In order to get a picture of wide open beautiful kitty eyes, I need bright sunlight, because the flash makes ’em squint. Hardly ever capture the right moment, so I’m delighted with this one.
Things Witches Say
There’s wax on the cat.
September 11, 2007
As I listen to the radio this morning, I am reminded of the date. And the more I listen, the more it becomes clear: No one knows what to say.
Arthur’s school calendar has today marked as “The Day We Will Never Forget.” Okay. If we’ll never forget, why do we have to mark it? There’s something so self-serving, so bombastic, about the statement. Never forgetting is internal, but marking the calendar with a big Twin Towers graphic overlaid by those word says “We’ll never forget motherfucker.”
And certainly rage is as appropriate a reaction as sorrow (which is where I tend to live with it), but graphic arts bombast I can do without.
We have been abused and taken advantage of by our government. Our love of country has been manipulated, our grief has been played like a violin. Osama bin Laden is still free and our troops were prevented from capturing him, and no one who actually had anything to do with the attacks of September 11 has been brought to justice. More American troops have died in Iraq, a war cynically sold to us as having ‘something’ to do with September 11, than actually died on September 11, 2001.
Our civil liberties have been eroded past the point of horror in the name of fighting back, and yet, we have not really fought back. There is no evidence that the PATRIOT Act or the illegal wiretappings have captured any terrorists.
The city of New York itself has been treated with cynicism and gross disregard. Respiratory disease among clean-up workers is rampant. Giuliani bears a great deal of blame for refusing to allow OSHA to run the safety show at Ground Zero, while the federal government is accountable for a false EPA report declaring the area safe, and yanking away money promised to survivors and rescuers.
And I could go on.
So today’s memorials focus on grief, because the rage that once was directed at bin Laden alone is now directed inward, towards our own government, and that is unbearable.
And about grief, there is so little to say.
Monday Movie Review: Man of the West
Man of the West (1958) 10/10
Link Jones (Gary Cooper) takes the train to El Paso to hire a schoolteacher for his homesteading community. But when the train is robbed and Link and fellow passengers Billie Ellis (Julie London) and Sam Beasley (Arthur O’Connell) are stranded, Link leads them to his old home, where he confronts his outlaw past in the form of his uncle (Lee J. Cobb) and the rest of the gang who robbed the train. Directed by Anthony Mann.
The conventional wisdom is that Sergio Leone launched a new kind of Western with A Fistful of Dollars and his subsequent “Spaghetti Westerns;” a dark, dirty Western of gritty violence, betrayal, and rape. But before Leone there was Anthony Mann and the “psychological Western.” Beginning in 1950 with Winchester ’73, Mann explored the psyche of men who were torn between the evil they had done and would do, and the goodness in their hearts. Most of these movies were made with Jimmy Stewart, but the last of them, Man of the West, was made with Gary Cooper.
I’ve seen three of the Stewart-Mann Westerns, and I’ve loved them all, but nothing prepared me for Man of the West, which was less reminiscent of Mann’s earlier movies than it was prescient of Leone’s. I mean there’s dark, and then there’s dark.
Or, to put it another way, Man of the West blew my mind.
Link Jones, brilliantly played by Cooper, is a complex man, overwhelmed by the longings and fears within, so much that he is not so much silent by nature as driven to silence, forced there by his frequent inability to voice a simple truth; his truths are all so complex. At first he seems awkward, almost goofy, but gradually we understand he is nervous and struggling with self-restraint. He carries to El Paso all the money that all his fellow homesteaders have saved to hire a schoolteacher (who will require a year’s salary in advance in order to relocate to such a remote settlement). He is nervous with the money—too nervous; the inside man on the train job takes notice—and then he is despondent when it is taken. With nowhere to go, he returns to the home he abandoned long ago, but the train robbers have beaten him there. He and his companions are taken prisoner, and the rest of the movie is played out as a tense hostage situation. Can Link free his fellow passengers? Can he avoid returning to the life of crime he despises?
The tension is brilliantly drawn, and the ugliness of the crooks (Cobb, Jack Lord, and John Dehner chief among them) is stunning. There’s a brilliant scene where the bad guys try to force Billie to strip for them. Brilliant in the sense of disturbing, frightening, even nauseating. In a sense, this scene epitomizes everything that’s great about this movie. Link is heroic but ineffectual. The bad guys are crude, nasty, and without limits. Billie is a real woman, not “the woman,” and her humiliation is all the more real for it. The whole thing is startling.
And it just keeps up like that. Link trying to think his way out, and the rest, very aware that’s exactly what he’s doing, but needing to keep him alive anyway, thwart him at every turn.
If you’ve been keeping up with my reviews, you know I’ve been on a Western kick for a while, maybe a year now. I don’t know why I’ve never heard of this one before, why so many other Westerns are more famous, and this masterpiece is collecting metaphorical dust.
Madeline L’Engle
Madeline L’Engle has died at the age of 88.
A Wrinkle In Time was one of my go-to books as a kid, I read it over and over. Despite my notable memory problems, I remember large chunks of the book. I still find the explanation of a tesseract, as the ends of cloth meeting one another, incomparably useful.
Madeline L’Engle brought me wonderful characters, extraordinary ideas, and concepts of science and philosophy that didn’t talk down to a young mind. To me, she will live forever.
Friday Catblogging: Return of Kittenblogging
I was cleaning my files and I found this beauty from January of ’06 (which is about when I figured out how to upload photos from my new camera). My little darlings would have been 3 months old in this shot. Ah, memories. Ain’t they cuties?
This photo has never appeared on the site. There were so many cute kitten pictures from around this age, it didn’t make the cut.
So here it is!
Respiratory Language Fun
Today I saw a commercial for some sort of medical product, and they said
If you have respiratory problems and are having trouble breathing…
So…there are people with respiratory problems who don’t have trouble breathing?
Inexplicable
Arthur had a doctor’s appointment in Westchester yesterday morning.
So we get in the car and as we start to pull out of the driveway, Arthur says “How come it’s always cold when we go to see Dr. R.?”
He asks me these sorts of inane questions all the time. I mean…what? What?
“Arthur,” I said, “How can that possibly be true? I make these appointments weeks in advance. We go in different seasons and at different times of the day. Oddly enough, it is kind of overcast today. But if by some bizarre coincidence it is true, how could you possibly imagine I’d know why?”
“Well, maybe it has something to do with the how the weather is over there.”
“But Arthur. We’re here now.”
“Oh! We are!”
Answers to Residence Trivia
The only unanswered one was a movie I knew was obscure, but you all knocked ’em out of the park so fast last week, I was determined to make it a little tougher.
