Yesteryou Chapter 17

Good morning.  If you're new to this blog, it just occurred to me that it is unfortunate that, if you were to want to follow the adventurous/oversentimental tale of Yesteryou, a novella I wrote, the first chapter you'd be seeing (mixed in w/ my musings, photos of my crafts, film reviews, etc) right now is chapter 17.  So just a note on that:  I'm serializing the chapters (like I did last year with my novel Planes of Sunday) so if you wanted to start at the beginning, you just have to click in the lower right hand corner of "older posts" til you got to chapter 1, and then voila.  or perhaps you could also type "yesteryou" in the search bar to bring up all the chapters.  Anyway, it's minorly inconvenient but I don't think it's so bad.  in the olden days people would wait with  baited breath for issues of periodicals to come out that'd contain the next installment of a story by oh I don't know charles dickens or mark twain (i think these are historical facts but they might just sound true), so when I decided to serialize Yesteryou, it was based on that concept, but it's a little more confusing than just having a periodical come out in real-time and to be like "oh boy, it's chapter 17!"  W/ a blog, it just sort of seems backwards.  

Anyway though have a great weekend if I don't sign in again before then.

oxo robin

17.

So nervous she was afraid of throwing up, Molly knocked on the girl's red apartment door, telling Richard "Okay, just remember not to hold me accountable for how awful these people might be.  The girl with the pot-- I don't even know her name.  She seems really cool, but--"

The red door opened and inside was revealed the favorite home Molly’d ever seen before or since this night.  The walls were covered with thin, velour rugs depicting picturesque nature scenes.  Lined up in front of the rugs of the short hallway that led from the living room to the bed and bathrooms, a row of feminine mannequins stood frozen in languorous 1950's hostess poses.  Each statue wore a vintage apron over their otherwise nude plastic bodies, and each apron was made from a fabric printed with a design that incorporated the animal depicted on the rug the mannequin stood in front of.  There was one wearing an apron with little brown bears poised on their hind legs and dancing in pairs, and the rug behind this bear-apron mannequin was of a Kodiak bear frozen mid-growl.  Also, there were sheets stapled at their corners to the ceilings, creating billows like ship sails along the ceiling’s surface, making the rooms feel like giant mattresses under a canopy bed or like a dwelling under the surreal shelter of a homemade parachute.  She fell a little in love with the girl, absorbing the girl's careful arrangement of these objects, and so did Richard.  When the girl made a quick visual survey of the apartment, her glance landed on them and she ambled over to them.  "Oh no," she smiled, "I told you there'd be fireworks, but they've already happened.  Sorry about that!  Is this your dad?" 

“Yes, I am.  It's nice to meet you.  Those earrings are beautiful, by the way, they really compliment the green of your eyes."  He couldn't help but compliment women's looks when he felt warmly towards them; he knew he ran the risk of making them feel objectified, though, and consequently he delivered his compliments as though willingly putting himself in danger.

Feeling embarrassed for him, though he was handsome enough to pull off such flirtation (it's just that there was something fragile about him) the girl ignored his compliment and continued, "You said you're from L.A., right?"  Molly nodded.  "Funny, the woman who brought all these fireworks is from L.A.  That's kind of a striking coincidence, huh?  Here, let me go get you the pot.  Could you give me some money for it, after all?  I ended up spending a lot on booze.  Just give me whatever you think is fair." 

Semi-literate review of Stone's Savages (2012)

Despite his well-documented personality flaws, I have been quite partial to Oliver Stone films since I was a pre-teen.  I found The Doors (1991) to be absolutely thrilling to watch, there’s so much exciting partying in that movie and frenetic artistic and self-destructive energy, I thought (whenever I watched it, which was A LOT):  “I want to be like Jim Morrison when I grow up!”  That’s sort of a joke, but truly, I thought his character was very well-developed, and the occasional ‘trippy’ camera work wasn’t overdone and it was just an engrossing, thrilling film. 

As a side note, I was too young to see any of the movies that I’m writing about, but that’s beside the point.  In my underdeveloped way, I was able to appreciate them. 

Less fun to watch but also a really engrossing film, where you’ll feel strong, strong empathy for the protagonist, even though he’s been turned into a self-defeating, powerless asshole because of the war, is Born on the Fourth of July, made 2 years earlier.  I can’t stand Tom Cruise as the cult-leading, ex-wife controlling closet case that he is, of course, but when people criticize his acting, I have to disagree, because he was amazing in this movie (and Vanilla Sky).

Some Oliver Stone movies were definitely too boring to me, since I was pretty young at the time they were out:  Wall Street (1987), JFK (1991), Nixon (1995) – total yawn-fests.  I think one of those movies (JFK) is literally 7 hours long, right?  And then there were the movies that came out when I was all growed up, World Trade Center and Alexander, but they both looked horrible. 

But oh man, Platoon (1986), Talk Radio (1988) and Natural Born Killers (1994), are all terrifying and riveting movies that I would strongly recommend to anyone who has been desensitized to violence and appreciates good dialogue (Talk Radio is actually not that violent, per se – it is very talk-y – I think it’s from a one-man play by Eric Bogosian but it was a little unclear on IMDB, but all the talk has an edge to it so while there’s not much physical violence, it is definitely unsettling to watch).  Platoon and Natural Born Killers are two of the grossest non-horror movies I’ve seen.

Then there’s his new(-ish) movie, Savages (2012), and there’s something sort of pointless about this film.  It’s about a love triangle of successful pot growers and their girlfriend whose lives all get thrown way off balance and violently ruined when the major Mexican drug cartel wants to force them to become business partners.  I like the love triangle part:  it’s this hippie girl who comes from money (Blake Lively), being willingly shared by a messed up veteran and a hippie who grow this amazing strain of pot; the three of them live in a semi-utopia for awhile.  The tenderness between these 3 feels authentic, and Lively’s character, O., who is the film’s narrator, is surprisingly likable, and her sometimes-eloquence never sounds forced.  

The rest of the movies is sort of horseshit though.  I don’t know if you go in for violence, like realistic portrayals of people’s brains being blown out when you least expect it etcetra, but even if that’s your bag, I still feel that you won’t care for the parts of this movie where there’s a bunch of well-done and shocking violence, because this part of the film is really weak, plot-wise.  Perhaps there really are cartel bosses like the one Selma Hayek plays, but the whole character felt very unreal.  And the real bad guy of the movie, Lado, played by Benecio del Toro, it’s like …. He’s evil as can be, but somehow, who cares?  It’s just sort of a pointless movie.  Spoiler Alert – there is a fake-out ending that I really liked that made me cry real tears and redeemed the movie for me, but then it’s revealed to just be a possible outcome, and not the actual one, and the real true end of the movie left me generally indifferent. 

Yesteryou Chapter 16

16.

  "Hi, it's me, the girl from the carnival, did I wake you?" 
"Nope.  Hi.  How are you?”

              “Okay I guess.  Sounds like you found your way back home.”

              “Ha, yeah, it was a total surprise, too.  I was just walking around, actually I’d started trying to visit some of the sites from the Rocky movies, and I found my apartment building on accident.  I just moved there and I totally forgot the street name and the number, but from now on my landmark is going to be an Ethiopian grocery store on the corner that’s always closed and smells like cum for some reason.  Wanna come over and pick up your pot.”

              “Um, I don’t know.  When I was walking back to the hotel I'm staying at it occurred to me we might as well just meet up sometime tomorrow in the regular daytime.  I’m a little delirious from lack of sleep.  What time is it, anyway?"

"About 3 am.  Hey, you can go back to sleep if you want, and I can just call you later, but I'm having a little impromptu party right now, if you want to come and hang out.  Someone's supposed to be bringing fireworks the likes of which nobody's ever seen, apparently -- that should be fun.  What do you think?"

craft corner

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King Frankie and Philosophy

My son is the most amazing being I've ever witnessed.  He is so curious, and preternaturally kind and sensitive, and funny, too.  Just this morning when I was holding him against me, chest to chest, as we took the elevator up to day care, he kept pointing (a new skill) at the little flower on my locket, and looking up at me inquisitively.  Then I opened the locket for him, and he just about lost his mind in happiness and amazement to see the two tiny photos inside my locket:  one of him, and one of me with my husband.  this moment, him discovering himself inside my locket -- it just stands outside of any temporal boundary as being something too precious, like to precious to exist terrestrially, you know?

The past few years, I'd taken to calling myself a secular humanist, mostly because I've been going through a hardcore Vonnegut obsession since at least 2006, and that's what he considered himself.

before that, i was just an athiest who took comfort in the thought of everyone rotting in the ground or getting burning into ashes to scatter on the wind after we die.

before that, when i was a huge pot head, i was a big believer in reincarnation, based on some "epiphany" i had.

i'd long flirted with existentialism, though.  Through all the little en-vogue french books I read as an undergrad, however, I am still awful at defining existentialism, and am going to have to just use the merriam-webster definition here: 

"a chiefly 20th century philosophical movement embracing diverse doctrines but centering on analysis of individual existence in an unfathomable universe and the plight of the individual who must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad."

What I liked about this philosophy was the concept thatlife is an unknowable and wily adventure and so you just have to chug along,trying to have (sometimes 'amoral' fun, except that yay, amorality doesn't really exist in the framework of existentialism), knowing that there's no universal judge of fairness watching over us.  But I had a hard time truly believing in any of this, because I have this naive attachment to the concept of fairness.  

Except I don't anymore.  Now i have proof, PROOF, of an "unfathomable universe."  because now i know that my miraculous little boy has inherited Marfan Syndrome, that same rare and alienating syndrome that led to the major open heart surgery I had in my twenties, and the major and more urgent one my dad had to have in his twenties as well.  I knew there was a 50 % chance of me passing this on to my son, but the genetic tests took months to complete, so I just had all this time to wish as strongly as possible that he'd escaped my fucked up genes.  but nope.  

So now I think I can truly embrace existentialism, because my poor, amazing little boy has a life of physical problems to endure, and all i can think to say is c'est la vie.

Nico and David Johansen

Craft Corner

Yellow and Gray Crocheted Scarf $12 + Shipping

6.5 inches wide by 66.5 inches long, crocheted from soft acrylic yarn, in a 1950's-era color scheme of soft gray and canary yellow. Made in a smoke and pet free environment.