Friday, September 22, 2023

Three Beautiful Things 09-21-2023: Getting Ready to Go, Dinner from Flavor Fusion, Hal Hartley's *Simple Men*

1. I'm going to spend Friday night in Spokane and return to Kellogg Saturday afternoon. It's a short trip, but with the way I spent so much time today listing out things to be sure to pack, you'd think I was going to Ireland for a month! Charging cord. Medicine. Tooth care stuff. Milk. Sparkling water. Change of clothes. Etc. Etc. I guess the basics are the same whether going away for a night or a month.

2. Debbie arrived home from school and wondered if we might want to order food to go. For us, this means either food from Wah Hing or from Garrenteed BBQ. I'd made a trip earlier today to Yoke's and I could see across Hill Street that the Flavor Fusion food truck was open today. I recommended we give it a try. I rocketed over in the Sube, ordered two rice boxes, Gimme Gimme Chimichurri Steak and Kung WOW Chicken along with two orders of Asian Cucumber Salad. 

I brought the orders home and we dug in and enjoyed the medley of flavors, the blends of heat, sweetness, and different textures. 

I wrote a Google review the other day for Beach Bum Bakery, ending it by saying that Beach Bum Bakery's bread, bagels, and pastries has significantly elevated the quality of my life in Kellogg and made me even happier to live here. 

I'll add Flavor Fusion to what I said about Beach Bum Bakery. Having this delicious Asian fusion food available in Kellogg not only makes me very happy, it adds to and further improves the quality of my life here. 

3. Debbie had had a good day at school today, particularly late in the day when she played a guitar and invited the students to sing songs along with her. One student requested that Debbie let her sing "Country Roads" with Debbie accompanying her. Debbie said yes and the rest of the students joined together to sing the chorus. "Can we do this every day?" the children asked, excitedly. They loved this way of ending their school day.

Debbie has been committed over the last couple of weeks or so to getting plenty of sleep at night and so has been turning in earlier than she did a year ago.

That's working. 

It works for me, too.

Tonight I watched he third movie of what has come to be known as Hal Hartley's Long Island Trilogy: The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, and Simple Men

Hartley did not make these movies with creating a trilogy in mind, but, as it turned out, these movies are connected by taking place in small towns on Long Island and by their exploration of the desire for connection in a world that is largely void of meaning, full of anxiety and uncertainty, and tedious. 

Simple Men tells the story of two brothers in search of their father who has escaped from prison. Hal Hartley loves working with implausible situations in these Long Island movies, and in Simple Men he creates, in the father, a character who was once a star shortstop for the Dodgers who later became an anarchist and was jailed for putting off a bomb in the Pentagon.

I found myself believing this implausible story about the father -- I mean, in the world of the movie, it was true -- and the real heart of the movie was not its plausibility, but its portrayal of the two brothers' journey from New York City to the outer reaches of Long Island to find their father, the characters they get involved with along the way, and the complications of their relationship to one another and to their dad. 

Hartley, when interviewed for a short feature for the Criterion Channel, talks about his love for Peter Brook's movie Marat/Sade. In particular, he loved how the action in this movie would suddenly break into dance -- non-realistically. 

Among my favorite scenes in Simple Men is such a dance scene. Three of the movie's character suddenly begin dancing, seeming to intuit how to move with each other, how to create choreography as they move further into their dance. They dance to Sonic Youth's "Kool Thing". Want to see it? Go here

The person who posted this on YouTube tells us that this scene is an homage to a scene from Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 movie, Band of Outsiders, a movie I've never seen.

But I have seen this iconic clip from the movie -- maybe you have, too.  Want to find out?  It's here


No comments: