Have I Forgotten Something?

Oh, yes. A week ago today, The Gambit hit the streets with the announcement for the latest Big Easy Theatre Award Nominations for work done in 2009. Lo and behold, The Glass Menagerie didn't do too badly. There was Lyla Hay Owen again nominated as Best Actress in a Drama and Liz Mills as Best Supporting Actress in a Drama. They were joined by Leon Contavesprie as Best Supporting Actor in a Drama.

Congratulations to each of you. You are richly deserving of your accolades.

Unfortunately, Keith Launey apparently sucked lemons, while I neglected to suck anyone, I mean, "thing".

Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on, brah!

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Ah Gits Weary

This has been a busy week for me. On Monday, Bobby decided it was high time for us to go all high-tech and had me drive him out to Chalmette (!) to buy an HDTV (that stands for - I think - "High Definition Television"). That done, I had to remove the old (very big and very, very heavy) television set and install the new very light and sleek little HDTV.

Very tiring.

On Tuesday, I had to get in touch with DirecTV to upgrade our service to "HD" so we'd be able to get our money's worth out of the new HDTV set. Little did we realize this would necessitate our getting a new DVR Receiver (that stands for "Digital Video Recorder") and a new satellite dish twice as large as the one we already had. All of which meant that a workman would have to come over to our apartment and put it all together.

Mentally, very stressful.

On Wednesday, I cleaned the toilets, swept the floors, dusted, and sprayed for roaches, not wanting the workman due to arrive the next day to think we lived like two old farts who never had any company.

Tiring again and hard on the back.

Thursday afternoon, the workman arrived and circled the block for twenty minutes until he could find a large enough place to park in front of our building because the new larger satellite dish was too heavy to carry from too far away. I think that was what he told me, but I can't be sure because he spoke with an accent that was either Italian or Russian. I couldn't tell which and was too shy to ask.

After he got the new dish hung up, he went out to his truck to bring in the new HD DVR Receiver. That was when he discovered he hadn't brought it and spent the next twenty minutes phoning around to try and find one in the vicinity so he wouldn't have to go too far out of the Quarter only to have turn around and drive back in because he didn't like driving downtown all that much. Luckily, he located one in the possession of another installation man who was only twenty minutes away. He'd be right back, he promised, and would phone me when he was near so I could hold his good parking space for him.

Forty minutes later, he was back. Well within an hour, we were hooked and ready and set to go. Bobby then left to go and play Ringo (which is Bingo with an R - don't ask), and I was left to figure out how all this new technology was meant to work. I got to watch an evening of Winter Olympics in state-of-the-art high definition. And you know what? Even in that state of state-of-the-art high definition crystal clarity, the Winter Olympics are still a pretty boring affair.

I apologize to any of my friends who might be fans of these winter sports, but, to me, athletics are just not athletics without a bunch of bros out hangin' loose and causing offense to old white people and Congressmen by not being properly deferential and respectful of our National Anthem while on the podium.

Nevertheless, I slept well Thursday night in my living room on my Barcalounger in front of a continuously-playing HDTV set. My sleep was filled with dreams of a Friday spent exploring the wonders of my more than 400-or-so High-Definition channels.

Sadly, these dreams were to lie forgotten and unfulfilled. Bobby decided to reward all my week's hard work by having me take him out to Harahan for a noontime showing of Shutter Island and refusing to let me fall asleep during the course of this (for want of a better word) movie.

I won't ruin this story for you if you intend to see the movie, but I will tell you, if you're anything like me, you'll see the ending coming at you from around the corner within the first five minutes of the opening credits.

It stars Leonardo DiCaprio and tons of other people you'll be sure to recognize. I have a problem with DiCaprio that I've probably mentioned in these pages in the past. I believe he is a profoundly gifted character actor who just doesn't cut it for me in leading-man roles. Leading-man clothes don't fit his frame. They're way too big for him.

In Shutter Island, he plays a U. S. Marshall being sent to find a prisoner who has escaped from an island prison from which it is impossible to escape. See the ending yet? The director, Martin Scorsese (who should probably stick to film preservation now that Robert De Niro is old and doesn't act anymore), shows that even he knows little Leonardo shouldn't be the lead in this picture by partnering him with Mark Ruffalo who plays another U. S. Marshall (albeit from Seattle - not Portland [don't look at me, it's in the script] - which means he doesn't have to speak with a Boston accent [why he's here in Boston and not back in Seattle-not-Portland, is the first of many questions this movie asks you to ponder]. Did I mention Shutter Island is an island off the Massachusetts coast?). Ruffalo is sadly miscast. He's miscast because, even though he looks a hell of a lot like Ricky Ricardo in this movie, it's obvious that the man has balls and a hairy sack while little Leo still doesn't have to shave every day.

There are pleasures to be had in this movie, don't get me wrong. Being Martin Scorsese still means you can get a cast of mighty magnitude. There is Sir (that's "Sir", did you hear me, "Sir") Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow (although I still can't figure out what he's doing in this picture besides keepiong up his SAG creds). Elias Koteas is in it. He gives a great performance as Christopher Meloni in Universal horror movie makeup. I was thrilled by it. I could positively smell Christopher Meloni sweat oozing from the screen when he was on. I even believed he was Christopher Meloni until the closing credits revealed it was really Elias Koteas playing Christopher Meloni. Captain Stottlemeyer from Monk is in the movie, too, looking good and having fun. There are some women here, as well. Michelle Williams is cast as DiCaprio's dead wife in flashbacks so that we might believe he's all grown up now. Somebody named Emily Mortimer is in it. She plays a young Patricia Clarkson who, it turns out, is also in the movie. She is later discovered brandishing a butter knife in a cave (don't ask) and looking her age.

Kudos to the make-up or costume departments - I don't know which - but somebody was responsible for the little band aid over Leonardo's left eye. It's there for like four-fifths of the entire movie, and it shows the wear and tear a band aid will go through over a period of days spent in a hurricane, engaging in fisticuffs, and climbing cliffs. The continuity is breathtaking. But, hey, it's a Scorsese picture.

Still, I wish Bobby would have let me doze off a little. I was dead tired.

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I Know I'm Way Too Sensitive for My Own Good, but ...

I just read this post, which is merely another step in a long trek this particular author is trudging as he dwells upon the nature of plagiarism in photography, and I felt funny. Funny weird, not the other funny. Then I came upon this post, which lit a light bright enough to begin to reveal my own shadowed thoughts to me.

When I read this, my stomach tightened and churned:

In any case, today I had one of those senior moments where the subconscious moments of my brain told the conscious ones about an art connection, which is just beautiful and wonderful, and maybe I’m the last person to realize this (if I am, send me references to other posts or articles and I’ll add them here). Regardless, here are Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (top) and Chris Jordan’s Remains of a home, Ninth Ward neighborhood (bottom). Just look how beautiful this is!

"Just look how beautiful this is!" is an ejaculate that seems to take no accounting of the residing pain and trauma still felt by those of us who weathered the Katrina storm and the subsequent failures of our levees and lived.

I say we lived because I am not certain we survived.

For a city with as great a sense of place and history as New Orleans, the sudden rush of waters that wiped away whole neighborhoods wrenched the seemingly solid ground from under our feet, and we have not regained our footing yet. The discoveries of the bodies we found bobbing in the stagnant pools Katrina left behind or rotting along the gutters of our streets were terrible beyond imagining. Those dead still lie among us. In New Orleans, no one is a stranger. We have all encountered one another in one way or another, for good or ill.

Now we find ourselves preparing for revelations to come that imply that some of those we had expected would look out for us were rather out to injure us. There can be no reasons that can justify or clarify whatever it was that swept over and took hold of those who took to murder, terrorism, and cover-up in the aftermath of the storm. Rather, there will be more years ahead of us for us to try to comprehend and rectify what went so horribly wrong in this hot, damp city during those days.

None of this is meant to indict the writer of that post. It is merely my own response to a common-enough moment of bland thoughtlessness. Certainly, the photographer was aware of what he was shooting. He titled his comprehensive work, In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster; and his photographs are beautiful, but beautiful in the context of terribilitas.

That is a far different thing than being pleasing to the eye.

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Only in New Orleans

I telephoned Walgreen's yesterday afternoon with my order for a refill of my cholesterol medicine. Don't worry. It's only 20 milligrams of Zimvastatin to be taken once daily. My doctor, wise young Dr. Wise, is proactive. He's easing me into my twilight years this way, gradually loading me up with all the old-people drugs I'll someday need to take to keep on living. He figures this way their eventual strength and numbers won't hit me with a frightening start all of a sudden in another ten years down the line. Anyway, I set my pickup time for 10 o'clock this morning. That way, I could swing over to the Faulkner House Bookstore on my way home. I wanted to get my hands on a play-script I'm interested in rereading.

Everything went as I had planned, and soon I found myself standing outside that narrow, venerable old building where the old Nobel laureate had once lived, turning the same old doorknob that old Bill himself would have wrapped his drunken fingers around back in the 1920's. I stepped up and into the old foyer, now fusty with stacks and racks of books, and said to the elegant Southern lady working there, "I'm looking for the Sweet Bird of Youth."

She turned to me, rested her left hand across the top of her breast, and sighed, "Oh, God, so am I."

You'll never get that kind of reception at your neighborhood Barnes and Noble.

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