Anaïs Nin November: Nothing left to do

“Scream,” by windkittyhana on the deviantart.

Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.

(Collages. 1964. p. 116.)

I am only alone if I am in the bath or driving. So the shower is where I generally get my barking out. I made an ocean in the pipes while I was pregnant, a terrible time for me because of the earth-destroying fights I would have with her father, and again when I left my husband, horrible silent sobs of shock and regret that would make me vomit. I have written before that I dislike crying or admitting to feeling feelings. But in the last few years, since this journal started, really, I’ve grown better at admitting to crying. I even sometimes let a few public tears go, if the occasion is momentuous enough that I forget myself, and I have oil on hand to keep my robot face from rusting.

All this context is by way of avoiding the content of this quote. I think I’ve sufficiently lambasted myself for one day (see below).

Movie Moment: Remember, remember

“Remember, remember.” It’s that day again. Tomorrow in my country is an election day. Since my country is very bossy, this will affect many other nations as well.

I have no idea which way the election will go. I gave up a decade ago on thinking I could understand people. I have no predictions for the outcome of this election, but I have my hopes. A motif in this film is the immutability of ideas: ideas are bulletproof, indestructible.

Are they, though?

I think they are entirely personal and held inside: no one and nothing is knowable. There is no way to trust that what someone says is what they’re really thinking, nor that anyone will do what they say they are going to. I know what I want to see happen in my country and in my life, but my doubts about those things are ebbing the spontaneity and passion from me, and I hate that, and it confuses me, and I don’t want it to be so. I once had a zeal for politics unmatched by almost anyone I know, and I still follow closely what goes on, but I feel like I’ve been burned over and over, like it’s scar tissue on scar tissue, and there are all these layers of dead hard flesh between the outside and my core.

I haven’t stopped caring. I haven’t stopped wanting to change the world and my own self, but I’ve stopped believing I can be touched or healed by what someone says, promises, proclaims to think or plans to do. I’m afraid that this is reflective of not just my political opinions and doings, but my approach to more interpersonal functions. And I don’t want that. I need to get back that optimism. It’s like I’m so sure of being broken that I throw myself off the shelf so at least it’s my own idea when I’m shattered on the floor. How is that consolation? I’m still in pieces. I don’t want to be bulletproof: I just don’t want to be glass.

This too. Man, if Pirate Bay goes down, my life is over. How fucking shallow am I? Such the molotov-lobbing anarchist, me. “I just want to download Walking Dead.” Waah, waah, waah — I don’t know how to love properly and I like illegally freeloading free loads of downloads. Spoiled and purposeless little shit.

Movie Millisecond: Even if there was oxygen in your balls

Mink Stole is not going to blow you. Ever.

Female Trouble (John Waters, 1974).

Fight Club Friday: It happens

Friday night’s all right for all kinds of fighting.

via.

Look, when you are being banged like a screen door in a hurricane, things just kind of get said.

Movie Millisecond: Apocalypse yesterday, or, It’s the end of the [ ] as we [ ]

The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963).

It’s not. It never is.

Movie Millisecond: Happy Thanksgiving Thursday from Wednesday

Addams Family Values (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1993).

Wednesday: You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now, my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides; you will play golf, and enjoy hot hors d’oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, “Do not trust the Pilgrims … especially Sarah Miller.”

Amanda: Gary, she’s changing the words!

Wednesday: … And for all these reasons, I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground.

edit 11/24/11: Several months ago I screencapped the hell out of a gorgeous, HD version of AFV with subtitles. Then my desktop hard drive crashed. I’ve been limping along on the strength of my laptop as I attempt to reconstruct the desktop with the help of others, but I hadn’t realized the breadth of my little tragedy until I went to put together my hotly anticipated Wednesday Thanksgiving post and brokenheartely remembered that batch of files hadn’t been transferred on to my external hard drive (which I frequently updated as a backup to both systems in the face of just such an eventuality as this). Sad. I’m sad about this.

Movie Millisecond: Always

Scream (Wes Craven, 1996).

Movie Millisecond: Let he who is without dorky clothes cast the first stone

Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994).

Monday, while my students were lined up to go out to recess, one of them said, “Miss L, did you know that tomorrow is Fifties Day?”

“Oh, no,” I replied drily. “What ever will I wear?”

Everyone laughed. They all got the joke. All of them. 100% of children age 8-9 years old recognize that E parties like it’s 1959. Tell A Friend.

Movie Millisecond: Arsenic and Old Lace

Appropriate film choice for the approaching holiday.

Talk nerdy to me — it’s Wednesday: Mad Math edition

It’s important to get hands-on with arithmetic lessons.

So besides going back to school for some masochistic post-grad-work (I couldn’t stay away forever), I’ve also been teaching mathematics to below-level fourth and fifth graders. I really like it. But it’s kept me busy. These are students who dislike math and need new ways to connect with their material: I’m trying to use a lot of concrete examples.

Anyone had a disconnect with math in their youth and recall lessons which resonated more strongly than the ol’ drill and kill? I’ve got ideas of my own but, with these scamps, I can’t have enough.

Movie Millisecond: Sucker punch him

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson, 2004).

Daily Batman: A story in stills, “The Electrical Brain” edition

Yesterday at the grocery, I spotted a collection of the 1943 Columbia Pictures Batman serial adaptations. I obviously had no choice but to pick it up — my hands were clearly tied — and I’ve found the content … illuminating?

The Dynamic Duo are first seen rounding up some miscreants and leaving them cuffed to a lightpole with a note pinned to one’s jacket for the police. The original script called for the Caped Crusaders to be their usual vigilante selves, but the censors deemed that a little too risky?

And, I guess with all the purportedly people-based government shifts going on in the world, they didn’t want the popcorn-scarfing masses to get ideas? — so Steve Jobs converted Batman and Robin in to federal agents. (May or may not be accurate.)

Isn’t it bromantic? Lewis Wilson as a jaunty, kohl-browed Batman, with Douglas Croft as the Boy Wonder, congratulate themselves on a good night of taking the law in to their own hands without right or invitation after hopping in a Batmobile chauffered by good old Alfred Pennyworth, whose previous comic presence had been a facial hairless, rotund figure — colloquial wisdom credits this adaptation’s portrayal of Alfred as thin, stately, and mustachioed with influencing his subsequent appearance in the comics.

Accordingly, so far as I’ve watched, this opening scene introducing their crime-fighting prowess is the only bit of vigilantism Batman and Robin display in the serial. Everything else is under the aegis of fighting Communist and Axis spy infiltration.

This comes from the “Japanese Cave of Horrors” scene and is CLEARLY a wax figure of Cary Grant as a fake POW.

The note pinned to the man up there on our right’s jacket is somewhat reminscent of the “deliver to Lt. Gordon” note from The Dark Knight. It also indicates that the key to the cuffs may be found in the apprehended man’s pocket. Ostensibly, the cuffs will be taken off and replaced with official ones, but as they do not know the secret identity of Batman and Robin, are the originals now a gift to the Gotham City PD? I assume so. Not to worry: Batman and Robin have lots more pairs of handcuffs. You know, for … crime-fighting.

Did it come from Gunga Din, do you reckon? The uniform, I mean? Where did props even get this figure? I feel like it’s just out of reach in my mind. Little help?

This first segment in the serial is titled “The Electrical Brain” and is a total yawn fest, since all that it features is electric zombies, atom-smashing handheld ray guns, a sinister villain, and more astounding racism than you can shake a KKK hood at. Oh, wait — it couldn’t be less boring. If you’re a fan of camp and jaw-dropping behavioral archaisms, like your happy hostess here, run, don’t walk out and find this collection.

Get all of your latently guilty chagrin primed, though. I’m not made out of moron: I understand the film is a product of its time — it’s part of why I find vintage, obscure cinema from this era interesting. But, sweet mother of Edward Said, the orientalism and propaganda are strong with this one.

The villain of the piece, Dr. Tito Daka, is a self-proclaimed servant of Hirohito. Daka is a Japanese enemy of capitalism who I’m amazed to say constitutes only a fraction of the deeply-woven Asian-targeted xenophobic mise-en-scene of the picture.

U.S. readers, if you’ve nursed some fantasy that the internment of our Japanese fellow citizens during the second World War was not widely known by most Americans and did not make a big dent in pop culture, this little slice of 1940’s life will prove you all kinds of unfortunately wrong.

Narrator: This was part of a foreign land transplanted bodily to America and known as Little Tokyo. Since a wise government rounded up the shifty-eyed Japs, it has become a ghost street where only one buusiness survives, eking out a precarious existence on the dimes of curiosity-seekers.

Wise government. Rounded up. Shifty-eyed. I honestly triple-took. “Did that just happen??”

It seems boldly racist to me, even for the time. So like I said, this serial has so far shown me that I don’t know crap about what was “okay” on the day-to-day in my country during this time.

Daka introduces himself to a new recruit to his organization, the partner of a recently sprung white collar criminal of sorts (his niece is dating Bruce Wayne, which is how the plotlines tie together), with the following charming monologue.

I am Dr. Daka, humble servant of His Majesty Hirohito, Heavenly Ruler and Prince of the Rising Sun. By divine destiny, my country shall destroy the democratic forces of evil in the United States to make way for the New Order, an Order that will bring about the liberation of the enslaved people of America.

Daka is portrayed by totally-not-Asian actor J. Carrol Naish, a future Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe winner. Irish by descent, Naish actually portrayed nearly nothing but non-traditional races in his performances, from Japanese to Puerto Rican to Middle Eastern.

Congruent to his alleged continent of origin in this serial and his heavy “oriental” makeup, Naish would later bring a whole new ball of uniquely challenging race-based character traits to the role of famous detective Charlie Chan on the small screen, in television’s The New Adventures of Charlie Chan (1957).

The teaser for the next installment. There was no Bat Cave in the comics until after the release of this serial. But so far the Bat Cave in the serial is a stone wall behind a regular desk, with flickering shadows of bats waving around in front of lights off-camera… so I’d have to say the comics Bat Cave, even if inspired by the serial, most certainly carries the edge.

Movie Millisecond: Laura

Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944).

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: A plug for Catholicism

60% of the time, it works 100% of the time.

Talk nerdy to me — Movie Millisecond: “Sad beep” edition

Guess R2 will go eat some worms.

Nobody likes me /everybody hates me /guess I’ll eat some worms…

Other people know that song, right?

Movie Millisecond: the Sandlot

The Sandlot (David M. Evans, 1993).

Since you won’t stop asking*, here are the rules for the Sandlot drinking game.

Take a drink whenever the narrator says, “Pickle.”

Take a drink every time Ham says “You’re killing me, Smalls.”

Take a drink any time the boys speak in unison.

Take a drink whenever Squints and Wendy Peffercorn look at each other.

Take a drink whenever Tommy Timmons echoes Timmy.

Take a drink whenever Babe Ruth is mentioned, by name or by nickname.

Take a drink any time someone spits.

Wendy Peffercorn will take you down to Cougar Town.

I’m not even going to bother listing some of the others we’ve come up with over the years. There is even a version I designed where you pick a character and have character-specific instructions (e.g., drink on “Yeah-yeah,” or, for beginners, drink whenever Bertram actually has a line). But really, I can’t in good conscience even keep going. Those rules are sufficient. Drink lots of water out there, dudes.

Conversely, I also have a long explanation of why this is an excellent model for Christian values and highly suited for use in a parochial school classroom. I’m a complex mirror maze of a woman. Not a “hot mess.” Complex mirror maze.

*completely untrue. it has never come up.

Fight Club Friday — Daily Batman: Punching toupees off edition

Friday night’s all right for fighting.

Another from when Batman gets clocked and thinks Bruce Wayne is his secret crimefighting identity.

…And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at Fight Club, you have to fight.

Bruce Wayne knocked that guy’s toupee off.

Movie Millisecond: Dinner

Wayne’s World 2 (Steven Surjik, 1993).

GPOY.

Movie Millisecond: ## [Rock] ##

Commando (Mark Lester, 1985). Hateration aside: you know it’s probably the most G screencap ever.

Movie Millisecond: Garbo explains

Related to the last post, since we’re on the subject of GG —

Mata Hari (George Fitzmaurice, 1931.)