2007-12-30

What a grand Sunday! After I offered my prayers, wrote my Holly Journal and my Camelot Journal entries and awakened Mick, we settled down to a day of housecleaning and movies. While I lazily worked my puzzles and wrote a letter of encouragement and support to Gary B’s Dad, who is having a tough time right now, Mick cleaned Camelot from top to bottom, leaving the house smelling sweet and looking pretty.

Then, over lunch, we started to watch “When Nietzsche Wept”, about which I can say little except that the costumes and production were simply lovely. The film put both of us to sleep in short order. I can note, however, that Ben Cross looks like the silhouette on the front of the Smith Brothers cough drop boxes of my youth with the beard he affected for his role, and that Armand Assante’s moustache was truly magnificent!

Something was wrong with the DVD we had rented of the new “Pirates of the Caribbean” film, and all it would show us was the trailers. We had to put off watching Johnny Depp and the crew disport themselves until next week, because when Mick went to replace our damaged copy, they were out of copies at the video store. So we watched “Why We Fight” instead. It was a good, mainstream look at the military-industrial-congressional-think-tank complex which has landed us so handily in the suds for so many years, supporting war-based programs with our money and war-based thinking with our sons and daughters’ dead bodies.

I think it will do well in informing and awakening America to the situation, as it avoids using the radical and liberal speakers which most such documentaries include. And yet it stated clearly that our nation has chosen to become the new Rome. Imperial America is not going to do any better than imperial Rome, suggested the narrator.

We ended our triple-feature movie day by taking in “Black Book”. It is a Dutch 2006 thriller World War II film by director Paul Verhoeven, starring Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman, and Halina Reijn, none of whom I had heard of before. They did a good job of creating a suspenseful story with excellent ensemble and good production values. The sound track was also delightfully authentic, taking me back to the music of my early childhood – I was born in 1943, and my parents played all these old songs on their record player, which back then took 78-rpm discs only.

Mick offered the closing prayer at the Gaia Meditation tonight. And we both gave thanks for a most restful and restorative Sabbath day, and for each other's good company.