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.

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.