2008-03-23

Happy Easter! There are perils to having Easter so early, the earliest date we will have this moveable feast for another 200 years! Fat snowflakes fell during the afternoon and the sun rarely shone with the brightness we associate with Easter Sunday. However the daffodils are out in force now and the grass is greening. It is an ease to the heart to feel the bonds of winter loosening at last.

After Morning Offering, Mick cleaned house while I did my puzzles and wrote my journals, having slept overly late. I also caught up some e-mail.

• I let Ian know that Mick has chosen the channeling we had last night for the next issue of Light/Lines. I am concerned that we will have to delay the issue until we can get that transcribed, however, since I like to keep to the quarterly schedule of March, June, September and December for our spring, summer, fall and winter issues.
• I sent a brief note to Michael, as his brother passed through the gates into larger life yesterday.
• I wrote Morris, responding to his questions about my health and congratulating him on having a brief rest from his hard work and constant travel.
• I responded to Rick’s question about how my heart cath test came out, letting him know it was normal, a wonderful outcome.
• I wrote my brother Jim, encouraging him to manage his credit card debt by finding a consolidation loan which has a far lower interest rate and a longer period of payback, and then putting away his credit cards.
• I discovered that my introduction to the Light/Lines compilation had gotten stranded, during a recent malfunction of the house’s computers, in the Out Box and sent it on to Ian at last.

Mick and I enjoyed a double feature this afternoon in our home theater. First we watched Rendition, a film dealing with the American torture machine which our leaders have chosen to build. It was a hard film to watch. However it was a complex, thoughtful, tenaciously intelligent treatment of this situation and a good story.

The cast was excellent. Jake Gyllenhaal was fine as an agent who decides to buck the system. Peter Sarsgaard and Reese Witherspoon turned in well-matched and powerful performances as the husband being detained and tortured and the wife trying to find him. And Meryl Streep was utterly and scarily on key in her supporting portrayal of the bureaucrat who thinks that the torture is necessary. The scenery of Africa’s cities was fascinating to see and generously shown as the terrorists ran down endless, narrow alleys and through crowded thoroughfares.

I think for anyone who wants to come to grips with what we Americans are doing right now, this movie is a must-see. It really brings the horror of our foolhardy, arrogant and wrong policy of “extreme rendition” home.

More and more veterans are speaking out about this policy. While the mass media cover the protestors on the right who object to the veterans who are speaking out, rather than covering the veterans, the internet does a good job of offering this information. One good example is Michael Prysner’s testimony at the Winter Soldier hearings. A link to his video of that is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i5ZUfpxnV0. That is the beginning of the testimony. There are more parts to it than this five-minute start, and it, also, brings home the reality of rendition.

Our second film was a whimsical, messy art film distantly reminiscent of Woody Allen’s brilliant, dark, failed film, Interiors. In the case of Interiors, Allen had given the continuous and never-ending disintegration of relationships in a family a tight, smart screenplay and an ensemble of brilliant actors had given his screenplay vibrant life. In the case of Margot at the Wedding, the screenplay was a mess. There was no movement. There was drama but no story. There was sound and fury but it signified little. While Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jack Black were a competent, committed troupe, they could not breathe life into this disastrously uncoordinated screenplay. There was no cohesive sense to the images used, the sometimes bizarre actions taken or the motivations of the characters. It was as though we walked in on a family, peeped for a while through its windows and then stopped looking.

Nicole Kidman is to be given credit for choosing such quirky films, for she could play it safe and enjoy high respect all around. She never plays it safe! We like to catch her films despite knowing ahead of time that they are very possibly poor choices in any mainstream sense, because we are curious as to what she’s doing. We certainly ended up scratching our heads over this one.

At the end of the day, we watched the U of L – Oklahoma game and enjoyed it. Two Kentucky teams have made it into the Sweet Sixteen, U of L beating Oklahoma soundly and the Western Kentucky U Hilltoppers edging out Drake in overtime.

Mick offered the closing prayer at the Gaia Meditation tonight.