dual personalities

Do you have a hard time agreeing on what to watch with your co-viewer(s)? DN and I often do, though we’ve found that a solid overlap in our respective interests and attention spans is the detective and/or heist genre. When Valentine’s Day approached, I thought, let’s watch Bullitt, a Steve McQueen film that my mother and father often watch on this holiday. “A 1968 American neo-noir action thriller film” is about as good as it gets for us.

I will admit that I could not follow the plot of this movie in the slightest, but you can bet I enjoyed watching Steve McQueen look annoyed in a turtleneck sweater. DN thoroughly appreciated the long shots of effortless driving and parallel parking in San Francisco, as well as the stunt under a moving jet on a runway. (For my part, that scene just kept making me think “I walked across a f-ing runway…”)

Side note: did you know that DN drove us from San Francisco to Seattle in a Dodge Charger? I’m aware that it was the bad guys driving the Charger in Bullitt, but it still sparked a positive memory of our own coastal drive. DN did plenty of his own accelerating like a madman, emphasis on the “man.”

We were inspired to watch Bullitt in part because we have been watching the Netflix documentary series Formula 1: Drive to Survive. (Yes, I associate Bullitt solely with the driving scenes. I had completely forgotten any actual plot.) We have finished the first season, following the 2018 Grand Prix championship, and I found it oddly engrossing.

I hate competition no matter what, but Formula 1 racing involves everything I hate most about competing. It’s accepted that even the best drivers can be thwarted by a bad car, so you can lose even when it isn’t your fault. Each driver has a teammate but that teammate is also their competition. And, of course, it can actually kill you. I don’t even like driving on the capital beltway, so these races are just a little mind-boggling. In every interview with a driver, they’re like “Yes, I could die. I just… don’t think about it.” And truly, they must not, because the entire point is going as fast as you can toward sharp turns and burning your tires as close to the brink as possible. And yet I am impressed enough to be writing about it. There is something appealingly earnest about all of these drivers, who have typically been racing since they were in go-karts.

Well, men driving fast is clearly an age-old appeal that isn’t going anywhere, and appropriate enough for Valentine’s Day.

This year, we went for family-friendly treats and fun to celebrate l-o-v-e. My mother always threw little parties for us growing up, and I’ve been looking forward to doing the same for Katie.

My sarcastic captions are really not appropriate, as Katie was genuinely thrilled to unwrap Play-Doh and a new set of bath toys. And I got to enjoy seeing her in a vintage cherry dress from my childhood, which she wore happily, along with cherry bloomers from her mamu and tights from her aunt Mary. What else do you need in a Valentine?

*Quoting from the romantic plot line of Bullitt in honor of Valentine’s Day

It’s Friday again! The best thing about this week was a diverting couple of hours I spent watching the 2008 Chinese movie, Red Cliff, an epic retelling of a war that took place in 208 AD, during the waning years of the Han Dynasty. Cao Cao, the power-hungry and cruel prime minister, browbeats his weak young lord into allowing him to attack the last independent warlords, Sun Quan and Liu Bai. Upon discovery of Cao Cao’s impending invasion, the two leaders unite, though the odds are definitely against them. What makes the movie stand out are the brilliant tactics that the warlords’ strategists, Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang, use against the invaders. (Apologies if I’ve gotten any of the names/characters mixed up. There are a lot and Chinese can be confusing.) Here is the great warrior tactician Zhou Yu.

And here is the master strategist Zhuge Liang. Although representing different components of the tenuous alliance, they become fast friends.

In the initial confrontation Zhou Yu and Liu Bai overcome their opponent’s numerical superiority with a tortoise formation, a maze of narrow, shifting shield wall passages in which to trap and kill the enemy cavalry. It’s a very cool scene and one of many clever stratagems that the two sides use. I won’t ruin the movie by revealing any more of them.

Meanwhile, Cao Cao sails a massive fleet of ships down the Yangtze to blockade the allied stronghold, Red Cliffs. The fleet of large, oddly chunky Chinese warships is impressive to say the least.

One of the things I particularly like about the film is that the two lead women act with great courage and equal cunning to the men, all while remaining feminine. The women’s roles feel natural and not, as in so many of today’s movies, inserted to demonstrate that women are equal to or better than men.

Another positive is that although Cao Cao is definitely a bad guy, he has some depth and he is intelligent. If anything, he is a tragic character, someone who had once been noble but who gave in to his base ambition and traded his honor for power.

This film is epic in the true sense of the word, and for a war movie, the violence is restrained; it is neither the focus, nor meant to titilate viewers. The point is to take real events and turn them into something extraordinary and heroic. As my middle son pointed out to me, the film is similar to The Iliad in that heroes engage in single combat while nameless foot soldiers fight around them, women both motivate and participate in events, and the advantage veers wildly between the two sides as each tries desperately to neutralize the enemy. Above all, the film reminds us to use our brains to even the odds and that sometimes “we must fight even if we cannot win”. With an attitude like that you never know what might happen.

Have a heroic weekend!

I’ve re-watched four episodes of Only Murders in the Building and I have blog titles for like the next three months.

When I was little, with regards to Peanuts characters, I used to think of myself as such a Lucy. One summer when I was away at camp, my mom even got me this super cool shirt I saw in a catalog with Lucy’s giant face on it. I thought it was tres cool. Now, I feel like I end up relating much more to Linus. See below.

Looking at the internet this week, I’ve wanted to exclaim, “PEACE!” like Linus several times. But, I have to remind myself to just let go. I’m not in control and that’s okay.

I had a very productive weekend. After staking out my window on Friday, anxiously waiting for the UPS man, I managed to actually see him arrive and ran down to hold open the door for him. He was carrying a large bookshelf I’d ordered and after I asked him to pleeeease carry it upstairs for me, he obliged. I think it nearly killed him, but I appreciated it.

On Saturday, I put it together all by myself. I’d paid a little more to order one that was made in the USA and thus had the holes drilled in the proper place and the manual wasn’t just pictures. It even had jokes.

It wasn’t lying! I got it finished and moved into my craft room. I then spent Sunday “styling” the shelf which actually just meant trying to make everything fit and then rearranging a closet to hide the things that wouldn’t fit. I’m almost there. But doesn’t it look nice?

Trust me, it’s a major improvement. I think a craft room is an ever-evolving space but I know I’m lucky to have one and I am grateful everyday.

Last week, while running errands, I was feeling a little irritated as happens when I’m driving on Missouri Boulevard. The radio was playing bad country music, the sun was in my eyes, everyone kept turning out of parking lots in front of me, and I’d had enough. I switched to my phone via bluetooth and was like, maybe my phone will play something better. For some reason it started playing this Crowder song where he’s doing his best impression of Mumford & Sons. I instantly felt better.

Happy Wednesday!

This week whizzed by as they are wont to do. A snow storm arrived more or less on cue, but the university did not deal with the storm as it has for the last 25+ years, by assuming everyone is capable of deciding on their own whether they can make it to campus for class. Instead, we received almost hourly “campus alerts” telling us that we could arrive by 10am or by 1pm, or go home at 3pm or 4pm, but that classes weren’t canceled. Yesterday morning, when the storm had just started and we had only gotten about 1″, I got an email from two young men telling me that they couldn’t come to class because they lived off campus and their driveway had been “plowed in”. They asked to attend class via Zoom. I’m sorry to say that I mocked them openly (though I did let them Zoom). I told my students that I was old enough to be their grandmother, and if I could make it to class, so could they. They seemed a little shocked by my attitude.

Here’s a shot I took out the dining room window this morning. It’s pretty typical of winter here and looks like any number of other pics I’ve posted. In other words, this snowstorm was nothing special.

Yet something has changed. Perhaps we’re so used to canceling things due to Covid that we have become hypersensitized to threat. What if I slip? What if I fall? What if my car crashes when I’m going 25 miles an hour due to the snow? What if I hurt myself shoveling or have a heart attack? (Those last two are good questions for the over 40 crowd but 20-year-olds?) I’m not a big risk taker myself, but this is getting ridiculous. We are creating a generation that is either afraid of everything or happy to seize potential disasters as an excuse to get out of obligations. I think Rousseau had the right idea (and if my DP has already quoted this, well, it’s worth reading again):

“The child raised for his station, never leaving it, could not be exposed to the disadvantages of another. But given the mobility of human things, given the unsettled and restless spirit of this age which upsets everything in each generation, can one conceive of a method more senseless than raising a child as though he never had to leave his room, as though he were going to be constantly surrounded by his servants? If the unfortunate makes a single step on the earth, if he goes down a single degree, he is lost. This is not teaching him to bear suffering; it is training him to feel it. One thinks only of preserving one’s child. That is not enough. One ought to teach him to preserve himself as a man. to bear the blows of fate, to brave opulence and poverty, to live, if he has to. in freezing Iceland or on Malta’s burning rocks. You may very well take precautions against his dying. He will nevertheless have to die. And though his death were not the product of your efforts, still these efforts would be ill conceived. It is less a question of keeping him from dying than of making him live. To live is not to breathe; it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

I promised myself that I would only post positive things, but sometimes I think it’s important to notice negative trends. I’m noticing.

Last night I rewarded myself by watching Little Kidnappers (1953) that my DP recommended yesterday. It was delightful! Those little boys were great (especially the youngest one). Although I knew I hadn’t seen the movie, as I watched I had a sense of déjà vu. Finally, I figured out that I had seen the made-for-TV 1990 remake starring Charlton Heston and Bruce Greenwood. It’s not a bad movie, but it doesn’t compare well with the 1953 one. Although shot on location somewhere in Canada, the family was much too well-to-do and the period costumes overdone.

In 1904, when the story takes place, most of those people living in the Nova Scotia hinterland were barely eking out a living. They didn’t dress like this:

Oh well. I suppose they simply wanted to update a beloved movie that teaches tolerance and kindness. We can forgive them their overblown production values, though I do wonder how they fit in the idea of the grandfather going barefoot and saving his boots for special occasions.

It’s time for me to gear up and go start shoveling. Don’t worry, I’ll be careful. Our next door neighbor and his snow blower do most of the work anyway. He’s a wonderful neighbor and a real blessing! I may gripe about the state of the world, but there are still plenty of good, kind people out there and I am grateful!

*Longfellow, “Snow-Flakes”

Well, Daughter #1 here. It has been awhile since I’ve contributed to the blog. Or maybe it hasn’t. The way time moves these days, you never know. There have probably been 33 news cycles, all of them dumb, and none of them “real” news. Anyway! We are battening down the hatches and stocking up the snack drawers here in Mid-MO as we get ready for the storm of the century. Or just a snowstorm. It all has the vibe of the opening of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Don’t worry, I have a supply of chips, wine, and candy. The only difference for me is that I’m really heading for more of a Delta Burke Season 3 look over here.

Anyway, again! The last time I was in St. Louis, my mother and I had a lot of success at an estate sale, getting several fun, little things that really dress up the home. One of them was this little Scrooge that cost a dollar.

I just love him. And I think I’m going to keep him out year round to a) remind me not to be a Scrooge and b) remind me to keep the spirit of Christmas all year round. I don’t know why but he brings me joy.

I recently went down a rabbit-hole of Simpsons Twitter. That is, people who tweet Simpsons lines or clips all day every day. And one interesting account that tweets “On this day in Simpsons history” about episodes that premiered that day. We’re talking people who buy Simpsons scripts on eBay and then tweet line-by-line comparisons to what ended up airing. Way down this rabbit hole, I came across this article about George Meyer, one of the writers/show runners. The article was written more than 20 years ago but this section really stood out to me:

“On most shows nowadays,” he said, “almost all the characters are stereotypes, or they embody one basic trait and very little else. And you have shows where all seven characters talk exactly like comedy writers. All the characters seem to be constantly cracking jokes—and, specifically, jokes meant to injure other people. My old girlfriend Maria once said that if anyone ever said to her even one of the things that the people on sitcoms routinely say to each other she would probably burst into tears and go running out of the room.

“When you and I were kids, the average TV comedy was about a witch, or a Martian, or a goofy frontier fort, or a comical Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. That was the mainstream. Now the average comedy is about a bunch of people who hang around in some generic urban setting having conversations and sniping at each other. I remember watching, in the sixties, an episode of ‘Get Smart’ in which some angry Indians were aiming a sixty-foot arrow at Washington, and Max said something like ‘That’s the second-biggest arrow I’ve ever seen,’ and I thought, Oh, great, shows are just going to keep getting nuttier and nuttier. I never dreamed that television comedy would turn in such a dreary direction, so that all you would see is people in living rooms putting each other down.”

I mean, he’s clearly talking about Friends and Seinfeld and even Frasier. NBC’s Must See TV Thursday lineup. But even on Designing Women, Julia really was kind of mean to Suzanne, even if she did stand up for her to that mean beauty queen that one time. I think this is why when my mom and I watch Brooklyn-99, we are really struck by how nice the characters all are to each other. For 25 years, we’ve watched comedies where people are almost exclusively rude to each other. And then we wonder why no one has any manners anymore, and no one is courteous, and no one thinks about another person’s feelings.

Of course, this is oversimplified and my degree is in English, not sociology, so I’m probably not really qualified to share my opinions, but the comment did make me think.

*the blog title is from Only Murders in the Building.