Ragtag Daily Prompt, Last Sunday of April 2023

The prompt today is COLORFUL.

And does self have a picture for you!

Took it a few minutes ago, after exit-ing Century 20, where she watched Sisu, which is so awesome she might not have enough words!

Do you want to watch a movie about a lone man who wipes out a whole company of Nazis? A movie set in Finland? During World War II? Then Sisu is for you! FIVE STARS! I laughed, I cheered! Who knew Finland could produce something so intense, so action-packed, so pulse-pounding? It’s this year’s Road Warrior, this year’s The Raid, this year’s John Wick 3: Parabellum!

This is a flowerbox around the outdoor seating for Quinto Sol, fantastic Mexican restaurant right across the street from Century 20, featuring specialties from Michoacan.

John Wick IV

Keanu, you are self’s forever and ever.

This installment of John Wick was almost three hours long, which she did not expect.

It is a paean to balletic fight moves.

Self had to leave just before the end. Was Keanu channeling Hamlet there.

Self has read some reviews which refer to Keanu as the Baba Yaga.

Umm, no. Keanu, unlike the Baba Yaga, is a man in search of his soul. He desires death. But he is human, therefore he never gets what he wants.

Death is not the answer, John Wick.

Son: Did he kill them all?

Is this a rhetorical question?

Looking back on this actor’s career, self think the best Keanu is action Keanu. He may have the blankest face, but he has moves.

It is known.

Sentence of the Day, The Impossible City

Am continuing with The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir, which is fascinating, as much of a deep dive into self’s girlhood (she visited Hong Kong on Family trips, maybe five or six times in her childhood) as anything else.

Sentence of the Day:

• Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express, the 1994 film of canned pineapples, painful longing, and drug dealers, is your favorite film — it’s why you want to visit Hong Kong, really

The Golden Globes: Spoiler Alert!

Executive Producer/Rapist tells the narrator he was able to snag a place for her at his table during the Golden Globes. Narrator is so grateful, so giddy with excitement. Really? We’re just five pages till the end. Is this going to be one of those novels where the rapist gets away with . . . everything?

On the evening of, the narrator keeps craning her neck to see if she can spot the actress/rape victim, because she misses her.

Get this: the narrator is sitting at the rapist’s table, and she still hopes the actress will come up to her WHILE SHE IS SITTING AT THE RAPIST’S TABLE. Is she mental? (Subtext: rape, it’s no big deal, stop being such a crybaby etc etc)

Stay tuned.

COMPLICIT, by Wendy M. Li

Finished Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor in the wee hours (Took self 5 days!) and began the next book on her reading list: Wendy M. Li’s Complicit. Very much taken with this novel’s snappy beginning.

MC is teaching film class and the students don’t seem all that mature.

Sample dialogue, pp. 5 – 6:

“Who are some film characters that you really remember? Come on, name a few.”

“James Bond,” someone shouts out.

“Luke Skywalker,” another guy says.

“Thor.”

“Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver,” some kid says, and I know he thinks he’s showing off his film knowledge, because he just referenced a movie made before 1980.

“Hannibal Lecter.”

— Complicit, by Wendy M. Li

Sentence of the Day: Bones and All Review, rogerebert.com

“Ingesting people across state lines in 1980, Maren finds herself on her own after her father runs away when she turns 18, only leaving behind a tape recounting her earliest episodes of cannibalism and her birth certificate.”

— Carlos Aguilar, review of Bones and All, rogerebert.com

Girl on a Motorcycle Deconstructed

Self has never heard of this French film until she read Essay # 1 in Rachel Kushner’s The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000 – 2020.

It stars Marianne Faithfull (She was today years old when she found out that it’s Marianne Faithfull, not Marianne Faithful) and Alain Delon and motorcycles.

SPOILER ALERT!

After a desperate visit to a rustic tavern where Marianne Faithfull drinks alone, kirsch after kirsch, brokenhearted over Alain Delon, she gets on her motorcycle, and things start to get weird. She writhes in the seat as if making love to the bike and starts swerving recklessly, splitting lanes on the autobahn. She loses control and slams broadside into a truck, is launched over the cab, and plows forcefully through the windshield of a four-door sedan. She dies, the lower half of her leather-clad body jutting from the front of the car. THE END.

— “Girl on a Motorcycle,” Essay # 1 of Rachel Kushner’s The Hard Crowd

WOW!

#amreading a Short Story by John Weir

If I kept going back to Armageddon, I thought, it would eventually turn out to have a plot. I saw it six times, and I never did. I was grateful; it was a relief to be spared the pain of cause/effect. Thank God for a plotless world. Watching the scene where Bruce Willis, draped in an American flag, says goodbye to earth from the floor of a crater in a huge piece of orbiting igneous rock was the most satisfying emotional experience I have ever had.

— “Neorealism at the Infiniplex,” in Your Nostalgia is Killing Me

A Rendition of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”

On the way to an archaeological dig in Arce, Italian archaeologist Angelo takes Ruth, Shona, and the two kids on a route that includes “descending hairpin bends . . . and unmade roads,” and the children complain of feeling sick.

“Stop the car!” Dr. Ruth Galloway orders. She’s worried the kids might throw up in Angelo’s car.

“Nearly there,” Angelo says. “You know, kids, you can’t be sick if you sing . . . ” and he launches into a rendition of OLD MACDONALD HAD A FARM. Self can’t even. The archaeologist is encouraging two British kids to sing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” in a British novel.

This is almost as hilarious as the moment in the movie Spenser when Princess Di, wanting to expose her boys to the wider world, plays BARRY MANILOW at full blast on her car radio and encourages William and Harry to sing along. Then Princess Di takes them to a KFC, somewhere near the Elizabeth Tower. That’s culcha for you!

The children oblige Angelo with “a few minutes of animal noises.” Oh my goodness! Self, who hasn’t heard this song in aaaaages, is suddenly singing along with Angelo: “And an oink oink here and an oink oink there.” This is what you call “deep memory work.”

Stay tuned.

Jan. 6 Committee, Where the Crawdads Sing, The Peloponnesian War

This summer of 2022 is really zipping along! Not to mention, she got a package delivered from USPS, and she very excitedly ripped it open (not her usual behavior) and found: a) it was the wrong item, and b) it was really addressed to her next-door neighbor. So she’ll have to get out of pajamas at some point today, and walk it over. BUMMER.

She finished reading Where the Crawdads Sing. She tore through it in four days, and read the closing pages while watching the Jan. 6 Committee Hearings. The novel would make a fine movie (which she’ll probably end up watching, just to see how it differs from the book), in fact the movie might possibly make more sense than the book, especially that ending! Don’t leave us all hanging, Dear Author. How did Marsh Girl engineer the whole thing? Down to the last minute and all? Even to the disguises?

She has so many books on her To-Read list, but after reading Where the Crawdads Sing, she seems to have selected History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides, which was written thousands of years ago, but which begins with the author saying something to the effect of: We all thought this would be a great war, but it wasn’t, it was just an ordinary war, and it lasted 27 years. And the people who started off as allies ended up as antagonists. It was led on one side by Athens, which started compelling its “confederate states” to contribute to the war effort by providing money rather than ships, and continued to require this payment “even though Athens had years before ceased waging war with Persia.” In short, an alliance which had been formed to fight against Persia became instead the birth of the Athenian Empire. All the more remarkable was that this was effected while Athens remained “fully democratic.”

It finally ended this way (not a spoiler because, it’s history): “After the loss of her whole navy in the late summer of 405, in the spring of 404 an Athens stripped of her empire and starved into submission surrendered . . . “

As for the author, Thucydides, all we know about him is what he said about himself, which, according to the Introduction (by T. E. Wick, of the University of Wisconsin), “is very little.” He lived through the full twenty-seven years of the war, but his History only reaches Year 21 — “it breaks off abruptly, in the middle of a paragrapgh, in the middle of a sentence.”

Wow! Self loves history. Which is why she’s been glued to these January 6 Committee Hearings, which in her humble opinion should be nominated for an Emmy award, they are so riveting. Not only that, but the varying rhetorical styles of Chairman Bennie Thompson, Vice-Chair Liz Cheney, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, Rep. Stephanie Murphy, Rep. Zoe Lofgren and Rep. Jamie Raskin are really something! Rep. Thompson is sonorous and grave, Rep. Cheney is blunt and no-holds-barred, Rep. Adam Kinzinger is witty and ironic, Rep. Stephanie Murphy is patriotic and poignant, Rep. Zoe Lofgren is down-to-earth, and Rep. Jamie Raskin is eloquent to the nth! Any of them could run rings around that master of dumb-yet-emotional speech, 45.

So much riveting drama and etc., all in the height of summer. Summer 2022 is definitely one for the history books.

Stay tuned.