Weekend's...End (By Definition)
Apr. 10th, 2005 11:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustJust want to take a moment off the top here to thank my friend chaplinlover for her kind info re the whole Master Choice baby-food scandal—this actually wasn’t much help per se, since what I’d been feeding Cal was from Heinz. But it’s nice to know somebody who cares is paying attention.;)
Since we all ended up with varying degrees of the bug in the end, there was no point in going to Ad Astra. My apologies to anybody who thought they’d see me there and were disappointed, but I wouldn’t have been much fun. I’m not a whole lot of fun right now, though significantly better.
Cal, meanwhile, is his old self, pretty much—a hundred pounds of trouble in a twenty-pound bag, continually tormenting himself with his own inability to realize or accept that he is a baby who exhausts his own limits and has to rest every once in a while, even if he wants to do anything but. His latest trick? Standing. He pulled himself up by the bars of his crib, loved it, so obviously that meant he had to do it again and again in quick succession, and now he won’t settle if you put him back in the damn crib, because that’s now only reserved for standing rather than for sleeping. Yeah: Entirely back to fucking normal.
Still, at least he’s producing poo rather than diarrhea, and the cream the doctor prescribed for him is working to minimize that hideous rash. And if we’re lucky, we can get him to cry himself to sleep before he vomits all over everything; that’d be a real plus.
Okay, quiet…
For myself, I had a massage yesterday (it screwed me up intensely last night, but this morning I could see the benefits) and was finally able to work out again today, after two "dark days" of sick lassitude. The masseur told me to stop doing weights, because I was making demands my body couldn’t match; respectfully, I beg to disagree, since I’m now in better shape than I was before I got pregnant, and that is all due to muscle-work. But I’ll switch to just doing machines and the toning routine with minimal weights for the rest of the week, see how that goes. And I may even go back in a week or so, if our budget allows for it.
Naturally, however, writing has fallen by the wayside. I’m inputting notes tonight, trying to get myself back in the mood, and will put a definite push on tomorrow (probably while Mom and Steve go see "Ain’t Misbehavin’", her present to him for installing hispeed on her computer. Try to do 500 to 1,000 words, see how that goes. ‘Cause it’s always good to have goals.
Okay: And here’s the next-to-last phase of the "movies" meme—like any of you were even looking for it, I’m sure. But anyway.
5 Movies I Love That No One's Ever Heard Of
The Crimson Rivers (Matthieu Kassowitz, dir.)
Nutty gothic mystery in that inimitably French way: It starts with two creepy cases that don’t seem to be related (a mutilated body, a desecrated grave) investigated by two renegade cops (dog-hating Jean Reno, high-kicking Vincent Cassel), then follows them as they both dovetail into a tiny Alpine valley controlled by a very…shall we say "inbred"?…university. More poetic than logical in a few places, but the general air of foreboding and old sins come to light is well worth the price of admission.
Dust Devil (Richard Stanley, dir.)
A man walks out of the Namib desert, his duster coat blowing, his spine outlined in bones. Is he a serial killer, the wind given human form, a magician who feeds on the souls of the lost and lonely? Stanley, a self-taught anthropologist whose ancestor found Dr Livingstone, is probably best known for being fired from helming his own adaptation of The Island of Dr Moreau, then sneaking back in disguised as a pig-man to heckle his replacement. This movie is his tribute to images which festered inside him for years after an ill-timed hitchhike through the same war-zone it’s set in: Like watching another person’s nightmare at close range, with exactly all the fascinating untranslatability that idea implies.
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (Errol Morris, dir.)
Certainly not as well-known as his The Thin Blue Line or Mr Death, this probably also comes off as Errol Morris’s least focused documentary—four talking heads outlining their obsessions (naked mole rats, artificial intelligence, topiary animals, lion-taming) in extreme close-up, coccooned by a non-stop welter of cross-cut circus, garden, robot and mole-rat footage. I find it hypnagogic and weirdly affecting, a beautifully harmonized mediation on self-actualization vs. mortality I can watch virtually anytime, from any point, and still enjoy.
Swordsman III: The East Is Red (Ching Siu-Tung, dir.)
Bridget Lin Chin-hsia enlarges spectacularly here on her previous star turn as demigod/demon Asia the Invincible, guru of the Sun Moon Sect, who mastered the world of martial arts only after voluntarily making himself a eunuch (which naturally means, in Hong Kong movie shorthand, that he literally turned into a woman). The fighting is insane, the subtitles gorgeously fucked ("Even you’ve to die for seeing me, does it worth?" "It’s worth!"), the art direction and set design enough to make Zhang Yimou weep; it’s Victor/Victoria with a body-count, and sooo much more.
And finally,
[The Big] Crime Wave (John Paisz, dir.)
Yes, I join![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
agincourtgirl here—it’s the freakiest live-action 1950’s Disney movie no one at Disney ever made, stuffed full to the gills with Colour Crime goodness! Sing it now: "Middles are hard to figure, as almost everyone knows/Steven would often feel helpless, go rigid down to his toes…"
And now I am overtaken with illness once more, so I’m signing off. Cal’s still asleep, there’s no TTC strike…all’s right with the world. Bon soir, mes amis.
Since we all ended up with varying degrees of the bug in the end, there was no point in going to Ad Astra. My apologies to anybody who thought they’d see me there and were disappointed, but I wouldn’t have been much fun. I’m not a whole lot of fun right now, though significantly better.
Cal, meanwhile, is his old self, pretty much—a hundred pounds of trouble in a twenty-pound bag, continually tormenting himself with his own inability to realize or accept that he is a baby who exhausts his own limits and has to rest every once in a while, even if he wants to do anything but. His latest trick? Standing. He pulled himself up by the bars of his crib, loved it, so obviously that meant he had to do it again and again in quick succession, and now he won’t settle if you put him back in the damn crib, because that’s now only reserved for standing rather than for sleeping. Yeah: Entirely back to fucking normal.
Still, at least he’s producing poo rather than diarrhea, and the cream the doctor prescribed for him is working to minimize that hideous rash. And if we’re lucky, we can get him to cry himself to sleep before he vomits all over everything; that’d be a real plus.
Okay, quiet…
For myself, I had a massage yesterday (it screwed me up intensely last night, but this morning I could see the benefits) and was finally able to work out again today, after two "dark days" of sick lassitude. The masseur told me to stop doing weights, because I was making demands my body couldn’t match; respectfully, I beg to disagree, since I’m now in better shape than I was before I got pregnant, and that is all due to muscle-work. But I’ll switch to just doing machines and the toning routine with minimal weights for the rest of the week, see how that goes. And I may even go back in a week or so, if our budget allows for it.
Naturally, however, writing has fallen by the wayside. I’m inputting notes tonight, trying to get myself back in the mood, and will put a definite push on tomorrow (probably while Mom and Steve go see "Ain’t Misbehavin’", her present to him for installing hispeed on her computer. Try to do 500 to 1,000 words, see how that goes. ‘Cause it’s always good to have goals.
Okay: And here’s the next-to-last phase of the "movies" meme—like any of you were even looking for it, I’m sure. But anyway.
5 Movies I Love That No One's Ever Heard Of
The Crimson Rivers (Matthieu Kassowitz, dir.)
Nutty gothic mystery in that inimitably French way: It starts with two creepy cases that don’t seem to be related (a mutilated body, a desecrated grave) investigated by two renegade cops (dog-hating Jean Reno, high-kicking Vincent Cassel), then follows them as they both dovetail into a tiny Alpine valley controlled by a very…shall we say "inbred"?…university. More poetic than logical in a few places, but the general air of foreboding and old sins come to light is well worth the price of admission.
Dust Devil (Richard Stanley, dir.)
A man walks out of the Namib desert, his duster coat blowing, his spine outlined in bones. Is he a serial killer, the wind given human form, a magician who feeds on the souls of the lost and lonely? Stanley, a self-taught anthropologist whose ancestor found Dr Livingstone, is probably best known for being fired from helming his own adaptation of The Island of Dr Moreau, then sneaking back in disguised as a pig-man to heckle his replacement. This movie is his tribute to images which festered inside him for years after an ill-timed hitchhike through the same war-zone it’s set in: Like watching another person’s nightmare at close range, with exactly all the fascinating untranslatability that idea implies.
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (Errol Morris, dir.)
Certainly not as well-known as his The Thin Blue Line or Mr Death, this probably also comes off as Errol Morris’s least focused documentary—four talking heads outlining their obsessions (naked mole rats, artificial intelligence, topiary animals, lion-taming) in extreme close-up, coccooned by a non-stop welter of cross-cut circus, garden, robot and mole-rat footage. I find it hypnagogic and weirdly affecting, a beautifully harmonized mediation on self-actualization vs. mortality I can watch virtually anytime, from any point, and still enjoy.
Swordsman III: The East Is Red (Ching Siu-Tung, dir.)
Bridget Lin Chin-hsia enlarges spectacularly here on her previous star turn as demigod/demon Asia the Invincible, guru of the Sun Moon Sect, who mastered the world of martial arts only after voluntarily making himself a eunuch (which naturally means, in Hong Kong movie shorthand, that he literally turned into a woman). The fighting is insane, the subtitles gorgeously fucked ("Even you’ve to die for seeing me, does it worth?" "It’s worth!"), the art direction and set design enough to make Zhang Yimou weep; it’s Victor/Victoria with a body-count, and sooo much more.
And finally,
[The Big] Crime Wave (John Paisz, dir.)
Yes, I join
agincourtgirl here—it’s the freakiest live-action 1950’s Disney movie no one at Disney ever made, stuffed full to the gills with Colour Crime goodness! Sing it now: "Middles are hard to figure, as almost everyone knows/Steven would often feel helpless, go rigid down to his toes…"And now I am overtaken with illness once more, so I’m signing off. Cal’s still asleep, there’s no TTC strike…all’s right with the world. Bon soir, mes amis.
