Cut through the ice among birds and seals
Today was full of snow. Very gentle snow, the kind that falls softly and steadily and spirals on the wind and makes a pile of garbage bags in a parking lot look like the hedgerows of a winter field; it started last night while ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I were at the 'Thon so that we walked through its cut-paper whirl a few times this morning, finally stopped around nightfall. I am hoping it does not all suddenly melt with a new seasonal spike tomorrow. I am enjoying the old-fashioned feel of New England in February.
It is my hope to write up the marathon tomorrow when I have had some sleep. Until then, links.
1. Maybe I'd feel differently if I had seen Downfall (2004) rather than doing my best to avoid the ranting Hitler meme, but it is a little strange to me to see Bruno Ganz remembered for that film rather than the role I always associate him with, the angel Damiel in Wings of Desire (1987). I imprinted more on Otto Sander's Cassiel, but that doesn't mean I couldn't appreciate his dark-haired, more wistful companion who quite literally runs away and joins the circus, falling for love, falling into love, trading the wings and armor and overcoat of his immortality for a terrible flannel jacket and a hat that doesn't match either, the ability to taste coffee and bleed, see in color, tell a lie. That was one of the first movies I loved and I loved all the actors in it who seemed inseparable from their characters, the ancient storyteller walking the vanished city, the trapeze artist in her stage feathers, Peter Falk. I saw Ganz in little else, but I don't think it would have mattered if I did. It was entirely believable that before he was an actor, he watched the world.
2.a_reasonable_man writes thoughtfully and beautifully about walls, Berlin included.
3. I had not known about the mummies of Cladh Hallan before tonight. It's another one of the ideas that would have terrified me when I was small: the icon of a body made from other bodies, bog-preserved and curated for centuries before their interment under new construction, strangers interlocked into family. "The results show that bones came from different people, none of whom even shared the same mother . . . The female is made from body parts that date to around the same time period. But isotopic dating showed that the male mummy is made from people who died a few hundred years apart." It feels ancestral, but I don't know. It was the Bronze Age. The rocks of South Uist are the oldest in the British Isles.
4. I have been listening repeatedly to Desperate Journalist's "Hollow." This was true even before I read the above-linked article, though I think they may have gotten a little mixed together since—frost in her hair and sand in her shoes, skirts the coastline, iron-black and blue.
5. I am deeply charmed by this picture of Samuel West embroidering a cabbage.
I slept very little on Saturday night, but I dreamed of tiny slugs carved into gingersnap cookies passing a candy cinnamon heart back and forth among one another. It was a kind of stop-motion animation. In real life I have no idea how it would be achieved, but in the dream it was adorable.
spatch and I were at the 'Thon so that we walked through its cut-paper whirl a few times this morning, finally stopped around nightfall. I am hoping it does not all suddenly melt with a new seasonal spike tomorrow. I am enjoying the old-fashioned feel of New England in February.It is my hope to write up the marathon tomorrow when I have had some sleep. Until then, links.
1. Maybe I'd feel differently if I had seen Downfall (2004) rather than doing my best to avoid the ranting Hitler meme, but it is a little strange to me to see Bruno Ganz remembered for that film rather than the role I always associate him with, the angel Damiel in Wings of Desire (1987). I imprinted more on Otto Sander's Cassiel, but that doesn't mean I couldn't appreciate his dark-haired, more wistful companion who quite literally runs away and joins the circus, falling for love, falling into love, trading the wings and armor and overcoat of his immortality for a terrible flannel jacket and a hat that doesn't match either, the ability to taste coffee and bleed, see in color, tell a lie. That was one of the first movies I loved and I loved all the actors in it who seemed inseparable from their characters, the ancient storyteller walking the vanished city, the trapeze artist in her stage feathers, Peter Falk. I saw Ganz in little else, but I don't think it would have mattered if I did. It was entirely believable that before he was an actor, he watched the world.
2.
a_reasonable_man writes thoughtfully and beautifully about walls, Berlin included.3. I had not known about the mummies of Cladh Hallan before tonight. It's another one of the ideas that would have terrified me when I was small: the icon of a body made from other bodies, bog-preserved and curated for centuries before their interment under new construction, strangers interlocked into family. "The results show that bones came from different people, none of whom even shared the same mother . . . The female is made from body parts that date to around the same time period. But isotopic dating showed that the male mummy is made from people who died a few hundred years apart." It feels ancestral, but I don't know. It was the Bronze Age. The rocks of South Uist are the oldest in the British Isles.
4. I have been listening repeatedly to Desperate Journalist's "Hollow." This was true even before I read the above-linked article, though I think they may have gotten a little mixed together since—frost in her hair and sand in her shoes, skirts the coastline, iron-black and blue.
5. I am deeply charmed by this picture of Samuel West embroidering a cabbage.
I slept very little on Saturday night, but I dreamed of tiny slugs carved into gingersnap cookies passing a candy cinnamon heart back and forth among one another. It was a kind of stop-motion animation. In real life I have no idea how it would be achieved, but in the dream it was adorable.
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That picture of Samuel West sewing a cabbage is very random and great, though.
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Thank you! I've been trying. I am still dead on my feet when awake, apparently, but the gesture has to count for something.
That picture of Samuel West sewing a cabbage is very random and great, though.
It really made me happy.
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I'm not surprised. I just think it's weird! I would not have expected Downfall to eclipse Wings of Desire, even in the Anglosphere.
(Not least because as far as I know - never watched one - that meme depends on different subtitles, and well, if your language is German those are kind of pointless.)
(Makes sense. I have never watched one either.)
Personally, I first saw him in The Marquise of O by Eric Rohmer, with Edith Clever as the Marquise, and he was the only one who could pull off someone who is, shall we say, one of Kleist's more problematic characters.
If you recommend it outside of being shown it in literature class, I'll watch it for him.
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I would have appreciated the cabbage embroiderer more had I not formed the mental image of him embroidering an actual cabbage - which, yes, would have been - well, unexpected, except that apparently I expected it.
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The description of snow above is so lovely... I want to wrap myself in it like a blanket, and contemplate hedgehogs.
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You're welcome! I just find them haunting.
I would have appreciated the cabbage embroiderer more had I not formed the mental image of him embroidering an actual cabbage - which, yes, would have been - well, unexpected, except that apparently I expected it.
I'm very sorry. I'm sure someone in the history of performance art has, in fact, embroidered a cabbage.
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I'm glad it's not just me.
(I'm charmed, though, that Ganz's response to the Downfall memes was more or less "Oh, young people today are so clever and creative!")
That is nice to know!
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I've heard excellent things about it. I just feel I am unlikely to want to watch a Hitler-centric movie any time soon.
SW & BG
https://twitter.com/exitthelemming/status/1096742158458064896
Re: SW & BG
Yes. Thank you for that.
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*sends tea*
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So there's a passage from Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960) that has haunted me since I was six or seven:
I turned the canoe around and started back toward the opening. Above it, on a deep ledge that ran from one side of the room to the other, my gaze fell upon a row of strange figures. There must have been two dozen of them standing against the black wall. They were as tall as I, with long arms and legs and short bodies made of reeds and clothed in gull feathers. Each one had eyes fashioned of round or oblong disks of abalone shell, but the rest of their faces were blank. The eyes glittered down at me, moved as the light on the water moved and was reflected upon them. They were more alive than the eyes of those who live.
In the middle of the group was a seated figure, a skeleton. It sat leaning against the wall with its knees drawn up and in its fingers, which were raised to its mouth, a flute of pelican bone.
There were other things there on the ledge, in the shadows among the standing figures, but having drifted far back in the room, I again paddled toward the opening. I had forgotten that the tide was coming in. To my great surprise the opening had narrowed. It was too small now for me to get through. We would have to stay there in the room until the tide went out, until dawn came.
I paddled to the far end of the cave. I did not look back at the glittering eyes of the figures on the ledge. I crouched in the bottom of the canoe and watched the shaft of light grow weak. The opening out to the sea grew smaller and finally disappeared. Night came and a star showed through the crevice overhead.
This star passed out of sight and another took its place. The tide lifted the canoe higher in the room, and as the water lapped against the walls it sounded like the soft music of a flute. It played many tunes throughout the long night and I slept little, watching the stars change. I knew that the skeleton who sat on the ledge playing his flute was one of my ancestors, and the others with the glittering eyes, though only images, were too, but still I was sleepless and afraid.
With the first light, another high tide almost setting, we left the cave. I did not look up at those standing quietly on the ledge or at the flute player playing for them, but paddled fast out into the morning sea. Nor did I look back.
That's what I thought of, as soon as I read of the mummies. Only sunwise instead of the sea. I don't know how I would find out. (Don't go looking.)
*sends tea*
*returns empty tea box rattling slightly with vertebrae inside, it wasn't like the guy was using that spine, all right?*
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I really wanted to see that! It was one of the movies on my FilmStruck watchlist that I never got around to. It always looked fascinating.
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The female skeleton is actually even weirder than that article describes – she had two incisors removed (after death) and was buried with one in each hand, and despite calling her the "female" skeleton, DNA suggests the skull belonged to a male (I mean, as much as DNA can identify lived experience, so take that for what it's worth).
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May I ask what came of it?
It does leave open the question of if there's many more similarly Frankenstein'd bodies out there, since how often would anyone bother to DNA test multiple parts of a skeleton?
Yes! I'm hoping people will start to look.
The female skeleton is actually even weirder than that article describes – she had two incisors removed (after death) and was buried with one in each hand
I saw that! (I read several articles after the one I linked.) That really feels like magic to me.
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I was teaching a class about it; here's the old link, if you're interested.
I saw that! (I read several articles after the one I linked.) That really feels like magic to me.
It does! It so clearly had to mean something to the people, though we'll likely never know what exactly. I love things like that, where so clearly there's some meaning there but one that has to remain sealed.
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Nice!