My puppy and I took a two hour stroll. It was supposed to be an historic ice storm.
We weren't very impressed. I only slipped 4 times, 1 near fall and 0 falls. It's early in the season but I'd say I'm on track to winning winter.
One the near fall I had to wind mill my arms. The frozen shoulder barely hurt. It didn't rotate around as much as I'd want but it worked. A few months ago I'd have just let the fall happen instead of enduring the pain of moving my arm. So I'm winning everywhere . . . except work. I hate my job. It's the kind of job you have to hate. They don't give you much choice.
I still think like a worker, a laborer, and that its us against them. Sadly, not many of my co-workers agree with me. I ignore them.
One of my coworkers was accused of stealing $1,200. Stupidly the accusation took place right in front of me, which is as stupid and as disorienting as it sounds. After a few moments of pretending I was unaware of what was going on my coworker began, in near tears to beg not to be fired. Management seemed, to me, to be taunting him, saying how this sort of thing usually meant instant termination.
I thought the scene crossed too many lines of decency and humanity. Its pretty bad to have to beg for a cruddy job, in this economy you often feel that sort of trembling fear and anxiety. I understand it too well. It's the only reason I'm still working there.
I felt frozen, I didn't want my coworker to see I'd seen his anguish. I tried talking to management directly and offered up a bit of defense and pointed out I shouldn't be here for this sort of conversation, that it was demeaning for all 3 of us. I tried to offer up a stronger defense but I kept thinking of the new laptop with 4G dongle he'd shown me the day before, and how he was encouraging me to join him in spending a couple hundred bucks for gifts for the other workers.
I always believe that people are innocent and if they're not then there are things and personalities that I can't understand. The only ones I assume are guilty are governments, management and the powerful who view society as an impediment to their success.
My doubts must have been pretty strong because I couldn't mount a more vigorous defense. I managed to finish up and leave offering up my support. It distracted me all the way home, thinking about the situation. I sent out 3 more resumes when I got home.
The next day I was stunned by an entire wall of edicts all demanding to be signed by me. I fumed and felt like walking out. They were mainly to prevent theft. I'm never to pleased to be accused of being a thief. I have a lot of things I can be called out on but not for being a petty thief. (I always work of the old edict about stealing from your employer: If you're not stealing a minimum of 3 times your annual salary don't do it. That includes taking pens or paperclips. I mean, you are going to get caught.)
It turns out the coworker offered to make up the shortage at $20 per month . . . that's five years by my calculator . . . great job security or I'm the fool for being honest. I mean, a five year zero interest loan . . .
That didn't bug me near as much as the 18 new rules and procedures I had to stomach on Christmas week.
I didn't walk out. Not more mature and level headed, just older and more fearful.

I'm enjoying having the TV. Still have mixed feelings about the WDTV Live. Odd thing is my feelings are very strong on loving and hating the device. My friend is coming to visit (with both the crazy dogs - which means my Christmas will be frenetic and most likely happy - just the way I like it!) and she's bringing the AppleTV with her. It's acting up in a way that's affecting a couple thousand people and the New Apple, is of course, ignoring the problem. It's a port problem that seems to have been launched with the new AppleTV 3.01 firmware.
I'll get to compare the two, side by side and I'll try to get it to work.
I did get to watch two of the best films I've seen this year. One's even American made!
"Moon" was a well hyped low budget flic. I liked it. Found it amusing and liked the return of science fiction, as opposed to Sci-Fi, to movies. Its been pretty well hyped so not much need to go over it. I found it a nice reaffirmation of freedom and humanity. Something most American movies seem to ignore in the 21st century.
The other film was denser and more surprising. Since "Running on Karma" I've always figured Johnny To and Ka-Fai Wa as two monster talents waiting to explode. They've done some brilliant work separately and done some light collaborations. this is the first film since "Karma" where've they've worked together as a team.
The movie is different. Firstly it's a FRENCH production! And stars French icon Johnny Hallyday! It starts off as a pretty standard though superbly made thriller, a move titled "Vengeance" makes it pretty obvious what we're going to see. I figured there'd be some sort of culture conflict, Europe vs Asia sort of thing.
To and Wa are too smart for that, in fact the film proudly touts the humanity of us all, even amidst society's killers. There are plenty of cool scenes and plenty of mayhem. The movie starts to turn at a picnic ground where the prey meets their families for dinner. The hunters stand by refusing to engage while the children are present.
Everyone gets shot up pretty badly. While the hunters administer to their wounds it turns out that Hallyday has a bullet in his skull that will cause him to become a total amnesiac with no long and a very spotty short term memory. An idea lifted in cloth from the cool "Memoir". To is smart enough to use that movie as a shorthand stop to dispense with boring exposition.
To uses the device effectively to get to his and Wa's central theme, the nature, purity and need for revenge. When Hallyday's memory finally goes he doesn't remember pictures of his murdered daughter and grand children. He doesn't even remember the meaning of the word revenge.
Anthony Wong gives a solid performance as the hired killer with values and morals as well as brains. Simon Yam plays the villain with over the top glee. Its important he be so despicable to prove the thesis of the movie.
Wong delivers Hallyday over to his pregnant wife and 8 children. He knows he and his crew are going off to die. Since Hallyday offered him everything he had for his revenge Wong leads him to the only safe place he knows.
There in the family Hallyday laughs and spends his days playing with the children. He's happy perhaps for the only time in his life.
The children and mother are upset when the news of their father's death makes the local news. Hallyday only has a polaroid of Wong to tell him that he even knows the man. But he feels the upset around him and feels some how responsible.
Confused and befuddled he falls to his knees at the edge of the ocean and he begins to pray. He has no memory of his religion but for To and Wa faith and belief are instinctual things. And in praying to nothing Hallyday is coming into the zen of his situation. Hallyday sits at the ocean locked in his meditations even as the tide rises and threatens to drown him, even after it recedes he stays locked in his position, until the ghosts of his memory seem to rise from the ocean. The people he has loved and the people he has grown to trust and see as friends rise up and give him release with a kiss.
And Hallyday the blank man from another world rises from the beach and goes off to kill, to seek vengeance. And he's aided cleverly and safely, by the children and the pregnant mother who need their own vengeance.
The idea of vengeance so elegantly woven into a high octane action movie is hard to conceive. It works for me and the film is enough of a hit to say To and Wa pulled it off.
I have a hard time accepting the organic necessity of revenge but that doesn't stop this from being one powerful film that would rank as one of the years best in any year.

I mentioned before that my friend is driving down from Canada to see me for the holidays. I'm touched and pleased and worried. I hope the weather is calmed down enough for her trip to be uninteresting. She'll have the two dogs with her. I don't know if they'll make the trek easier or more difficult. I'm looking forward to seeing them as well.
I'm poised to have a broke but excellent Christmas. What could be better.

I sort of lost interest in the NFL when the Saints lost tonight. The idea of two undefeated teams meeting in the SuperBowl was staggering and blissful. The Saints with Reggie Bush as the sun, Coulston as the wind and Drew Brees as the tired warrior bringing self esteem to a city and making that his primary goal despite the horrors that his own life have instilled filled me with a pride in the human race. I loved Brees leading the Saints in that pre-game high school rocking cheer. Seeing pros get as up and excited as kids is unique. The Saints may not have own them all but they won my heart. And sometimes a loss like this brings them down hard enough to reality to see them through to win the rest.
Pure crap such an important game was stuck on that dreary contentious NFL network. It should be banned by an act of congress and the NFL's anti-trust exemption revoked.

My picks are in bold.

Indianapolis at Jacksonville - The Colts did their part and the Jaguars made it more than interesting.

Dallas at New Orleans - Curse this shabby Cowboys team.

Chicago at Baltimore - The Ravens have disappointed this season but still have a shot a playoff spot. The Bears only interest is in drafting some wide receivers.

New England at Buffalo - When will be certain that Tom Brady is really back?

Arizona at Detroit - Two teams coming off embarassing losses. The Lions are used to that.

Cleveland at Kansas City - Cruddy game of the week. The Browns beat the Steelers?

Atlanta at New York Jets - Mark Sanchez should be back and Ryan has the Jets paying some D. The Falcons need more than an 80% Matt Ryan to compete.

Houston at St Louis - A game of no interest whatsoever!

Miami at Tennessee - Two teams whose play off dreams are fading fast, this could still be one of the better games this Sunday. Taking the Vince Young Titans because he's playing inspired football and is pretty fun to watch.

Oakland at Denver - This game should stop the Broncos from achiving an 8-8 record after an 8-0 start!

Cincinnati at San Diego - Game of the Week. Chad Ocho Cinco invites his twitter followers out for breakfast the day before a game and then walks with them to Starbucks for coffee. Plans to wear his dead teammates jersey knowing he'll be fined massively. A teammate dies and it will either inspire or deaden a team. I hope it inspires. This is my second fave team this year. The Chargers will probably when going away but where's the beauty in that?

Tampa Bay at Seattle - Another who cares game.

San Francisco at Philadelphia - I like the 49ers. I don't like the Eagles this year. They took Vick and lied to defend it. They have also played erratic football.

Green Bay at Pittsburgh - The Steelers lost to Cleveland . . . They should just cancel the rest of their season. Maybe they already have.

New York Giants at Washington - Big rivalry game or snooze fest?

Minnesota 41 at Carolina 14 - At sometime they most have thought this would be a relevant game. What records will Favre and Petersen break is the only thing of possible interest.

MERRY CHRISTMAS! Peace on Earth!

Posted by David at 5:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "3D" by Unknown Been tired. It's the job mainly and my normal not sleeping well thing. It just leaves me perpetually exhausted. Like last night was my first day off of the weekend I slept about 4 hours during the day and then nearly 6 hours through the night. None of this helps me re0tune my body clock. It does show that my body is screaming for rest.
Today I also think I'm coming down with a cold.
Mainly I'm not doing much of anything except dealing with doctors and going to work. I don't think that's good, but almost anything else I do becomes an arduous labor that leaves me wasted and with no energy.
Not updating this site means I'm not thinking about myself and my puppy enough. I'm just reacting and living off of instinct. That's fine for a while. Its one of the reasons I live by a rigid code and set of rules I don't deviate from even if, most of the time, I don't remember why I made up the rules in the first place.
Physical therapy and all these doctors are starting to wear thin on me. On Monday I have to see the opthamologist. I'm close to blind in my left eye. Its useless for looking at anything but it doesn't look freakish and it does help me with depth perception. I drop enough stuff and stumble around enough that the idea of me thrashing about in a 2D world is amusing or daunting depending on the time of day.
I don't think the eye thing is that serious but it has to be dealt with. I've long known that I'd rather go blind then deaf. Not that I'd prefer it. I still want to barter though, like, "I'll give up my eye sight but I demand that I be able to play the guitar again, at least as well as I did 3 years ago!"
I like to pretend that there's justice in this life.
I saw the orthopedist this week. I like the guy. Turns out he put himself through school playing baseball. Was a shortstop! There's no Fraternal Order of Shortstops but there should be. At least it
Click images for desktop size: "Abstract Affinity" by XGA made me feel a sense of commonality.
My right hand has been partially numb for a few months now. Now that the shoulder has been relatively tamed (about 30% of the motion returned, pain is common but not constant) the theory was that some of the numbness should have vanished. It hasn't.
The shoulder pain was so bad that I've distorted a lot of my body in trying to deal with it. That's made for some horrible pain as those muscles start to relax and unconstrict. It appears one of the things I've done is to compress my ulnar nerve.
Now I have to see a neurologist to have an EMT (?) to see where the compression is occurring. If its anywhere but my shoulder the only solution is surgery to move it and uncompress the nerve . . . If its him my shoulder surgery is a probable option but I might be able to decompress it with physical therapy.
I ended up talking about this with the doc. I expressed my concerns, mainly that I'd have to balance out surgery with my life expectancy. Like why put myself through this if I've got only 3 years to go.
I told him that the best prognosis I'd gotten was living through till last year. I tried to sit patiently while he reviewed my medical history and he agreed that looking at that thing its pretty hard to believe that I am still alive, harder to believe that I'm so robust and looking like I do. He told me his nurse wanted to check my ID because she thought I was stealing someone's identity. I couldn't possibly be as old as I claimed.
The final decision was that it was impossible to guess how long I
Click image: "Bo Jangles and Shirley Temple" could reasonably expect to hang on. He noticed that in February I'm scheduled for the big cardio stress test. He said that will give the clearest factual basis to determine how long I could fairly expect. With a grin he said, "And I'd say it close to impossible for anything else to happen to you!"
We agreed that I should get the EMT (?) so we'd have a handle on the problem and then there'd be little risk in waiting until after the cardio stress test to make a decision on the surgery. I need to get it fixed. It will just degrade to the point of paralysis, but that stage would be years down the line.
Physical therapy is going fine. They want me to do the underwater exercises 5 times a week. Another tedious wearying chore. I'll do it.

A few people have noticed I've updated the Jukebox. ANother 20 tunes from my hit list.
It might be the last time I can. I see where the music publishers have started to take umbrage against the internet.
Unlike the RIAA who are just a bunch of twerps who, to protect their useless job, have extended
Click images for desktop size: "Pieces of a Dream" by Titusboy their authority because there's no one to tell them to shut up, the music publishers are scary guys. They've controlled music in the world since at least the Civil War.
I mean they were a force back since young educated orphan ladies could make a living looking cute and playing and singing the latest cool hits at an upright piano in department stores, hawking the latest hit sheet music, making other girls dream of seducing the cute boys by emulating her playing skill.
The music publishers used to count the number of plays a record would get on a juke box to make sure they got their cut! They have the army, the interest and the money. I mean, the record labels owe the publishers MILLIONS! And they're past due. The publishers have lived through wars, external and internal, mob wars and discord. They're a force.
I've been debating about whether I should update the music libraries. I have a couple hundred new titles but I only have a couple hundred of the titles here. I'm considering the argument that most people just like to browse the library to see the posters and read about the movies. They also usually complain because I didn't write any of the reviews . . .

The most interesting movie I've seen has been "Written By," a Chinese movie. Ka-Fai Wai wrote and co-directed, with Johnny To, the shattering "Running on Karma". On his own he's been a quixotic and impressive director.
"Written By" is a sort of ghost story. I hate ghost stories. They never fail to bore me. But Ka-Fai Wai has made something unique here.
There's a car accident with the entire family, a Mom, Dad, sister and brother in the car. Dad is killed, Sister is blinded. The other two are relatively unscathed. Ten years on Mom still has not accepted her husband's death. Blind sister decides to write a novel, using her braille typewriter. The novel will tell Dad's story in a make believe world where everything is reversed. Dad is now blind and the only survivor of the accident.
The film criss crosses the stories, and, due to the plastic power of movies, both stories seem genuinely real to us. For the first half of the movie it feels like Ka-Fai Wai is going to explode the
Click images for desktop size: "Cleopatra" by Maxfield Parrish ghost story genre and make it impossible for anyone else to ever make another one. Its powerful and deeply moving stuff. Writing the novel is therapeutic for the family. It also become obsessive and soon the Dad in the novel is handling the problems of the real world in a fashion that is more direct and sensible than the real family.
Oddly the films power begins to dissipate when the two world begin to collide. The end is almost just silly, but at least it's entertaining.
A great film that couldn't deliver on the genius of its original concept. Not a loss because at least it got made.
Ching Wan Lau, the actor who plays Dad, is incredible. Considering the stunning job he recently turned in for "The Mad Detective" I'd say that this guy has entered the Marlon Brando-Robert DiNero class of actors. He locks into the difficult part and never variates. His charters are complete rounded people that we can feel in our hearts and in out guts. He's brilliant in ways that would make an Anglo actor a legend.

My puppy claims she's never been happier. We went to her therapy dog evaluation. She failed. But it seems she still wants to do this. Selfishly I've decided that I need to finish physica therapy before we start in on her refresher classes. They want her, she wants to do it. It will work out.

Finally Stafon Johnson, the awesome power tailback for the USC Trojans had a horrifying accident this week. He dropped a 275 pound free weight on his neck! Seven hours of surgery later and it looks like he'll survive . His loss will hurt the team this season but that's a small thing compared to how much the world would have suffered if he hadn't survived. He's doing okay. I'm glad for that.

Posted by David at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Emily" by Jugeminias Missing my puppy badly.
I slept better last night. Discovered a plan that semi-worked. Involved a lot of propping with pillows and proper splaying. I slept for 3 hours straight through.
But dreamt of my puppy. On nights like this she'd tell me puppy jokes, watch over me and recommend a good snack. Being a doctor dog she'd know when to nuzzle me, when to play with me, take me outside, when to have me pet her.
I miss my puppy. Trying hard to not let my desperation for her turn into obsession.
Obsession almost always means you miss the obvious solutions in life.
I'm hoping that tomorrow starts to yield some results to my mad flurry of resume rending job searching. Its time for interviews and time for hoping.
I went to this store, Ross. They have plenty f cheap slacks. They sell Dockers for like eight bucks. I figure dockers are okay for some interviews. I begrudge spending the eight bucks.
I bought some used books yesterday. The trip was to drop off job apps. I got four books for nine dollars. Three of them will be interesting but hardly vital, the find was David Drake's "Killer".
"Killer," is a book I was thinking about months ago. Its a science fiction tale about a vicious killing machine monster that gets loose on earth. What makes this story compelling is that the earth its gone to war with is ancient Rome! And the monsters hunter is a former gladiator!
I'm into the first one hundred pages. The story drags a bit more than I remembered but its still fascinating. There's some effort made to show the life of free Romans. The history lesson is integrated well into the plot so it hardly feels like you're learning anything at all! Good stuff.

July 5, 2009

---

We woke the next morning with heavy growing hearts. A border, an imaginary line meant we had to
Click images for desktop size: "Enhanced Canadian Wilderness" by James Davidson go our own ways.
The Days Inn provided a free breakfast. We decided to save some money and eat it. The breakfast was poor but could fill you up.
The worst part was a tray full of eggs cooked someway that they're all perfectly round. They are also nearly indestructible. Even though heaped on the plate none of their yolks showed any hint of breaking. I was afraid of them. They did not seem like food but more like the Japanese plastic sculptures of food the restaurants display.
To while away the time until checkout we walked and talked. We thought of strategies, of hopes and of plans. All bright optimistic stuff to avoid thinking of my departure time.
When we checked out we went looking for a bookstore, so I could get something to read on the long bus ride.
We went to Borders. My friend found a couple of cook books and a gluten free magazine she'd never before seen. I couldn't find anything. The prices for he titles were too high for my remote interest in them.
We then found a spectacular looking used book store but it was closed on the Sunday. We looked through the windows and regretted the day.
It seemed a nice place to sit and talk and attempt to say goodbye.

Click images for desktop size: "Divine Right" by Marvel We had lunch at this Irish style pub. I had a quesadilla . . . it was not good but better than I feared.
Following a last second "I need another bungi cord" panic we went to the bus station. We sat and waited. Talked.
There were two US Immigrations cop hanging around. Border Patrol this far from a border? My bus pulled in but we weren't allowed to board. The Border Patrol had to go in and harass the passengers. They pulled an Indian guy off the bus and were huge jerks. They made him get his luggage and they inspected everything in an incredibly arrogant fashion.
I got on the bus. My friend was in tears. I flashed all the ASL I knew at her. I don't know if she knew what I was saying. I kept flashing ASL even as the bus pulled out. When we got to the other side of the bus station my friend was out there. She waved. I waved back and watched her walk to her car. I wanted to tell her there's no sense in crying. No one was dead yet.
So two days out of prison, nearly 4 weeks from a heart attack and here I was on the dreaded
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Frank Mellech Greyhound. No chance to recover. No chance to breathe.
I had 16 hours to think about things.
I started thinking about the racist cop who started this ugly turn. I don't like cops. Its their insanity and their presumption I don't like. After they've been at it long enough they start to think that everyone is guilty and its only a matter of time till they have you under the lights burying their saps in your kidneys.
This Scott McVicar wasn't even unique. I'd noticed that the area cops were almost all of a freaky breed. They remind me of nothing more than the cops in "A Clockwork Orange". "Just jobs for two who are of job working age!"
They're thugs too cowardly to run with the gangs and the worst of them who find the gangs to tame for the sadistic hatred they carry in their souls.
The sick part is that they no longer make the cops wear uniforms, not consistent uniforms. They let them fuss and futz with their uniforms to the point that there is no longer any relief when you see a cop. McVicar wore no name tag - ever. He even obscured his badge. He fitted and tugged his uniform and wore so much extra unofficial gear he looked more like a manga character than a cop. He wasn't alone. The end result is they look like a manga inspired gang that gets to carry guns and openly hate.
I've never seen any police force in the world that allowed its cops to customize their uniforms to such an extent that the officers couldn't be readily identified. Not even in Africa around the equator. They want the police to be readily identified in an effort to stop trouble except in Canada where the by-word is to let the thugs keep the thugs in their place and who cares what they look like.
Suddenly squad car cops are allowed to do investigations. And a cop so stupid and ignorant he thinks everything he sees on the internet is true. And based on that I was thrown in prison. I was never fingerprinted, photographed nor DNA tested. They have no idea if I was even the guy in the story. But on the whim of a racist cop who thinks in sci-fi fantasy cop terms I was arrested and thrown in prison by K.W. (Ken) McMurtrie, an immigration cop who tried to glamorize his role by
Click images for desktop size: "Frankenstein" by Universal pretending that I was a dangerous arch fiend so he could justify his budget. Then when his speculative case fell apart he lied and tied to justify his heinous acts. He doesn't care about people. Just about his superiors reaming him about going over budget.
In my friends neighborhood there was a mini scandal. Some 25 year old kid walked up to an old man and punched the old man until he was dead. No one could understand it.
Now I do know what happened. He'd just been released from Maplehurst.
You can't take a young violent man, throw him in a ell, abuse and debase him through a constant, clearly administratively approved series of verbal, physical and psychological abuse. Reduce his self esteem to less than zero and then give him nothing but time. No encouragement, no chance to improve himself, just encourage his violence, set him up to commit institutionally approved violence against other inmates.
Are the people who set up this system illiterate? Haven't they bothered to read or even be aware of the last 60 years of penal work and reform.
MAXSEX (Maximum Security) is harsh. I've visited prisoners in MAXSEC in Europe and the USA. I was treated with respect. So were the prisoners. The sort of behavior exhibited by the guards at Maplehurst would not have been tolerated at any of those prisons if only because the type of prisoners in MAXSEC would think nothing of killing a guard ho was insulting and belittling and threatening, but also because everyone knows very few MAXSEC prisoners get life sentences. Most of them will be out on the street. In a true MAXSEC prisoners case every effort is made to attempt to rehabilitate him to avoid just spitting killers back onto the street. They succeed quite often. More than 70%.
The prisoners at Maplehurst are NOT MAXSEC! Shoplifters are not MAXSEC. They do not promote a danger to others around them. Guys on two year sentences for being drunk and disorderly are not MAXSEC.
Maplehurst makes no attempt at education or rehabilitation. They punish. The punish the innocent and the guilty equally. But what else they are doing is training killers. You could even produce an argument proving it is intentional.
It was in the 1930's that it was shown that the treatment of prisoners especially in modes such as practiced at Maplehurst increased a prisoners propensity to violence and that propensity stayed with the prisoner long after his incarceration had ended. Repeat offenders increased and the repeat offenses were noted for their escalating physical violence.

Click images for desktop size: "Forest" by Unknown The punishment administered at hell holes like Maplehurst punishes society far more than it punishes the prisoner.
We got nearer my stop. The bus was over crowded and it was making my shoulder crazy.
I knew instead of thinking of the injustice of the recent past I needed to start thinking about the future or I'd be in trouble.
All I could think about was my puppy.
But she's not here.
Maybe she never will be again.
I refuse to accept that I deserve anymore punishment. I rebel.

Posted by David at 4:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Californian Farm Sunset" by 0videoman I don't think its a good sign that I'm waking up feeling worse than when I went to sleep. It all feels so contrarian. Like a nap should cure a head ache or an upset stomach. Shouldn't it.
I'm feeling rotten. Worse than I've felt in years. No where near as bad as the first chemo but remarkably bad all the same. Hands all cramped up, stomach twirling, eyes struggling to focus through the head ache and my skin feels hot and clammy at the same time.
What a mess I've become.
Most of this was predicted as side effects to starting insulin. They're supposed to go away. I'm up to 25 units a day now with no stabilization in the offing. It bothers me that I was getting similar blood sugar numbers with just the pills and vigorous exercise. To have the expense and the discomfort as well as the psychological numbness from having to do the injections and not see any radical bim bam improvement is disheartening. This wretched feeling only adds to the malaise.
I've been using hot moist heat on my shoulders and elbow. It doesn't do anything to relieve the neuropathic pain but it does loosen up the other muscles that were clenched tight. It provides minimal relieve but minimal seems like a lot right now.
I looked it up and 25 units of insulin is equal to about one third of a milligram. I'm clearly astonished that I carry around a big old gland like a pancreas and all it does for all the care I give it is to produce about one third of a milligram of insulin a day. Its even more distressing to accept that I'm so vulnerable that a drug about the size and weight of a snow flake or half the size of a mosquito should have this devastating effect on me.
My friend is home from her conference. I opened the gate for her to drive into the yard and she ran over this big rock we keep by the gate for propping the gate open. The rock is about 10 inches in diameter. It didn't hurt the car but it did bounce the rock into my foot. My big toe is all blackened. It
Click images for desktop size: "Silent Passage" by Unknown shows how bad off I am that I barely notice the pain from a traumatic injury.
I was glad to see my friend. I struggled hard not to pass out. By the time I'd sorted through that she'd fallen asleep! She slept for nearly 14 hours. Poor thing, she must have needed the rest.
She went into work today because she's the only management person who'll be accessible today. She took the giant dog and the gentle dog with her! That will be interesting for her and for her co-workers!
I'm going to miss them but I'm glad they're getting a break.
There was an upsetting incident with the foster dog yesterday. We took about an hour walk and been home about 15 minutes when I heard a bad bit of snarling and whining.
The foster dog had pressed the gentle dog into a corner and was snarling and biting at his neck. Gentle dog was not resisting but was clearly suffering. I pulled the foster dog off. He made no act or aggressive motion towards me.
The gentle dog was rattled but not physically harmed. He was upset but the one who was the most upset was the giant dog. He was trembling and stuck close to me for the next few hours. He was far more upset than the gentle dog.
The foster dog is subject to aggressive play. He initiates every play period and will not relent until the dogs play with him. After the attack they refused to deal with him for a couple of hours, all except my puppy who will only play with him if he plays her games.
Most of this is just a dog trying to figure out his place in the pack. Clearly he is not going to challenge me as the alpha dog and he's not interested in challenging my female puppy but he's using the
Click images for desktop size: "Count Basie" aggressive play to attempt to dominate the two males.
The only solution I have is to watch them carefully and when the foster begins to play and the playing is not reciprocated and continues to press he'll have to go to a time out.
The aggressive play indicates a lot of things. Breaking him of that bad habit may open him up to concentrating more clearly and being less stressed.
Its a saga.
One thing I might have known but didn't realize is that gentle dog was neutered late in life. This is odd to me because he is so gentle and happy, not in the way I associate with late neutered males. He was actually being used as a stud in the puppy mill he was rescued from which makes his gentleness and lack of aggression even more moving.
He still likes to bite me though . . .

For some reason I found myself thinking about Irvin Kershner. He's a film director there's no reason
Click images for desktop size: "The Call of the Wild" by Cole Phillips for anyone to know about except that for some incomprehensible reason he was picked to direct the "Star Wars" sequel, "The Empire Strikes Back". As I consider that to be the only watchable episode of "Star Wars" I find it interesting Lucas picked Kershner, a man whose career, up till then, had been defined by good but not remarkable gentle movies about people. There was never any hard edged cataclysms in Kershner;s movies. In "A Fine Madness" the hero, Sean Connery, is a poet who gets a lobotomy as a by product to trying to avoid jail for late alimony payments. in "The Flim Flam Man", George C Scott plays a con man who prowls the rural south. Scott is old, self aware, charming and sad without any bitterness.
Kershner's movies tended to be enjoyable, reasonably successful. How this translated out to working on a cash cow and making that cash cow the most interesting of the series is something worth contemplating.
Today figures to be much like tomorrow, with me trying to hold on. Friday is my friends "TV night". I've got the roomba running in the living room. I like to get everything nice so she can just veg out and enjoy the only show she watches. I'm still a believer in the Spartan aesthetic, and part of the asthetic is cleanliness. Even if she doesn't notice it makes me feel good getting it together for her.
I've learned how to move so as not to create any enormous pain for myself. I sort of had to. The sun has finally come out after 4 days! So it might be a better day.
There's no reason it shouldn't be. No reason it couldn't be.

Posted by David at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Click images for desktop size: "Nature" by Celso Junior Good news. Last night my blood sugars were 8.0 which is just a bit bad. This morning my blood sugars were 5.4 which is pretty good.
I had a breakfast of eggs, frijoles, kiwi and potatoes. Two hours later my blood sugars were . . . (testing) 12.3 . . . That's not too good. Should have been between 7 and 10.
I'm up to 16 units of Lantus (insulin) so it will be 17 units tonight.
At least there's some sort of reaction.

The perspective foster dog parents didn't come yesterday. They'll come to meet him on Friday or Saturday. He could care less. He's found his place in the pack. Now he just has to face his place in the house hold.
The only thing wrong with him is that he is the world's sloppiest drinker. He drinks savagely and leaves at least half of what he takes out dripping from his mouth. I've watched him gulp up a pint of water, turn his head and let it all fall out on the floor. Fortunately I don't mind mopping a lot.
Yesterday, while cleaning up the painting for the day, the giant dog and the gentle dog found a real funny joke. I left the front door open because it was nice. The pair of them came up on the porch and whined and wiggled to get me to open the door for them so they could go into the house. They plowed in and two 20 seconds later they were back up on the porch begging to get into the house . . . I looked at them with one of my looks and let them in.
Twenty seconds later they RAN onto the porch, giant dog was wiggling and laughing so hard he could barely shine so gentle dog scratched at the door to get in.
I let them in. Five seconds later they were both stumbling onto the porch shaking with laughter and collapsing on each other going to the door. I laughed too. This was a signal to attack me and try and
Click images for desktop size: "Peacock Phoenix" by Unknown lick me. I hate being licked which, to them, made this all the funnier.
I have to remember I like dogs.
While I see painting as something that needs to be done I knew my friend enjoys it. I underestimated how much she would enjoy it. She said she was having fun. She looked forward to it.
This held even though she discovered that the paint wasn't exactly the color she had envisioned.
We got the paint at the Salvation Army! Recycled paint. It was cheaper but not a steal. Still it looks cleaner. The old paint looked like the product of a drunken hippy pipe dream. Not real hippies but like those old guys who have dreams of hooking up with a space cadet hard body chick. The chick had dreams of going to design school or being a fashionista.
She was with the old guy only because she had nothing else to do and no money to do it with. She probably needed a place to crash that night. After a couple of drinks and a joint she was probably wrinkling her nose at the state of the place and came up with this whacked design scheme. Since this was a way to get the chick to hang out the old guy readily agreed and the end result was . . . this?
She probably left as soon as it was finished, probably with the guy behind the counter at the liquor store.
Now the porch will look like the inside of a mushroom on a sunny day . . . Which is still better.
All week long there was an 80% chance of rain last night and today. So last night I spent about an hour hauling all the stuff I'd taken off the porch back onto the porch. There's a lot. The porch is more a summer room that a porch (two chaise lounges and three tables sort of things as well as an incalculable amount of lamps. My friend had fallen asleep so I had to do it myself. Hurt myself early and often.
Today its mid sixties and there's only a 30% chance of rain tonight . . . I couldn't have worked anyway. Even taped my shoulders are both killing me, add in all the dings and I'm close to worthless.
Still a vacation day is a vacation day.
I did watch two movies last evening. Back in the 80's Dolph Lundgren was the next big thing. There was this xeroxed magazine you couldn't afford to miss by the Hollywood Kids. It was six pages of
Click images for desktop size: "No Peeking" by Peter Dribben the nastiest cattiest fawning gossip in LA.
When Lundgren was cast in "He Man and the Masters of the Universe" opposite Frank Langella as Skeltor they went ballistic to the point of sneaking into the Lundgren's costume fitting. They reported he was more imposing and gorgeous in real life even if he did have pimples on his butt.
I figure that's the mark of real adoring fame. Either when someone takes the time to notice the pimples on your butt or loves you despite them.
Of course then then movie came out and Lundgren wasn't hot anymore. It was really bad. Langella survived because he got to wear a mask through the whole movie. Lundgren did a lot of junk movies after that. He became irrelevant.
He had that one interesting flash with "Big SHowdown in Little Tokyo" but everyone put that off to the burgeoning star power of Brandon Lee. Then he sort of faded to direct to video.
I somehow got a hold of a copy of a movie called "Missionary Man" when I saw it starred Lundgren I left it on but proceeded to do chores while it played. It wasn't great but it was good and Lundgren directed himself in a way I guess he really wanted to be. Chaste, huge, dangerous with an leaning towards finer feelings that he and his character knew he would never fully grasp.
I liked it. Made me see his next (or maybe previous) direct to DVD thing called "Diamond Dogs". It really sucked.
But yesterday I watched the 1989 Lundgren "The Punisher". While
Click images for desktop size: "Ray Charles" not a gruesome as the latest Punisher flic its surprisingly good. Lundgren is very effective as the deranged revenge fueled anti-hero. Marvel Comics wasn't the power house production company it is now so this is just a cheapie (even though Stan Lee still grabbed a production credit).
It actually made me feel warmly for Dolph Lundgren, and the cheap but stylish sets and his lumbering presence made for a cool enough 90 minutes.
After that I watched a strange movie, "Method Man". Nothing to do with the rapper/movie star. Its a seventies kung fu flic. This may be the worst movie ever made but and this is a shock the action choreography and the fighters are superb! It makes no sense. But when the fighters are mixing it up it reaches level similar to Liu Chia Lang's glorious choreography of Philip Kwok in the Chang Cheh flics that followed it. The fighters fly around and perform astonishing purely physical feats that dazzle and delight then we get back to the dreadful story which makes little sense even by cheapie 70's kung fu standards.

Click images for desktop size: "One Puff" by Monogamez Today is my puppy's aunt's birthday. To celebrate her 50 year old cat, (CAT!) is still hanging on. Perhaps just to spite me and my puppy. I can live with that. This is one of those cats with the sense to wish she were a dog.
My puppy's aunt other celebration was that their flat panel TV blew up! An over priced Sony. But even then there's a birthday miracle. They got the extended warranty so they get a brand new, current model FREE!
I've never heard of one of those extended warranties ever working out for anyone before. Sounds like a good, no make that an excellent happy birthday to me. Well, it should be.

Posted by David at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Gunslinger Girl" by VM Before my injection my blood sugar was 6.8, just inside the target. This morning the count was 5.9, which is okay.
It bugs me that a couple of months ago I was getting better numbers just from the pills. For all the stigma and grief from the injections I was expecting something more dramatic from the insulin.
I have gotten a bit better at doing it. My stomach is sore from it. The hardest part is, well the whole thing is hard and tricky; holding the needle dead steady while it hurts is hard then pushing in the little plunger is tricky and uncomfortable but the part I got wired is holding the needle inside of me for a count of 20. It makes me cringe now, even thinking about it.
The reason is that if you pull the needle out too soon the insulin seeps out . . . Crazy.
The insulin is not improving the pain in my shoulders yet. Its still excruciating and stops me from doing things like putting on my jacket. and combing my hair.
I mowed the rest of the yard yesterday. It rained in the morning but then the sun came out and there was enough of a wind to dry out the grass. My left handed falling pull start still worked. I was able to grimace through getting the mower over and around all the hills and stumps and things.
I was concerned because I felt more exhausted than I should. Its a side effect that should level out. Quickly I hope. Getting fatigued stirs negative memories.

Today is a big day. An important day. It is my puppy's fourth birthday.

Click images for desktop size: "Kurbatova" by Playboy Four years old and in all that time we've only been apart about 15 weeks. Twelve weeks while she was being weaned from her mother. Three weeks when we moved. The three weeks were hard on both of us for exactly the same reason and with pretty much the same intensity and longing.
She may not be the perfect dog to anyone else but she and I are perfect together.
She remembers things I tell her and will do things to please me. She gets defiant and demanding. She gets angry. She gets loving and protective. She plays jokes and tricks on me. We bicker and fight. We play games that are meaningless to everyone but her and me.
Together we are a boy and a dog.
I never much liked the show "Cheers", knowing a couple of the writers didn't help, but I heard a part of one episode where one of the characters said he was writing a novel about a man and his dog wandering the corn fields and drinking beer. I could read a novel like that and picture my puppy as the dog.
The entire world would be a scary bad place if by some cosmic mishap she and I had never met.
I feel pretty much the same way about my friend.

This is my friend's last day of work. Vacation time.
Only a week but it will be nice for and for me. Except someone stupid, probably me, decided that the vacation should be spent painting the porch . . . how dull. I mean why ruin a vacation just because the house needs the work?
So it will improve our lives, what reason is that to ignore frivolous self gratification.
I hate painting. It will be fine. We might even laugh while we're suffering through the arduous chore.

We managed to get tickets for the Jack White tour. The one he's doing with that other side band of his, Dead something or other. I like Jack White and still think he's the guitarist of the 21st Century.
Click images for desktop size: "Punk" by Unknownk His shows don't disappoint. He's an entertainer. Of course on this tour he's playing the drums . . .
I always viewed the White Stripes as pretty much a solo act. I can imagine White dragging along his ex-wife as support. You just don't do solo acts with just an electric guitar. White showed you could.
Meg was a pretty poor drummer. She'd lose the beat a lot but White keep a more driving steady beat in his head. His work on the guitar still astounds me.
Its interesting seeing him not be the soloist with the Raconteurs, to lose a part of himself within a real band. Some of the work is excellent, none of it less than good but it felt like White was losing some part of himself, like he was being too deferential to his band mates. I would have been more interested if it had been "Jack White & The Raconteurs" instead of a true band. It would have been awesome seeing White's manic intensity with a back up band. The Raconteurs are a collaboration.
I've only seen YouTube Videos of the Raconteurs live. The stage show looks like the same sort of democratic sharing thing until White does "Bang Bang" the crazy Nancy Sinatra number. Its worth seeking out. It shows what White could do as the frontman.
This will b interesting. Jack White as a drummer. Yow! He can keep a beat so we'll see if it catches fire.

I saw "Zatoichi 17: Zatoichi Challenged".
Peter Welling's defined an auteur as a director who was able to work within established genres and stay within the strict conventions demanded while still managing to express his own voice. Zatoichi movies are almost a genre unto themselves. Formally they are
Click image: "Growing Love" by Frida Lind Chambara (sword fighting) and jidai-geki (period piece).
Within this definition it still astonishes me that Kenjiro Misumi is not recognized as one of the greatest directors in the world.
Zatoichi's movie's follow a path, a path that Misumi defined. I wonder if most of his brilliant story telling innovations have been lost as they have comprised the bedrock of Japanese chambara films in the sixties and seventies.
This entry in the Zatoichi saga is fascinating on its own, touching and startling, moving with an economy and sparseness that recalls zen. It stands on its own as well as laying the groundwork for Misumi's later works and themes.
Worth renting for sure.

The foster dog is starting to fit in to the pack better with each moment. Now we're off to the closed down dog park to see what there might be to see on this birthday day.

Posted by David at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "D'Amour" by Douleur I'm re-reading Raymond Chandler's and Robert Parker's "Poodle Springs". That's the book that was supposedly based on notes and pages Chandler was working on when he died. I've heard its anywhere from 5 pages of manuscript to 100.
Anyway, somebody hired Robert Parker to finish the book up.
When I first heard of this I rushed and got it right away. Got it in hard cover. I mean this is literature. Raymond Chandler. When you
Click images for desktop size: "Hope and Crosby"live in pop culture land as much as I do literature that you can actually enjoy, that isn't some arduous task that will some how make you into a mythic better person, you have to jump on it. Buying it in hard cover made it mean something, made it permanent and real.
I was pretty excited and really sort of sad that it more than a little bit sucked.
Robert Parker isn't anywhere near the writer Chandler was. Chandler was about the scene, the characters, and the poetry. Parker is about the plot, about the mystery and the crime.
Because of Chandler I've read a lot of mystery stuff. Don't care for most of it.
Part of the problem is that its hard to figure which is Chandler and what is Parker imitating Chandler. Like there's a scene where Marlowe helps out a gambling cheat who's also a bigamist. He helps him avoid getting arrested for murder because he saw the guy with his first wife and thought they looked sweet together. That's not totally inconsistent with Marlowe, but it's a bit too sentimental to be taken seriously. You wonder how much did Chandler intend to keep and how much was just taking a look at it.

Click images for desktop size: "Conquering the World" by Unknown At this stage of his life Chandler did all of his writing into a tape recorder then had it all transcribed. He would then ruthlessly edit the typewritten pages.
Its easy to imagine the meticulousness that he approached his editing. When he submitted his first short story he went through and typed it by himself. Because the cheap pulp magazines used justified margins Chandler went through and typed his manuscript with the same justified margins! This wasn't mousing over a button and clicking it, he counted letters and spaces and figured it all out.
So even though he typed things out there's no guarantee that he would have left it in the final story. We all know that Marlowe could get sappy, but he never acted sappy and he never saw killers as friends no matter how much he liked them before they became killers, no matter how sympathetic he might be.
In the book Marlowe is married to the multi-millionairess Linda Loring nee' Potter from "The Long Goodbye". Parker has them constantly squabbling about how Marlowe has to be his own man. Chandler never squabbled. You get the impression that Parker had so many great squabble lines that he decided he needed to use them all. Instead of condensing them all down to a bare element he scatters them throughout the story so they become tedious instead of whip smart. After the first squabble you know this marriage is doomed. Chandler would have let us see that love is always present but the people are just too wrong for each other. All the bickering just makes us dislike both of the people and feel relieved when they're apart.
I even wonder about the title. "Poodle Springs" as a nom de plume for Palm Springs is a little weird. Chandler didn't like dogs so perhaps he'd have kept it to show his contempt for the desert resort. But the same way he let Faun Lake stand in for Big Bear I don't think he'd have let his roman de clef predominate the story. It was the location, the air of the scene not the feelings for the place that overwhelmed.
Back in the life where I cared about such things I wrote an adaptation of Chandler's last original unproduced screenplay. I wrote it so I could make the movie with my friends, shoot it on 8mm stock with sound than transfer it to video for a sale to VHS. It was a good plan and I managed to strip the story down to free to use locations (borrowing from all my friends, their homes and their clubs, restaurants and offices). We even shot a few scenes before the contact I had at the video distributorship told me the cost the Chandler Estate agents wanted for my adaptation. The WGA said that my script contained about 35% of
Click images for desktop size: "Hannabai" by Kurkosawa Chandler's so I had to play ball. Forced me to abandon that little dream.
In rewriting his screenplay and bringing it into contemporary LA, a stripped down LA, I was inadvertently following Chandler's big advice for how to learn to write. He always preached that you had to read something you liked then sit down and rewrite it in your own words. Not copy it but try to recreate the impact of the scene or the characters.
The by product of this is that I learned more about how Chandler constructed his scenes, what appealed to me and also how different Chandler's and my view of the world actually is.
In understanding it I grew to appreciate the differences as much as the similarities. I was able to see more clearly his concepts of the world and of LA. It served me well in understanding people, and having compassion for those who are different and those who I think are just wrong.
I guess "Poodle Springs" as flawed and poor as it is still serves some purpose in that it forces me to remember the the LA that Chandler created so that I can recall more vividly the LA I lived in.

It rained all weekend. My friend had to work all weekend. Not the best of times. Done now.
My friend meets her new boss today, on the telephone. Conference call thing. Seems odd to me but at least they didn't ask her to make the 2 hour drive to meet him.
My arms have become ridiculous. I'm bored with the agony. Tomorrow, if I get my bike running today, I get my Doctorate in self Injectology. I'm holding out the wispy hope that insulin might go some way to relieving this grief. So bad that muscles around the pain have turned into walnuts. If I was of the paranoid bent I'd decided the knots are masticized tumors.
The foster dog is amazing. He has to live in his crate with the stupid cone head collar on but he remains joyous. Sometimes a little bit more than required. I've only ever had one foster dog who arrived calm. Charles. an old cocker> He was very much about his business and even more so about his pace. Otherwise every foster has arrived full of life, a complete ignorance of most things human, and an inbred compulsion to play with everything.
I think that's right.

Posted by David at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Steve Argyle Yesterday was filled with nothing else but dogs. Giant dog has decided that the foster dog is okay so long as he is playing with him and not with giant dog's toys.
Foster dog would bring toys to me to throw and drop them in my lap. I would reach for them and discover that giant dog, who was sitting next to me, had deftly removed them. He was holding them angrily between his paws. Foster dog just went and got new ones. At one stage giant dog was holding three toys between his paws. He glared at me in case I had any funny ideas.
Even my puppy got slightly less disdainful. She initiated play. Of course the play was her game and could only be played by her rules.
When giant dog would play bound at foster dog gentle dog would join in by attacking giant dog! And then foster dog had to go to the vet.
If ever a dog needed a trip to the vet . . . doesn't make it easier. He was a pain. There was an unfixed female beagle at the vet's office. He was uncontrollable. I took him outside. This is the rescue service's vet so we had no choice, but I soon saw that there was no exercise area. No grass at all except the little patch we were standing on, and that little patch was next to the highway. Cars went by too fast for me to be comfortable.
I wouldn't have left my dog there.
Foster dog is going to be fixed, shot up and the have his dew claws removed. He has the ugliest dew claws I've ever seen on a dog. I'm amazed that he hasn't hurt himself before this. They have to be removed. The healing process is long. Three weeks minimum. He'll have to be crated and carried around some.
Poor guy. He's still one of the happiest dogs I've ever seen. His life has been pretty miserable but he keeps playing and laughing. He keeps the world shaped in his image. I admire that. I hope he keeps his attitude after all this surgery.

Click images for desktop size: "The Last Supper" by Da Vinci This surgery will make his life better but I always wonder if it will be worth it if he loses that gift of changing the world to his own joyous view.
Its one of the reason I go on so much about my health issues.
When the doctor's tell you some bad news, you got this or that brand of cancer for example, and then detail the available cures they always seem to do it in a rush. When you ask for details they get brusque, especially about the side effects.
Something like, "You've got lympho ballistic leukemia. No big deal its curable."
In my case it took over seven years to cure. I've been cured, or at least in remission for nearly two years. I've often felt like giving up, even recently. But I don't regret still being alive. No matter how low I've fallen or how despair filled things have often seemed. When it comes to doctor's and scuzzy insurance companies sucking up my money (This policy cover 100% of all costs of normal and average acceptable fees as decided by us you will be responsible for any additional charges as decided by your service provider.
Its been worth it to me. I have my puppy and I have my friend. I like the world well enough, I stubborn enough to enjoy things like music and songs and stories.
Its been worth it to me but it might not be worth it to someone else. When the doctor says, "I won't lie to you," or "I'm not going to sugar coat it," its safe to assume that he's going to enjoy being brutal, he won't discuss things so you can have a clear idea of what's in front of you, and that he's been pretty much misleading you in things up till then.
Most people will be empathetic at first but they don't know how to act. Most of us don't much like confronting mortality. I sure don't. I
Click images for desktop size: "The Bride of Frankenstein" always planned to be immortal, spitting into microphones, running down fields while opponents tripped over their own feet trying to catch me with all the dogs who've ever lived with me cheering me on from the stands or the mosh pit.
When they find out your ill people shut it out of their front brain and work hard to drive it out of their back brain too. The light we see blinds us to all but itself.
They get dismissive or they avoid you. Or worse, they suck it up so every meeting becomes more a confrontation than a casual conversation. Your mind's not working great either. You can't ignore the moments of self pity where you won't like yourself very much either.
I was kind of lucky and people really couldn't notice. I'm pretty dour anyway. In almost any relationship there would come a point would someone would look at me a bit amazed and say, "I never realized it before, your really a pretty funny guy, like you tell a lot of jokes. I never knew you were joking!"
The only difference for me is that they stopped saying that.
I think, no, I know that people need to know what's in front of them. They don't need to know the
Click images for desktop size: "Taoist Immortals" by Fûgai Honko future but they have to know enough to make a decision they can live with, not live happily maybe but they have to see some joy out there at the end of it all.
Steve McQueen went through it all, even ended up in Mexico swallowing extract of peach pit (Laetrile) while two people I know killed themselves. One by driving head on into a fire truck that was enroute to a fire.
I miss them all but there's no choice but to respect their decisions even if you regret their choices.
That's all.

I've listened to the new Bob Dylan, "Together for Life" and the New Neil Young, "Fork in the Road".
I like Neil Young. Everybody has had to sit through my Neil Young story. (Maybe that should be Neil Young Story - keep it capitalized so it enters myth). Me and my buddies hid on a hill at Point Dume and watched them build Bob Dylan's house and got a rush when we saw Roger McQuinn, even ran down the hill to talk to him.
I still listen to their stuff, their old stuff.
Because I loved their old stuff so much I probably took it harder and more personally that I think this new tuff absolutely sucks. Too old, too used to a life of riches and wealth. Young at least seems to try and understand what's going on in the world. He even has feeling for it but its not there in the music.
Dylan has lived in the legend cocoon so long that he's forgotten what it means to be human, to be angry and sad. He writes about heartburn like it was heartbreak.
It makes me sad.
What cheered me was re-watching "Hustle and Flow" as I did the usual household chores. An old movie but still the best film ever about creating music. It works from points of extremity and hyperbole. Music does. What I keep finding touching is the fact that the people here are all dreaming and reaching for that dream and in struggling for it they regain the humanity that the world has sought to pull out of them. All the other movies that tried to tell this story forgot about the human part, they wasted my time telling me about being an inhuman legend.
Time to take the dogs for their walk.
Next week I have to meet the parents of the players of my team. I have to prepare a three minute speech about what to expect from me and what I want from them so that we can build their children into something the children can be proud of. And I have to do this while I'm laughing at the latest dog jokes. Then I have to get ready for poor foster dog to come back to his home.

Posted by David at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Old Friends" by Unknown When I was young (scary phrase that) I think I was in some sort of pain most days. Between football, baseball and surfing I was usually dinged up. (Football needs no explanation, I hope. Baseball, from always getting spiked, plowing into catchers and pulling the double play. From surfing it was mainly stepping on sea urchins, getting stung by jelly fish sort of thing.)
It never bothered me much then. It never slowed me down. Never really paid attention to it.
Maybe I was distracted or something. Now I'm growing weary of pain.
Tomorrow I have to do all the kitting of kids for the coming football season. It causes me great pain just to wash my own hair. The shoulder is killing me slowly. I'd feel near ecstatic to just have 15 minutes where I wasn't flinching and cringing from hurt.
Today I have to do a lot of exercises to loosen the shoulder. I figure the kid's will be anywhere from 4' 11" to 6' 2". I don't think it would make a good impression for me to be wincing every time I reach up to adjust a jaw pad or pump air into a helmet.
Today I have to bring up the kennel from the basement to get ready for the new foster puppy. Tat would normally be a pretty pleasurable task but now I have to worry about if I'll even be able to get it upstairs.
Yesterday wasn't a very great day. Lots of rain. Still it didn't start until after the dogs and I had our walk.
I haven't heard from the doc about my injecting myself with Lantus lessons. So I called and eft a lesson with the Pharmacist who's supposed to teach me. I got a call back a few hours later and the earliest appointment would be May 12th. I took the appointment but that didn't please me. For one thing the pain in my shoulder is neuropathic. That means it doesn't respond to acetomiaphin, ibuprofen or even aspirin. It only responds to this one pill. The pill was marketed as a mood
Click images for desktop size: "Obsession" by Michael Mobius elevator but didn't work too well but they discovered that it was great for relieving neuropathic pain.
When I looked up the pill and saw that it was a mood elevator I panicked in a small way. I thought maybe they thought I was suicidal, depressed or something and were trying to slip something past me. They doubly assured me that wasn't the case but I didn't really believe them until I managed to read the whole history of the drug.
It did a fair, not great job of reducing the pain but it also made me groggy and made my skin feel numb and tingly, so I stopped taking it. I went looking for it yesterday. I couldn't find it. Its probably expired anyway.
While I was looking for the pills I got another call from the doctor's office. They wanted to make sure I knew that teaching me how to inject myself would cost at least one hundred bucks . . . I have to wonder how hard they think will be.
I called the pharmacy I use, the cheapest one and found out that they won't fill the script for Lantus until I've been taught to inject myself. I almost asked if I had to bring a certificate. Like maybe I got a diploma; Doctor of Gluteus Maximus Stickiumus. They probably just take my word for it.
Right away I got a call from my friend asking me to make an emergency appointment with the doctor. She banged her knee a few days ago. It was causing her a lot of hurt. It bruised and was making
Click images for desktop size: "Music Lesson" by Leighton her whole body cold and clammy. I'm not a doc but I ascribe cold and clammy to broken bones. That morning I gave her a sports wrap like I'd give a kid with a sore knee. It apparently didn't help.
She got to the doctor. His word was that it wasn't sprained or broken just a deep bruise. She could expect pain for two more weeks . . .
That was a bit of a relief, I guess, but not the best news. Especially with the weekend we've got coming up. Selfishly, I now realize, it never occurred to me that maybe we should cancel some of the plans for her. I guess I'll have to rely on my friend sticking up for herself and ignoring any pressure I might unintentionally be putting on her.
I want to do the dog walk Sunday but its pretty unfair to ask someone with a bum knee to walk under cloudy skies.
The worst part of pain, for me, is that it distracts me too much. When you've got as little brain power as I do even small distractions create obstacles.

I did watch a couple of movies last night. I like horror movies. I watch a lot of bad ones in the faint
Click images for desktop size: "View of the Kiyomizudera" by Unknown hope of finding that golden moments: Karloff as Frankenstein trying to catch a sunbeam; Leatherface dancing in the dawn, dancing to the beat of his revving chainsaw while Marilyn Burns, sticky with red Karo syrup in the back of a pick up truck, provides a lilting melody of the hysterical laughter of freedom; the mad family feud in "The Hills Have Eyes", a feud crystalized in the heart of the dog "Beast" who sees it as a blood feud of revenge as he avoids thinking of his female companion dog eviscerated by the mutants.
I like horror movies a lot. Some incredibly talented guys get started in horror movies. So do some jerks. Horror always sells. Guys like me will sit in dank movie theaters, rent the DVDs hoping for the one moment of splatter that manages to encapsulate all our fears and shows them to the light. Tobe Hooper, who disappointed me like no other, made the incredibly brilliant "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" a film the critics all hated, at the time. So you can't trust anyone but your own eyes and ears when it comes to horror. Nothing else is reliable.
That said I watched "Laid to Rest". I was surprised that Bobbi Sue Luther, produced her first starring role. She's someone you'd describe as "big tits. little talent".
As a producer she did some great things. The gore and splatter were very good. The actors, except her and the killer, all worked really hard to make their cardboard characters seem to be made of flesh was well as obvious blood. Kevin Gage made a nothing character into someone likable. This got exploited pretty badly in a cruddy added on death scene at the end.
Cool special effects haven't moved me since I saw Tom Savini's glorious throat slitting scene that opened the carnage in "Friday the 13th". This stuff is cool but also really "so what".
The ending of the movie was stupid. It did one raise one interesting question. The star was whacked in the head which gave her amnesia. She discovers that she is/was a cheap prostitute so now she'd
Click images for desktop size: "Kim Novak" almost wishes she were dead. Her rage grows from her self loathing. I thought that strange.
I then watched Enki Bilal's "Immortal (Ad Vitam)". I like a lot of Bilal's artwork. The movie's gotten a lot of buzz because of its mixing of cgi and live characters. I guess the tech was interesting. The movie was not. The monsters were semi cool but the story was stupid and seemed to have no point, dramatic purpose or consistency. I can accept that ancient Egyptian gods are real, I'm willing to meet a story teller that far. I can even accept that the ancient gods sole reason for existing past creating the universe is to breed with a special type of person to create new gods.
I think if I'm willing to work that hard that the story teller has to do more than just string together some scenes of unrelated people and events. I'd have liked it if any of the characters was slightly interesting.
The story starts with Horous, the God, trying to inhabit a human body. Because of the new fad of eugenics and transposing human body parts Horous discovers that every human he enters blows up! This brings in the cops who are searching for this new serial killer. Then they sort of forget about all of that.
There's a weird love story about the guy Horous finds who never had a transplant and the chick who is the miracle who can breed a new god.
Bilal (which is the same name as the crazy mutant twin in the much better "Basket Case") throws out a whole lot of, I guess, very personal ideas about sex, love and loss. Not one of them did he explain, justify or explain. It was just a pretty boring mess that I felt was more an endurance contest than a movie.

At least the dog walk is this Sunday. I just got an email from my friend. She's as excited about it as I am, bum knee and all!

Posted by David at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Grand Central Station" by Ian Foster Yesterday was bright and sunny. It reached 80.
Today it is 57 and pouring ice cold rain.

I took the dogs out for a shortish walk. Every person who was walking a dog got an advert from me telling them about the wonderful dog walk on Sunday. I started the pitch with the off the wall info that this place is so beautiful that they charge a hundred grand to have a wedding there!
I wonder if anyone of them will show. Their dogs would love it.
I walked the 5 miles to the doctor's office in 43 minutes. It would not have been as fast if I had the dogs with me but it would have been more memorable.
Click images for desktop size: "The Jolie Family"
It was hot and I was sweaty. From the reaction and movement of the other waiting patients they must have figured I had swine flu. Anyway it got me into an examination room in record time.
While I waited for the doc I had time to read an entire book! It was "Diabetes for Dummies". Interesting franchise. They seem determined to provide instruction for everything.
The doc came in in a rush. He was nervous about something. The man has no chin. Where his chin would have been was quivering. He asked a couple of unimportant although mildly pertinent questions, clearly to calm himself down. He was so nervous I tried to be relaxing.
He sucked it up and then just plunged into it. He pulled up my blood tests. He explained them so fast I couldn't follow anything he said. When I asked for clarification he didn't get much calmer.
The hardest part for him was that my diabetes was out of control. The pills (metformin) that sensitizes my body to insulin was still working fine but the pill that forces my pancreas to produce more insulin was not. My pancreas was producing almost no insulin. Time for me to go on the needle.
He flinched when he said it. As if he was afraid I was going to slug him. I still had the dark glasses
Click images for desktop size: "In Like Flint" by JW McGinnis on and I was certain that I had my normal blank poker face on so he must have been reacting to something deep inside himself. "I'm afraid you're going to have to start doing injections. It's only one a night. The needles are so thin they don't really hurt. Honest." He said it all in a rush then rared back in his chair pulling as far away from me as he could.
While pulled back he continued, "And there's albumen in your urine. The chemo damage to your kidneys is degenerating. You'll have to take some pills for that. Apropo, no, Avisio for them. To protect them more than anything."
I pulled my chair closer so I could see his computer screen more clearly.
"Boy, my bad cholesterol is super low, isn't it. Sixty really good isn't it?"
"Yes, but your good cholesterol is far too low. The proportion is bad. You seem awfully calm about all this?"
"I kind of knew this was coming. One day. Not happy about it but . . . It will it be Lantus? Is that the insulin injection?"
"Yes. Lantus. I'm putting you on 100 units a day. Increasing it by 10 units a day until the blood sugars get under control. The Lantus could cause further damage to your kidneys."
"I got my dialysis in my future?"
He fumbled before he said, "Most people don't need dialysis even after years of Lantus. You can't promise anything though."
All I could do was nod. He took my blood pressure while he went on to explain all the new procedures and things I'd have to fit into my new daily routine. And all the arcane cabalic rituals I'd have to undertake before I could fill my new prescriptions. One of them is I have to meet with the staff pharmacist. Not to fill the scripts but to have the rules explained to me and to show me how to inject myself. A pharmacist?
My blood pressure was 120 over 60. I was expecting it to be through the roof but it was the best its been in six weeks. I have not the slightest idea what that signifies. The doc ignored my question about it.
So after I start taking the injections I have to check my blood sugars 3 to 5 times a day. That means bleeding 3 to 5 times a day. Two weeks after I start I have to do another blood panel. Two weeks after that I have to go back in and see the doc.
The money for all this worries me the most.
I don't know how I feel about all this. Not happy. Not too upset. Just the grim inevitability of it all. Not even paranoid.

Click images for desktop size: "2009 USC Football" More pills, plus injections plus more blood work is a pretty worst case scenario but at least I ain't dead. I figure bad news here means I'm owed some good luck over there.
I walked home. A lot slower. I passed some youngish girls walking dogs. I figured that a sweaty man wearing shades and ear buds might not come across right so I didn't tell them about the dog walk on Sunday. I wanted to.
On the way home I stopped at the bakery to get some of the cheaper but superior bread and some Halvarti with Jalapeno cheese. The bakery was uncomfortably warm. There was an irate guy there holding a screaming baby. He was shouting at the little old ladies who work there. It seems he ordered some rolls that he was supposed to pick up on Sunday. He didn't. They sold them to someone else. He had it in his head that once he ordered them they belonged to him and they should have held on to them. He hadn't called and told them this. He hadn't paid them anything.
He kept getting louder. The baby kept getting louder and the little old ladies looked warm, uncomfortable and frightened.
I was pretty calm and suggested he go outside for a minute and let the baby cool down. He spun on me. I had about five inches on him and I wasn't holding a baby. He took my well meaning advice.
The little old lady thanked me. I said, "For what?"
She said, "I wish Mr Giant Dog had been here! Hem must be so comforting to you."
I explained that the dogs were at home. I never thought of Giant Dog as being comforting, at least not in the way she meant.
At home my friend and I watched another Doris Day movie, "It Happened to Jane". It wasn't very good. The situation was too real to be silly. Jack Lemmon had a good monologue and Kippy's dad Ernie Kovacs, was pretty much wasted. First totally duff Doris Day movie we've watched together. Next up will be "A Touch of Mink" with Day and Cary Grant. Rah!
My friend was beat after her day but she still offered up a lot of sympathy and support. I don't think she appreciated that I'd rather think about the dog walk and kitting up the kids on Saturday.
No problem is so big it can't be ignored.

Posted by David at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Carp" by Unknown It was a pretty unexciting Sunday. But pleasant. I'd forgotten that time can sometimes just be a pleasant thing to just see pass. There aren't ever enough of these moments. I often forget to treasure them. Times where life is just content. It will be short lived and can't be sensibly ignored or taken for granted.
After the bad storms the clouds passed and the sun came out. We drove to the Indian Reservation, did some more light grocery shopping and went to Taco Bell. My friend loves their hard shell vegetarian tacos. I got a bean burrito and a "Beefy Cheesy Melt". Since everything else was vegetarian someone took it upon themselves to make my Melt Beefy-less. It was fine, They made up for the lack of meat by using extra rice. Rice was what I was craving anyway.
When we got back home it was nice enough to sit outside with the dogs. The dogs love me but my friend is "The Mom". Her being outside set them into joyous doggie paroxysms. Like me dogs seldom express joy by sitting still in quiet contentment.
My puppy played with her Kong and pressed it against my friends leg. My friend didn't understand that this meant you were supposed to try and steal it from my puppy. The giant dog bought out one of his squeaky toys and just drove us nuts with that. The gentle dog was the happiest and most active of the bunch. His way of expressing his joy is to bite me. Not painfully, he likes to grab hold of my wrist and just hang on. For whatever canine reason this puts him into a state approaching nirvana.
Clearly no side effects to Saturday's vet visit.
That evening we watched the Doris Day, Clark Gable movie "Teacher's Pet". I discovered that my
Click images for desktop size: "Midnight Worries" by Unknown friend is a budding Doris Day fan. She even knows facts about her! I'd never seen more than bits and pieces of the movie before and was surprised at just how good it was. Plenty of surprises and plenty of laughs with just a tinge of bathos, just enough to make you think you were seeing something more worthwhile than an entertainment.
Good movie.
We watched an episode of "Kung Fu". We'd fallen off the ritual. I hold that it was because the last few had been so dire. This one was good. For one thing it had the genius that is Keye Luke in it for even the briefest spell. Even a small amount of Keye Luke is enough to make anything taste better. The episode was "The Arrogant Dragon". Carradine was very effective even though his fighting skill still stinks, his acting ability was clicking at a high level. High enough to hide some bad plot holes and some uncomfortable sexual tension. And my old buddy Jimmy Hong got to play a rat!
What I liked most was the careful acknowledgment of Chinese history. It was surprising and welcome even if scant. Basically they acknowledged the birth of the Tongs as being a result of the Manchu's burning of the Shaolin Temple.
Today I've got my doctor's appointment. I called this morning and they've got my blood test results. I'm out of excuses. I have to get my home test results diary into a readable-by-others shape. This morning my blood pressure was 140 over 90. About ten points higher than is considered safe and about 20 points higher than sis safe for first thing in the morning.
I'm hoping that this can be addressed just through diet. I don't want
Click images for desktop size: "Stevie Wonder" to take any more pills. I want no more pills worse than I want to be able to stop restricting my diet any further. My fat intake is already restricted to 45 grams per day, no sugar, no pork etc. I guess coffee and salt are next on the list.
My blood sugars have been running on the high side of acceptable. Within the parameters. There's a chance I might have to deal with that. I get amazed that my diet has to be so restrictive. I know an older diabetic here, on insulin injections, and I had breakfast with him. He had bacon and eggs! BACON! Sometimes its hard to remember that my diet is restricted as much by the chemo's and their after effects as they are by the diabetes. As much as I don't want more pills I want injections even less. So it goes, Diet, More Pills, Injections in my order of preferences. And I really want none of them.
Next Saturday I have to spend 8 hours kitting out kids. I roped my friend in for 4 hours of registering the kids. Paperwork . . . I'm still pleased she'll be there for part of the day.

Click images for desktop size: "Hot Air Balloons" by Unknown Then on Sunday will be the spring dog walk!!
There is little on the appointment calendar that is as much fun as the dog walk, for me and the dogs. This will be the packs third one!

Even though the door is open to the pretty day my puppy has chosen to spend this time inside wrapped around my feet.
I love my puppy. Its nice that its reciprocated. Nicer to know she's not mad about the diet. I've cut all her food in half. She seems no hungrier than usual and she's always hungry.

Congrats to the Men of Troy. Eleven players taken in the NFL draft and 3 of them in the first round! Then Tony Dungy saying that a kid would be crazy not to attend USC becasue SOuthern California is the school that gives you the best chance to succeed!! YOW!

Posted by David at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Crimson Dawn" by Spargett With constant disk repair and running a full series of diagnostic and repair tools I'm keeping the iMac running. Running acceptably.
That's good because I'm going to need this thing to get ready for the season. I want to start prepping a playbook and do those other "coacherly" things. I used to be impressed when I'd go to pre-season coaches meetings and I'd see a coach there with a 4 inch binder over filled with his playbook. I always figure that this was one heck of of coach, a lot better than I could ever be. Then our teams would meet in the season and we'd beat them 80-0.
I never figured it out. I have a good friend who coaches O-Line at a
Click images for desktop size: "Bob Dylan" high school. He has a 400 page playbook! But its not really a playbook. It has some O-Line plays in it but the book is mainly a preparation, a how to book on the theory of playing the Line, dietary and strength needs. The whole shebang.
Each season he says he has to throw out about 100 pages and maybe add in 50 or sixty. Now he's a coach who's a lot better than I'll ever be.
See, I don't know how to prepare a playbook until I see what kind of kids I have. This Saturday a couple of coaches were waxing rhapsodic about how much they love the pulling guard. The pulling guard is where, for example, you would get your right guard to run down to the left side of the line and turn forward and block so you have an extra surprise blocker for your running back. I agree that it is a pretty play. In all my years of coaching I've only had one guard who had the speed to reach his assignment.
The coaches talked some more about the difficulty in getting their tackles alert enough to know to pick up any backside pursuit. A defensive end could read the pull and follow it. Their solution to having slow guards was to give the Running Back some extra steps in the backfield so that he couldn't get to the proposed hole until the guard got there.
I won't ever coach against these guys which is good. I hope that this attitude is prevalent throughout
Click images for desktop size: "Angel Fish" by Unknown the league. When I see a slow guard pull the call is simple. You have the Defensive end hold his position which nullifies the tackle looking for back side pursuit, the middle line backer shadows the pulling guard and the Strong Safety pursues the pulling guard on a run blitz.
In college and high school ball that should either stop the play for no gain or limit it to 3 yards. At this level it should result in a three yard loss and 40% of the time a turn over.
If I get lucky and get a running back with that much speed I'll use cross blocking to open up seams and pound him up the A and B gaps for 4 yards a clip all day.
If I've got a guard who can turn and cover 4 yards in the time it takes my running back 7 yards I'll run a couple pulling plays to set up the decoy and go opposite and use the full back to pick off the Defensive End while the TE knocks off the Sam Backer.
And if I don't have players who can remember all that we just do straight ahead blocking and run a spread like running game.
Thing is I like a wide open game. I like 50 yard passes on the corner route. But if I've got a QB who can only throw the ball twenty yards I sort of have to adapt and do something different.
I never saw the job of coaching as being something to please myself. I think of it as a chance to give kids their best opportunity at success. I can't figure out what method that might be until I've seen what the kids can do and what they like to do.
Sure I try to get my QB to throw 50 yard lasers. I try to get my RB's to run 4.2 forties. But if they can't my job is to figure out what we can do with the talent they have.
The only thing I can use to justify my unconventional approach is to say that in the last 10 years of coaching my teams have led their league in scoring 9 times and in total yardage 8 times. I've always been incredibly lucky in the talent that's been entrusted to me to teach so maybe if I went in with a system already planned out and fit the kids to the system the kids would have been even
Click images for desktop size: "Brunette" by Archie Dickens more successful. I don't really know.
I've got my list of stuff I need for the first practice: 2 stop watches 3 whistles, a ladder, some cones and some step over blocks. And some bodies to fit in the whistles and stop watches. A Defensive Coordinator would be nice too.

My friend got home at 7:15 last night. That puts it at a 32 hour day. She survived it pretty well.
The month stays pretty rough with a new boss, budgets etc. She gets a couple weeks off in May. We're going to pain the porch. Probably being ably assisted by nosey dogs.
We actually watched a Zatoichi movie! I'm mildly surprised she's become a Shintaro Katsu fan. This was the eleventh Zatocihi film and there's no denying that Katsu has definitely worked incredibly hard on developing the character. He's made a sad, funny and never pathetic creature. His sword fighting in this one is very good. Its easy to believe that the carnage is being perpetuated by a blind man. I think bathos is more enjoyable than pathos and bathos always works best when its resolved with gallons of stage blood.

I've checked my puppy's email. I was amazed that she had nearly one thousand. All from kids in hospitals. They don't get to see much spring in the hospital.
I made up a maze game for her site. I thought it would be a quick and easy thing to do. It took me six weeks and five drafts. The final thing had 28 layers! Normally I'm amazed to get 4 or 5 layers in a picture. I'm glad the kids like it. Much gladder than I am sad that they are where they are.
The main crux of their emails is that we need to have more adventures!
I also notice that a lot of the kids thank my puppy but almost none even acknowledge I exist! The few that do think I should give my puppy more ice cream . . .

My health feels better. The old complaints are not improving. They'll bug me but not inhibit me, I think. No doubt they'll improve just enough so I can be uncomfortable but still able to do all the porch painting . . .

Posted by David at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Night and Day" by Michael Parkes On Tuesday for some reason I decided to wash my phone. In the washing machine with my jeans. I don't understand why I next decided to dry it in the dryer, with my jeans.
I heard something clunking around in the dryer but put it off to heavy jean zippers. It wasn't until I emptied the dryer that I started to find all the parts of the phone. Four of them to be exactly.
As my phone is the cheapest Samsung model made, free, sort of, with a pay as you go plan, I didn't have much hope but I
Click images for desktop size: "Robert Mitchum" reassembled it anyway and I was surprised that it worked just as well as it did before.
There's some peculiar stippling on the screen but everything is still legible. I figure the stippling adds character and will be prove positive, should it ever be stolen or lost, that its my phone.
Comforting. I now have a bit of respect for Samsung.
This goes along with me not getting my blood work done today. The doc told me it was necessary to fast for twelve hours before the test.
I have to take four pills a day with food. Every morning I convince my body that coffee is food and I take two of the pills with coffee. Works fine. The doc insists that coffee is NOT food.
Last night I started the fast. Not that big a deal. This morning I went to the lab and was told I had not been fasting as I had a cup of coffee.

Click images for desktop size: "August Night Fire" by Moving Insect This does not upset me as much as it pleases me. I now have proof that coffee is food and my pill regime is totally justified and with expert testimony!

I've been asked why I spend some much time worrying about chambara flic's like those of Kenji Misumi.
I think Misumi is a world class filmmaker. As much an artist as anyone can be who makes movies. I think that in understanding his movies we come closer to understanding parts of ourself and parts of others that were previously dark and maybe hidden. A part of humanity that no other filmmaker is dealing with or at least not dealing with so clearly and concisely and intentionally.
I think that we all relate to movies and art based on a lot of different factors. One of the most important ones, right after being entertained, is identification. Identifying with a situation, a fantasy or hope but most often with a character.
If you look at the top grossing movies, something like the "Titanic" the first movie to do a billion bucks in business, shows the identification factor pretty well. Men related to DiCaprio, king of the world, dying frozen, sacrificing himself for love, a selfish sacrifice that will forever lock his pale features into her brain and extol their love to mythic proportions at least to her. Women related to the lady being old and rich having that golden memory to cling to, a memory crystalized in a trinket.
I hated the "Titanic".
I feel the same way about Misumi's films. His lead character's provide me with something I can relate to; a character with no hope who refuses to die. What this says about my mental state compared to a guy who wants to die gloriously frozen in the dark Atlantic doesn't seem worth speculating about.
The fact that most of Misumi's resolutions seem to be that the lead simply kills everybody is the fantasy element and the entertainment part of the equation.
What is fascinating is how each character arrives at his moment of despair, the time when he discovers his dreams are gone, and with the dreams gone so is his life. And the fact that the lead has to think through and discover a solution to not dying is instructional.
A character like "The Mute Samurai" who merely goes mad and decides he has to make enough
Click images for desktop size: "Old Mill" by Maxfield Parrish money to go to Spain and kill holds almost no interest to him. The blind Zatoichi who fights to keep his humour and his vision of a world at peace and in proper order are his main interest.
His Ito Ogami who seeks reprieve by adhering closely to the tenets of bushido, rightness and politeness interest him, that the man stays sane in the face of lies and duplicity and condemnation is his meat. Staying this righteous, sane and pure enables Misumi's heroes to have the strength, mindset and ability to destroy small armies single handedly.
Misumi understands he needs to show us this blood letting power in a way that lures us into the tale and does not turn us away in horror, hence he constructs his bloody flowers of overwhelming peace extolling a loveliness of death and carnage.
So after seeing a minor Misumi film, such as his modern "Sword" where a kendo student seeks absolution in the glory of steel as opposed to wood, I leave the viewing with a different sense of the world around me and the people who inhabit it. I always thought, I was taught, that this is the main function and aspiration of all "art".

Yesterday was Tax Day. I'm chagrined about all these Tea Bag protests. Seems silly even as Roger Ailes tried to hype them as significant. Ailes is all about the dollar. His plan to try and get a grass roots thing going smacks of the loser tactic that has been in place since Caesar.
I forget that as stupid and transparent as these sorts of scams are every millennia or so they actually work. So I can't really be surprised that a rich white guy would try this silly stunt.
I wish people were protesting real things though. I'm sickened that Obama is fulfilling some of my worst nightmares. He's loading the DOJ with RIAA attorneys, the worst scum bag lawyers in existence are getting power.
Time Warner, the scuzziest of the mass media companies wants to restrict people's access to knowledge and information. With their plan you'd pay fifty bucks for enough internet access to make 10 minutes of VOIP calls, pay half your bills on-line and visit no other web pages while being allowed to receive about 3 unsecured emails a day. That is not fair or competitive. All of this based on an infrastructure that was built by us, the tax payers. An infra structure they have not updated or done decent upkeep on even though showing massive profits.
They justify this by claiming they have a responsibility to their share holders, conjuring up images of your granny not having to eat cat food because she got that sweet TWC dividend check. But the reality is that the guys demanding this outrageous increase in price are the major shareholders. So they're raking in massive unfair profits for themselves.
The latest figures show that CEO's still receive a wage 300 times larger than the workers.
Where the hell is Obama here? Why is he not threatening to force TWC and AT&T to repay the money they were given in the form of right of way and land use, municipality funded cable and monopolistic contracts by reducing the tariff? Resulting in free internet for a generation?
No protesters?

Posted by David at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Mourning Her Warrior Dead" by Charles Marion Russell Its seems I was mistaken about the dog shelters here. Blind man and the elephant thing.
The two shelters I've been to were non-kill shelters ergo I decided they're all non-kill. They're not.
The dogs we're fostering come from the kill shelter.
I begrudgingly concede that there might be a place in the world for kill shelters. Some dogs have been so cruelly tormented, usually by humans, that the end of life is the only way to end the poor creature's anguish.
I thoroughly believe that every animal and every person can become an important and necessary part of this world if they're
Click images for desktop size: "Winning Hand" by Unknown only given a chance.
I have to concede that not everyone is capable of giving people and animals that second chance. Some of us have to work so hard to protect ourselves that its near impossible to drop the armour long enough to let an alien thing into our hearts. Understanding takes a toll too, even though I know the rewards are great so is the risk.
One of my fosters, Jack, was at death's door. He'd been fostered and even they couldn't cope with him. So he ended up with me. I never knew what the problem was. It was a lot of little things. Nothing that meant anything. He was fine. The only thing we couldn't cope with that he was worse than my puppy. When we went on walks the two of them were of the school of getting there fastest and getting back home even faster, and if they had to drag me along to do it so be it. He got better but that's just the way he is. He calmed down a lot, got curious about stuff and learned it was okay to love people.
That this is a kill shelter makes the decision about what pups to foster a lot easier. My urge is to
Click images for desktop size: "Market Scene by Candle Ligh" by Schendel van Petrus say, "Just give us all of them scheduled to die tomorrow," which isn't fair to them or to the dogs living with me now.
It looks like the pup we'll take will be a 9 month old chow/shepherd mix. YOW! Big girl. She was a surrender. The people who gave her up got her for free via one of those CraigsList permutations that runs locally. So they put about fifty cents worth of gas into her and gave her nearly a week to fit in.
She's head shy, afraid of children, afraid of other dogs. If you'd had three homes and a shelter in your life you'd feel pretty shy and scared too. She's being judged for temperament now. The only thing that worries me about a new dog is that it not be cruel to the dogs that live with me now. No vicious attacks. Yelling at them, nipping at them I understand and deal with but snarling ripping attacks are out.
I have a commitment to my family. The dogs who are my family members will help a foster and be fine. They deserve most of my consideration at first. They deserve to feel safe in their home. If it seems hypocritical to place one animal's safety in front of another's I can live with being a hypocrite. The dogs and I have struggled to learn to live together and to be happy together. They are family and they deserve my protection as we welcome another family member into our lives.
We'll see how it plays out. I'm excited.

Yesterday was a pretty wasted mess. Too tired. Too cold.
I got the minimum done which is good enough most days.
I watched another episode of "The Mute Samurai". Mainly to see Misumi's direction. Misumi's episode was different in tone and effect than the rest of the series. Clearly personal. It was called, "The Girl with Blue Eyes" and was about a blonde gajin girl who washed ashore in the arms of her dead mother. The little girl is adopted by a kindly grandfather type. The rest of the village was prepared to let the infant to simply die. Even
Click images for desktop size: "Anime" by Unknown now with the girl only five years old they spit on her, revile her for being a foreigner.
The little girl is lonely. She spends her days wetting her hair and praying to the goddess of the stream that her fiery red hair will miraculously turn black.
A wanted outlaw comes into the area. He breaks into the grandpa's house and forces them to give him food. He does not harm them. He talks to the little girl, roughly and harshly but without prejudice. Then he leaves.
The next day the little girl is playing at the beach. There's commotion at the village bulletin board. They are all looking at the wanted poster for "Sabu", the outlaw who broke into her house. She goes to hear what they're saying and the adult women push her aside, calling her dirty and disgraceful.
The little girl goes home and begins making rice cakes and tea. She packs them into bamboo containers and heads off. She goes to the mountains and walks along a desolate path shouting the outlaw's name.
Sabu comes out and grabs her. She tells him she figured he must be hungry and offers him the rice cakes and tea. He eats them greedily.
They're by a stream. As the little girl tells him what is happening in town she goes about her odd ritual of wetting her hair from the stream. She tells Sabu of her prayers to have black hair.
Sabu tells her he will turn her hair black if she brings him food everyday. She eagerly agrees and they continue talking.
Sabu uses her to deliver messages and to bring him food. She takes him to a deep cave, a better place to hide that only she knows about.
Finally Kiichi Hogan comes into the story. Kiichi is here for the reward. This time we see the subtle differences between Misumi's Ito Ogami, Lone Wolf, and Hogan. Ogami walks the path of hell but he is a complete, ruthless but sane, man. Kiichi Hogan is obsessive, loaded with rage and hate that his silence forces him to hold all inside of him. He's insane but has the saving grace of being a good man at his core.
In Misumi's episodes Hogan is not even allowed the ecstasy of voice over. He is just a massive unhinged killer who's innate goodness prohibits him from taking the easy way out.
Surprisingly this episode has almost no sword play, very little action at all. Hogan finds Sabu but at the little girl's entreaties he does not fight him and capture him. He leaves.
Other bounty hunters don't have his morals. They figure out the little girl is Sabu's contact. They grab her, hold her and without her help find Sabu's hiding place.
They're afraid to go into the deep cave and ferret him out so they tie the little girl to a tree and start to beat her with sticks, yelling into the cave that they'll stop beating the girl if Sabu comes out
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Unknown to be killed.
Sabu does. The little girl yells, "I never told them anything!"
Sabu replies, "I know that."
The bounty hunters and gang surround Sabu. They forget the beaten little girl. With no announcement Hogan comes up behind her. He cuts her ropes, freeing her. She looks at him and then runs to Sabu.
With little flash Hogan kills the bad guys. That's it for action.
The episode ends with Sabu about to go to prison. He turns to the little girl and promises to take care of her when he is released. He also apologizes to her for lying that he could turn her golden hair black. The cop then tells the little girl she should be proud of her differences. She made a black soul like Sabu's white due to her differences. She is a gift from the gods.

Posted by David at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Interleaved" by Lawn Elf My mother always had a lot of friends. They were usually young women.
I didn't understand it at the time but often one of these women would end up staying with us. They were unwed expectant mothers. They had no place to go. Even though we lived in near poverty my mother always opened our home to them.
At first I didn't understand what pregnant even meant. I just knew it was some lady that worked at the concession stand at the drive-in with my mother. They stayed with us, got fat and then they weren't around anymore.

Click image: "Day Dream" by Paul Fischer It always felt a little bit empty when they'd leave.
My mother continued doing this even after she got married. My stepfather didn't mind having another attractive woman in the house. From my step-father I heard a lot f disparaging phrases: Round heels, shacked up and stupid, knocked up and broke, and one I still don't really get, tripped the guy and beat him to the ground.
I liked the young women. They'd stare at me sometimes in a funny way I couldn't grasp but I liked them well enough. One in particular fascinated me. She was a morose girl, from the east coast she was as close to a beatnik as I'd ever seen. She said "cool" a lot and wore black turtle necks and a beret. That's as close to a beatnik as you could get in Southern California. The climate is not conducive to introspection. She might have been my first love.
She would borrow my red card board record player and play this one album, Gregory Corso's "Happy Birthday to Death".
To me this was a weird record. It wasn't songs. It was this guy, Corso, reading his poetry while this bongo player just wailed away. I liked the bongo's at least. I'd sit with her while she played this. Partially to protect my precious record player and partly because she'd talk to me. I had little idea of what she was talking to me about but she spoke so seriously and intently it made me feel like I was being treated as an adult.

Click images for desktop size: "Book Cover" by JW McGinnis After one of her soliloquies I felt like I should fill the silence so I'd ask a stupid question that seemed important to me. Like, on the record, it bugged me that after each cut the people didn't clap and applaud but they'd snap their fingers and shuffle their feet. It seemed weird then and now.
Now I realize it gives me the impression of some guy who got rich for the day at the race track and was at some lurid live sex show and this sweaty guy keeps shouting out, "Oh yeah baby!" while the rest of the raincoat crowd pretends to ignore him.
Anyway after I'd ask my stupid question the beatnik girl (who's name I can't remember) would tussle my hair gently, look at me sadly and give me a hug, sometimes even a kiss on the cheek.
I'd just started drum lessons then. I didn't have a set. I just had the rubber practice pad and anything else that fell under my drumsticks.
I liked the bongos. Liked them a lot. And then actually found a set at a yard sale. Cost a quarter. I think they were used more for decoration than for playing. Something to throw on the lanai for the tiki torch parties that were popular in the neighborhood.
I'd also only heard bongos on the record. I didn't know they were played by hand. It only took a couple of days for me to put the drumsticks through the skins. A whole quarter wasted. The price of a comic book down the tubes.
The beatnik girl who seldom noticed me except she was going through some sort of maternal angst, tried to show me how to use them, playing along with her Corso record. I wasn't interested in her bad music lessons so I listened to the words, Corso's words:
I stand in the dark light in the dark street and look up at my window,
I was born there.
The lights are on; other people are moving about.
I am with raincoat; cigarette in mouth,
hat over eye, hand on gat.
I cross the street and enter the building.
The garbage cans haven't stopped smelling.

Click images for desktop size: "Frank Sinatra" by Unknown I liked that.
I guess beatnik girl felt some maternal streak and decided to tell me about Corso, stuff she'd read on the record sleeve. Corso got sent to prison 3 times. For stealing a toaster, a suit and breaking into his school to have a warm place to sleep. All before he was 17. He was imprisoned as an adult with Mafia hoods and murders.
Prison scared me. I didn't think of poets as tough guys who could survive prison. I thought prisons were where you went to die.
I found out it was easier to read poetry than to listen to it. Even with bongos it's easier to read.
Corso's stuff was funny and mean. There was a picture on the back of one f beatnik girls books. He looked like a handsome prize fighter.
Poetry had its own music to it. It wasn't song lyrics. The best song lyrics, to me, are slogans, something to counterpoint the beat.
Poetry carried its own beat. For Corso it was tough and percussive. Words barking out at the night before heading into the long howl of the end of us all.
I can't remember beatnik girl's name, or her face. But I remember Corso.

I'm getting used to my new mouth. Brushing my teeth is still a hassle. Eating is a chore but not an impossible one.
Blood pressure is still all over the place but always slightly too high.
The pain in my right shoulder is aggravating. I remember that when I had similar in the left it took me three months or more of daily exercise to finally sort it out. Since my left elbow and thumbs are still gimpy I feel a bit lost most of the time. Making coffee is more of a chore. It feels like one of the labours of Hercules getting the kettle plugged in. Reaching for stuff, even light stuff takes grit.
The best thing about this weekend was that my friend has got four days off. Today's the last of them. I like her being around. I think she likes being around. I like to think that part of her pleasure at being home is that I'm here. Crabby people like to think that they are somehow an asset.
We watched the "hot" new Japanese film, "Ichi". That's the rethinking of Zatoichi. It replaces the cool blind masseur with a femme yetar player.
It was terrible. They cast some forgettable J-pop star as Ichi, I figure to try and catch the same lightening that fired the similar in intent "Azumi".
"Ichi" sucked. It was boring, meandering and a waste of the totally cool actors they did have in it.

Click images for desktop size: "Rapunzel" by Olivia No humanity. No soul. Bad fighting.

The iMac is giving me big fits. This morning it was all locked up. The UIServer crashed so couldn't do anything but reboot. Oddly it killed the network connection for some unknown reason. Then had to reboot it again after less than an hour. Everything just locked up and refused to quiesce. Still making daily back-ups, even though I forgot yesterdays.

Posted by David at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Rossetti and Dunton" by Dunn Not feeling well today. Whatever I think is wrong I've decided is wrong inside of me.
I'm to see the doctor on April 20th. Have to bring along all my numbers, my health diary.
Its obvious somethings wrong. After doing the lite exercise of working out the pain in my shoulder, Stretch it to the point where the pain just is about to start, then hold it for a count of 10 - repeat; trotting around the yard my blood pressure was 195 over 108. At the oral surgeons on Tuesday it was 180 over 90. Waking up its around 155 over 90.

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Unknown A year or so ago it never got above 130 over 70.
A year seems rapid to me. A rapid change.
I'm trying to resist self treatment. Diet is easy and obvious. Cut out sodium etc. I get twitched because I keep remembering the oncology team saying that it was important that I keep my blood pressure low, like my opthamologist was always telling me my eyes would do better if I kept my sugars at near hyperglycemic levels. Truths we hold to be self evident stuff.
My blood sugars are okay but not near the low levels I was keeping them at. Sometimes I think I'd do better if I would just get overwhelmed. Let panic take me someplace.
At least I can still laugh and think.
The giant dog has gone to work with my friend. The crazy thing jumped about four feet up in the air on his way to the car, he was so excited.
Inside my puppy let loose the saddest coyote/wolf howl I've ever heard from her. Its what prompted
Click images for desktop size: "Emotion Machine" by Unknown my trotting around the yard with her and gentle dog. My puppy gets the Kong. I chase her. Gentle dog latches on to my wrist and tries to keep me from catching her.
It must be a great game to them. They want to play it all the time.
It will be funny walking the two sane dogs. Easier on me but the giant dog's intent insanity sure makes every one of our expeditions a memorable adventure!
My mind may be wrapped up in morbidity but I can still think.
I've been watching a TV series. A Japanese TV series: The Mute Samurai. The first episode was entitled "The Man Who Lost The Ability to Sing" which is pretty RAH when you think about it.
What attracted me to it was the star, Tomisaburo Wakayama, of "Lone Wolf and Cub". Wakayama's brother Shintaro Katsu, Zatoichi, makes appearances. Hideo Gosha wrote the story! When I saw that a few episodes were directed by Misumi Kenji, it became must see stuff.
I'm watching them in order. They're pretty standard TV fair. I'm not keen on the pacing. The plot is that Kiichi's father was an honest judge in Nagasaki. He refused to turn a blind eye to the foreigners illegal drug smuggling so the foreigners killed him, his wife and slashed Kiichi's throat and left him to die so he could watch the foreigner's rape his fiancee.
Lots of reason for hopeless rage there.
Kiichi spends the show as a bounty hunter. He lives off the money but mainly is searching for criminals who can lead him to the foreigners. When the show picks up he's been on the quest for 18 years!!
He's become a deadly swordsman who's only fear is that the foreigners might have left Japan before he can kill them!
The humour of the stories comes from Kiichi's discovery that he only gets half as much money for bringing in the criminals dead. That and people making fun of the strong samurai that cannot speak. This is a tough show. In the first five minutes there's a graphic decapitation.
Misumi directs the third episode. It fit in to the series canon but because it's Misumi it takes an odder slant.
There are ideas that flow through all of Misumi's films. That's one of the requirements to be considered an "auteur". One of the most telling is his depiction of society and its relationship to his swordsmen. Society becomes a dense but single character in his films.
In this short film (which is what most of these TV episodes come across as) his concept of society gets clearer than ever before.

Click images for desktop size: "John Kennedy" Society and the people in it are vile, frightened contemptible things. Why shouldn't they be. Any hint of heroism from one of its part leads it to being rejected and destroyed by the society that protects itself above all else. Self preservation rules the vast majority. It is all they have.
And due to the low cruel lives they are forced into it is the superior man's instinctual need to love these people. To protect them and enable them to perhaps grow into something more than the miserable thing they are condemned to be.
And the superior man does this while not living amongst them, not ever letting them touch him lest they contaminate the purity of his love with their sodden reality.
Society's only touch of humanity comes from the women who maybe just as rough as their men but they have samurai's strength in their hearts. They are not afraid to show gratitude and realize their is pride in humility.
It would seem that this grim view of the world is essential to the power of Misumi's imagery. It forces him to construct his "fleur de mal" images of gore and beauty.
A world where the only thing worth loving is contemptible and represents dirt that you would never allow to taint your own soul is a tough place to live. That Misumi's heroes thrive in this world without regret and that they never let their love for their common man become infused with pity presents an image unlike any I've encountered in classical or existentialist literature. I guess it only works if you've got a heavy sword and the emotional where with all to calmly slay dozens at a pitch.
I'm going to take my pair of dogs out to explore a world that's not tinged with madness. I like walking all three of them. I always figure people see us and point while thinking to themselves, "There goes the luckiest man in the world."

Posted by David at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Clothes Make the Man" by Unknown There are four inches of snow on the ground. The temperature is 27. Easter weekend is this weekend.
Yesterday my friend left for work. The giant puppy has strange issues. Whenever we or she leave he starts a pathetic crying. My puppy will often join in with a mournful howl.
Normally this all ends as soon as I step back in the house. I have to go out with my friend to open and close the gate behind her. Yesterday when I came back inside the giant dog's tears didn't stop.
Before I could start to comfort him the phone rang. My friend was
Click image: "Charmed to Meet You" by Unknown coming home. The snow was too bad for her to go into work.
I think the giant dog is taking credit for bringing her back to him.
As we settled in, her to work and me to annoy her and the dogs, I felt something odd. My gums had been swollen since the tooth extractions but they started to throb in a way that worried me.
I called the oral surgeon and got an emergency appointment.
The guy who pulled my teeth is on vacation. I liked his stand in far better. He said I had the start of an infection and I was healing much slower than usual.
Leukemia and chemo-patients are extremely susceptible to infection. Diabetics are slow healers.
It bugged me that this was in all my medical history. Before the extraction I even called and asked if I could pick up the script for the antibiotics before hand. I was told of course not.
I wonder if my call rankled them enough to not prescribe any antibiotics out of some sort of professional spite or in a vain attempt to not pay that much attention to my own health - let the
Click images for desktop size: "Esther" by Benouville MD's handle it all, Just be compliant and shut up.
I figure the latter.
So the stand in doc gave me a script for Amoxicillin, a pretty non-specific anti-biotic.
I was so amazed and relieved that there was no charge for the visit that it wasn't till some time later that I started to wonder why I wasn't charged.
I spent the idle moments waiting around asking anyone who was foolish enough to listen what they thought about the weather. No one seemed as upset about the snow and cold as I did. Much to my chagrin they all seemed to accept it pretty much as the way things work "around these parts".
Other than that relatively complicated ploy of mine to annoy my friend and the dogs we settled in.
It was pleasantly dull. I didn't even have much time for my usual pondering of what is going to snatch my simple comfort away from me.
We watched a Japanese movie: "Suspect X". It was surprisingly good and entertaining. It started with a crazy cool "Mister Wizard" style explanation and demonstration on how to make a super particle accelerator from things you can find around the house, if you happen to live in a medical tech supply factory anyway.
The film is based on a successful Japanese TV series so I wasn't all prepared for what was to come. A murder mystery that became a struggle between a genius physicist and a super genius mathematician.
And somehow it became a tale of enduring and effective heartbreak, loneliness and profound sadness. Its smart enough in its story telling to lay out some red herrings as to the character and motives of the characters, allowing you to gleefully jump to some conclusions that will intertwine your own guilt with the guilt of the leads and the distaste for the mere cops who slave away to solve the crime.
At one point the "villain", the mathematician, asks the physicist to not solve the crime; "It will bring no one happiness."
The ending is searing, simple with an elegance that speak to the truth of the lost.
A warmly recommended movie. Not great but terribly cool entertainment.
I've already had the dogs out in the bad weather. They love it. They knocked me down once. Unintentional this time. My puppy and the gentle dog saw something and went after it while giant
Click images for desktop size: "DC Comics" dog saw the same thing and decided to back away from it, probably to consider joining in on the attack. I was doing pretty well until giant dog decided that whatever was out there was small enough to make it safe for him to join in on the attack. He moved too fast for me so I went over. To the pups disgust I kept a hold on all three leashes.
One of my kids (former players) likes to send me the UK top 40 three or four times a year. I think I once muttered something about being afraid of loosing touch. For some reason he sends me the POP top 40. And once again I'm amazed that there are as many of those tracks that I sort of like and there are tracks I down right hate (keyboards and drum machines are often but not always the progeny of hate).

Posted by David at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Summer Time" by Lete My wires arrived today. About 5 minutes before it was time to go to the oral surgeon.
That made certain it would be a good day.
I was up about 3:30 in the morning. Too much pain kicking in. I don't think I was worried but who knows.
My puppy feel asleep with me. She was pressed hard against me, probably trying to push me out of the bed.
When I got up she came in and stood guard around my chair. I always imagine that she's standing guard out of some sort of doggie sense of duty and that all the while she's really praying that no one shows up to bother me, fearful she might have to do something. Still, its comforting.

Click images for desktop size: Unknown I did little until it was time to feed the dogs. Did my vital sign stuff. It was about the same. Nothing special.
I got sleepy but now it was too late to go back to sleep.
I got my wires and hooked them up pretty easily. Its not very instinctive and very difficult to figure out the right left connection. I did it with trial and error. It requires a lot of force to connect and reconnect the things. They are so light and fragile all the force mad me nervous.
Then it was time to get the six teeth pulled.
It was pretty much a non-event. The worst part was the nine novocaine shots. They hurt like hell. Two under the tongue and two in the roof of my mouth were very memorable. My toes curled in an unpleasant way.
Then the doc came in and pulled all six in about five minutes . . . He did it pretty well, I guess, but his speed just confirmed the feeling that I had that I was product and not human. I got no meds or pain killers. They set up a two week follow-up appointment in 3 weeks.
My mouth was totally numb and stuffed full of bloody gauze and they kept asking me questions. I
Click images for desktop size: "Strawberry" by Unknown kept answering but they couldn't understand me.
The surprise was that the bill was less than the pre-approved amount. It was still too much but there were no complications.
As the novocaine wore off I watched Frank Miller's "The Spirit". It was pretty poor although I thought Gabriel Macht was excellent as The Spirit.
I always loved Will Eisner's comics. The Spirit was a real favorite. As bad as the movie was my heart was seriously warmed when they'd get some of the Will Eisner touches right. Except for Macht the movie lacked Eisner's humanity, what Eisner merely implied they spelled out, like the fact that The Spirit is the world's only Jewish Masked Crime Fighter. They lost the humanity, the understanding of evil and in place of Eisner's sly humour we got tacky slapstick.
The pain was pretty bad but compared to the pain of the 3 erupted teeth it seemed almost like a relief. Like the torturer had moved on to adifferent set of nerves. There's an occasional bad stab but nothing that I can't handle.
I'm happy the wire for the Ultimate Ears finally arrived. The disgusting part is that it took 2 weeks for the Post Office to deliver a 2 ounce parcel less than 1 thousand miles. Very pathetic.
As much as I like the Entymotic 4's that I borrowed I'm happy to have the UE's back.
The Entymotics are more precise and much clearer in the midrange but the slightly boomy UE's are nearly as precise and have a much more soothing relaxing sound. Its very hard to pick between them. That the UE's were a gift probably gives them a slight edge.
I expect to be pretty laid up tomorrow but if I can I'll finish up telling about Ong Bak 2.

Posted by David at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Scarf, Girl and New Friend" by Leah Felecity It's snowing . . .

My puppy has always loved her Kong, a red hard rubber conical toy. But she's very specific about it being her Kong.
When Jack, our foster dog, got adopted I included a Kong with his going away package. I made a mistake and gave my puppies Kong to Jack and kept his. This was a bigger mistake than I thought. My puppy who spent every minute outside with the Kong in her mouth refused to touch "Jack;s" Kong. She had no interest in it. Instead she
Click images for desktop size: "Fess Parker" spent a good portion of every day searching for her Kong.
After nearly a year she started to play with "Jack's" Kong. Soon she was as enamored with it as always. By enamored I mean chasing it, teasing me with it and wanting me to chase her to steal it from her.
After our move she lost the Kong in a snow drift. I'd been looking as hard as I can. She'd scuttle along beside me desperate and frustrated.
Her aunt sent her a new Kong for her birthday last year. My puppy studiously ignored it until yesterday.
She finds it vital to have her Kong and to torment me with it. I don't know why but it seems to be some sort of lifeline between us.

I spent the weekend lightly suffering. I wonder if tomorrow's oral surgery, six teeth gone, is preying that heavily on me. I also wonder if the debilitating effect of the pain in my mouth is starting to affect the rest of my health. I'm constantly weary. My right shoulder is hurting em terribly. I can't put on a jacket with out grunting in pain. The exercises seem to keep the worst of the pain away.
My left elbow has stated to throb and weaken. I have a hard time holding the coffee pot. My thumbs continue to ache and stay weak.

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by A Brito My left ankle feels tweaked and burning. My right knee burns and gives out when I try to stand.
My blood sugar levels have been haywire. And every day my blood pressure seems to be rising, particularly the diastolic (the littler number).
Maybe its holistic. Could the pain in my mouth be branching out and affecting the rest of my body? Or could it be a matter of will? Keeping the pain in my mouth in check has permitted the rest of my body's aches and pains to resurface.
It will be interesting to see after tomorrow afternoon when my life will be mainly saliva, blood and a numb tongue.

I did watch three movies this weekend.
The first was a surprise in that it didn't totally suck; "Marley and Me". How did this Owen guy get to be a star? Alan Arkin was in it and he was reliably funny.
For a while it seemed almost that the filmmakers had swiped a page from the Japanese. The Japanese style of dog movie making is to realize that the dogs are not merely an object to cutify but a separate character that has a value within the dramatic dynamic.
That wasn't quite so. It turned out that the film was mainly just a biography of this newspaper writer. At least the dog was in it a lot and was used, slightly, as a device to elucidate the character and miasma of the human characters.
I expected it to be terrible. It wasn't.
The Korean film, "The Divine Weapon" was something of a throwback. It was definitely made to cash in on the popularity of "Red Cliff", that monstrously huge John Woo epic detailing how China came to be.
This film details how Jaesong broke free of China to become its own tiny and proud country. Being Korean the epic part is incidental to the drama and relationships of the people.
There's been a trend, lately, in Korean films, to have these period pieces reflect modern times - rapping monks, ancient caps made to resemble backwards baseball caps. That sort of thing. I find it disconcerting and not a little bit stupid.
"The Divine Weapon" doesn't mess with that. Instead it paints a lovely picture of people in the 15th century trying to survive and make a new and better life.

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by 3D The odd thing that keeps this from being incredible is that the film's agenda is to push patriotism and freedom. Freedom can only be accomplished via creating weapons of mass destruction.
The movie details the Korean invention (or perfection) of the Flaming Arrow, or exploding arrows, including rockets, the first weapon capable of killing people over a mile away.
For me its hard to cheer 100 people killing 100,000 by using a weapon no one other than the inventors had even conceived.
The battles are epic and have a rough beauty but what was thrilling was the love story between the female creator of the divine weapon and the former noble, now a merchant, who helps her build the missiles. One scene in particular choked me up. It was intensely beautiful, simple and direct.
Earlier in the film the woman gives herself a pep talk; "Are you sad? No, you cannot afford to be sad! Even if I'm lonely I can't feel lonely. I can't ever admit how scared I am."
Later on she has been betrayed and ordered to be turned over to the Ming government for execution. The merchant fights and will surely die or kill his best friend but she stops him and surrenders herself. He yells after her, "Are you sad?"
"No!" she barks back.
"Are you sad?" he yells.
"No!", she exclaims as she walks to the prison cart.
"Are you lonely?"
"No!" and she turns, "I have you!"
He's speechless and watches silently as she is taken away. Its more powerful than anything but a movie could show.
Finally I got to see the long anticipated "Ong Bak 2".
I was nervous about the film ever since its was announced. I think Tony Jaa's "Tom Yum Gum" is one of the 10 greatest movies ever made. Mixing bone breaking martial arts with human feelings, love of creatures not human, gripping your heart and your adrenal gland is no small task.
"Chocolate proved that director Pikanew's talent is deadly real. But for some reason Tony Jaa decided to direct his third movie himself. The announcement made me flinch. I thought of Bruce Willis . . . (Have you seen "The Adventures of Hudson Hawke"?)
I was calmed only slightly when I saw the trailer, on line, for "Ong Bak 2". Then I read a really disparaging review. The review savaged the film. It was clear the writer had little knowledge of international cinema and no knowledge or interest in martial arts movies.
So I was excited and nervous about being disappointed.

Click images for desktop size: "The Salute of the Robe Trade" by Charles Russell Any film with Tony Jaa is going to get 4 stars out of 5 from me. The man moves with a sensuous grace and ease that is totally unworldly. He moves how an angel or an ancient god would move as if gravity and the earth around him were mere incidentals that can't even distract him. The man has two pet elephants! Of course he is quick to correct, the elephants aren't pets. They are family. RAH!
"Ong Bak 2" starts with a simple title, "It was the Buddhist year 1974. In the Christian calendar it was 1491."
This was a surprise. Tony Jaa the ultimate 21st Century hero was doing an ancient?

I need to stop. My concentration is fragmenting. This is already long. I'll continue after my oral surgery tomorrow.
As my friend says, I find it impossible to stay quiet for too long.
How does she put up with me? Normally with good grace and humour.

Posted by David at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "In Bones We Trust" by Unknown When I dream, or at least remember my dreams, they are always very heavily plotted stories. They're seen like movies, complete with retakes and cutaway shoots with insets and over the shoulder close-ups. Otherwise my dreams are just fleeting images, like wayward film frames.
Lately I've been dreaming about pain. I feel the pain in my dream. I wake up and sure enough I'm in pain. Prophesy fulfilled.
Since dreams are important, they tell me, I wonder what these strange overly constructed dreams of mine mean. Dreams are the way the subconscious mind helps us deal with the issues of the day, the reconstruction of events filed into memories, trauma and events forgotten. ( At least thats what they taught me in the classes I had to take to deal with victims of child abuse) My dreams often consist of shot after shot of a key being removed from a dresser. Different angles, different lighting, until I get the correct shot and the dream continues.
A lot has happened. Nothing earth shattering or even important to anyone but me.

Click images for desktop size: "Gloucester Harbor" by Edward Hopper I went to the Doctor's on Friday, the GP. He gave me some chores. On Saturday my friend and I got the prescriptions filled. We got the Blood Pressure machine and more diabetic testing strips.
My blood pressure is high. Not scary so but high. 150 over 86 one morning! I'm putting it off to the pain and the tension about even using the blood pressure machine.
I haven't been checking my blood sugars as well as I normally should. The strips cost like eighty bucks for a months supply, so I got into the habit of only checking it when I felt weird or wanted to eat something on the "unapproved" list.
There's nothing to justify this. My blood sugars have been a bit on the high side. As the diabetes at this stage could lead to blindness or to losing a limb I'll have to go back to being paranoid checking them even after I finish the doc's medical stats diary.
Diabetes is a degenerative disease. It only gets worse. Its like a car, as much as you pray a knock in the car isn't going to go away until it breaks down or you get it fixed. I'll have to keep a tighter rein on everything.
Today becomes the first day of my extended walking exercise program. Its hard to figure. I can walk 2 miles in less than a half hour by myself. When I walk the dogs the same walk takes about 90 minutes. Some of that extra time is due to weird little doggie detours and stopping to smell the lamp posts of life.
I also have to figure where we're going to walk to. My puppy and the giant dog don't like going to too many new places so I need to double our walking time while staying relatively close to their comfort zone and working my body a bit.
I think that means walking around in circles.
On Saturday we too of on a mini shopping spree. The main goal was this decent second hand book store.
We also made a run for Gluten Free Ice Cream Cones for my friend. The place where she used to go for them was closed. HAd the sign up: "Under New Ownership Opening Soon".
Every time I see that I wince. The Oriental Theater on Sunset had that sign on their marquee for 4 years until it finally reopened; not as a movie house but as "The Guitar Center".
We went to 4 other health food joints on a vain quest for the elusive ice cream cone.
My friend got three vegan cookbooks she'd been coveting. Not second hand. She's been working like
Click images for desktop size: "Favorite Poet" by Alma Tadema a lost slave for the past couple months. I was pleased she'd gotten something that mad her eyes light up.
We stopped for lunch at some sea food place. Eating out was hard on me. I could barely chew. I had a "Cajun" Poor boy sandwich that I ate with a knife and fork. I never learn to not order cajun food except in Louisiana. It was okay for all that. It felt alien to be sitting in a restaurant with just my friend. I liked it. I still have this habit of always looking around for someone I might know.
We finally got to the bookstore and they had a sale on cookbooks! 35% off. RAH! My friend got 11! I found three of my Destroyer books, all three of them ghosted by my friend Will.
We drove home. The car did fine and we felt happy.
Sunday was just a lounging around day. Need those periodically. Monday my friend took the day off. We had some light plans but it turned into another lounging around day.
I'd enjoyed "King of the Texas Rangers" so much I decided to check out some more serials. I was disappointed, not in the serials themselves but in the discs. The Columbia serials (which tend to have better actors but less excitement and poorer special effects) looked like they'd been mastered from beat to death VHS tapes. There's was tearing at the bottom and occasional rolling!
The Republic serial, "Dick Tracy" looked like it was a CAM but not recorded from a screen but from an old sheet hung in a windy barn!
"Daredevils of the Red Circle" suffered from the same flaws but was,
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Soa Lee so far, at least watchable. Its pretty cool. The heroes are circus daredevils! The youngest is an escape artist, the middle (Herman Brix) a strong man, and the eldest an Olympic High Diver and Rhodes Scholar, or something similar.
Its been decent so far but its still hard to understand how Brix can stop crooks from fleeing by lifting up the rear end of their car but is lousy in the fights!
I also watched "The Yakuza". An old movie I first became aware of when I was a kid. The whole town was talking it up. Paul Schrader had managed to get the studios into a major bidding contest. Martin Scorsese was begging to make the movie. Sadly Sidney Pollack, he of "Tootsie" fame got the deal. If you'd ask me who would be the least competent director to make a big budget yakuza flic Pollack would have been near the top of the list.
It was cool that they had the brains to get a still fit and exceptional Ken Takura to play the lead. Even cooler they got sleepy eyed Robert Mitchum to play the American in Japan.
It was interesting to see how Pollack destroyed a great story. Takura and Mitchum wiping out a yakuza gang should have been classic but it was just boring. The only other time I saw it was when it first came out. I thought it was boring then. Sad that my kid instincts were justified by the crusty old man reality of today.
I can't help but thinking about how cool it could have been.
Dog baths today. The world quakes.

Posted by David at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Witchfinder General's Kitchen" by Andy Jones" Under threat of physical damage to myself I've been instructed to point out that my friend only ate NINE tacos on Saturday. The tenth was given to the pups. She does admit that she could have eaten the tenth.
Further the implication that she often eats 9 or more tacos is erroneous. She struggles to keep her weight over 115. I believe that is pounds not kilograms.


Click images for desktop size: "Dog" by S4W A while ago I broke the audio cable on my Ultimate Eat super.fi 5's. I've finally gotten around to finding that I can replace the cable for only 20 bucks. Which seems a lot for a cable but considering my disastrous attempts to rewire and splice the super thin wires it seems like a bargain.
The only issue is that there seems to be no way that I can see to remove the old cord. The only help is that the picture of the replacement cord shows two pretty little gold plugs that obviously plug into the old ear speakers. Still, I can't see anyway to remove the old cord short of cutting the wire off which makes me fearful of damaging the tiny female plugs that the picture indicates exist there.
I wrote to Ultimate Ears but haven't gotten a response yet. Frustrated I just now pulled the cord as hard as I could and I've either removed the old cord properly or damaged everything beyond repair. That's the way most of my repairs go.

Click images for desktop size: "Angie Dickensen" I'm going to order the replacement cable and see what happens from there.

We're still watching an episode of the old David Carradine TV show, "Kung Fu" every Sunday.
I'm a bit stunned about how the show progresses. I still have problems that becoming a star on a hit show Carradine never bothered to learn any rudiments of martial arts. His dancer kicks and repetitive moves that have no foundation in fighting get tedious and I constantly find myself thinking about how great it would have been to have had Bruce Lee in the role.
But the biggest problem is the lack of a story editor. The shows bring in forgotten plot points at random and then promptly forgets them again, not only within the show but in the series. Most of the time he's just wandering around America but for no apparent reason he is suddenly searching for his brother. He appears to wander from Louisiana to the Mojave Desert. Since this a distance of about 2,000 miles you have to figure part of his Shaolin training is teleportation.
These second season shows don't have Keye Luke very often. Luke is still one of my fave actors. He was a professional and committed to every role he played. As Charlie Chan's number one son he moved with an easy grace, easy enough to have him play an Olympic Athlete and be totally believable. As the blind Master Po in the series he lent the show a gravitas and sense of joy that they can't replicate. Without Luke the Temple sets suddenly look cheap and thrown together. Luke exuded enough sheer joyous power to steal all the focus so that all you see is him. He's always had the magic.
Oddly even with the overt input from Carradine and all the screaming flaws the show never fails to entertain. At its best it gives some serious insight and provides something more to think of than just
Click images for desktop size: "Bedside Book" by Kahle "cool!" (Which does not negate how much I like "cool!")
Its this constant battle between exhilaration and disappointment that makes me look forward to each episode. That and that I get to share the experience with my friend. As a guy who thought a great Saturday was to go to 4 different theaters and see 8 or nine movies on the day and who's greatest pleasure was when someone would go along with me on these celluloid forays that means a lot to me. Even when they hate something I enjoyed or loved something I thought was just okay it makes everything so much better.
Considering that the only book I found of interest in my friends library turned out to be one of those book vaults, where the middle of the book is cut out to hide stuff; it can't be underestimated.
I've been watching a lot of movies, as usual. Nothing great. In fact the best thing I've seen was "Alien Raiders", which says something about the movie funk I'm in. "Alien Raiders" was okay. A nice low budget movie that made the most of its situation, worked well. I liked it more than I did the preachy "The Mist", even with fewer monsters and a lot less special effects.
I've been watching the "new" Shaw Brothers films. Nothing spectacular there. So far the best of them was the previously unreleased "Martial Club" by Liu Chia Liang. The main focus of the movie was Lion Dancing!! There was an opening segment that Liu (a recognized Master of kung fu) explaining the rigid code and rules of the Lion Dance.
It was a fun breezy movie that made me laugh. Had some great fights and an incredible human pyramid of about fifty people. It walked and was part of the Lion Dance choreography.

Tomorrow I've got my appointment with the oral surgeon. Eight forty five in the morning.
I think I have a ride there but will probably have to walk home. Normally no big deal. We've had some nice enough weather lately but they're saying its going to rain tomorrow. Using child logic I've decided that if I manage to get home before it rains that signifies that everything in my life is gong to turn out well.

Posted by David at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Moon Dreams" by Yana Foltice My friend and I were talking this weekend. We were talking about governments and my grief at getting some documents.
She said, "The government is there to make my life easier. That's their job."
I find such optimism charming. Even when I strongly disagree.
I think the governments job is to get paid.
I think that's the absolute grief still left from Bush - he who believes in helping the rich, condemning the poor, who thinks freedom is not a right but a privilege for the select few; that the rich can lead the
Click image: "KC Mo Library" by gwENvision cattle cows of the poor to the slaughterhouse and have them singing nice pop tunes in praise of the abattoir while filling them with fear of the black helicopters that seek to enslave them. You got to love the Republicans, the Conservatives and any other ruling party.
We're Americans and we do this kind of stuff better than most.
What I mean is that Bush hires guys, who hire guys, who hire guys building a pyramid, a great ponzi scheme to enrich themselves.
And the guys at the bottom, the faces of the government we actually deal with are guys with a sinecure, a job for life.
Funny thing is that government jobs, their raises, their promotions, their job prestige have twisted goals. No government employee gets a push for customer satisfaction.

Click images for desktop size: "Mudbugs" by Carlos W You can make a claim that elections are the ultimate expression of customer satisfaction, but elections haven't really been that for a long time. Even the recent election was more about customer dissatisfaction and fear.
Have you ever heard of a cop getting a promotion because he went out and talked to kids and managed to get them to give up gang banging and cut crime? Of course not. Those guys are out there. Normally they get transferred out. Stopping crime cuts into federal allocated funds.
Its like a traffic cop doesn't get kudos for stopping drivers and correcting bad driving habits. He gets his perks by writing tickets, and if he's below his quota maybe he sees somethings that aren't there. Because he's got that guilty conscience or if his entire moral foundation has been eroded by his job he gets nasty, surly and hate filled and takes it out on you for no reason over than he can.
They don't fire this cop. They don't try and calm him down. As long as he's bringing in the money they give him promotions and praise. He gets to train others to be like him and all the other guys see that and begin to emulate him.
Or the corpulent 350 pound guy from Homeland Security. He can't get another job. He's fat, slovenly, sluggish and not very bright in the bargain but he gets to go through all of your belongings at the airport and he gets to keep whatever he sees or likes because in his limited world he can make a case for it being dangerous. Once one of these clones confiscated a nail clipper so I wouldn't clip a stewardesses jugular or something.
He's got a government job. Its impossible for him to get fired. Ever.
All the way down to the crabby lady at the DMV. She's been there for 20 years. She's mean,
Click image: "Adam Strange and Hawkman" by DC Comics inaccurate hates her job and hates you, sees you as an inconvenience in the way of her happy life dream. She'll be there until they promote her or she decides to retire at a pension that will pay her 80% of her salary. No one cares, in government, that she's inept and slowing down a flawed system even further. She shows up.
I was in the Immigration office in London. Leave me alone too long and I explore. I saw a chart on the wall, very prominent. It was a list of all the immigration officers and it tracked how many Jamaicans, Africans and Hispanics they'd managed to deport or deny entry. Maybe it was a pool but it looked to white board official not be sanctioned.
There was no chart for how many people they'd allowed in who were leading happy productive lives, contributing to the community. Governments can't afford to expand their vision that far.
You can always remember a good experience with a government official or agency because they are rare glowing moments that shock and surprise. It takes a while to recollect all the miserable times with the government because they are the rule. Why remember the routine and ordinary.
It will take a generation to get rid of Bush's deadwood. Obama, shockingly, seems to be making attempts in that direction. I think that will fail.

We tried to watch "The Watchmen" yesterday. We were both falling asleep within fifteen minutes. What a dreary, talky mess.
I read "The Watchmen" comic. I thought it was okay. I even sought out some other Alan Moore stuff. As to thinking it was a "great novel". I'm a bit dumbfounded by that. I didn't even think it was a great comic book.
We watched the super hyped credit sequence set to Dylan's "The Times They Are A'Changing" and thought it was just messy.
We went and watched something else. Enjoyed it.

Dentist tomorrow.
I expect to have three teeth pulled. I'll be aggravated that they won't let me have the teeth. I want to save them up.
In "The Mother and the Whore" there's a character, an artist. He plans to have his left hand amputated and then place it in an ornate jar with a brass inscription that says, "The Artist's Hand 1956-1973". I don't want to got hat far I just want to have a cigar box collection of the things I used to be. Like Seth Brundle in Cronenberg's "The Fly". A display of the proof that I at least used to be human.

Click images for desktop size: "New Hat" by Unknown This morning the ibuprofen nearly masked the mouth pain. I was considering canceling the appointment, not seriously considering but it crossed my mind for sure. I can barely chew food now. When these 3 teeth (if it only becomes 3) are gone it will still be hard to eat, to chew. Of course I'm more worried about how I'll look.
Appointments at ten. I expect the crabbiness to last for about 30 days . . .
On the 20th I have to see the GP doctor . . . so much fun.
On Saturday we have to take the new car in for warranty work. Nothing serious. Squeaky brakes and a blown sounding front speaker.
Its been raining. Warmish and damp. A chilling damp. Plenty of mud so the dogs are very happy.
I've cut back on feeding skanky cat. Yesterday I discovered she was living in or at least keeping out of the weather in the collapsed bomb shelter.
The idea of trapping a feral cat, taking her/it to the vet fatigues me. I've decided to feed it only every other day. That should keep it comfortable enough to stay alive but hungry enough to look for someplace else to hang out.
At least I hope so. I don't know much about cats. I think they started the bubonic plague and give people cancer. At least that's what I've heard.
There's so much that I think that I've forgotten. Maybe its not important but it seems important to me. At least too important to risk forgetting. Remembering used to be in my blood.

Posted by David at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Oasis" by Michael Parkes The gentle dog went to work with my friend. My puppy, surprisingly misses him. I figure they had some adventure penciled into their schedule.
It always feels odd, now, having only two dogs. I know I liked it best when I had four. Having only two is like looking at the dregs in the bottle.
I'm going to put the giant dog on the corner. With his new haircut
Click images for desktop size: "The Beatles" and all I'll turn him into a "working dog". Get him to approach cars and people, 10 minutes of pets for a nickel. My puppy will be his "business manager". If we can avoid the vice cops we should make a few dollars.
It works out well though. The two remaining enjoy the extra attention, the extra room. Its easier to walk two dogs than three but three requires almost no effort. Getting pulled down on ice requires no effort at all, at least from me. I can fall down with almost no assistance at all.
Bad pain day. This is still a house filled with love and germs.
My friend coughed badly all night. She was feeling better but relapsed. I'm in what should be the final bad day of the germ. Tomorrow I should be recovering and I should be fine by Thursday night.
Last night I fell asleep watching a movie. It was an interesting one too.
This Hong Kong based company has set itself a lofty goal; they're releasing every Shaw Brothers film ever made on DVD. Remastering them, cleaning up the soundtracks and trying to present them
Click images for desktop size: "Unknown" as classics. Guys like me appreciate that. (Quentin Tarentino does to. I have to admit it irks me that he's cadged the Shaw Brothers opening logo to open his movies. It seems some how disrespectful . . . if its possible to disrespect a movie studio, a money making operation).
Shaw Brothers always had the rep for making the best, slickest looking movies in Asia. Decent film stock, wonderfully detailed sets and a host of the best directors and a stable of Asian Superstars. They reworked the old Hollywood studio system, keeping their top talent working almost non-stop.
After Shaw Brothers broke the king fu movie at Cannes in the 70's they became an international force. Golden Harvest, who vacillated between making some of the best and the worst movies going - but they had Bruce Lee - benefited greatly from the superior product coming from their rivals.
What's cool is that Celestial has finally gotten into the movies that Shaw Brothers was making before they broke the genre world wide. This is the first time that these films have been able to be seen outside of China or your local China Town movie theater.
(I've always liked the theaters in China town and Little Tokyo. The Japanese theaters were always SOA but the Chinese theaters were always grim affairs with projection bulbs that were somehow always old and close to death. Its like the mystery of how some guys always managed to have 3 days growth of beard, never four and never clean shaven. Chinese Movie Houses (at least in LA) always had a dim bulb that would finally burn out in 10 hours. And of course the snacks for sale in the lobby were . . . interesting. Dried fish, strange crackers and popcorn you'd have to be fool hardy or at least braver than me to try.)
The new/old movies Celestial is bringing out are at least interesting and sometimes exquisite. The level of kung fu in the movies is far below what we've come to expect. For some reason every genre of Shaw Brothers films seems to require at least two kung fu battles. I'm not complaining.
So far I've been able to see "The Impostor" a sort of whacky story about David Chiang being this heavy duty altruist who is also a master of disguise. He's bored, rich and nosey, so he solves crimes . . . Its very amenable.
"The Delightful Forest" (The movie I fell asleep during last night) is a part of "The Water Margin" (The classic ultimate Chinese novel about freedom and brotherhood). Its got Lung Ti, an actor who's
Click images for desktop size: "St Catherine" by Carlo Dolci career has easily spanned five decades! Lung Ti is this incredibly moral guy who also happens to be a devastating fighter. He' thrown in prison, a prison he could easily escape but choses not to as that would be wrong. The Delightful Forest of the title is a town of gambling casinos and brothels . . . what I saw was entertaining.
I've got about four more to see and more promised. These movies all hold enough potential that I keep thinking that there's going to be a mind blasting movie coming up any second. Maybe not but the search and expectations are a lot of fun.
Of the four I have seen none of them were disastrous or boring and that's saying something.
I might have gotten he dishwasher fixed. I tried not to tear it apart but to just fix most of it in place. The water here must be pretty hard. Mainly I had to pick out chunks of lime and calcium! It was hampering the spray of water.
Did a full load last night. I'm afraid to look at the dishes. If they're not clean it means I have to take the whole thing apart again. I usually enjoy that sort of thing. For some reason the dishwasher falls outside my list of things I like to take apart.
I only have six episodes of "King of the Rangers". I really hope I can get the last six. Its very enjoyable on its own level. I admit that part of the enjoyment is watching "Slingin'" Sammy Baugh attempt to act. They give him few lines, fortunately. He recites them like a six year old trying to remember a piece for his first assembly.
The only draw back is that Duncan Renaldo is so great its a shame that he keeps being limited to being the side kick, the guy who screws up and gets slugged so the bad guys can escape. Its still a potent good time serial.
I've set a deadline of this weekend to finish up a new little movie for my puppy's blog. The kids are starting to write and bug HER to get something new posted. I wish I had simpler ideas . . .

Posted by David at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Pin Up Art" by JW McGinnis Just like in books movies have scenes, moments mainly, that stay fresh and alive in our minds forever. Since the genius of the scenes in books are always open to our personal interpretation, (I always imagine the hero as looking like me . . . sort of thing) and the moments in movies are plastic concrete, universal and indisputable, I prefer movies.
No surprise there.
The dogs woke me at 1:30 this morning. I still have no idea why, although I expect it has something to do with two new dogs who moved into the area, even though they're about 200 yards away at the closest point to our yard, our dogs take great umbrage to their presence.
I woke up in pain. After letting the dogs out I took some ibuprofen and meditated about some of the great moments in movies. It helped get me to sleep in a nice way.
Somehow think about movies almost always starts with John Wayne. I don't know why, it just does. I guess I'm still surprised that he was a lineman at USC.
Wayne had a few great moments; indelible scenes that stay with you forever. Whenever things get hopeless I always have a flash of Wayne as Ringo in "Stagecoach", falling forward into the dust as he takes on three bad guys with only a winchester and 3 bullets. And that moment in "True Grit" when Wayne confronts Robert Duvall and Duvall's gang in the natural arena. After Duvall points out the obvious truth that Wayne is old, fat, one eyed and tired Wayne shouts, "Fill your hands you sonsabitches!" Put his horse's reins in his mouth and rides at the gang firing wildly.
A lot of movies have moments like that, moments that help us survive what our own imaginations
Click images for desktop size: "Kitchen" by Unknown might not let us survive. That's one of the reasons for art.
I wasn't thinking about those moments I was thinking about the moments that codify a movie so well that it burns and illuminates not only our lives but the lives of others, enabling to let us see things we perhaps never even sensed.
Like for me the greatest moment for Wayne came in "The Searchers". Its a movie loaded with great moments, like the crazy teenaged girls who've escaped the Apaches, or the moment when Wayne scoops up Natalie Wood as though she were no more significant than a doll, a wisp an image. But moment that fits my definition is when Wayne returns Natalie Woods to her family. He stands in the doorway a hero, but a hero ignored, Jeff Chandler pushes past him and we know that because of Wayne's efforts all will be better for the world, the people in that house whose life he has touched and improved will leave a version of happily ever after. But Wayne just stands in the doorway, gripping his own right arm with his left hand, while the Sons of the Pioneers acting like some bumpkin Greek chorus exhort him to ride away, ride way.
The house looks so dark, cool and inviting. We know it is filled with celebration and happiness, while the world beyond the doorway is bright, harsh and unrelenting. (The technology required to get that shot are remarkable considering 1957 film stock and lenses.) And Wayne turns away and does that John Wayne walk to his horse while invisible hands slam the door shut, locking him forever outside.
What makes this great is that in 45 seconds without being lectured or told we understand so many things; the nature of heroes, the way some men are meant to only be alone, how single decisions can unhinge and change the trajectory of a life, decisions fueled not with logic but with emotion.

Click images for desktop size: "The Monkees" I'm glad they never made a sequel to "The Searchers". It would have destroyed that perfect moment.
Who doesn't remember Steve McQueen in "The Great Escape"? When he's sitting on his motorcycle looking at the miles long barbed wired fence that is the only impediment to his freedom. The German army closing in on him, surrounding him. And that moment when he revs the bike up, spins it around and makes that unforgettable leap. A fails.
What propels the scene from cool to the frisson I'm talking about is that while McQueen lies tangled in the wire that this is not a failure, its just a set back. He'll escape and if needed he'll escape again. Freedom is our nature and it doesn't take greatness or even great determination for all of us to be seeking freedom until we finally succeed.
There is a difference between totally cool and the frisson that impacts and makes fact of the swirl of thoughts and emotions that circulate around us everyday. Clint Eastwood's "The Unforgiven" offers up the best example of this. Everyone remembers the final scene in the bar where Eastwood blows everything apart and there's that great confrontation between Eastwood and Gene Hackman where Eastwood hisses out the line, "I've killed women and children, just about everything that's lived or crawled and now I'm going to kill you."
That scene is just cool entertainment but the scene proceeding, the
Click images for desktop size: "New Ponies" by Unknown bit that sets all this up is the powerful one that cuts to the quick of our humanity.
The whole film has shown Eastwood to be extremely strong, strong enough to change his life for a woman he loves and after she passes away his strength carries him through to continue for the sake of his two children. The biggest change has been for him to avoid liquor at all costs. Eastwood listens to the girl who brings them their money. He listens to the atrocities Little Bill has perpetuated against Eastwood's only friend.
Against a silver streaked black and gray sky he listens and in his shock and pain he gets week. He takes a bottle of whiskey and in between his horrified questions he pours the whiskey down his throat. The camera takes a low angle as if to frame him heroically against dramatic sky. Eastwood's aged face and cracking voice destroy any illusion of heroism, it simply denies us the ease of assuming he's transforming into a mere beast.
And its in that moment that so much is revealed about ourselves. The little kid cheerleader who sees the whiskey as Eastwood's spinach. We know as he drinks he's turing into an indomitable killer.
Click images for desktop size: "Life Is A Stage" by WallColl Then there's the profound sadness. We see a man so overcome with grief at losing his friend that he destroys himself the only way he knows will work. Eastwood gives up the sobriety and humanity he has struggled to maintain for nearly a many years as he was a mad outlaw. He gives up what he has fought to become out of rage, loneliness and a love for another that is greater than the love he has for himself.
"A Man Who Was Superman" is a movie I hold in high regard. I seem to be pretty much alone in this. Its okay. I can always wait for the rest of the world to catch up.
"A Man Who Was Superman" has a lot of those cool moments. But it also has an explosive scene that plays so simply and elegantly that it speaks not only of talent but fortuitous happenstance.
The movie is about this guy who is stark raving bonkers. He dresses in bright Hawaiian shirts and chinos. This is his "Superman" outfit. Most of the time he is deliriously happy. He spends his days helping people, saving kids, catching purse snatchers, doing what he can to save the planet. He always smiles, remembers people and adores his life.
He has bad moments. He can't always fly because Lex Luthor has exposed him to kryptonite. And he has psychotic breaks. He lives in a condemned building. One morning the wreckers show up. He sees the bulldozers as carnivorous monsters. He fights them.
This fight lands him back in the mental hospital. They treat him. He's heals. The medicate him to at least hold his level of healing. Everyone is certain they are doing the best for him.
"Superman" becomes Mon Suk. Mon Suk shuffles through life. Not happy. Not sad, He simply is. He remembers the trauma that drove him to madness but it is a distant memory that he cannot touch. The drugs see to that.
In his madness Mon Suk was tracking down a beast that lived in the sewers. It turns out the beast was actually a patch of explosive methane gas. It blows.
Mon Suk is a witness to the explosion. Many people are hurt, house and cars catch a fire. The fire engines rushing to the scene get caught up in the explosion. There is no more help coming.
For every person injured there are ten spectators who watch.
Mon Suk watches too and sees that a little five year old girl who was "Superman's" friend is trapped in the fire, trapped on the third floor. And the drugs that keep him calm, that keep him in twilight
Click images for desktop size: "Monkey" by WallColl allow him to simply watch.
Helpless he turns and walks away, doing that drug induced shuffle, holding his briefcase to his chest. He walks away.
A friend goes to look for him and she finds Mon Suk at a garden hose. He's dousing his head and his clothes. At first she thinks he's gone mad again but then she realizes that he's planning to go into the fire and rescue the girl. I guess you can't kill Superman.
In that moment you realize that sanity does not always mean happiness and that sometimes it takes insanity to save the world. It rushes at you and forces you to identify with Mon Suk. It makes you realize we can all be something more than the rest of the world thinks we can be. Its beautiful and its frightening.

Meditating on movies always brings something out of me. Something I feel is good. Even bad movies can sometimes have that fleeting movement where happenstance has more art than the guys behind or in front of the camera. Moments that encapsulate life and meaning.
I love the movies.

Its been raining for 18 hours now. Hard rain. All the snow has melted and the ground feels like primordial ooze. The dogs all had groomer baths . . . gentle dog and giant dog also got haircuts. My puppy got her nails trimmed. They seem to enjoy ruining the clean look playing in the muck. They make me laugh and it will all wash off eventually.
I'm pretty much over the cold. One odd side effect. I seem to have expended so much energy fighting the cold that I'm irretrievably fatigued. It takes a huge amount of energy just to move.
It's nowhere near the fatigue from leukemia. I just don't like it. I don't like the feeling of wanting to just curl up in a ball and forget the world. The rain and mud makes me not want to take a walk with the dogs. I may have to anyway. Cold rain and mud are better than this feeling.
My friend's cold is still lingering! This worries me more than I'm worried about myself.
She basically had two days off. She had to drive an hour to a meeting (GO GO LITTLE NEW CAR!) and then we had a lot of errands to run but I would have hoped that it would have been a gentle enough time for her to recover more fully.
We picked up our new glasses. Just lenses, used old frames. They help me a lot. Even through the cataract. I have to wear them a couple of weeks to see if my eyes are stable enough to invest in the tinted bifocals I'm supposed to wear outside.

Posted by David at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "4 cm a Second" by Kabegami Walked to the bakery with the dogs yesterday. They sell bread, fresh bread, for twenty cents less a loaf then the supermarkets. That's twenty cents less than the ultra cheap tasteless gummy generic supermarkets sell.
When we got there I realized I didn't have any money. At least I made the discovery before I went in, so its a good thing I spared myself that bit of humbleness.
At first I had a bit of panic that I'd lost the cash. But it was on my desk at home, all happy to see me.
My friend has to be gluten free. She gets painfully ill if she makes a mistake. I never ate much bread before. Once in a while, maybe. Now bread has become a luxury thing for me. Toast is my new filet mignon. Plain bread m steak tatar.
Amazing what we miss when its denied. I never missed drugs or alcohol when I stopped them. I sometimes miss sugar, but not often. I don't mind artificial sweeteners. I do sort of miss fat and meat in a funny compulsive way. Fat is far worse for me than sugar. Its interesting that so many American foods are too high in fat.
One thing I discovered, early on in the regime, is that the super cheap non-brand foods are generally lower in fat than the high priced brand name lo-fat equivalents. Some of those cheap foods are even edible. A few taste just fine.

Last night while my friend is still trying to catch up to her deadlines, (she's feeling about 50% better. So am I.) I watched an old TV show with one of my wife's old flames as the featured actor. I
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Mooz supplanted him in her life. I thought the show was really funny. It wasn't meant to be. It put me in a good move to think that when people compared us, and he was a notorious pretty boy actor, they used to say we were equally good looking but that I was taller and fitter.
Curse me for having mirrors in the house! The tyranny of mirrors is in their truth. I remember hearing that he went bald . . . I'm not there yet.
The I watched the first episode of a 1941 serial, "King of the Rangers". It's an English-Whitney Republic serial and it was pretty good. Its pretty silly, even in the first episode. Its a western but set in that mystical place where guys still wear six shooters and Nashville cowboy duds while driving those great monster 1930's cars. The cars look like they weigh about 6 tons! Cars are used for speed but horses are the preferred transportation.
The plot is the Texas Rangers versus the Nazis!! For some reason, maybe war hadn't been declared or something, they aren't called
Click images for desktop size: "Bogart" by S4W Nazis and there aren't any swastikas, but even a 6 year old would know. They give the Nazi salute and say "Hail!" instead of "Heil!" sort of thing.
The coolest bit so far was the meeting between the spies and the Overlords. The Overlords fly around in a giant Zeppelin! I guess no one ever looks up in this part of Texas . . . and when they meet with the spies, the spies fly to the zeppelin in a monoplane which has a big hook on the top. They hook onto the zeppelin then climb a rope ladder up to the ballon cockpit!
They didn't show how they get the plane off of the hook. I'm looking forward to that. I imagine the plane plummeting to the ground while the motor kicks in somehow. Planes can't do a reverse so I think the only way off the zeppelin has to be dropped!
The thing that drew me to the serial was the cast. It stars Hall of Fame QB "Slingin'" Sammy Baugh. That's even how they billed him. He was in the middle of his NFL career. He looks great especially
Click images for desktop size: "Polar Light" by Mr Zer0 when he takes out bad guys with a flying tackle. He says his lines clearly, which is the most you can say about his acting.
The Washington Redskins must have been cringing every time their Superstar QB did a stunt. Back then they paid him nearly as much as a shop foreman. He was getting nearly $500 a week to be in movies!
The other big draw is his side kick is the cool Duncan Rinaldo (who's biggest fame was as the "Cisco Kid" in old time TV). Rinaldo really looks great as the Mexican lawman who's helping out the Rangers. Snake thin, very quick, dangerous AND friendly looking! Very cool. Sadly his job as the Mexican sidekick is to lose fights and get rescued. His appearance doesn't make that seem possible. He's the hero, or at least he should be.
Oh, basic plot. Tom King (Sammy Baugh) is a superstar college football player. While the Texas All Stars are playing the Alabama Unnameds Tom's father is driving to Austin to deliver a list of spies and saboteurs while he listens to his son's game.
The spies shoot him. Why he was driving a convertible and why he made no copies of the list is not addressed. He's shot skids off the road and dies while Tom scores the winning touchdown.
There's no real great old time football footage here.
After the game Tom is changing when he gets a telegram telling him his father has been murdered. He quits school and joins the Texas Rangers to avenge his father. They make him a captain!!
The adventures thereafter are a bit contrived, even by serial standards. But they are done with great gusto and astonishing special effects. Great fires, huge explosions.
What I liked as well was that they cross the border between Mexico and Texas with no impediment at all! It's noticed that at one time or another Baugh and Rinaldo are out of their jurisdiction but its handled with a simple, "Don't worry. You're with me," lazzies faire. I think that even in 1941 there was at least a little more border protection but where would the excitement be in that.
I have to admit I'm looking forward to more of this.

Posted by David at 7:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Igniting Colours" by KGRZ The skanky cat came back.
It's snowing.
I'm sick with a cold.
My friend is sick with her cold. She shared it with me.
And that brings it all up to date.
Pretty much.
The day is snowing and the snow looks like glitter gently raining down. Its still snow. Its still cold.
The Oscars were Sunday. Pretty horrible affair. The winners anyway.
I refuse to acknowledge any award that doesn't go to Marisa Tomei this year. Although even if I don't think much of Penelope Cruz there is something infinitely cool imagining the party afterwards. Her ex, Tom Cruise, covets an Oscar as much as his
Click images for desktop size: "Faces" by Unknown "Theatan" brain can crave anything and while he's trying to rebuild a career his wackiness threatens to take from him him having to congratulate Cruz at one of the Post-Oscar parties would have been astonishing.
I've tried to watch "Slumdog Millionaire" twice. Fallen asleep once and found cutting my fingernails more interesting the second time. Now I feel obligated to try again . . . nothing like movies as home work assignments.
Its pretty much the same with "Milk". Keep trying to watch it and keep getting distracted. Watching it has become another chore.
Heath Ledger got the Oscar . . . Peter Finch got one after he died for his role in "Network". Finch was at least good. Ledger's take on Joker, that nothing has to make sense in his entire performance
Click images for desktop size: "He Was a Friend of Mine" by Hebus and consistency from day to day is a trivial thing when you're playing a madmen isn't anything I could appreciate.
I liked the tech awards though . . .
I finally did watch Truffaut's "La Nuit Americane". It won a best foreign film Oscar, back in the day. Back then they used to put the foreign winner as an automatic candidate for Best Picture the following year. None of them ever won so they dropped the idea.
A lot of my fears were justified. When I first saw the movie I went to the theater everyday for a week to see it. It solidified my ambitions. I was going to be an NFL running back who used his fame to promote his band and then when I retired from the NFL I was going to use my fabulous wealth to make movies. This little movie made me certain that's what I wanted and was going to do.
The movie is great, up there with "Sullivan's Travels" as one of the best movies ever about making movies. Back then it was a film that inspired me and made me want to be something more than I was. Now, its just a great "film".
Watching it reminded me of something. Bernie Grant was a black member of Parliament. The first black member if I recall. I liked him and was seriously grieved when he passed away.
One of the crazier dreams he had that he let me be a small part of was to start an Arts and Entertainment Academy. Fancy as heck. Not to be just a school but an open place where kids could come and use the creative urges they were overwhelmed with. Dance, theatre, music, TV, film, whatever. A place to learn and a place to create.
Bernie even had a location picked. Cheap land behind the sewer processing plant up by Edmonton. My light involvement was in the recording studio and the theatre. The construction and equipment end.
He had the dream, the location and the people lined up to make it a reality.
Then the focus for his plan got shifted, at least by the money people, to the London Olympic Committee. I was involved in that too, until I quit. I thought it was, is and will be a lousy idea. The London Olympics seemed to be an ego and money thing. There wasn't going to be any lasting legacy for the kids. The all white, all upper class steering members wanted the ego and the money. The benefits to kids that they insisted were there were all
Click images for desktop size: "Iron Snowflakes" by Unknown a sham that only rich white guys who never talked to poor, minority, or working class kids could ever take seriously.
And then Bernie died. His widow tried to keep his idea alive but she lacked the charisma and drive. The new blood who took over Bernie's seat had different ambitions. Not that his desires and drives weren't okay but they didn't focus on the kids.
So the dream died. Vanished as if it never existed. I think the world would have shifted some if it had happened. There's be fewer criminals, because they'd have had a chance to be something else. There'd have been a rise in self esteem. There'd have been hope, not just for the kids in Haringay but all the kids around the country and then the world. To go to the Academy all you had to do was want to.
That was what I felt now watching "La Nuit Americane". It was watching dreams die. It was seeing the few things in my grandiose plans seem small and ridiculous. I know they weren't. I know a lot of people would kill to have some of the chances I had, the chances I missed and the chances I seized on and the ones I made for myself.
It might seem silly to most but I realize that the only accomplishments that I truly think were important were the things I helped others accomplish. The kids who got into school, the ones who played sports pro and the few who got to the Olympics. Even the bad movies and plays that my work helped get finished. The puppies I've found who became friends and family.
I guess that's why I was a good tech and never really wanted to be a director.

There's a drag about being sick. My friend's cold has hung on for well over a week. Mine was terrible yesterday but only bad today. I figure tomorrow I'll be close to well and by Thursday I'll, hopefully, be fine.

Click images for desktop size: "Alice 19th" by H02B One drag is that the dentist called. They had a cancellation and could see me then. But the stupid cold caboshed that.
I figure the dentist will add to but ultimately reduce my discomfort by at least 40%, at least for now. Maybe someone else will cancel next week.
I did get the Medical History form to complete. I hate that, reliving the past. Somethings I remember far too clearly. I remember it through my eyes, my feet, my hands and my heart. I don't much like recalling the past. It hurts.
I know I write a lot about the past but those are thoughts that come unbidden. I don't dredge through "back then" except when I need it to understand "now".
At least this medical history form seems cognizant of chemo and its effects on the body, teeth etc.
The final drag is that the sold is slowing my friend down at work. She missed a couple of inconsequential deadlines. She takes that sort of thing seriously. It distresses her. Then she had her first major conflict at the job.
Her boss retired last month. The job is now held by a woman wearing two hats, as a National VP and as a Regional VP. Its temporary but for right now . . . Her normal position is National VP. She seems to be trying to use the new regional position to entrench her position Nationally while subordinating the regional objectives to her other objectives.
By all accounts he can be pretty rude too.
It will pass but its silly which makes it a drag.
The final drag is skanky cat. I put food out for her. She eats it. Problem is I'm not dead cert its a female. I don't know if she vanished because she found better food and warmth elsewhere or if she vanished to have a litter. If she's around at spring I'll have to catch it/her and probably have to have it neutered. Stupid cats.

Posted by David at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Dreams of Smoke" by Unknown Finally wrapping up my thoughts about the Budd Boetticher Box Set.
I know I'm going on about them but this is an important body of work to me. Boetticher is an important director who makes films that not only help me to understand the movie making process but also give dense glimpses into the make up of people and the different perceptions people have of each other and of the world.
Besides they're great fun and Boetticher is a great story teller. I still
Click images for desktop size: "Cute Pug" by Unknown think fun is a vital part of any great work of art, any masterpiece and just as important as variant views of the world.
And sometimes thinking about these stories brings insight and sometimes its just a way to avoid, if only for a little while, the steady stream of upsets that come into your life.
Its like William Blake and Kenneth Patchen new the "real" world we all live in but saw worlds beyond that, worlds just as real but not as easily obtainable. Movie maker Anthony Mann saw the world but barely noticed the people. For him mankind was just a natural part of environment, twisted and shaped by emotional forces as powerful as the winds and water that carve mountains and canyons. John Ford saw people as caricatures that were burnished by their environment; men who lived in the spectacular landscapes became capable of spectacular things, but they were always in battle. Peace was a thing to be strived for but it was
Click images for desktop size: "Dreams of Water" by LawnElf seldom granted except to those people on the fringe who were really just spear carriers in the great framework of life.
Budd Boetticher didn't understand the real world. His midnight admissions to mental institutions prove that. He understood the stage and he understood people. The world for him was vacuum where men drifted occasionally stumbling across love but most often just drifting waiting for a place to cling to, to hold and belong to.
The twenty first century has gone even further than the twentieth in isolating people from their environment. People exist and live in a place they create in their minds. Boetticher's insights into people seem even more valid today, at least to me, than they did back in the late 50's.
Understanding people, especially people in extremis is important. Personal communication is drifting and rage is seizing to many people's hearts. Icy rage, killing rage too much of the time. When cowards are being foisted as hero's, when groups are being idolized instead of people its time to reassess and to grasp at understanding.
I think Boetticher supplies some of those keys. I think its important to understand his movies so that we can have a cleaner view of the guy sitting next to us. Understanding can bring contempt as well as love. Both emotions need a real basis for growing other than to be mired in surfaces and glitz.
You have to start somewhere.

I've been asked to explain a couple of terms: low menemic and high menemic. Northrop Frye, a Canadian literary critic coined the phrases in his "Anatomy of Criticism". He thought characters in novels could either be classified as low menemic - average people, the normal guy trying to just get by in this life; high menemic - the superior man, a character with all the tools to not only survive but to conquer, control and dominate any situation; and finally the mythic character - the man emboldened with near supernatural powers, he cuts a swath through the world near invulnerable.
The terms are pretty commonplace in criticism nowadays and are especially apt when discussing movies and genre films specifically.

After Van Cleef (Frank) makes his calm reasoned speech understanding what Brigade is doing the film quietly shifts. We leave the light dusty browns of the desert for foliage and greenery; the first
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by WallpapersMaina incipient signs of civilization and femininity.
As they enter the grove the arena is dominated by a large lightening stripped tree with two cross like branches. "A hanging tree," Roberts proclaims it. He makes some off the cuff "gallows" jokes and is gruffly rebuffed by Brigade, "You talk too much."
Steele still doesn't like any of these men but she's grown to accept them. She's still grieving her husband but, as Roberts put it, "She's a woman that needs a man." The men begin to turn to her for a softness that wasn't one of their needs in the desert, only a need now when they're in the shade of trees and greenery.
Roberts begins by saying, "Mrs Lane, I'd be obliged to look after you when we hit Santa Cruz." He then proceeds to tell her about his place up in the Secos, he repeats the story about the bible salesman explaining the word Amnesty to him and how after he gets Billy away from Brigade how he plans to start a new life.
Steele is horrified at the idea of Roberts killing Brigade to get Billy. Even more horrified that Brigade is trading Billy's life for money. Steele goes to Brigade and confronts him and tells him how Roberts plans to kill him for Billy. Brigade takes it nonchalantly until she begins to berate him for being a bounty hunter. Brigade erupts with a cold desolate fury.
He used to be the sheriff of Santa Cruz. One day he threw Billy's brother, Frank, into prison. Frank swore to get even. The day came when Frank was released. His wife pleaded with Brigade to leave Santa Cruz, to go someplace with her and to start a fresh. While Brigade was out of town Frank came and kidnapped his wife. Frank hung her on the hanging tree.
Not surprisingly Steele is unprepared for this shocking story. Brigade ends any comfort with a chilly,
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Gamago "Goodnight, Mrs Lane." Unknown to him is that Roberts was in the bushes and overheard the entire conversation. It clearly impacts the bad man but its unclear in what way.
He talks with Whit (James Coburn). Whit wants to plan how to kill Brigade and snatch Billy. "Brigade ain't a man you can take head on," he says.
"It wouldn't be right to do him any other way," Roberts replies, "Don't worry. When the time comes I'll take care of it."
Then in one of the movies most memorable scenes Whit asks Roberts. "I was thinking, I sure would be obliged if I could come work for you at your place."
What happens next is purely predictable but satisfying all the more for that. People sometimes need to have things go the way we want them to. After all the tales of carnage and the tension building up to a carnage promised conclusion we need to see affection turn right.
"Work for me! You ain't working for me Whit!"
Defensively Whit protests, "I don't know much but I can scratch at the dirt and I slop hogs real good . . ."
"Whit, how long you and I been riding together?"
"I don't know," Whit pauses, "About two years I reckon."
"More like five! Why do you think that is?" Roberts asks.
With a shrug Whit answers, "Guess your kind of used to it."
"No Whit, I like you." "Really?" Whit answers surprised.
"You ain't working for me Whit. We're partners. Right down the middle. Now go keep an eye on Billy. I got thinking to do."
This scene in all its simplicity is the one that everyone who has ever seen the film always remember. Its nearly sad that we are most moved by a man begrudgingly admitting to friendship.
Come the dawn Roberts sends Whit to the rise to watch for Frank and his men. He then confronts Brigade. Roberts tells him he overheard his conversation with Mrs Lane. He tells him that Whit and he will back his play with Frank but when its over it won't make a difference. He's going to go right over Brigade to get Billy and get that amnesty.
Brigade is stoic and dismissive.
Its worth noting, Whit goes to look for Frank. He stands in some odd otherworldly place. The rear of
Click images for desktop size: "Babies" by Unknown his horse stands in the green comfort while he gazes out at the burning deadly desert. He watches a dust cloud appear and turns and rides back hard to the embracing coolness of the trees and the grass, shouting Frank's coming.
The group prepares. Roberts and Whit hide in the bushes. Whit is giving the "chore" of protecting Steele.
Brigade tosses a rope over the branch of the hanging tree . . .
When Frank enters the arena he sees his brother on a horse with his neck in a noose. Brigade stands next to the horse, totally exposed, a rifle in his hand.
Nastily Brigade explains the situation to Frank. Frank understands and says, "If that horse spooks you'll kill him!"
Brigade responds, "If his neck don't snap you'll have time to cut him down."
"This ain't right, Brigade. What happened between us was so long ago I near forgot about it!"
Brigade gives one of the scariest responses in movie history, "A man can do that." When a man suspends his humanity or denies it, when he places himself below a level there's nothing left to do.
Frank charges firing wildly. Billy's horse spooks and Billy is swinging, gasping from the tree while Brigade calmly raises his rifle and blows Frank out of the saddle.
Frank's men start to followup the charge but retreat under a withering hail of fire from Roberts and Whit. When they retreat Brigade pulls out his six gun and shoots a single shot to cut the rope. Billy collapses still alive.
While Brigade inspects his prisoner Roberts comes thundering up on his black horse he dismounts on the run making you wonder what he's running from or to.
"I come for Billy," he says.

Click images for desktop size: "Blowout at Exit 168" by Till Nowak Brigade says in the same dead humanity denying voice, "Come get him."
Brigade stands perfectly erect while Roberts advances, his hand ready to draw. Suddenly Brigade turns his back to Roberts, turns back and tosses him the keys to Billy's handcuffs.
Roberts is google eyed. Brigade says in a voice that tries to sound friendly but can't, "If you ever go against the law again it will be me comes looking for you."
Laughing Roberts says, "I'll remember that. I surely will."
The two outlaws, Billy and Steele gather up to make the few hour ride to Santa Cruz. Steele's future is undetermined, Billy's future will be decided by an old west court and Whit and Robert's have a dream.
Brigade has no future. He burns down the hanging tree, that hateful symbol.
From the top of the rise Roberts can't see the fire but he sees the black smoke curling to the sky. He turns and rides with the group saying, "It figures."

Scott should have retired after this. Ben Brigade was the pinnacle of his acting career. He used every power he had and made it into a memorable character it was the finest acting job he was capable of and the finest of his career.
"Ride Lonesome" was a big enough hit that Ranown rushed to do a follow-up, "Comanche Station".
Maybe if I'd seen "Comanche Station" sometime removed from "Ride Lonesome" I'd have a different opinion of it.
It's a good movie, good enough for anyone to be proud of. Unfortunately fresh off of seeing "Ride Lonesome" it seems like a redux, a rehash.
This time Scott is a man searching for his wife for the last ten years. She's was captured by Comanches. Every time he hears of a white woman captive being offered for trade he heads to the hills with "two bucks worth of blankets and a winchester rifle" to rescue the woman. He's constantly disappointed that it is not his wife.
On the mission he's on this time he rescues Nancy Lowe, played by Nancy Gates.
The first night out she's starts to escape the memory of her capture even trusting Scott far enough to ask if he thought her husband would still love her even after she'd been held captive by the Comanche.
Scott's response is predictable, "If he's man enough he will."
They go to Comanche Station, the stage coach point where he runs into Claude Aikens, a scalp hunter, and Aikens two young gunmen. Scott had Aikens courtmartialed when they were in the Army together. Aikens clearly has a festering hatred for him. He also informs Scott and Gates that there is a $5,000 reward on Gates, offered by her husband. Dead or alive. Her husband wants her dead body so he could at least have closure and give her a proper burial.

Click images for desktop size: "In Like Flint" by JW McGinnis Aikens and the gunmen plan to ride along with Scott, they need the extra gun because the Comanche are on the warpath in retaliation for some scalp hunters raiding their camp and killing the women and children. When its convenient they plan to kill Scott and the woman. The plan to kill the woman so she can't bear witness to their murder of Scott.
The two young guns are an amalgamation of the two young guns in "The Tall T" and Robert's and Coburn. Skip Homier plays essentially the same role in both films!
They are given some chances but they don't ever explode like the other two films. Its satisfying but not mesmerizing.
Aikens is not as strong as other Boetticher villains. Aikens is a good actor and reaches as well as he did in Howard Hawk's "Rio Bravo". Aikens another guy who became a star playing a whacky sheriff, his turn came in "BJ and the Bear"! He's competent and shows some promise but he doesn't inspire fear or hatred. He's just a bad guy.
Its actually a great film but it is not up to the greatness of the ones preceding it.
The ending is odd and seems to be going for some point I failed to see.
Aikens is bothered by the fact that a man would post a reward instead of hunting for his wife himself. Scott rebuffs him with, "if he'd done that, they'd both be dead."
Aikens keeps at it though.
At the end when Scott finally delivers Gates it turns out she has a child and that her husband is blind.

There's a decent biography on Boetticher to complete the box set. It didn't teach me anything new but it might be informative for some just meeting his work.
Boetticher's work is the thing. It is brilliant. Its sad that he never released another film except for "Legs Diamond" a movie I never really got. He wasted his life in his dream. He was trying to make a documentary biography about Carlos Suara, the great bullfighter. Aside from the fact that I don't find men fighting cows entertaining the movie was doomed and afterwards irrevocably when Suara died in a car wreck. Boetticher spun out of control after that but for one great brief period he was amongst the best that ever was.

Posted by David at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Clarence Carter The main problem with "Decision at Sundown" was that the whole movie was set in a town.
Civilization for Boetticher is best represented when it is shown as a roughly held together series of shacks that bend but determinedly refuse to buckle under the desert winds.
Its odd that Boetticher can take a crew into the desert and we always feel centered and easily understand our location in relation to the rest of the world, but when he moves into towns its disorienting and confusing.
In "Buchanan Rides Alone" its hard to keep even the relationship of the hotel, saloon straight. And its relationship to the judge's home is an absolute mystery. Sometimes you can walk there but most of the time you have to take a horse.
It seems that Boetticher is making a strong statement about our relationship to cities and towns.
In "Buchanan Rides Alone" the town of Agry is a border town. A bridge with a hand painted sign (and no border guards) details the imaginary line between countries. Scott crosses the line into Agry. He is smiling, jovial clearly happy to be back in the USA. But for all his genial demeanour he wears the crossed bandoliers of the Mexican Revolutionary. He smiles but resists orders from the corpulent aggro sheriff.
You can see him resisting anger, insisting to himself that he's going to keep his happy mood at nearly any cost. In total its a brilliant economical way of introducing a character.
The story itself is a bit quizzical and too complicated for what's involved, filled with elections, trials, familial squabbles and far too many people!
It can't be discounted completely. For one thing there is a remarkable portrayal of Mexicans. They
Click images for desktop size: "Surf" by Unknown are presented as being as smart and courageous as the Americans and far more honest. Its a handsome portrait of the people and surprising in a film of this era where the only good foreigners were the base totally submissive ones. Foreigners who had any ambition were normally criminals or spies, an enemy.
Ranown must have realized they had some problems and they got Burt Kennedy to doctor the script. His hand shows in a couple of fascinating ways.
During the Scott's trial the sheriff (who has his eyes on stealing the $2,000 dollar "stake Scott was carrying to buy his dream ranch) asks him, "So you're just another hard case drifter willing to kill for money?" Scott's laconic answer id "You could say that."
Kennedy's other obvious contribution is the character of Pecos, beautifully played by L.Q. Jones. Pecos is fascinating, easy going, amoral, amiable and loyal - to a point.
He's attracted to Scott because they're both from West Texas. He admires Scott's ability to speak with unabashed love for West Texas.
After the trial the sheriff has the innocent Scott escorted out of town by two gunmen who's job is to murder Scott. As they ride along Scott conceals his gloom over his impending death by waxing euphoric on the beauty of West Texas.
Pecos apologizes for having to murder Scott. Scott accepts the apology.
At the river bank the other gunman forces Scott to dismount and unsaddle his horse. Pecos asks the other gunman if there's anyway to avoid having to do this killing. He's told no, they have to do the "job".
Scott stands with his hands at his side and his back to his executioners. A shot rings out and Scott collapses. After a moment Pecos walks up to Scott and kicks Scott's boots. "You ain't dead," he says.
The shot that Scott figured had ended his life was from Pecos shooting his partner in the head.
They try and bury the dead gunman but the hole they dug fills up with water so Pecos straps the body high up in a tree.

Click images for desktop size: "Dangerous Curves" by 3D Fiction Before Scott can gather up and take off Pecos starts to deliver a eulogy to his victim. Its darkly macabre and very funny. Scott keeps waiting for it to end his eyes growing larger as he listens to Pecos. He says "Amen" to end the unbalanced "tribute" and the explanation to the deadman that Pecos just couldn't allow a fellow West Texan to die.
As they ride along Scott offers Pecos a partnership in his dream ranch. He tells Pecos he's riding back to Agry to get his stake that the sheriff stole. He assures Pecos that even if he doesn't follow him into town he's still going to be his partner in the ranch.
Amazingly for movies but actually pretty sanely, Pecos agrees to wait for him then! He lets the hero ride off to fight the bad guys alone and has no qualms or issues about it!
If he'd stayed alive for the entire movie Pecos could have given the film a needed lift.
When you have talent it shows up most when you try and learn from your mistakes. Randolph Scott was talking about retiring. Ranown decided to make a masterpiece. They succeeded.
When I was 11 I'd outgrown Captain Spaceman's Cartoon show. Channel 13 started showing 90 minute movies after school, "After School Theater" or something. It's where I learned to love Corman flics like "Teenage Caveman" et al. One week they were doing a
Click images for desktop size: "Robin" by DC Comics Western week. I remember seeing a mash up of "Cisco Kid" episodes disguised as a movie, even a Roy Roger's thing. The care that they selected these films was apparent. Its where I first saw the movie, "The Man From Laramie" Anthony Mann's revenge film where Jimmy Stewart gets a bullet in his hand: Crucifixion with hot lead. The only thing I got out of that film was a long living fear of having my body desecrated and a fascination with anatomy. I figured a bullet through the hand was far worse than death. Jimmy Stewart was a good enough actor to convince me I was right. The next day they showed "Ride Lonesome".
Even as a kid I was blown away. Even watching it on a B&W TV couldn't detract from the power. Two people who were no more than icons (Scott and Karen Steele), a crazy bad guy (James Best), A bastion of evil (Lee Van Cleef) and two guys I thought were really funny (Parnell Roberts and James Coburn).
Throw in some Indians and a plot that was merely "3 guys and a girl get chased by Indians and bad guys while they take another bad guy to jail, was primal enough to reach through to the lizard brain in any of us.
It was pretty shocking to see the movie again, some 20 years later, and see that things weren't quite that simple.
You can make a pretty good argument for Boetticher being a genius in the fact that he constructed a movie that could reach out and impact a child and an adult. Its not that easy to do with out maudlin
Click images for desktop size: "Candy" by Unknown pandering ala Disney. Nor is it a simple thing to inject such complex dreams into minds and dreams of people without making the process opaque and annoying.
I watched the movie a few times off of a VHS tape I made from some late night broadcast. It wasn't available anyway else. Seeing the DVD in an excellent reproduction of the Cinerama process was illuminating. With Scott's impending retirement from movies they clearly went all out.
The movie opens with Scott hunting Billy John. James Best is superb here. He'd match this performance with his equally superb performance a couple of years later in Sam Fuller's "Shock Corridor". It leaves me nonplussed that he wouldn't gain fame or recognition until he played the moronic sheriff in the "Dukes of Hazard" TV series.
Billy John is aware that Scott (as Ben Brigade) is close by. He continues to sip his coffee and sits easy and relaxed.
We know he's the bad guy. All characters in Boetticher movies are organic. They look like they were grown in the earth and locked in there until they felt the need to roam around the stones and bones of the desert. Boetticher villains are vain, created not by nature but by man. Richard Boone affected a silken peacock green scarf, Chink a fiery red shirt etc. In low budget productions these are considered options. In the equally sparse world these movies inhabit they are bright beacons.
Billy wears natural dusty gray but affects a long eagles feather that droops down the back. In this world something natural being worn for a sense of élan is more depraved than silken scarves.
(Its interesting to note that you can still go to Western Costume and find, Glen Ford hats, John Wayne hats, etc. It was commonplace for stars to effect one style of hat and then use it as a symbol for their entire career. Scott wasn't allowed this. He always wore a distinctly different style. I once worked with a director who thought that any scene could be saved by having the actor wear a "silly hat". He swiped the concept from Preston Surges. Boetticher seems to use the inverse of the principal in his costume choices. In "Ride Lonesome" Brigade wears a more standard wide brimmed Stetson.)
Billy shot a man in Santa Cruz; shot him in the back.
Billy is calm. He's prepared an ambush for Brigade. Three of his buddies are hiding in the sandstone rock ready to blow him apart. Brigade defuses the trap by the simple measure of assuring Billy that
Click images for desktop size: "Desert Blooms" by Unknown before they get him he will surely cut Billy down before he dies. Its no bluff.
In that one moment its apparent there's a radical change here. Previously Scott played nothing but low menemic characters, normal men pushed by circumstance to be something more than they ever intended to be. The confrontation with Billy establishes as a high menemic character, the man of will and talent.
It also sets up expectations of Billy's character, something of a coward, something of a rattlesnake, someone easily led.
Brigade starts the long task of dragging Billy back to Santa Cruz to be hanged. He lets Billy ride free, except for a pair of heavy handcuffs. Billy spends the time reminding Brigade of his brother, the dangerous brother Frank who is, no doubt, tailing them now rushing to catch up and free him.
They stop at a stage way station. Suddenly Brigade is ambushed! Billy is sure it is his brother Frank but it turns out to be someone Brigade knows; the outlaws Sam and Whit. (Roberts and Coburn).
Surprisingly Roberts is every bit the physical match for Brigade, broad shouldered, tall and moves with an athletic grace. Whit is tall, gawky but clearly efficient within his strictly limited range.
There is a tense moment when Roberts gathers up Brigades rifle. He's garrulous and chatters about meeting him out here.
Brigade listens, introduces Billy. Roberts says, "I heard of you. You're not as small as I figured you'd be."
Brigade says, "A man needs a reason to ride this Country, Boone." Stating his question as a fact.
Robert's response is equally laconic. "That he does. Can see what yours is." and then he casually tosses Brigade back his rifle.
Suddenly Karen Steele steps out of the Stage House yelling at the men to clear out! To punctuate her sincerity she fires her rifle sending a bullet uncomfortably close to the group. They scarcely react.
It pleases me that during the filming Steele and Boetticher were in love. In the movie she's the other icon, the tough blonde who should have been born in the noir 40's. She's soft, not brittle but strong and capable. She lives her life without a plan but lives it to the extreme.
Now she does not want 3 outlaws and a low life bounty hunter as her guests. She only wants the man she loves, the stationmaster to return from rounding up stray horses. She doesn't want him greeted by this motley crew.
Before there can be a serious confrontation the stage coach approaches. Roberts assures Brigade
Click images for desktop size: "The Helper" by Unknown that they were not there to rob it. When the coach gets closer they see that the driver is dead, an Indian lance through his chest. The stage crashes into the corral but rights itself.
The men open the door and apparently everyone inside is dead. Surprisingly, while the men stare in silence, it's Billy who yells out to Steele, "Don't come out here! Ain't nothing for a woman to see!"
It strikes as discordant tone to have the bad guy be the only character who reacts to the woman's presence. It hurts us in our need to view Billy as merely scum.
Steele still wants the group to move out. She insists she is going to stay to wait for her husband's return. Until a group of Indians show up. They want to trade a horse for Steele . . . they play along with it until Steele discovers the horse they want to trade for her was the one her husband was riding when he left the station the day before.
Accepting her loss she agrees to travel with the stoic Brigade, his trophy and the two comical outlaws. Travel with them back to a distant civilization, a civilization that seems to make them all uneasy.
They travel. Roberts rides with Brigade shattering at him non-stop. At one point he tells them why they were riding this forbidden territory. It appears that there is not only a bounty on Billy John. They are also offering unconditional amnesty to anyone who brings him in.
It seems Roberts already has a patch of land up around Secos. Its nothing now but he plans to "run some cattle and work the dirt" until it is "someplace that a man can belong to."
While they're talking on the far distant sand hills some figures converge and begin to trail the group. They tiny shadows seem to be ignored by Roberts and Brigade. Its just one of the ways Boetticher uses the Cinerama screen and its great depth of field. For the most part it is used to show the vast panorama and to frame the men with it in such a way that they seem to dwarf the
Click images for desktop size: "End Effected" by Envy immensity of the world by force of will.
The indians weren't ignored. Brigade interrupts the conversation by telling Roberts there's an old adobe corral just over the next rise and they ride like demons to get into it while the tiny shadows start to converge on them resolving into a murderous pack of Indians.
The adobe corral is a cool set. A skeletal reminder of civilization conquered. The only thing that remains are the bricks that were made from the surrounding dirt. The four ride like demons to get to its thick walls while Brigade plays skirmisher and lays back firing efficiently into the onrushing Indians.
After beating back the Indian attack they settle in for the night. Brigade sets with his horse. Brigade is the only one Steele seems comfortable being around, She asks how his horse is doing. Brigade explains in a way that seems to be as much describing himself as the animals condition. "His leg ain't broke. He just won't get up. He's got it in his head that its all over and he's just waiting to die."
"What can you do for him?" Steele asks.
"Not much. Sit with him. Let him now he's not alone and hope he'll realize he can get up if he wants to." Brigade answers.
Later the horse does finally stand but only after Brigade has given up hope. The horse stands because Roberts saves Brigades life from Billy. As a sardonic joke Roberts fires off a round from his rifle in response the horse almost leaps to its feet. Power of life coming not from loving attention but from negligent bad bahaviour?
Roberts also uses the stop over to wax lovingly, if pornographically, about the psychology and beauty of Steele. Whit looks at Steele with different eyes after Roberts Rhapsodic reveries.
They also wonder why they're traveling out in the open when they all know that Frank is in hot pursuit. "its like he wants Frank to catch up to us!"
Frank (Lee Van Cleef) has been in hot pursuit with three of his men. He's run his horses near to death, but when he reaches the adobe corral he suddenly realizes he can slow down. "I did Brigade a hurt once. He's not taking Billy to hang, he's using him to get me. Water the horses and lets get some sleep. There's no hurry now. He'll wait for me."

I'll try to finish up the analysis of the Budd Boetticher Box Set in my next post. This one seems to be getting long.


Click images for desktop size: "Brown" by Benoit Vanneuville My back is better.
We picked up the new car on Saturday. Its pretty and seems to fit my friend well. Hoping it can reduce some of the tension that's been crawling up our spines and into our brains.
Only two things wrong with it so far. It was advertised as cruise controlled. Cruise Control is standard on it. But there's no cruise control!
Driving it home when I got out to open the gate saw a lot of white smoke coming from the wheel well. To me the smell and smoke meant a dragging brake! But there was no excessive heat from the brakes. I waited a half hour and checked again. Still no big heat or remnants of same. No sound like bad bearings or signs of the tire rubbing anything.
They checked the brakes before hand. Maybe they left something dangling. Its still under warranty so I'm waiting to call them to see if there's anything else to complain about.
I still plan to write them a letter of appreciation.
The puppies are all fine here.
One blast of negative news. My puppy's aunt was laid off today . . .
Makes me real happy that the Republican pigs did everything in their power to destroy the effectiveness of the Stimulus bill and then after gutting it still bragged about how they'd made it ineffective.

Posted by David at 4:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Betty Page" by Olivia Until Sergio Leone unraveled the western with his "Dollars" movies there were three kings of the genre. John "He made westerns" Ford, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher (pronounced bet-ek-er).
John Ford remains something of an icon, nearly a legend. Anthony Mann found the westerns too small! He moved into epics like "El Cid" and Spartacus (the movie that launched Stanley Kubrick who took over when Mann died during production).
While Mann is appreciated he doesn't have the fame and accolades he deserves. Boetticher has been mainly ignored. A few guys, like me and a couple of other western aficionados have been playing him up forever, in just the same way I played up Preston Sturges, as a man who was an entertainer first and through his entertainment managed to produce first quality art. (Art, there's an ugly off putting
Click images for desktop size: "Solitary Hunter" by Unknown word for most. It makes it sound like the opposite of fun, like something you can't just enjoy but a thing that has to be approached with awe and a tinge of fear. Bad art (Cecile B DeMille, I think, wants that aura. Sturges and Mann and Ford wanted you to have a rollicking good time first.)
But all in all Boetticher has been ignored. People still catch some of his movies on TV and marvel but it's usually too late in the movie for them to remember the credits.
As DVD sellers are desperate for product suddenly guys like Boetticher are getting some notice. It started when they finally discovered the Batjac library. Batjac was John Wayne's short lived production company. It was designed to make money but Wayne didn't have much of a head for
Click images for desktop size: "Boat Girl" by Scott Jackson business.
I like the idea of great films being made while guys sit on the beach sharing a bottle, the deals finalized with a handshake and maybe, somewhere down the line we draw up a contract to appease those union guys. That's filmmaking I can appreciate.
When John Wayne died no one had any idea where the films even were! They found the Batjac library about 2005, stashed in one of the old Hollywood film vaults. There wasn't much of interest there but there was the Randolph Scott. Lee Marvin western "7 Men From Now." It was the first release from Batjac and got an excellent release, capitalizing on the fact that this film was never on TV and unseen since 1956. Tied into the John Wayne legend it did okay.
"7 Men From Now" was also the first collaboration between, Scott, Harry Joe Brown, Burt Kennedy and Budd Boetticher.
It wasn't readily apparent but this was a stew that would grow into a gorgeous monster.
The disc didn't set any records but it made enough to justify gathering up the other RANOWN films (RAN-dolph Scott and Harry Joe Br-OWN=RANOWN) and making an interesting box set. Even though none of these films run over 72 minutes they're all on separate discs. The only extra of note is an okay talking head documentary about Boetticher.
The disks are all wide screen and done well enough. Since my memories of all these films are from TV the bright color and widescreen is a heady enhancement.
For Burt Kennedy "7 Men From Now" was his first produced screenplay. He learned a lot from it. He avoided the mistakes it made for the rest of his career. Kennedy eventually moved into directing, working in TV until he got a shot with "Return of the Seven" a sequel of sorts to "The Magnificent 7". The he exploded with the chilling western,
Click images for desktop size: "Cherry Red with Butterfly" by Anonymous "Welcome to Hard Times" and the "Support Your Local Sheriff" and "Support Your Local Gunfighter". He even did an adaptation of Jim Thompson's brilliant pulp novel, "The Killer Inside Me."
Kennedy was in his mid 30's when he churned out "7 Men From Now". It was a learning experience. He used it to learn so he could now write some awesome things.
Boetticher was a hanger on fringe director. His last job before directing was as a Matador down in Mexico! Somehow he used this to get into Hollywood show biz.
He did maybe a dozen B type adventure films. Nothing truly astonishing from any I've seen. Then he had a small hit with his autobiographical movie, "The Bullfighter and the Lady." The movie didn't impress me, more because of my distaste for bullfighting then anything else. But the guy had learned how to tell a story.
He started to make westerns. His first was the Audie Murphy movie, "The Cimarron Kid". It was alright. It stepped him up to better budgets and better actors, like Glenn Ford in "The Man From the Alamo".
But it wasn't until "The Tall T" that he really exploded.
"The Tall T" is a movie that moves you in many different ways, few of which you could readily anticipate. Part of this is due to some astonishing acting. Part of it is due to Randolph Scott acknowledging the limits of his abilities and his willingness to see himself as the centerpiece of a project and not just a movie star.
"The Tall T" starts off with Scott pretty much playing the hapless buffoon. His buffoonery is amplified over and over. The only typical "manly" attribute he's given is honor.
Instead of going for a drink he goes to by the candy he promised a young boy he'd pick up. When he makes a bet with his old boss (his horse against a prize brahma "seed" bull) to ride the bull Scott looses and then dives into a water trough to avoid getting trampled. He rises from the trough looking like a rodeo clown.
Next we see Scott walking the 20 miles back home. His friend, Ringtoon, picks him up over the complaints of his chartered passengers. They pull into Scott's destination. The stage line office where Scott plans to borrow a horse and deliver his candy to the 9 year old boy.
Suddenly the movie transforms. It becomes galvanic with the appearance of Richard Boone, as gang leader Frank, and Henry Silva as Chink. The names are important. They are as much adjectives as they are nouns.

Click images for desktop size: "Program" by Maxfield Parrish Boone is magnificent, quietly deadly, thin and easily quick, totally self aware and, by implication, totally self obsessed, and most of all charismatic. Silva, who became famous for playing noir-ish type deranged gangsters brings the edge of urban psychosis juvenile delinquency to the wild mountain scenery.
When the stage coach pulls into the station they are robbed by Frank, Chink and Billy Jack. Scott stands by helpless and ineffectual while Chink kills his friend Ringtoon.
They've already killed the station master and the 9 year old boy. Billy Jack takes the candy Scott bought for the kid and happily eats it. They dumped the bodies down the well, polluting the only water for miles. They refuse Scott the right to give his friend a "proper burial". Scott is forced to dump his friend into the well.
Its clear that Frank plans to kill Scott and the two passengers; the newlywed Mims. Mrs Mims is an heiress. Her father owns the richest copper mine in the territory. Her husband bargains with the robbers by telling them this, even outlying a plan where the robbers can collect a huge ransom for the woman. In effect he's selling his wife, trying to barter her for his own life. She remains unaware of this.
Boone decides to follow through with this plan, asking for 50,000 in ransom. Mims' is relieved to be out of immediate danger and proud of himself for concocting such a masterful scheme to extort money from his father-in-law.
Mrs Mims is played by the lovely Maureen O'Sullivan, best known for playing the primally sexy Jane in the Weismuller Tarzan flics. Here she startlingly transforms herself into a dowdy, mousey subservient sub-human thing. She reacts, clearly, not with her heart but with what her mind tells her that her heart should feel. Its a wonderful performance.
To Chink's disappointment Frank doesn't allow him to kill Scott and put him in the well. At first that seems to be a mere plot contrivance. You can't kill the hero, sort of thing. It might have been that but it is used effectively to show what the film is really about, the revelation of character. The make up of humanity and the masks we use in order to live each day in a savage barren world. With that intent Boetticher steps very close to genius just for making the attempt.
The film plays out. The scheme plays out. It never cheats. It never loses its tension. What the story does to is astonish and surprise.

Click images for desktop size: "Disruption" by Krabban The thrills start with Boone explaining to Scott that he kept Scott alive because he liked him. Scott works hard to contain his disgust at being "liked" by this criminal.
Boone doesn't notice. He tells Scott of the hours of tedium riding with young guns like Chink and Billy Jack. How they never have dreams beyond a bottle and a woman. And Boone is weary of that sort of conversation. He forces Scott to talk about his ranch.
True to the sociopath Boone turns Scott's wistful memories of his "place" to reflect on his own need to belong somewhere to have a part of the world where he belongs, that is absolutely his.
This small exchange makes us start to like Boone. It sets us up for the next scene.
Mims returns with Billy Jack. Their errand was successful. His father-in-law will raise the 50,000 and ransom his daughter. The three outlaws are joyous at the impending wealth. In a burst of generosity Boone tells Mims they don't need him anymore. He's free to go.
Mims is stunned, but he can't stop talking. He tries to make Boone see what a brilliant idea this is. How much he will be able to speed up the money collection. He can even lead the father-in-law back to the money drop off.
Affably Boone agrees with him, nearly compliments him. Mims looks at the shack that imprisons his wife and says, "I should say goodbye. No, it's best I get going right away and get this done." He can barely conceal his glee as he mounts up and rides away.
Boone's performance is unsettling. He seems genuine and sincere but underneath the tone is the unhinged cruelty of a man who has had a lifetime of living with his mental disease and no longer recognizes it as a disease but merely a part of his life and personality.
Everybody but Scott, who is disgusted, is ecstatic. O'Sullivan comes out of the shack at the sound of all the laughter. When her husband reaches the top of the hill he turns and waves.
Now the first time I saw this scene my stomach dropped, like when you're playing Mario Brothers and you send the little guy jumping across a chasm and he misses and he plummets to his electronic death.
Boone stops smiling and says, "Bust him, Chink." Instantly Chink stops laughing and fires his rifle kitting Mims. Before he can finish falling Chink draws his six gun and shoots him twice more.
O'Sullivan shrieks in terror. Boone is stunned.
"What's wrong with her?" he says nonplussed. He speaks to her like he was talking to a slow child. "Lady, you should be thanking me for this. That man sold you. Do you hear me, lady? He sold you!" Then, rather annoyed, "She should be thanking me for ridding her of a thing like that husband of
Click images for desktop size: "Ali Landry" hers."
"He was her husband," is Scott's laconic reply.
"That don't mean never mind," Boone grumbles, "it don't mean he's a man."
O'Sullivan gets her scene too, where she seems to spark inside her dowdy face and confess she's not crying for her dead husband but for herself. Now she thinks she is doomed to be forever alone. Good stuff. Touching and not jarring the mood.
Scott continues as a low menemic hero up through the end. His dispatching of the two youngsters is violent. More so that only because the deaths of Mims and Ringtoon were shown before. This is the 50's so the gore is only implied but the implication is horrendous enough.
When the two young guns are dispensed with and Boone is miles away O'Sullivan wants to run away, escape. Its a sensible plan. Scott rebuffs her with the line, "There are some things a man just can't ride around." And he plans to murder Boone.
Boone trumps him. He returns to the hideout, money bags stuffed with cash. He discovers his henchmen savagely murdered and then falls into Scott's trap. Instead of desperately fighting back he complies with Scott's demands to drop the money and his gun but he keeps his back to Scott and walks to his horse. "You won't shoot me in the back. Your not that kind of man."
And he rides off.
In some ways I would have preferred that would have been the ending. Boone stirred up so many ambivalent feelings that having him simply ride off would have been totally satisfying. But this was the 50's of Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. Bad guys couldn't ever just get away with it.
Boone rides out of sight and pulls his rifle from its scabbard and gallops back into camp where Scott blasts him out of the saddle. Scott and O'Sullivan walk to their horses gradually growing closer together.
For a B feature, "The Tall T" was a success. A lot of people going to see it instead of the A feature it
Click images for desktop size: "Blueprint" by Louie Mantia was played with.
After directing a couple of episodes of "The Count of Monte Cristo" TV show. (!) RANOWN wanted another movie. They rushed out "Decision at Sundown".
After the high achievements of "The Tall T" this was a let down. Burt Kennedy didn't do the script. This movie was pretty formulaic. Stranger rides into town makes complacent town people reassess their life etc. The interesting parts are plentiful. Scott was called on to play a psycho reminiscent of Howie Kemp, Jimmy Stewart's character in the great "Naked Spur". Its too nuanced a character for Scott to altogether pull off.
The movies not a waste and is enjoyable; but that's all.
For the next one they bought Kennedy in to punch up an interesting but formulaic script' "Buchanan Rides Alone".
More of that next time and then the rest of the box set.

My back is about 95%. It usually is. No pain if I don't move to fast and I no longer have to crawl up my own body to stand up. Except I have a cold. I'm fighting it pretty well.
Tomorrow we pick up my friends new car. Getting stoked.
Beau coup walking today WITHOUT A DOG! Getting license plates, checks, the usual drill. You have to work for everything even the things you've earned.

Posted by David at 9:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Ginvera de Benci" by Leonardo Da Vinci And wasn't that one of the cruddiest Superbowls ever.
Definitely in the top 5. If it weren't for the final 10 minutes it would have been number 2. Ten minutes isn't a game.
The grand finale of the season was partially ruined by nightmarish bad officiating. When one team uses two challenges to get two horrific calls over turned you do have reason to question the ref's impartiality.
Still the most jaw dropping calls were the non-ejections of two Steelers. Their dirty play was disgraceful, a bad example to kids.
Click image: "Virtual GIrl" by Wallpaper CollectionThe worst was allowing James Harrison to remain in the game. Driving his fist into a player who was down on his knees is terrible but then to hit the guy in the throat while he's staggering to get up deserves the most powerful punishment.
James Harrison has worked hard to play this game. He had a magnificent season. For me it will be forever tainted by his twisted and dangerous antics.
The Cardinals' play calling was absurd. I still can't figure out what they were thinking of. Their most successful drive was off the no huddle and exploiting the brilliant play of Larry Fitzgerald, Bolden and Breaston. Then they forgot about it.
When all they had to do was stop the Steelers for two minutes they went into a weak prevent instead of maintaining the inspired play that got them the lead. The coaching got them to the Superbowl but the coaching cost them the championship.

Click images for desktop size: "Poncho Rockwell" by Paul Gilligan I managed to miss Bruce Springsteen . . .
Now comes that fallow part of the year. They'll be the Football Combine in a couple of weeks. There's enough Trojans invited to make that mildly interesting. I'll be curious about Clay Matthews and Mark Sanchez.
I'm one of those who think that Mark made a mistake in entering the draft early. I honestly think that a senior year could have seen him as at least a Heisman finalist. It would have let him learn to control his emotions and set him up for a solid NFL career.
As it is now I think he'll get the signing bonus he craves but will either set on the bench for two years, which would not be a bad thing, or get thrown to the lions too soon and end up shuffling around as a back up until he gets a fair chance somewhere down the line.
I still hope for the best for him. He is a fine young man.
Then there'll be the draft in April which is always lightly amusing. I wonder if USC can beat last years record for first round picks.
There's baseball season and there's spring ball and then a dearth until August.
Nice cycle of life. I don't think I would want to change it.

Today I plan to watch a movie, "Outlander". Its about a spaceship that crashes on Earth during the Iron Age and mixes the Space Man up with some Vikings who have to work together to kill a space monster.
There's this sci-fi writer, David Drake, who wrote a book with a near identical idea. Except in his book there was no space man, only the space monster. The monster was a baboon like creature, slightly larger than man sized and incredibly viscous.
The monster lands in ancient Rome and is hunted by Gladiators!! Drake is too prolific (I can't even remember the title of this book) to be great but he has written a couple of great books. This one and "Redliners".
What made this one great was the history of Ancient Rome he threw in not only for atmosphere but to advance the plot.
The gladiators aren't horrified by the creature, but like the mice in the Sufi legends seek only the most expedient professional means of killing it. Their vengeance and anger has no place in their plans to destroy something bigger and stronger than they are. They move like Gladiators, with no fear but only the need to finish the task.

Click images for desktop size: "Dogs" by Unknown Great book, I wish I could remember the title . . .

I was hoping that we'd hear about the car loan by now. The loan officer doesn't seem to be in. So we have to be patient.
I hate being patient sometimes. There should be no problems at all but with the economy the way it is now I trust banks even less, which is something I thought would be impossible.
My friend needs that car.
I need for her to have what she needs.
The dogs could care less.

Posted by David at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Click images for desktop size: "Now You See Him" by NFL Films My friend got her new car yesterday. Not really, not yet but all is nearly finished.
The car lot was pretty interesting. The lot itself was just about a quarter mile long and it had four rows of cars jammed side by side. Just a huge amount of cars.
Their system is that you inspect a car and then go to the main office where you give the the number of the car you want. They give you the key, copy your driver's license and that's about it. You drive the car as long as you want and then take out the next one you're
Click images for desktop size: "Zathara" by DC Comics interested in.
RAH! No sales pressure at all. There's was a windy snow storm yesterday and the place was still packed! One of the cars we were interested in was sold wile we were there! We drove about 90 minutes to get there based on a recommendation and was very glad for the experience.
We checked out 6 cars. All makes, all models there for easy comparison. Aside from the thirty mile an hour winds and blinding snow it was a great experience.
After you pick the car you want you have to sit down with a salesman . . . that was painless too. The only thing that was tried to sell to us was a warranty. Its a good warranty but hyper-expensive. A thousand bucks for 2 years! Since its also like 90 minutes away I didn't see much value to it but
Click images for desktop size: "Ninety Degrees" by A Brito did think my friend should get the 6 month warranty to get into spring.
My friend went to the bank Friday evening. Did all the loan stuff. The guy said there should be no problem but it was too late to get the final approval. If he doesn't see a problem I'd ho[e that means there won't be any problems.
My friend was totally chuffed but a little bit dismayed that her favorite car was also the cheapest car we looked at! She felt even better that a local dealership had the identical car with 20 thousand fewer miles for FOURTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS MORE!
The way this place works is that they get the car in and just set it in the lot. When the car is purchased they throw it into the shop, detail it, tune it new tires and do any work they find. You get to say any problems you saw. Like I pointed out some light staining on the rear seats and felt really anal for doing so, but so what.
Then in a week to 10 days you go and pick the car up. Seems odd at first but also seems incredibly fair.
Since my eyes got to bad to drive its been a long time since I got to shop for a car. It was fun, especially doing it this way. I was tired but not in the usual weary way that car salesmen usually inflict.
On the way home we stopped at Taco Bell to celebrate. She had gluten free bean tacos (yeah, they make them) and I had a bean burrito, meximelt and a chicken taco.
When we got home we continued to celebrate - she took a nap and I shoveled snow. Since I keep the yard so well shoveled out it only took me about a half hour to shovel the two inches of snow that fell. As soon as I finished it started to snow again!
My friend's nap was cut short. My puppy was sleeping with her and my puppy likes to cuddle, except she so big and so strong that her cuddling has the usual effect of pushing you off the bed!
So we watched the Chinese movie "Ip Man". Ip is best remembered today as the guy who first taught Bruce Lee.
The film was very good. Donnie Yen is still amazing. His hand speed is staggering.
The first two thirds of the movie are supposed to be pretty accurate. They had the two legendary episodes in Ip's life that I knew about: Ip fighting a swordsman armed with a feather duster and his famous fight with ten Japanese karate experts where he thrashed them all without ever being touched.
Marvelous recreations better than I had imagined from just reading about them. Like the final third
Click images for desktop size: "Gothic Alien" by Unknown of the film which is a weird amalgamation of fantasy and fact, if that wasn't the way it really was this is the way it should have been.
Good stuff and a good movie to finish a celebratory day to.

Today's the Superbowl. The end of football for another year.
Once again the Superbowl is in a fair weather city. I always sort of wish the game were played in a driving snowstorm, an ice bowl, a real pit where the intensity would have to build and it could become a savage contest of men and nature.
While I don't think this game will be as bad as the Steelers-Seahawks debacle I don't expect a very good game.
The Steelers have all the tools to stage a massive blowout. If Heinz Ward is 80% or better it will be a long turgid day for the Cardinals.
The Cardinals just don't match up well. Their offense is too quick strike to wear the Steelers down. I expect Larry Fitzgerald to exploit an overly aggressive Troy Polamanu and avoid the shut out but that's about it.
There is an X Factor. Kurt Warner. He's been here before and knows he will probably never get here again.
He's won strong and lost to Tom Brady is Brady's first start and the beginning of his legend. He could rise up angry and dismantle the dream but it seems to miraculous.
Even though the Cardinals have been bigger underdog's than this in every single one of their playoff games. No one thought they could handle Carolina and felt certain that the Eagles would trounce them easily.
There's a pretty good chance the game will go to the back ups. Rothlisberger still holds the ball too long. His astonishing effectiveness on third and long this season justifies it but it makes him vulnerable.
Warner will have a hard time surviving the blitz. When it gets down to back-up QB's Matt Linehart
Click images for desktop size: "World Wide" by Unknown still comes up short against Steeler back up Byron Leftwich.
It maybe herd like but I see the Steelers covering the spread in almost every scenario. That doesn't please me at all.
The half time show. A good reason to hate Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake. Their nipple ring fiasco ensures that we will never see decent bands at the Superbowl. A strong performance by Tom Petty last year just proves to those old dinosaurs in the NFL (and I've met too many of the old untrustworthy bastards) that this is the ticket.
Bruce Springsteen . . . does anyone care? Springsteen's cred with me drops even lower, that he'd do such a gig smells like sell out.
He couldn't possible be as bad as Paul McCartney (the Superbowl and an aged Beatle??) and no one could be horrifying as the Rolling Stones but this should be an incredibly dreary show. I wonder if he opens or closes with Reagan's fave tune, "Born in the USA".

Before that we still have some errands to run while we have the rented car.
My friend will be gone for 3 days next week. Need FOOD for ME!
Its been so long that I've been able to drive I'm used to having to walk a few miles in bad conditions to feed myself, but there's no sense in being macho all the time.

Posted by David at 8:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Museum: Randor the Red" by Artix Entertainment LLC Went to sleep last night certain I was going to wake up with a cold; scratchy throat, throbbing sinuses. I woke this morning feeling pretty much the way I always feel. I credit Linus Pawling and Vitamin C.
For some reason I found my thoughts stuck, not on the Superbowl, but on Blake, Patchen, Corso and Chandler. I like them because they saw a huge vista of the world that was near inclusive and set out to describe them in terms and ways that were clean and simple. Accessible. They knew it was important to see this world in the cadence they saw it.
I think that Blake's "Visionary" works got too wrapped up in
Click images for desktop size: "TOAD" by Unknown Swedenborg to fully succeed in that. The mysticism lost me somewhere and its easier to blame Swedenborg than to see if the lack of comprehension is a failing in me.
Conversely I like Cocteau because all of his "revelations" are simple and obvious but he dressed them up in fine brocades and wild flowers to make them seem like more than they were.
I find it odd that none of my faves ever seemed to consider forgiveness. While Patchen and Blake railed against God and tried to take him to task they never blamed him for humanity and its gross failures. Patchen demanded to know why he allowed men to harm other men. Blake wanted to know why he did not elevate man from the toils of the earth.
(I have always found it amusing and educational that most of Blake's published letters to friends usually included a line about, "Could I borrow 50 pounds so that I can buy copper plates to complete . . . " Genius and grocers and landlords never mix.)

Click images for desktop size: "Monochrome Blonde Geometry" by Doug Chavo Chandler's world was godless. Man created life carnally and cruelly. Survival of the fittest and only the high mnemic could possible survive.
None of them ever blamed God for terrible things that are god made, like diseases and cancers. They wanted him to account for greed and poverty and war. Man made things that he should have abolished.
Strange morning.

Another inch of snow yesterday. I discovered that the paths around the yard that the dogs and I have stomped down are pretty narrow. They're invisible under the new snow and if I step off them the snow is calf deep.
I did some light shoveling, loosened up my shoulders.
My puppy was anxious to play with me yesterday. She bought me a toy and demanded I chase her. It made me think that sometimes she misses being a therapy dog. We did have fun. I chased her, she scurried and the gentle dog would bite me, grab my wrist and hold on. Its the way he likes to play with me.
He used to be a somber, wary dog. Now he's happy and more doggish. I like that. I like that he's having fun and wants to join in.
My friend is probably going to rent a car this weekend so we can go look at new cars, well, used cars. The expense bothers me.
She applied for a car loan at her bank. Did it on-line. When she didn't have an answer she called them and was told they never received it and that they'd had a few other complaints like that. He wanted her to come in to fill out a loan app and claimed that applying from the banks website was dangerous that all of her confidential data could easily be hijacked . . . My paranoid streak makes me think this is a new banking ploy to sell
Click image: "Yungang Grottoes at Datong" by Unknown you stuff, (sell you money?). Its hard to accept that a bank would want its employees to claim that their secure web site is hopelessly insecure but it would work on a lot of people and it would force people through the door so they can sell you stuff. Like my friend applied for a 10-15 thousand dollar loan, just preliminary approval like we used to get. If they get her in they could bombard her, take her to the max of her credit limit. Tellers and loan officers are still grossly underpaid, they get their raises and bonuses based on how much they get out the door so it makes sense.
Basically I don't believe the on-line app was lost.
I was expecting to get a ride from my friend's parents to avoid having to pay to rent. They're going through their own little impenetrable miasma. No offer, just my expectations.
Funny, my friend's assistant is going to Aruba for two weeks. She has a new Hyundai that she offered to loan my friend while she's gone!
My first thoughts were how could the assistant afford two weeks in Aruba and a new car while the boss cannot! I'm just like that and sometimes don't see the obvious (single, no house payment, helpful parents). That still doesn't overwhelm my gratitude at such a magnanimous gesture. The assistant has a new puppy. I put it off to the basic generosity of doggishness.
Today is blank. My head is still blank, still coping somewhat with pain and worries. We still have to figure out a good deal on the rental and have to prepare for my friend's being out of town for 3 days next week. Where she's staying has no internet! An odd thing, I think, in this day and age. At least the rental car and the hotel are being paid for by the company.
Then on Sunday, the Superbowl. I've seldom been less excited.
Every time I try to think seriously about the game I find myself falling asleep. It looks to be pretty boring. The Cardinals' O might bring some excitement but the Steelers' will probably make the excitement be mostly near misses.
Even as I think about it now I feel myself getting groggy.
I have to make some time to stay awake and make my pick.

Posted by David at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Legs" by Unknown Its snowing. The drought is over.
Looking forward to shoveling and scooping and having dogs in my way while I do it.

My friend is going to work at home for the rest of the week. She found out yesterday that she has to go out of town for three days next week. The good part is that the company (a not for profit) will pay for the rental car.
Yesterday I made tuna melts on gluten free rye bread for her lunch, (plain ol' tuna salad for me) and then shrimp taco's with chipolite
Click images for desktop size: "The Waterhole" by Unknownpeppers for dinner. They were too hot but I liked them.
Today I have no idea for meals . . . The extent of my menu's usually runs only to days. My normal lunch is stuff she can't or won't eat; popcorn, cereal, macaroni and cheese . . . Now I'll have to think. Not my strongest suit.
Last night we saw the best American dog movie I've seen in a while: "Hotel for Dogs". There's a lot wrong with it. Mainly the script is pure Sid Fields.
Sid fields was a not very successful screenplay writer who needed money so he wrote a book on how to write a screenplay. I don't remember the exact title. The main part of the book that is still dogging the industry was his breakdown of pages - it's like, 1-2 grabber, 3-4 introduction of characters and plot, 80 low point, 85 resolution etc.

Click images for desktop size: "Lenbach" by Franz Von Hirtenknabe An alarming number of producers in the 80's and 90's kept a copy of that breakdown in their desk or pocket. They'd run through a screenplay and order changes based on Field's breakdown. Their logic was movies A, B and C were the top three grossers that year and they all followed the Field's breakdown slavishly ergo if their movie did the same it would also have a shot.
A lot of people unfairly trash Hollywood movies. Field's breakdown actually gives them some footing for their arguments. When computers eventually begin to write the outlines for movies it will probably be Field's breakdown that forms the infrastructure and then they really will all look the same.
Anyway, "Hotel for Dogs" is a kids movie. A brother and sister are orphans living with Kevin Dillon. They're inept foster parents #10, funny and cruel without meaning to be.
The younger brother is something of a Rube Goldberg genius. They have a dog, "Friday" (as usual I can't remember any of the characters names, just the dogs' names). He creates an elevator so the dog, who they're hiding from the foster parents, can get out of their 3rd floor apartment and back into it on its own volition. Its a crazy cool device using a power drill and a paw activated button. You can tell the props department had a lot of fun building this and the other gadgets.
Through a series of misadventures the kids end up with 6 stray dogs. Fortunately they have also discovered an abandoned hotel. They stash the dogs there. Eventually they have to figure out how to feed and care for the dogs while they are at school. The kid starts to build some incredible devices that automatically feed, bathe, exercise and amuse the dogs. All the devices are doggie activated and they are cooler than the gizmo's Tim Burton dreamt up for "Pee Wee's Big Adventure". Most of the joy of the movie is in seeing these marvelous constructions work. Its tempting to say, "You gotta see the . . . " I won't. If I did there's not much left towards the joy of discovery.
The brother and sister are next joined by the empathetic cute boy, the pudgy girl and the smart alec fat kid who decide to work together and save every stray dog in the city from the villainous dog catchers. (You need a villain but the dog catchers aren't very upsetting, more or less just city employees doing a job they don't much care about, which is chillingly accurate).
The kids end up with about 60 dogs and the devices get even more astounding. Eventually they are discovered. The dogs are all taken to the pound and the bother and sister are sent to different orphanages. (The low point)

Click images for desktop size: "Fashion Sex & Food" by Unknown On the eve of their execution (odd Chidiock Tichbone reference) Friday escaped from the pound. Using that good common sense that only movie dogs are blessed with he reunites the cute boy and the sister, they rescue the younger brother and get pudgy girl and fat smart alec kid together and form a rather credible plan to rescue the dogs! (resolution).
Its pretty amusing stuff actually.
The conclusion of the film could have been, should have been trite. Don Cheadle plays the Social WOrker who saves the day.
If you've seen "Taken" you know that its just a pretty mediocre action/thriller except they have Liam Neeson as the lead. Neeson takes the part seriously and gives the silly tale a weight that most action stars bring through physicality. As in he can't bring the joy or believability of seeing Donnie Yen fly through a glass liquor cabinet but he can make the grim faced father stalking the killers real. While Clint Eastwood made his avengers compelling blankness that tunneled through to faded memories of hard earned happiness Neeson makes his avenging father a deeply etched creature of despair finding solace in duty.
In a similar vein Cheadle brings gravitas to his final resolution. He gives his enunciation a touching genuiness as real as his scenes in "Hotel Rawanda". It works and end the film on a proud note.
The dogs are all pretty wonderful and, for the most part, act like genuine dogs. They're delightful to watch and joyous in their approach to their new lives.
An odd film for me to warmly recommend.

Click images for desktop size: "Morning Enough" by Blurburger After the movie my friend made a comment that she didn't think my puppy much liked her. My puppy's breed characteristics tend towards aloofness mixed with goofiness, a strange reserve. They tend to show love and loyalty to one person and to care fervently for their pack, or their herd or their family.
My puppy loves my friend. She doesn't like many people. She loves kids but even then she has to size them up first.
When she was working as a therapy dog part of her rounds were to go from room to room and see if the occupant could benefit from petting a dog. Some people she simply would ignore. On her own property she dislikes strangers until she decides they are alright. She won't be trifled with.
I watched her viscously get in the face of a handyman on the property because he moved to fast towards me. She didn't bite but she made it clear she would if he got any closer. And this fellow liked dogs!
Unless you have a treat for her. She'll take treats from anyone.
The glucosamine seems to have had a rather rapid effect on the dogs. Gentle dogs limp is hardly apparent. I have to stare at him intently to notice any hint of it. The giant dog is running like a maniac when he's outside, clearly feeling good all over. I'm amazed that this happened so quickly. My hope is that the injury to gentle dog was so minor it didn't take much to correct.
My puppy shows no effect whatsoever . . . she just keeps on being she.
Oh, I've had to clamp down on the images again due to hot linking. Now they'll only appear directly on this site. Somebody linked to a full sized one not even just a thumbnail, on some bulletin board. It used to allow you to put the url to the image in your browser to see it. They used that technique to get around the normal policy. Band width is flying through the roof. I've had to stop that until the bulleting board page moves on.

Posted by David at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Jazz" by Unknown No football this weekend. None.
Why bother with weekends if there's not a feeling of football.
It gives me time to think. Who needs time to think? What I think about is life and guilt.
Every time there's a tragedy there's a pretty human response to feel like some how you've failed. Like you could have done or didn't do the one thing that could have made things different. Somehow different always feels better.
Maybe its not a human thing. Maybe its a catholic thing, this guilt.

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by HK Pepnx II But like when the little blind dog died I spent weeks thinking what I could have done to give him more time. When the car died I still keep rolling through my mind what I could have done differently, what I should have done. Even when I conclude that we did what we could there's another possibility.
This doesn't detract from addressing issues. It doesn't bog you down. Maybe Catholics are trained to feel and deal with guilt.
We have found a place that sells cars at a reasonable cost. With a couple that look pretty possible. Used cars but . . .
When you remember that my first 3 cars each cost less than fifty bucks . . . I even got one car that ran until I sold it for a game ball used cars costing over 10 grand kind of freak me.
Some of these cars still have warranty time left so we'll check it out.
For various reasons that reminds me of stupid errands I did with my second car (the first car, a green 52 Pontiac with the amber indian head for a hood ornament [yes, older even than me] the one where I shoe polished the leather upholstery - the car still ran great, especially with my specially
Click images for desktop size: "Indians Hunting Buffalo" by Charles Marion designed coat hanger choke, but the smell of the shoe polish got you super sick after about 10 minutes).
I was writing songs so I thought I should check out some poetry. I was driving back from the beach when I saw this book store I'd heard of on the wrong side of the street. I did a you turn and went into Papa Bach's. It was a weird hippie joint. They burned incense which still makes me queasy. They had all these small press books and this line called new directions.
They had this book by William Borroughs. "Naked Lunch". I thought it was "Naked Came a Stranger" which was like this porno book I'd read about in the LA Times. It was supposed to be an "erotic" novel that was written by a different author in each chapter. Being a kid I was most stunned that women had written some of it. I was still convinced that women hated sex and only endured it with a huge amount of cajoling and pleading. The idea of women writing porn was jaw dropping.
I figured in this hippie shop they'd sell porn even to a grossly underaged kid. So I grabbed "Naked Lunch" (thinking it was "Naked Came a Stranger", how many books could there be with naked in the title anyway) grabbed a mess of small press poetry and New Directions books (to conceal my real intention was the purpose) and stood there, a fifteen year old surfer in baggies ready to make my purchase.
I went to school that day and spent the whole day reading "Naked Lunch" in class. I didn't care if it was the wrong book. It had plenty of porn, but all the wrong sort. It was the fact I found it funny, mystifying and well, at that time my world consisted of the beach, football, clubs, school and avoiding my step father.
"Naked Lunch" was about places I never imagined could be, about people I didn't seriously think existed. I thought it was great.
After reading it through twice in a day I loaned it to my friend Tom. He thought it was crazy but liked some of the funny bits. We began having conversations straight from the book, talking in that weird broken metier of drug addicts and William Burroughs. Our favorite joke became, "I am the Great Slashtubitch and I can tell you fake the orgasm by the way you wiggle your big toe!" I have no idea why we thought it was funny except in some sort of Bevis and Butthead way.
Pretty soon we'd infected the entire football team with the book. About 80 high school kids roaming the halls reciting chunks of "Naked Lunch" to each other was not something I figure the Board of Education would have approved of.

Click images for desktop size: "Anime" by Unknown There was an Assistant Principal at school. He was in charge of discipline. That meant he was the guy who gave you detention and called your parents if you were absent or parked your car in the wrong spot or if your muffler was too loud. He carried a hunk of celluloid in his pocket so he could measure your hair to make sure it didn't cover more than 1 and 1/2 inches of your collar . . . Catholic School.
Thing is, he dug the job, the power we guessed.
His name was close enough to one of the "Naked Lunch" characters, the Sollibees, that we all took to calling him Mr Sollibee (The sollibees were creatures who lived underneath tavern bars, they poked their heads out through holes in the bar to "service" customers while they drank. The name fit our attitude towards him perfectly. Soon the whole school was calling him Mr Sollibee. I don't think he ever twigged as to why we were all suddenly mispronouncing his name. None of the other teachers did either. At least we never caught any of them laughing.
Because that book was such a hit I checked out the other things I'd picked up that day. I was amazed. Kenneth Patchen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso. Beat poets.
None of them helped me write any songs but they led me to believe that poets were the next Superman. I read how Corso used to read his poetry to a simple bongo accompaniment, which still sounds totally cool to me. And Kenneth Patchen explained the movies in his head and made them sound cooler than "The Great Escape" and "A Fistful of Dollars" combined.
I rally thought these were the guys who had powers "far beyond those of mortal men". I doubt if they helped me write better lyrics . . . (look for me babe but I ain't there; could hardly stand improvement . . . ) but I felt these guys understood parts of the world that I sensed were out there but had never seen. I thought that they had the map to something important. Something important to me and to the world and that it was a power they had, power louder than my Fender amp. I liked them, adored them and didn't want to be
Click images for desktop size: "Jeanne D'Arc" by Michael Parkes like them but I wanted to know what they knew even while I thought it was impossible.
Their effect on me was that I lead the conference in yards and touchdowns that season.
For the first time in my life I wanted to go someplace that wasn't in California.

Its been cold here. But we seem to be in the middle of a snow drought. There's enough snow on the ground to keep everything pretty and the constant snow means the dogs and I have got solid paths wending through the yard. Great paths that lead no where but are easy to follow.
The giant dog has suddenly decided he won't go outside without me. I have no idea why. His attitude hasn't changed and when we go out together he gets full on dog play crazy. Bears watching.
A couple of weeks ago the gentle dog went to work with my friend. He got so excited he leapt in the air and landed, slipping on the ice. Lately we've noticed that he starts to limp every time he first gets up from sleeping or just lying around. Its not a bad limp and it vanished pretty quickly. He has no tenderness in his legs and no change in his attitude. Walking him is still like walking a kite. So I worry. Today started to give each of them 500 mg of Glucosamine to lubricate their joints. Reports as events warrant.
Of course my puppy still loves me and I love her.

Posted by David at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Fractal 4" by Clody I was pretty pleased that among the first things Obama has done is to stop as much of the killing of endangered species that George Bush was trying to slip through.
Bush was and is a pratt.
With the abrupt announcing of the end of torture and the closure of the illegal prisons more and more people are starting to bicker about criminal charges. I agree.
One thing that some sociologists and most film critics (real film critics, not opinion dispensers) agree on is that horror movies are a good indication of the general state of mind of the people. I think that's cool. Judging where we are by what scares us most. Understanding our fears gives a clearer image of who we are.

Click images for desktop size: "Unknown Starlet" Yeah. I like that.
I like horror movies almost as much as I like Westerns. Its harder to make a good scary movie than it is to make a great Western. Like Westerns the first filmmakers tried horror. Edison did that weird Oglethorpe version of Frankenstein, Melies flics had plenty of horror elements, pudgy ladies becoming skeletons and the Devil always lurking about with his imps. Cool stuff all.
The scariest thing for me was a book my mother left lying around the house, some stranger than fiction thing that was filled with lavacious stories about something unseen biting the hell out of innocent children; women whose eye spit fountains of blood around Mexican deserts; people spontaneously bursting into flames! Not the sort of thing you should let a 7 year old who was watching his happy world disintegrate only because his mother fell in love and bought this stranger into our home. I was hooked on fear and adrenalin from then out.
The twenties saw Lon Chaney and his monsters that were products of human deformity. In the 30's we had a continuation of the humanoid being the cruelest monster - Browning (who worked a lot
Click images for desktop size: "Gallery of Covers" by Unknown with Chaney in the silent days) giving up Dracula and Freaks. And Whale gave up Frankenstein. Even what made King Kong so memorable was his resemblance to human beings.
The Germans, so heavily involved in great horror movies in the 20's following WWI seemed to stop horror. Maybe they weren't scared of anything.
The forties bought on the real ultimate horror: WWII; and the horror movies moved into a slightly new type of monster; the monster who grieved, the monster who couldn't stop his monstrous devotion to terror.
The fifties exploded with Sci-Fi and horror. Teenagers, the scariest thing adults had ever seen were the monsters now, rock & roll was a monster. And there was the atom bomb and any second we could all be vaporized and the entire planet destroyed in a paroxysm of wild adult fury. The world was such a terrifying place that we also knew that there was even more evil out there in outer space. But the Japanese touched the real horror and showed it came not from the stars but as a natural rebellion to man, it came from nature: Godzilla.
The atomic legacy wasn't just a painful death it was giganticism: Giant ants, grasshoppers, leeches killing all those the bomb sought to spare.
The sixties was the Hammer and AIP era. American International took the fifties themes to even higher layers of hysteria to a thumping beat. The Hammer flics said the world is still a safe and scary place, familiar. The monsters are deviants but we already know them. It didn't go deep enough and justified the deviant fantasies of the Gore movies.
(What's more deviant than paying to see a former Playboy Playmate get her leg cut off with an axe or her tongue pulled out of her mouth with ice tongs.)

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by KRM PhotosThe 60's ended with a horror so great it opened up the 70's: George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" changed the world for a little while. I mean Roger Ebert wrote a piece for Reader Digest calling this film a socially depraved nightmare! The medium was the new monster!
And the 70's saw "Last House on the Left", "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", "The Hills Have Eyes" and the emergence of David Cronenberg.
Horror became a sensual sexual thing. Pleasure was always punished and the weak were fodder, only the strong survived. The monster was us, just stronger and less inhibited, more willing to survive.
The 80's belonged to Cronenberg. He purified and extolled the 70's. Horror was a by product of our lives, a virus that floated from lover to eunuch and a horror that extolled the perverted. It gave Clive Barker his starting inspiration. The 80's monsters were creatures from Hell. creatures who had human vices and needed love, a deviant love.
It saw the Hellraiser films stand with the Freddie Krueger movies. Splatter moved into the main stream building off of Cronenberg and Paul Schrader's "Taxi Driver".
One oddity were the "Friday the 13th" movies. Created by Steve Miner who worked on "The Last House on the Left" took and exalted the 70's themes by creating an inhuman monster who punished promiscuity with a searing precision.
The 90's spawned little in new horror. Real life was getting too complicated. The old school ruled and shut out the upstarts who might interfere with their mini empires.
Charles Band made his straight to video cheapies. They were sometimes entertaining. Sam Rami did the most destruction by combining a healthy does of bleak humour with the fear, a natural enough reaction. The final decimation cam from Italy. It started in the 80's but blossomed under Argento's hand and guidance.
Horror was reduced to steel and a knife and our own ability to merely watch and remain passive. Great globs of cool icy hatred and death.
And the 00's? Bush's time of remaking the world saw everyone fleeing into a fear of creativity. Brian Yzuna continued onward making original films that were often flaccid but never unimposing (Where is Creaming Mad George). The Asian horror cycle clicked in. Lots of ghosts and possessions of inanimate objects. Diverting
Click images for desktop size: "Green Lantern" by DC Comicsbut not much else.
It began the era of the re-make. The great lost propensity of the damned. Doomed to never create but to simply relive the same old fear over and over again. How dull.
Even the crazed independents, the usual saviors of horror were working harder to look and act like the hits. There were no demons driving them. I mean, they're remaking "My Bloody Valentine" which was a mediocre 80's rip off of Friday the 13th.
I recently saw some horrors that left me pretty cold but seem indicative of the 00's. "Vacancy" was psycho with a profit motive. It was simply fun to kill people and then sell the security tapes for some serious bucks. I guess its scary that people would die for something so trivial.
"The Strangers" was a turgid mess. So slow it was almost expressionistic. Pretty poor and derivative with no payoff at all.
"The Alphabet Killer" was an attempt at something undefinable. It ended up being worthless and shameless. I liked the idea of a serial killer being hunted by an ambulatory schizophrenic except Eliza Dushku is not the actress to pull it off. Her idea of a schizo coping with hallucinations seems to be to twitch a lot and make weird faces. Asia Argento could have made the role real and probably made this a better movie. Oh you do get a glance at Dushku's nude breasts. It wasn't that exciting.
"Hit and Run" was typically dreadful but had some odd quirks. A fat leading lady who is pretty despicable as a character. She gets drunk and runs over some random guy. On getting home she finds his broken body tangled in her Jeep's front bumper so she takes the easy way out and beats him to death with one of her daddy's gold clubs. Then she buries this poor victim out in the woods . . . and she's the heroine.
I mean she has a guilty conscious so I guess that's alright. The guy wasn't really dead and for some reason being hit by a car, bashed in the head and then buried alive doesn't sit well with him. He actually presented as unreasonable and monstrous for wanting justice!
Off course the heroine get away with it and kills this loathsome monster. See he's a monster because he was recently diagnosed as being bipolar. There's little made of the fact that the pudgy girl tried to murder a man with a wife and son. See, provoked by the pudgy girl he murder's his wife . . . see pudgy girl was doing the world a favor
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Gibberlingbecause bipolar guys are notorious for murdering their spouses . . . well, that's the movies argument anyway.
There's a tacked on ending when pudgy girl gets caught. Someone must have said we can't let her get away with killing the guy even if she does have great tits! So she gets busted in a way that totally ignores the visual evidence we saw maybe two minutes before . . . I guess they figured that my attention span would have drifted away before then.
But it is an interesting trend: The perpetrator as victim: Bush's intended legacy. Nothing that happens to pudgy girl is anyway near as vile as the things she did to her victim. But it was an accident nearly and she even had a nightmare!
I like that movies try to present us with identifiable characters and then strives to find a person who embodies our self image, not the view others have but our self image. Its scary that being fat is becoming that idealized view of ourselves.

The server was down for a few hours. The hosting company says the cooling system broke and they had to shut down the servers to protect them. I can relate to that.
Should be fine now.

No football this weekend. I have a couple of Football movies to watch. I'm a football addict.
The dogs all love me. That's good but a little heart rending at times.
My friend planned to pull an all nighter. I was pleased she ended up coming home and getting some sleep.
There's been no solution to the car issue. Maybe when the job is done at work can sit down and come up with a real plan. Right now a lot of it eels like we're waiting for divine intervention. Not bad as ideas go but seldom workable.
One of her co-workers is facing a similar dilemma, a 10 year old car that costs just slightly less to repair than it would to replace.

Posted by David at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Five O'Clock in Orksland" by Mathias Kollros I've been so obsessed with the Great Car Trauma of 2009 and my friends difficult time at work (no problems, just excessive work) that I've lost sight of the other things I've been doing.
I made dog treats.
They finally decided that they love dehydrated sweet potato. My puppy loves dried apple. No surprise there, she love plain apple and will beg fiercely when I'm eating one. The gentle dog and the giant dog are more reserved about the dried apple. They only want it when my puppy is still happily eating hers. That figures. They are dogs as well as being my friends and family.
I like making things for the dogs. Not just out of love but because I am always worried about commercial dog food.
Today the Chinese government announced they had sentenced three
Click images for desktop size: "Dogs" by S4W people to death for the use of melamine in baby formula that led directly to an undisclosed mount of infant deaths.
I just hope that its the right three people. I'm opposed to the death penalty but I guess murdering a few hundred kids justifies it as much as Ted Bundy's death.
I just hope its the right three people and not just 3 schmoes who were following orders from some highly placed party official or some rich businessman. They may have learned that from capitalism, protect the rich who kill for negligent profit.
Because all the American food producers used melamine (a deadly plastic additive that increases the measured protein level of foods when mixed in) to save about 10 cents a bag on their over priced premium food and then suffered no legal penalties for cheating us and killing animals. They made them take the poison food back . . . if it were unopened.

Click images for desktop size: "American Flag" by Unknown Can't feel too badly about that, after all we also cleared Union Carbide for killing nearly 4,000 in India because it Union Carbide was too cheap to install required safety equipment. Poison gas clouds or saving 10,000 bucks. To the corporate guys theirs no value to human lives, but 10,000 bucks that like a good months wage.
Its an old story which is why I'm nervous about prepared foods. I used a small factory to make my puppy's food to spec. Here the pet shop makes their own special blend. I feel slightly more secure.
Making my/their own dog treats makes me feel safer. So, its a selfish thing, because, trust me, the dogs don't much care.
My thumbs have gotten worse. Last night I had to figure out how to open the door with my elbows. Perseverance pays. Took me about 5 minutes. I can't open most jars.
Odd thing is that this morning my right thumb feels much better and the left feels much worse than the right one ever did. This just goes to confirm my self diagnoses of more neuropathic damage. Livable no that I'm certain what it is.
The pain in my thumbs has one benefit. I don't like living on pain killers even if the only ones I'll take are ibuprofen. I usually wait to long to take them only succumbing when the pain gets unendurable. Oddly I can never time it to figure out when to take them to avoid those episodes.
The thumbs start to hurt about half an hour before the big pain comes. So if I take the pills when the thumbs start to ache (and its a very endurable pain) I avoid those blind flashes. It is almost worth it.
The only real problem is in guitar playing. I use my left thumb to mute strings when I play certain chords. This makes that kind of impossible. It just means that I have to execute my right hand with a lot more accuracy. Since I've always been a pretty sloppy player in that sense (Mess and finesse) its energy that exercises new muscles.
My left hand is getting stronger and more precise. I'm pleased by that. I was afraid that the muscles wouldn't respond to exercise and would just atrophy. Its coming along fine. My biggest problems seem to be some of the more extravagant minor chords (which I adore) and some of the crazed 7ths (which I can play around by leaving out a couple of string. Who'd notice?)
I've also been rearranging the living room. Not so much rearranging it as tacking down wires and trying to hide them as well as I can. Its hard hammering.

Click images for desktop size: "Joan of Ark (Orleans)" by Yasushi Nirasawa I do get to move all the furniture and unleash the roomba of dirt war upon it. The roomba still fascinates me. If I'm not careful I end up staring at it while it does its work, which sort of defeats the purpose of a vacuuming robot. I'm glad I'm not the only one who this happens to; a lot people comment on it.
So there's just a light dusty snow this morning. None since I shoveled out the driveway so no forced interaction with jerk neighbors. That's a good thing.
No luck on finding the ideal car. (Affordable) My friend just wants her old car back. Maybe that will be the way to go. She commented on the fact that the rental is causing her some pain in her arms.
The cat has not defecated in the house for a couple of days. This is another good thing.
My friend has decided that the cat is afraid of me. I could only wish. This morning it came and sat on my foot and yelled at me to let her out. Stupid cat.
Haven't seen any decent movies. The Oscar nominations are boring as hell. Even the foreign flics are dull. Danny Boyle getting nominated makes me want to weep. He stinks and "Slum Dog Millionaire" was dull silliness to me.
I always thought Aronofsky's movies were pretentious tripe. "The Wrestler" came off like a low budget less ambitoius "Raging Bull". Mickey Rourke was pretty outstanding. I thought Marisa Tomei was incredible and pretty nice to look at. . .
I did find a copy of a film I haven't seen since it first came out "Truffaut's" La Nuit Americaine". I'm semi-afraid to watch it. This movie, as much as Cocteau and Steve McQueen probably made me go for the grad degree in Cinema. I mean, I remember watching this movie about making a movie and thinking, "This is what I need to do!" instead of taking a career I could make a living at . . . I'm afraid the movie will rightly stink and I'll stare at it and wonder about my own level of sanity then and now. Like running into an old girlfriend on the street it exposes you
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Luis Royoto more risk of ridicule than pleasure. I'll probably still watch it.
Also it seems we're in one of those fallow periods where there seems to be no new music to interest me. Bruce Springsteen doesn't interest me at all. Which at least gives me the chance to justifylistening to my old stuff.
I like that fine.
ecto, the app I use to layout this site, has sort of stagnated since the developer guy sold it to the big software company. Its still buggy but does what it does well enough to justify hassling with it. I was having a huge problem with it. It was just like taking forever to load. Figured out it was the attachment.plst file. Because there's so many attachments that file had grown for about 8k to 14 megs. The app insisted on writing and reading that file each time it was loaded and each time I added a picture. I just dumped the file. No ill effects after three days and it runs nice and smoothly again.
A bug I don't expect to see fixed.
Most people who use Mac's know about Quicksilver. A nifty little app for launching apps, docs, editing, its kind of remarkable. And its free!
The guy who developed Quicksilver has dumped the project. He's made it open source but thus far no one seems to have taken it up.
He left Quicksilver for a paying gig with Google. I'm glad he's making money. He's developing a Quicksilver replacement for them called "Google Search Box". It works pretty well and its also free. Well, free only in the sense you don't have to pay for it.
The search box is dead ugly. Disappointing after the several elegant interfaces you could pick and chose with Quicksilver. Here you can only chose the color of the box. Not any color you want but select from 4. And you have to look at the stupid google logo.
One of its "benefits" is that it searches not only your hard drive but checks the internet as well, mostly launching the browser and the google search. It also launches the app associated with the document when you pull one of those up.
Its buggy, although the 2nd alpha fixes the most annoying things. Its got a long way to go. I'm trying to ignore Quicksilver and use it. Its hard as Quicksilver require no thought from me. Its an app that learns from you as you work so it is always snappy. Google Search Box isn't there yet at all, but maybe.
And that is all. Time to take my fit dogs for their fit walk.

Posted by David at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Erotic Opera" by Alex Varenne I wasn't very overwhelmed with the inauguration speech.
Somehow it reminded me of a my old physics professor berating the class for doing so poorly on an exam that he had to throw out the bell curve.
I don't mind being underwhelmed. FDR was not a very magnificent speaker and he pulled this country out of a similar set of nasty circumstances.
I was very disheartened by the actions and comments of people like Rush Limbaugh. I mean there's a fat kid who clearly had his butt kicked every day when he was growing up and now has so much nastiness left in him that all the other fat kids with bruised rear
Click image: "Penguins" by Wallpaper Collection ends follow him slavishly.
And the other Republican antics are just so much dross that its apparent they're committed to becoming a third party.
One thing is that Cheney reminded me of was Mussolini. An evil man as judged by history who viewed himself as compassionate and who cared for his people. He did not think he lied. He thought he was being Machiavellian clever.
There was this odd book, "Inferno" by Larry Niven. I don't usually like much of Niven's stuff but this book had an interesting conceit.
It retold Dante's "Inferno" in the simplest Cliff Notes way possible. The guide through the Seven Circles of Hell was Benito Mussolini.
Here the endless damnation, pain and torment was not seen as an end in and of itself. The layers of hell were seen not as a test but a rite of purification. A voyage through lakes of boiling blood and burning pitch to self awareness and discovery. So that by making the long path of torture through hell one can finally understand themselves and rise up to heaven.

Click images for desktop size: "Girl, Scotty and Violin" by Archie Dickens The book uses people like Billy the Kid to show how this rite can be abandoned but not failed. "Inferno" eventually ends up listing the seven circles of hell the same way De Sade's last book descended into being a simple lists of tortures he wished he been able to try.
Its an nteresting read and as Mussolini details his sins and regrets it is words that belonged in Dick Cheney's mouth. Cheney has implemented torture and been directly responsible for the death of thousands and still feels no regrets.
Who moreso deserves hell and an eternity of struggling through the lake of boiling blood.
Not even Bush, moving into his restricted multi-million dollar home has been so callous, unrepentant, blame shifting and vile he's a man doomed by himself.
Here's to a future.

My puppy's aun made a suggestion: that we look for a year old car that still has a few years left on the warranty. A pretty good idea. The main stumbling block is that brand new cars can be had with 0% financing. That might make the slightly used car more expensive. We'll have to keep searching though. Its worth investigating.
One idle thought I'd had was trying to pick up a junker, "Transportation Cars" they call them in the ads. Something to last a few months until the Honda hybrids come out. The price on them seems to keep rising but its still cheaper than most out there and 63 mpg is pretty cool.
So much to consider and time is like a taxi meter right now.

Posted by David at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Amazing Taprohmtom Braid Tree Temple" by Whamuel It snowed. Another 2 and one half inches, I'd guess.
I was only partially joking about snow shoveling and martial arts having a similarity. When I shovel snow I get a feeling eerily similar to the feeling I used to get at karate special trainings.
Its the constant repetitive motion perhaps. Or its like the comedy training in "Return to the 36th Chamber" where the monks have the acolyte do what seems to be a dull never ending task. It ends up that the acolyte has been martial arts training. So well he isn't even aware of it. "Karate Kid" stole the well and condensed it to "wax on, wax off". Which is easier to remember but not quite as deep.
What I'm referring to is the meditation part of the exercise. Shoveling snow and throwing 1,000 kicks aren't as different as I'd
Click images for desktop size: "Dark Days" by PicDeskTop like to think. The major difference is that at the end of the snow shoveling exercise you can look back and see a clear path that, hopefully, leads somewhere. With martial arts you only have a tired body and the feeling that you've accomplished something great.
I'm not sure which is more zen.
In the "Lone Wolf and Cub" manga and movies there's a story about Ogami Itto being hired to kill a monk. a very holy monk; a Buddha walking the earth.
Ogami confronts the monk as he prays in a temple. In the manga Ogami's sword slashes and cannot touch the immobile monk. In the movie Ogami cannot even draw his sword.
The monk tells Ogami he cannot be killed because he "is one with the void. The universe begins and ends in me. There is no place where you can strike the heart of the universe. You are enlightened Ogami Itto but your enlightenment is only that of the assassin."
In the comic the exchange ends with the monk saying, "to kill a Buddha you must be a Buddha."

Click images for desktop size: "Woody Acres" by Jon Draperr In the manga Ogami goes to a temple, fast and prays for 3 months before feeling he is ready. He confronts the monk in a procession and attacks. A line of blood drops down his forehead. He raises his hand and says, "A magnificent stroke." Then his body splits in half, sliced down the vertical from skull to hips.
In the movie Ogami uses a scandalous trick to get the monk in his grasp. He pulls the monk from a boat and drags him underwater. There Ogami stabs the monk with a knife. The monk says, underwater, "so this is the path to enlightenment you have chosen."
I don't think I have a preference between the two ways of telling a story.
I do know that I used to do an annual fast. The first week was rough as the body tried to live off the toxins I'd ingested the previous year. After that first week I felt great. Demonstrably stronger, faster. Better concentration.
I used to run five miles every day. During those runs my mind thought of nothing. I didn't have a Walkman or an iPod. I only had the white noise in my brain to keep me company. I marked out the distance previously. I'd start the stop watch and run. Very few of those runs produced any memories. I'd look at the stop watch and 32 to 35 minutes had passed. I was at the mark I knew was five miles from the starting point. That was the only evidence that I had done what I set out to do.
I wonder, now not then, if this was the state of meditation that the Shaolin monks strove for when they practiced their martial arts. To simply flow. To live with their minds filled with something like my white noise?
I'm not a good Buddhist or Christian, I'm not much of a good anything, except a good man. I can say
Click images for desktop size: "Autumn White Birch" by Maxfield Parrish that with pretty much a calm self assurance.
Shoveling snow produces some similar meditative ideals in me.
Lewis Carroll, (Charles Dodgson), wrote a book that's been fairly well maligned: "Sylvie and Bruno". Dodgson was a great writer. No contest. Most people would call James Joyce a great writer. He wrote three great books. William Faulkner is a great writer. He wrote three great books and created a lot of great scenes. Even my pet, Raymond Chandler only wrote two great books. Charles Dodgson was a great writer.
His "Sylvie and Bruno" is hard to track down. It has some problems but also some great scenes. One of the Chapters of the book is titled, "Bruno's Revenge". It was based on a short story he'd published years before in some dwee Victorian Kiddie mag.
In the story Bruno is angry with his sister, Sylvie. He feels he's been wronged and seeks revenge by destroying her carefully tended flower garden.
Before he can begin his odious task the narrator, an ill defined adult who alternates between being omnipotent and hapless, stops Bruno and then helps him expend his rage by lovingly enhancing the garden, finding colored stones to accent and line the paths, removing weeds and whatever other stuff you do for a garden.
At the end of his labours Bruno and the narrator are exhausted. Bruno finds his rage has dissipated. The physical exertion in the spirit of kindness, not forgiveness but kindness has removed his rage and transported him closer to the Victorian God Dodgson fervently believed in.
I think you need to pay attention to Dodgson. He made a deep impression in four different disciplines, Kids Lit, Math, Photography and Religion. I mean, any guy who can mathematically prove that Jesus Christ was the Messiah is a force to contend with not against. And its in nice Western terms and not alien Eastern philosophy.
My shoveling the driveway, I guess that's a difficult task, some consider it ridiculous, was my "Bruno's revenge."
I've been angry about the neighbor's dumping a ton of snow pressed against the gate, angry about shoveling it out at midnight so we can get into the house, angry that I still can't use the man gate, angry that even after shoveling it out he sees fit to block the gate with his trailer and snowmobile.
The physical labour locked me into the white noise in my head. It expelled my rage and accomplished something positive.

Click images for desktop size: "An Impossible Dream" by Sweibel Last night I went out with the dogs to tour the house, like we do every night. I bought them inside and back out to get the mail. I have to use the car gate to do this now and while the gentle dog and the giant dog are getting better at it they still can't be 100% trusted outside. So I went back out to get the mail and was shocked to see that the snow mobile was parked so close to the gate I had to climb over it to get out.
I came back inside enraged. I know that I have to let the rage out or it turns into dark fury so I complained. I got responses that I didn't anticipate.
I went back, climbed the snow mobile and knocked on his door, filled with undisapated rage justified with ludicrous "facts", like the fire department can't get into the house, an ambulance and how he had no right to dictate what times we were allowed to come and go.
Angrier still that I still don't feel that this is malicious more that this guy is such an ass he doesn't think or care about others.
Luckily he didn't answer the door. I think he was asleep and I didn't press it. I wasn't that angry yet. That's the furious parts job, to be irrational.
This morning I dealt partially with the snow. When the snow stops I'll finish the rest of it, if I've time.
When cleaning the car I was surprised that it was coated all over with ice. There'd been no rain and the temperature has not gone above freezing, the car hadn't been moved in 3 and half days, so I'm bewildered. My only guess is that the sun shone yesterday. I guess it heated the glass and metal enough to melt stuff and then it refroze. Its just a guess.
When my brain isn't filled with white noise its filled with thoughts like that. Those thoughts always lead to other thoughts like that.
The noise is better, calmer.
Maybe its because I'm dumb. I'm the kind of dumb who believes people are smarter than me because they say they're smarter than me. It takes a lot to change my mind.

Posted by David at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Returning the Sphere" by Michael Parkes My friend goes back to work today.
Feel rather blank about that. She made this a happy holiday. I fell way behind in my self assigned chores but had nothing but memorable fun.
I think the dogs will miss her being about even more than I will.
Predicted horrid weather did not really materialize. No ice storm. So she'll go in and I'll take the dogs for a long walk and everything will settle back into place. The dogs will have the hardest time getting back onto the non-holiday schedule.
I know its been a good holiday because I have a morbid fear of taking out the garbage tomorrow.

We watched an interesting movie the other day, "Wendy and
Click image for desktop size: "Scar Nebula" by NASA Lucy". I don't think I liked it much.
Its about a girl who is traveling by car from Muncie, Indiana; going to Alaska to find a new frontier, a new life with just her and her dog, Lucy. Wendy's plans are vague. She takes employment advice from a drunken reprobate who dances around a bonfire while exhorting the other reprobates with stories of past drunkenness and destruction.
She sleeps in her car that night after calculating her meager finances. She's awakened by the store security guard who tells her that she has to move her car. It won't start. She grinds it. It sounds like a blown head gasket, but no one seems to know this.
She eats and waits for a garage to open. When she goes to feed the dog she discovers she's out of dog food. She goes to the local grocery store, ties Lucy to the bike rack while she goes inside.
Click images for desktop size: "The Wolf" by Wallpaper Collection Wendy gets busted by some nerdo high school kid for shoplifting two cans of dog food. The kid insists that they call the cops. The cops take her away ignoring her pleas about her dog, who is still tied up in front.
Several hours later she's released. She has to pay a fifty dollar fine. Cops being the jerks they like to be let her take a bus back to find her dog. Lucy's gone.
The rest of the film plot is about Wendy trying to find Lucy and to get her car running. This is probably enough plot for a movie. What's frightening is that the theme of the movie is the intense vulnerability of twenty-ish Wendy. One person is modestly kind to her, the security guard who made her move on. His kindness is manifested in directions to the dog pound and then by letting her use his mobile to call the pound even going so far as to let her give them his number if there's word on Lucy.
The rest of the world, her family, the people on the street, the sun, the moon and the star, the garage mechanic could care less about her devastating plight. They all have their own lives and there is the pervading ill feeling that they are all just an unforeseen incident away from joining Wendy in her fall from stability.
Vulnerability, lack of stability and the lack of a caring world, where victims can only victimize each other and dreams are gambles and well meaning promises that cannot be kept.
Its a sad film. Well done for the budget. Slow but interesting enough to keep watching. Nothing dramatically tragic happens in the movie which makes it sadder still. Its a movie that's too easy. Its like watching the legacy of George W Bush, the train wrecks of the lives of the common man.

Somehow that movie made me think of the greatest tragedy of the 21st Century. The loss of our free press. A very systematic destruction caused by the freedom of the press being exploited by the rich. The constant dumbing down of America and the world.
Journalism used to be nobel. Reporters used to work on stories. The people trusted the press to blandly report staggering facts. We all knew the press was manipulated. One of the few scenes I liked in "Citizen Kane: was when he had the two
Click images for desktop size: "A Walk In Time" by n0rcalguy headlines prepared for election day. One read, "KANE WINS" while the other read "FRAUD AT POLLS". We were trained to look past that, to interpret and refine. Only the "other guy" was stupid enough to fall for the obvious ploys.
In the 60's guys like Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson raised journalism to an art form.
They worked with unflagging energy, visiting the places, interviewing the people, assembling the facts from the phantasmagoria of conflicting views and distilled it to a vivid narrative that had the power and purity of fiction. But it was real. Almost too real to bear.
Capote's "In Cold Blood" showed the power of the "true crime" novel. All the facts and the words were real. The emotions, the words, the actions, the emotions were all real, verified and accurate.
At about the same time Tom Wolfe was also working on the "new" journalism. He produced some interesting work. (Although I'm still trying to understand what the surfers in his South Bay surf story were actually saying when they used the slang term "panthers" to describe non-surfers. It a word I've never heard used. I don't know if he misheard them or if they were having some one day joke, perhaps at Wolfe's expense.)
It culminated with the brilliant "Electric Kool Aid Acid Test" describing the life of Ken Kesey and Jack Cassidy, two giants of fiction. One a writer of not insignificant talent and the other a character transformed by Jack Kerouac into one of the great fictional characters of all time. Wolfe lived with them, reported on them and wrote a non-fiction book that burst with drama, reality and perception.
While Capote's book left him an emotional wreck unable to follow it up Wolfe's no less interesting but emotionally safer work enabled him to continue to the present day.

Click images for desktop size: "Spirit" by Seven Edge The west coast had another journalist - Hunter Thompson wrote "Hell's Angels". He realized his job was not to create characters but to divine and then to define the character, conveying them with a clarity that infected the milieu. He worked not with boring stats and charts but with a vivid present that made the people even more real than they actually were.
Thompson then went on to create Gonzo Journalism with his serialized masterwork, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas".
The success of these new journalists didn't go unnoticed by other aspiring reporters. But their work was too hard. Not only was it necessary to find the story but then you had to meet all those people, distill the facts, report the facts (which used to be the usual reporters job) but then you had to build these facts into a narrative, adding drama and imagery. and somehow avoiding those moments were real life is not as exciting as drama.
It was a lot easier simply to create the whole story under the old justification that "someplace out there there really is somebody like this". Not only was this a tidier mode of reporting and story telling, it was quicker and much less stressful. Things could progress the way they should go instead of the way they might.
So we had all the scandals of award winning reporters actually just writing pure fiction. It created some scandals but it still is going on today.
So reporters got lazier. They saw the ambitious caught in their own scandal, they saw hacks get TV shows that replaced facts with opinion. They saw guys doing less work and getting more money while their employers refused to publish the big real stories for fear of offending advertisers and because it didn't fit the way the rich thought the world should be.
Now we have the internet. Which seems to be nothing but personal bias. Its easy to find a news source that fits your personal prejudices and easier still to find sites to revile. The reporting is sloppy most of the time. No one investigates or digs through to truth. They seem to start out with a concept they want to prove and look for the facts that prove it while ignoring any facts that might disprove.
The insanity of this was bred in the law. OJ Simpson is an easy example. We all "know" he is guilty. It used to be that only an idiot would dispute the verdict of judge and jury. But California passed a
Click images for desktop size: "The Long Leg" by Edward Hopper law that said it didn't matter if you were found innocent, we could apply a new standard for the civil courts that ignored the criminal courts decision to redefine the truth.
Now we weren't idiots we were people who were capable of deciding the truth because we were told there were several black and white truths that were ours for the choosing. News became nothing more than entertainment to feed us the different truths we wanted. Pick one.
The free press gave way to entertainment and laziness that was rewarded more handsomely than those fools who put themselves at risk, who dug and fought to find the one truth.
Sad stuff for us. The end result is that a movie gets made about a nice girl who loves her dog and discovers that the world is nothing but an uncaring place where what we are no longer matters and love has to be discarded for dollars and pence.
A documentary.
I think its just the end result of a press that ignores that our leaders have turned us all into war criminals who torture and violate all the principals that used to make us the good guys. They bow to the pressure instead of standing tough armed only with the truth and an unquenched desire to reveal that truth to us all.
So we suffer and we suddenly can only notice our own suffering and not the anguish of the man next to us.

The sun is out. Its time to take the dogs for a long walk. They don't like the fact that the world changes on human whims. They'll still laugh, are laughing now.
So am I.
Its just harder to notice when I do it.

Posted by David at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click images for desktop size: "Modern Princess" by Unknown Its been a pretty good year.
Too much moving back and forth but a good year despite all that.
My friends birthday was sort of dull for her. It was fine for me. Her only present from me she got too early. She had to go with me to the post office to pick it up and when we got there, despite my admonitions she read the box label . . . so I let her have it. The gift I mean. It was a set of knives. Not
Click image: "My Life And Yours" by Unknown very romantic but the sort of thing I think she likes . . .
We watched the klazzik, to our minds anyway, Japanese movie, "Dog Star".
Its a simple movie with an exquisite conceit. A blind man is struck by a truck. His seeing eye dog, Shiro, survives. The blind man has not done enough good deeds to get into heaven. He decides to grant his best friend, Shiro, a request, a good deed. Shiro wants to be a human so he can go see the little girl who raised him.
Shiro becomes an adult male human, but still a dog inside. They avoid most of the cheap dog stuff laffs and let Shiro be a man who is a dog inside.
He meets his old owner and is overwhelmed with his joy. One of my fave scenes is when he asks her if she is happy now. When she says yes Shiro gets up and runs full speed around the school playground.
The scene that breaks me down is when Shiro, after all of their adventures, sits with the girl on the beach and finally convinces her that he is not just the love of her life but is truly her old dog Shiro, more than anything her devoted friend.
There's a shot from behind where we see the girl sitting next to, not the man Shiro, but the dog Shiro as they stare into the clear night sky. It kills me even thinking about it. Its echoed later in the film with a heart rending sadness and beauty that is unshakeable.
I wish all my dogs could talk to me more fully instead of their struggles to communicate with me and my thick headed too human demeanor.
Its the end of the year today.
I can't come up with more than the three films I've already discussed as the best of the year. "A Man Who Was Superman," "The Underdog
Click images for desktop size: "Patent OfficeKnight", and "JCVD." I know the point is to list five at least but any other films in the list would just diminish the major accomplishments of these three. "A Man Who Was Superman" is already in the top 25 of my all time favorites. I still can recall vivid scenes that make little sense outside the film. The sense being explaining their power - Superman standing at a garden hose covering himself with water. Five teenagers struggling to lift a car all wearing tropical cheap Hawaiian shirts. Its that kind of movie. Beauty is there and makes itself beautiful by recreating our world in a vivid way that time makes us ignore.
For music . . . As doomed as I found Alkaline Trio and their putrid show the Album "Agony & Irony" was excellent. The only guy who has yet to disappoint is Jack White. The Raconteurs, "Consolers of the Lonely" was fine and contained a few songs that I want to learn so I can dazzle people.
The best album was a reissue. I've only had scratched up copies of Gene Vincent's "The Day the World Turned Blue" and "A Million Shades of Blue". The high compression and tics and pops have become a part of the music. The CD re-issue of both albums is impressive. The remastering is excellent but its Gene himself who devours my soul.
The man could sing. He knew how to sell a song. Most of the music on the disk is trivial, at time horrendous like the 8 minute hippie dirge "Tush Hog" is unlistenable to me.
Even in the trivial numbers Gene displays a compelling emotive power that almost thinks the music is good. It makes me wish he hadn't died a fat drunk. But if he hadn't would have have been able to compose and ding like he did. The closest I can compare him to is Charlie "Bird" Parker. If their lives weren't paeans to self destructiveness could they have heard the sounds they heard and been driven to make us understand?
I still know a lot of guys who'll punch you out for even hinting that Gene wasn't the greatest thing to ever happen in this life. As much as I love him some have taken umbrage with me. I'm not that violent about it. I just think that if you can't be carried away by the beauty of Blue that Gene carried within him its only sad for you.


Click images for desktop size: "Another Face" by Unknown For the New Year you always need some "Auld Lang Syne" for your party. Here's three.
Guy Lambardo and the Royal Canadians version is the standard, almost the original.
Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies bring a new funny life to the old tune. It rocks okay.
Lou Rawls brings a jaw dropping version. Its a solo accapela trip. I never new Rawls was this cool.

Best wishes for all into the New Year. Especially my friend, my friends and my puppies, past present and future.

Posted by David at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click images for desktop size: "Lost in the Fun" by Unknown Today is my friends birthday. I think she celebrated it a day early by staying in bed the whole day and reading a mystery suspense thriller book from a series she's interested in. Michael Connelly, I think.