Postcard of the Day

Went to meet a Saint at the shelter yesterday.  Kinda relieved it wasn't a match, as I hadn't been thinking dog, and wasn't ready for one.  Just saw that she's gotten adopted, though. so rah.

Got the diagnosis today that I do indeed have the circadian rhythm problem known as delayed sleep wake phase disorder.  No surprise, but interesting to hear that it sounds like mine's not exactly mild.  The average human "tau" (or daily sleep cycle rhythm period) is 24.2 hours, and mine's significantly longer than that.  Plus I'm a classic night owl, the way I perk up after the sun goes down, even if I'm dragging in the afternoon, and almost always want to sleep all morning (plus some), and stay up until the sun's about to come up (or later).  Next I'll be getting some individualized sleep coaching, to help me max the adjustments, though the doc said I have already been doing a lot of the classic coping things--- and pointed out that most of us are contending with some adjusting to fit the day/night cycle & attendant social function timing demands.

I'm extra tired today, as if to underscore the finding, cuz I had to be arrive early this morn for my appt at Domino's Farms.  (A funny thing about this area is that the nutso pizza magnate's sprawling complex that had petting zoos and giant light-up crosses is also where not the U medical system has a lot of offices).

Gotta make a point to write soon about last weekend, my weekend of movies and other flavors of enjoying myself.  It was really somethin'.

 

weekend movie joy (sans big spoilers)

Okay, so a week ago tomorrow it was Friday afternoon, and it occurred to me that I'd not yet seen Drive Away Dolls, and maybe I'd better get on that, as I'd wanted to see it when I saw the trailer last summer, and then there was the delay while the strike is going on, but who knows how much longer it'd be in theaters.  A friend had texted me out of nowhere about a surprise it in, prompting some real irritation in me, as I'd just recently before that told her I was going to hold off on reader her text chain about not liking the audience reaction to American Fiction when she saw that (turned out it was about what people were laughing at), and I didn't even want that much spoiler before T and I were going to see it a few days later.  Fortunately, though in a sense she gave away one of the biggest surprises in the film, (a) it was just a MacGuffin, and (b) there was another occurrence of a similar thing early in the film, in a minor bit, that I thought at the time might be what she was talking about, so I had my suspense suspended still 'til the other reveal.  So, back to Friday afternoon of last week, I checked the listings, and the best screening for me would mean leaving work over an hour early, but I did.  Cuz why not.

Back in the day I developed a theory that if you want your weekend to feel longer, go out on Friday evening.  I don't know if it's really that, at least all the time, but maybe that happened this time, cuz starting my weekend a little early that way almost made up for the fact that I had to work again on Monday.  Or really Sunday, a little, and also just a smidge Saturday afternoon.

So Drive Away Dolls, struck me, one of only 2 people in the theater, as a lot of fun.  It had some good chuckles, and eventually it made me miss sleeping with women.  But not just during the fucking-around fucking around toward the beginning.  Those were more the chuckles, and the sort of recollection of lesbian milieu, but then when there's acutal fucking while connecting, the demi- soul in me really missed sex with women.  Or, you know, woman.  And that was nice.  As nice as the laughs and the art direction and the somewhat quirky characters.  One Coen brother might not be as good as two, but is still better than most versions of none.

I'd driven to Canton for this one, and afterwards stopped at Bray's, the old-fashioned hamburger place (I recommend the "original").  Then I stopped to snap this shot

before stopping at IKEA for a walkabout of the marketplace.  Came home with a new floor lamp (there's not enough light in here sometimes) and a bathmat-size rug that looks like a flower.  It was a nice evening.


I don't think I saw any movies Saturday, but Sunday I saw two, in the getting-ready-for-the-Oscars vein.  That spoiler friend mentioned above used to try to see all the Best Picture nominees before the Oscars, and I don't do that, but I like to see all of them that I'm interested in, sometimes, and am doing that this year.  For the first of these, my only good option was a 1:00pm screening at the State, which isn't exactly easy to get to on foot when yer knees are acting up (as mine are) -- and it turned out the elevator's broken, too, so there were quite a lot of stairs, since my theater was in what used to be the top part of the balcony.  (There's an escalator for part of it, though, and I boldly got them to reverse it for me afterwards, as down is the really hard going.)  That movie was Poor Things.  Which, I'll just say it, oughta be Best Picture, and I'm certain I'll feel that way after Oppenheimer.  MAYbe Barbie would be as good a choice.  But Poor Things is REALLY good.  And now I want to go back and see some more Yorgos Lanthimos films.  (I think the only other one I've seen is The Favourite.)

So Emma Stone has the lead in Poor Things, and on top of that, she has some unusual facial expressions, cuzza her unusual character, and I knew that going in, so I was prepared for the visual reminiscence factor that I can experience when she's in a film, and even ready for it to be notched up a little, knowing that face would feature some not exactly socially smooth looks, along with the conventional "beauty".  I didn't know, though, that I'd be seeing her character having zounds of orgasms, which was rather something extra in that regard.  And talk about making me miss sex.  Sex is good in Poor Things, even when it's not good sex.  It's like one major variation on life that the characters experience as they experience life.  Moreover, the whole business of all the rest of the business of the film, along with that business, was enlivening to me.  At once I could be half-observing the art and artifice of it while nonetheless suspending disbelief fully and believing in every bit of it, thoroughly beyond unlikely as it all is.  By the end, there's a utopian Everywoman at the center of a surreal fantasy with more thoughtful realism in it than you get in the vast bulk of movies.  And along the way some of the lines Emma delivers--- laugh-out-loud wonders. 

It's also just marvelous to look at.  By the time I saw the cable car carriages into Alexandria, against one of the many amazing skies in the film, I knew that this is what Baz Luhrman would do, if he had restraint, and put the production design in service of the story, instead of something closer to the other way around.  It's a harsh film in the way that the harshness is necessary for a real humanity.  Like Moonlight was.  And satisfying in the way Moonlight was--- just utterly thoroughly satisfying, as maybe a dozen films, through all these years, have left me feeling, sitting in the cinema after they finally flicker out.


Afterwards, so long as I was downtown (at the intersection I consider the heart of this little burg), and it wasn't even dark yet (the up side of hauling my Sunday ass out to a 1:00 matinee), I thought I'd stop into the Ben & Jerry's store across the street to shop the pints--- my fave flavor isn't usually in grocery stores.  Plus they had a new (non-dairy) oatmeal variation, and that was exciting, after the current one they came up with not being as good as the discontinued earlier one.

 

Turns out it's quite good too, that Oatmeal Dream Pie.  Both of the above endorsed by me.

Before I went in there, though, since ice cream melts, I stopped in to SEE to check out frames, and had a lovely time talking to the guy working.  He hadn't yet seen Poor Things, but I'm sure his queerness will like its queerness, at the very least.  "Believe it or not," I told him (among other things) (and among things about the movie), "I had a lover who looked a lot like Emma Stone."  He believed it, quite matter-of-factly.  I'd not have shared that had we not already been chatting in the unusually real way I like, when lucky enough to come by it in such circumstances.  Circumstances that require one-on-one, I reckon, and are generally not likely when in the customer-worker dynamic.

I got a little card with his name on it and the model number of the one pair of frames that grabbed me, though they are perhaps a bit much (in $$ as well as in, like, muchness) to be my next everyday wears.  But I kinda wanna get 'em anyway, as a souvenir of that afternoon.

All of that was walking around with both hiking sticks, as it's been a bit rough for the knees lately.  But it was such a nice mini-odyssey trek-about (spiritually and physically) that it felt like the walking sticks only added to the sense of adventure.


For the last movie of the weekend, that night I streamed The Holdovers.  At first I thought it'd probably be about what you'd expect, and it started out that way, though from the start it did a little extra to get the feeling of the setting across.  I *think* it opened with the popping sound you get at the beginning of putting on a record, in the silence before the first song, though I suppose that could have been from something else.  But, y'know, that trick is used at the beginning of that record "Back in the Day", at least the remix version), and how fun to use it at the opening of a movie.  And the movie's aware of its sounds--- has a pretty dead-on soundtrack for the feel, epitiomized by a record (it cues up more than once) that I didn't know of from the period (1970--71) called "Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying", with one particularly lovely/deep recurring drop to a heart-chord; it's by Labi Siffre, who's still alive, and had one also-male partner for 48 years, a large portion of which they were in a menage a trois with another dude.

But I digress.  The thing that really sets the setting in The Holdovers is how it looks like it was shot on film, though it wasn't, combined with the direction and cinematography.  It was just nice to be in that setting while the story got told, and also nice when it had surprises.  Maybe the best of those was a poignant moment when Paul Giamatti's character's hopes (and our moviegoer expectations) are dashed, and both we and he know it's truer to life for it, and life is sadder for it too.  Not as marvelous a film as Poor Things, and not as fun as Poor Things or the Drive Away, but solid, and smart in its way, and well played.


Oh, and before Poor Things there was a trailer for Love Lies Bleeding, which is a forthcoming "romantic thriller" with --- yes--- lesbians.  (!)  Seems like we got a swath of lesbian movies for a while, after the decades of dearth, and then for a while they kinda dried up [insert lesbian joke here].  And now one Coen and his not-brother partner have embarked on a "lesbian trilogy", and there's also this Love Lies Bleeding, which looks like it might provide some of the feel of indie movies of the '80s but with the anachronistic improvement of the lesbianism not being such a big deal, or practically the whole subject itself whenever it popped up, which was pretty much the case back then.

So that's what my movie weekend last weekend was like.