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scanned a bunch of my own cards just now
May. 15th, 2022 03:50 pmWas cleaning and found the "to scan" pile. More fun than more cleaning. :)
I had already paused the Noir Alley film of the day, which seems to ask more actual watching the screen than works while straightening up. Could it be that I'm in the beginnings of a move like Susan Dennis (I could link to her dreamwidth now but I think she's just a newsfeed here at lj, and somehow I don't feel like looking that up), who told us some time ago that she didn't used to be the tidy keeper of carefully/intentionally chosen possessions that she is now? Since reading that, I have rather had it in my mind that people can transition that way.
In my case it's maybe more of a retarded/stunted moving in process, failing to contend with the baggage of multiple others as well as myself, as I deal with (and don't deal with, or only slowly make progress with) my varioius metaphorical baggages.
After knocking The Natural in a conversation the other day, out of lack of appreciation for its over-the-topness and some other elements of its style---and largely irritation at the full triteness of the bottom of the ninth, two out, two strikes, and it's always a damned home run---I watched more of it yesterday, or maybe the night before. Whatever was left from where I turned it on. I think I missed Barbara Hershey entirely, unless that was her in a photograph later. Anyhow, I can now sort of get a handle on a way to appreciate its style, even including bogusly contemporary the black-and-white stuff that was supposed to look like newsreels actually looked, with its crisp late-20th-century lettering. Maybe even with the option of better techniques for simulating old film, a director might choose that cartoonishness to be part of near-magic realism. There sure was a lot of that in there. And I'm okay with over-the-top on that, like all the sparks coming down in the end. When I saw what I saw of it initially, though, I remember being hung up on "Why don't they just use old b&w film and cameras to make the 'old' footage?" And other quibbles.
So it's still not a great baseball movie, to me, although it's the epitome of a certain fable-like fantasy sketch of dreamy memory-imitating broad-stroke unreality, with not so treacley an overlay as Levinson exhibits elsewhere. Yet what made me think of it just now was a line from it I liked, and which it turns out (unsurprisingly) was in the Malumud original. The babe (#3, or maybe #2 or #1, I dunno) says to Robert Redford, when they're being all philosophical toward the end (sometime around when there's been revealed the absurd notion that one more baseball game would likely kill him via his stomach, compromised by past mistakes, exploding), "We have two lives, Roy---the life we learn with and the life we live after that."
All this to say: if we posit that structure, maybe I'm finally feeling the move into the latter. Definitely there in some ways, solidly. Working on some lingering embedded-deep stuff these days.
Next post: one of the cards I just scanned. It might be a while 'til I get others from today uploaded, and I have others on deck (online) already. But throwing out one just as a nod to the scanning.
Also scanned a stack of old IDs of me, including my first drivers' licenses. Perhaps there's a post with those to do down the road.
I had already paused the Noir Alley film of the day, which seems to ask more actual watching the screen than works while straightening up. Could it be that I'm in the beginnings of a move like Susan Dennis (I could link to her dreamwidth now but I think she's just a newsfeed here at lj, and somehow I don't feel like looking that up), who told us some time ago that she didn't used to be the tidy keeper of carefully/intentionally chosen possessions that she is now? Since reading that, I have rather had it in my mind that people can transition that way.
In my case it's maybe more of a retarded/stunted moving in process, failing to contend with the baggage of multiple others as well as myself, as I deal with (and don't deal with, or only slowly make progress with) my varioius metaphorical baggages.
After knocking The Natural in a conversation the other day, out of lack of appreciation for its over-the-topness and some other elements of its style---and largely irritation at the full triteness of the bottom of the ninth, two out, two strikes, and it's always a damned home run---I watched more of it yesterday, or maybe the night before. Whatever was left from where I turned it on. I think I missed Barbara Hershey entirely, unless that was her in a photograph later. Anyhow, I can now sort of get a handle on a way to appreciate its style, even including bogusly contemporary the black-and-white stuff that was supposed to look like newsreels actually looked, with its crisp late-20th-century lettering. Maybe even with the option of better techniques for simulating old film, a director might choose that cartoonishness to be part of near-magic realism. There sure was a lot of that in there. And I'm okay with over-the-top on that, like all the sparks coming down in the end. When I saw what I saw of it initially, though, I remember being hung up on "Why don't they just use old b&w film and cameras to make the 'old' footage?" And other quibbles.
So it's still not a great baseball movie, to me, although it's the epitome of a certain fable-like fantasy sketch of dreamy memory-imitating broad-stroke unreality, with not so treacley an overlay as Levinson exhibits elsewhere. Yet what made me think of it just now was a line from it I liked, and which it turns out (unsurprisingly) was in the Malumud original. The babe (#3, or maybe #2 or #1, I dunno) says to Robert Redford, when they're being all philosophical toward the end (sometime around when there's been revealed the absurd notion that one more baseball game would likely kill him via his stomach, compromised by past mistakes, exploding), "We have two lives, Roy---the life we learn with and the life we live after that."
All this to say: if we posit that structure, maybe I'm finally feeling the move into the latter. Definitely there in some ways, solidly. Working on some lingering embedded-deep stuff these days.
Next post: one of the cards I just scanned. It might be a while 'til I get others from today uploaded, and I have others on deck (online) already. But throwing out one just as a nod to the scanning.
Also scanned a stack of old IDs of me, including my first drivers' licenses. Perhaps there's a post with those to do down the road.
