Every once in a while, I take a notion to have a movie weekend. Sometimes there's a reason - research for a project, or I'm feeling a little hesitant in my Spanish comprehension - but for the most part, it's just time for a movie weekend.
This week, I was looking for a melody - one that hovers in the back of my memory and tries to ooch forward occasionally, but will never quite surface. This week, I needed that melody. It's sweet and elegant, childlike and stately, one of a kind.
So Bri and I hit Wild and Woolly Video on Bardstown Road last Saturday afternoon and came out with an armload. And what an armload!
One of her picks was a French rendition of Bluebeard, the scary morality tale of the young woman whose blue-bearded husband warns her never to unlock the room with the little gold key. If you ever heard a fairy tale, you know how this one comes out. But this production is brilliant and eerie - directed by Catherine Breillat, it links make-believe with the recent past of my childhood and quite successfully builds suspense in spite of the obvious. This one goes in one of my "fantasy classes" on Cinema as Literature.
My picks included Coco Before Chanel, which I guess qualifies as fictionalized history, if not historical fiction. Having read the Wikipedia bio, I expect they got the basic facts about as straight as one can, without sworn testimony. But without a fly on the wall, it's anybody's guess how accurate the details are. Nevertheless, it's an admirable effort, a fun movie, and Audrey Tatou is (duh...) perfect. (Like she could be anything else.)
The Unknown Quantity - totally - was Avenue Montaigne. The synopsis sounded amusing: Jeune femme from le stiques comes to Paree, finds a job as a wait-person at a cafe' (where they don't hire women, merci' very beaucoups) next door to the theatre, and proceeds, via her engenuite', to solve the problems of all the overwrought soap stars and nouveau riche art collectors within range, not to mention a tormented concert pianist and a jackass cafe' manager. AND she makes her Grandmama happy.
Bottom line: If you love Cinderella, heroines with grit, happy coincidences, and happier endings, rent this movie. You will love it! Definitely goes on MY Favorites List.
The icing on the cake I saved for this evening, two days past due. (Yep. This is me. The Queen of Overdue Fines. Wild and Woolly lets me pay on the installment plan. Seriously.)
The icing on the cake was Babe.
This is the movie I went looking for. The Saint-Saëns melody that repeats throughout this sweet, lovely film simply haunts me. For several years, I struggled to write a hymn lyric to the tune. Watching the movie tonight, and hearing - maybe for the first time, for all I've watched Babe half a dozen times or more - Farmer Hoggett singing softly to the little pig, "If I had the words to make a day for you..." I realized my efforts were superfluous. The song is one of complete, unconditional, uncomplicated, WYSIWYG love, and there is none greater. I don't think I'll forget the melody again; it's imprinted now in my head.
And the take-away is this: the half-grown pig, nudging gently at his bereft adoptive mother, Fly, who's seen her litter of pups farmed out and lost her mate, Rex, to his own ill temper and jealousy, and saying, "Mom? Mom? Are you alright, Mom?" And the farmer, the man of few words, willing a sad little pig to live, and softly singing to him from some unidentified place deep in his own heart's memory.
No species-defined lines. No assumptions. No prejudgment. Just love. Wide-open, accepting - willing to be hurt, if that's what it takes (although not out actively looking for pain) - but mostly just knowing that it's in giving that we receive.
I finished the evening with a phone call from my sister. She's beautiful, and I love her. Life isn't easy right now - but that's just life. The good part is us. We have each other to lean on.
Showing posts with label Louisville landmarks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Louisville landmarks. Show all posts
14 September 2010
30 June 2010
Eventually
I'll come back to the ride eventually. It was my first real three-day ride, after all. And there were more adventures. But not today.
Today, I decided around 3 p.m. that I'd had enough for a while. I needed a break. So I told my neighbor Andrew I had an errand to run, picked up my helmet and pocketbook, and headed down to the bike rack.
Nellie Belle rode in on the back of the car this morning. I was running late-ish, and Bri needed the car to make deliveries this evening. But that was fine. It meant Nellie was sitting in her spot in the loading dock, waiting. I strapped my pocketbook under the cargo net, put on my new red-and-pink tropical-floral helmet (fun!), and set out the four blocks to Creation Gardens.
I was back 25 minutes later -- and feeling like I'd had a two-hour break. Creation Gardens is a wholesale "fresh and local" restaurant supplier with a small retail operation on the side. Seriously on the side... The retail store is on a teeny little side street that looks like an alley, just east of the interstate overpass that's just east of Slugger Field. There are two ways to get there from where I work, three blocks west on Main: You can go south to Market, come back east past the interstate, and ride two blocks north -- or you can ride east to Slugger Field, north half a block, east another two blocks, and circle back to the block that's missing. I chose the latter route. It meant I didn't have to deal with any "main drags," and it took me right past the Louisville Extreme Park, which has some really good energy, anytime, day or night. Kids on skateboards and bikes - what can I tell you? Die, obesity, die! :-)
The retail store for Creation Gardens reminds me of nothing so much as Noah's Food Co-Op in Raleigh, back in the '80s when we "old hippies" were still trying to act like old hippies. (These days, we still do, but we're quieter.) They have open shelves, bulk bins, and the stock seems sort of randomly placed -- or at least, the price tags are randomly placed. But I found a couple things that made me say to hell with the price tags. Honest.
My mission was to find some fast salad makings for dinner at Gilda's Club. This is an off week for volunteers, so we'd all signed up for potluck - all of us friends and family and others with ties to cancer - and I was down for "green salad." So... a head of romaine and a head of red leaf lettuce; one red onion; one smallish {pretty!} yellow squash and two small {really pretty) zucchini; two medium-to-small bunches of broccoli; two pints of mixed heirloom cherry tomatoes. And a wedge of Brie - right at 4 oz. for less than $4. Unheard of.
They were going to give me a market basket, but I argued a box would strap better onto the back of the bike. The box they found - a plain white one - held my produce, my purse, and my bike lock, and it provided just enough tension on the cargo net that my rear light was quite secure. I'll use that box until it wears out.
Quality of produce? Well, I can tell you this: I came home with about 6 oz. of mixed chopped squash - maybe half a cup - and about half as much chopped broc. I only sliced about 1/3 of the onion, paper-thin, so the other 2/3 remains. The lettuce and the mixed heirloom tomatoes are all gone. I didn't even offer up the Brie.
And I think I may do a quick veggie stir-fry tomorrow evening with the left-over squash bits, broccoli, and a little onion. Maybe we'll have some tomatoes ripe soon.
Today, I decided around 3 p.m. that I'd had enough for a while. I needed a break. So I told my neighbor Andrew I had an errand to run, picked up my helmet and pocketbook, and headed down to the bike rack.
Nellie Belle rode in on the back of the car this morning. I was running late-ish, and Bri needed the car to make deliveries this evening. But that was fine. It meant Nellie was sitting in her spot in the loading dock, waiting. I strapped my pocketbook under the cargo net, put on my new red-and-pink tropical-floral helmet (fun!), and set out the four blocks to Creation Gardens.
I was back 25 minutes later -- and feeling like I'd had a two-hour break. Creation Gardens is a wholesale "fresh and local" restaurant supplier with a small retail operation on the side. Seriously on the side... The retail store is on a teeny little side street that looks like an alley, just east of the interstate overpass that's just east of Slugger Field. There are two ways to get there from where I work, three blocks west on Main: You can go south to Market, come back east past the interstate, and ride two blocks north -- or you can ride east to Slugger Field, north half a block, east another two blocks, and circle back to the block that's missing. I chose the latter route. It meant I didn't have to deal with any "main drags," and it took me right past the Louisville Extreme Park, which has some really good energy, anytime, day or night. Kids on skateboards and bikes - what can I tell you? Die, obesity, die! :-)
The retail store for Creation Gardens reminds me of nothing so much as Noah's Food Co-Op in Raleigh, back in the '80s when we "old hippies" were still trying to act like old hippies. (These days, we still do, but we're quieter.) They have open shelves, bulk bins, and the stock seems sort of randomly placed -- or at least, the price tags are randomly placed. But I found a couple things that made me say to hell with the price tags. Honest.
My mission was to find some fast salad makings for dinner at Gilda's Club. This is an off week for volunteers, so we'd all signed up for potluck - all of us friends and family and others with ties to cancer - and I was down for "green salad." So... a head of romaine and a head of red leaf lettuce; one red onion; one smallish {pretty!} yellow squash and two small {really pretty) zucchini; two medium-to-small bunches of broccoli; two pints of mixed heirloom cherry tomatoes. And a wedge of Brie - right at 4 oz. for less than $4. Unheard of.
They were going to give me a market basket, but I argued a box would strap better onto the back of the bike. The box they found - a plain white one - held my produce, my purse, and my bike lock, and it provided just enough tension on the cargo net that my rear light was quite secure. I'll use that box until it wears out.
Quality of produce? Well, I can tell you this: I came home with about 6 oz. of mixed chopped squash - maybe half a cup - and about half as much chopped broc. I only sliced about 1/3 of the onion, paper-thin, so the other 2/3 remains. The lettuce and the mixed heirloom tomatoes are all gone. I didn't even offer up the Brie.
And I think I may do a quick veggie stir-fry tomorrow evening with the left-over squash bits, broccoli, and a little onion. Maybe we'll have some tomatoes ripe soon.
13 December 2009
Pedaling on
Nellie Belle, the blue Bianchi, has been in the shed for a couple of weeks now. By the tim
e the earache got better, it was colder than cold (not to mention raining), and I haven't ridden in a bit. Maybe Sunday - it looks like it might be a little better out.
But in the meantime, I finally downloaded the pictures I took on the way home two weeks ago, as I came through downtown Louisville.
On Market Street, as you're coming out from the West End, you pass a couple of places of interest -- like the Glass Factory, whe
re they used to have the world's greatest jazz club before it gave up the ghost, and where they still let you make your own glass ornaments, in addition to watching glassblowers as work -- and then you pass under the highway and you're downtown.
The incredible thing to me is that, looking back over my shoulder as I waited for the light, I could see roses still blooming in the post-Thanksgiving chill.
Of course, the big thing on Thanksgiving weekend is "Light Up Louisville," when they turn on all the Christmas lights in the courthous
e square. This year the big deal was that they switched everything over to LED lights to save money, which is good. Beats the heck out of a few years ago, when they were bringing in 
the big tree via helicopter and they kind of dropped it...
And there were roses in the square, too.
e the earache got better, it was colder than cold (not to mention raining), and I haven't ridden in a bit. Maybe Sunday - it looks like it might be a little better out.But in the meantime, I finally downloaded the pictures I took on the way home two weeks ago, as I came through downtown Louisville.
On Market Street, as you're coming out from the West End, you pass a couple of places of interest -- like the Glass Factory, whe
re they used to have the world's greatest jazz club before it gave up the ghost, and where they still let you make your own glass ornaments, in addition to watching glassblowers as work -- and then you pass under the highway and you're downtown.
The incredible thing to me is that, looking back over my shoulder as I waited for the light, I could see roses still blooming in the post-Thanksgiving chill.
Of course, the big thing on Thanksgiving weekend is "Light Up Louisville," when they turn on all the Christmas lights in the courthous
e square. This year the big deal was that they switched everything over to LED lights to save money, which is good. Beats the heck out of a few years ago, when they were bringing in 
the big tree via helicopter and they kind of dropped it...And there were roses in the square, too.
27 February 2009
One from the Vault - originally posted February 12, 2008 on MySpace
en espanol, por favor
First, someone needs to clue me in to how to insert Spanish characters here.
Now.
I've been watching a lot of movies lately. I used to have a Blockbuster Online membership, but I realized after a while that I was spending 'way too much money per movie. I had the basic $10-a-month plan, which doesn't sound bad - you get a movie, you send it back, they send you the next one in your queue, and if you're watching movies as soon as you get them, it's a real deal. Unfortunately, between school, the new(ish) house, work, other projects, and whatnot, I was frequently keeping a movie two or three months before I watched it, sometimes longer. That adds up when you look at it realistically: $30 to keep a movie three months? I could've bought it for less!
So I cancelled that and signed up at Wild and Wooly Video, a local venture that has all the odd-duck stuff I love. It's on Bardstown Road, in the Highlands -- if you know Louisville, that will tell you what sort of place it is. If you don't - well, the Highlands is a neighborhood not far from downtown, where the houses are old, the population is exceedingly diverse, and the businesses lean well to the left of "funky." It was among the businesses of the Highlands - and the main drag, Bardstown Road, in particular - that the locally popular slogan evolved: Keep Louisville Weird! And trust me, W&WV is about as weird as they come, and darn proud of it!
So here's the thing: I did not exactly excel in foreign languages in school. In fact, at one point, I changed my major from Sociology to Psychology to get out of having to take any more language credits. I can mimic accents flawlessly, but when I get through reading a page of text and I'm asked what it means, my response is usually along the lines of, "Ruh?" However, last summer, a group of us convinced our translation team and a few others to start a lunchtime conversational Spanish class, and I actually started catching on. So I set myself a goal of becoming comfortable, if not fluent, in Spanish, and one of the ways I figured I could do it would be to watch Spanish-language movies.
It's working. Along about movie # 7 or 8 -- Vacas, a fascinating little piece of Basque historical melodrama - I realized I was only looking at the subtitles about a third as often as when I started, right after Christmas. I was starting to understand the dialogue. And besides the redeeming educational value, I find many of these movies are simply like nothing I've seen before.
I know a lot of people have seen Pan's Labyrinth. It's a fairy tale in the truest sense, dark and violent and frightening, and it almost seems, just before the end, as though evil has won. It's stunning - haunting, powerful, exceedingly well-done in every aspect.
That was one of the first. Since then, I've watched so many movies, mostly from Spain, some very recent and others going back to the early '70s. I've found out what Geraldine Chaplin's been doing since Dr. Zhivago - Spanish cinema! I've learned a good bit about Spanish history and culture in addition to the language, and I've also seen several really good movies from Latin America, running the gamut from romantic to bizarre (that would be Vera, which I watched a couple nights ago and still haven't figured out). I've discovered a favorite actress, Ana Torrant, who couldn't have been more than 5 when she did Secret of the Beehive, and is now probably in her mid-thirties. Vacas is a few years old; she may have been in her late 20s when she made that.
One weekend, I rented both Volver -- very recent, with Penelope Cruz cast pretty much against type -- and Cria Cuervos, the first of Torrant's movies I saw. (Geraldine Chaplin was in it, playing both Torrant's character as an adult and, in the flashbacks that made up most of the story, her character's mother's ghost.) I had to watch that one twice.
They're both ghost stories in a sense. Volver means "to return." And there were many returns: the return of a lost parent, the return of a woman to a place she'd run from, the return of relationships that had been dead. Cria Cuervos is set in Franco-era Madrid. Ana Torrant plays a middle child among three daughters, who blames her father for her mother's death. (Although the cause is never specified, I'm thinking ovarian or cervical cancer, given the scene that takes place just before she dies.)
It took me a while to figure out the title. It means "raising crows," and it comes from a Spanish proverb that says, "If you raise crows, they will scratch your eyes out." I finally ran it past my daughter the other night, completely out of context - she hasn't seen the movie and didn't know what it was about - and she got it immediately. If you raise your children to be demanding and selfish and self-absorbed, they'll make you pay for it.
Little Ana is not a bad child. She's not really homicidal, in spite of the fact that she believes she's killed her father and has no regret for having done so. She's about 8 years old, and she figures he deserved it. In fact, I'd have to disagree with the two or three reviewers I read later, who thought she was depressed and suicidal. I think she was a take-charge kind of kid who basically saw what was wrong and tried in her own odd-duck way to fix it. There's one scene where she fantasizes jumping off a rooftop, but it was pretty clear to me that she isn't imagining killing herself - after she jumps, she flies, dipping and swooping around her neighborhood. She's imagining being free.
She's not a demanding, selfish little "crow," but she does prove out the proverb. She also proves out my favorite definition of a spoiled child, made by one of the umpty-eleven seminal psychologists whose work I studied, and I've forgotten which (Maslow, maybe?): A "spoiled" child is one who' s been taught that she needs something to survive, and then has it taken away. Except for the housekeeper, and her mother, who is dead, Ana is either ignored or treated more harshly than either of her sisters by the other adults in her life. She was her mother's favorite, the most like her and the most loved. And now, her mother is gone, and since she believes she's the only one who knows the truth, she takes it upon herself to correct the situation. With great, dark eyes and a solemn affect, she goes about the work of repairing her world as best she can, and the movie as a whole is alternately darkly hilarious and gently sad, but still hopeful.
After all, she does grow up to look like Geraldine Chaplin! And she doesn't appear to be in prison, so I'm guessing it all comes out in the wash.
So there's your movie review for tonight. Remember this name: Ana Torrant. She can act circles around every Hollywood beauty I can think of. Go rent Cria Cuervos or Vacas or The Devil's Backbone (a whole 'nother cast, and another review for another night) and work on your Spanish!
First, someone needs to clue me in to how to insert Spanish characters here.
Now.
I've been watching a lot of movies lately. I used to have a Blockbuster Online membership, but I realized after a while that I was spending 'way too much money per movie. I had the basic $10-a-month plan, which doesn't sound bad - you get a movie, you send it back, they send you the next one in your queue, and if you're watching movies as soon as you get them, it's a real deal. Unfortunately, between school, the new(ish) house, work, other projects, and whatnot, I was frequently keeping a movie two or three months before I watched it, sometimes longer. That adds up when you look at it realistically: $30 to keep a movie three months? I could've bought it for less!
So I cancelled that and signed up at Wild and Wooly Video, a local venture that has all the odd-duck stuff I love. It's on Bardstown Road, in the Highlands -- if you know Louisville, that will tell you what sort of place it is. If you don't - well, the Highlands is a neighborhood not far from downtown, where the houses are old, the population is exceedingly diverse, and the businesses lean well to the left of "funky." It was among the businesses of the Highlands - and the main drag, Bardstown Road, in particular - that the locally popular slogan evolved: Keep Louisville Weird! And trust me, W&WV is about as weird as they come, and darn proud of it!
So here's the thing: I did not exactly excel in foreign languages in school. In fact, at one point, I changed my major from Sociology to Psychology to get out of having to take any more language credits. I can mimic accents flawlessly, but when I get through reading a page of text and I'm asked what it means, my response is usually along the lines of, "Ruh?" However, last summer, a group of us convinced our translation team and a few others to start a lunchtime conversational Spanish class, and I actually started catching on. So I set myself a goal of becoming comfortable, if not fluent, in Spanish, and one of the ways I figured I could do it would be to watch Spanish-language movies.
It's working. Along about movie # 7 or 8 -- Vacas, a fascinating little piece of Basque historical melodrama - I realized I was only looking at the subtitles about a third as often as when I started, right after Christmas. I was starting to understand the dialogue. And besides the redeeming educational value, I find many of these movies are simply like nothing I've seen before.
I know a lot of people have seen Pan's Labyrinth. It's a fairy tale in the truest sense, dark and violent and frightening, and it almost seems, just before the end, as though evil has won. It's stunning - haunting, powerful, exceedingly well-done in every aspect.
That was one of the first. Since then, I've watched so many movies, mostly from Spain, some very recent and others going back to the early '70s. I've found out what Geraldine Chaplin's been doing since Dr. Zhivago - Spanish cinema! I've learned a good bit about Spanish history and culture in addition to the language, and I've also seen several really good movies from Latin America, running the gamut from romantic to bizarre (that would be Vera, which I watched a couple nights ago and still haven't figured out). I've discovered a favorite actress, Ana Torrant, who couldn't have been more than 5 when she did Secret of the Beehive, and is now probably in her mid-thirties. Vacas is a few years old; she may have been in her late 20s when she made that.
One weekend, I rented both Volver -- very recent, with Penelope Cruz cast pretty much against type -- and Cria Cuervos, the first of Torrant's movies I saw. (Geraldine Chaplin was in it, playing both Torrant's character as an adult and, in the flashbacks that made up most of the story, her character's mother's ghost.) I had to watch that one twice.
They're both ghost stories in a sense. Volver means "to return." And there were many returns: the return of a lost parent, the return of a woman to a place she'd run from, the return of relationships that had been dead. Cria Cuervos is set in Franco-era Madrid. Ana Torrant plays a middle child among three daughters, who blames her father for her mother's death. (Although the cause is never specified, I'm thinking ovarian or cervical cancer, given the scene that takes place just before she dies.)
It took me a while to figure out the title. It means "raising crows," and it comes from a Spanish proverb that says, "If you raise crows, they will scratch your eyes out." I finally ran it past my daughter the other night, completely out of context - she hasn't seen the movie and didn't know what it was about - and she got it immediately. If you raise your children to be demanding and selfish and self-absorbed, they'll make you pay for it.
Little Ana is not a bad child. She's not really homicidal, in spite of the fact that she believes she's killed her father and has no regret for having done so. She's about 8 years old, and she figures he deserved it. In fact, I'd have to disagree with the two or three reviewers I read later, who thought she was depressed and suicidal. I think she was a take-charge kind of kid who basically saw what was wrong and tried in her own odd-duck way to fix it. There's one scene where she fantasizes jumping off a rooftop, but it was pretty clear to me that she isn't imagining killing herself - after she jumps, she flies, dipping and swooping around her neighborhood. She's imagining being free.
She's not a demanding, selfish little "crow," but she does prove out the proverb. She also proves out my favorite definition of a spoiled child, made by one of the umpty-eleven seminal psychologists whose work I studied, and I've forgotten which (Maslow, maybe?): A "spoiled" child is one who' s been taught that she needs something to survive, and then has it taken away. Except for the housekeeper, and her mother, who is dead, Ana is either ignored or treated more harshly than either of her sisters by the other adults in her life. She was her mother's favorite, the most like her and the most loved. And now, her mother is gone, and since she believes she's the only one who knows the truth, she takes it upon herself to correct the situation. With great, dark eyes and a solemn affect, she goes about the work of repairing her world as best she can, and the movie as a whole is alternately darkly hilarious and gently sad, but still hopeful.
After all, she does grow up to look like Geraldine Chaplin! And she doesn't appear to be in prison, so I'm guessing it all comes out in the wash.
So there's your movie review for tonight. Remember this name: Ana Torrant. She can act circles around every Hollywood beauty I can think of. Go rent Cria Cuervos or Vacas or The Devil's Backbone (a whole 'nother cast, and another review for another night) and work on your Spanish!
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