January 9, 2010
mots I
Two words, well four Agnes words.
One used in relation to her work describes her as a film essayist. It suggests rolling to me rather than a full stop between. I like this idea that I am being essayed in a film. Sometimes being essayed on the page is so constricted. I was reading something recently about this topic mais c’etait qui? Monsieur Focault? It will come back to me.
Terrain vague.
Have loved these two words that describe a single place since we meeted and greeted them in Petit Nicolas (merci a mon petit). The boys go to the terrain vague and there’s so much possibility there. Terrain vague the opposite of high density. A patch left open for things to be discarded on and people such as small folk to run amok in and weave around what’s discarded.
January 9, 2010
Agnes …
I delight in Agnes playfulness: you could nearly see her smiling behind or through the camera at times watching Le Bonheur. Alas it was not quite the film to watch when submerged in a melancholy over a recent death. Or perhaps…
Wonderful dresses, the colours, the cuts, the making of dresses. I like that people work in her films. In this film they construct things. Then Agnes shreds apart the noodles of ‘happiness’, these panoramas of frolicking children and cheerful mother and wife whose oh so obliging and oh so ready and the husband who just stands there commending and commanding her .. the children who comply, go to bed sans complaint , Until
he, hubby’s, slinging his hook and on and on til he does the soliloquy and it’s almost impossible to fathom this woman (wife) until of course she does what she does.
At 1.16 there’s a particularly captivating piece of music it again is underneath this series of “ideals” but there’s something very chronic and flustered in the music in contrast to the snapshots.
But the manner in which people go into the ground and might be forgotten whether it was fictional, a construct, was too much for this poor melted head. I’ll have to return to it, when the head returns to itself.
I did, while watching, cast off my Peig shawl I’ve been knitting for probably over a year, in dribbles. It looks odd but I fastened the two pieces the small Puffin knitted for me and I think it will be quite dandy.
January 9, 2010
Only thing to do when little makes sense and all is in a state of collapse, including the misbehaving lungs, is to settle down and let Agnes Varda direct matters.
On the menu are Le Bonheur and La Pointe Courte.
In a lovely surreal medical complaint my cough is so bad that every time it literally hyena squeaks I get a ferocious pain in left hip! That’s pretty darn spectacular for a cough. I had been feeling decidedly smug having been very healthy for a whole 4 months and bouncing about turning handsprings. Always when I feel sick my thoughts go to mothers with small children and I commend them from the depth of my tired size 7 leg warmed feet today. Whoever, where-ever, if you are sick and you have a child under five, you have an entire ventricle of my heart in empathy.
Potluckcanuck.blogspot.com has a poignant post on motherhood today. Go over and inhale it. And to the prick who sneered at her, yes go fuck yerself matey.
It’s very discombobulating when people cannot look a child in the eye I find. I am not suggesting everyone has to have them, far from it, but those who cannot be civil and even acknowledge children unsettle me. Strangely prevalent among artists that disposition or indisposition I should say. Makes me appreciate those who do acknowledge my son twice as much, though again it’s really only basic civility.
January 8, 2010
Cancer the robber has taken Tommy, a man I’ve known all my life. What a terrible night.
His father stood in the doorway, his mother stood in the doorway, he stood in the doorway and now there is no one to stand in the doorway.
His animals are still in the fields. But he won’t be up to feed them tomorrow.
There’s something all wrong in that sequence.
RIP.
January 8, 2010
“The middle aged woman whose literary prototype is the nurse in Romeo+Juliet may say what she pleases, wink+nudge at whomever she desires but we know it is all a joke upon her, for she is licensed to be free b/c she is so old and ugly nobody will have her.”
Angela Carter The Sadeian Woman An exercise in cultural history.
January 7, 2010
#6 Tea blend. No breach the lung levee blend
Today’s blend “do not even think about attempting to breach the levee of my lungs” blend is a confrontational response to the virus that has besieged me despite the finest innoculation schedule modern medicine can provide. Hmmmm.
2 tablespoons of thyme.
1 tablespoon of very ancient, so ancient the writing has faded Japanese Green tea that a friend bought from Tokyo in the previous decade before the last decade.
Tea endureth, no?
It will take a powerful leaf to send a warning to the viral load. On va voir….
January 7, 2010
What really is the point of having tonsils and a throat?
I ask this on a day where mine are causing me major grief.
Cracking open the virology textbook.
And ready to tile the back of my throat.
Not for the faint of heart: nice Northern voice over instruction on a tonsilectomy ici. description of foot pedal pressure similar to a sewing machine…
January 5, 2010
January Joe
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F10tP5HIpaA&hl=en_GB&fs=1&]
Usually I convene with Joe around late November, but this year I’ve joined him a little prematurely. No explanation. Just a bit of Joe before January sinks us.
January 4, 2010
865
There are also detached blocks on the system so much advocated by the highest authorities on insanity
…. To these detached blocks or buildings, the patients who show symptoms of improvement can be
removed, there to meet with those less afflicted than they have been accustomed to mingle with, and
thence when further improvement takes place to another block, where less insanity may be found than
in that which they left. [The Irish Builder 1869:135]
(read in: producing persons and developing institutions in rural Ireland. A Jamie Saris. (American Ethnologist Journal)