I'll do things to you that are beyond all known philosophies

[sovay]

Hell. Usually I write up my trips to D.C. while waiting for various forms of public transit, but this time I was very kindly dropped off at the airport by strange_selkie and darthrami (and my two-year-old godchild!), made my flight with less than five minutes to spare thanks to a patdown in the course of which my boarding pass and driver's license temporarily went missing, and then dozed achily through most of the flight as well as the sitting on the tarmac while weather conditions in Boston dicked around with takeoff, with the result that I think I am too tired to finish even the low-rent, spacy Cliff's Notes version. Just imagine it's all epigrammatic and evocative. I'm going to bed.

It turned out to be a good thing I brought the flat cap to show off to Selkie, because on Friday night I got off the Metro at West Falls Church to find a brisk sharp snow glittering out of the sky and my winter hat on a banister in Lexington; I wound up wearing it for the rest of the trip. It's actually very comfortable and chimes with my scarf. Also, I can take it anywhere and it neither sheds nor tries to eat anyone else's haberdashery.

My god-daughter is tall, fair-haired and dark-eyed, and speaks in short imperative bursts of non-grammar like Animal of the Electric Mayhem; it takes her about a day to remember who I am and start spontaneously grabbing me around the knees, after which she still doesn't really want to kiss me goodnight, but on Saturday she headbutted me and tried to eat my nose, which I'm taking as mostly the same thing. I brought her a picture book and a poem about Wittgenstein, only one of which I'd written myself. She put it on top of her toy stove. He appears to be having philosophical differences with the vegetable steamer.

(I was staying with rushthatspeaks and B., but even birthday-celebrating two-year-olds have early enough bedtimes that I was around for the ceremony on l both nights; she didn't want me to read to her, but she insisted on having me there while her mothers read. "Sit on the rocking horse," Selkie directed, seeing me casting around for somewhere to settle. I thought: Honour, riches, marriage-blessing and said nothing.)

The funny thing about Barbarella (1968) is not that it's an enjoyably culty piece of classic sci-fi camp that gave us the names of one band I love and one band I know only through pop reputation, but that whole stretches of it are effectively futuristic, alien and alternatingly eerie and delightful, with terrific art direction from which a suprising amount of worldbuilding can be convincingly extrapolated. It's the only film I've ever seen where the indescribably decadent and wicked city actually feels like it, full of matter-of-fact sexual and emotional violence, where all the children are feral and predatory until the survivors are recaptured and introduced into society and rank is based on inventiveness of cruelty. There is a labyrinth both Jim Henson and Wayne Barlowe must have seen, where the outcasts wander, studying, lamenting, kissing and caressing even as they become part of its walls. There are the creepiest dolls I have ever seen—their teeth are the crowded splinters of deep-sea fish, snapping mechanically—and a drowning man being smoked in a hookah. There is also a great sense of fun, because the film knows when it's being tongue-in-cheek and when it's being actually quite hot and when it's just dropped in from Planet WTF. (rachelmanija, this film has parakeets of doom.) Milo O'Shea is one of the great unsung mad scientists of cinema. ("The Earth has lost its last great dictator!") Anita Pallenberg's first appearance, enigmatically rescuing Barbarella with small spinning knives and Joan Greenwood's curling velvet voice, is simply brain-melting. And Jane Fonda carries off both outfits and lines of dialogue that should never have worked, even in a future where no one ever seems to wear pants. Oh, right, and there's Marcel Marceau and very embarrassed revolutionaries and a blind angel everyone wants to sleep with. Rush had been wanting to show me this movie for a year. It was the correct way to spend Friday night.

The birthday party itself was at Silver Stars Gymnastics, where a quantity of children between the ages of one and five could bounce off, clamber over, and otherwise hurl themselves upon various brightly colored surfaces and nobody cared if I sat on a balance beam in the corner and read. (It was one of the ways I stayed awake this weekend. I haven't really slept since before Arisia.) Occasionally something very cute would run by at high Doppler volume. When they had tired themselves out, there was cake.

I could have done with more nineteenth century in the language, but I loved everything about Lev AC Rosen's All Men of Genius (2011) except its handling of the Malvolio character. Okay, never mind. This one is going to be a post.

Without exception, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Medea (1969) is the best film I have seen of a classical myth. This would also have needed to be a post, but Rush has written it up so I don't have to. It is gorgeous, violent and estranging, true to the differences of its world in ways that I had not thought anyone, even one of Derek Jarman's heroes, had filmed. It has sparagmos. It has bronze mirrors. It has Maria Callas. I remembered Medea was the granddaughter of Helios just as the sun began to speak.

I did not expect to be able to eat Thai papaya salad at nine o'clock at night and not be terribly ill, but it was a pleasant surprise. Pass the limes.

Thanks to Rami and Selkie, I have now seen "A Study in Pink" and "The Great Game" from the first series of Sherlock—I have it on their authority (and also the internet's) that "The Blind Banker" is not worth watching, unless you really like Orientalism and bad plotting. I had not so much avoided the series as not actively sought it out in part because I wasn't sure whether Steven Moffat's characterization of Holmes as "a high-functioning sociopath" would work for me. The short answer: by the end of the first episode, yes. Martin Freeman's Watson, on the other hand, I liked straight off.

Coming back through security at Baltimore, I had the world's most apologetic TSA employee; he said anxiously that the full-body scans were being done very differently now and burst into surprised laughter (which he also apologized for) when I told him I wasn't worried about getting cancer or being turned into porn, I just really didn't want to be scanned, thank you. He seemed aware that he had an awful job and was trying to be nonthreatening about it. Considering how much more awkward he seemed about arranging the patdown than I was in asking for it, I think he succeeded.

Have a photograph of me with my godchild, taken on Saturday night:



Tomorrow, work.

Comments

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

That's a very sweet photograph. Thanks for sharing!

I'm glad for the flat cap, cute kid, and other good things, such as your safe return. I feel as if there's more I should say, but I'm having trouble thinking it through. I'm sorry you're exhausted, and hope you can find sleep tonight.

I did not expect to be able to eat Thai papaya salad at nine o'clock at night and not be terribly ill, but it was a pleasant surprise. Pass the limes.

I'm pleased for your pleasant surprise. I'd try to pass a lime, but they don't seem to email very well.

I'm also pleased you encountered a polite TSA employee.

I've never seen Barbarella* nor any of Sherlock. It sounds as if I should, although I'm pretty much useless at getting round to watching anything--for a week or more I've had the first episode of Dúshlán: An Saighdiúr which is an Irish-language documentary about the conflict in Afghanistan in which a friend of mine has the primary speaking role, sat on my hard drive and I've not managed to watch more than the opening.

ETA: Love the LJ-cut text!

*Parakeets of doom? I can't believe I've not yet seen a film, seven years older than myself, that would contain such a thing.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Awww. That's a lovely picture. Welcome back.

He appears to be having philosophical differences with the vegetable steamer.

Hee!

"Sit on the rocking horse," ... I thought: Honour, riches, marriage-blessing and said nothing.

Lovely. An Easter egg.

I truly need to see Medea now.

Nine

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Oh, Barbarella is a guilty pleasure of mine.

One of my favourite lines ever is: "The angel is aerodynamically sound. It's just a question of morale."

I do like that maze. And the ice-yacht. And I'm guessing Matmos is one of your favourite bands?

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I still have to see more than bits of Brbarella. I do recall stumbling across an review of it, in a book of essays on design, that argued it was more genuinely futuristic than 2001.

[kenjari.livejournal.com]

I think I have to see Barbarella - it sounds both weirder and more fun than I had been led to believe. I also love one of the bands who got their name from it, but I'm not sure it's the same one.
I'm glad you liked Sherlock. My friend hca brought it over when she came out to help after the car accident. She showed me the same two episodes, having the same opinion of The Blind Banker as your friends. I loved it - it turned out to be the perfect thing for the situation, since it forced me to think about something else.

[irisbleufic.livejournal.com]

I'm going to have to track down that Pasolini film. The only example of his work I've ever seen is his adaptation of some of the Canterbury Tales. At least I think that was his...

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

Well, except for the work thing...

If gods and reapers start trooping through the nursery, I'm calling you.

It was a good visit.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

Wow, so much. A lot of lovely things (especially your godchild).

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a lovely and interestingly serendipitous weekend.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

VERY sweet photo.

And wow, I've somehow never seen a writeup of Barbarella, and now I MUST SEE IT