Author: Allegra

Born when atmospheric carbon was 316 PPM. Settled on MST country since 1997. Parent, grandparent.

The glue

I think my family is glued together with movies. Last night, Jeff and I watched Support Your Local Sheriff for about the nth time, but it was Keith’s first time watching, and I don’t watch movies the same way I used to, so I was impressed.

James Garner makes being effortlessly masculine and a bit of a selfish bastard poetry in motion; Joan Hackett does the smart but ditzy daughter with a verve and authority which is delightful; Jack Elam is flat out brilliant; Bruce Dern as a yob = lucky guy, he got some of the best lines; Walter Brennan as his long-suffering crusty cuss of a father is like a multi-layered parody of himself; all the casting is marvellous.  The script is where it starts though, and William Bowers, also responsible for Advance to the Rear, the remake of My Man Godfrey with David Niven, and the Sheepman, wrote one for the comedy ages.  Highly recommended.

Another movie I watched recently, which I am not going to recommend because it’s a damned strange, disturbing, and not very kind to animals movie, was The Holy Mountain.  I was whipping around somebody’s personal best 100 movie list on the internet and this one got mentioned with such inarticulate adoration (“Just see it.  It’s too hard to describe”) that I had to make Jeff get it from Zip.

I LOVED IT.  I can hardly wait to show it to all my coolest film fan friends, because it is strange and marvellous and disgusting and eye-popping and very memorable.  About an hour in, I thought, “Man, this movie simply cannot get ANY better (this was at the point a six foot ball python showed up… there are A LOT of animals in this movie.)  In another scene a guy gets to take a symbolic (rebirth) bath with a baby hippo; women get their heads shaved; a guy who’s like Jesus shares a joint with a quadruple amputee; one hundred lamb carcasses are paraded around on crucifixes; a man gets hauled up the side of a building in an incredible, bizarre shot; tarot cards are invoked; and the end … well, it predates the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail by quite a bit, and there’s NO WAY on earth you can convince me that Terry Gilliam didn’t see it before they made Grail.  Anyway, the movie is about spiritual quest(s) and it pauses occasionally to kick militarism, consumerism and religion with glee and hobnailed boots, while mocking itself and occasionally giving hints about how to deconstruct the movie.

Even if you don’t follow the ‘plot’ it is an amazing and very big budget piece of awesome weird, and the visuals completely saturated my ability to take them in.  And I liked the hippy dippy music, so there.  The director says, “I ask from film what most people ask of psychedelic drugs” and the only response to that was/is, “Yes.”

News of note

Something in my house that I don’t own (Don’t you weep) is now finished.  I am back writing songs down again after taking a break.

Margot is cleaner.  I bathed her (again!) this morning.  I also applied conditioner, because she’s so staticky she’s attracting dirt like a CRT.  She is an indoor-outdoor cat, and they say you should never let Persians be indoor-outdoor cats because

  • They are purebreds and people will steal them (she’s chipped)
  • They get filthy laying about in the debris outside
  • They are none too smart and rather too docile

Unfortunately, the place has a cat door, so what can ya do?  Besides, she looks so cute chasing bugs in the backyard and galloping up the back deck stairs.

Speaking of stairs, I have installed the anti-skid tape on the basement stairs, and this should prevent all three cats and any relevant hoomins from skidding down those stairs asswise.  (All three cats have wiped out on the stairs).

I am glad I haven’t had the R John Caspell memorial signage made up yet because it must now include the words “And Cat Vomitarium” under “Memorial Pinball Parlour” because, like, you know, the cats enjoy throwing up on that blue carpet.

Here is my hat with a rainbow on it

Part of my remarkable afternoon at Mike’s last week was coming back into his place from a couple of hours on that nice toasty balcony and finding my hat with a rainbow splashed across it.

rainbow hat

It reminded me…

… of the rainbow on the living room floor in the house on Oakridge Drive when I was growing up.  We had a fishtank in the front entrance way, and at the right time of day, at the right time of year, the light would hit one end of it as if it was passing through a prism, and throw a spray of brilliant colour on the hardwood floor. I think we got at least one picture of that squirrelled away someplace.

…. of the rainbow on the slate floor in the cafeteria at my old job.  Same thing… light would come into the atrium, bounce through the an edge of a glass plate on the railing, and throw colours on the floor.  As far as I know, Jarmo and I were the only people who ever noticed, or at least commented about it.

Deb, that tiny feather is from your bird room. After all this time it hasn’t fallen out or blown away.

Photo credit Mike.  The rest of the pics from that afternoon are, thanks to the mental image of my brother clawing his eyes out, NOT being posted.

Remarkable science news culled from eurekalert.org

Our skin can feel sensation with more than one set of nerves.

Instant battery… just add paper?

There’s something deeply wrong with this story.  I don’t care about the radiation, I just don’t want to fly through a thunderstorm.

Fit teenaged boys are smarter. So go get some exercise, ya little punks.

As a result of our long childhood, which seems to get longer every year, parents are involved with their kids longer. Nodding, nodding.

This has implications for everything from analysis of disease outbreaks to making more robust computer networks.

Odds und sods

Doris Lessing interviewed. She has a way of saying things that is resonantly remarkable.

Alan Moore is inta majic. Now why the heck would anybody be startled by that.  What he says really resonates.  I know I am supposed to be a hard ass atheist, I should be a materialist, blah ha ha woof mew.  There’s a lot I don’t know, including my own mind, sometimes.

A picture…. The guy who plays Esposito on Castle getting ‘bit’ by the Eric Northman from True Blood. For shiz like thiz twitter was invented….

Onion-style article about the stupidity of contemporary Brits.

So about all this type casting, stereo typing, and other mental short cut stuff….  Will be very hard to read, but I thought it was pretty funny.

I would have posted links to MP3s of Emma Goldman’s writings, but when there was a mispronunciation in the FIRST 30 SECONDS I say to myself, damn those modern anarchists, can’t they get anything rite write right??

And with this last link, I realize that irony explodes into a cloud of multiversial memes, and go back to transcribing Dennis’ reminiscences.