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2005-11-28, 11:04 a.m.:
I did a lot of thinking about superheroes this weekend. (It was because of watching Spiderman 2 twice, followed by Howard�s End once. Dear Lord, how I love that book. I am a true blue Forster fan, an unadulterated afionado of the 19th century novel. Though, far as I know, HE may have been published in the new century. Still.) And, as usual, I found myself thinking about Star Wars. At the Thanksgiving party I confessed to J. and Rose that I spend about 30% of my day, each day, any given day, thinking about Star Wars. I think even J. was sorry for me. Yoda's worst line ever: "Around the survivors a perimeter create!" (from AOTC) 1st runner-up for Yoda's worst line ever: "Not if anything to say about it I have." (ROTS) 2nd runner-up (I could go on): "A prophecy that misread could have been." (ROTS) Probably the cheesiest line from ROTS: "Hold me like you did at the lake on Naboo." (Padme to Anakin) My personal least favorite line in all of the films - the punning is just too much, and I generally hate gag-type comedy and slapstick - ESPECIALLY IN STAR WARS, unless it's really subtle - but then we all know that "subtle" and "Star Wars" do not really travel hand in hand across the galaxy together: "What a drag" (C-3PO quipping, after having his head tractored by Artoo across the sand, in AOTC) Dialogue that makes the least sense #1: "My lady, I've failed you" (Padme's decoy, right before she dies as the result of an attack on Senator Amidala's life, in AOTC. OK, if the whole point of having a double is to avert grave threats to the life and welfare of the senator, in what sense did she "fail" Padme? By dying? Oops, sorry, my Lady. Actually, I think she did her job exactly well.) Worst line in any Star Wars movie: "I hate sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating. And it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here, everything's soft, and smooth ...." (Anakin to Padme, AOTC) And he starts stroking her shoulder blade as he says it. It�s cringeworthy, the line, though the pouty-boy delivery doesn�t help either. It�s amazing, actually, how good both Hayden Christiansen and Natalie Portman seem to be in other movies, other roles. They�re not bad actors. They are nearly uniformly dreadful in the prequel trilogy. I could name possibly a few scenes, a few fragments of scenes only, in which they�re not dreadful but rather merely mediocre in these movies. Weirdly, I think Natalie Portman was best in The Phantom Menace, when she was still a kid, essentially. Possibly her acting chops are getting blunted as she grows older � I still think her best film was The Professional, when she was � what? � only about 11 years old. 0 comments
2005-11-23, 11:36 a.m.:
Notes to self on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving: I think the town I'm meant to live in is Las Vegas. Or maybe Boston. No, Las Vegas. It's just the right amount of seedy, gaudy, liveable and workaday for me. Oh, I wish I were the person meant for Berlin or Seattle or San Francisco or London (Paris being so highly, highly overrated). I'm not. Towns I'd most like to know by heart: Rome and Amsterdam. Though I have come to suspect that Amsterdam, once you know it by heart, will become deadly dull, provincial. Like Vienna, like Munich. Provincinial, small-townish, no surprises around any corner. I wish I were spending Thanksgiving in Tokyo, eating vegetable and jumbo shrimp tempura and drinking green tea. Eating eel sushi. Thinking about Kuniyoshi's ghost prints. Waking up to the smell of bamboo mats and the color of the light through ricepaper screens. I made cranberry and orange relish yesterday, and I folded baby clothes for hours: these too small, these too big still, these fit for giving away to a baby girl. Now I need to bathe the baby and prepare boxes for shipping and clean the library and shelve many, many books without a proper library ladder. I just want to drink coffee with a hint of orange liqueur in it (it being not quite 11:27AM, AM = in the morning!) and while away the day with writing, reading, jottings and note-taking, letter-writing, the paper from the past three months - all those Book sections piling up, unruffled, unread - and the New Yorker and comic books and chapbooks and books of poetry. All that. It would be a good day to be single, reclusive. I could spend the day slowly, lovingly unpacking each of my action figures from its bubble wrap, carefully wiping it off, then placing it very deliberately on the mantleplace - just like I did that time on Hawthorne St. I was just thinking of it the other day (the 150-year-old mantle, covered with action figures). I was thinking: What a thing for a single person, a person with no babies slung around her waist, a person who has never heard of a Diaper Champ, a person in her late twenties or early or mid thirties, who will stay up all night watching bad old horror movies on TV and drinking whiskey and water and then later fall asleep with the light on, penned in on her bed by books, journals, pens, notepads, letters, photos, maybe a guitar. I was feeling a little nostalgic for all that, but only in my euphoria for the way things are now: Peter, Att and baby Ro. And I have my cats and my action figures and my lunchboxes and my 2,000 books here, too. And I am going back to school, for English, and in the spring we (Att and I, not just me) will start skating at the campus ice rink. Some things work out just perfectly, I guess. 0 comments
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