El Burro Volador

The other day I had the privilege of watching Le Cercle Rouge, a seminal French heist movie that has apparently inspired many of the directors I admire.  Perhaps the most notable feature of the movie, for the contemporary American viewer, is the low incidence of dialogue.  Many sustained sequences follow characters performing some action, whether mundane or dramatic, in more or less total silence.  While this is most arresting during the famous half-hour heist sequence itself, it occurs throughout the film.

A character driving his car takes a turnoff into a pasture.  Drives across the bumpy, rutted ground.  Stops the car, shuts off the engine.  Gets out, walks to a nearby stump.  Sits down.  Takes out a cigarette.  Lights it.  Begins to smoke.  Each action occurs slowly, deliberately, and is allowed to be completed without any jump cuts, just a long, sustained shot.  And all this time not a word is said.

I can’t help but feel that in a Hollywood film made today he would have been talking on a cell phone, perhaps advancing the plot, or, more likely, would not have been alone to begin with, having a funny sidekick along to add noise to such a scene.  Or perhaps it would have been edited into a montage.  Regardless, sustained intervals of silence are generally avoided like jury duty in “commercial” films these days, and I think it is a shame.  I’m not saying that every film needs to be like Gerry, but I do enjoy the occasional piece of understimulation amidst the constant multimedia bombardment that is the “typical” American lifestyle.  It is nice to have space for your mind to work, to have to guess and extrapolate to build meaning instead of having a surfeit of message blared at you.  I guess that is why many of the films that I enjoy are described by reviewers as “cerebral”; I really do like having to use that creepy-looking glob of stuff inside my thick skull.

Yes, we now know that the disappearance of strawberries from our garden was caused not by disease but by a certain garden pest.  Rebekah has caught the little blighter in action, and should have some photographic evidence soon…

In unrelated news, my blogging has become erratic because of:

1) My addiction to free (or mostly free) online games Weewar and My Brute.  These things tend to beckon to me when I’m sitting in front of my computer, so they are fairly direct competitors to this endeavor -I’m trying to shake it off.

2) Employment/scheduling shakeups.  I am continuing to line up increasing amounts of work outside the sulfur mines, and simultaneously working out a piecework arrangement so that I can get away from the hourly-rate drudgery.  I want to work there in short, hard bursts and then leave so that I am available to run my burgeoning roleplaying/tutoring/mentoring business – which is set to bring in hundreds of bucks this week – I guess it may take off into something that more or less frees me from the onerous part of my current “day job”.

Rebekah and I have a lovely little strawberry plant in our back yard.  In the summertime, it can usually be counted on to produce a few beautiful little berries every so often.  Though they are small, they are such an arrestingly deep red, and so much more flavorful than the strawberries one gets at the supermarket, that I treasure each handful that ‘Bekah brings in for us to share.

That is why it has been particularly worrisome to me to see that some mysterious botanical ailment has afflicted our strawberry plant.  I am baffled, which is hardly surprising considering my more or less total ignorance of the finer points of gardening, but Rebek possesses an impressive amount of the green lore, and the symptoms puzzle her as well.  I am turning to my reader(s?) for help, so I shall describe for you the outward signs of the ailment in brief:

Berries appear to be forming normally, beginning as small green buds that gradually grow larger and blush toward that deep red color they will attain when ripe.  Then, just as they approach ripeness, Rebekah will venture out into the garden one morning and find a pulpy red stump where once the nascent berry dangled.  It is almost as if the berries have burst or something, though there is seldom any trace of exploded berry upon the ground.  Has any such thing been heard of in the annals of botanical science?  Are we the proud owners of the first exploding strawberry plant?

Yesterday was Father’s Day, of course – a day which has come to possess an increased significance for me in recent years.  I have been blessed with a pair of excellent fathers, which makes no karmic sense, considering my utter lack of involvement with the countless spawn I have likely left scattered around the continent as a result of my youthful…wanderings.  I do think about them some on Father’s Day…

Sorry I haven’t posted for a few days.  Life has been barreling onward.  There continues to be shakeups at the shop, as I move into a more transitional mode of employment there.  But in other, better news, it seems that I have landed my second paid roleplaying gig, this time to run games at a two-day retreat for gifted kids.  What excites me most about this opportunity is that more than one of the families that will be in attendance are reported to be looking for someone to facilitate an ongoing group – I am hopeful that I can turn this into another weekly job.  If so, roleplaying games would be making half my house payment every month – which would be pretty sweet.

Rebek had planned on going for a hike with her papa this morning, in honor of his birthday/ father’s day (little known fact: Merlyn was actually born on father’s day, which explains why he is so good at it), but I am not sure that the weather likes this idea.  We’ll see.  I have to go wake her up now, so I’m getting out my Duck Spatula.

She came home last night.  Thank goodness.  That’s all I really have to say this morning.

Finished Untimely Meditations last night.  Have decided that, with my first session as a professional gamemaster looming, it is time to fire up a good ol’ fantasy novel and steep myself in the genre.  Although I am having to learn a new gaming system for this group, in a lot of ways I feel like I am returning to my earliest days in the hobby.  Playing with a bunch of adolescents who are new to roleplaying, you approach the stories you tell differently.

I am forgoing the intricately woven plots about the true nature of evil and the possibility or impossibility of genuine redemption, friendship and the difficult choices caused by conflicting allegiances, etc – which were the central ideas of my last campaign.  Instead, I am thinking of a straightforward good-triumphs-over-evil arc with some room to weave in subplots specific to each character.  I mean, these kids aren’t jaded yet, so why not give them the simple pleasure of being the heroes and heroines and saving the day?

In totally unrelated news – I mentioned that I did a ton of yardwork the other day, and was just sick of it.  Well, in the days since, as I have looked at my reformed lawns, I have felt, not satisfaction really, but a sort of lessening of despair and relief from the anxiety that the yard police will show up and haul me off to jail.  This is my relationship with society in microcosm: dread followed by resentment followed by uneasy accommodation.

Today I just want to say how proud I am of Rebekah.  She has been such a diligent college student lately, taking her placement test, registering for classes, carefully checking to make sure that her selections will transfer to UNC in a useful way, designing a class schedule that will be compatible with a few shifts a week at her job as well – she’s just doing such a good and thorough job.

Of course, I haven’t been seeing much of her lately, as she has been gone nights house/dog sitting again.  As usual, the household has degenerated into complete savagery in her absence.  I thought we’d run out of food two days ago, but then I found some birdseed Rebekah keeps to stock the bird feeder out back.  After ascertaining that it tasted terrible, I came up with a cunning plan.  I refilled the bird feeder out back, then began to hunt the birds that showed up.

This is not as easy as you would think – my first attempts, using Clementine or one of the cats tied to a rope as my implement, were entirely unsuccessful.  Clemmy’s barking startled the birds before I was in range, and Gypsy is too fat to throw far or high enough.  Cleo stays airborne the longest, but she lacks the focus to be an effective hunter.  Since then I have been enjoying somewhat mixed success using a blowgun I fashioned from a length of pipe I got from under the kitchen sink.  I use Rebekah’s sewing needles as ammunition.  I call it mixed success because, although I am killing quite an adequate supply of birds, they aren’t much good raw, and I can’t cook them since the kitchen flooded…

I have been working on the ol’ ipod playlist recently, and have finally got close enough to capacity that I will have to cut a song for each song I want to add.  I was able to delay this for a while by clearing out a couple of Schumann pieces which totalled nearly an hour of music.  Other items on the chopping block were “Be Like That” by 3 Doors Down, which is a decent little song, I guess, but happened to come up in the shuffle when I was looking to cut something.  Another casualty was “A Little Bit More” by Doctor Hook & the Medicine Show.  It has become evident that this is one of those “Jekyll and Hyde” bands – I love the wacky and subversive stuff they did with Shel Silverstein, and tend to dislike the schmaltzy pop-country sound that lead to all their subsequent chart success.  This one was just offbeat enough to survive previous cuts, but eventually the bar got raised too high.

Now the exciting part: new additions!

A couple of albums by Irish bands made the cut, including To the Faithful Departed, which is the last of the Cranberries albums I unearthed a while back.  What’s not to like about the Cranberries?  I even love to say the name of their lead singer, Dolores O’Riordan.  That’s a moniker that could go in the hall of fame for “Most Irish Names”.  Anyhow, I also tossed on Drift, the excellent debut album from The Devlins, whom I saw in concert back in my teens – they were opening for someone – I want to say Tori Amos, though that seems like a strange pairing for some reason.  I liked their sound and bought Drift and the single “Waiting” off their second album – it’s one of the only cd singles I own, and if I could just find it I would add it to the playlist as well.

I also added the soundtrack to Collateral.  This is another one of those surprisingly good movie soundtracks with an unlikely mix of songs ranging from techno (Paul Oakenfold’s “Ready Steady Go”) to jazz (Miles Davis doing “Spanish Key”) to hip hop (The Roots) to Tejano/Latin-inflected rock (“Guero Canelo” by Calexico) and features a handful of memorable instrumental pieces from the film’s score as well.  Ultimately, I think I may be more fond of the soundtrack than the movie itself…

Today, possibly even as I type this, Rebekah is taking her placement test for college.  It will determine what her math and English requirements/options are, so it is not without importance, but at least its not super high-stakes.

Anyhow, I know the entire cast and crew of El Burro Volador are wishing her luck.  Except for Yevgeny.  I hate Yevgeny.

Also, her sprain is healing with uncanny speed.  One of her pixie contacts gifted her a magical salve made from wolf’s bane cut fresh upon the moors with a knife made from a fish’s jawbone and it is almost unnerving how quickly her ankle has mended.  Unfortunately, Clementine will not stop trying to lick it off, either because she thinks it is delicious or because she wants to prove that she can safely eat something called “wolf’s bane“.

In other news, I’ve done a ton of yard work today, and am currently cursing the unhappy hour in which I first set eyes on this wretched patch of earth.  It just fights you every inch of the way.