week (and is still playing out) in Paris, my feelings about the book have a deeper resonance that I can’t ignore.
The truth is, comedy often is an act of courage, especially when satire and lampooning are employed.
Pogo began as a cute comic about anthropomorphic animals living in the Okefenokee Swamp of the American South. Quite soon, however, Walt Kelly–who drew and scripted Pogo from 1948 until his death in 1973–began to introduce caricatures of real life personalities to the swamp’s denizens. As early as 1949, Kelly began to lampoon publishing magnates and political figures in the panels of Pogo, drawing fire from such iconic personages as publisher William Randolph Hearst. In this way, Kelly’s lovable, innocent, brown-eyed Pogo ‘Possum faced down social and political foes, from Castro to Khrushchev to JFK to LBJ to the John Birch Society.
Kelly may never have feared for his actual life in busting those powerful chops, but he did experience backlash. As a syndicated cartoonist, he felt the pinch financially when newspapers, in retribution for some of the strip’s more pointed social commentary, dropped Pogo from their pages. Also, it cannot be denied that in creating his wildcat, Simple J. Malarkey, an obvious caricature of the paranoid Communist-hunter Senator Joseph McCarthy, Kelly was poking the Big Bear, an act that could easily have gotten him blacklisted entirely.
Through satire, Kelly pointed out our foibles and challenged our fears. In reading Pogo, we grew braver and wiser, and could see more clearly the daily idiocy we so often ignore.
Kelly was not alone in his work, and is not alone. There is a direct line from Pogo that reaches back to the political pamphleteers of Elizabethan England and Revolutionary France. Likewise, there is a direct line that stretches from Pogo forward to The Onion, SNL, and yes, to Charlie Hebdo.
And so, I think Jon Stewart got it wrong. Comedy is commentary, comedy is brave, and in that, comedy is an act of courage, because in the end, one of the bravest things we can ever do is laugh at ourselves.
To the murdered tigers of Charlie Hebdo: Nous ne vous oublierons pas.
k
Kanji character Raku: happiness, music, joy.
Posted in Culture, Seattle, tagged Seattle, Seattle Times, Seattle traffic, traffic on 06 Jan 2015| 11 Comments »
I hope you all had a fine holiday. I had a fine one, myself.
During the holiday break I slept late (well, for me, 7AM is late). Each morning as my wife snoozed in, I’d get up, throw on my old-man schmatta, turn up the heat, start a pot of coffee, and slipper outside into the drizzling wet to retrieve my moistened newspaper. Back inside, I’d pour myself a chunk of joe, settle into my big buffalo chair, and, by the light of the early morning drear, decipher the grey-on-grey type that was smudged across my paper’s wet, see-through pages.
I took great pleasure in this. It was quiet. The only sounds were the exhalation of the furnace, the ticking of the clock, and the drip of rain in the downspout. Sometimes the cat would climb up and join me as I read. It was a lovely way to start each day.
Except for the morning of December 30.
That morning, the Seattle Times, in a massive brain-fart of editorial doofishness, turned a quarter of the op-ed page over to Gage Stowe, a newcomer to our shores, so he could complain about one of Seattle’s greatest flaws: traffic. I mean, they even gave him a lead-in on the front-page banner: “Seattle newbie: Why is traffic so bad?” (more…)
Posted in Culture, tagged holiday vacation, Staycation on 19 Dec 2014| 2 Comments »
We have a stay-cation coming up, beginning in just over two hours. I’ve been looking forward to another chance to “practice my retirement” for some time. The year 2014 hasn’t been good for time off–most of our attempts at vacations have gotten bollixed up or re-purposed by events and necessities. But for this one, we’ve pretty much cleared the decked halls of hurdles and complications.
So, what do I intend to do? Some of these things may sound mundane, but that’ll tell you what kind of year it’s been.
Sometimes, it’s the little things.
k
Posted in Movies, tagged classic films, Marlon Brando, Morituri, movie reviews, WWII movies, Yul Brynner on 16 Dec 2014| 5 Comments »
It’s a rare occasion when I’m wholly surprised by a movie. Rarer still is when I come across a star-powered film of which I’ve heard absolutely nothing. Rarest of all is a movie that combines both of these.
Morituri (1965) is such a film.
Before I stumbled across it while channel-surfing, I’d never heard of this WWII story starring Marlon Brando and Yul Brynner. It was released in ’65 to middling reviews and box-office crickets. The title of the film was deemed the main culprit for this poor performance–audiences didn’t understand the title’s reference to the phrase Nos morituri te salutamus, or “We who are about to die salute you.”–but I think it also it was a matter of the public’s waning appetite for tense movies about the war. In the early ’60s, we saw a definite down-tick in the number of WWII films produced by Hollywood, alongside a shift to movies with more romance and humor (The Americanization of Emily, Ensign Pulver, Father Goose, and The Sound of Music– I mean come on…singing Nazis? ). We were still making great WWII dramas, to be sure; some of the greatest, in fact, came out of the mid-’60s, such as Judgment at Nuremburg and The Longest Day, but on the whole the WWII thriller was becoming less common.
Into this changing landscape steamed Morituri. (more…)
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 