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.
