Holiday Movies

Holidays and Holiday entertainments. When I think of xmas movies I first think of Bell, Book and Candle. Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak, supported by Jack Lemmon, Elsa Lanchester, Hermione Gingold, and the inimitable Ernie Kovacs. It's a movie about witches living in Manhattan in 1960. Novak plays a witch, somewhat bored with her life and her powers, who decides to take Stewart, a publisher, away from his fiancee, a woman the Novak character tangled with in her college days. Of course along the way she falls in love with Stewart, and ceases being a witch because of it. It's sentimental and set, in the beginning, at xmas time.

I particularly like Jack Lemmon in this movie. He plays Novak's character's younger brother, a warlock. He's terrible at making money and always broke. Somewhere along the way he hooks up with the Ernie Kovacs' character, Sidney Redlitch, a writer who writes about the occult. Elsa Lanchester is the older aunt to the two witches and she is also a witch, though her powers are even more meager than Lemmon's. Hermione Gingold plays the grande dame witch who's potion breaks Novak's spell on Jimmy Stewart. She is quite funny in her main scene, and she also has some small pieces with Kovacs who is wonderful, drinking and smoking his ever present cigar.

Of course, my wife and I consider this our movie, though neither of us are witches, nor do we practice the craft. We just like the people and the interaction this piece portrays. It was originally a broadway play and it was quite successful. I don't really know how it came to the screen, but it was well handled and it is so very entertaining. I never get tired of it. Of course, now I have my own Kimberly. And she has charmed me in her own specific and wonderful way. No need of witchcraft. I count myself lucky to have attracted her interest at all. At the time, some 13 years ago now, I prayed to the Goddess Arianrhod every night. I didn't ask Her for Kimb, or for anyone exactly. I asked her for a partner that would be right for me. So it was truly wonderful when this woman, much younger than myself, turned out to be so very simpatico for the old failed writer. True mercy there. So, if anyone wonders why I am not an atheist, or why I believe the weird things I believe, I say this one thing supports my whole belief system, no problem.

And christmas? Christ Mass? I know that it is the return of life, marked by the lengthening of days, that makes this time of year truly important. And I don't begrudge the fact that the xtians needed to graft their imagined cosmology onto a natural event that had been celebrated by humans for literally tens of thousands of years. That was something the xtians were good at, that they god from the romans, using the pre-existing gods/goddesses/holy days to stand for things they needed to push onto local populations to rule over them.

It doesn't change what is really important here: The Wheel Turning. Yes folks, all that any holy day really stands for is the changing of time from season to season, from moment to moment, marking those that have stood here before us and anticipating those that will stand here after we have left the building.

Consciousness is about remembering life in its mutable dance. Those that have lived. Those that have spoken and those that have loved and those that have died. And it is about the ability to imagine tomorrow. Imagine all the people, living life in peace. We really are all dreamers. We all know these things are possible.

Where we lose our connection to the divine is when ego, generally ego, causes us to choose to believe things that are not actually true. Like gay is a choice, or abortion is completely different than miscarriage, or that one person's race makes him/her a certain kind of personality. Ludicrous concepts, bitterly cherished by people who's egos are wounded by their lives and their choices.

I also like the Alistair Sim Christmas Carol. It's the only really good one, yet Hollywood keeps remaking this story, poorly. And now this version has been edged out at the local video store. There's a kharmic price to be paid for this. Those directors and producers have something to confront when they pass over. In any case, Sim's Scrooge will always be the one to remember. And particularly, when he awakens in the morning and knows he can save himself. He has come to admit the lies he has told himself, and now he is free to live in the truth and be happy. Good stuff. Everyone should see this movie.

Finally, Love Actually. That is a good holiday movie that pulls us together. And it even has a sad story, the man nearly cheating on his perfectly wonderful wife. Alan Rickman, who plays Snape in the Harry Potter movies, is perfect for this part. He doesn't actually want to do it, but the girl who entices him makes it difficult to resist. Then he ends up hurting his wife, played by Emma Thompson. This downer sets up the rest of this movie and Hugh Grant's, as the Prime Minister, chance at love. It is a silly heartfelt movie. I also like the part where the guy romances his best friend's wife, but not in a bad way. Just letting her know how speical she is. Very sweet. May have to see it again now, just to re-live those moments.

I've been thinking about old movies for awhile now, due to a post on Self-Styled Siren's blog, about re-viewing old movies. Surely I have done plenty of that in my life. But it is harder now than it used to be. There used to be old movies all over tv. You could find all sorts of things from long ago. And there are movies I've seen like fifty times because of that. But now, now the cable waves are filled with recently produced dreck that holds no one's attention for very long. That's why we have remote controls. So we can flip around and avoid any slow moment.

Sad, isn't it? Anyway, this about does it for Tim's mildly nostalgic xmas movies post on a blog that essentially nobody reads anymore, even my friends. I suppose that is par for the course. After I'm dead and gone, my children will look through these and read some of them, if only to remember the old man. Hopefully there will too many of these posts for them to actually get through. I can go on and on. I have copies of all the letters I wrote in the 1970s and 1980s to prove it. I averaged about 3000 words a day in those days. I can't imagine anyone ever read all those letters, except for me, of course. I read them and thought they were great. I am just a lousy critic of my own work. Probably why it is as rambly as it is. Conversational tone and all that. Oh well.

I know I will live and die in your arms, Sweet Lady. Thank you for this gift of this time in the sun, my beautiful wife, my wonderful daughters, my charming son. All those people who's lives have touched me so much. All the scenes of natural world beauty that beguile me, particularly the woods and the streams and the rocky trail. Thank You for Your mercy. I have truly needed it and You have always brought it to me.

Aboard the Ship As It Lists into Port

The week before xmas week here in the midwest. Or really the eastern edge of the central part of the usa. Next Friday my family is taking the City of New Orleans to Jackson, Mississippi, to spend the holidays with my in-laws. This bodes well, and I am happy to have it to look forward to. We get along just fine and I can do some of the cooking there. Their house is quite comfortable and Ms. Piper will have a jolly time.

We usually do the zoo in Jackson, and the science museum. They recently re-did their art musuem, which was a wretched hole, and it's now quite nice. Some good stuff and well presented. Points to whoever engineered this reversal.

There is also a more than decent greek restaurant there that perhaps we will spend an afternoon at, having the lamb and the dolmas and all the good stuff.

Politics
It's really difficult to comment now, so much of what exists in the political world is merely contention for the sake of contention. Things are gradually getting better in the way of financial reality, but so many people are out of jobs that is bound to have a profound effect on bottom lines and tax revenues.

Personally I haven't been particularly disappointed by Obama's administration. They have heeled to the center and tried to accomplish things in the face of the rightwing noise machine. I am not pleased with how many things have gone, but I am not particularly surprised by them, either. Now there is a lot of blowback from the liberal blogs about the disappointment that Obama is for them. I feel kind of bad for them, feeling that way. But the way things work for us it is never going to be that easy.

Sure we elected sixty democratic senators. But the fact is we didn't really do that. Lieberman is an independent, as is the senator from Vermont. And we know that Lieberman is just a bitter old man, headed straight for history's dustbin with his reputation as a jerk signed and sealed now. And some of the democratic centrists tread a fine line as to their political philosophy and standing. Ben Nelson is from Nebraska. He is under the illusion that people in Nebraska are not as financially strapped as them big city liberals. He is, of course, wrong, but he thinks he needs to play it a certain way to be re-elected. It is probably really impossible to move the ship of state very much in any given iteration of presidential power. It is much easier to poke holes below the waterline. That is what GWB and his frenzied Veep managed to do. We shall see if Obama can keep the vessel floating for four or eight years.

If we do get to a second term, I think we will see a somewhat less centrist position. But Obama has always been about the art of the possible. And I think, from reading his books, that we can count on him being ultimately a centrist in terms of programs. As to the wars, that is another subject. I think Obama will extract us from both of those wars before the 2012 elections, as an act of political need.

Well, I'm lousy at predictions, so don't mind me. It's just a hard time for the good old USA.

Thanks to the Lady for another day with my remarkable wife and child. May you all learn to see Her love and feel Her mercy in the passing of sun and moon and the singing of wind and rain.

The Grey Lady's New Clothes

I don't read the Washington Post anymore, though I did read it for most of my adult life. In the last two or three years it has really morphed into something truly awful. The people that run the Post clearly are now part of the rightwing noise machine. There is little attempt made to ever respond to the ludicrous statements the right continues to invent to weaken the Obama administration.

This comes to a head, I think, this week. The Post has apparently published an expanded version of Sarah Palin's Facebook rant concerning whether global warming is real and whether President Obama should go to the summit in Copenhagen. She talks about scare tactics and junk science. As someone pointed out in the comments section at HuffPost, this is "richly ironic" since scare tactics is one of her primary tools in advancing her career and her party. All she has ever been able to say about Obama and the democrats is that they are "scary". Palin is the person who invented and popularized "death panels" as part of the debate on health care. She is busy telling everybody that Obama and Pelosi and Reid are destroying america and we'd better wake up and throw them out and put her and her ilk in.

Yet she offers no actual solutions and she reveals no actual understanding of how the world works, either the financial world, or the world of international affairs. She is basically concerned with transferring money to the rich, from the rest of us. And she is entirely concerned with sending the jews all back to greater Israel, as is called for in the book of Revelations. Middle east be damned. Screw the palestinians and all the other arabs, standing in god's way.

And she is clearly accepted by the mainstream media as the face of the republican party. We are in some serious trouble I have to say. And the drag of her and her statements is to the far right. It moves all republicans further and further into the sphere of the religious fundamentalists that would remake this country as a "christian" society. They would like to outlaw contraception, along with abortion. They would like to re-criminalize all forms of sexual behaviour outside of biblical marriage. They are essentially equivalent to the Mullahs that enforce Sharia Law in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

When global warming does its real trip on us you will see Sarah P. and her fellow travelers state not that they were wrong, but that god is judging us for allowing homosexuals to hav average, normal lives. They will say that all natural disasters were brought upon us by that nasty jerk of a god that rules the old testament.

And a lot of people will believe them, just as a billion people believe in the weirdness that is taught in the Q'uran. It's hard not to see religious wars heating up in the near future. Frankly, the "war" with Al Queda and the Taliban is essentially a religious war. And religious wars persist as long as their are believers out there.

Sorry to be so pessimistic, but the Washington Post was the news organization that pursued the Watergate scandal that ended with Nixon's resignation. Those were the days my friend. Those days are clearly gone. The WaPo didn't even try to take down George W. Bush, who committed far worse crimes than Dick Nixon. They joined in the party all the way. It makes you wonder what they think up there in la la land, the rich and powerful. They have designed the situation we find ourselves in because of their needs for power and money. Anothe mighty institution has fallen.

The Washington Post really can't go out of business fast enough. The health of the republic demands it.

And Sarah Palin represents the real anti-christ. She is willing to say anything and do anything for money and power and she understands only that which is about her personally. She would be a president that would make George W. Bush seem nuanced by comparison.

May the Lady's mercy save us from these people. May we awaken to our faults and find our way through this Her creation with respect and grace. Thanks to the Lady for even the chance to live here.

The Lady and the Tiger, Please Choose

The week shudders to a halt. No one reads this blog, officially. The stats for the last week include only my visits. Very humbling.

Tiger Woods turns out to be a pretty typical rich guy. He's on the road, he's got the scratch. He's banging whatever blonde barbie he runs into. This is surprising how? There is that biological imperative here. My wife says, "But his wife is beautiful! Why would he cheat on her?" Every male knows there is a biological imperative behind that. Yes, the best thing for the self and for the race is to form a partnership, have children, do a good job raising them. But there is also a core motivation in the male: spread the seed around. Make babies in various combinations. The more combinations the better the odds are that your genetic trace will survive and dominate in any given grouping. Yawn. This is just not that interesting.

As a human with a consciousness of self, and an understanding of how the universe works, we have the ability to control those core motivations that are built into the machine. So the reality is we do a little bit of both: we sow some wild oats, as they say, and then we pair off and really reproduce. This is how it has always been, and it probably always will be this to some extent. Now that there are way too many of our species screwing up the planet, we have gotten ahold of some techniques to hold down the reproductive aspect of having sex.

Men are going to have sex, if only with themselves. That does not make them bad guys. It is having sex and imagining that there is no responsibility for what it does to you and to your partner that makes some men "bad". Frankly, it is self centeredness that has never been questioned that creates most of the problems for the species.

Tiger is unfortunately the more common version of the well off, ambitious male. It is now really between him and his wife. If she is smart she will leave him, because it is very unlikely he is going to change now. Why should he change? His validation is all about winning golf tournaments and having blonde women sleep with him. Why would he change?

And will this destroy his career selling things for other people? Nah. Other men look at him and wish they were him. The only similar question I have at this time is this: Is gambling Michael Jordan's form of cheating? One wonders.

I'm sure there will be far too much time spent on this subject in the next few weeks. Happy Solstice folks.

I ask the Lady's mercy for my own failings, both in the past and in the present. One thing I am sure of is that She knows how we were made and how we have dealt with that. We do have choice. That is the important aspect of all being.

Old Friend

Well, I heard from my friend, Corlyss, yesterday morning that Pat Smith died on Thanksgiving. I sent out a few emails, to people I knew would want to know. My friend in Los Angeles told me he had already been called by Pat's daughter, and Jessica the Witch told me that Jake Smith had called her. So the grapevine passed the word. And I sent a couple of private emails out to people I've known a long time who knew both Pat and me, but nobody wrote me back.

With my current health issues, the subject of leaving the planet has been on my mind a lot. I lived with Pat Smith from the spring of 1973 until July of 1981, when I left our apartment on South Grand and moved in, initially, with Greg Lakebrink, and later with Bradway.

Pat was married to Larry Smith most of those years. They had two children together and there didn't seem to be a big reason to divorce him. He didn't seem to care at that time. Darned if I know. We lived on Scarritt Street in central Springfield for most of that time. It was in that house that the Scarritt Occasional Society was born. That later morphed into Scarritt Associates. It was a writing group and I also helped Knoepfle produce a series of poetry chapbooks. Most of those people we published eventually became part of the Scarritt reality.

Pat had had a production company of a sort with Sandy Martin Knoll. They taught a class in producing a magazine at SSU. Pat and Larry lived across the street from John and Sandy. Somewhere along the way there Pat and John Knoll had an extended affair. Ironically, Pat later found John Knoll in St. Louis and married him there sometime in this last decade. I guess his love for her was real.

My love for Pat was also real, but it wasn't enough. Somewhere along the line I realized that Pat didn't really care for my writing. We were both pretty much beer alcoholics by then. I couldn't see how my being there was any good for her at all. And I felt I had wasted years of her life, living off of her income while I struggled to be some sort of writer. Something I knew she didn't think would ever happen. Of course, it didn't happen. I wrote tons of things, but never tried to publish them.

I'd say the one good thing I promoted in Pat's life was her own writing. She wrote several novels in that period that we were together. She also wrote some fine poems, and we published a chapbook of her pieces entitled "The Museum Is Closed." There are poems in that book that are addressed to me, and they are very beautiful, but dark. That came out in the period that our relationship was becoming frayed.

And of course I was always also in love with and involved with Janne that entire time. That didn't help. Nor did the other love affairs that passed through both of our lives. Pat eventually was good friends with Janne. And I hear from JR that Keats, Pat's daughter, called Janne this last week. Some mild irony there.

Pat Smith. Well, I loved her and I miss her. She changed towards me, of course. After I left her we were sort of mild friends, but eventually she became quite cold towards me. Understandable. She was in her forties when we broke up. I don't really know how it all went for her after that. I saw her on the street in 1986, after returning from living in New York City. She was clearly disappointed I was still with Becky Bradway.

Later I saw her one day while I was walking with Paige home from the 7/11 in the old neighborhood in Springfield that I lived in for 12 years. In one of those odd notes, I lived on the corner of 10th and Bryn Mawr and Pat lived about two blocks away, halfway down the block on Yale, the next street over from 10th. We lived within blocks of each other for, well, many years. I knew which house was her's, but by then I was sort of scared of her. After Becky left me in 1993 I called Pat up and asked her for Janne's number. That really pissed her off, I think. And she told me she didn't have it, but that was not true.

Odd how these things go. It was just as well I didn't speak with Janne at that time. She was busy having her son that fall of 1993. Janne would've been a 42 year old mother then, so hearing from me, all dissolute and despairing about my cheating wife, wouldn't have helped her in any way. So Pat was right to steer me away.

So, in many ways Scarritt was a good place for me. I did a lot of writing, I had a lot of friends who were writers. We had some serious parties. We danced, we smoked pot, we drank a lot of beer. Of course with Janne I drank scotch. Pat favored irish when she drank hard stuff. But mostly in those days we drank vast quantities of bottled beer. And we had people over all the time, so everyone drank a lot of that stuff. It was for all practical purposes a classic salon. People felt free to just drop by and drink and hang with me. And with Pat.

Pat was a good hostess. She had certain things she could cook, and I had certain things I could cook. We did lots and lots of rock and roll music. Pat was deep into certain areas of pop music. I remember the Beatles were always important. Before we were actually involved I remember going to see the Rolling Stones in St. Louis with Pat and John Knoll. I think that is when I first started seeing her romantically.

Magazines. Living with Pat was the first time I ever spent a lot of time with someone who read many many magazines. We always had subscriptions to New York, New Yorker, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Creem, and we bought tons of magazines, mainly men's magazines, Penthouse, Playboy and Club. I look back on that with some embarrassment. But things had changed so much from the fifties it was sort of where the seventies led us. We were all much more open about sex and sexuality than we are even now. Something about the time and place? I don't know.

Pat was an obsessive re-reader. She had authors that she re-read like crazy. Particularly Georgette Heyer. On the weekends she would often get out a stack of books and pile them up by her and then whip through them, reading the parts she really liked. She might go through fifty books in a weekend, no problem. I do that some myself, though never on her scale. She'd be sitting there on the couch with a glass of beer and a cigarette, and she'd be laughing and crying at the same time. She smoked Kents and we drank Pabst Blue Ribbons mainly.

We went to a lot of garage sales, estate sales, and auctions. Pat loved buying beautiful things for low bucks. She came from pretty good Chicago-area roots, so she knew quality stuff. In those days you could often find really remarkable pieces at those sales. Later they came to be dominated by dealers and people looking to get on PBS. But Pat bought a few very nice things at those sales. I really respected her abilities.

I was a shitty partner for her. She deserved better. And she wasn't a great partner for me, either. But we had a lot of good times and I remember those years well. I have vast quantities of documentation, of course. I even have a file folder of house notes that Pat and I would leave each other. She had beautiful, even remarkable handwriting. Very chic. As a matter of fact she was pretty darn chic for a girl from the western suburbs who went to ISU.

And she was a great mom, too. She spent the time on her kids and had enormous patience with them. And they both turned out great, of course. No surprise. They were smart people and their parents were both engaged in their lives. My son, Joel, probably never had a friend as sweet as Jake Smith. They spent a lot of time together in the summers when Joel would come from Oregon. I had a fairly rocky relationship with Pat's daughter, Keats. But I knew she was smart and would have an interesting life. Keats also wrote most of a novel in those days, about a girl named Annette. I still have pieces of that manuscript in my files.

I also remember that Jake Smith was the first person I knew with a personal computer. I think it was a TRS80 that he got his grandfather, Jim Hilton, to buy him. I remember helping him program a simple game, at the long table in the South Grand Avenue apartment, must've been 1980-81. You could see his mind working. It was fun.

Well. Life is what it is. I hope to be around for some more years. At this point I would hope I have as many as Pat had. But you don't really know. She was a lot more responsible than me. I can't seem to hold anything together. I was wondering why Pat got so much of the credit for the old Scarritt days, but now I think that perhaps I wasn't as central to all that as I imagined at the time. I was pretty much a pretentious young jerk. I know this because I have all the audio tapes that Cheryl Frank made of that group and I have listened to them. I do not come off great. Pat's on them too. Particularly the tape of the Illinois Writers group reading at their spring do in the spring of 1979. Pat is slightly drunk and she is reading some things that really cut you up (well, me in particular). Her poetry always struck me as very similar in tone to Ann Sexton, another good episcopalian woman who had to deal with suicide in her life. What did Pat always say? The dark night of the soul.

I ask the Lady for Her mercy for the spirit that is Pat now. May we all walk with Lady into that valley and beyond into the sunlight of our truth.