![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Pants | Hat | Gods | Paste | Fritz
Dec. 5th, 2002 12:06 amIs there some kind of a home-ec-for-grown-ups course I can take? Really, I'm a clueless wreck in this area. I mean, I have rips in some clothing that would likely be simple to mend if only I knew what tools and materials I'd need, and how to use them. And M had to teach me how to wash dishes. (I had been washing dishes before living here, but I now know I was washing them in a pretty dumb and inefficient way (self-taught after I moved into my first apartment, six years ago).)
I tell my mom this is all her fault for raising me to be a lazy so-and-so with no basic housekeeping skills at all, and she says Har har, ya need a wife! Yeh, thanks. Give us grandchildren! Pretty grandchildren brains, rraargh!!! Yes, yes... (I love my mom, really. But: sigh.)
A small victory: got a nice knit hat, yesterday at the Harvard CoOp at Longwood. I knew it was time to buy this winter's hat when the wind blowing up Highland near chewed my ears off during the 10-minute walk from my house to the subway. (I didn't know of any places in Davis that might sell me a hat, except for maybe Goodwill, and, erm, too many basic cootie-fears to make me consider that.)
I was worried that all their hats would be in Harvard colors, but I found a perfectly fine gray one that says HARVARD MEDICAL in small red letters on the, uh, folded-up part. Normally I eschew any kind of decoration or pattern or slogan on my clothes, but I figured I could make an exception for this. I'd be lying to say I don't wear it with a wee little bit of pride. It's nice.
(Tangent: My backpack of the last two years or so has had a big O'Reilly logo on it, and it's starting to fall apart, so I had been thinking about getting a Harvard backpack. But I have a Harvard hat now, and I don't want to wear two like-branded items. That'd make me look like a fanboy, or something. On cold days, anyway.)
I thought about one of my favorite scenes from American Gods during that walk through the cold, and I should note that I did in fact enjoy that book very much. Really: It was hitting me with "Aha!"s for the rest of the day after I finished it, as pieces of the story clicked into place. You should read this book.
Note to self: If brushing teeth in the morning, do so before taking a shower. If you must shower first, wipe off mirror so you can see your face after brushing teeth.
I wonder how many mornings before today I have worn crusted-over toothpaste drool until I wiped it away with my lunchtime napkin or whatnot. I only noticed today because of course the first thing I did upon arriving at work was rush into the bathroom to see how bad my hat-hair was.
I'm typing these words whilst sitting in the Brattle Theatre. I don't think I've been here since... Donnie Darko? Dude, that was like, last January. If I haven't done so yet, let me declare my life officially restarted. Not so's youd notice, what with me now burying myself in ICCB catch-up for the foreseeable future (which is to say, thru the holidays -- which is the best time to do catchup, at least in academia, where everything moves with a flobbery klopness and nobody really expects anyone to do much of anything).
Hey, a small Brattle popcorn fits snugly into the in-seat cupholders here. How's that for service? I shall now formally forgive the popcorn cup art for depicting the Millenium Falcon flying backwards.
Anyway, I am here because I progged through the Square seeking a copy of Deadline and found nothing by at all by Mr. DeMarco in either of the major bookstores. The game store was closed, so no new Go set for me tonight, either. On an impulse, probably because I saw the word "Brattle" somewhere (for the theatre is named after the street it is on) and I became aware of how very long it's been, I wandered over to peek at the marquee: Metropolis (The Fritz Lang one, not the anime one). I have seen this before, sort of... on a video tape, seven or eight years ago, the version with colored filters over everything and set to a Queen soundtrack. I don't remember much of that beyond a couple of scenes, because it didn't make a whole lot of sense.
[ time passes ]
OK, I have seen the movie. Wow, I am still wearing the goofy grin I wore all the way home. I chose wisely. Modulo all the goofy and dated bits, including the two main heroic characters really, really overacting (enough to make the audience snicker a little too often) and the hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-50-foot-crucifix judeochristian allegories, this was a fine thing to see. According to the meta-information given to us by the opening titlecards, this print is the newest and most like the original, of which only around 75 percent has survived the 20th century. Because entire scenes were missing in some cases, titlecards in a modern typeface would ocassionally summarize what we're missing, gluing together the surviving footage. It worked as well as it could.
I entered the movie afraid that I'd be too aware of its age to enjoy it the way it wanted me to. While it's true that at the start I found myself looking at the special effects and thinking "Gee, I wonder how that did that, way back then," I happily dropped into the right mental context within a few minutes (though the effect would vanish momentarily when things failed to pass through my irony filter, such as the many times the hero struck a Heroic Pose, or the heroine becoming terrified beyond sanity by someone shining a flashlight at her). I was also worried that I'd be turned off by the RRR TECHNOLOGY BAD motif, which turned out not to exist... the film supports technology and the men and women who make it all work, but it warns against a world run by technology without soul. So the moral is, buy a Mac, yuk yuk.
Um, yes: My favorite part was actually a little movie-within-the-movie, a retelling of the Tower of Babel story, which was not only visually beautiful (and remember that this beauty has to blast through my super-futuristic 21st-century jadedness in order to register, so you know that's quality) but gives a delightfully sinister spin to the orginal tale, making the reason for the tower's fall far more human and believable than is recorded in scripture.
And the film's ending... oh boy. It shows you that not only The Terminator but also the entire 4-H club owe everything to this picture's final images and words (respectively), but said words appear in ALL CAPS AT THE END!!!! BECAUSE IT'S THE MORAL!!! -->THE END!!<-- And it really says "THE END" in a giant typeface immediately after while the orchestra gives a final BLOMP and you can imagine that I said "Yay" and meant every word.
Actually, the moral also appeared at the very beginning, after the opening credits and before the title, under the label: epigram. Curious! I have never heard of such a thing. The movie tells you right up front that its point can be expressed succinctly, and, by the way, here it is. Hmmf... I suppose if I searched hard enough I could think of some modern movies that use the same device, but the baldness of it here interested me.