Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

New Responsibility

Last month my only Facebook responsibility was to announce celebrity deaths.

This month I have an added duty: outing the Coronavirus Task Force Briefing Face-Touchers.

I watch every Coronavirus Task Force Briefing, every day, every minute, and document when a doctor or politico moves their viruses closer to their respiratory systems.

I understand when some people touch their faces. Recently Agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue isn’t a doctor, and I assume he’s the Perdue Chicken Magnate, so even thought he touched his face a record eleven times, I forgive him.

I forgive him. He makes no claims to be a doctor or a President.

Actually the president touches his face, on average, only once per briefing.

He isn’t a doctor, like Secretary Ben Carson, shown here coughing directly into his hand:

The people I look to, the ones I ask the most of, are the doctors. Doctor Scarf (I can’t tell you her real name, it’s something like Biloxi, but I am certain we all know her as Doctor Scarf) and then everyone’s favorite: Doctor “I can’t just wrestle the President to the ground [when he lies]” Fauci.

Doctor Fauci is going to touch his face, and I forgive him, because he owns it.

The one that bothers me is Dr. Scarf. She is the opposite of Dr. Fauci.

And then days later:

“Did I touch my face by accident,” sure. Give me a break.

Of course, so you know who never never ever touches his face? Well, two people, the Surgeon General, who should be in charge, and then the man who is actually in charge, everyones favorite cyborg, Vice President Pence.

(And what happened to the dark doctor? Why isn’t she in the meetings any more? Was it the blinking? She blinked a LOT.)

Pence is on camera every day, and he has not cracked once. This has only served to convince me that in the day the Veep touches his face we will all drop dead in our homes and turn to dust. If I survive I will post, “PENCE TOUCHES FACE IT’S ALL OVER.”

Review: The Invisible Man

“Twenty dollars?” I squawked, “Emma didn’t cost twenty dollars!” I appreciate that studios are releasing movies on streaming services, but is this price gouging? I was ready to wait to see if the price went down, given that I did not have high hopes for The Invisible Man movie.

But Gary really wanted to see it, and we have all kinds of gas money in the budget that is taking up space, so why not? 

Was it worth it? Yes. So worth it. 

There was one point when I said, “Oh, damn. I figured out the end.” And no, no I did not figure out the end, they set me up to think I knew what was going to happen and then, man, they veered way off.

It was excellent. Gary said it was like Hitchcock. I don’t know about that, but it was worth 10 bucks per person. 

 

Weekly Paint Progress: 3/26

This week the lamp went from this ...

to this ...

I thought I’d be in detail mode but I’m still in sloppy mode. I overpainted and I need to add yellow back. I like the water in the vase, though.

The small project is the lemons. It uses mainly transparent colors.

 

 

Planning Ahead

I took inventory of what was in every freezer and larder.

Oddly, there are no cans of beans. Note: go buy quaranbeans.

Shown below is the end of my inventory. (Those two scrawled lines are “HUNKS CHEES(E)” and “BLUE BERRIE(S)” specifically.) So, here is some of what we will be eating if we are confined for, say, two months.

Do not scoff. I will eat or sell or barter the raccoons. I look at them now and I see fat, peanut-fed raccoon steaks.

I suppose I should have added opossums to the list as well, but they are muscular and I may want to keep them to pull the miniature plows in the backyard cabbage farm we will soon establish.

The skunks, however, will not be eaten or put to work: they will be bred. Remember GlamourSkunk, with her all-white tail and sporty banded legs? She has brought along her brothers and sisters. Their all-white tails are a little thinner, the bands a little spottier, but still miles more attractive than your standard skunk. Gary and I were debating if they were a separate breed of skunk, or mutants, or if we were just seeing recessive genes, and then we started making Mendel charts, and clearly skunk-breeding will be our new hobby.

Review: Emma

(I must say, good call filmmakers for releasing your first-run movies on Amazon during the pandemic.)

I was complaining to someone that the trailer for Emma looked like they were capitalizing on the physical humor, and that frightened me, because that would be like a trailer for the Three Stooges that capitalized on the wordplay.

I was wrong, so wrong. This is the best version of Emma ever. It s a confection. I am so sad Mom died twelve years before this movie was made, because it had all her key components for a period drama: costumes and hairstyles and tea food. I counted three cakes which were not there to move the plot along, they were just there to have a very tall ornate cake. 

Casting:

The new Emma is an actress I have never seen before who makes Gwenyth Paltrow look fat and lumbering. She looks perfect.

The new Mr. Wodehouse is Bill Nighy. I was dismayed when I saw him bounding down steps in the trailer, and thought they were trying to make him healthy. They do not. There are several delightful scenes with screens. 

My one quibble is that the new Mr Knightley is too young to be Mr. Knightley. Isn’t he supposed to be fifteen years older? You can blame my father figure issues, but the scenes where he’s chastising her are not sexy at all.

I quite enjoyed it. I’m sure I will enjoy it even more in years to come, when the school girls don’t make me think of The Handmaid’s Tale and the one footman no longer reminds me of Seth Meyers. It made at least one evening of The Confinement more pleasant.

Weekly Paint Progress: 3/19

The week the lamp went from this ....

to this ...

I was going to focus on the red petals but then I got caught up in everything else.

And the small project went from this ...

.. to this ...

It was originally supposed to look like the image below. My canvas was square and I had to do some adjustments. I think it’s okay. I think the next one will be better, it’s lemons, lemons are easier.

Dad’s Taste

I know that there’s no accounting for taste, and it takes all kinds, but my Dad had the most vile taste in food. These were his favorites:

• Black licorice
• Head cheese
• Olive jalapeño loaf 

He also liked hard liquor, cheap beer, chalky chocolate, fried bologna, strong coffee, and saltines with butter.

All I can guess is that all the smoking killed his taste buds and he had no idea what he was eating.

This Ancestry research makes me wonder what would happen if he’d had his own biological children. What foods would they have preferred? Braunschweiger, I suppose, and mustard. Testicles. Limburger. And those children would LOVE their testicle limburger braunschweiger loaf sandwiches and say, like Dad, “You don’t know what you’re missing.” 

Post-plague Walmart

Since January Gary has expressly forbidden me from buying the giant big-box blocks o’ of toilet paper that I like to keep in the basement because I like to stock up in case there’s a pandemic or SOME SUCH THING. I now only buy one week’s worth at a time. 

Of course this week he demanded the Walmart pallet-sized toilet paper.  I responded that there’s no relation between Covid-19 and toilet paper, he just suddenly wants to buy it because it’s a Thing he can Do.

”NO ALL OUR U.S. TOILET PAPER IS MADE IN CHINA AND NOW ALL THOSE FACTORIES ARE CLOSED SO THERE WILL BE NO MORE TOILET PAPER.”

So I went to Walmart to take the required photo of the empty shelves.

Check out my photo of this woman also taking a photo of the empty shelves.

We chatted only briefly because she was on the phone. Evidently this woman was giving a live-on-the scene report from the Walmart for her housebound friend.

Gary also wanted soap and surgical masks — no doubt also made in China — so I was trolling the aisles. I kept encountering her taking photos and talking to her friend.

”Soap’s all gone ... why are there no vitamins ... guess people want to stay healthy to fight off the virus ... yeah, no Kleenex, it’s tiny toilet paper ... Fiber One bars are fully stocked, no one cares about that shit...” and then I think her friend suggested the relation between too much fiber / too much shit / too little toilet paper, because she laughed.

And it wasn’t just this woman, everyone added to the party atmosphere. Know that when the Apocalypse comes, if you go to the Walmart, you will find all the desperate people banding together to help each other out. It sounded like this:

Stranger A to the crowd: “Have you all seen liquid body soap, is there any left?”

Stranger B to Stranger A: ”I saw some Palmolive dishwashing liquid, you could use that.”

Stranger C, to the crowd: ”IF ANYONE’S LOOKING FOR t.p. THEY HAVE THESE flushable wipes HERE ON AISLE 24” 

It was delightful. Gary went out and easily found toilet paper at the Dierbergs, so all is well.

Weekly Paint Progress: 3/12

This week the lamp went from this:

to this ...

(The table looks skewed, but that’s because of the angle I took the photo.)

The small project went from this ...

to this:

I don’t know why, but the small one looks very 1950s to me. 

Circuit Breakers

I’ve had a job in the financial industry for over a dozen years, and on Monday I finally got to see what it looks like when stocks plummet so hard that trading halts. (Trading might have halted in the past 12 years, but I never saw it.) I flipped on the news when I saw the circuit breaker was imminent and I got to see it unfold live. 

The CNN reporter at the exchange was scattered, because clearly someone was talking into her earpiece.  She was saying things like, “There's supposed to be a bell,” when we could clearly hear a bell behind her. I was thrown too, because it was a chiming bell, like a ringtone - I suppose it could have been a ringtone. I think we both expected a blaring bell. Perhaps there was one and the chimes were a warning.

Stephanie Ruhle at MSNBC was her usual steely self, and they had no one on the floor at the pivotal moment, so she just carried on while the number on the screen sat at 7% until she got the official word.

CNBC was, of course, the most phlegmatic, explaining this was to be expected in so many ways. Nothing was on screen but graphs, graphs, graphs.

Milestone for me, though.

 

 

Patient Zero

I will spend the next twenty years waiting for the episode of Nova in which they track down the Covid-19 Patient Zero. I hope that street meat bat was pretty damn delicious. 

I say twenty years because I think it took twenty years to find the German flight attendant who was the Aids Patient Zero. Well, more accurately, Patient Zero and Typhoid Mary combined.

If they are looking for the Covid-19 equivalent, they should start looking under the nails of the hardest-working Princess Cruise chef.

I’m a little alarmed to read it’s in a US Army base in Italy now. That’s how the Spanish flu spread, they say, it started in a troop hospital, then the servicemen flew home to spread it to all their countries.

My part in the fight against the virus is to document the suicidal level of face-touching that goes on during Pence’s Coronavirus updates.

 

Celebrity Hat: Resurrection

Back in the day, nine years ago, we went to the Kentucky Derby. For a few months I prepared for the derby by making an ornate hat. 


At the derby among lesser hats

It only took a few months make the hat. It was well received at the Derby, and in fact, so well received that it earned the name Celebrity Hat. (If you want to read the genesis and the glory day of the hat, read from this post to this one, ignoring any non-hat details in between.)

Celebrity Hat faded into obscurity, no doubt because she did not go on Dancing With the Stars as Becs suggested. Instead, she made a few trips to work functions, and gained enough of a standing that someone asked to borrow her for a charity event about five years ago.

I took a critical look at CH before whoring her out, and I did not like what I saw. Fine from the front, but chaos in the back. I ended up flipping her backward and adding some nice chunky peonies. Then, when she returned, it was back to the basement for her.

This year, Friend #2 had a charity event, and had that white feather looked more curly than crunched she would have looked perfect. No one who borrows the hat has a pea-head like mine, so this time I got the stapler and augmented the Velcro and now Celebrity Hat has two settings: Pea and Normal.

Friend #2 has now reported that CH had a fine time and was again greeted by the same words she heard at the Derby: “Now that is a hat.”

This time CH will have a job while in storage. I used Saran Wrap to shape that white feather around a Nerf Ball, so she will emerge perfectly curly and glorious the next time she makes a comeback.

Weekly Paint Progress: 3/5

This was the lamp last week:

...and here’s the lamp this week.

Ugh - the lampshade is tilted and it’s really evident I manipulated the photo and I didn’t change all the perspective. Plus I need to add the red to the tulips.

I’m taking it easy on the small piece. This is the first thing in Teach Yourself to Oil Paint, or whatever the name is.

This should go fast.

Shen Yun

If you live in St. Louis and watch either CNN or MSNBC you have seen the ubiquitous commercials for the Shen Yun dance troupe. All you gain from the commercial is that they are a Chinese, they leap, they wear flowing costumes and seem to be adored by a variety of breathless individuals who work in the entertainment field. (One exhorts you to “coooooome” a little TOO breathlessly.)

That’s all you gain from the commercial, but the internet will tell you that the dancers may be from China, but they can’t go back to China because they’re members of the Falun Gong religious practice that was persecuted in China in the 90s. 

(To my relief, Falun Gong is not Aum-Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult that released SARIN nerve gas in the Tokyo subway in the 90s. Evidently my brain can only store one Asian cult at a time.)

Dance doesn’t appeal to me as much it does to others. I imagine usually this would be very popular in Saint Louis. Sadly for Shen Yun, this isn’t the week for Chinese dancers, because if you don’t do your research you might think they just flew in from China on the Covid-19 express instead of being the children of Chinese ex-pats.

Contagion

I’ve been on a tear, watching all the classic 1930s movies I should have seen and never did. I started with Pygmalion (Leslie Howard, yum), then Leslie brought me to Of Human Bondage, then Bette Davis took my hand and I watched Jezebel.

Three films in a row with puzzling endings. Pygmalion, of course, had to end romantically. Even George Bernard Shaw bowed to the pressure and consigned Higgins and Eliza to what was fated to be a miserable five-week relationship.

Then, in Of Human Bondage, the hero’s motivations were baffling. Perhaps I just don’t remember what is is to be young and hate yourself. Why did the protagonist do anything or end up with anyone?

After those two peculiar endings, [spoiler] Bette Davis was suddenly cured of her Borderline Personality Disorder at the end of Jezebel. I just accepted it. Still, in what world would a woman in a hoop skirt hop a wagon headed to a leper colony? 

After doubting the movie’s realism, I noticed the obvious modern-day parallel with Jezebel: infectious disease. It portrays New Orleans as cloudy with mosquitoes carrying yellow fever. (Henry Fonda even swats one and is as doomed as Bette when she coughs in Of Human Bondage.) Today, bug-filled barges coming down the Mississippi are replaced by cruise ships carrying coronavirus. The 2020 Olympics might be affected, instead of the Olympus Ball.

Perhaps coronavirus just needs a few good cannon volleys, the germ defense of choice in the movie. 

Weekly Paint Progress: 2/27

I say the zebra is done. Last week it was this:

‘

Now it is this (some of the white molding is stronger)

... when it was originally this:

Next week my small project will be something from Teach Yourself to Oil Paint. I said I was going to have an easy project that doesn’t try to stretch my skills and I mean it. Sometimes I go back and play Leaving On a Jet Plane on my guitar. This will be the painting equivalent.

I did something new with the lamp. I didn’t look at what I was trying to paint, I just painted what I thought should be there. This was last week:

.. and this week I added purple shadows to the background and some wood grain to the table:

Next week I will be roughing in the flowers, and then the fun will begin with the details.

 

Review: The Gentlemen

We were scoping out what movie to see when Gary read a review of The Gentlemen.

”This reviewer says you’ll like it if you like Guy Ritchie movies.”

Then, of course, we had to look up Guy Ritchie movies. I hadn’t seen any of them. Gary had seen some bits and scenes, usually while waiting out a commercial.

I found a little video primer of what makes a a Guy Ritchie movie - crime, cursing, clever opening credits, captions, fast dialog, and split screens. I like captions and fast dialog, so I was on board.

We bandied the term “a Guy Ritchie movie” about all evening before the show. Gary would curse: I’d say, “Isn't that a little too Guy Ritchie?” When we arrived he pointed out Guy Ritchie’s name on the poster. We jostled each other during the opening credits when the screen shrieked A FILM BY GUY RITCHIE.

After the movie, heading to the car, Gary was still talking about how much he enjoyed the movie, when I stopped and covered my ears.

“Please stop talking. Please. I can’t take any more talking. I just listened to Hugh Grant talk for two hours. And don’t tell me people in Britain really say ‘cunty’ that often.”

I think I’d like Guy Ritchie movies if they were a little less Guy Ritchie.

Concern

“Are you okay?”

A young man asked me that last week. I was entering a building at the community college, he was exiting. 

I was completely fine, so I was taken aback by his concern. I had only a second to think of a reason he might have asked.

”Oh, I’m just cold,” I said, because he would soon discover it was 15 degrees outdoors (-9 Celsius). 

The cold was a handy excuse, and it kept me from huffing, “I am perfectly fine, young man.” That might not have been why he asked if I was okay.

I was opening a heavy door and I’m sure that looked awkward. 

I am in my late fifties, and the young man may have interpreted my sags and wattles as some tumorous face disease.

There is now a permanent vertical wrinkle line between my eyebrows. Perhaps I always appear to be worried. 

Perhaps he assumed — from a distance — I was a plump young college woman, who became increasingly disabled as he got closer. 

What he should have asked was, “Are you lost?” because I would have said, “I might be. My class is in the HUM building. I take it that means the humanities building? And if so, is this indeed the Humanities building?” And then I might have babbled, “Oh the humanity,” and the young man would have backed away slowly.

It was nice, though, that instead of:

”You look out of place, lady! I am concerned about you.”

”Mind your manners, you insolent puppy!”

... we said, “Are you okay?” “Oh, I’m just cold.”

News Drama

The news has latched on to this case of the “Doomsday Mom” and her missing children.

Why is this case being presented as if the children have died? I think those kids are fine. I think the 17-year-old daughter recognized her Mom is mentally ill and is drawn to a man who is probably mentally ill. Instead of embracing the new and wacky family situation, the girl took off with her young brother to protect him from her unstable parents.

I hear great relief that the mom has “finally” been arrested for abandoning her children. I’d like to give the daughter an award for finally abandoning her mom and rescuing her brother.

Of course, now that I’ve said this the children are going to be found dead in an underground shelter. 

Weekly Paint Progress: 2/20

This week the zebra went from this ...

to this.. 

I felt like the zebra is close to done. I need to fuzz up the tips of the mane and do some more molding.

The lamp went from this ...

...to this ...

The lamp is a challenge. I feel like I want to pitch it and start over again, like I did with the painting of Gary. Perhaps my dislike is going to free me up to make more creative decisions and it might work out better. 

Weekly Paint Progress 2/13

This week the zebra went from this ...

... to this ...

All I did was add a light wash of white to some of the stripes to do some contouring, and then I worked on the eye.

I did less on the lamp but it looks like more.

... to this.

Opera Puppets (spoiler)

When we saw Rigoletto this past summer, we noticed the main character hauls around a ventriloquist’s dummy. I asked Friend Anne if the dummy was standard and she said no. I felt the dummy was distracting and creepy. Also, it didn’t sing. The reviewer for the Post wasn’t a big fan either.

Then I watched the recent PBS broadcast of Madama Butterfly. (Evidently when she’s at the Met, she’s Madama, when she’s in Saint Louis she’s Madame.)  

[Spoiler] Do you plan to see Madama Butterfly (or Madame, depending on your proximity to the coast, la-LAH)? Then stop reading right now, because there’s a key plot point coming.

At one point she brings out her child and it’s a freaky Mummenschanz puppet. See the dark veiled puppeteers?

The reason there’s a puppeteer’s hand behind Pinocchio’s head there is because that’s where the handle is they use to tilt his head, because he wasn’t creepy enough already.

I wondered, why not have a live human child play that part? There’s no singing involved. Couldn’t a toddler be counted on to be led around by the hand and then pretend to sleep at one point? Just fall asleep and then wave a flag at the end.

So evidently using creepy articulated wood dolls to fill minor roles is a thing they do at operas now. I know I haven’t seen a lot of operas but I do not approve.

UPDATED: My Oscars Ballot

Here are my desired winners - to be updated tonight when I find out how wrong I am.

I don’t call these predictions. They are the nominees I want to win, not the ones I think will win.

BEST PICTURE
Ford v Ferrari 
The Irishman
Jojo Rabbit     Desired Winner! Of course I want Jojo Rabbit to win. 
Joker
Little Women
Marriage Story
1917
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Parasite is the Actual Winner, and it was my least favorite. 

BEST ACTOR
Antonio Banderas - Pain and Glory
Leonardo DiCaprio - Once Upon a Time In Hollywood
Adam Driver - Marriage Story
Joaquin Phoenix - Joker    Desired Winner! Hard to play “crazy“ convincingly and compassionately. He also snags the Actual Winner award.
Jonathan Pryce - The Two Popes

BEST ACTRESS
Cythia Erivo - Harriet
Scarlett Johansson - Marriage Story
Saoirse Ronan - Little Women
Charlize Theron - Bombshell
Renée Zellweger - Judy   Desired Winner! Maybe acting is like oil painting, it’s harder to do an exact representation than someone you can just make up. She is also the Actual Winner.

SUPPORTING ACTOR
Tom Hanks - A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Anthony Hopkins - The Two Popes
Al Pacino - The Irishman
Joe Pesci - The Irishman
Brad Pitt - Once Upon a Time In Hollywood   Desired Winner! Entirely because he’s fifty and he looks nice with his shirt off. And Brad is the Actual Winner, because such a physical achievement deserves an award.

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Kathy Bates - Richard Jewell
Laura Dern - Marriage Story.  And she’s the Actual Winner, as expected by everyone. 
Scarlett Johnsson - Jojo Rabbit   Desired Winner! She should win just for the scene when they introduce her character.
Florence Pugh - Little Women
Margot Robbie - Bombshell

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
The Irishman - Steven Zaillian
Jojo Rabbit - Taika Waititi.  Actual Winner, and I am just as happy as if Greta Gerwig had won.
Joker - Todd Phillips & Scott Silver
Little Women - Greta Gerwig   Desired Winner! I loved the non-linear timeline.
The Two Popes - Anthony McCarten

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Knives Out - Rian Johnson   Desired Winner! It was between this and 1917, and this had more dialogue, plot, and the things I like.
Marriage Story - Noah Baumbach
1917 - Krysty Wilson-Cairns & Sam Mendes 
Once Upon a Time In Hollywood - Quentin Tarantino
Parasite - Bong Joon Ho & Han Jin Won  Actual winner. I need to watch this movie again alone, so I can pay more attention. Perhaps I would like it more.

 

Summer Concerts

I’ve booked two summer concerts already this year.

First: Barenaked Ladies, of course. They’re inaugurating a new smaller music venue located next to the old bigger music venue, so that should be fun.

Second: The Beach Boys. To my surprise, there are actual original Beach Boys touring. We might even get Brian Wilson if he feels up to it. That one will be at the homey Saint Louis Family Arena, which is like a Barbie-sized version of the St. Louis Blues’ hockey arena.

Both concerts are in smallish venues, both in July, and both require that I get with the 2020’s and use an electronic ticket on my phone. Don’t they know that some of us save the tickets from memorable concerts? 

I suppose we’ll content ourselves with iPhone photos to remember it by. Not the same, though.

Weekly Paint Progress 2/6

This week the zebra went from this ...

...to this...

(That mane will get fuzzed out.)

...and the lamp went from this...

... to this.

That lamp is too close to the wall, but right now everything that’s wrong with it can be adjusted.

Family Update

Brother Dave - Dave’s current diagnosis is “probably cancer,” but he isn’t scheduled for any further tests or treatment for three weeks. I cannot even imagine hearing “You might have cancer. Sit tight for 21 days and we’ll get back with you.” On investigation, I see a three-week wait is the standard, but still, that must be hard.

Father Jerry - I find myself thinking about The Paternovel as I watch television. I make little notes like “a character needs to wake up in an unrecognized place” because that’s always fun, and it looked compelling on television. I don’t think this is how real writers do things. So, in order to get a little better at my new hobby of novel-writing/parent-editing, I’ve signed up for a six-week community college novel-writing class to begin later this month.

Half Step-Sister - Ancestry has finally come up with a non-white family connection. It’s not a blood / DNA match, but evidently when Jerry’s second wife went to find her destiny in Africa, she left behind a daughter in Gambia. Or, I suppose, perhaps she picked up a daughter in Gambia. I don’t know, I backed away from that information because I didn’t have hours to spend. That will require further investigation, though.

SuperBowl Fakeout

Gary and I have our own family Super Bowl ritual. The most important part of the ritual is that we reject all party invitations and spend the night, just the two of us, eating poorly and watching the television. I watch commercials and Gary watches the game, as opposed to our usual practice of ignoring commercials and ignoring football every other day of the year.

This year I thought we could break free from tradition and benefit from our disinterest. The Saint Louis aquarium has been very crowded since opening last December: I thought we could visit late in the day on Super Bowl Sunday. We could even get back home by the time the game was over and all the traffic accidents began.

Sadly, Sunday is the one day the aquarium is not open late. It was a damn good plan, though. I’ll have to find a better way to dodge some crowds next year.

Weekly Paint Progress 1/30

On to the dual projects.

I’m starting with the easy one:

and - not counting tracing - after 90 minutes I’m this far:

Here’s the tricky one:

... and that is a nightmare. It’s much larger, so tracing was not an option. I tried to do a value study and eventually wiped most of down with turpentine.

I’m really not sure how I’m going to make the yellow light seem translucent. Forget cast shadows, now I’m trying cast light. Doomed.

Academy Awards Rundown

For the first time ever I have seen all the Best Picture nominees before the Academy Awards. (Turns out you can see a lot of first-run movies if you don’t spend money on vacation. (I just worked it out: a couple could see two full-price movies a week.))

Here's my nominee list sorted from best to worst.

Jojo Rabbit

Little Women

Once upon a Time...in Hollywood

The Irishman

1917

Joker

Marriage Story - I saw this but didn’t review it. Suffice to say that the scene that critics call the “Big Fight Scene” is what I would call a “Fight Scene.”

Ford v Ferrari

Parasite

Weekly Paint Progress: 1/23

This week the vases finished up, going from this:

to this:

from originally this:

I am just stopping on this misguided mess, for a few months at least - if not forever. I swear next week I’m starting on dual projects (I know, I’ve said that before), plus one of them will be large. 

 

Review: Joker

Gary loved this movie. I acknowledge it was much better than I anticipated. I might have enjoyed it as much as Gary did if I did not have:

1. Mental illness in my family, and
2. One of the “certain neurological conditions” mentioned as an explanation for Joker’s laugh.

Still, even though the film hit too close to home, and there were some glaring continuity errors you wouldn’t expect in a big-budget movie, I was impressed.

Here’s my highest praise: it kept me awake even though it started 20 minutes after my bedtime.

Review: Parasite

At first I thought Parasite was the perfect movie to watch on Amazon. Sure, Gary would take advantage of the home setting by giving it a commentary track, but who cares if he talks during a foreign film? It’s subtitled. 

One half hour in to the movie he announced, “I hate this. There’s —.”

“No one to like,” I sighed. This is a deal-breaker for Gary. “Go take a nap. I’m not forcing you to watch this.”

”No, no, I’ll gut it out. For you.” Our love only carried him for another half hour, when he announced, “This is awful. Why was this nominated for an Academy Award?”

“Go nap. Seriously. I’m fine here.”

He came back after an hour nap and watched the end. The end didn’t revise his opinion. It generally left me cold as well. I don’t know if I would have agreed with the audience in Canne and awarded it the prize. Perhaps if I had seen it without Gary’s counterpoint of negativity I might have liked it.

The Novel: The Judgement

On the whole ... I liked parts of it. The writing is really poetic in places. Still, no one needs a chapter about the poetry of an oil strike any more than they need a chapter on how to get ambergris out of a white whale.

Characters - Perhaps a few too many, and the sheriff’s eyes were described as pig-like more than once, but they all had at least two dimensions. The good guy’s a bit too good, and he seems to run only on emotional extremes, but the main female character Aggie is really well-developed. The villain is probably the most interesting, of course, as they often are.

Setting  - Well, I would have liked to have been reminded it was 1930 between chapters 1 and 14. And there are two towns mentioned: One in Arkansas and one in Oklahoma, and it’s essential you know where you are because flashbacks are in Arkansas. That’s confusing.

Conflict - Drinking vs the demons: guilt, fear, self-delusion. 

Plot - Instead of a bell curve of rising action, climax, falling action, it’s a flat line until three fourths in, when there’s a steep spike upward, a plateau, and then an immediate and even sharper plummet down. (“The trial took three days ... THE END.”)

Resolution - I’ve written essays for junior high that had more thought put into the resolution. 

Theme - Drinking is bad, don’t do it.

So am I doing anything with the novel?

Well, I want to, because parts of it are good. The parts that let you picture yourself in the action, those are great. The parts most writers hate: what my one fiction professor described as “getting out of the apartment and down to the car” — those parts are actually pretty enjoyable.

Hoo-boy, that plot though. Entire chapters need to be gutted and swapped around so that something actually happens. Do I have enough imagination for that? I once was able to daydream for hours, in my youth.

Now of course, I worry for hours. Is that the same?

Sounds like a project. Hm. 

 

Weekly Paint Progess: 1/16

This week the vases went from this craziness ...

to this intense drug trip ...

But then I did some research and found out what I did wrong. I should have started with an underpainting using opaque colors (or opaque black and white, like I did with the teacups). I knew that, but I thought I could do multiple layers of transparent colors, as you do with watercolors. The problem is how to make them pastel. If you lighten by mixing it white with a transparent (like I tried with the pink pitcher) that makes it opaque. 

So then, before I threw it in the trash I put opaque on what I had and I got this:

What I’ve ended up doing is to paint it all backward, transparent then opaque instead of the right way. But I kind of like it. I think I need to add depth and color to the pink pitcher and tidy up the top corners of the right pitcher. 

Of course, given that I put a thick opaque layer over a thin transparent layer it will peel and crack and not last for centuries, but that is a blessing.

The Novel: Chapter 18

At three pages long, it reads strongly of “Good people are alive, bad people are caught, gotta wrap this up because the paper goes to press at 3 p.m.” 

It also has a touch of It’s a Wonderful Life, because Our Hero Joe has his long hospital stay paid for by the cast of colorful characters, so that’s sweet. Then he gets engaged to the Plucky Waitress Mary and continues his life in the oil fields, the end.

Literally, it has “THE END” centered and capitalized. Across the decades you can hear him think “Finally, I can say I finished my novel. Time for a drink.”

Review: 1917 (no Spoilers)

• Evidently the escape to the movies continues into 2020. I am afraid to calculate how much money I could have saved if I hadn’t seen any movies, or if I had only seen good movies. I wouldn’t call this movie an escape, though. 
• Who knew war could be so ugly and so pretty? The cinematography was lovely. 
• After the movie I was in the Des Peres Cinema bathroom, washing my hands. Each sink had an automated soap dispenser, automated faucet, and I swear to you, an individual automated hand air dryer. I had just spent two hours thinking nothing but “Thank God I’m not a soldier,” so having my own personal hand dryer was quite the contrast.

The Novel: Chapter 17

Okay, Jerry truly must have seen the original ending of Fatal Attraction, because in that ending Anne Archer finds tapes that prove Michael Douglas didn’t kill Glenn Close (when she actually committed suicide), and then here, Hero Joe’s friend finds the diary entry of the dead Moxie that discusses the evil plot to kill Aggie and frame Joe. 

(I dimly remember diaries of dead people aren’t admissible in court, because you can’t cross-examine the dead person. Upon further research I find that point’s iffy.)

I was looking forward to the trial, but this is all that’s there: “The trial took three days. Flick testified for the  prosecution and got off with life in prison...” and then it lists each character and what punishment they got — as if it were a newspaper article. 

He’ll devote a chapter to an oil well or snorting coke, but the climax of his plot gets a paragraph. Makes no sense.

Weekly Paint Progess: 1/9

This week the vases went from this ...

to this ...

This is terrifying. It has all gone too dark. I know I’m supposed to paint from dark to light, but I don’t know how I make that a pink pitcher now instead of a red pitcher. Screw it, it’s a red pitcher now. I wonder if a layer of “transparent” white will fix anything or if it will make things muddy. 

Bah! Looks like I’m going to make dark Fauvist pitchers, see how that turns out, and then I’m starting over again the way I did with the teacups, with a black and white opaque painting. 

An Unexpected Review: Cats

Gary heard Cats was a train-wreck, cringe-worthy, an abomination. My only guess is that the makers of Cats have publicized its flaws virally so rubberneckers like my husband want to see it out of morbid curiosity.

“I’m not spending money to see a bad movie,” I said. Yet still, he wore me down and two tickets were purchased, because I will spend money to avoid an argument.

I was influenced by this review, that characterizes the movie as bad, but so in-your-face unapologetically bad that it becomes appealing.

We agreed to nudge each other if we saw anything really bad. There was a lot of nudging.

We couldn’t get lost in the movie because some graphic artists hadn't been given enough time to perfect their work. The artist who made Ian McClellan into a cat had enough time.

But then the main cat looks like a cat wearing a rubber human mask. So, I never truly suspended my disbelief. 

Oh hai. Do you has a flavor?

The whole thing culminates in a reprise of Memory, and of course when the music began to build my eyes began to leak, but at the same time I began to laugh. I laughed at two things: first, it was sung by a CAT with a FACE and second, said cat chewed that scenery like Meow Mix. Way over the top.

I felt a little bad for having criticized the young man at Little Women who did not share the feelings of the rest of the audience. People around me were still sniffling when the same CAT flies off in a HOT AIR BALLOON (spoilers). I just clamped my hand over my mouth so no one could tell I was simultaneously laughing and crying. I hope it looked like I was just quietly sobbing.

Afterward I did my usual post-movie research. The musical was a second draft of a song-writing exercise based partly on first drafts of unpublished poems (so I suppose it’s right that the movie was still in draft form when it got to the theaters). I wondered why Judi Dench allowed herself to be filmed in a cat costume and then read the history of the stage musical and found she had been slated to be Grisabella until she had an injury.

Elbow-nudging now forgotten, Gary has decided he loved it, partly because he has a crush on the cat-human hybrid above. 

The Novel: Chapter 16

Okay, chapter 16 is 20 pages long instead of the measly 4 pages we got in chapter 15. And it has three (count ‘em, three) murders: Aggie, Aggie’s Friend in Drunkenness and Innocent Bystander Moxie, and an attempt on Our Hero Joe.

Aggie’s murder scene is unnecessarily unpleasant. The villain lights a cigar and tells Aggie that if she can smoke it until it’s ash, she can live, but if she spits it out before it’s burned down all the way he’ll shoot her. (Spoiler alert! She dies.) One of my earliest unpleasant memories of Jerry is of him holding my asthmatic brother down and making him smoke a cigarette until his lips turned blue. We hate the villain already, it seems perverse to add extra cruelty. That scene might need to go away.

Dark. It’s a dark chapter. However, when Joe is taken to the hospital to be pronounced dead, he isn’t quite dead yet, so we will see what happens.