Beethoven In The Camellia Rain

Sazanka tsuyu, "rainy season of the camellia flower." There is something about this rain that is different from other rain. Maybe it's its placid persistence. Maybe it's the way it shades the colors of fall, deep bark, glowing leaves, flowers still bloom in the roots of trees. Occasionally more than a patter, but rarely an unwelcoming downpour, late November and early December sparkle under gray skies.

Andrea Kleesattel
Sazanka Tsuyu
Land of Tomorrow Blog

We know what we are
but know not what we might be
even when it rains.

Camellia flowers
have their own rain in Japan
and now that I know

I’ll think of rain here
as Camellia rain too
this time of the year.

Even when it rains
there’s one rain and another.
We know what we are

even when it rains
but know not what we might be.
Rain falling on flowers.

It's great to hear a native speaker say these things and to remind me of when to pronounce numbers in different ways depending on their context (9 is "kyu," unless it's referring to 9 o'clock in which case it's "ku, " and numerous other situations often with 6 or 8 complicit), but I'm discovering that the real fun time in the lesson, at least for me, is when Kaneko-san trails off from the exercise enough that I can hand him my sakubun, my essay. It's during this point that we get to start a long exchange of near hits and misses of understanding.

Usually the essay just talks about something from my week, or weekend, or about my daily routine. This week I wrote about the concerts that we are playing and that I like Beethoven. And with this a discovery of something common in our blood. I'm not surprised that Kaneko-san likes Beethoven. Just as I'm coming to understand Japanese more and more each week, I'm coming to understand my dear teacher, and to have some set of expectations for his behavior. When he read that we were playing the 7th Symphony he found the word in the dictionary for "nature." "Ah," I said, "Roku ban," (the sixth). He looked at me a little confused. I hummed the pastoral opening of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony and his face lit up as he exploded with excitement. "Hai, hai!" he said. I feel the same way about that melody and getting to sing it in my Japanese lesson.

It feels so satisfying to get a little closer to someone.

Andrea Kleesattel
Kaneko-san and Beethoven
Land of Tomorrow Blog

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Camellia Flowers
at Wikipedia

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Mischa Barton, Mischa Barton

“Now I Dream Of The Plum Rains”

It Shall Be So Madness Must Unwatched Go

The Prettiest Ophelia Is An Asteroid


The Optimum Expressive Moment Of Time And Place

Beethoven, Britney Spears And A Ghost

“Sudden Glimpses Of A Radiant World”

To most eyes the sign-manual of the impressionist is the blue shadow. And it must be admitted that too many impressionists have painted as if the blue shadow were the only distinguishing sign of the difference between the new and the old. The gallery-trotter, with eyes filled with dead and buried symbolisms of nature, comes upon Bunker's meadows, or Sinding's mountain-tops, or Larsson's sunsets, and exclaims, "Oh, see those dreadful pictures! Where did they get such colors."

To see these colors is a development. In my own case, I may confess, I got my first idea of colored shadows from reading one of Herbert Spencer's essays ten years ago. I then came to see blue and grape-color in the shadows on the snow. By turning my head top-side down, I came to see that shadows falling upon yellow sand were violet, and the shadows of vivid sunlight falling on the white of a macadamized street were blue, like the shadows on snows.

Being so instructed, I came to catch through the corners of my eyes sudden glimpses of a radiant world which vanished as magically as it came. On my horse I caught glimpses of this marvellous land of color as I galloped across some bridge. In this world stone-walls were no longer cold gray, they were warm purple, deepening as the sun westered. And so the landscape grew radiant year by year, until at last no painter's impression surpassed my world in beauty.

Hamlin Garland
excerpt from: Garland on Impressionism
taken from: “Crumbling Idols”
more at: The Hamlin Garland Society

In terms of images, much of my life has been spent taking and printing black and white photographs. It is still second nature for me to look at a scene and see the values—the lights, darks and gradations between. Even though I’ve made a lot of efforts to focus entirely on color in images, I still do not really trust my eyes to see color the way a person would see color if they hadn’t spent years, decades even, thinking in terms of black and white and grays.

When I look at Impressionist paintings I enjoy the colors as much as anyone, but I’ve always wondered about the technical thinking behind Impressionism. Blue shadows and purple shadows, as a topic, is still discussed in pop instruction manuals for would-be impressionist painters. But I’ve read, and heard, amateur painters say that they don’t see colored shadows, however they do paint colored shadows because that is what they’ve read or been taught in workshops.

When I look at shadows I see them as values of gray. Or the local color of whatever object the shadow falls on but almost completely de-saturated and turned to a dark gray version of itself.


But then I don’t trust my own eyes.


Technology these days makes this kind of issue trivial.

Even with the most elementary tools, reality, such as it is, can answer the question of shadow color very definitively.

That’s what I did late this afternoon.

When the Sun was in the west—but before everything had turned sunset orange—I took a picture of a scene with very clear shadows and a very blue sky. And the shadows were falling on a very neutral-colored base. I didn’t try to tell a story or make a great composition, I just wanted to get a clear sky and a good shadow in the same image.

Here’s what I got. Notice I put two red circles on the image near the middle of the clear sky and toward the bottom in a shadow. (The bottom circle is on the chunk of concrete next to the dark shadow of the wall. There are little labels “A” and “B” next to the circles but I made the labels too small. And this is reduced in resolution for the blog, and the contrast is enhanced. But for my color tests I used the high-res, raw image. If you click on the picture it will get bigger.)

In Microsoft Paint, I simply used the magic eyedropper to sample the color from the sky inside the top circle and from the shadow on the concrete inside the bottom circle.

The results surprised me. But they wouldn’t surprise an experienced Impressionist.

Here is the result for the sky color:

It is clearly blue. It is bright, saturated and has a green bias, absolutely typical of the classic paint color cerulean blue that is often used to paint a sky.

Here is the result for the shadow color:

It is clearly blue, too! It is sampled from reasonably neutral concrete and it is almost exactly the same hue as the sky! It really couldn’t be more definitive. The differences, of course, are that the shadow color is less luminous, that is darker, and less saturated, that is less intense.


Isn’t that a cool little test?


The color of the illumination—blue skylight—became the local color of the shadowed object. It is very low in saturation and I believe it takes practice to “see” desaturated colors. But clearly the color is there to be seen.

And over a hundred years ago Hamlin Garland, in his passionate and enthusiastic way, captured the actual reality of the situation. The world is radiant around us and once we realize it, the world is something like real magic.

I’m going to end with that part of his quote again because it is so cool. Instructed, by art, if we pay attention and learn, art teaches us that the real world around us is infinitely more beautiful than anything any artist could capture.

Being so instructed, I came to catch through the corners of my eyes sudden glimpses of a radiant world which vanished as magically as it came. On my horse I caught glimpses of this marvellous land of color as I galloped across some bridge. In this world stone-walls were no longer cold gray, they were warm purple, deepening as the sun westered. And so the landscape grew radiant year by year, until at last no painter's impression surpassed my world in beauty.

Pictures As A Place Where Distance Goes

Susan sat at the piano playing
and the music she played took her away

Susan Didn’t Take Anyone With Her

“You’ve had quite a trip. Three hundred and thirty-three thousand light years—is that right?”

“Oh, no, just half that.”

“I meant the round trip.”

“Oh. But we didn’t come back the same way.”

“Eh?”

“I don’t know how to put it, but in these ships, if you make a jump, any jump, the short way back is the long way ’round. You go straight ahead until you’re back where you started. Well, not ‘straight’ since space is curved—but straight as can be. That returns everything to zero.”

“A cosmic great-circle?”

“That’s the idea. All the way around in a straight line.”

“Mmm—” He frowned thoughtfully. “Kip, how far is it, around the Universe? The red-shift limit?”

I hesitated. “Dad, I asked—but the answer didn’t mean anything.” (The Mother Thing had said, “How can there be ‘distance’ where there is nothing?”) “It’s not a distance; it’s more of a condition. I didn’t travel it; I just went. You don’t go through, you slide past.”

Dad looked pensive. “I should know not to ask a mathematical question in words.”

How can there be distance where there is nothing?

Beth kept a stuffed swordfish on her office wall.

Beth was petite and I always suspected
that the fish was a little longer than her—
I mean if she had gotten horizontal
and if you counted the fish’s sword and tail.

Below the fish on the wall was a photo
of Beth strapped to a chair in a fishing boat,
holding her rod and reel, while two of the crew
held the fish fresh from the ocean above her.

How can there be distance where there is nothing?

We spent a lot of time talking about books
and in those days I almost always carried
a camera. I never took her picture.

I wrote a poem once about the book ‘Pinball.’

That was the first book we ever talked about.

Sometimes when I play music at a keyboard
when the music sounds right and the keys feel right
I suspect if I were a little better
I mean better at thinking about music
I could play something that would take me someplace
and the music could somehow reach out to Beth
wherever she would be at that same moment
and take her somehow to the same someplace, too.

I think she’d laugh and say, “Put me back, or else
I will stuff you and hang you up on my wall.”

Of course I would put her back, but I think, too,
she’d look around and ask, “How did you do that?”

How can there be distance where there is nothing?

I’d start explaining about metafiction
as lyrics coupled to a jazz melody
but she’d just laugh again and say, “I should know
not to ask a musical question in words.”

How can there be distance where there is nothing?

I’m glad I never took a picture of Beth.

Pictures are something. Then there can be distance.

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Beth Plays Pinball

Pluto In Magic And Alchemy

The Metronome As A Place To Switch Off

Over the weekend I said to somebody, “I can’t believe this weather. I’m wearing two shirts, two jackets and a scarf and I’m still shivering.”

She just laughed and said, “You need to move someplace warm, buddy.”

She called me “buddy.” And so—it’s cause-and-effect, for me—I’ve been thinking a lot about the most famous ‘Buddy’ I know, which would be ‘Buddy Glass’ and which would be J. D. Salinger.

Web Gallagher "Buddy" Glass (born 1919): The protagonist in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. It is revealed in the latter that he wrote at least two stories collected in Nine Stories: "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "Teddy." It is also suggested in Seymour that he wrote The Catcher in the Rye. Buddy is often considered to be Salinger's alter ego. He lives in upstate New York and teaches English at a rural women's college. He also volunteers his time to instruct some of the faculty of his college in Mahayana Buddhism. Buddy and Seymour were only two years apart, spent most of their youths living together, and were very close before Seymour's suicide in 1948. Buddy narrates most of the Glass stories.

Glass Family
at Wikipedia

Pumpkin Are Free

No Zen Here

And Salinger has been in the news lately because many US schools will be dropping “Catcher In The Rye” from their reading programs.


I do need to move someplace, but “someplace warm” is only part of what I’m looking for.

Escape From Earth And The Status Cow

A Long Walk



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I wrote a little song late Sunday night—
I’m thinking of doing a puppet show—
but instead of enjoying the music
I enjoyed time with my technology,
first trying out the song in four-four time
and then playing the same thing in waltz time,
trying to decide which one I liked best.

In the end I switched off the metronome
and just recorded it playing freely
without imposing a time signature,
without imposing even a rhythm,
three phrases fitting themselves together.

Monday morning somehow all by themselves
overnight when I wasn’t even up
in my head the phrases re-worked themselves
into a simple four-four arrangement
that I recorded at my workstation
before I even put on my glasses.

Los Angeles might be the next best thing
to Hyperborea or Atlantis.

But I still haven’t given up all hope
of finding a way to those real places.

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Impossible Places: Guitars And Flutes

Real Estate Gothic

Dinosaur By Moonlight: A Puppet Show

The Occult Technology Of Lost Songs

The Root Landscape Of Impressionism

Alfred Sisley, the least successful of the major artists associated with Impressionism, has been very little studied. He died in relative poverty and obscurity in 1899; his friends Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro had all become relatively wealthy and famous. Yet, of all the Impressionist landscape painters, Sisley was the most continuously faithful to the tenets of the movement. While Pissarro shifted style frequently and Monet, Paul Cezanne, and Renoir developed modes of painting almost totally at odds with the informally structured, suburban landscape aesthetic of the 1870s, Sisley persisted in his attempts to refine and extend that style in isolation. Unlike his colleagues who painted in England, Italy, and throughout much of France, he rarely left the root landscape of Impressionism, the Ile de France. In fact, [Street in Moret and others] were made in the ancient walled town of Moret-sur-Loing, where Sisley spent the last nineteen years of his life.

A quality of nostalgia suffuses Sisley’s late paintings, done after Impressionism had been superseded by other avant-garde movements. No modern forms invade his landscapes—there are no trains, factories, or machines. Gone, too, are the suburban strollers and boaters of the 1870s. They have been replaced by what Sisley and others must have hoped would be an enduring past, a world of ordinary small-town life without the distractions and moral ambiguities of Paris. Sisley’s art after 1886 is in every sense “late” Impressionism—impressions of a rapidly vanishing world.

Richard Brettell
from “French Impressionists”

When Alfred Sisley was a young painter
he created Impressionist landscapes
that had little touches that were his own.
He used little angles others did not.
He put his images in perspective
when his friends avoided that kind of thing.

And when his friends moved on to other things—
and when his world moved on to other things—
even as an old man he continued
to use little angles others did not.

And he continued to paint his own world,
not the new world being built around him.

I know a book that is one of a kind.

I’ve read a lot of books but I can’t name
another book that is quite like this book.

A woman painter went to the Balkans
and painted the ruins from the Balkan wars.

She wasn’t harassed. People rebuilding
or trying to sometimes stopped to watch her.
Photographers from magazines sometimes
took her photo while she painted pictures.

One painter working in a ruined landscape.

The phrase “Ile de France” means Island of France.
It means the area around Paris.
All the Impressionists, when they started,
created images of that landscape.

The root landscape of Impressionism.

If someone can, I think it’s good to be
continuously faithful to something.

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Ile-de-France
at Wikipedia

Balkan Wars
at Wikipedia

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Trivial Things As Doubleplusungood

Beyond The Horizon From Here

That Girl – In Which I Quote The Khmer Rouge


“Sexy As The Dead Bridges”

The Prettiest Ophelia Is An Asteroid

Aberrant Forms

Random Thoughts On Not Being Eaten

As a child, I would ask [my father] why he committed so much of his time to the study of martial arts—and why I had to learn. He looked at me and said, “Because I hate violence. I hate it so much and what it can do to innocent people. That’s why I try to learn many answers to how to combat it so people have a chance to survive and live. That is why I want you to learn—because I know I cannot always be there to protect you, so you must learn to protect yourself. All people must learn to protect themselves. This is what drives me to keep learning.”

Diana Inosanto
quoted in Black Belt Magazine
1/13 print edition

Dan Inosanto
at Wikipedia

Last Friday was magazine day for me.

There’s a neighborhood magazine store a couple of miles from here (I mentioned it in Where I Torment, Torture And Traumatize A Teen) and the last Friday of every month they get in their new issues. Ever since I did my post Scraps For Alison With Love And Squalor last year I’ve been cutting back on magazines because I was buying way too many, spending way too much money. Now every month I just buy two, Sky & Telescope and American Cinematographer. Then if there’s something special in another magazine I’ll pick it up, too. This month I also picked up Black Belt because it had an article on Dan Inosanto.

The article was just run-of-the-mill, but I really liked that quote from his daughter. Some people might think that the world of martial arts attracts men and women who enjoy violence or have some kind of fascination with violence. Ridiculous action movies kind of promote that view. But I’ve been very lucky to have met one or two very, very good martial artists and, without exception, the people I’ve met who have achieved extraordinary skill levels all have had an attitude in one way or another similar to Dan Inosanto’s as expressed by his daughter—the notion of a kind of hatred of violence and a desire to defeat it, not a desire to embrace it.

It’s a big difference.

And I think there’s some kind of deeper meaning to the fact that contemporary pop culture and contemporary entertainment almost always embrace violence. And even when contemporary culture presents violence as bad, it is almost always confronted by more violence, violence that’s just more excessive, or somehow magically insurmountable.

That way madness lies. But it seems to be the direction the modern world is heading in.


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Monster are so smart.
I mean the real-life monsters.
They’re smart and hungry

and I’ve come to think
they’re something like creative.
Driven by hunger

they’re not creative
but they can pretend to be
because they’re so smart.

Because they’re hungry,
I mean the real-life monsters,
they can make you think

instead of fighting
you’d rather have them eat you.
Monsters are so smart.

Lines Of Force Surrounding Joan Cusack

... When Oliver refuses to call off the bomb, Faraday has to stop it before it's too late.

Faraday forces his car into a secure parking garage of a federal building, only to discover that he has followed the wrong van into the parking garage. Attempting to calm Faraday, Whit informs him that he is the only person not cleared to be in the garage. Realizing his mistake too late, Faraday rushes to the trunk of his rental car, opening it to reveal a hidden bomb just seconds before it explodes, killing Faraday, Whit, and 182 others. Posthumously, he is vilified as a terrorist seeking revenge for his wife's death. The Langs get away, and Grant, now orphaned, ends up living with relatives, not knowing of his father's innocence. After the Langs decide to move out of the neighborhood, Cheryl suggests that they should go "someplace nice, someplace safe."

Arlington Road
at Wikipedia

The tag-line for the film “Arlington Road”
is Fear Thy Neighbor. At the trick ending
when the troubled academic works out
what’s going on, the man runs to his car
and the camera zooms in on the car
and the whole impact of the trick ending
was lost on me because I only saw
the make and model of the rental car
because it was the same make and model
as a car owned by somebody I feared.

And I wondered why the movie’s “hero,”
who does nothing at all to save the day,
was named after one of my favorite
scientists who really was a great man.

It was a bad movie although I like
Joan Cusack and she was raised around here.

So there’s the car and “Michael Faraday”
and Joan Cusack grew up in Evanston
and the story of the film is about
a troubled academic working out
that someone he knows who seems pretty cool
in fact might be pretty bad with a plan
the troubled academic won’t survive.

It’s a bad film built on a trick ending
but it made a big impression on me
just because of its associations.

But I’m not of course an academic.

The rest was all close enough to scare me
because I do see myself as “troubled”
although more in a slapstick kind of way.

I have no idea what it all means
but I remembered all this stuff today
because I saw a small car, deep-sea blue,
that was the same make, model and color
as a car owned by somebody I liked,
and that made me think of the other car,
the car that was the same make and model
as the rental car in the trick ending
of “Arlington Road.” And I realized
the make and model of that car has slipped
out of my memory although I spent
a lot of time being afraid of it.

Having forgotten the make and model
of that car makes me smile and I’ll never
watch “Arlington Road” again. It’s been fun
thinking about the associations
but I’d rather keep them academic
so they can never blow up in my face.

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Michael Faraday
at Wikipedia

Joan Cusack
at Wikipedia


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Associative Editing Techniques


Faraday On The Separation Of Matter And Space

Faraday On The Non-Rotation Of Lines-Of-Force

Faraday On Speculation In ‘Natural Philosophy’

Faraday’s Legacy

New Socks In The Overall Scheme Of Things

My new socks arrived today.

Six patterns, two pairs of each.

The Mayan apocalypse
is December twenty-first,
only a few weeks away.

I don’t think the world will end
or global culture will fall.

I just think winter will start.

But I always feel better
when I’m wearing argyle socks
so if the Mayans were right
and this world passes away
and our spiritual self
migrates to another plane
where we don’t need shoes and socks
I will be in a good mood
for the transfiguration
and that might count for something.

If it’s just winter starting
my toes won’t be sticking out
and that counts for something, too.

Now I’m ready, come what may.

My new socks arrived today.

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Mayan Apocalypse
at Wikipedia

Mayan Apocalypse 12/21/12 Website


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New Socks In Darkness And Light

The Call Of The Goblins


No Doubts About The Party


This Evening At The Stilyagi Bar®

Everything Is Out Of Order

Martha In The Overall Scheme Of Things

Martha And The Alchemy Of Doors

Martha And The End Of The World Working

The Sugary Metaphysics Of Lost And Escape

Late Sunday afternoon here around Chicago we had what people I know call a “creamsicle sunset.”

(I don’t know if they still have Creamsicles or if everyone knows what they are. If not: What is a Creamsicle?)

Not only did the sunset look like a sugary snack, but I noticed that the orange sunset light and purple shadowed clouds to my eyes looked very similar to the hues in the Dunkin’ Donuts logo.

I thought it was interesting enough to grab a picture, but I just zoomed in a little, I didn’t think it was interesting enough to stop what I was doing and walk over a couple of blocks to get as close to the sign as I should have for a good view of the letter colors.

But it was a pretty sunset.

“Isn’t the sunset pretty?” she said.

I looked over. “It is very pretty,” I said.

The colors grabbed my attention.

“Oh no,” she said. “Now you’re thinking about something, aren’t you? What are you thinking about? I bet it’s something about dinosaurs, isn’t it?”

I said, “No. I was just thinking about those colors. Those shades of orange and purple. They look sort of like the exact same colors as in the Dunkin’ Donuts logo letters.”

She made a face, and said, “I do not want to hear anything more about Dunkin’ Donuts. We don’t even eat there. Why the hell are you always talking about them?”

I thought about that and I looked at her face, shadowed, but in a plain shadow not a purple shadow like the clouds in the background. I looked at her, and behind her I could see the Dunkin’ Donuts sign. For a moment I couldn’t stop looking from one to the other, but at the same time I couldn’t think of anything to say.

So I simply said, “I don’t know.” Then, to say something, I simply read the bottom part of the sign, and said, “America runs on Dunkin’.”

“Well, I sure don’t,” she said. She grabbed my arm and pulled me along, away from the scene, and away from the sign and the sunset that looked so much like the sign.

So now I can’t stop thinking about why I think so much about Dunkin’ Donuts.

Somebody had scattered sugar packets from Dunkin’ Donuts all over the lawns where we were walking. The packets were white, with orange and purple letters on them saying Dunkin’ Donuts.

I was going to say the sugar packets were very colorful and looked like little flowers in the grass, but I kept that thought to myself.

Now I really can’t stop thinking about why I think so much about Dunkin’ Donuts.


Like supervillains
sugar and advertising
laugh then laugh louder.

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Beautiful Queen Of All The World’s Gadgets

Three Clouds Overhead Started Shouting At Me


Merica Uns On Unkin

“The Librarian And The Painter”


The Donut Shop Parking Lot Is Not Enough

“A bra running from donut sex teaches
the metaphysics of lost and escape.”

New Socks In Darkness And Light

“I retain from nature a certain sequence and a certain correctness in placing the tones, I study nature so as not to do foolish things, to remain reasonable—however, I don’t mind so much whether my color corresponds exactly so long as it looks beautiful on my canvas, as beautiful as it looks in nature.”

Van Gogh
quoted in “Painting with the Impressionists”
by Jonathan Stephenson

Later, Hitchcock would make a sad boast to interviewers: an actual clause had been inserted into his Universal contract, he said, stating that he could make any film for the studio that he wanted, as long as it was budgeted under $3 million—and as long as it was't Mary Rose.

“Alfred Hitchcock:
A Life in Darkness and Light”
by Patrick McGilligan

I bought socks today. Well, I ordered them
from Amazon. Twelve pairs of argyle socks.
Because I walk a lot I wear out socks
but twelve pairs should last me through the winter.

I read a book about Hitchcock today.
Hitchcock always had wanted to direct
a ghost story based on James Barrie’s play
called “Mary Rose” but the studio head
thought no audience would want to see it.
Hitchcock, so the Hollywood legend goes,
would slightly change the ending for his film
and instead of ending with the ghost’s fate
would have a narrator guide the viewer
back to the real world of mundane events.
And Hitchcock wrote the narration himself,
at least so the Hollywood legend goes,
a simple list of everyday events
contrasted against ghostly goings-on.
And the final words as Hitchcock wrote them
were the narrator’s sigh: “You understand.”

Next week when my new socks are delivered
I’m sure I’ll be writing things wearing them
and I’m hoping to do some painting, too.
I’m struck by the connection between words
and what words represent, and images
and what images represent. I think
there is something else, too, some other thing
behind whatever gets represented,
whether it’s done with words or images,
in the same way what gets represented
is behind the words and the images.

I’m sad Hitchcock never filmed “Mary Rose.”
He lived an event-filled life. I wonder
how Hitchcock’s life would have shaped a ghost film.
I don’t want to be foolish about ghosts
but I think if you are reasonable
the more closely you look at the real world
the more you see. Shifting, translucent things.
See-through things. I’m trying to understand.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


“Mary Rose”
at Wikipedia


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Mischa: Sexy Things About Physics

Pretty Flowers With The Loch Ness Monster

Old Ghosts Haunting A Garden Shop Moon



Trivial Things As Doubleplusungood

Somewhere Between Chicago And Paris

Lights Above The Garden Shop

The New Soap Dish Post (And TV Painting)

Okay, fair warning, today’s post is going to be something darn close to, umm, really stupid. But I’m kind of excited about it. I have just a couple of very unrelated things, but they both are related to some old posts and they both came about today sort of completely by themselves. So today is just going to be a kind of very old fashioned blog post where I simply talk for a moment about a couple of things that happened today. But the couple of things made me kind of excited.

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I should say, too, that I don’t know exactly why—possibly too much sugar and caffeine, or possibly too much processed food with hidden wheat products, or possibly all those things—but I’ve been kind of under-the-weather for the last couple of weeks. I have had some feeling good days, but I also have had some days where I’ve been running a fever and some days where various muscles and joints have been hurting me and some days where my stomach has been upset and some days where I’ve had a splitting headache. I suspect it’s a combination of some kind of allergy reaction and, generally, just getting old.

I’m talking about my health because today I’ve been feeling pretty good so my getting excited over two little and completely obscure personal things may be more about my health than the actual things that have gotten me excited. I don’t know. But there you go.

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Okay, first of all, I’ve talked about soap a few times here on the blog. And in real life I now and then talk about soap, too.

Forgot To Buy Soap (Distracted By Fantasy)

Leptons, Quarks, Gauge Bosons And Britney Spears

The Old Gypsy Woman Said Dirt Is Coming My Way

A couple of years ago I looked around all over trying to find one of those little plastic containers for traveling with a bar of soap. I couldn’t find one anywhere. Finally I think I found one at some dollar store and I’ve kept a bar of Coast soap in the container pretty much non-stop. I shower every day and I take long showers and I go through a lot of soap. But Coast doesn’t cost much. (FYI, Coast soap is celebrating being around for thirty-five years.)

But the little plastic container I finally found apparently was made of cheap plastic or something and it had little ridges and ribs embossed into and onto its surface and it became impossible to keep clean. That sounds kind of bizarre—it’s in the shower every morning getting wet, it has soap in it all day. But my little plastic soap container was getting rank with dirt and maybe even mold or something. No matter how carefully and how hard I tried to wash it, the little grooves in the surface created crevices that dirt and whatever could stick in. I just couldn’t clean it and it was bugging me.

But look. New soap dish:

Today I was in Walgreens and in the back they had a bin with a whole selection of soap boxes in different colors. My last soap box was yellow, so this time I went with clear.

I’m so happy. It only cost $2 and it’s almost like having a remodeled bathroom for me. A perfectly clean soap dish, and the surface is all smooth with no patterns, so I’m guessing it will be easy to clean.

This is the kind of thing that excites me.

*

This is another kind of thing that excites me.

Although I’m feeling okay today, I’ve had a tough couple of weeks and when I’m feeling down I usually watch a lot of old episodes of the TV show “Smallville.” I’m not exactly proud of liking the show as much as I do, but nobody’s perfect.

Anyway, my favorite seasons of Smallville are seasons three and four and I usually go through them in sequence, episode by episode, as I get free time. So I’ve seen both of those complete seasons many times. An uncountable number of times.

But today I saw something that I’ve never seen before!

Not only have I watched all those episodes many times, but I’ve specifically watched certain episodes, and I’ve even posted screen-grabs from certain specific episodes. But from one of those episodes where I’ve posted two or three screen-grabs, today I saw something that I’ve always missed even though I once specifically posted about the very subject.

Before I show another screen-grab, look back at my post Lana Lang And “The Supervillain’s Nightclub” and notice the picture of Lex Luthor in the background. That’s a scene from when Lana is supposed to be studying art in Paris. (It’s some Canadian city doubling for Paris.)

And in my post Motion Beyond The Witch Point I talked about how when Lana was in Paris she does a rubbing of a tombstone in a church. I singled out that episode because I thought it was cool that the series actually showed someone making art.

Okay, that’s background.

Today I put in the DVD with that episode on it and hit play and I went over to take a photograph of my new soap dish while the episode was playing. And from the corner of my eye I saw the camera pan away from Lana-in-Paris to show some scenery and there was a close-up—just in passing—of a woman painting a picture!

She’s doing an en plein air painting with an easel setup outside and she has a palette on her hand and everything. Look (the image is a little blurred because the camera is literally panning past the artist to follow Lana walking behind the post):

And I just stopped what I was doing and hit rewind and freeze-frame and stared and thought, “What the hell, how have I missed this?”

I mean, I did a whole post talking about moments where characters are shown doing art, and somehow I missed an actual depiction of a woman creating a painting.

I know it’s probably impossible to think of anything more pointless than a passing camera move from a TV show that has been off the air for years (except maybe a new soap dish) but I was pretty excited to notice that bit of action in the episode.

Here in real life—such as it is—I’ve never seen anyone actually doing an en plein air painting. Not anywhere in Chicago like around the Art Institute or along the beautiful lakefront or at any of the museums or other tourist attractions.

But it’s cool seeing someone pretending to do a painting. It would be more cool to me if the modern world had stuff like this happening much more often in real life. Maybe we’ll get back to it someday. I don’t know.

I’m happy enough that my fantasy life got a little richer with a pretend image of someone doing art. It’s better than nothing.

Although I wonder about that. I’ll probably come back to that thought—is good fantasy better than bad reality?—and talk about it again.

*

So, that’s what I have for today!

Lights Above The Garden Shop

They turn off the lights at the garden shop
after closing time and the Sun goes down
but the Moon reflects the Sun. Other lights—
traffic lights and store signs—push back the night
and some details inside the garden shop
can be seen if somebody looks closely.

Orchestra By Piano Light

Before closing time at the garden shop
there are bright lights above all the buildings.

The two lights at the top of this photo
are really at the top of this photo.

They are really above the garden shop.

That’s the Moon with Jupiter above it.

My camera had some difficulty
with this wide range of luminosity.

Street lights just a few feet away from me.

The garden shop a hundred yards away.

Two hundred and fifty two thousand miles
to the Moon. And the planet Jupiter
three hundred and seventy million miles.

The snapshot captures a lot of distance.

The planet Jupiter is the largest
planet in the solar system but here
it’s smaller than the Moon and it’s smaller
than the lights surrounding the garden shop.

Images are always in perspective.

The snapshot captures a lot of distance.

A plant growing inside the garden shop
that is trying to understand science
a flower doing astronomy work
without eyes might know about Jupiter
because Jupiter is active across
the whole electromagnetic spectrum
and shines in more than just visible light.

Images are always in perspective.

The snapshot captures a lot of distance.

I wonder what that scientist flower
with no eyes and no sense of perspective
thinks about the distance to Jupiter?

I wonder if that scientist flower
can reach out and gently push a petal
through the ochre clouds around Jupiter
and make a little vortex or a swirl
and enjoy the feel of Jupiter’s clouds
something like viscous against its petal?

I wonder what that scientist flower
thinks about the distance to Jupiter?

Something makes the clouds around Jupiter
swirl and flow into wild and random shapes.

I wonder if plants in the garden shop
think about distance the same way we do?

Something makes the clouds around Jupiter
swirl and flow into wild and random shapes.

Are we in perspective? Can we get out?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


Pluto In Magic And Alchemy


All The Issues Of Perspective


An Unclear Story About Walking To Mars


The North Pole Or Someone’s Garden


Somewhere Between Chicago And Paris

The Pigeons Inside My Head (Return To)

Getting technology to work doesn’t scare me.
I’m not scared by theory, or practicing technique.

For me that stuff is like throwing bread to the birds.

People scare me. And I wish I could fly away
the way pigeons fly away when people scare them.

That’s what it’s like inside my head.

Songs For Hippies Don’t Scare The Pigeons

Usually when I get out in public in the real world I have this kind of general uneasiness, a kind of vague—and I know irrational—sort of suspicion that, so to speak, everyone else has read the script and everyone else has been through rehearsals but I’m just waking up in the middle of the scene with only the foggiest notion of what’s going on.

I'm usually like one of those pigeons you see with its pigeon head nervously bobbing around, nervously looking around and constantly taking off flying at any little sound or movement.

Usually.

But every now and then something wildly unexpected happens to me and then I get almost the exactly opposite sensation.

Today I have two almost completely unrelated little stories that are only related because they are examples of those rare moments when I don’t feel ludicrously out-of-place. One story is older, and one just happened. The second story, too, is a kind of loose end or a conclusion to a blog post from last year and I had no idea the post was unfinished!

*

This first story happened about a year ago, I think. I can’t believe I haven’t told this, but according to the Blogger search function, I don’t think I have told this story yet.

I was standing around in a grocery store. A middle-aged woman was standing near me by her very filled-up shopping cart and she was studying a handful of coupons. Very carefully she was leafing through coupon after coupon. Two young children, a boy and a girl, both about ten or twelve years old, were waiting impatiently behind the woman and making exasperated faces at each other.

I thought to myself, “My Mom used to stand around reading coupons, too. It was so annoying.” And then I thought, with mental italics, “I hate coupons.”

As I thought that, the woman put her coupons in her purse and pushed her shopping cart past me. The two kids made relieved faces at each other and didn’t exactly hurry to keep up.

As the woman passed me, a coupon fell out of the top of her cart onto the floor next to me.

I looked down, and I thought, “No. I hate coupons. I’m not going to pick that up and give it to her.”

As I was thinking that, the two kids started walking to catch up to the woman. The young boy bent down and picked up the coupon the woman dropped. He said to the young girl, “Look. Your Mom dropped a coupon.”

The young girl made another face and said, “Here. Give it to me.” She took the coupon from the boy, crumpled the coupon up and threw it behind some products on a shelf. Still making a face, she turned back to the boy and said, “I hate coupons.”

And she said it with italics! She said the words with exactly the tone of voice that I had thought the words!

I thought, “Wow! I’m not the only person in the world who hates coupons! And this kid hates coupons in exactly the same way I do! Cool!”

I don’t often feel that kind of connection to the world around me. I didn’t even mind the thought that my reaction was somehow similar to a ten or twelve year old child. It was an okay moment.

It was sort of like a Charles Schluz “Peanuts” strip came to life around me and I was Linus instead of Charlie Brown.

That’s what it’s like inside my head.

*

This second story is a sequel to my post I’m An Idiot—Episode 748 and I didn’t even have to try to write it!

Just a couple of days ago I was walking past a convenience store and I looked in and saw that they still had a couple of containers of Hostess cupcakes on display.

I was still feeling a little sick and sugar isn’t good for me when I’m sick, but Hostess cupcakes are no more so I didn’t want to pass up a chance to have two final farewell cupcakes.

So I went inside and picked up one of the containers of cupcakes—there are two cupcakes per package—and got in line.

And I immediately began grumbling to myself because there were like three or four people in line in front of me and the line was moving slowly.

And I remembered that it was the same convenience store a year ago where the line had stopped moving because a young woman was looking through her purse for a dollar and I gave her a dollar and, after she’d left, the clerk had told me she was only looking for a dollar because she hadn’t wanted to break a fifty dollar bill she’d had.

So I was standing there in line grumbling to myself that I was waiting in a slow line just to buy some cupcakes.

And as my eyes wandered aimlessly around the store, right there on the floor in front of the check-out counter where someone was paying their bill, I saw a $5 bill.

It wasn’t even crumpled up or anything. It was a $5 bill just lying there on the floor and a whole line of people were standing around somehow not seeing it.

I wondered if the person paying had dropped it. I didn’t say anything, but I waited for the person at the counter to pay their bill and leave, just in case they were going to look down and see the five dollar bill and pick it up.

But they didn’t. They paid and left.

Nobody else in line had noticed the money on the floor right there next to them!

So I just walked forward, bent down and picked up the five dollar bill and returned to my place in line.

And I thought to myself, first, “Holy cow! It’s like the universe is going to buy these cupcakes for me!”

And then I remembered, again, that this was the store where I had given a young woman a dollar bill. And I thought, “Holy cow! It’s like the universe is giving me back my dollar, plus interest!”

When I got home boy did those cupcakes taste good!

That’s what it’s like inside my head.

*

That’s all I have for today, but this all reminds me, too, of:

Landscape With Tiny Dirigibles. Or Not.

Five Parking Lots And I Wonder

She gasped, very loudly, and said, “You can’t use that picture!”

I laughed and asked, “Why not?”

She said, “It’s from ‘Prometheus’ and you said that film is stupid.”

I said, “It is a stupid film. But it’s still a science fiction film. It’s still about people trying to work out what the hell is going on. To me even bad science fiction is better than just about anything else.”

She said, “Then why don’t you buy it?”

I said, “Well, it’s still stupid, too. So I just rent it now and then. Philosophy is good but saving money is like religion.”

The Call Of The Goblins

What The Dinosaurs See

Real And ‘Real’ Liminal Entities

The Loch Ness Monster Versus Pretty Flowers

“Indestructible And Ungraspable”

In this photograph, there are five parking lots visible:

At the very bottom, in the very foreground, the first parking lot is that of a medical building. Then just across the shrubbery is the donut shop. Across the street is a restaurant. Next to that the brown brick building is another medical building. In the background between that blue trash bin and the cream building beyond the brown brick building is the parking lot of an auto repair shop.

This is a satellite picture from Google Maps. A bird flying over the five parking lots and looking down at the landscape below would see them like this. I’ve added red guidelines to what the bird would see:

The very top of this view is the background of the ground-level picture. The top parking lot is the auto repair shop. Coming down in this photo is like coming forward in the ground-level scene. Second from the top is the brown brick medical center. Then the restaurant. Then the donut shop. Finally, at the bottom of this picture, is the medical center parking lot that is in the very foreground of the ground-level photogaph.

Five parking lots.

I saw a possum running from the parking lot by the brown brick medical building to behind that blue trash bin and then into the parking lot behind the auto repair shop. From there the possum disappeared behind the residential buildings north of these parking lots.

Although the residential buildings have parking lots, too, so possibly the possum was experimenting to see how far he or she could explore without ever leaving a parking lot.

Of course the possum might not understand anything about cars at all, so the parking lots might simply be landscape to the possum. Real wilderness, to the possum’s way of looking at things.

I don’t know.



*



Five parking lots. Or are they something else?

They’re something else to a bird or possum.

Why shouldn’t they be something else to us?

I can walk through all five or drive through them
or look down at them from a satellite
and when I do those things they’re parking lots.

But is anything we ever look at
simply the thing in front of us we see?

A TV set isn’t a plastic box,
it’s a receiver for radiation
carefully encoded with sights and sounds.

A car we see is a decorative shell
on an internal combustion engine
converting chemicals into movement.

When we see a person, they’re not the skin
and hair and clothing and things they carry,
the person is the thoughts and emotions
somewhere inside or somewhere connected
somehow to the bits and pieces we see.

When is anything we ever look at
simply the thing in front of us we see?

Why is it tempting to think parking lots
are parking lots because that’s what we see?

When is anything we ever look at
simply the thing in front of us we see?

A bird or a possum sees wilderness.

We see parking lots and think “parking lots”
even though we understand what we see
is almost never what we’re looking at.

Five parking lots. Or are they something else?

I’m guessing they have to be something else,
after all we see them as parking lots
and we never see what we’re looking at.

Five parking lots. I wonder: What are they?

And if anybody knows what they are,
what science did they use to work it out?

From a satellite orbiting the Earth
sending what it sees to my computer,
it all looks so simple: Five parking lots.

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Parking Lots

Everything’s Happening In Parking Lots

Wild Dogs As Acoustic Holdouts (Redux)

Bird Calls (A Sunday Post)


Change: Sudden, Incomprehensible And Deadly

A Story About Monsters For Halloween

Business At The Garden’s Edge


Somewhere Between Chicago And Paris

Somewhere Between Chicago And Paris

“All that we see dissipates, moves on. Nature is always the same, but nothing of her remains, nothing of what appears before us. Our art must provide some fleeting sense of her permanence, with the essence, the appearance of her changeability. It must give us an awareness of her eternal qualities. What lies below her? Nothing, perhaps. Perhaps everything. Everything, do you see? And so I join her roaming hands.”

Paul Cézanne
quoted in “Painting with the Impressionists”
by Jonathan Stephenson

Somewhere between Chicago and Paris
not as the crow flies I mean looking up
and seeing hearing a dirigible
somewhere between Chicago and Paris
as the dirigible flies through the space
between here and there humming like music
or musique concrète between here and there
there must be a song and a special sound
a special sound made up just for the song
somewhere between Chicago and Paris
not the ones where no dirigibles fly
I mean the ones where painters stand looking
and asking “If parallel lines are not
aligned parallel to the picture plane
if they angle away from here to there
can I still paint them as parallel lines?”
and answering themselves by painting them
somewhere between Chicago and Paris
I mean the ones where dirigibles fly
above painters painting like scientists
where industry hums like musique concrète
a man is sitting in bed writing verse
and the sound of his pen against paper
recorded digitized and synthesized
and then played but synced to another time
sounds like it’s a song from another time
a dirigible from another time
hums musique concrète from another time
somewhere between Chicago and Paris
now and then like parallel lines crossing
now and then this time and another time.

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Saturday Morning Note:

I don’t like to change a post after I post it
but this morning—even before anyone
emailed me, I swear!—I realized that last night I
used the word “perpendicular” in a way
that didn’t make sense with what I was saying.
So I changed that line about the painters wondering
how to handle perspective to mean what I meant
and I added a line. I need to shake up
my editorial staff!


*


Somewhere Between Atlantis And Los Angeles

Trivial Things As Doubleplusungood

Industrial Landscape, Industrial Decay, Jazz


“When All My Words About Britney Disappear”

The North Pole Or Someone’s Garden

This Airship, This Woman, This Dream

Digging Britney Redux


Los Angeles, Nonetheless, Is

A Piece Of Paper Above An Asteroid

Professional Folk Singer As A Phobia

Loudon Wainwright’s sporadic acting career, which includes parts in the films Big Fish, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and Knocked Up (for which he wrote music with Joe Henry), and the TV shows Undeclared and Parks and Recreation, began in 1974–75 when he appeared three times in the television series M*A*S*H as Capt. Calvin Spalding, the singing surgeon. In addition to acting, his job was to write songs. When asked if writing on commission is different from writing from personal inspiration, he replied, “Once you get down to it, it isn’t. I bring my toolbox, as they horribly say. With M*A*S*H, they literally put me in a room with a yellow legal pad and some pencils and said, 'We need a song about Douglas MacArthur in two hours.' I’d said I could do it, so I had to do it. It’s like, 'Of course I can ride a horse!' They gave me material to read, and told me to use words like 'Incheon.' I wasn’t even old enough to know what that was. But I found out I could do that kind of writing.”

Loudon Wainwright III
Acoustic Guitar Interview
November 2012

I have almost nothing for today, but I have one very little loose end to tie-up that has been bugging me for a while now.

One of my all-time favorite musicians is a folk singer named Loudon Wainwright III.

I’ve mentioned him a few times here, and even played one of his songs.

Quasi Una Red Guitar Fantasia

Unrequited As A Cosmology


And he was married for a while to Kate McGarrigle and I mentioned the McGarrigle sisters once here.

Something Heroic And Remote


Well, in the November issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine (which was at newstands last month) they had an interview with Loudon Wainwright III and I never posted any quotes from the interview or even mentioned it here at the blog.

I felt like I should have talked about the interview because I’ve done posts about him. But the thing is, for the last few years I haven’t been paying much attention to him or the songs he’s written lately.

Early on in his career I thought his songs were full of life and humor and very individual and almost always worth listening to. He was exactly what I thought a musician should be.

But then, little by little, I started to get the impression he was sort of just going through the motions. All of his songs started to sound very generic to me, hardly worth listening to. It was almost as if he started to parody himself.

And that’s kind of what I thought about the interview.

It all read very mundane to me. Maybe even sad. Or sad-making. He talks about writing genre songs and about being self-obsessed and how he can write songs almost to-order, such as when the producers of the TV show “MASH” would just give him a list of words to include in a song and he would go off and write a song that included those words.

The interview to me sounded like Loudon Wainwright III narrating how the whole business of being a “folk musician” just became his job.

I know professional musicians have to earn a living so they have to crank out product, like an assembly line. Very often age or exhaustion seem to get the best of such people and that is my impression of what happened to my favorite folk singer, Loudon Wainwright III.

His early albums are still great, still amazing. Certainly the first three, maybe the first four or five.

But after that something seems to have happened. It scares the hell out of me because I wonder if it happens to everybody—I wonder will it happen or has it happened to me?—and it just seems awful that people can then spend decades just coasting through life, or even struggling through life, but not really adding anything to the Big Context around us.

(Someday I’ll return to this same issue about filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock—when he was making films and indulging his own weirdness, possibly his own inner demons even, his films were remarkable. Most of those films are still remarkable today. But for some reason—possibly after the incredible “Marnie”, for various reasons—Hitchcock stopped indulging himself. Or he was prevented by studio executives from indulging himself. And all his subsequent films were hardly worth watching. No more magic at all. Or something even less than magic because he often seemed to parody himself.)

Anyway, so this has been on my mind a lot and since I don’t have anything special for today I thought I’d use this post to catch up on Loudon Wainwright III and put up a quote and the link to his most recent interview. I guess it’s kind of interesting. And he sounds honest and open. But that, too, is kind of a nightmare thought—what an awful awareness it must be, if a person can be self-aware of such things—that you are honest and open and skillful but there’s nothing left inside of you of any real worth that your skill can make use of to share.

A Name, A Face, An Interesting Construction

The Red Jacket
Mlle Isabelle Lambert | 1885

The picture shows a young girl - Isabelle Lambert - who posed for Morisot several times. Morisot was apparently interested in capturing the world of the young girl combined with or given depth by the new potential for expressing sensuality that lay in the Impressionistic approach to painting.

She also often used her daughter Julie as a model and as in this picture united a penetrating experience of the model with a sense-stimulating rendering of the close surroundings. Like most of the Impressionists, who were inspired by their close environment, Morisot found a challenge in painting among other things the immediately accessible places in her own house and in the garden in Paris.

Ordrupgaard

Today I learned a name that I’ve searched for,
the name of Berthe Morisot’s model
in almost all of Morisot’s paintings
where a woman’s face can be recognized.

“Isabelle Lambert” was the model’s name.

All I know about her beyond her face
is that an art historian describes
her dying tragically and very young.

She may have been Berthe Morisot’s maid.

She may have been Julie Manet’s nanny.

She may be the girl at the garden’s edge.

Isn’t that an interesting construction,
the ‘may have been’, ‘may have been’ and ‘may be’?

All that Isabelle Lambert may have been
and what she still may be in the paintings
and in our minds when we see the paintings,
see Morisot’s depiction of her face,
from microsecond to microsecond
as alive in our thoughts as anyone.

I’m glad I learned her name, although I know
nothing changes—What was and what may be.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


“The Garden’s Edge”

Monsters—From Microsecond To Microsecond

The Law Of The Orchid And Rainbow Jungle

Refuge, Sanctuary And Asylum As Synonyms

Mischa Barton, Mischa Barton

Somewhere Between Atlantis And Los Angeles

A few months ago I mentioned that Cynthia Rothrock was designing clothing with Don Wilson. That stuff has come to market, and can be purchased at Traditionz.

Just to wrap this up as a topic, and very briefly start on another, I’ve mentioned Cynthia Rothrock in three posts:

The Way Of The Intercepting Fist

Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’ Ends In Disaster

Celebrity-Talk, And The Epistemology Of Hippie


And since I don’t think I’m ever going to mention Cynthia Rothrock again after today, I’m going to take this opportunity to use Cynthia Rothrock so I can write this:



Here, that is, wherever we’re at right now,
somewhere between Atlantis from the past
and the Los Angeles of the future,
I’ve probably incurred a karmic debt
just because I’ve typed the name ‘Taylor Swift’
more times than I’ve typed ‘Cynthia Rothrock.’

I have no desire to meet Taylor Swift
because I’m afraid she’d just stare at me.

That’s happened enough to me in my life.

I don’t want to meet Cynthia Rothrock
because I’m afraid at some point she’d say
she secretly likes Taylor Swift’s music.

That’s happened more than enough to me, too.

But if I had to meet one of the two
I’d much rather meet Cynthia Rothrock
because I’d like to get her opinion
of the different ways Asians interpret
‘hard’ versus ‘soft’ both as philosophies
and as practical techniques for striking
compared to Western interpretations.

But I would approach our conversation
like a street fight and control my center
and watch our distance and watch her timing
and if the topic of music came up
I’d deliver a feint, break off, and run.

I’ve looked around and I’d rather try work
than have Taylor Swift stuff happen to me.

JILL ROBERTS: “I mean, what am I supposed to do? Go to college? Grad school? Work? Look around. We all live in public now. We’re all on the Internet. How do you think people become famous anymore? You don’t have to achieve anything. You just got to have fucked-up shit happen to you.”

“Scream 4”