Thanksgiving, et al.
November 21, 2007
I went to the bank on Monday morning to deposit the check Felicia gave me for the bills. My bank opens at 9 am, which is when I’m due at work, so I was in a hurry. I signed over the check and requested 20 bucks in cash, preferably with some one-dollar bills for the Coke machine at work. Now, I was the first customer for this particular teller, but in spite of that, he was already out of one-dollar bills. How the hell does that happen? “I’ll need to go get some,” he tells me. I don’t feel like waiting, so on a whim, I ask: “How about dollar coins?” Sure enough, he has them. This is my first opportunity to see the new dollar coin. They are issuing the dollar coin in series, with the faces of the presidents. It’s kind of like the states on the back of quarters. Anyway, the gist of this is that I had a fistful of dollars and looking at them made me feel kind of like a pirate. Because the dollar coin is gold, they remind me of pieces of eight. Arr.
I don’t have electrolysis this weekend, and I have a good friend visiting town on Friday, so I’m probably going to get all girlied up for the occasion. I got an eyebrow waxing yesterday. I told my aesthetician that I didn’t want them as thin as she made them last time. I’m very pleased with the result. I would have had my entire body done, too, but for the expense ahead of the holidays and the fact that I’m not going to be revealing those parts of my body anyway. It’s a relief being able to shave my face for a change.
I was driving into work this morning and the Baptist church in Hallsville, MO had their little sign kitted out with a Thanksgiving Day message. It read: “Be thankful to God that you still have air to breath” (sic). What a strange holiday greeting. I mean, this sorta casts God as an abusive spouse, having blacked one of his wife’s eyes, saying “be thankful I don’t blacken the other one.” WTF? Are they saying, sure, your job has been outsourced and the food pantries are out of food this year, but at least God is still letting you have the air (until the administration manages to repeal the Clean Air Act, anyway–and they’re trying…), so be thankful? Feh. It only fuels my view that fundamentalist Christianity is fundamentally misanthropic. I mean, I love the actual teachings of Jesus Christ. “Do unto others as you would have done unto you,” “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” “He who is without sin, cast the first stone.” Jesus Christ was an absolutely brilliant ethical philosopher. Asking one’s self “What would Jesus do?” isn’t a bad way to approach life. But when you get into the theology of Christianity, I start to have profound problems. It starts from the premise that God so loved the world he created that he conceived of its destruction immediately afterwards, and goes downhill from there. The notion that people are born bad because Eve had a sexual awakening (suggesting that sex and knowledge are inherently evil) and requiring the intercession of a peaceful man nailed to a tree to expunge that badness sticks in my craw. I can’t really reconcile the theological elements of Christianity with the actual teachings of Christ. In the Catholic faith of my youth–from which I am very estranged–this would put me in line with the Nestorians. But, of course, Catholicism views Nestorianism as heresy, and grounds for excommunication. Go figure.
We’ll be spending Thanksgiving with my younger brother. I’m mulling over whether or not to tell him that I’ll be starting female hormones in two weeks (wow, THAT crept up on me). He already knows that I crossdress. It won’t be a big shock. On the other hand, I don’t particularly want to make the gathering into bunch of awkward silences, either, which it probably will. Decisions, decisions. With any luck, we’ll be going to see Beowulf at the Imax in 3-D. That’ll be fun. It’ll make up for the fact that I’m not cooking this year. I love to cook, so I’ll miss it. We’ll have a gathering in a couple of weeks for my birthday. Perhaps I’ll cook a turkey then. I bought a new food injector and I’ve been itching to use it on a bird. (A cup of wine injected into the turkey makes for the best turkey you’ve ever tasted. Try it, sometime).
In any event, happy turkey day to everyone.
Entry for November 16, 2007
November 16, 2007
My apologies for repurposing material I’ve posted elsewhere:
I’ve been sitting on public domain collections of Hitchcock for a while now. One of my brothers, who seems to forget this every year, buys me them at Christmas. Hopefully, I’ve nipped this in the bud, but I still have more than enough of them. The quality of the transfers is wildly variable, as you might expect, but they’re watchable for the most part (I’ll get to that further on). As I was watching Young and Innocent and Blackmail this week, I kept hearing Andre De Toth’s dismissal of Hitchcock in Hollywood (“He got fat and lazy”–well, he was ALWAYS fat). I began to understand just what he meant.
Young and Innocent (1937) is an early variation on Hitchcock’s “man wrongly accused on the run” movies, following on The 39 Steps a couple of years earlier. It’s certainly energetic. Of the early British Hitchcock movies, this is the one that seems most like his Hollywood movies. Clearly, he had become a prestige director by this time, and the higher budget is on full display in two sequences: in the mine cave-in, which seems an arbitrary disaster like the plane crash in Foreign Correspondent; and the famed overhead shot of a ballroom that comes to rest four inches from the eyes of the killer (it’s almost a reversed version of the final shot of the shower scene in Psycho, the one that dollies back from Janet Leigh’s staring eye). But in a lot of ways, this movie isn’t like Hitchcock’s Hollywood films at all. Visually, it’s loaded with quaint excressences the likes of which Hitchcock would strip out of his later movies, and some sequences show the director clinging to the visual shorthand of his silent movies.
Blackmail (1929) is a true sound/silent hybrid, and shows Hitchcock at his most inventive. There’s a bold dynamism in his shot compositions and editing scheme in the silent portions of the film, and a kind of remarkable frankness in the sound material that would go underground during the director’s long tenure laboring under the Production code. Hitchcock provides no title cards for the silent portions, but he doesn’t need them (compare this to Rich and Strange, in which the sound portions are punctuated with title cards, perhaps tongue in cheek). With this film’s climax, we find the first instance of the director staging mayhem in or near a monument as a means of contrasting order and chaos, a trope rumored to have been suggested to Hitchcock by Michael Powell. Unfortunately, the disc pixilated into a storm of digital noise at the end of the movie. The problem with the public domain is that you often get what you pay for, or, more accurately, when you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
I was reading a lament that the art of the movie poster was lost. While I can certainly understand this sentiment, I think there are still movie posters being made today that stand with the best posters of yesteryear. Two of my favorites are from horror movies made last year. I love, love, love this poster for Perfume: The Story of a Murderer:
I love, love, love this poster for The Host:
But this may be my favorite horror movie poster. It’s for The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre 2:
