Odd thing on my Eyebrow: Popped it.

I had this little red bump at the base of my left eyebrow and even underneath a few of the hairs there, and it swelled a bit and had a small dull ache when I poked it, but it never developed into a full-on zit with poppable head.

So, the other morning after breakfast, I stood in front of the mirror, and took the tips of my 2 index fingers and pressed it from beneath, and through the skin I could see a bit of white emerge, almost an orb rising through murky water, and though it reached skin level, it didn’t pop; instead, I had to give one last firm push, then kind of wipe it/scratch it off the surface, and it was just this kind of hardened blob of fatty zit shit.

After I brushed my teeth, I re-visited it, and squeezed again from the base, and suddenly two white bits of moist sebaceous material flew out, one landing a quarter inch down left of the eyebrow, and the other going the other direction and getting caught in a few hairs in my eyebrow. 

I wiped that shit off my face, tried squeezing again, and the area got very red and inflamed, but nothing else came out, so it seemed I had squeezed it dry.

So, I put some rubbing alcohol on it to sterilize the area and further dry out any invisible fatty stuff, and went on with my day.

Saw All About My Mother, Was Very Disturbed.

So I was very disturbed by Almodovar’s All About My Mother.

I had missed it in original release, though I remember people talking about it, including one Spanish lit specialist who was saying that although a lot of people didn’t care for it, she found it touching, as a “love letter to his mother and all the strong women in his life”.

Later, after seeing a lot of his other stuff – I had never seen an Almodovar movie at that time – I remembered her description, and thought I would really like the film; so many of his movies are just dark and turgid, with these unexpected rays of light, and so I thought that that movie would be brighter and have a lot of very emotionally immediate moments throughout.

Instead, I found it disturbing with very few moments of light (though perhaps my perceptions were skewed because the film broke off and the projectionist left out a reel with crucial character developments, and they only played that reel after the film ended, to show us what we had missed).

Overall, the film seemed to parallel mothers, transsexuals, and actresses, where all the best ones are unknowable in some ways and engage in willed acts of self-creation, where the product is a performance that someone grows into and has just enough of a core of authenticity to convince and capture.

It was a very unsettling perspective on mothers, who we think are all sweetness and light and transparent.

On top of that, it suggested, too, that motherhood can be a fix like cigarettes or promiscuous sex, and only after trying it does a woman become almost like an addict and realize she’s come home.

I found that idea a bit sexist since it makes it seem like women are only fully realized in motherhood (much like Pope Francis’s theology of women!), but since the director parallels trannies’ commitment to being women, it seems he’s going at something larger and chosen, with motherhood being the prime example:

Just like in the key transsexual speech where people become more and more like the dream that they know they are, it seems that people who are/choose to be mothers also learn to increasingly live into the role, though they never quite arrive.

In this sense, the final dedication is key, since it's to all actresses who play actresses, all women who act, all men who want to become women, and all women who want to become mothers; Almodovar isn't dedicating to people pre-pregnancy who want to have kids, but rather women who already have kids and want to be and are trying to be mothers.

After the film, I walked down the main shopping street in the city to enjoy the day after the long winter, and it was odd to see women everywhere, and think of them as unfathomable people and potential mothers.  It was almost like they were another species.

Also, I thought that the film was very gay, since its perspective couldn’t nec. be offered by a straight man, since sexual desire would get in the way of contemplation of women and obscure the perspective. 

In that way, 2 straight men in the film were telling: the nun’s father with Alzheimer’s, who walks around and asks women how tall and what weight they are (since they’re otherwise interchangeable for him?), and the actor who bothers the tranny for a blowjob and wants her to go through with it even after she receives a phone call with bad news. 

Those moments are small but an important counterpoint to the main subject.

I want a few of my friends who had wild lives and have recently become mothers to see the film, but I’m kind of afraid to ask them to watch it, since they might read something more into my request than my getting their perspectives as young mothers.

Am Beginning a New List: Films seen on the Big Screen.

I’ve kept a list of books that I read for recreation since like 2006, and just the other day I was thinking of a film buff I know who keeps a list of every film that he sees on the big screen.

Then, as I was going through my list of books I read, I noticed that I had begun keeping a list of films seen on the big screen back in 2009, but had it had fallen off after like 5 or so films, including Lee Daniel’s Precious and Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, both seen in original release.

I decided to start that list up again, and when I went the other day to put in the first film I’d seen since that decision – Almodovar’s All About My Mother, which was showing at a filmhouse – I noticed that the very last film on my previous list had been Almodovar’s Broken Embraces, which I had seen in original release.

I now list film, director, date seen, and at which venue, and hope I keep it up, and am kind of regretful that I don't have such a list going back years.

All Things French: A Trend.

For some reason I’ve had a lot of contact with French culture the past few months: I saw a few films by French director Jacques Demy (“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”, “A Room in the City”), and I’ve begun reading a novel by Balzac for the writing class I’m teaching.

On top of that, I’ve been reading a hagiography of St. Francis of Paola, and it turns out that he’s the patron saint of the town that my one (French) colleague comes from. 

I texted him and asked him if he was from that town and if so did he know St. Francis of Paola, and he texted back –

Of course I am and of course I do!

- which, by the way, sounds like he was translating “bien sur” as “of course” when it’s probably better as “darn right”.

Although I rarely run into him, I saw him like the very next day at the library, and I talked to him some more about the saint and what’s known of him in his town.

He said that everyone knows that he saved the town from some plague, and that once a year there’s a big “gravade” (=saint’s procession?) where they walk with a statue of him around town.

He said it’s mostly hyper-Catholic families who do that, so although he learned about the saint in school and knew people he went, he himself never participated in the procession, even just going to watch it.

Was in Wisconsin again - Great convo w/old-time labor activist.

I was up in Wisconsin again a few weekends ago in order to help out a Democratic party friend there who was running for a local position, in the get-out-the-vote effort a weekend before the election.

I ran into a ton of people, and it was basically like a reunion from the 2012 Obama campaign.

After a full day of getting-out-the-vote by going door-to-door, I ended up going out for a beer with a younger (white) guy from the town who had run a local Obama office and has done a ton of organizing stuff, and we ended up at this bar run by 3 very liberal women and he ran into a ton of people he knew, including a very (old) (white) (straggly ponytailed) guy with a (Southern) accent who came to the bar to watch an NCAA game since his grandkids had commandeered the TV at home.

Turns out that he had grown up in a mining family in West Virginia and had always gravitated to the communist/socialist left of the unions, though he went to charismatic churches all the years growing up.

"At heart I identify with the prophetic tradition, you would call it," he said.

He also said he would love to poke fun at the up-tight commie union people back in the day.

"Religion is the opiate for a lot of the people," he would say to them, "But your opiate is ideological purity.  You're exactly like Jesus, no more than 12 allowed, get any bigger than that and then there's a new church just like the Pentecostals."

Pop culture thoughts (2 of 2): "Gravity".

"Gravity" is officially my favorite movie, ever, and I've now seen it 4 times on the big screen.

== [ SPOILERS AHEAD ] ==


Several points:

1) The film is actually a subtle character drama, though you don't notice it the 1st time around since there's so much sh*t blowing up in space. 

Suspense also overwhelms the subtle points of the script, like the emotional stages that Sandra Bullock's character goes through (emotional distance, fear and realizations she's not ready to die, acceptance of death, renewal).

The 1st time I saw the film, it seemed like the background of Sandra Bullock's astronaut (esp. death of a child) came out of nowhere and rang kind of false, but that's actually the central plot, the space setting is incidental or at least secondary to the main plot...

I had run into some people at a bar before the 3rd time I saw the film, and one was like, "Oh yeah, that space movie," and the other was like, "Oh yeah, that movie about a woman getting over the death of her child," and the 2nd person's impressions are much more keyed into what the film really is.

On that note, for people who think it's a space movie, they're disappointed by the ending.  A guy I know from the student bar was kind of pissed how it just ended with Sandra Bullock climbing onto a beach and then walking off.  "I was waiting for the wild dogs to come out," he was like - which makes perfect sense if a person thinks the primary plot is her going through crisis after crisis with no larger point.

As Alfonso Cuaron has said in an interview, though, the film is fundamentally about "spiritual rebirth as a possible outcome of adversity."

2) Like the same director's Y Tu Mama Tambien, the film is really layered and makes more sense on multiple rewatchings, even with small details - for example, Sandra Bullock's obsession w/work resulting from the death of her daughter is what leads her to continue to repair the Hubble even as they're ordered to get back in the shuttle.

This is part of Cuaron's narrative technique, I've noticed, where he drops a crucial interpretative context pretty late in a film, which is odd, since often viewers don't go back mentally and re-read things.

3) Similarly, Sandra Bullock's emotional range is pretty amazing - for example, as she re-enters the atmosphere, she leadenly starts using lines from George Clooney's character on how she'll either die or have a great story etc and it seems cheesy - but then she turns inward and freshens up and is like, "I'm ready" - with the implication being "to die", and at that point you realize that the rest was just a coping mechanism where she was (badly) imitating Clooney's character since she really didn't know how to cope and that was all she'd been exposed to as a model.

4) The film only really works its magic at its fullest once, on an initial viewing on an immersive big screen. 

Effectively, it moves the viewer along with Sandra Bullock towards transfigured perception by disorienting them through long spinning shots for 80+ minutes, then re-experiencing the earth with her as she crawls on the beach and arises.

Interestingly, I've read online that the opening shot is like 12-15 minutes long with no cuts, and that's both for the effect, and also to mimic the effect of a space documentary where there's long shots since there's not a luxury of cutting (which Cuaron said in the interview that I linked to above).

Myself, I felt that the last scene with Sandra Bullock crashing into the ocean and swimming and then crawling out of the water was *endless* and took up at least a good 5-10 minutes.  Instead, it's pretty short, as I came to recognize on my 2nd and subsequent viewings.  Time must have been pretty distorted for me, that first time, above and beyond the daze that I had on exiting the film the 1st 3 times I saw it (though not the 4th).

5) Pretty much, I feel like the film just sucks you in, and as much as I try to pay attention to camera angles and music and sound and whatnot, it's difficult, because you just keep getting caught up in the plot or immersed in what's being shown... 

(The colors and compositions are gorgeous - so much to look at!)

My 4th and last time seeing the film was within 2 weeks of the 3rd time I saw it, and that prevented me from forgetting a lot and thus helped me tune stuff out and notice a lot more different stuff (e.g. the sound - tools and crashes can only be heard when someone on screen is touching something physical, since sound travels through vibrations and otherwise sound can't be experienced in space; I had read about the effect, which is subtle, but I had forgot to look out for that detail).

6) On that note, Cuaron said to see the film on IMAX or a place with a *great* sound system, and the 4th time I saw it the sound system was fantastic, and added a ton to the experience.

7) Overall, I feel that Cuaron is an incredibly obsessive person (even more obsessive than I am), and so that's part of what gels with the movie for me, beyond me buying in wholeheartedly to its major themes.

In many interviews, he compares making the film to being a fox chased by hounds for 4 years, and I think that's true, for him.

8) What's also nice about the film is that it's populist; Cuaron made it accessible, and he also erred on the side of enjoyability (and aimed for enjoyability and a total cinema experience as a goal!).

And, he did this while making a film about "spiritual rebirth as a possible outcome of adversity," which sounds like a pretentious piece-of-crap film.

Those 2 choices - enjoyability, intellectual depth - don't come along often; a Chicago Reader reviewer called the film an "intellectual blockbuster", which I agree with, except that the ideas of the movie are viscerally felt, not thought.

. . .

...I have no more to add for now, but will likely later...

Comment: Missing Mexico.

At my one hippie friend from Michigan's birthday party the other weekend, some of her co-workers she's friends with showed up, including this one (Mexican) guy I've met once before at a bar.

For some reason people were talking about food, and he says the one thing that he misses about Mexico is how fresh everything is:

If you order chicken soup, he said, you pick out the chicken and they kill it right there.

If you need milk, he said, they milk it right there, and it's all foamy and perfect for capuccino.

He also said that he has a small potted habanero pepper plant at home, and he uses that for spice in his food, since it's spicier and better-tasting than what you get in stores.

I shared with him how my parents have been growing tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions off their porch, and how those fresh vegetables made the best salad when I was visiting them at the end of this summer.