I’m not going to wait until my “Movies from the second half of 2024” post for this one:
This is the kind of movie you’d think was entirely contrived from a deeply silly notion until you learn that it’s essentially a true story. (Yes, yes, some of it is fudged from what happened in reality, so what, it’s a movie, people. Schindler’s List wasn’t 100 percent accurate, either.) The bones of it are as follows: a serial killer who ingratiates himself to women by pretending to be a photographer before getting them alone and killing them goes on The Dating Game as one of the bachelors, and our heroine, played by Anna Kendrick–who also directed the film in her debut–is the contestant on the show picking between the three bachelors.
Guess who she ends up picking.
This is not a light-hearted comedy, so be aware if or when you watch it; it’s more disturbing than that. It is a deeply affecting movie on a very basic level, and I think part of that is because of how Kendrick has somehow managed to walk a tightrope here. The movie feels like it’s supposed to be a light-hearted comedy, even if of the “black comedy” variety, and yet, the more you watch the more you realize it isn’t. The “almost comic” feel lulls us into a feeling of calm acceptance…much as a skilled serial murderer does.
Woman of the Hour also depicts several of our killer’s actual efforts, and in each case Kendrick shows us a moment when the woman starts to feel a bit of discomfort, but by then it’s too late. There are moments, too, when glances are shared between characters, and it’s the women who are able to pick up on a bad situation developing while the men just nod and move on because hey, “nuttin’ to see here”. I’ll put it this way: If you, as a man, were offended at all by the recent “choose the bear” discourse that unfolded on social media, then maybe watching Woman of the Hour would be a good idea, because what happens to the women in this movie is far more a reality than we like to admit.
I suppose that Woman of the Hour is actually a horror movie, but it’s one where the monster is utterly and almost boringly human. Recommended…but beware, this one might linger.
OK, I’m up early on a Sunday drinking coffee and we’re hoping to get to Letchworth today, but I’ll just toss off a quick quiz-thing! And I’m doing this one before I read Roger‘s answers!
What’s the best birthday party you’ve ever had?
I never had a birthday party. Next! (When I turned ten we had a family dinner at the Big Restaurant in Olean, as we had just moved there. The place was called The Castle, and it was part of a resort-hotel thing that was quite the going concern back in the day. Nothing of The Castle remains. It fell on hard times and different fashions, the idea of vacationing in a place just for the resort and not much else kind of fell by the wayside, and The Castle gradually rotted and now is gone.)
Where is your favorite place you’ve ever visited?
I love too many places to name a favorite, I think, but of all the places I have gone, I could see myself living in Ithaca, or Geneva (NY), in the Finger Lakes region.
How do you like to spend your free time?
Reading, writing, photography, listening to music. (OK, sorry about the weird numbering here. As I start a new paragraph to answer each of these the WordPress list thing is renumbering as best it can, so each question is ending up Number One, and I’m not going to bother changing it.)
What’s one of your favorite bands?
Just one? Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors.
What is the cutest animal you’ve ever seen in person?
Excluding our own pets? I’ll go with the otters I saw at the New England Aquarium with my mother back in the 80s.
How would you describe your style?
Cottagecore, with overalls.
If your wardrobe could only be one color, what would it be?
Blue, I guess. Because of all the denim!
What was the first concert you ever went to?
A concert band at the University of Wisconsin in LaCrosse. I was in kindergarten. If we’re talking rock or other pop music? That would be the first time we saw the Trans Siberian Orchestra.
What is the best book you’ve ever read?
The Lord of the Rings. (BTW, I include The Hobbit in there.)
What’s your favorite movie of all time?
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.
What’s the stupidest movie or TV show you’ve ever seen?
Hudson Hawk. (Which actually has some kind of weird charm to it, believe it or not. It’s best known for being a colossal flop, but it has some real gonzo goofiness going in there.)
If you could only have one food for the rest of your life, what would you choose?
OK, this particular quiz is really old-school, isn’t it? This feels like first-generation blog quizzes from back in 2003. Anyway, for purposes of this thing, I’d say…pizza? It has so many variations. But even that would get boring very quickly.
What are your biggest pet peeves?
I’m reminded of George Carlin’s quote: “I don’t have pet peeves, I have major psychotic f*ckin’ hatreds!” I’m not sure what my biggest ones are, but fresh on my mind are dudes who have to voice every disagreement they have with any opinion they see, guys on crotch-rockets who are obviously riding that thing for Adventure (I use “crotch-rocket” to refer to a specific item; it does not mean a generic motorcycle), people who will run into someone they know someplace and then stand right there to catch up without ever once looking around to see if they are blocking traffic in some way (because they always are), and overalls worn with one strap unfastened (don’t ask me why, I just don’t like the look).
Are you more into brains or looks?
If I have to interact with you, I hope there’s a brain in there.
Do you celebrate any holidays? What’s your favorite?
In order: Christmas, New Years, Thanksgiving. Halloween always feels like it should be more of a thing in our household, but it usually isn’t. I still have a weird thing about Valentines Day, even though I’ve been married for 27 years to a woman I started dating when I was 19. The last few years it’s been very hard to get excited for Independence Day, but here’s hoping we can get that mojo back.
Oh, and I don’t care what anybody says, “Sweetest Day” is not a thing.
Actress and singer Mitzi Gaynor has died. She was 93, and she was one of the very last remaining stars with ties to the great era of the Hollywood movie musical. Her biggest role was likely South Pacific, the Rodgers-and-Hammerstein classic (which I may have never actually seen all the way through, it’s not lodged in my memory all that well at all), which is set in–of course!–the islands of the South Pacific during World War II.
This particular song is the one from that show which I know best, though I am abashed to admit that it’s not because of the song but because a teevee commercial for a hair care product used the theme as the basis for its jingle: “I’m gonna wash that gray right out of my hair!” It was some years before I learned the truth.
Here is Mitzi Gaynor singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair” from South Pacific.
Dame Judith Weir is a British composer with whose work I am entirely unfamiliar except for the present work, which I just heard for the first time the other day. But my lack of knowledge of Weir’s music shouldn’t be taken as any kind of statement of her skill, because her work is apparently of sufficient renown in the United Kingdom that Queen Elizabeth II actually named her Master of the King’s Music, a post which is analogous to a Poet Laureate but for composers. Weir held this post for a ten year term which just ended earlier this year. (Her successor, named by King Charles III, is Errollyn Wallen, whom we’ll investigate another time.)
The welcome arrival of rain is a work Weir wrote under commission by the Minnesota Orchestra. Her inspiration was the arrival of the monsoons on the Indian Subcontinent, and the joy with which the rains are seen when they come. Weir writes:
This profuse and exuberant piece arose out of bare beginnings; a scale passage followed by a simple melody. Whilst I composed it, as the notes and the pages multiplied, I began to think of a comparison with the arrival of the monsoon in India, when aridity is pierced by life-giving rain; and humans, animals and vegetation revel in sudden activity and fertility. Although the monsoon is expected yearly, its arrival is always joyously surprising. The music¹s title was inspired by a passage from the 18,000 verse Hindu text, Bhagavata Purana ( quoted in the score.)
A 6-phrase scale pattern is heard at the beginning of the piece in highly compressed forms; in rushing passages for the winds and as chords for the solo strings. Then an 8-phrase melody is heard in a lush and spacious version where strings predominate above horns and trumpets. From here on, these two melodic sources are alternated as the basis of melody and harmony, right up to the utterly energetic culmination where both melodies are heard together with their respective variations; there follows a gentle, rainy coda. A prominent solo for the drum section (rototoms, tomtoms and timpani) starts in the middle of the piece and reinforces the ever-growing energy of the music.
Here is The welcome arrival of rain by Dame Judith Weir.
You don’t always need to wander far to find great subjects and scenes for photos. I took this while walking the doggos just around the corner from our house.
At the end of my adventures I was drinking a case of sixteen-ounce tallboys a night, and there’s one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all. I don’t say that with pride or shame, only with a vague sense of sorrow and loss. I like that book. I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page.
At the worst of it I no longer wanted to drink and no longer wanted to be sober, either. I felt evicted from life. At the start of the road back I just tried to believe the people who said that things would get better if I gave them time to do so. And I never stopped writing. Some of the stuff that came out was tentative and flat, but at least it was there. I buried those unhappy, lackluster pages in the bottom drawer of my desk and got on to the next project. Little by little I found the beat again, and after that I found the joy again. I came back to my family with gratitude, and back to my work with relief–I came back to it the way folks come back to a summer cottage after a long winter, checking first to make sure nothing has been stolen or broken during the cold season. Nothing had been. It was still all there, still all whole. Once the pipes were thawed out and the electricity was turned back on, everything worked fine.
—Stephen King, ON WRITING: A MEMOIR OF THE CRAFT
So I actually did some writing today, and oddly…that’s something I haven’t been able to say a whole lot lately.
What’s going on? Am I slowing down? Am I losing my passion for trying to tell stories and create literary tales and whatnot?
Am I losing touch with the written word?
At times that’s what it’s felt like, and it’s been deeply disconcerting, I must admit.
Part of it is the “big elephant” in the room of my recent life over the last, oh, year-and-a-half: Photography. I suppose it’s to be expected that when you find a new passion; the other ones tend to fade a bit. I suppose it’s like that famous meme of the guy taking a second look at a pretty passing woman while his current pretty woman looks at him in consternation. And yes, photography has become a huge passion, that much I can’t deny; and it’s not just that it’s the shiny new thing. It’s that it has given me something new to learn. That’s huge.
Of course, it’s not like I have nothing to learn from writing! How silly would it be for me to claim “That’s it, I’ve learned all there is to know about writing, I now know it all and will go forth and learn no more! All that’s left is just putting down the words!” Of course that’s nonsensical…but writing isn’t new anymore, is it?
I expect that as the weather turns to the colder and more unpleasant, and as my main camera is currently a device that lacks weather-sealing, I will find myself turning back to the literary once again. But there’s something else that’s probably at the heart of my reluctance–no, not that, not reluctance, but rather a lack of enthusiasm for writing of late.
It’s that Mom is gone.
My mother wasn’t huge into enthusiastically cheerleading for my writing. That just wasn’t her style. But she always believed in my ability, and she always made that known. Mom believed in me as a writer probably more than anybody else in my life, and now that source of encouragement and belief is gone. I wonder if that’s a part, in any way, of my general feeling of “Meh” when I would otherwise have been sitting down to write. It’s hard, I think, to keep doing a thing that you’re not always sure you’re really good at when one of your constant sources of possible belief that keeps you going is gone.
But then…the stories get a vote too, don’t they? And they’re not done. Forgotten Stars V is languishing in a holding pattern between edits; I need to get it out to some readers. The Adventures of Lighthouse Boy (not the actual title) is unfinished, and that’s the one I’ve been starting to work on again. Others remain: the second John Lazarus book, The Jaws of Cerberus (my demonic kayak adventure novel), Orion’s Huntress (space opera set in the same world as The Song of Forgotten Stars, but with no overlap), among others. A story cycle set on a fictional Finger Lake in New York, an essay book about Star Wars, another essay book about James Bond…these things aren’t gonna write themselves.
Hold on, let’s start here: one of my favorite paintings at the Buffalo AKG Museum.
Giacomo Balla, “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash”
Nice, huh? I like the suggested motion in the dog’s figure and in the leash. I always linger on this one when I get to where it hangs in the museum.
Now, where was I? Oh yeah, flashlights.
(Yes, the painting is relevant. Bear with me.)
The flashlight company is called OLight, and my coworker likes to tell me–rather mischievously–when they’re running sales. Whenever he says this, my response is always the same: “Oh lord, don’t tell me that!” Because if there’s one thing that’s almost guaranteed to get me to part with money, it’s a flashlight. (By the way, that old post of mine, linked above? All but two of those flashlights are now distant memories, and I don’t even remember the little red keylight that was apparently two bucks at Home Depot whenever I got that.)
But anyway, back to OLight. I do not visit that site with any regularity at all, because they’ll get a lot more of my money if I go too often. Heck, I just looked up the URL to link it above and I almost clicked four things to put in my cart! Dangerous, it is! However, sometimes there is necessity, and thus I have to discuss my one time (thus far) purchasing from OLight.
Enter the dogs.
Specifically, Hobbes.
When we adopted him last year, it was late in the summer when the nights were starting to settle earlier. Cane, you’ll remember, was mostly white with a few brindle spots, so we could see him in the back yard even when it was totally dark; we knew where he was and could corral him to bring him in when we let him out there to do his business either at night or in early morning. Hobbes, however, is completely brindle, so The Wife realized pretty quickly that it was going to a problem seeing him when he was let loose into the yard when it was dark.
She brought this concern up, and then I visited the OLight site…and saw this item here:
Now, was this a case of my phone listening to me and making sometime appear? I don’t know, but I do know that based on what I read, this is what the doctor ordered: a small light, with a multi-colored LED set-up on each end, about the size of one of those small McCormick spice containers, with a carabiner-style clip for attaching to stuff…like a backpack, or a belt loop, or somewhere on one’s person or on a dog’s leash.
Yup, this appeared to be just what the doctor ordered. Or rather, it’s what “the doctor” suggested and what I ordered. I got two of them, one for Hobbes and one for Carla. And then we proceeded to not use them for almost a year because Hobbes got injured and to this day he hasn’t been released into the yard on his own recognizance. But as our night-time dog walks are increasingly happening when it’s dark out, we have started using them even though the dogs are leashed. Hobbes doesn’t wear his yet, but on a lark I threw one on Carla’s collar one night. We wondered how she would react…and she didn’t. At all. She just does all her normal walk stuff with this light hanging from her collar. It barely weighs an ounce, so I’m not sure she even physically notices it, aside from seeing light.
And this is where our painting above comes into play, because a few times I’ve snapped Carla’s picture while walking, and the results put me immediately in mind of my favorite painting at the Buffalo AKG!
On the lower pic, it may appear that Carla has somehow red-shifted, because note the blue on her backside! That blue glow is actually coming from Hobbes’s light behind her. These lights can be set on each end to red, green, blue, or white, or flashing between all of those–and the ends can be set independent of the others, so I can set it to red and blue (on Bills game days!) or maybe red and green once we’re into the holidays. Visibility for one’s dogs is always a good idea, and I like having these for safety reasons.
Is that all I bought on that first OLight order? Why, no! I got a small flashlight for The Wife to carry in her purse or bag, and I got a small pen light to hang on my keychain because I’ve been in want of such a thing since my last keychain light died. Currently that’s all I have from OLight. But I’m sure that will change at some point, as I am highly impressed with what I’ve seen of their products thus far.
(Note to self: It’s probably time to update the “Flashlights I own” post….)
