The Late, Great Harley ...

... has dropped in from wherever kitty souls go to wish you all a happy New Year. POLers may remember my tribute to our little kickass Manx stumpy when she passed away back in 2006. Dave just unearthed this picture, and I couldn't resist sharing it. This was Harley in her prime, when her motto was Don't Fuck With Me. She got fragile and senile as she aged, but I prefer to remember her young and scary.

Harley's ghost seems like good company for saying goodbye to 2007. I don't know about you, but I could use a little extra fighting spirit to help me shake off the pall of this past year and stir up some enthusiasm for the next. It's not easy to stomach the fact that the best case scenario for 2008 is Hillary Rodham Clinton as president, a mild recession, and a war that doesn't re-escalate. The worst case is something I don't even want to think about, but I'll say this: If Rudy Giuliani wins the election, I'm gonna round up all the witches I know and do a mass spell to send every ferocious housecat on the planet to take care of him. Harley will come back from the dead to lead them. (Okay, serious Pagans, I'm just kidding. I know that kind of thing is Not Done. But I can dream, can't I?)

Enough negativity. What were some things I liked this year? Perfume-wise, there was Alice in Wonderland (Parfums d'Imperfiction), Kaffir (Anya's Garden), Moss (Ava-Luxe) and Ambre Sultan (Serge Lutens). Lots of others, too, but those especially stand out. Many, many thanks to Chaya, Leo, Besotted, Ruby, Renee, Jen and all the other delightful perfume freaks who shared their collections with me.

It was a weird year for books, in that I read a number of things I admired but didn't really enjoy. There were a few titles I found myself waving obnoxiously at friends, including Twilight Sleep by Edith Wharton, Apollo's Fire by Michael Sims, Intifada: The Long Day of Rage by David Pratt and An Explanation of America by Robert Pinsky. I've been enjoying brief visits with A. Van Jordan's Quantum Lyrics, and I swear I'm going to blog about it as soon as I get around to giving it the attention it deserves.

As for movies, I'm getting to be quite finicky about what I'll go see, so there's a very short list of things I loved and would recommend: Killer of Sheep, Pan's Labyrinth and (assuming you don't think "Washington Bullets" is an NRA publication) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten.

As for music, it's too complicated to even get into it. I am constantly falling in and out of love with stuff. I'm afraid if I tout something as a 2007 fave here, a month from now I'll be cringing at the thought that I ever listened to it. I know one song I'll never tire of, however, is Leon Russell's "Stranger in a Strange Land." I've loved it since I was a kid and it's been stuck in my head since I read this terrific little essay about Leon at Counterpunch. That's an earworm I can live with.

And that's quite enough looking back. I hope you're all enjoying a nice holiday, doing whatever magic you do to bring health and happiness in the New Year.

Pigs and Battleships

A series of films by Shohei Imamura is currently touring the country, and it landed in Nashville this weekend. Imamura's work is notoriously dark and disturbing. Since we weren't feeling very courageous, we opted to see Pigs and Battleships (sometimes translated as Hogs and Warships), one of his more lighthearted efforts, though it's still pretty harsh stuff. It follows a group of gangsters and prostitutes in occupied Japan as they scheme to make the most out the odious Yankee presence. Imamura is not interested in showing any sympathy to the Americans, but he doesn't really spare anybody in his sweeping condemnation of human greed. The movie is funny, disgusting and sad by turns, but it ends with a happy embrace of naive materialism, as we watch the heroine march off to achieve her dream of working in a factory and becoming middle class. There's tremendous irony in that, of course, which was not lost on Imamura. In fact, the whole film is layered with irony. It somehow manages to be a very sophisticated, nuanced social critique even while it indulges in gross-out humor, lots of sex and a pig stampede.

If the series comes your way, it's definitely worth seeing any of the films. Several of them are available on DVD. Sadly, Pigs and Battleships doesn't seem to be, but you can get a pretty good idea of what it's like from the trailer below.

*Viewer advisory: As with Killer of Sheep, this great film may not be suitable for sensitive vegetarians and animal rights zealots.

Benazir and Indira on the couch

"The mistake we make is to confuse populism for popularity. There is no doubt that both these women had their ears to the ground; as opposed to the sons of the soil, they were the mothers of the earth. This again works well in the Electra Complex where the daughters aspire to replace the mother. In villages and remote towns it can have tremendous appeal. The poor and illiterate in our subcontinent like to be seen as loyal subjects being the benefactors of largesse. Political coquetry is a trait that comes with the territory."

That's a snippet from Farzana Versey's musings yesterday in Counterpunch. Her writing is pretty gooey (e.g., I think she means "beneficiaries of largesse"), but she does a good job of touching on all the uncomfortable realities embodied in a figure such as Benazir Bhutto. In any case, Versey's take is a lot more interesting than most of the stuff that's being churned out on the assassination. Read the whole article here.

Pearl takes BitterGrace for a walk

This is me with doggy daughter Pearl, celebrating Christmas with a little hike in the woods. Miss P deserves to get some air time on this blog. She's half as big and twice as smart as the other two, so she wreaks far less havoc, bless her. She was our household's first canine, and she arrived on my birthday ten years ago as a starving, sick abandoned puppy. She is not so crazy about either of the big furry monsters who share her den, but when they run roughshod over her, she takes comfort in her clear intellectual superiority--and in being Dave's favorite.

Girl Crush, cont'd.

Le Coucher de Sappho, Charles Gleyre, 1867


Sappho's Hymn to Aphrodite

Iridescent-throned Aphrodite, deathless
Child of Zeus, wile-weaver, I now implore you,
Don't--I beg you, Lady--with pains and torments
Crush down my spirit,

But before if ever you've heard my pleadings
Then return, as once when you left your father's
Golden house; you yoked to your shining car your
Wing-whirring sparrows;

Skimming down the paths of the sky's bright ether
On they brought you over the earth's black bosom,
Swiftly--then you stood with a sudden brilliance,
Goddess, before me ... (more)


Translation (c) 1997 Elizabeth Vandiver, from Diotima

One Sentence Perfume Review: Bel Respiro, Les Exclusifs de Chanel

Who says you can't wrap the lawn clippings in a piece of chamois and call it a bouquet?



Notes per Now Smell This: crushed leaves, rosemary, thyme, rose, lilac, hyacinth, green tea, aromatic grasses, myrrh and leather.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

We all love Jennifer so much

Since we seem to have a collective girl crush on Jennifer Jason Leigh, here's a feverish little poem by Richard Lovelace that made me think of her when I ran across it today. I like Jennifer best when she is gloriously disheveled--as she is in Margot at the Wedding, by the way.


Song to Amarantha, that she would Dishevel her Hair

Amarantha sweet and fair
Ah braid no more that shining hair!
As my curious hand or eye
Hovering round thee let it fly.

Let it fly as unconfin’d
As its calm ravisher, the wind,
Who hath left his darling th’East,
To wanton o’er that spicy nest.

Ev’ry tress must be confest
But neatly tangled at the best;
Like a clue of golden thread,
Most excellently ravelled.

Do not then wind up that light
In ribands, and o’er-cloud in night;
Like the sun in’s early ray,
But shake your head and scatter day.

See ’tis broke! Within this grove
The bower, and the walks of love,
Weary lie we down and rest,
And fan each other’s panting breast.

Here we’ll strip and cool our fire
In cream below, in milk-baths higher:
And when all wells are drawn dry,
I’ll drink a tear out of thine eye,

Which our very joys shall leave
That sorrows thus we can deceive;
Or our very sorrows weep,
That joys so ripe, so little keep.


By Richard Lovelace (1618-1657), via Poetry Foundation

"Sisters, sisters, there were never such devoted sisters..."

I hope everybody who was interested in having a good Christmas did, with or without Jesus. Here at our blended Pagan-Christian household we exchanged gifts (some habits die hard), and then took a hike in the woods with one of the dogs. I can’t think of a better way to spend a holiday.

Last night, the designated worshipper in our house went off to church, and I went to the movies. I’ve been anxious to see Noah Baumbach’s new film Margot at the Wedding, in spite of the mostly crummy reviews, and I figured there’s no better time to wallow in fictional family neuroses than Christmas Eve. If you haven’t heard about the movie, click above for the website. Or just watch the trailer:





It’s hard to say whether I liked this movie. I’m not sure it wants to be liked. The characters are all clever, verbose, self-centered jerks, except for the kids, who are just clever and self-centered. The title character, played by Nicole Kidman, is one of those relentless passive-aggressive types who can only survive among people who share her pretensions and insecurities—an earthier set would mop up the floor with her in no time flat. In addition to stabbing her sister in the back at every opportunity, Margot is the ultimate Freudian nightmare mommy, alternately seductive and brutal toward her young son. The complaint from most of the critics has been that it’s impossible to stay interested in such a thoroughly dislikable character. Salon’s reviewer also goes out of her way to note that it’s hard to look at Kidman’s obviously botoxed face. That seems a bit catty, and it’s also a pointless attack on the movie, since the character Kidman is playing is exactly the type who would overdo a cosmetic touch-up. (Personally, I couldn’t care less what Kidman looks like when the irresistible Jennifer Jason Leigh is flouncing around the screen in an open pajama top. Not that I have a girl crush on her or anything.)

Dislikable characters notwithstanding, I did stay interested right up to the bummer of an ending—which speaks well of the movie, since my walk-out rate as a solitary moviegoer hovers somewhere around 50%. I have zero tolerance for tedium when I don’t have Dave or some other companion to consider. I suspect what kept me in my seat—apart from JJL—was the sibling drama between Margot and Pauline. I have always been fascinated by sister relationships. I’m the youngest of three kids, the only girl, and when I was young I desperately wanted a sister. My mother had a girl baby after me that died at birth, which only added to my sense of being deprived. I’d watch my mother interact with her sister, or my grandmother with my great aunts, and it always seemed that there was a special kind of love between them—hate, too, of course—which you couldn’t experience with anyone but a sister.

Being an only daughter shaped me in a lot of ways. Among other things, I think it helped give me a feisty attitude toward males, especially in their bullying mode. I had to hold my own with the boys since there was nobody else on my team to back me up. It also left me ill-equipped for certain kinds of female communication. To this day, I am baffled by the dishy intimacy of beauty salon discourse.

I remember a friend once saying to me that she would never get married because she didn’t want to be defined by a relationship with another person. I always thought that was one of the dumber things I ever heard a smart person say. Whether you marry or not, you’re always defined by your relationships with other people. There’s no escaping that you’re someone’s child, sibling, lover, friend, parent, student, employee, etc., etc. As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve come to realize how much our lives are also defined by the relationships we don’t have. In my case, I’ll never know what it is to have a sister or to be a mother, but everybody has particular connections that they forgo, or that life’s lottery doesn’t deliver. Maybe you mourn the lack, maybe you don’t, but if you look at the broad picture of your life, you’re bound to find empty spots that’ll make you wonder what it would have meant if they’d been filled.

Which brings us back to Margot at the Wedding, which, for me, was a glimpse of a mystery that has intrigued me all my life. It’s a terrific exploration of the dark bond that can only exist between sisters, a bond I’ll never know. I walked out of the theater feeling as if I’d spent 2 hours at a psychological peep show. A lurid, funny, seriously twisted peep show. Then I went home and asked Dave about how things went at church. Who says you can’t have it all?





Photo of Alice Liddell and her sisters by Lewis Carroll, from Wikimedia Commons.

Hopkins loved trees

Saturday morning I went out, as I always do, to greet the first sunrise after the winter solstice, and this year I was rewarded with a gentle gray and pink dawn. It wasn't long before the sun rose into the clouds and the sky turned leaden, but there was a brief moment when the thin fog reflected the light, and the air itself seemed to take on the sweet color of a dove's breast. The trees were black from the damp, and as I looked up through the tangle of bare branches I felt myself floating with them in the rosy mist.

This morning was a different story--dark and blustery, with little snow squalls that started and stopped without warning. After ten minutes out there my eyes were streaming from cold, and I said the hell with it and headed back down the trail toward my car. But something about the woods never wants to let me go. I turned around again and followed a more sheltered path that I don't take very often. It kept me out of the worst of the wind, but the the tall trees above me were getting the full force of it, swaying and crashing into their neighbors. It occurred to me that these were excellent conditions for getting brained by a falling branch, but I couldn't resist standing underneath to watch them battle the wind and each other.

This afternoon I was reading Hopkins, because something a friend said made me think of him, and in one of those serendipitous moments readers live for, I came across this unfinished poem:

Not of all my eyes see, wandering on the world,
Is anything a milk to the mind so, so sighs deep
Poetry tó it, as a tree whose boughs break in the sky.
Say it is áshboughs: whether on a December day and furled
Fast ór they in clammyish lashtender combs creep
Apart wide and new-nestle at heaven most high.

They touch heaven, tabour on it; how their talons sweep
The smouldering enormous winter welkin! May
Mells blue and snowwhite through them, a fringe and fray
Of greenery: it is old earth's groping towards the steep
Heaven whom she childs us by.

From The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 1967) 185.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

A gentleman always takes his helmet off

Mars Undressing Venus, Paolo Veronese, ca.1570

Image from The Web Gallery of Art