DONKEYS IN THE GLOAMING

donkey jen has burrs in her mane

 

The sun lowers in the sky, the shadows grow longer. The line between sunlight and shade creeps across the donkey meadow. The red oak leaves in the distance glow red. Birds, chipmunks, squirrels dart about after siesta gathering seeds for supper to keep them warm through the night. Jenny and Jack left the hay I put out for them midday to graze on the short grass given a tiny boost by days of sunlight after a good rain. While the meadow has a bit of grass to nibble, I throw them a little bit of hay per day to supplement their diet. They like this fresh hay. The donkeys are grazing in the direction of the watering hole. They find patches of growth they've missed. Last year I gave them more hay than they ate. They would not eat the broom straw that was thick in the hay. Every day the broom straw was left over. I started feeding them hay the days of the rain, under the trees where the rain is not so direct.

 

jenny scratches her neck on the fence

 

I sit here looking out the window at the grazing donkeys, see their constant awareness of the other. It is a loving awareness between them, not fear. They are so equally matched one cannot dominate the other. Jack can take Jenny down, only when she's willing. Throughout her pregnancy she kicks Jack when he gets frisky. Websites I've looked at about donkeys say to keep them apart when the one is pregnant. Like that's going to work. They'd be braying for each other all the time, just for the presence of the other. I like to think Jack knows her condition and respects it, but know better. He is driven by the mind between his back legs such that Jenny has to keep him reminded she's not ready. It frustrates Jack, though he handles his frustration well. He's not one to be belligerent and hateful. He goes about Jenny gently, more for his own safety than consideration of Jenny's condition. I'm guessing she has maybe two more weeks. Their gestation period is a year, though often goes into an extra month.

 

 jack anticipates something to eat

 

Jack's most outstanding characteristic is his humility. Before Jenny entered the meadow I was guessing humility might be a donkey characteristic. Jenny popped that assumption. Jenny has a humble nature too, but she has to trust you first and Jenny does not take trust for granted. Jenny has a jealous streak strong as Jack's humility. Jack and I have learned to keep the peace by letting Jenny be first in all things, first with the carrots, first with the hay, first to talk to. She does not like being fondled, so when I want to pet on them, I pet Jack first. Jenny gets jealous watching and wants to be petted too. Jack doesn't care. Jack has a great longing to be first when I take the grain to them, though he defers to Jenny every day. If she sees danger he might get some of the grain first, she snorts, grunts, growls, and Jack backs away squealing to me in agony while he waits for me to pour his portion.

sofia grooms her cat fur

 

The gloaming has settled over the land now, the last sunlight gone from the trees on the ridge in the distance. The squirrels and birds went home for the night. Cat lies curled in her window seat. I'm half way into a Romanian film, California Dreamin. It is two and a half hours long. I don't have it for a movie that long to sit all the way through. I have no problem cutting a film in half. In childhood, daddy, who had been a WW2 marine hated standing in line after his experience in chow and other lines. When we went to a movie, we went in the middle and sat through the theater emptying and refilling, then previews and cartoon. I learned early to see the second half of a movie first and use the first half to fill in the blanks. I saw the movies from beginning to end by myself. I learned along the way to see movies by myself. I tend to like movies nobody else likes and tend not to like the ones everybody else likes. Last time I went to a movie with somebody, it was Derek Jarman's Richard II. Walking away from the theater, I said, "Good film." The retort: "It was Terrible!" My friends Lucas and Judy are the only people I can watch movies with in full enjoyment.

rhododendron leaves and shadows

 

photos by tj worthington

 

 

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WOODY ALLEN: EXISTENTIALIST IN NEW YORK

woody allen

I'm still in the spell of this evening's ongoing film festival event, Woody Allen: A Documentary, released in 2011, directed by Robert Weide. Woody Allen is the Bob Dylan of film in my generation. Like Dylan, his beginning was extra good, he stood out. Before he started making films, he was one of America's funniest comedians in his youth. Then he made very popular silly movies full of existential humor. Then he made Annie Hall, Interiors, Manhattan, and a long list of others, many of them classic American films the day they were released. The silly went away overnight. As he explained in Manhattan, he was tired of writing silly television comedy when he had so much more to say. I heard a critic say of Interiors that it was deep and heavy. Yeah. Not everything in life is comedy. Tragic stories happen too. Though Interiors was a story that took the viewer through sorrow, sorrow is a legitimate human feeling. Artists go for the range of the human scope, not what appeals to corporate sponsors. It's our place to keep up with the artist as much as it is the artist's place to keep up with us. I recall something I heard or read in an interview with Bob Dylan some years ago when asked what a certain song meant. Dylan said, It's my place to write them and yours to figure them out. These are surely not the exact words, but it's the part my sorry memory retains. Woody Allen, in his mid seventies during the filming, had the same attitude. He makes the films, puts them out there, some people like them, some people don't.

meryl streep and woody allen in manhattan

The only parts about the documentary that failed to get my full appreciation were the critics. This one, FX Feeney I think was his name, I took for so limited he fell into the Pauline Kael slot for me, the Hollywood critic of late 60s, early 70s. I found I disagreed with her taste a hundred percent of the time. I don't deny Feeney some fair insights, but he didn't hold my interest much. He was too affiliated with Hollywood, Academy Awards, red carpet glitz for my taste. In my personal film watching, Hollywood only figures as films to avoid. Hollywood is corporate glorified television. I like independents. Woody Allen is the ultimate independent. It was told that he goes to the producers, tells them he has a movie to make, and it's on. He doesn't even have to give a brief of the plot unless he wants to conversationally. In a way he is the Shakespeare of America in our time. Allen writes his films, acts in them and directs them. His films are as particularly American as Shakespeare's plays are English. Shakespeare made silly comedies in his beginning years, grew weary of them and wrote serious dramas in the history plays and tragedies. Allen's history plays were stories of the contemporary upper middle class of Manhattan. In my own personal taste, Crimes and Misdemeanors is my favorite Allen film. I see it his Hamlet. In Shakespeare's time the belief was that we pay for our sins. In Allen's time, not necessarily.

woody allen

Somebody insightfully called Woody Allen the Albert Camus of comedy. When you see it, it's almost too obvious to mention, but I doubt I'd ever come up with that insight on my own. Absurd is Allen's view of the world. A line from one of the films, maybe Hannah and Her Sisters, Max von Sydow says in a kind of Shakespearean monologue, an aside to the audience, "If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he would never stop throwing up." Max von Sydow in Allen's film was a nod to Bergman. The Allen period that satisfies me the most is the time of making each film an American version of a given great director's film. My other favorite Allen film is the one critics slam and call his worst, Stardust Memories. He played with Fellini's 8 1/2, the story of a director having a difficult time with women, the result of his own infidelities, driven to introspection and self-doubt of himself as an artist. One of the many aspects of Stardust Memories that took hold of me was the way he brought forward the feminine beauty of the women in the film. Early in the film, neither one is what I'd call stunning. Nice looking women. As the film goes along, they become more and more beautiful. By the end, Charlotte Rampling became the Venus of now before my eyes. She became a vision of beauty, and by then we knew her humanity too.

charlotte rampling in stardust memories

 

 

Woody Allen appreciates the feminine like few film directors I can think of. He likes a woman's mind, how women think, how women feel, and especially explores what really is the feminine. Allen finds the truly feminine that has nothing to do with makeup and fashions. He finds and brings forward the grace in his actresses. He appreciates the feminine especially sexually, which he does not deny, but uses in the telling of his stories. The women in his films are not just roles, but complete human beings, even the incomplete ones. In a way like feminist writer Germaine Greer, Allen is always looking for the authentic feminine in a woman, and he finds it, brings it forward in full appreciation. This aspect of Allen's films was not touched in the documentary of his life in film making. Allen's appreciation of the feminine stands out for me in Allen's art form along with his humor and insight. Actually, I found it odd that the people who put the documentary together failed to bring up Allen's appreciation of and respect for the feminine as expressed in his films. Allen's women have a feminine grace seen in few films that are not French. He also looks at the nature of the people in this world with a cold and sympathetic eye. From his start in show business he was carried along by his amazing talent. He said in an interview for the film, "After all these lucky breaks, why do I feel like I got screwed somehow?" Hearing him say that, I thought it as good an illustration of Allen's world view and comedy in a one-liner as could be found. He is the master of the one-liner.

 

  

woody allen with hair

 

 

 

*

ATTRACTIVE ILLUSION

both ends burning

This picture came to me through one of those emails that goes around. Upon seeing it, my first association came to mind: Edna StVincent Millay. A man I knew during college years had known her when they were younger, when she was living. He said she burned her candle at both ends. I may as well have seen her name. She wouldn't have come to mind any quicker. Odd to carry such an association over 45 years. I've never paid much attention to her poetry. I have a biography of her I've never read. She did some pretty fair translations of Baudelaire, too. I think of Millay and the French writer Anais Nin as similar sorts of characters. I've not read much of Nin either, so what I'm going by is image. I take Anais Nin for another woman of the time who burned her candle at both ends. Some people have it in them. Like John Lee Hooker said in Boogie Chillun, "it's got to come out." I don't know if anybody still uses that metaphor, burning the candle at both ends. It makes a picture.

Found a wonderful cartoon today I have to share by Benita Epstein. Image is a mother speaking to daughter who looks like maybe a teen, in front of mother on a table a birthday cake with candles not burning and 3 balloons in the air. Mom says to daughter, "As your mother, I took the liberty of making your wishes and blowing out your candles." Daughter has arms crossed in front and big round eyes. I've been wondering about seeing roller derby videos on YouTube and finally brought some up today and watched a few rounds, went to netflix and ordered a couple of roller derby documentaries. In the 50s I would watch Roller Derby every chance. I wanted to skate that banked track fast as I could go. It looks like the way they do it now is on a flat floor, like a gym, tape off the track and go. They can't go quite as fast, but they still get the job done.

Saw some bizarre movies this week. Two by a Japanese director, Takashi Miike. One was Shinjuku Triad Society and the other was Graveyard of Honor. Very strange films. They were something on the order of art action films. Both involved Yakuza, the Japanese mob. The people in them were so self-centered they never took anybody else into account for anything but a target. Really mean people. Miike gives the impression that the world of urban vice is where the really mean people can be found. The characters were so cold hearted toward one another I sat asking myself how people like this can live. It wasn't much of a wait before I saw they don't live long. Both films were beautiful visually, photographer using urban compositions of horizontal and vertical lines, colors galore, the people the movement in the various compositions. They were brilliantly made films. I'm glad I don't live in that world.

It's funny how attractive the world of the mob, wherever it is, can be to the rest of us who don't have what it takes to live like that, the pole dance clubs where cops go to find the guys they're looking for. What the French call l'enfer, the dark side, where everybody has a price tag and is advertising self for whatever the specialty. Lots of money changing hands. When I go into those places in movies, I marvel at how much money it costs to spend say one whole evening in such a place. Drinks would have some outrageous prices on them. So would the girls and the contract killers. I can't imagine how chilling it must be inside one of those places. Steven Seagal goes about in them like he knows his way around and is comfortable. Then he pulls out a gun and commences firing. Why do I watch things like this? It's a way of seeing into that world, knowing it's fiction, knowing the real such world is nothing like depicted in the action film, but there are aspects the production catches well, the visual part. Video comic books. 

Movies take me to wherever they are filmed. Sometimes cities in the world I'll never go to, like Bucharest, Warsaw, Berlin, Paris, Rio, China, the Himalayas, the various landscapes in Africa, everyplace in the world. I see into cultures, especially our own, see patterns that run through all cultures, like all people. I see architecture everywhere in the world, what people look like in various places, how people live in the different parts of the world. Film making gets better all the time as a result of all the schools teaching the aspects of making a film. I've come to appreciate several genres of film such that they all run together in this time of artistic fusion. In movies I can safely go into places and situations I'd never see in this lifetime. The physical activity of traveling and the expense, etc, keeps me at home having a travelogue I'm watching in story form, landscapes all over the world. I feel gratitude that I'm able to see so many of the best movies made and documentaries, every kind of thing, from the beginning of film making to present. I'm grateful indeed for that.  

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GUN CONTROL MEANS HITTING YOUR TARGET

yellow and blue



It's been a quiet and restless day without a car. Watched 2 movies, Larry the Cable Guy's, Health Inspector, which was actually funny in its demented way. Had me laughing at crazy things he says and his state of mind. His pickup's back bumper was covered with bumper stickers. One I especially liked said Gun Control Means Hitting Your Target.



The next movie was from Taiwan, the Nationalist island off the coast of mainland China. It's largely composed of descendants of people who left China to get away from Communism after the Nationalists lost the war and evacuated to Taiwan, like Cubans evacuated to Miami. The city, Taipei, is an advanced modern city along the lines of Hong Kong and Macao, but different. Hong Kong was under British control and Macao, Portuguese. Taipei is Chinese governed.The Taiwanese carry on the old Chinese traditions Mao cut out on the mainland.



The story in the film is such that I can't say it is a story. Relatively very little drama. At the moment of the movie's climax, we got a climax, and that was release of the building tension that was about the question, What's going on? Everybody was asking that question in their behavior. It was like the camera followed 3 different people living their lives, each in their own circumstances. Interesting visual compositions all the way through, the way doors and shadows fall on floors and walls. It was made with an artist's eye. Very little talking, just seeing the different ones in their places and times. It was called, What Time Is It There?



One of the people we watch, a young woman of maybe 20 went to Paris. She bought a watch from a boy we're watching of about the same age before she left, emphasizing she wanted a watch that kept two different times, Taipei and Paris, when he was out selling watches from a suitcase that opens into a display full of them. She wanted to buy the watch he was wearing, but he said it was bad luck. She insisted, he sold it. The boy's mother is the 3rd. She is in mourning over her husband who died at the beginning of the film. The boy is too. She hires a priest to try to conjure her husband's spirit back. The son thinks she's ridiculous. They eat together and seldom talk. The city is going on all around them wherever they are. Buses galore, swarms of yellow taxis, cars, motor scooters, bicycles, walking.



Today I've kind of felt in mourning for humanity. Tuesday at lunch Jim Winfield said something about killing being a bad thing to do. Ever since then I've looked at humans since the earliest tribes that carried spears and had bones in their noses, at war with neighboring tribes all the time. Killing somebody of another tribe is nothing. All over Africa killing is what's going on. We glorify it in war, make a very big deal of it. The Old Testament wars were genocidal wars like going on in places like Sudan where warlords and their armies get about in Toyota and Nissan pickups with machine guns mounted in the back, manned by teenage boys high on reefer mowing people down.



The Indian wars on our continent were genocidal like the Bible wars, chaplains preaching sermons about the glorious Hebrew killing machine, something akin to Genghis Khan in the far east. God's chosen army. Dying going on all the time everywhere and it's just numbers. Political murders are always ok. CIA and FBI murders, don't ask, don't tell. But if I shoot somebody, there's hell to pay for committing the most heinous of crimes. Younger, I believed human life important. From what I see all around now that I've grown up, I'm not so sure. If it is, we're still a long ways from getting it.

LONG HOT SUMMER

orson welles and joanne woodward (hairdo alert)


joanne woodward and paul newman



Summer heat brought the movie title to mind. I'd always associated it with Tennessee Williams. Looked it up at netflix and it's made from Faulkner stories. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, I'd been thinking Elizabeth Taylor, in the time when they were discovering each other, late 50s. I was a little apprehensive to see a 50s Hollywood movie. But I remembered Tennessee Williams' Baby Doll made on film around the same time with Carol Baker, and it was an excellent film like Streetcar Named Desire made an excellent American film in that time. Thought I'd take a look and see what this is I've missed all these years. It came out when I was in the 10th grade, not yet aware of film beyond US Army and Indians, early Elvis movies, The Girl Can't Help It, Jane Mansfield and Little Richard.



Long Hot Summer I'd always heard of, but evidently nothing about it except it had a Tennessee Williams kind of title. In a preview I saw after the movie, somebody said it was the sexiest movie-drama of 1958. That gave me a good laugh. It was the first suggestion to me there was anything sexy about the movie. At the moment, I thought, how sexy did it get in 1958 for this to be called sexiest? I remember Tobacco Road was from that time. 50 years into the future, looking back, I can see late 50s was a time for pushing the envelope where censorship was concerned. A couple fully clothed, even shoes, fell laughing on a bed. That's about as close to sexy as I can see in it, sexy only by suggestion.



That part is neither here nor there. It was just shocking to me hearing it called a sexy movie. I thought it a brilliant film all the way around. What was taken for sexy was just telling a story closer to the way we live the story. They were adults talking the way grownups talk. It was so Southern, it was Suthun. Rural Mississippi where the town and county are ruled by the man who owns all the businesses in town. Orson Welles was a Faulkner Big Daddy. I was anticipating something about like Splendor In The Grass or A Summer Place. It was closer to Cat On A Hot Tin Roof than any of the others, except Baby Doll, banned for a very long time. Long Hot Summer was William Faulkner's story telling, so there was no way it could be a simple-minded movie I can leave to go to the kitchen without putting on pause.



Going by publicity, it is a romance between Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. It is indeed that, and a a good one too. It's also the story of Orson Welles' story as much as it is theirs. It's a love story between his woman, Angela Lansbury, and him. It's a love story between him and his 2 daughters and his one son. The long hot summer is a difficult time for all of them in the energy that runs between them. In a way, the entire story was everybody's redemption. This particular cast was able to work with each other like musicians in a band. Lee Remick when she was young. The Fifties. Big skirts. As a result of the ill ease of the summer heat, everybody gets to rubbing around on metaphorical cushions like cats.



These were all actors and actresses, that's what they were called in the 50s, able to become the character they're portraying. I felt like I was watching a tour de force of great acting, great directing, great script writing, great story telling.
The interiors of a south Mississippi rich man's home. The interior photography was as beautiful as Woody Allen's. Perhaps my favorite aspect of the movie was the very human dimension of the story, the characterizations by actors of people with complex relationships and issues that were never resolved until the long hot summer when it was all brought to the surface for everybody at the same time. The Welles character is the most complex, as he is the hub and the other actors are the spokes of the wheel that is their story. It's everybody's story, and everybody's story is in relation to Will Varner (Orson Welles). I loved that his name was Will as his will was the dominant characteristic everyone knew in him, and Welles could work his eyes talking to somebody in ways that amplify his meaning. He knows how to make the character come from inside himself. His character carried several levels of understanding.



Makes me want to examine my head for not reading any Faulkner in an obscene number of years to say such a thing. He tells a fully satisfying story. You get real people doing what real people do. Often I had to remind myself this film is half a century old. The story itself kept reminding me it was Faulkner. Faulkner is the American Shakespeare. Will Varner was a certain kind of Southern man that everybody in the South knows about. Dennis Hopper played this kind of man in the Southern movie, Parris Trout. I felt like Faulkner enjoyed writing the Welles character most of all for his full, rich life, rich in a lot of ways besides money that no one much had ever seen in him since his wife died some years before. He was the Old South whose importance faded, but he was intelligent enough to place his legacy in the right hands. A character of many facets that were largely unnoticed until that summer when he showed up in the sexiest movie of 1958.

A LIFETIME OF MOVIES

air bellows art museum

In the summer of 1958 or 59 I took a bus to downtown Kansas City to see Highschool Confidential. Jerry Lee Lewis. He sang the song that was the sort of theme song of the movie. The only thing I remembered was that it was in b&w, disappointing, no music much. I'd forgotten all together that it was a story of an undercover cop infiltrating a California high school for dealers of marijuana and heroin. Probably don't remember it because I didn't know what it was then. At age 16 or 17 I was disappointed. Jerry Lee opened and closed the film riding by a highschool on the back of a flatbed truck playing the piano with a band, him singing High School Confidential. That was it for Jerry Lee. Of course, it was crazy as it could be with the 50s reefer madness way of thinking. Or just the 50s way of thinking. That was crazy enough.

I'd rate High School Confidential down there with Tommy Sands and Annette Funicello teenage beach movies. They were boring then like they're boring now. When I was 11 I saw Victor Mature in Demetrius and the Gladiators. One of those movies of the early 50s about Bible times, and somehow Demetrius got to see Jesus or something like that. I sat in the theater seat crying at the end--I suppose Demetrius died and went to heaven. An elderly woman sitting in front of me turned around and told me it got to her too. When I was 33 I saw a minute or two of it by chance, and about barfed where I stood. Strangely, I knew what it was the moment I saw the screen. That disturbed me. Made me want some psychotherapy to help dispose of it. The thought of seeing it now makes my innards squirm. Mainly because it is so bad. Not even funny bad. Just offal.

When I was pre-school, my grandmother Brink would take me with her on a bus to downtown Kansas City to see a movie on her day off. She was the hostess at a restaurant I think was called Macy's Tea Room in downtown KC, in the Muehlbach (sp?) building. The name of the building may be false memory. She took me to see Betty Grable and her million dollar legs in The BigTop. We loved it. That was our fun time together, going to see a movie she wanted to see. Until the Red Shoes. I couldn't see it. I was too young. It was too adult a theme. I wouldn't get it. She was afraid it would corrupt my child mind. In my early 60s I found the Red Shoes in the library. It was a pretty good movie. I'd have loved it at age 5 more than now. The only thing I loved about it was seeing what it was that I wondered about ever since, what it was about that movie. I would have cried at the end just like I know she did.

Possibly it is my grandmother who set into motion my love for movies. She lived close enough to a movie theater I could walk to it, a mile or more, when I was staying with grandma and grandpa. We had a movie theater in a mile or more walking distance from home. Had to walk through a black section and a Mexican section to get to it. It was a chancy thing to do, considering how territorial young boys are and you're walking through their neighborhood and they don't know you; they either went to Catholic school or the black school, and I went to the white school. We didn't know each other. I never had any trouble. It turned out nobody wanted to give me any trouble because I was a white kid. I'd get looked at with a look like a white kid walking through their neighborhood was something you don't see every day.

In the summers during high school I lived with grandparents and worked for grandfather on the golf course, mowing greens, mowing around greens, mowing rough areas on the edges of the fairways. Watering greens, the whole upkeep of greens and fairways. I walked to the movie theater every week to see the new movie of the week. One called Tanganyika gave me a hell of a fright. Outside was dark when the movie was over. It had leopards jumping out of trees and big snakes dropping out of trees. A great long stretch of sidewalk I had to walk had tree limbs overhanging. It was so scary I remember it today. I knew that something was going to get me under every tree. Evidently I prayed without ceasing, because nothing got me. It was in this time I saw The Birds. That was quite a walk back to the house too.

When my grandmother Brink was 80 she came here to stay a week with me. Our entertainment one evening was to drive to Elkin to see Karate Kid. She didn't know if she could sit all the way through it, because of her restless leg syndrome there was no medication for then. She got so involved in the movie, like I did, her legs never bothered her one time. On the way home she told me some things I had absolutely no idea about, basically that my grandmother is a person in the world like me, hobbling along in confusion, doing the best we can with what we've got to do with. She told me about an abortion in Chinatown in KC in early 1920s. She told me why. Suddenly, grandmother came to life for me. Before, she'd always been my grandmother. She became a woman with a life of her own, and I was part of her life. The day she died, a color photograph of the planet Neptune appeared on the front page of nearly every paper in the country.

This weekend when Carpenters were here, they brought a 2disc sort of biographical film of the life of Edvard Munch. He's the Norwegian artist of late 19th century who painted the Scream, the human with no gender distinction standing on a bridge, orange sky, hands to sides of head, mouth a big O. Most amazing to all of us was that the people who made the film found someone who looked exactly like Munch. And they found an someone who looked exactly like August Strindberg, Swedish playwright of the time. All of us appreciate a beautifully made film, and we were in awe of this.

We watched one Friday night, the next one Saturday night, looking forward to it all day with scenes from the first half floating in the mind. Peter Watkins made the film. I must remember to google him. It is now in the top 10 or 20 of my favorite movies. There is a point beyond which I cannot say one is better than another. It's that small number I call among my favorites. There with House of Flying Daggers, Apocalypse Now, Shanghai Triad, 8 1/2, Pasolini's Oedipus, Runaway Train, Seven Samurai and a host of others. I like to watch a good film like I like to stand in front of a painting in a museum that knocks my sox off, like something by Antoni Tapies, Robert Mangold, Andy Warhol, Jean Arp. At this time in my life I can look back and say art is the only thing that has ever been of interest to me.

SEAGAL

crow in space

What was billed as the hottest day of the year didn't quite make it. I'm so glad the television doesn't ever get turned on here. There was a time before it went digital that sometimes we'd turn on the tv weather at 5:15, watch until the weather was over and turn it off. I couldn't spend any time here if he had to have the tv going. We have similar indifference to anything that's on. I'm a movie watcher and Jr is not. I can watch almost any movie, and Jr can't watch any. When he was a kid, he and Joe Blum, who grew up on the next farm, would walk to Sparta to see a movie. He wasn't impressed. There was nothing to it as far as he could see. Made up stories that never happened. He never took an interest in any movie, and all he ever cared about on tv was the Flatt & Scruggs early morning show.

I heard myself say I could watch almost any movie, and have to admit that is not so. There are more movies I cannot watch than can. Teen slasher flicks don't trip my trigger. I don't want to see films made from best-selling serial killer novels where a deranged white man kidnaps, torments and kills teenage babes. Thrillers I think they're called. I don't want that filth in my head. Just about anything with a Hollywood star I don't care to see. If the names are the same as any of them on Yahoo entertainment headlines, I have no interest. Just about anything made in Hollywood or Hong Kong, I don't care to see unless made by people independent of the glitz and riches wealth studios where average is the Big A.

I'd say with netflix I watch at least one foreign language film to one English language film. Maybe more. Sometimes I watch English language films with subtitles. Because of muttering. There's always muttering and whispering. Syriana I only watch with subtitles. I like Steven Seagal films with subtitles too. Muttering and I like the script in a lot of his films, maybe half. Some are pathetic and some are good films. Patriot was one that was pathetic. My personal favorite is Mercenary for Justice. It has our hero exercising his intelligence as a martial art in itself.

The first one I saw was maybe 15 or so years ago. A guy I knew liked the action genre and told me about Steven Seagal. We rented and saw Out for Justice. The only thing I remembered from it was blowing a guy's leg off with a shotgun. That's how I identified the film years later when I knew I'd seen one Seagal film, but the title slid off my indifference. I remember finding it a film that made me give some credit to the action genre. Not enough to want to see it again.

My friend Debi, Tom Pruitt's great niece, took up working at Una's next door to my shop. We got reacquainted after 25 at least years while she was away. She was a Steven Seagal freak. She kept saying to me, you gotta see...whichever one she was telling about. I like a men with guns movie from time to time. Two I found in the library. The rest I found at netflix. So far, I've seen them all. I like the character he makes. He's like Charles Bronson, the Next Generation.

Seagal grew up in Japan learning martial arts to an advanced degree. I like about his character, there being only one with different names, the Seagal persona, that he is a conscious man. Even when he's down and out, he is still conscious. The three I like best all have Justice in the title, meaning they're revenge stories. "When I find out who killed Bobby Lupo, I'm gonna kill him." Out for Justice, a Brooklyn cop, devout catholic. He doesn't like it when his priest gets killed. He just about loses his baby-doll wife, but gets her back. Lots of shooting. The man who does it his way. Out there by himself with no reins.

His character is devout in the religion of whatever part of the world he's playing in. In Thailand and Japan he's a Buddhist who has a personal relationship with the abbot of a monastery, a seeker. In America he's a devout Catholic. At the end of Out For Justice, he says, "You gotta admit, God has a strange sense of humor." Often he saves a cute little girl or a ravishing babe from harm, sometimes both. A couple of times the babe didn't make it. Mostly he saves her. And the babe can be any race with Seagal. Every race of a girlfriend throughout the films.

His form of martial art he uses I can't remember, but it's one of minimal movement, though swift. One of the best demonstrations of his martial arts choreography is in Out For Justice, a saloon fight. Everybody in the place vs. Mr. Bad. They all lost. One guy he popped in the face with his elbow and that was it. It's a truth that when somebody goes at him with an implement of some sort, pool cue, wrench, bat, Seagal takes it away from him and uses it on the guy. I like it that he uses real martial arts moves, not just flashy kicks and spins. At the end, the guy that killed Bobby Lupo went at Seagal with a corkscrew. Wrong thing to do. Seagal took it from him and plunged it into his forehead. Then shot him three times. The man doesn't mess around.

And he's an ethical man. In film you don't often run across an ethical man unless he's making a point. Seagal doesn't make a point of anything with his ethics. He's a man whose life is guided by real values. He's often a hitman or involved in the underworld of killing, often CIA, the Company. His priest friends are all sympathetic with him, though they don't see the way he lives his life the way he does. He's the baddest of the bad, he and everybody else knows it. His name puts certain people on alert. He goes into every conflict knowing he's coming out standing up. A few times he almost didn't. I've been feeling a longing to see a Steven Seagal flick for some weeks. Every once in awhile I need one.