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Monday, June 16th, 2008
Sylvia did pretty well with watching Monsieur Verdoux last night, paying attention to the plot and the characters, giving indications she understood what was going on. She lost interest about a half hour before the end of the movie though. (It is 2 hours long.) Before the feature there was a preview for Encounters at the End of the World; Sylvia asked if that was what I had seen the other night and said she wanted to see it, but at home, "So we could make it softer."
posted morning of June 16th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, June 15th, 2008
Here is something I did not know Charlie Chaplin could do: compose excellent scores for a movie soundtrack. He is credited as writer, director, and composer for Monsieur Verdoux; and the music is great. The writing and direction also! Too bad the idea for the movie (which Chaplin bought from Welles) isn't really up to the quality of Chaplin's talent. It seems insubstantial to me, a trifling comedy of manners that Chaplin tries to turn into a fable about capitalism and morality.
posted evening of June 15th, 2008: Respond
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Woo-hoo! My very own day! (Happy Father's Day to those of you who meet the requirements.)
 Our family activity for today was going to be a drive down to the shore and playing on the beach; but alas, the weather is not such as to make that work out well. So instead, we're going to take the train into town this afternoon and watch Monsieur Verdoux at the Flim Forum.
posted morning of June 15th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, June 14th, 2008
I am being continually surprised, as I read Nixonland, at the extent of the racial violence that occurred in America in the early to mid-60's -- and secondarily surprised at myself for being surprised. I am more ignorant of my country's history than I like to think of myself as being. Take for instance the Watts riots -- I have of course heard of these before and had a notion of their importance; but somehow I had assumed they were a concrete event that took place over a week or something at a particular time and place. Come to find out instead that for a period of at least a few years, a large area of Los Angeles was borrderline anarchic and prone to break out in mass violence. Similarly I had no idea of the frequency with which white mobs assembled in Chicago, and for how long that went on. Thanks for schooling me, Mr. Perlstein.
 (And thanks, Edge of the American West bloggers, for giving me inspiration to do some history reading -- I'm finding your this day in history posts fascinating.)
posted morning of June 14th, 2008: Respond
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 So it was, to be clear up front, not a great movie, certainly not in a class with Herzog's great works. It had a lot of visual beauty, and occasional arresting moments of clarity; but it felt to me like Herzog stumbled aimlessly into these moments, like his heart was not in this movie. Still I would recommend the movie, just for the visuals, and the cute fluffy seals. (The portions of the soundtrack which were recordings of seal grunts were fantastically good; the music portions were hit or miss.)
posted morning of June 14th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, June 13th, 2008
Friday the 13th falls on a Friday this month! Best bet's probably to stay indoors, under the covers.
posted morning of June 13th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
One of the first things I thought of in response to Dave's post about authoritarian "followers", was Michael Verhöven's 1991 movie, The Nasty Girl. Reacquainted myself with it through the providence of Wikipædia; I had forgotten it was based on a true story. The woman whose experience was the basis for the movie wrote (in 1985) a book about her town's history, Widerstand und Erfolgung Am Beispiel Passaus 1933-1939, which I am a little shocked to see has never been printed in English (that I can find).
posted evening of June 10th, 2008: 2 responses
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Remember what I said a couple of weeks ago about it not really being that hot? That is no longer operative; it's really brutal, and has been for a couple of days now. But! Supposed to break tonight! And sure enough the rain is pouring down. Hopefully the latter half of this week will be a little more acceptable.
...And yes, it's much more bearable now temperature-wise. Still humid though. We had a really massive storm last night that brought down trees on people's cars and houses in the area -- our immediate neighborhood seems to have been pretty well spared.
posted evening of June 10th, 2008: Respond
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The high walls that enclose the cold mosque courtyard are made from massive stones that are blackened with age but undiminished; the icy funeral stone chills a person just to look at it... It is as if this courtyard -- these colossal stones, these giant walls -- existed for no other purpose than to make a person feel helpless and bereft.-- Fethiye Çetin, My Grandmother
I had been wondering, since I first read about this book, what the form of the memoir would be. It appears it will be shifting back and forth between Çetin's adult life and her childhood, and her grandmother's childhood -- this works very well, at least the amount of it I've read thus far.
posted evening of June 10th, 2008: Respond
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Today I (whose reading material is almost entirely novels) bought two works of non-fiction to occupy myself with in the coming weeks. The first, which I'm reading this evening, is Fethiye Çetin's My Grandmother: A Memoir; when I finish this I will embark on Rick Perlstein's considerably more voluminous Nixonland. I was attracted to Çetin's memoir (besides by the Maureen Freely association) because I want to learn more about the genocide in Armenia. I have always had a vague notion of it as a historical event but no real sense of how it had happened or what its repercussions had been. It seems to me (though this could just be because I have been paying more attention to Turkey since I got interested in Pamuk) like it is getting more discussion in recent years than it did, say, ten years ago -- Freely's introduction* seems to bear that out. Freely gives a very concise history of the events in Armenia (which to my surprise, does not refer in this context to the small former SSR by that name, but to a large portion of the modern country of Turkey.) She also speaks briefly about how Çetin came to write this memoir, and about contemporary clashes between Turkish nationalists and people who have attempted to air the story of these events. She does not mention whether Çetin herself has been a target; I hope she has not. The only historical events I have much of a handle on that seem analogous to the genocide in Armenia, are the genocides committed against the native peoples of America. I wonder if that is a productive avenue of thinking -- maybe I will float it by the Edge of the West folks.
*Something I am curious about -- Freely mentions the author several times in the introduction, and always by her full name, never an honorific plus last name, or last name alone. This sounds kind of awkward to my ears and I'm wondering if it's something to do with Turkish custom. Anybody know?
posted evening of June 10th, 2008: Respond
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Dr. Holbo came up with a 
interesting 