Monday, October 31, 2016

Day of the Dead-- Día de Muertos

Huichol Skull with Peyote 

"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past..."

Now is a time, traditionally, to honor the dead, especially our family and those we have loved. Naturally, I think of my parents both of whom suffered long, dreadful ends to their lives. I think of my two grandmothers to whom I was so close, whose affection warmed my heart and both of whom helped create the values I've held since childhood. Fond memories arise of my husband Darryl's grandmother, Aunt Edna, and his mother. I think too of my friends' loved ones and parents, especially life-long friend Lee Killian's parents who were always sweet and kind to me, and of Lee's uncles. I think of Julian Baird of San Francisco, my first gay lover, who invited me to San Francisco many times, with whom I lived for several months on Russian Hill. There are many other cherished friends now hid in death's dateless night, in the words of WS.



As The Day of the Dead and All Saints' Day arrive, my thoughts and emotions go back exactly thirty years. My closest friend, my kindred spirit, from 1969 until 1986 was murdered that October. His mother and family had his body taken back to Tulsa to be buried there, and they flew his companion and myself in their private plane to Tulsa. I recall it all as if yesterday, the flight, seeing Jim's mother, my primal scream, and seeing people masked with images of death everywhere we went in Tulsa. It was surreal and I had no idea what to do. I just let others lead me around. I gave a ring I wore that I bought in Mexico with Jim to be placed in his casket. His mother introduced me to her friends at the funeral as "like a son to Jim." 

Jim was the first person with whom I visited Mexico in 1971. We returned two more times and we both kept journals of our rich and powerful experiences throughout the country. We both lived at Johnny Mercer's home on Moon River and Jim completed his book on Keats and Yeats there. By our last trip together to Mexico, when Jim spent a year teaching there, I was already studying D.H. Lawrence for my Master's thesis and degree at Tulane, the university where we both earned our doctorates. When I moved from New Orleans back to Savannah, we held readings aloud of Proust, with a few friends, in the garden courtyard of my apartment on Oglethorpe Ave. In the early 1980s we alternated teaching the same course in Philosophy at Armstrong-Atlantic University in Savannah.


It was through Jim that I met Jake. Jim wrote a series of poems to Jake. In 1976 Jake and I became fast friends as we traveled together to New Orleans and a year later in '77 to San Francisco and Big Sur. We drove cross country and had intimate experiences that Jake called "enterprises of great pith and moment" (WS again). Later we both studied law and moved to Atlanta to attend Law School and work together in the Law Library of Ga. State University.


On the day of Jim's funeral on November 1, 1986, after the service and a gathering of the family, I flew back to Atlanta to attend Jake's wedding. Thus the surreal play of Thanatos and Eros in my disoriented psyche that day. Festivities of the Day of the Dead, of Día de Muertos, always conjure that day for me. And on the day itself, and those leading up to it, I dance in memory with them both, Jim and Jake. I feel their spirits around me and praise those remarkable years we shared together. 








James Land Jones

Jake Waldrop


Jack 




Saturday, October 29, 2016

Carnage in America


American Horror Story

Speaking of American Horror Story, the camp, cult goings on in this scream of a series create the perfect metaphor for what is happening in this country and this election. There is so much mayhem and so many twists, and so many gruesome or sexually perverse happenings, that all hope of sanity and reason is lost. Halloween is but a footnote. As one character in the series remarks, "I'm not from the United States; I'm not used to all this carnage."
Kathy Bates gives a tour-de-force performance as the wall-to-wall carnage begins.
HARPERSBAZAAR.COM|BY EMMA DIBDIN
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Don Lawson There's a book you may wish to know about--In the Dust of this Planet, by Eugene Thacker. It argues that horror is the only genre adequate for the depiction of contemporary life.
UnlikeReply116 mins
Jack Miller
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Politics has seeped like pollution into every decision that is made these days. Forget justice or fairness. Make no mistake, there is nothing incriminating in this so-called investigation of an aide's laptop. They have already reviewed every email on HRC's server. Any emails here would be from HRC's aide or emails already reviewed. This was a political decision to please Republican members of Congress and attempt to change the election outcome. It is unethical and Republican Comey should resign or be reprimanded for gross interference with a national election a week and a half before election day. Hopefully, the electorate will see through his politically motivated decision.
Comey’s decision to make public new evidence, which may raise additional legal questions about Clinton, has raised concern among legal authorities.
NEWYORKER.COM|BY JANE MAYER
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Jack Miller I'd like to add that Comey obviously knew that linking Anthony Wiener to Clinton, however indirectly, would give fuel to Republicans. That makes his timing even more damning. I do hope he is fired or seriously reprimanded after the election.
LikeReply129 minsEdited
Jack Miller Another point: I gave up on institutions being for justice when the 5 Republican Supreme Court Justices stopped the FL recount in Bush v. Gore. When you think back on cross-dressing FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, you have to realize how involved they can be in politics. It is sad and disillusioning; but a fact nonetheless.


Friday, October 28, 2016

Murakami's Norwegian Wood


Tonight's sublime, erotic film of the novel by Haruki Murakami that I read with enthusiasm a few years ago. This review is precise in its appraisal, without giving any of the story's secrets away. Murakami wrote the screenplay. 

This Japanese adaptation of Haruki Murakami's bestseller is gorgeous and sensual, says Peter Bradshaw

Norwegian Wood
Pact with the past ... Norwegian Wood.

Forbidden love is the sexiest kind, and love of death the most forbidden kind, in this emoish erotic tragedy from Franco-Vietnamese film-maker Tran Anh Hung, based on the bestselling 1987 novel by Haruki Murakami. It is set in Tokyo in the late 1960s – a world of student dorms, going for walks, getting letters from your girlfriend, sitting in your student room looking at LP sleeves while the record is playing; it's a world of sexual and romantic excitement that is a cousin to widespread political unrest. Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama) is a student who begins a relationship with Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi), a beautiful, delicate young woman whom he knew a year before, in high school. But while Watanabe works towards his degree, Naoko is in a remote psychological facility, suffering from a breakdown, able to receive Watanabe only infrequently as a visitor. What binds them together – in a dark ecstasy of despair – is an inexpressibly painful event in their past, a terrible, mutual loss. It is holding them back in life, and threatens to smother and paralyse them. But Watanabe and Naoko find themselves trying to forge a conjugal, sacramental bond with this past and, perhaps, with death itself. Attempting to fall in love with each other, as damaged souls, is a way of giving a narrative purpose and a moral grandeur to their lives, which another, more uncomplicated kind of dating could not possibly achieve. Their relationship almost attains the status of a suicide pact in which both partners are left alive. As if the situation were not complicated enough, Watanabe also finds himself attracted to Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), a smart, sexy, free-spirited girl on campus who appears to represent a healthy and psychologically unencumbered future. However, Midori is cool, a little cruel – a flirt and a tease. She, too, has her secret world of pain. When she suffers a loss, she demands that Watanabe take her to a porn film to dull the pain. But for Watanabe, perhaps, this is not exactly the point. The pain is the porn. This movie is gorgeously photographed by Ping Bin Lee, and has a plangent, keening orchestral score by Jonny Greenwood. It rewards attention with a very sensual experience, although there might be some who, understandably, find it indulgent. Having watched it now a second time since its premiere at last year's Venice film festival, I find the film that came into my mind – apart of course from Twilight – was Wong Kar-Wai's romantic classic In the Mood for Love (which Ping Bin Lee also shot), about two people drawn together by their respective partners' infidelities. That has the same tragedy, irony and romance which combine to create a doomy eroticism. Norwegian Wood ignites its own fierce, moth-attracting flame.


--Peter Bradshaw

Saturday, October 15, 2016

CAROL







Watched the superb film Carol again tonight. I've written of it elsewhere, my journal or on FB. I had seen it in Chattanooga with Starr. The love story, set in the 1950s and based on the novel, could not be more beautifully rendered. It is a masterpiece, a work of art that patiently, with sumptuous detail, allows the relationship it explores to come to life. The character of Carol wore the same bracelet in a couple of scenes and the gold choker that my mother wore. I still have the bracelet; Mom sold the gold necklace after her divorce.
The review below gives a glowing overview. I loved the music as well, and was pleased to see actors now well-known that were not so well-known when the film was released.









Carol

Peter Bradshaw's film of the week

Carol review – Cate Blanchett superb in a five-star tale of forbidden love  5/5 stars

Todd Haynes’s 50s-set drama in which Blanchett’s divorcing woman falls for Rooney Mara’s doe-eyed shop assistant is an intoxicating triumph.

The cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces … the tinkling piano in the next apartment. Todd Haynes’s narcotic and delicious film Carol is in love with this kind of detail: the story of a forbidden love affair that makes no apology for always offering up exquisitely observed minutiae from the early 1950s. It is almost as if the transgression, secrecy and wrongness must paradoxically emerge in the well judged rightness and just-so-ness of all its period touches. The movie finds something erotic everywhere – in the surfaces, the tailoring, the furnishing and of course the cigarettes. It revives the lost art of smoking at lunch, smoking with gloves, and the exotic moue of exhaling smoke sideways, out of consideration for the person in front of you.
Cate Blanchett plays Carol, an unhappy, divorcing woman who falls instantly in love with department store assistant Therese, played by Rooney Mara, who is selling Carol a toy train as a Christmas present for her daughter. A counter-intuitive present for the 50s, of course, but the point is that it’s large, so it has to be delivered; Carol must therefore give Therese her address and then, accidentally on purpose, she leaves her gloves behind on the counter.
Blanchett’s performance is utterly right, her hauteur and elegance matched with fear and self-doubt. When I first saw Carol at Cannes this year, she reminded me of a predatory animal suddenly struck with a tranquilliser dart. On watching it again, what I noticed was Blanchett continually touching her face and stroking her hair as she speaks to Therese: a “poker tell” of desire. Rooney Mara is doe-eyed and callow, submissive yet watchful (she is a would-be photographer), her faintly dysfunctional fringe often schoolgirlishly framed in a sweet pom-pommed beret.
Screenwriter Phyllis Nagy has superbly adapted Patricia Highsmith’s original 1952 novel The Price of Salt, a bestseller at the time under the pen name Claire Morgan. Nagy’s version brings out both the drama and the swoony, ambient mood; Haynes’s direction and Affonso Gonçalves’s editing take her script at a cool andante. The screenplay slims down the novel’s tendency to oblique talkiness; it cuts down on use of the phrase “I love you”; and interestingly it does not hint at Carol’s rather Hellenic suggestion in the original that gay love is a higher form than straight, a more balanced relationship.


There is a shrewd homage to Brief Encounter, and the film also allows you to see the lineaments of classic Highsmith crime. The two women’s discontent casts light on a structural homoeroticism in Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, famously filmed by Hitchcock: two men collude in a transgression to be rid of their respective encumbrances. Carol takes this through the gender looking glass, although here the transgression is a matter of love and free will. Therese is no Ripley: she is not manipulative or parasitical in the way she might be in another sort of story – the sort, in fact, that might want to insist on an unhappy ending for gay love – but the two lovers take off together, on the lam almost. There is the Nabokovian flourish of a revolver.
Sarah Paulson gives a smart supporting performance as Carol’s easygoing confidante and former lover Abby. Kyle Chandler is superb as her furious husband Harge – short for Hargess, but here suggesting an unsexy combination of “hard” and “large”. He is angry and unhappy, boorishly hating himself for not having punished Carol more for her previous infidelity. His contribution amplifies the complex dynamic of this new love affair: she is in revolt against his domestic mastery and he is on the point of taking Carol’s infant daughter away from her in a custody battle. Therese is not merely to be Carol’s lover but quasi-daughter, someone who will come under her protection.
The film shows us the corsetry and mystery with which gay people in the 1950s could manage their lives with dignity, but it also inhales the clouds of depression and self-control into which Carol has had to retreat and from which she is now defiantly emerging, a prototypical version of Betty Friedan’s feminine mystique, announced a decade after this.
The writing and performances are superb, the production design and costumes by Judy Becker and Sandy Powell tremendous. And the effect is intoxicating.
From the Guardian:

--Jack




Thursday, October 06, 2016

The Debate, Red Tide, and other recent Posts


Racists, misogynists, and the uneducated may dislike the idea of a woman President who helps minorities and the poor. But what do they think a spoiled billionaire who pays no taxes and actually owes millions, who has ties to foreign governments, will do for them? He has never helped anyone outside of his family. Is it a desire for war and anarchy? Polluted air and water kill everyone equally. Climate change and nuclear proliferation are catastrophic and very real possibilities. So, how can anyone want this foolish, fly-off-the handle egotist to have any real power? Trump is a menace on every level-- economy, military, environment, leadership. It is time to end the entertainment and select a serious, intelligent, level-headed woman to head the nation and take her place among the world's leaders.

Edwin G. Reynolds, Ron Smith and 17 others


Joseph Mydell I agree Jack, but am disturbed by article in The Daily Telegraph (Saturday 24th) entitled, "Gay, Muslim, Hispanic...they're right behind their man Trump" with smiling photos of said representatives!

Justin Waldman ... and he snorts coke.

Jefferson Carter I still can't forgive Hillary for her past pro-invasion votes, but voting for her instead of Trumpf is like voting for a flawed but intelligent human being instead of an orangutan throwing a shit fit.

Trump said he'd do away with the EPA and all those regulations. This is what the result is of a lack of regulations. Siesta Beach is arguably the most beautiful beach in the world, but global warming and constant Fertilizer Runoff and phosphate polluted water have caused increasing red tide to destroy the natural life and beauty. This week's news...

SIESTA KEY, Fla.-- The weather is perfect for a beach day, but the water far from it.
MYSUNCOAST.COM|BY KATE FLEXTER

Had the debate been a prize fight, it would have been stopped in the third round. But it’s not clear in this crazy campaign how much it will matter.
HUFFINGTONPOST.COM

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Justin Waldman Proper chump. The sniff rate of 6/minute at one stage suggested to me he was schtoned on coke. The dude's woolly-thinking disobedience confirmed it. Do you really want a coke-schniffing president? Maybe. Maybe. I'm tellin' ya folks. Maybe.


Jack Miller http://www.nytimes.com/.../poli.../fact-check-debate.html...










Racists, misogynists, and the uneducated may dislike the idea of a woman President who helps minorities and the poor. But what do they think a spoiled billionaire who pays no taxes and actually owes millions, who has ties to foreign governments, will do for them? He has never helped anyone outside of his family. Is it a desire for war and anarchy? Polluted air and water kill everyone equally. Climate change and nuclear proliferation are catastrophic and very real possibilities. So, how can anyone want this foolish, fly-off-the handle egotist to have any real power? Trump is a menace on every level-- economy, military, environment, leadership. It is time to end the entertainment and select a serious, intelligent, level-headed woman to head the nation and take her place among the world's leaders.



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19Edwin G. Reynolds, Ron Smith and 17 others
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Joseph Mydell I agree Jack, but am disturbed by article in The Daily Telegraph (Saturday 24th) entitled, "Gay, Muslim, Hispanic...they're right behind their man Trump" with smiling photos of said representatives!
Like · Reply · September 27 at 12:34pm · Edited

Joseph Mydell replied · 3 Replies



Justin Waldman ... and he snorts coke.
Like · Reply · 1 · September 27 at 12:24pm

Justin Waldman replied · 2 Replies



Jefferson Carter I still can't forgive Hillary for her past pro-invasion votes, but voting for her instead of Trumpf is like voting for a flawed but intelligent human being instead of an orangutan throwing a shit fit.
Like · Reply · 2 · September 27 at 3:09pm

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Jack Miller
September 27 at 10:57am ·



Trump said he'd do away with the EPA and all those regulations. This is what the result is of a lack of regulations. Siesta Beach is arguably the most beautiful beach in the world, but global warming and constant Fertilizer Runoff and phosphate polluted water have caused increasing red tide to destroy the natural life and beauty. This week's news...


Red Tide hits Siesta Beach leading to massive fish kills
SIESTA KEY, Fla.-- The weather is perfect for a beach day, but the water far from it.
MYSUNCOAST.COM|BY KATE FLEXTER




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Jack Miller Do we really want to dismantle the EPA?https://www.epa.gov/nutri.../where-nutrient-pollution-occurs



Where Nutrient Pollution Occurs | Nutrient Pollution | US EPA
EPA.GOV

Like · Reply · Remove Preview · September 27 at 11:34am


Jack Miller http://www.tampabay.com/.../sewage-dump-may-lead.../2293875



Sewage dump may lead to algae blooms, fish kill, lost seagrass, experts say
TAMPABAY.COM

Like · Reply · Remove Preview · September 28 at 11:35pm

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Jack Miller shared a link.
September 27 at 10:32am ·




Trump's Debate Performance Was The Worst Ever
Had the debate been a prize fight, it would have been stopped in the third round. But it’s not clear in this crazy campaign how much it will matter.
HUFFINGTONPOST.COM




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3Brenda Sullivan, Amy Watts Blaise and Justin Waldman
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Justin Waldman Proper chump. The sniff rate of 6/minute at one stage suggested to me he was schtoned on coke. The dude's woolly-thinking disobedience confirmed it. Do you really want a coke-schniffing president? Maybe. Maybe. I'm tellin' ya folks. Maybe.
Like · Reply · September 27 at 10:48am

Jack Miller replied · 1 Reply



Justin Waldman Hehe, love Huff. We recorded it (it played out at 3am our time) and are watching it in 15min bits. I'm not sure we can stomach more in one sitting.
Unlike · Reply · 1 · September 27 at 10:50am


Jack Miller http://www.nytimes.com/.../poli.../fact-check-debate.html...



Our Fact Checks of the First Debate
Our team of reporters fact-checked Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump on the economy, trade and other issues.
NYTIMES.COM|BY THE NEW YORK TIMES