After much time thinking about it, I went and bought a copy of ‘Kill Bill Vol. 1.’

I’ve had Vol. 2 for quite a while. I think 2 is a better movie, and certainly more watchable in re-runs. But the level of cool established by Vol 1 is quite a frightening thing. No single film should be able to be that completely cool in two hours. It’s like everything cool all smashed together in a cool way, to make something cooler than cool.

I watched the ‘making of’ thing on the DVD special features, and Tarantino is citing all these old kung-fu movies he watched as a kid, and there was an interesting thing he said about ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ He said ‘Kill Bill’ is to kung fu flicks what ‘Raiders’ is to the serial adventures from the 30s and 40s. And I hadn’t thought of that. I guess that’s why I’m not a professional movie reviewer.

I was thinking about how you’d make a ‘kung fu’ movie about aikido. It’d be some guy avoiding fights and making friends for two hours. Then I remembered ‘Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman.’ The new one. Zatoichi is a recurring character in Japanese culture. In this retelling, he’s a masseuse who works the kinks out of all manner of things, including social injustice. He’s a swordsman who goes around avoiding fights when he can, and making friends where he can. It’s a good ‘un.

Rented ‘Porco Rosso.’

Simply excellent. Full of Miazaki’s standard stuff: Airplanes, enemies-become-friends plot twists, a young girl sets off on an adventure, and plenty of charm and humor. Wonderful flight sequences and the occasional buckle is swashed.

Porco Rosso, once an honorable seaplane pilot, has been cursed to wear the face of a pig. It’s the ’30s in the Adriatic, and thus he gets to utter lines like ‘I’d rather be a pig than a fascist.’ The film was underwritten by Japan Air Lines, to show business travellers as an in-flight movie, and isn’t so obviously written for younger audiences, like other Miazaki films.

Highly recommended. Just released in the US on DVD by Disney.

Here’s a story about the housemate from my last blog:

Emma begs in the kitchen. She begs from the homeowner, who seems to enjoy it, and Emma begs from me, and I don’t. I’m teaching Emma not to beg from me while I’m in the kitchen.

I do this by staring at her and walking towards her and crowding her out and saying, “No.” She used to come right back and start begging again, but now she doesn’t even start half the time. But she gets confused when I’m in the kitchen with the homeowner… Which set of rules applies? She starts in, then backs off, then starts in again. It’s kind of funny to watch.

The other thing Emma does is to hold her forehead up against your leg and twist it, like an elaborate head-butt. She does this when she’s gleeful and excited. You sit down on the floor and scratch her neck, and she gets happy and starts twisting her head into your leg or your belly or wherever it fits. It’s a sign that she’s getting out of control a little bit. If you try to stop scratching her neck, she’ll start barking and looking like she’ll jump up on you.

And I know exatly what it is. She’s stimming. Emma’s autistic.

Another one of my housemates:

I think she doesn’t pay her share of the rent, but it would be impolite to ask.

Other housemates here. And yes, I like my 50mm/2 lens wide open.. You gotta prollem with that?

I’m not a gearhead (that’s my brother). I’m a codehead, a webmonkey, a shutterbug.

This guy, however, is a gearhead aesthete. And he just bought a 1965 station wagon. There’s something that’s just wonderful about how he describes it:

The 1965 Ford Country Squire is for desert rats, for night snake hunters, for amatuer naturalists, for Gila Monsters, for dark highways and most of all, for hope. As evidenced by the faded glory in the back quarter glass, it is an automobile for Americans. It is a vehicle for traversing the great western ranges with 7 friends. The 1965 Ford Country Squire is for those that like to travel with a full bar as even Schumann undoubtedly thought impossible to contain inside a single automobile. The western canon, the full OED, the 1972 Encyclopedia Brittanica would all fit with still enough room for Jefferson’s entire library from Montecello. It is possible that the 1965 Ford Country Squire could contain all knowledge to the 17th century in its vaulted luggage compartment. Indeed a car of great authenticity and rich patina, I am not partial to naming automobiles but ‘surface rust’ would be fitting. Yes, it is for sale. For $2250, trades accepted.

Billmon welcomes you to The American Cultural Revolution. And you really should have to pay to see brilliance like this.

Update: The… ahem… discussion continues on this entry. thatliberalmedia is referring to a comment I made on my ‘blog on this entry.

All I did was ask him if he’s a Stalinist…

Place to visit: Zumwalt Prairie, part of the Nature Conservancy.

Also Steens Mountain, including Keiger Gorge.

Maybe one day. Might help to have a 4×4.

I got to these things by looking for online stock photo services. That’s the trouble with this kind of research… You start looking, and then you end up trying to find out more about the places in the pictures.

There’s a minor stir in the ‘blogosphere about the so-called issue of the secularization of Easter. The point being that some mall somewhere had an easter-like event where the bunny wasn’t called the ‘Easter Bunny,’ but instead the ‘Garden Bunny.’ Conservative commentators, hard-pressed to find anything relevant to talk about, are now mustering all the outrage they can manage to decry the secularization and PC-ification of Easter, just like they did last Xmas.

Now what strikes me about this isn’t so much that this faux-outrage is really, really stupid (though that strikes me as well), but mostly that the Easter bunny is a pagan figure. He’s Odin. He delivers eggs so that the spring can be renewed through fucking at pagan festivals. He harkens back to the myth of the cyclical rebirth of the Sun God, who will rule through the spring and summer and give life to the seed of the crops.

Early Christianity needed to co-opt this holiday and make it acceptable, so it blended these ideas with the notion of a dead and resurrected Christ, not the sun god, but the son of god.

So saying that the Easter bunny is not actually the Easter bunny, but some ‘Garden’ bunny, is actually a move away from a more paganized Christianity towards a more ‘pure’ one, whatever that means. I remember my mom told me one time that her dad was very unhappy that she was putting up a Christmas tree, since that’s a pagan symbol. Same with the Easter bunny. There are Xtians out there who prefer to leave the bunny out of the holiday of the resurrection.

And that’s the real irony: Religious right wingers would complain that the bunny is pagan, but if it you say it’s not the Easter bunny, then you’re accused of secularizing Easter.

Feh.

I have a new favorite thing.

You quarter an organically-grown Pacific Rose apple (grown in Washington state, of course). You then eat those quarters with cantal cheese. Pacific Rose is a new strain, and cantal is the oldest French cheese, going back at least 2000 years. Then, to wash it all down, you open a bottle of Reed’s Ginger Brew.

I’ve been eating pears with cantal, because we had a good D’Anjou crop come in to the stores, but now it’s apples. I’m thinking about experimenting with melting the cheese over the apples for a short time, but I don’t want to end up with a cooked apple. Hmm.