Of all its lives past and all the places I could go
All of it sudden it feels like fall; the wind blows like dead leaves even when they're green on the trees. Autolycus has claimed my knees as his personal heat source. The crickets are aggressively loud, which is an improvement on the bass-heavy music of the upstairs neighbors which has been thumping on and off since the afternoon.
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yhlee sent me what he described as a sea-themed bagatelle, which on arrival turned out to be a pencil sketch of a mermaid by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law. I need more picture frames. And more bookshelves. Maybe I just need more walls. It is coming up on a decade since my library was really unpacked.
I was delighted to see that Tubi is currently offering my favorite bog body movie, Michael Almereyda's The Eternal (1998). I was introduced to it byalexxkay in 2018 and loved it at once, although even then it was obviously in desperate need of a decent home release. The director, the main cast and crew are all still around; I feel some nice distributor of cult films should be able to commission some essays or commentaries and interviews and for God's sake some cover art that represents with any accuracy the film's dream-steeped deadpan. It got hung out to dry hard by its studio. It remains far more obscure than it deserves to be.
I had never heard of JewBelong before they started putting up billboards on Mass. Ave., but I am afraid that since the first one I saw asserted, "At one point there were six million people who never thought a few hateful comments would lead anywhere," it did not make me feel welcomed into a non-denominationally inclusive community so much as it inclined me toward vandalism because more victim-blaming is the last thing the popular reception of the Holocaust needs.spatch spotted another apparently reminding that secular Jews were sent to the death camps too, as if pretending it's news that the scientific racism of antisemitism doesn't care about observance. From this statistically limited sampling, I gather the organization believes that American Jews are complacent in their assimilation and unaware of the dangers of antisemitism, which rather runs counter to their website's claim not to want to shame their readers for what they may or may not know about Judaism and also seems to me, especially during the High Holidays which have become spikes in necessary security measures for synagogues, fundamentally incorrect. I have decided not to engage with their internet presence further, but I am not looking forward to seeing the billboards again the next time I go to Porter Square.
I was reading Laurence Yep's "Dragons I Have Known and Loved," the speech he gave as Guest of Honor at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in 2010, and while I know that characters are really not their authors fissioned off into suitable narratives, when he prefaced his experience of a glider flight which he took dubiously as research for Dragon of the Lost Sea (1982) with "Now I had always been happy with my relationship to gravity. I did my job by staying on the ground, and it did its job by keeping me there," I heard Squeaky Lau so strongly that I am trying to locate a copy of Mountain Light (1985) as we speak.
I would still really like to be rested, or nourished, or un-stressed enough to write about movies, but it may be that the most I can say about Carbine Williams (1952) is that while its casting of James Stewart, Jean Hagen, and Wendell Corey did ensure that I was never bored with its actors, in terms of dramatic interest it really shouldn't have been able to waste the surefire American weirdness of a protagonist rehabilitating himself as a gunsmith while serving a thirty-year term for having shot someone.
yhlee sent me what he described as a sea-themed bagatelle, which on arrival turned out to be a pencil sketch of a mermaid by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law. I need more picture frames. And more bookshelves. Maybe I just need more walls. It is coming up on a decade since my library was really unpacked.I was delighted to see that Tubi is currently offering my favorite bog body movie, Michael Almereyda's The Eternal (1998). I was introduced to it by
alexxkay in 2018 and loved it at once, although even then it was obviously in desperate need of a decent home release. The director, the main cast and crew are all still around; I feel some nice distributor of cult films should be able to commission some essays or commentaries and interviews and for God's sake some cover art that represents with any accuracy the film's dream-steeped deadpan. It got hung out to dry hard by its studio. It remains far more obscure than it deserves to be.I had never heard of JewBelong before they started putting up billboards on Mass. Ave., but I am afraid that since the first one I saw asserted, "At one point there were six million people who never thought a few hateful comments would lead anywhere," it did not make me feel welcomed into a non-denominationally inclusive community so much as it inclined me toward vandalism because more victim-blaming is the last thing the popular reception of the Holocaust needs.
spatch spotted another apparently reminding that secular Jews were sent to the death camps too, as if pretending it's news that the scientific racism of antisemitism doesn't care about observance. From this statistically limited sampling, I gather the organization believes that American Jews are complacent in their assimilation and unaware of the dangers of antisemitism, which rather runs counter to their website's claim not to want to shame their readers for what they may or may not know about Judaism and also seems to me, especially during the High Holidays which have become spikes in necessary security measures for synagogues, fundamentally incorrect. I have decided not to engage with their internet presence further, but I am not looking forward to seeing the billboards again the next time I go to Porter Square.I was reading Laurence Yep's "Dragons I Have Known and Loved," the speech he gave as Guest of Honor at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in 2010, and while I know that characters are really not their authors fissioned off into suitable narratives, when he prefaced his experience of a glider flight which he took dubiously as research for Dragon of the Lost Sea (1982) with "Now I had always been happy with my relationship to gravity. I did my job by staying on the ground, and it did its job by keeping me there," I heard Squeaky Lau so strongly that I am trying to locate a copy of Mountain Light (1985) as we speak.
I would still really like to be rested, or nourished, or un-stressed enough to write about movies, but it may be that the most I can say about Carbine Williams (1952) is that while its casting of James Stewart, Jean Hagen, and Wendell Corey did ensure that I was never bored with its actors, in terms of dramatic interest it really shouldn't have been able to waste the surefire American weirdness of a protagonist rehabilitating himself as a gunsmith while serving a thirty-year term for having shot someone.
no subject
They appear to be a real Jewish organization with a disclaimer on their website defending their flip, hip style against charges of disrespect, but it's worded as if their critics are all humorless frum pedants, not cultural coreligionists who think their Holocaust messaging sounds way too much like right-wing gun nuts who like to play gotcha with the canard that no Jew fought back against genocide. They do have a contact form. I suspect I should construct a more coherent communiqué than what the fuck was that I had to look at for Rosh Hashanah?
Here's a silent flip through, for when you have the spoons for it.
Much appreciated!
My beloved Page of Wands is shown playing an instrument akin to a violin or viola.
Nice. May I ask what makes the card so important to you?
I like the use of foxes and big cats for fire.
no subject
Okay, I just read that disclaimer and wow. Wow. That sure is a thing somebody wrote and apparently several other somebodies saw fit to sign off on. I kind of feel like it invites exactly the sort of feedback it's your first instinct to write, but then again, there's very much a "we dare you" tone running through that disclaimer that makes me think their only reaction would be smugness at having provoked outrage.
May I ask what makes the card so important to you?
Oh, gosh. That would take at least one essay, a chapbook, and probably a novella. The short version is that I have a deep affinity for string instruments, especially violins and guitars, a deep affinity for foxes, an abiding love for changeling spirits, and the Page of Wands is variously known as the passionate creation/inspiration card. That really speaks to me at this point because I feel like I'm finally starting to really come out of a fallow creative period that started over ten years ago, when both my health (never great) and my marriage (rocky for most of its duration) disintegrated at an accelerated rate. Through the six years prior, I had managed to establish a regular writing habit that allowed me to be unprecedentedly prolific; what felt like overnight, I was reduced to clawing together barely enough words for school assignments, and sometimes not even that.
I am still not even close to where I was at the beginning of that six year period, but I can see it from here, if that makes sense. The Page of Wands feels like an affirmation from my own subconscious that I'm moving in the right direction as I learn how my creative brain works now.
no subject
It has struck me that I may have found where the Jewish edgelords hang out.
Oh, gosh. That would take at least one essay, a chapbook, and probably a novella.
Well, I'll read all of them.
I am still not even close to where I was at the beginning of that six year period, but I can see it from here, if that makes sense. The Page of Wands feels like an affirmation from my own subconscious that I'm moving in the right direction as I learn how my creative brain works now.
I am glad you have that lighthouse.
*hugs*