1. I turned many of those farm fresh vegetables I bought at the Farmers' Market yesterday into a simple stir fry, a simple, very satisfying stir fry, and fixed some basmati rice to eat with the vegetables. I topped the rice and vegetables with the Thai peanut sauce I bought a week ago and wondered again if I could figure out a way to make a peanut sauce on my own that would be as good -- maybe even better.
2. I sure hope the Bijou Metro is downtown to stay. Four small theaters. Right now eleven movies are playing on those four screens, with viewing times beginning at 11:45 a.m. and ending at 10:45 p.m. The movies are almost all independent, foreign, and documentary. It's a ten minute walk from home. When the Bijou Metro opened, I had hoped I would get down there a lot and that's sure what's happening. Early this afternoon I went to Sarah Polley's memoir documentary Stories We Tell. How do we sort things out? Arrive at how we decide to live with things? Make our way in the world? We tell stories and we listen to stories and we make stories our own and they become our way of believing what we think is true. In Stories We Tell, Sarah Polley explores the complicated story of her mother by interviewing her mother's children, her father, her father, and about 8-10 other people who knew her mother. Home movies and recreations of scenes from her mother's life appear in conjunction with the interviews and truths emerge, not the truth, but various truths as Sarah Polley elicits various stories from those she interviews.
We learn how different participants think truth can be known. One man, in particular, thinks the real truth is his to tell. We learn why he thinks this way. Sarah Polley's mother died in 1990. The stories, drawn from memory, are at least thirty years old; most are much older stories. A central story emerges, ripe with contradictions, both of "fact" and of emotion. In the end, the story being told is Sarah Polley's. She shaped this documentary. She decided on the sequence of the interviews. We don't know what stories never made it to the final cut. Her ingenuity in shaping this story gave me deep pleasure and I loved learning once again that so much of what we know, don't know, think we know, and will never know depends on who is telling the story, what we decide to listen to, and what details of those stories make the final cut. ::
3. When I was, say 25-30 years old, or so, I loved to watch movies about characters 25-30 years old, or so, struggling with love and relationships and the questions about commitment, marriage, sex, divorce, dating again, and so on that really dominated my life back then. As Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz got underway, these movies were suddenly back: The Return of the Secaucus 7, Between the Lines, Chilly Scenes of Winter (a.k.a Head Over Heels), Baby It's You, Lianna, The Big Chill and others. As the movie developed, I wasn't sure I wanted to go back to being 25-30 years old. I wasn't sure I wanted to relive baby talk in my first marriage, the confusion of being attracted to other women, the disorientation of divorce, or relive my immaturity. On the exterior, I never experienced exactly what happened in the story of Take This Waltz, but the interior of the movie unsettled me, especially as my 25-30 year old self came, throughout the movie, knocking at my mind's door, demanding to be remembered, taken seriously, maybe forgiven. And so as I watched Take This Waltz, I relived episodes from my younger years, my first wife's longing for and search for something better, the gaps that opened between her and me, her decision to move out, the emptiness of realizing that very little really in life works out as dreamed, the discovery that we are always, at some level, alone, and the feeling of dread as the Buggles sang "In my mind and in my car, we can't rewind we've gone too far"as Margot and Daniel dizzy themselves on the Scrambler, an amusement park ride that made me think of Richard and Linda Thompson's "Wall of Death":
Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
Let me ride on the Wall Of Death one more time
You can waste your time on the other rides
This is the nearest to being alive
Oh let me take my chances on the Wall Of Death
The movie reminded me how, at Tony's Club, in uptown Kellogg, moments after midnight in the first minutes of my thirtieth birthday, I turned to someone, took a long draw from my free birthday beer, and said, "Am I ever happy to kiss the sweet ass of the twenties good-bye." Of course, I didn't kiss the twenties good-bye. They often come knocking. Last night they came knocking while I watched this movie. They continued to knock at my mind's door all through the night. They are still knocking this morning.
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