Saw Two Movies This Weekend, Excited About a Sequel for One

 So, another brilliant afternoon in Maine, bruised gin martini at hand (as in "shaken not stirred"); David Sanborn on iTunes (blast form my past) and two movies to talk about. Both movies deserve a sequel, but to be honest, I am only looking forward to one.



Robin Hood?  OK. Ever since Elizabeth, I have had a crush on that tomboy-ish Kate Blanchette.  Put her in armor and I am there. And Russell Crowe is OK in my book (see Master and Commander and Gladiator), so in spite of the tepid reviews, I was prepared to enjoy Robin Hood and Hell, I did! What's not to love about medieval England?  I have been to a Renaissance Faire or two, after all.  I am down with the whole the Dark Ages weren't really that dark.  And Ridley Scott is , after all Ridley Scott (Hello, on my top 40 movies of all time - the Duellists, Alien, Blade Runner, Kingdom of Heaven (which this movie most resembles), Gladiator). Great fighting scenes in that quick time/slow time way of Gladiator. Lot's of realism.

What nags me about Robin Hood is the obvious setting up of the sequel, the franchise, the bloody POC - let's get kids eating their lunches from our lunch boxes and sleeping  in our tie-in sheets and thinking Jack Sparrow is cool- feel to the movie.  A prequel indeed!  The movie stuck me over and over again as introduction of characters and setting of foundations for the next movie.  Take the character of the Sheriff of Nottingham, really important to this episode?  Not so much.  NEXT episode, you bet.  But they had to introduce him now to set the table for the next movie.  Friar Tuck?  Same deal.  The 'Lost Boys of the Hood', come on?,  it just goes on and on.  The only interesting part was King John - good guy? bad guy? Who can tell?
(Sidebar comment - Test for a villain?  Shaved head.  Sorry, Jon Luc Picard.  You know if the guy shaves his head, he is, by default , the villain.  True for both movies, by the way)

Will I go see the sequel (oh there is a sequel, make no mistake)? Probably, but like watching Pirates of the Caribbean or eating at a McDonald's, the experience will be unhealthy and boring, predictable in a word.



Some movies you can watch, enjoy and forget.  Others stick with you. Robin Hood is the former.  I haven't given it a thought.  (OK maybe a fleeting thought about Lady Marian in her PJ's by the firelight, but  give me a break.)  District Nine is one of the latter.  There are unanswered questions - What happened to the aliens to bring them here? Why didn't they use their superior technology? How could we have treated them the way we did?  What would I do?

Both movies trade in archetypes and myths.  And you would think for all the stagecraft, Robin Hood would come out as the winner, but Wikus van de Merw is Everyman called to be something higher and better than when he starts.  (And he may just be the Prometheus of this myth in part 2.)  Maybe Robin Hood suffers because it is historical - we know how the Welch, the Scots and especially the Irish will benefit from English democracy won from King John.  And the zenophobia in District Nine has its analogue in Robin Hood, the French are little better than the 'Prawns'.  Maybe it is precisely the modernity of District Nine that makes it compelling?  It is, after all, as much about African politics and culture, black and white, as it is about aliens.  There is just something that rings truer in District Nine, more compelling and more human to me - for good or ill.

While I was mowing the lawn after watching District Nine, I got to  thinking about how we treat minorities throughout history.  That led me to consider our own genocidal treatment of Native Americans (Google Seminoles, for one example of how they were hunted after expulsion from Florida.) What if there had been some devastating illness in the New World that decimated the European population instead of the other way around?  What if Native Americans had gained a technological advantage over whites in the New World? (Maybe by way of contact with the Chinese or Arabs from Muslim Spain.)  What if there was a nation of English whites along the eastern seaboard and a Spanish nation along the western seaboard, but the rest of the country belong to the native nations?  Say from Tennessee to Colorado was in native nation hands?  The farmlands of Ohio, the mines of the Rockies, the oil in the Gulf, all in native nation hands?  How would that have changed the course of history?

So District Ten ('I will return in three years') could be a very interesting movie.  Unpredictable. How will we fare? Independence Day all over again?  Or something different?  I am excited to think about what the next chapter of our relationship with the 'prawns' might be.

"Robin Hood: Outlaw of Nottingham"? I can guess.  Marian is kidnapped; Robin must save her by infiltrating Nottingham; assisted by the lost boys of the hood who Little John makes into a fighting force;  King John finally forced to sign the Magna Carta at the end.

Myths are always predictable: we all know the stories before we hear and see them presented.  But which myth?  What is the story we are watching? That what sometimes makes the narrative compelling.

Rural Nocturne

This poem was originally published by the Maine Sunday Telegram. One of only three poems I have had published. It went through some revision from the version submitted in the Charles Street manuscript. Most notably, there was a couple of lines around Line 15 that referred to a hunting cat and rats in the hay mow. There was also some lines about swallow babies. I took them out since I felt they were trite and more importantly, it took away from the obvious punchline at the end. Oh, yeah, that's right. . . . that's why they are here. Protection? From whom or what? I cannot remember ever going into the barn and the cattle not being awake and alert; old instincts of the herd that would not go away. That was the genesis of this poem. what are they waiting for, if anything? I don't know about the 'dark wind', but I like the reinforcing power of alliteration. . . maybe more than rhyme. In the published version I changed 'cough' to 'breath' in line 10 to alliterate with betray, but 'calves' and 'cough' work just as well.

The night comes in.

The black hulks down over the barn.

From the moonless sky swallows, noiseless,

Dive to nests in the rafters.

Quiet.

And the night creeps in.

Seeps thru broken panes and

Doors banging idle in the dark wind.

The cattle in their muck-lined barn

Are anxious, huddle shoulder to shoulder

Watching the door with ink black eyes.

Behind, against the walls, cows

And calves wait unseen. A cough

Betrays their place.

Pigs rustle in their stalls in

Restless sleep and are still again.

The night air comes in, thick as

Blood on butcher's boots,

And this barn creaks,

waiting.

Setting the Stage

Summer has come to Maine. The day is warm and there is a breeze in the oaks outside my window. I am sitting in my oxblood room with a cold beer and a two inch folder of printed and handwritten pages on the desk beside me. My old friend Hal is playing "Thingamajig" from his CD, "People Wave" in the background. I am about to embark on a project that I have had for many months now; a project that was the genesis of this blog, to a certain extent. What a perfect day for it.

From the time I was about 15 years old, I wrote almost every day, certainly every week. This writing continued throughout college and into the first years of my marriage. Eventually the writing subsided to a trickle, but continues to this day, off and on. My preferred medium was the poem, as you can no doubt tell from this blog. I feel the poem is to writing what espresso is to coffee, a fast hit meant to capture the moment. I have great admiration for novelists and short story writers and would love to try my hand. Who knows? But historically, my output has been in verse. What I propose to do is share that with you.

To a certain extent, all writing is self-indulgent. And with this medium of blog self, anybody can 'publish' their thoughts. My goal is to share my writing in the hopes that it may inspire others who love language. My second goal is to preserve on the web my writing and hence my self-history. Honestly, the latter is more important to me than the former. Pretty early on, I realized that I was writing to understand myself more than to entertain or inform others. No poet ever writes for commercial reasons.

In January of 1981, I entered a poetry contest put on by Loyola College to be published in the Charles Street Press Folio Chapbook Series. I submitted 12 poems that were my best work. I paid a $1.00 reading fee. My poems were all rejected. (Later, I published one of them in the Portland Sunday Telegram when they still published poems every week.) Afterward, I wrote notes to myself outlining what I was trying to convey in the poems. This document was probably my high water mark, so it seems a good place to start. Finally, I will say that as I publish, I feel no guilt about editing as I see fit. This is not Coleridge's notebooks here, nobody is going to be scouring these post for insights into my poetic process. Seem fair?

Oh yeah, of course I had the merit badge. Life Scout.

The Boat's Gone

Well, the boat got sold and is gone. A family with young children and a friend that knows fiberglass bought it for a song. Sad to see the empty space in the back lawn, but I am glad to have it go to someone who might actually get a few more years out of it. My history with the boat (it never really had a name), was mixed at best. Emica and I were remembering sailing on the Saco and I was knocked out of the boat and she sailed away for about 50 feet or so before the boat came around into the wind and broached. I can close my eyes and remember the watching that beautiful boat in water and thinking how sweetly it sailed in the same moment terrified that Emica was alone in the boat. Fortunately, Emica is a natural fish and just swam away when the boat went over. OF COURSE, we were both wearing PFDs, as all boaters big and small should. That and the storm on the lake are probably my worst memories, but I do have good ones of looking up at the sun flashing off the bowed sail and the gurgle of the water under the hull and thinking this was/is the life. Well it was fun while it lasted, I guess.

This poem by Richard Wilbur has nothing to do with boats or sailing, but it does have to do with beauty, so there. From Chief Modern Poets of Britain and America, Volume II published by Macmillian. I carried this book with me in Spring of 2003 and remember reading it often in Machias while I was on site there for an implementation. I marked this poem then. I especially liked the second stanza.

THE BEAUTIFUL CHANGES

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides

The Queen Anne's Lace lying like lilies

On water; it glides

So from the walker, it turns

Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you

Valleys my mind in fabulous-blue Lucerne.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed

By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it;

As a mantis, arranged

On a green leaf, grows

Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves

Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says

They are not only yours; the beautiful changes

In such kind ways,

Wishing ever to sunder

Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose

For a moment all that it touches back to wonder. (1947)