2007-09-09

It was a quiet Sabbath for Mick and me. I was still feeling below par by quite a bit and did not attend services today at St. Luke’s, so I had the whole morning free to do the Sunday puzzles and enjoy a long round of solitaire. Mick cleaned house, pursued closely by Dan D. Lion, who loves the frequent snuggles he gets by being close by and looking appealing. He has no fear of the vacuum cleaner’s noise at all. Chloe and Pickwick, on the other hand, are to be found under covers, little lumps of “stop that racket” during Mick's cleaning forays.

We sat down to lunch and the first of our most enjoyable trio of videos, “I think I Love My Wife”, starring, directed by, written and produced by Chris Rock. Rock is a funny man and an accurate observer, and I enjoyed the film, with the exception of noting that no man should be his own director. The voice-overs were “off”, being read too slowly. A second ear would have caught that. The best moment in the film was at the ending – a great place to have a best moment – when Rock and Gina Torres, who plays his wife, half-talk and half-lip-synch their way through a “Meatloaf”-like song about marital woes.

Pausing only to make some popcorn, we went into our second video of the day, a film titled “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer”. It was a fascinating, surreal story of a man who could identify the scent of anything and everything and who was so drawn to preserving the most beautiful thing in his world, women in their virginity, that he murders them in order to capture their scent. Naturally, it is an outrageous tale, taken literally, but it accesses a far deeper, mythical level of the pain of being human and evanescent in the world of permanent values. It was absolutely brilliant. Ben Whishaw was appropriately brooding, intense and inarticulate as the perfume maker-murderer. I Googled to see if it had won any awards, since I thought it surely must have, and sure enough, in Europe’s festivals it had garnered a total of nine.

We took a break then while Mick did some errands, getting set up for tomorrow’s work and buying me a new hotpad, as my old one has died. I did a bit of editing on the interview a year or so ago with Marcia McMahon which has now been transcribed.

Then we sat down with dinner and our final film, a beauty of a movie with the unlikely title of “Black Snake Moan”. I am very glad Mick was not put off by the name, for it was a jewel of a film, quirky, fine-honed and true. The sound track alone was worth the viewing. Samuel L. Jackson was excellent as a man troubled in his mind, a respectable church-goer yet full of anger, as were all the characters which inhabit this story. Christina Ricci, an actress whose work I have not seen before, was also excellent as a young woman driven half-mad by sexual abuse as a child and continually abused ever since.

Despite the seeming racial theme, it has nothing to do with race. Despite its seeming Southern theme, it has nothing to do with the Deep South. It is all about how people get off track in this life, in spite of their best intentions, because of the unresolved pain in their souls and the persistent and overpowering energy of past abuse. Particularly effective were two themes: the use of a ridiculously large chain by which Ricci’s character was restrained from becoming lost in delusion and violence, and an image of an old-style cigarette lighter with a fancy imprint of the American flag being flicked open and lit. The lighter had been lit just moments before Ricci’s worst memory of sexual abuse. These two images were brought together in the film’s quietly triumphant ending.

What a tasty day at the movies! We have seldom had such a lucky three finds, all in one day. And this is our first Sunday free from the L/L Research public meetings. Clearly our change was a total success for the Mick Man. The new Saturday night meeting schedule frees Mick up for one day of complete rest and relaxation upon which he can always count. Psychologically, this is just what he needs, working as hard as he does for Jim's Lawn Service.

My amorous swain then asked for a date, after we offered the Gaia Meditation, and so we ended the evening with a time of beauty of our own, offering our shimmering energy to the one Creator and having loads of fun in the process. This was followed by our kitty snuggle and a sweet good night at 11:30 PM.