Familial Relations, Minor Irritations, and Why I'm Not Seeing Silent Hill

Lately, I seem to be alternating between those two stereotypically male obsessions: sex and death. Last week, obviously, it was sex. While it is still early in this week, it doesn't look good for Eros. Maybe it's the cold sore forming on my lip. Maybe it's the fight I had with my sister yesterday when I was feeling rather vulnerable. Maybe it's the imperious and insulting patron I had to deal with today. Maybe it's all the reviews I've been reading for Silent Hill, a film that in trailers looked at once fascinating and repulsive.

Yeah, let's deal with Silent Hill first. It's the most harmless. It looks great from what I've seen. Since it seems to have zombies, Passaro will probably see it and Dilbert most likely took his wife this past weekend. That was one thing Dilbert and I could never agree on: he loved zombie movies and couldn't understand why I didn't want to share that with him. While I agreed on spec that the Living Dead movies were probably great satires and commentaries on their times, there was no way I was going to watch people's bodies being torn apart and their brains eaten. I have never liked gore. It's one of the reasons I didn't pursue a sideline in makeup, since most of the creative stuff is blood and guts and I have no desire to spend my days looking at them, even for pretend. Yeah, yeah, I'm a doctors' daughter, but I never had a taste for human flesh, living, dead, or undead. I digress: I think part of my point was that there have been rave reviews on the genre web sites for the gore in Silent Hill, so you can pretty much forget my seeing it on that count.

There's also the fact that I've never been big on horror movies in general. I have always had plenty to be afraid of, or so I've thought: failing in school, social rejection, poverty, losing my job, violent death, damnation, the usual. I didn't and don't feel the need to add to those, even for the space of a few hours in a controlled setting. Now, I like Greek (and Shakespearean, and Jacobean, and modern) tragedies for their sense of catharsis, even though I never feel the need to feel more depressed than the average reading of the paper will make me. But somehow, that's different for me, though I'm not sure why. Anyway, I don't like horror flicks, even the ones that are more psychological than messy or played for laughs. And Silent Hill is definitely a horror movie.

Also in the minus column, three words: video game movie.

All that said, I will probably see this movie sometime on DVD, in broad daylight, with someone else around to distract me. It just looks that interesting.

As far as the nascent cold sore I'm fomenting, it's disgusting, it's disfiguring, and it'll be gone soon and there's nothing much I can do about it anyway.

When it comes to nasty patrons I just need to convince them I'm not very bright or experienced, and then they're condescending but they become less vicious. Usually.

The fight with my sister is most disturbing, not least because I don't really like fighting with her. That said, I am completely fed up with her narcissism and cavelier attitude towards other people's feelings, namely mine. I am tired of being told to be like her and playing Tonto to her Lone Ranger. I used to think that was the best way to get along with her, and it was certainly the easiest. But it has gotten old. I was thinking of going out to California to visit her, or even somehow drop the bombshell that I'm sincerely sorry for the way I treated her when we were kids, but I can't deal with it now. Now, I just hope she follows through on her notion of going into therapy. It's hard work and not always much fun, as I can attest, but it would be all about her.

So did anything good happen recently? Yes. My mother came into town briefly and we spent a pleasant day together, including taking in a play. Mom gave me a wonderful present when she announced that she is not coming next weekend to stay with me, as she had announced she was going to do back in February, which really made my whole day right there. It means I don't have to give my apartment the scrubbing and bowdlerization that is attendant upon one of her visits. I have been reading a delightful book, Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters. I have been practicing a certain self-awareness in dealing with my mother and others. The blogs I read (see the side of this page) have been particularly good lately. I have been using self-restraint at work and with strangers. Life is good, I think, even if I don't always appreciate it.

Lust Bunny

I spent the last day before my birthday in a state of deep rut. How bad was it? I was sitting in the Jesus Freak Cafe, and the only thing to tune out Christian Rock was Garrison Kiellor gassing on through my headphones. My fantasies involved various pieces of the furniture. I took a long walk when I got too restless, and it rained. My lascivious thoughts continued unabated. I gained momentary relief of a dark sort when I remembered some of the things I read in The Game by Neil Strauss, which has pretty much convinced me that if I am in a social situation, and a man is looking in my direction and his lips are moving, he is lying big time. Like I said, it was only temporary, but it did get me into a side thought of whether I'd rather be lied to or continue on in my solitary frustration. Either way, it'd end badly. I am comforted by the knowledge of the transience of all things, including lustful states.

On a far more positive note, I forgot my lunch yesterday and had to go to Panera. After I finshed lunch and had opened my book, I was approached to do a survey interview. Assured that I would get back in time to start my next shift and the lure of a $25 gift card, I acquiesced. I had a rather delightful ten minutes talking to three decently attractive men and being asked my opinion and being videotaped. And I was paid. Now, of course, they wanted something from me and didn't have their full cards on the table, but I am never picked for this sort of thing, and it was kind of flattering. They didn't want anything but my opinion, but as anyone who knows me knows, you're likely to get that whether you pay for it or not. It really brightened up my day.

So, tomorow I meet my mother and we do brunch and a play. St. Buffy, please don't let me strangle her.

Goin' Round and Round

Top songs in rotation at the Solitary Cafe:

Lie to Me (Jonny Lang)
Nowhere to Run (Martha Reeves and the Vandellas)
Too Many Fish in the Sea (The Marvelletes)
Still Wonder (Jonny Lang)

Regressive Fun

I promise, at some point, I will get to the adventure that is working at CPL. Just not tonight.

I was looking for some information on a saint through Google, and I stumbled across an online version of the Catholic Encyclopedia (published circa 1912), on a web site run by the Brothers of Christian Instruction. http://newadvent.org/cathen makes for some, um, interesting reading. Here's an excerpt from the entry on Protestantism:

No bond of union exists between the many national Churches, except their common hatred of 'Rome,' which is the birthmark of all and the trade-mark of many, even unto our day.

Raised Protestant, I was working up a full head of steam over this until I realized that there was no entry for Vatican II and that the whole thing had pretty much been copied verbatim from an edition from early in the last century. Still, it seems a little irresponsible of the BCI to go to the trouble of uploading a work like this with no updating and little or no comment (for real laughs, read the entry on Judaism) when it wouldn't have been all that much more difficult to modernize some of the views expressed. In the end, I went back to comforts of the sinners at the Chicago Sun-Times and listened to the gospel program on the radio.

Disappointment Story

Well, I just got finished watching the DVD I most anticipated since it came out in December: Detective Story. I saw the play it was based on lo these many years ago my first year of college, and it deeply affected me. I've had a minor obsession with it ever since. I've wanted to direct it both on stage and film, maybe even write something based on it. I am more determined now, since the film version we have could so obviously be improved upon.

Maybe I feel betrayed that apparently one could get away with far more on stage than one could on screen, which I suppose I could blame on the Hayes Code. Maybe it's just my Shakespearean obsession with preserving the original text of a work (if you think my review here is trenchant, you should see me savage non-Branagh Shakespeare adaptations). Maybe I just had unrealistic expectations.

So what really stuck in my craw? It wasn't Kirk Douglas. He was pretty much perfect. Most of the actors were pretty good, even if I thought some of the character choices they made were melodramatic to the point of being almost awful. The first thing was when McCleod calls his wife a "tramp." In the play it's "whore," and it's a much stronger choice, and justifies what happens later much better that some half-assed word like "tramp." Second, the Italian thief is played as a complete nut job, which doesn't make what happens at the end nearly as shocking and generally is distracting to other performances. As a script thing, he keeps mentioning that he's a "four-time loser" so many times that the audience is bludgeoned with it the way they aren't in the play. One of my biggest gripes is the handling of the adaptation in general: they didn't trust the audience enough. The character of Joe, the reporter, is pretty much eviscerated and his Jewishness erased. But the biggest thing? The thing that almost made me write the movie off completely before finishing? Mary didn't have an illegal operation. She went to a "baby farm." No. No. No. NO. She had an ABORTION in the play, but I guess the pantywaists at Paramount Studios couldn't handle it. It fuels everything that happens in the main storyline after it's revealed, but they had to bowdlerize it to get the material past the censors, I suppose. It's very disappointing.

All is not lost. Perhaps I should save up my pennies to produce this show. Perhaps I should call up the head of my undergraduate department, who was rumored to put Detective Story in the running for production by the school every year, and tell him to grow some cojones and direct it before I, his idiot student, do. Or maybe I could come up with a new screenplay (as soon as I learn how to write one) and get a film friend to direct it. Or come up with my own riff on it. I guess the movie couldn't have been all that bad to instigate such a creative storm. I credit the source material entirely. That's Detective Story by Sidney Kingsley, if you feel like looking it up.