Here's a picture of my lovely wifey. I don't need any other reason that that to post it, but it's also a nice shot of the path that runs from the area around La Sirenetta up to our Via Trento, the street of our current apartment. We almost always take the more direct trek along the road, but then we remember that if you go around the other way you get a lovely view of the ocean.
Yesterday I mentioned that the weather had broken a tad here, replacing the endless and tortuous days of blazing heat, wilting humidity, and a particular cruel sun with days that are a little more livable. Part of that relates to a few rain showers, which, again, is the first rain that Sicily has seen since early May. When we woke up to rain one morning, Janet and I walked down to La Sirenetta simply to drink coffee and watch it rain. We've also seen the arrival of some clouds, which were a no show for the first month+ of our time here. We may actually survive after all.
Janet snapped this picture the other evening when we were out for our nightly passegiata. Normally, I do my best to eliminate every picture that she takes of me, but I couldn't find any reason to complain about this one.
The other day I was on my daily walk and was surprised to find La Sirenetta was closed for the day (I stop there every morning - so expect a lot of La Sirenetta stories as I get caught up). Consequently, I decided to try a place that I walk by every morning. I always refer to it as the posh place, although that's not it's official name. Seriously, is this a beautiful place to have your morning coffee and cornetto or what?
This is another one of those films that I would have never seen without the good graces of the Criterion Channel: Kyoshi Kurosawa's 2012 Penance. I'm not a huge Kurosawa fan, or maybe it would be better to say that I like his films although I don't like them as much as I think I should. It's not that I want to say I like Kyoshi Kurosawa films because I want people to think that I'm a sophisticated consumer of films, but rather that in some ways I like the idea of Kyoshi Kurosawa more than the reality of his films. They are always creepy and unique, but they're also awfully slow moving (which is almost never a problem for me, obviously). In this case it is especially true because Penance is a series of five interrelated films, each a little over an hour long, which tells the story of a group of girls who witness the disappearance of another young girl, although none of them can remember the face of the man who took her. The murdered girl's mother blames them and curses them all to do penance for their crime in not remembering. I'm in the middle of the five films, so I suppose I should have waited until the end, but I'm so far behind in my posts that I took the opportunity to mention Penance, although it's more of a placeholder at this point. At this point I'd say it's worth checking out, although I don't know if I would give it a glowing recommendation yet. More later.
Happily, the weather has broken here a bit. In fact, it has even rained three times this week, which is apparently the first rain that Terrasini had received since a sprinkling on 9 May. We're at the stage now where the high is in the low 80s, although the temperature difference between high and low is astonishingly small (often as little as seven degrees). When we arrived in middle August we suffered through a series of 98 degree days, with a heat index routinely around 110. That alone doesn't begin to explain how routinely miserable it was, mainly because the sun, in a cloudless sky, was simply unrelenting. Just brutal.
This odd picture reminds me, in an appropriately strange way, of the United Arab Emirates. I sometimes will try to explain to my friends that in the truly posh Emirati malls there were vending machines where you could buy small gold ingots; you know, for those days when you're shopping and you really feel you should bring home some gold. I'm not certain that my friends believe me, although I've shown them pictures (and, for that matter, it's celebrated somewhere on the pages of this blog, infirm with years and creaking under the weight of over three-thousand posts). In this case the vending machine wasn't dispersing gold ingots, but instead bread. I haven't tried it yet, but I'll let you know if it's good.
Here's one of those movies that I had always heard about, but never actually taken the opportunity to watch: Lou Adler's 1982 Ladies and Gentlemen, the Famous Stains. I mainly associate Adler with the music industry, so I guess it's not that strange that he would have directed this effort. It didn't receive much initial love, although critics have been kinder in their criticism over the decades. Mainly, today, it's odd to see how Diane Lane and Laura Dern haven't aged, and how Ray Winstone has aged (although he's, typically very good in this movie). It's the story of Lane's band as she, chameleon-like, searches for the right persona to make it big. I don't think I would recommend it heartily, but there are some nice peculiar moments, and you could do worse things with your time.
Here's a picture of Janet not stealing an orange on the walk home the other day. We're still trying to adjust to a very different climate, one that features palm trees and oranges and prickly pears (I'll tell that story soon) - as compared to evergreen and tons of snow.
And another Carla Simon movie, and I liked this one quite a bit as well. This film, earlier than her recent film Romeria, explores a similar earlier event: the time right after her father and mother died of AIDS. This one, Summer 1993, covers the time when she as a young girl moves to live with her uncle's family. It is very touching, and also gets at the paranoia relating to the early days of the AIDS years. Highly recommended.
I don't know if I'll recapture the film-watching momentum that I had earlier in the year (waiting out the Vermont winter is a great impetus to watch movies, exploring a beautiful new Sicilian world less so), but I'm happy to finally get wifi and access once again to movies. The other day I watched Carla Simon's new film, Romeria, and was very impressed. Carla Simon is a very talented Spanish director, and one of those folks that I would have never discovered without the Criterion Channel. The film is a semi-autobiographical account of a young woman trying to uncover the truth (in an almost Proustian fashion) of the mysteries and family lies surrounding the death of her parents from AIDS. It's very powerful, and highly recommended.
Our apartment here in Terrasini is an odd little place. It's not that it's bad, per se, and there are parts of it which are really nice. It was recently renovated and it's pretty solid. The problem is that it's a tiny one bedroom, which simply doesn't begin to serve the needs of two people who are either working/writing or writing. Plus, it's down near the water in the midst of the old fishermen's village, which is charming, and I love it, but it also leaves a twenty-minute walk up the hill to go shopping or find any shops. This wouldn't be a problem if you aren't a sixty-six year old man who walks with a cane (although I'm getting around better than I thought I would). However, the biggest problem may simply be something which would be hard to fix: it's a first floor apartment, which means that there's no balcony and the doors/windows are covered with frosted glass. We often feel like Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner, part of this great experiment. We could be anyplace in the world for all we'd ever know from inside the apartment. However, then you'll open the door, turn left, and there's the Mediterranean Sea (which, oddly, makes the painfully sanitized environment inside the apartment even worse). Yes, in many ways this qualifies as the very definition of #FirstWorldProblem, but it's still not what we were hoping for. So, I guess I'll stick with too far too walk to buy groceries as the biggest reason why we're moving to a different apartment later in the month.
And I'm way behind in my year-long capture of movies watched, not so much in movies recorded, but instead on movies watched. Just recently I started downloading movies from the Criterion Channel, in lieu of streaming (for the last month we've acted as wifi vampires at several local coffeeshops. The first movie I downloaded was Shohei Imamura's essential 1962 film Pigs and Battleships. It's a film I've watched many times, not only because I used it in my Japanese film noir class, but also because it is a wonderful film. Essential viewing.
Well, that was a challenge, but we made it. Actually, we arrived here in Terrasini on 13 August, it just took a month to get wireless set up. But, much more on that later. It's enough right now to mark that we're here safe and sound. Many, many more stories to come.
Last night I once again delved into the Julien Duvivier collection on the Criterion Channel, and once again I was not disappointed. Un Carnet de Bal didn't feel quite like some of Duvivier's classic poetic realism films, but it was still quite good. Marie Bell stars as Christine Surgere, a recent and young widow who fells that life now has no meaning, while also coming to grips with the fact that she'd been lonely her entire married life. She decides to pursue men who had signed her dance card on her first ball when she was sixteen years old, beginning an odyssey populated by old (hopeful) lovers, played by a legion of famous French actors: Harry Baur (as Alain Regnault), Pierre Blanchar (as Thierry Raynal). Fernandel (as Fabien Coutissol), Louis Jouvet (as Pierre Verdier), etc. You see this structure fairly often as told from the male perspective, so it was interesting to see it told from a woman's perspective. Her discovered former dance partners - romanticized in her memory and imagination - are leading very different lifestyles, some quite life-affirming and some quite disturbing. The ending is both redemptive and more than a bit disturbing. Highly recommended.
The other night I rewatched a film that showcased the alpha and omega of French cinematic cool: Jean Gabin and Alain Delon. They starred together (in, I think, for the only time) in the classic heist film Any Number Can Win. The film focuses on Mister Charles (Gabin), a wizened and world weary criminal just out of jail, and his impetuous young partner (Francis Verlot), who try one last big score. It ends badly, mainly because of some bad luck (as had haunted Mister Charles on his two other failed scores) but mainly because of the headstrong carelessness of Francis. The ending is classic, and is the relationship between these two legendary French actors. Highly recommended.
All relationships - immediate family or friends or with your significant other - all have their own language, developed organically over time. Janet and I will often ask each other, "So, are you getting in the box?", which is a reference to the classic Italian film Mafioso. It essentially means, are you in or not? - or have you been drawn into something against your will? If you're not in on the formation of the linguistic shorthand it sounds like gibberish. Back in college my friends, when discussing beautiful women, would say, "She's some of it," which eventually evolved into "She's most of it," or "She's a remarkably high percentage of it." I don't think any of us remember who came up with the phrase - or, for that matter, exactly what "it" was. For years my Champlain friends and I would always say "phrasing" whenever anyone said something, unintentionally, which could be interpreted sexually. This was a direct reference to the TV show Archer, and we used the term faithfully, even folks who had never seen an episode. Recently, on one of my Thursday sleepovers at Kevin's, we were talking about the Minnesota radio station that Kevin loves (the one that has the They Might Be Giants marathon, that Kevin fixes his schedule around - like a true fan, he takes the day off from work to listen). Kevin will email them quite a bit, and they sometimes respond online, and I'm always telling him that I can foresee this as his post-retirement gig. Anyway, he was telling me about the teenage daughter of one of the station's biggest supporters, who will share emoticons as reviews of restaurants and movies (probably trying to help the terminally uncool older folks become slightly more cool). One of them was to type in Chipmunk Waffle Waffle Chipmunk, which was, at least at that moment, the highest ranking you could get. This quickly became shorthand between us on a text chain to affirm our support for a proposed plan.
For years I've heard of Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon but had somehow never seen it. Thankfully, the Criterion Channel never gives up on the exhausting chore of educating me (again, growing up in Indiana is hard to overcome). Last night I was finally able to watch it, and what a treasure it is. It tells the story of a young boy (played Lamorisse's son Pascal) who discovers a beautiful red balloon, who follows him around Paris. So many adults and other jealous children try to take the balloon away, and in the end finally destroy it. This leads to all the other balloons in Paris arriving and flying Pascal away. It's an extraordinary allegory of a child's innocence and hope and attraction to beauty, in the face of a cold materialistic world. There's also definitely a spiritual theme playing itself out. Essential viewing.
I know I've admitted before that I'm not that huge of a fan of French New Wave, which is probably more of a testament to my total lack of sophistication. The significance of the French New Wave is undeniable, but I simply go back and forth of so many of the films - loving some films from Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Varda and Francois Truffaut and Jacques Demy and Alain Resnais, but also being left quite cold by others. Essentially, maybe I'll just fall back on the tried and true, I respect their work immense, but I just don't consistently like it. Similarly, I've been slow to come to the works of Eric Rohmer, and he, I think more than the others, is almost a day to day reflection of what kind of mood I'm in. Sometimes I think, "Please, for the love of god, will you just stop talking," and other days I'll think, "He's really sharing some essential truth here." Last night I re-watched his 1983 film Pauline at the Beach, which I liked a lot more than my first viewing. It focuses on fifteen year old Pauline (played by Amanda Langlet) who tries to figure out life and love and sex, and also why all of the actual adults in the film are such assholes. I would definitely recommend it.
I'm definitely enjoying the Criterion Channel's Julien Duvivier collection this month, although I've already seen several of his films. The other night I watched his 1936 film They Were Five, starring Jean Gabin (playing Jeannot), Charles Vanel (as Charlot), and Raymond Aimos (as Tintin). It's a story of five friends, down on their luck, who win some money and decide to open a restaurant on an island, both to make some money but especially as a symbol of their friendship. I think it's a bit too easy to read the film as misogynistic today, mainly because their plans and friendship is torn asunder by the women in their lives, but I think it's more of a statement on the strength and fragility of male friendship - that is, the flaw is within them. Plus, there's a whole deeper allegory going on here abut the rise and fall of the Popular Front, although a failure to take it to that allegorical depth will not damage your enjoyment of the film. Gabin is, as always, fantastic. I didn't know much about Raymond Aimos, who sounds like a very interesting character, who never forgot his friends, organized food drives, and opened up a restaurant to feed hungry children. Nevertheless, he was shot and killed, maybe just accidentally, by a Resistance fighter during the chaos of Paris being liberated. They Were Five is definitely recommended.
Last week I posted on what I feared was going to be our last trip to the Whammy Bar, our Friday night tradition. As it turns out, there was one last trip (we're flying out Wednesday, inshallah) as my great friends Kevin and Kerry came out.
I know this is a blasphemous statement, but I'm not really that big of a Martin Scorsese fan. I appreciate his films, but I don't know if I actually love any of them. I've never made a list, but I'm not certain he would make my list of top five greatest American directors. However, this may simply be an issue of a purely personal subjective taste, because I do respect him quite a bit. I especially appreciate his attempts to break away and try different things, such as his adaption of The Age of Innocence. Another example of this was his ambitious attempt to tackle Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ. I had not seen it since the year it came out, and my re-watch the other night left me feeling much the same way: it's both an over-criticized but also over-praised film. The people who criticized it for being blasphemous (and probably never saw it, for that matter) clearly missed the point of the film. It's a spiritual reflection on the unique nature of Jesus's nature and also of faith itself. At the same time, I think it misses far more than it hits, and I suspect that a lot of the critical praise was a response to the criticism from religious fanatics. It's worth watching, and it has some lovely moments.
I took a flyer on a film the other night that doesn't have a particularly good reputation (which has never stopped me in the past): Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. I've seen it described as the worst film ever from a director of genius. I don't know if I'd go that far, although it was pretty dreadful, long and mainly pointless. It's hard to reconcile this film with absolute classics like L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse, Red Desert, and Blowup. It's full of no name actors giving no name performances of uninspired lines. I'd give it a pass if I were you, although it's received a little more love the last few years from critics.
Last Friday we attended our fourth, and final, CFL game of the season, heading up to Ottawa for a much too short stay. I had seen a game at Ottawa with my friend Sanford years ago, but my return visit had waited way too long. It was a notable trip because 1) Erik joined a small circle of my friends who have attended games at more than one CFL stadium, and 2) Kevin tied me for seeing a game at his 8th (of 9) CFL stadiums. The REDBLACKS are really bad this year, although they're fighting yard (just seriously undermanned), but a good time was had by all. One end of the stadium was missing, replaced by a huge pit. We thought that maybe they were expanding the stadium (it only held 25,000, which is not the smallest CFL stadium, but pretty close), but instead they removed 2500 seats (still not the smallest CFL stadium at 22,500, but getting closer), but instead they're carving off the space for a new arena for the women's hockey team. One of the things about seeing a game in Ottawa, which is cool, is that they are very mindful of the space in a beautiful downtown so they're not tearing anything down to build parking lots (how Sanford and I ever found a place to park last time is a mystery lost to time). Anyway, the space for the new women's hockey arena (and I'm glad they are getting one) had to come from somewhere. It left a huge pit just beyond one of the endzones, and kicks would fairly routinely clear the fence and enter the pit, the ball disappearing.
The Criterion Channel is currently featuring a Julien Duvivier collection right now, which gave me a chance to rewatch his brilliant and highly influential 1937 film Pepe le moko, one of the highlights of the French poetic realism movement (several other examples of which were featured earlier this year). It stars the immortal Jean Gabin, which is really all you'd ever need to know if you're deciding whether to watch a film or not. He's a French criminal who would really love to get back to Paris, but he's trapped in the winding backstreets of the Algiers casbah. As long as he's ensconced there he's safe, but if he's drawn out then things get much more dangerous. His life is made much more difficult by Inspector Slimane (Lucas Gridoux), who lives in the casbah, and who Pepe knows he should kill, but who he lets live because of his peculiar code of honor - and also because of the two women competing for his attention, Gaby (played by Mireille Balin, whose real life story would make a great novel about France's complicated relationship to World War II) and Ines (Line Noro). Highly recommended.
The other night I was finally able to convince Janet to watch Craig Gillespie's wonderful 2007 film Lars and the Real Girl. I had been pushing it for a while, but after Janet and her friend Jana watched Project Hail Mary the other night she was in the mood for another Ryan Gosling movie. I am always wont to opine that it was Lars and the Real Girl that convinced me that Ryan Gosling is actually a very good actor, and I'll stick with that. It really is a great movie, and one that I didn't bother to watch in the theaters because I, thankfully incorrectly, thought that it looked like a one note sex comedy. It's actually a layered film about loss and love and community. It's also a film that makes me cry every time. Gosling gives a wonderful performance, totally against type, as the bumbling and painfully introverted Lars. Patricia Clarkson (who I believe knows a good script better than any actor alive today) gives a lovely performance as Dr. Dagmar Berman, who helps hold everything together. Emily Mortimer and Paul Schneider play Lars's sister-in-law Karin and her husband Gus (and in many ways the film is as much about Gus's story arc as it is about Lars's). Kelli Garner is funny and heartbreaking as Lars's would-be girlfriend Margo, and my students (I routinely showed this film in class when we discussed Feminist and Queer theory) rooted for Lars and Margo so hard. It's only sad when I think that Gillespie never came even remotely close to directing a film this good ever again. Highly recommended.
I blew through the Criterion Channel's Rumberas collection (again, that odd, but utterly enjoyable, mishmash of film noir, social commentary, and off the chart musical) when I watched Jose Diaz Morales's 1947 movie Carita de Cielo. It starred Maria Elena Marques and Antonio Badu, although it's mainly, and rightly, known for being Ninon Sevilla's (the greatest star of Rumberas films) first movie. She has two illogical in regards to the plot - but amazing - dance routines. It's amazing how sexually charged her performances were, utterly unlike anything you would have seen in US films at the same time (or for years to come). Beyond her performance the film is forgettable, and it doesn't have any of the social commentary which sparks the other Rumberas films in the collection. Still, it's Ninon Sevilla, FFS, so you might give it a watch.
And the second half of my unexpected horror doubleheader was Damien McCarthy's Hokum. It tells the story of a very skeptical writer, who is also more than a bit of a total jerk, who travels to a town in Ireland to spread his parents ashes. I didn't like it as much as Obsession, but I still liked it quite a bit, and there were some very creepy moments. Adam Scott gives a fine performance as the writer. There are so unlikeable characters in the film that it's difficult to care more about them, but it was still a finely crafted piece. Recommended.
Yesterday I pushed a book to the front of my queue, one that I purchased several months ago, but which seemed oddly timely at this moment. Previously, I've championed the New York Review of Books series, which features so many books that have somehow slipped under the radar, and which the editors there feel should get more love. They have almost universally proved to be great choices. I picked up Domenico Starnone's The Old Man by the Sea, before I even realized the almost cinematic joke I was playing on myself.
Of course, it seems particularly appropriate for this moment as we plan for our upcoming move. The process has been challenging, and doesn't seem like it's going to be any less challenging in the near future, but we do have a place to live lined up (not the apartment we wanted) in a sea side town (not the town we wanted), but it's still a seaside town in Italy, which makes my statements above the very definition of #FirstWorld Problems.
Yesterday I enjoyed a rare movie doubleheader (not in the Criterion Channel universe, obviously) when I was able to watch a movie with my son in the afternoon and another one with Janet in the evening. Plus, they were both recent releases, this was almost unheard-of. Gary had texted me in the morning to ask if I wanted to see a movie, and, like all dads, I jumped at the opportunity to spend time with my son (well, not my dad, naturally, but others). He suggested that we watch last year's huge hit, Curry Barker's Obsession, which I had somehow never seen. I don't know what I need to say about it, since I'm probably the last person in North America to see it. I can say that I definitely liked it. It's not a terribly original story, in that it's about a wish for love that goes terribly awry, but it was beautifully constructed - especially the cinematography. Inde Navarette, as Nikki, was especially good. Highly recommended.
One of the things I was most looking forward to on the Winnipeg trip was to visit the Bud Grant statue outside of the Blue Bombers stadium. As I've discussed way too often, my first introduction to the CFL was, year ago, decades ago, discovering that Bud Grant, then the coach of the Minnesota Vikings, had begun his career coaching in the CFL. Inexplicably, no one at the stadium seemed to understand where his statue was located - they kept directing me to statue for another head coach on the other side of the stadium - which left me a little grumpy, which was stupid on my part because they're doubtless all volunteers. Still, he's Bud Grant FFS! My only defense if that I'm old and my legs are a constant source of great pain, which, I guess, also speaks to my love of the CFL, as these trips are definitely a physical challenge for me. For future reference, he's at the back of the stadium, next to the Blue Bombers store. We didn't get to the statue until after the game, and then I couldn't get back into the store to buy merchandise, which was a very poor business decision on their part because I would have naturally bought out the store.
And now, not surprisingly, I'm disappearing down a Khyentse Norbu rabbit hole, the Bhutanese director (and much more) whose film, Travellers & Magicians, I watched the other night. Last night I watched his first film, The Cup (1999). It tells the story, apparently based on actual events, of some monks who come up with a scheme to acquire (temporarily) a TV and satellite dish - and in the process convince the head of their monastery of the brilliance of this plan - so that they could watch the World Cup final match. A very sweet film, and highly recommended.
Yesterday I had the tremendous pleasure of meeting my friend Sheila Liming for coffee and Proust down in Montpelier. She's closing in on her completion of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and we wanted to get together to discuss The Fugitive (the sixth volume) before I disappeared off the earth. I'll definitely miss her, and not simply because she's the one person I met at Champlain who is happy to get together to discuss Proust. If you're looking for some interesting and thought-provoking books to read, definitely check out some of Sheila's.
You have to lose this statue outside the Roughriders stadium, which celebrates the endless passion and devotion of Saskatchewan fans: the 13th man.
While these two guys have obviously seen better days, the Roughriders (Grey Cup Champions last year) are still percolating along quite nicely. Their stadium is quite nice. A couple days earlier, when we were talking to a Blue Bombers fan at the Winnipeg Zoo, and recounting our plans, he proposed that we'd really like Regina and the Roughriders game, although we'd discover that in every single area it would be slightly worse than the similar experience in Winnipeg. I don't know if I'd agree with him, but I appreciated the smack talk from two bitter rivals.
Not every movie that you see is one that you would have normally chosen to watch, obviously, but that doesn't mean that it was a bad time. Last night Janet wanted to watch The Sheep Detectives, and while I was not that enthusiastic, it was a pretty fun movie. If you're reading this post you already know more about the movie than I do, so I won't repeat the story. I definitely enjoyed it more than Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (which I'm obviously continuing to dump on - and the characters were more fully realized).
By definition, true fans are fans that travel, that is, they attend both home and road games. As we were waiting for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers game to start we were impressed by the number of Toronto Argonauts fans there were in the stadium, and that takes some effort because the Bombers routinely sell out (essentially, you need to start your planning early - months ago I was looking for tickets on a pre-sale on the first day that tickets were available, and the picking were already sparse). We were sitting there when I turned to Kevin and said, "Dude, we sat behind that guy in Toronto!" It says something about how often you go to games and how much you pay attention when you recognize not only players, but also fans. Anyway, the Argos fans showed out.
This was the moment in the third quarter of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats vs. Saskatchewan Roughriders game when the fun finally began to disappear behind the stadium. It was a brutally hot game - in the upper 90s when the game began - and it was at this moment when we realized that we might actually survive. It's almost like the inverse of last June's Calgary game, where it was so cold that we just about froze - in both instances, we came out of the game vowing to go back, because the weather was so daunting that it didn't give us a clear picture of what it's like to see a game there. The fans were enthusiastic, but I think everyone was in survival mode.
There are certain facts or statistics that all sports fans can recite, almost unbidden, about their favorite teams. For example, all Vikings fans can tell you that although they've never won a Super Bowl (going 0-4), they have actually won a championship. The first four Super Bowls were essentially exhibition games, sort of like a college football bowl game that doesn't have national championship implications. So, the Vikings lost Super Bowl IV, but had already clinched the NFL championship by beating the Cleveland Browns (hence, they were the last NFL champions before the official merger). Similarly, every true Buffalo Bills fan can tell you that the only NFL team to lose to a CFL team is, not surprisingly, the Buffalo Bills (it's complicated, like all relationships, because it was an exhibition game, at least for the Bills, but it fell right in the middle of the CFL season - I wish I knew more about this, because the rules are pretty different, including number of players on a side, so I have no idea how the rules worked for that game). And after that too lengthy preamble, the actual point of the post: every Saskatchewan Roughriders fan can tell you that the majority of all CFL merchandise purchased is Roughriders merchandise; essentially, that there are more Saskatchewan t-shirts and hats and jerseys and onesies, etc. sold than the rest of the CFL combined. I thought that this was just mythology, but it's actually true. If you understand the fanaticism of Buffalo Bills fans, you'll understand Roughriders fans.
As I'm wont to opine, there are things I won't miss about Vermont and things that I will definitely miss about Vermont. In the latter category is out wonderfully odd little community here in Calais (although it will be much worse for Janet, as she's been here longer and is much more deeply embedded in the community). This would include weekend nights at the Whammy Bar, the room in the back of the Maple Corners Store that magically transforms itself into a bar on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. It's a Friday night tradition for us, and that will be tough to leave behind.
As part of my goal of re-reading beloved books (Proust's In Search of Lost Time) and re-watching films (John Ford's The Searchers, etc.) before the big move so that I'll survive not initially bringing them, I gave another viewing to Hal Hartley's Amateur. It tells the story of Thomas, who has amnesia and is on a journey to regain his memory - with a lovely Hartley-esque scene wherein Thomas sits on a bench next to a kid reading the Odyssey. The kid explains the Odyssey to Thomas, who in turn gives him a nudie magazine. It's a classic Hartley moment, and a key one, as we discover that Thomas, pre-injury (he had been pushed out a window) was a very bad guy (although he never learns the whole truth, or, to paraphrase Hartley himself, the unbelievable truth). There are wonderful performances from Hartley regulars from Martin Donovan (as Thomas), Eline Lowensohn (as Sofia), and Damian Young (as Edward), although the film is stolen by Isabelle Huppert (her appearance in the film says everything that you need to know in regards to how Hartley is beloved by true professionals - although now he usually crowd sources funds for his movie - from me included, happily - because we live in a nation of idiots). She plays Isabelle, an ex-nun who describes herself as a nymphomaniac, although she's a virgin. It features a typically wonderful Hal Hartley ending ("Yes . . . I know this man."). It's not my favorite of his films, but, like all Hal Hartley films, it is essential viewing.
What, another Bhutanese movie? The Criterion Channel is featuring a collection of Khyentse Norbu films, and the other night I watched Travellers and Magicians. It tells the story of Dondup, a local official, who is fixated on leaving his tiny village and going to America, and his slow and halting journey to make it out of Bhutan. It is chock full of beautiful pictures of Bhutan, and, not surprisingly, you get the idea that in the end he won't go, although the movie doesn't take that simple Wizard of Oz approach. Dondup is played by Tshewang Dendup, who I believe is the only professional actor in the movie. While watching the film I kept thinking about how much more satisfying this film about an epic journey was than Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. Norbu himself is a fascinating character, being, in addition to a filmmaker, also a Tibetan Lama and a writer. Highly recommended.
I really need to get this down for posterity before I completely forget: a couple weeks ago I finally saw a bear. I was driving up County Road, probably about a mile from out cabin, when I saw a young bear loping across the road (as bears do). This was the first time in my twenty-six years living in Vermont that I had seen a bear. It's not like I've had much better luck with moose, having seen four total, and none in the last twenty years, but bears had remained utterly elusive. Sadly, I have no pictures of the beastie to post, although it would have probably ended up playing itself out like the end of Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man.
Obviously, not every film that I watch on the Criterion Channel ends up being one that I love, or even like for that matter. Last night I watched Monte Hellman's 1966 Ride in the Whirlwind, which is featured in this month's Harry Dean Stanton collection. I suppose now it's mainly known for co-starring a young Jack Nicholson, who also wrote the screenplay and co-produced it. The film is a western that is sort of about mis-placed justice/vengeance, but it's also pretty muddled. If you're a Jack Nicholson or Harry Dean Stanton - or Millie Perkins or Cameron Mitchell - completist, you might check it out. Otherwise, you would be better off watching William Wellman's 1943 The Ox-Bow Incident (starring Henry Fonda and Dana Andrews), which is a much better exploration of vigilate justice.
