As Moe Szyzlak's father used to say, "Sooner or later, everybody gets shot." Yep. It's inevitable. Death. It's a-comin'. Thanks for the reminder, guys. No Country for Old Men was a real holiday treat. I take comfort in the fact that the odds of me encountering any of the brutal ends depicted here are slim. What's unnerving is that when confronted with the choice, I might rather take a quick demise over any one of the impending, soul-crushing deaths of the characters who survive the duration of the film.
So what's to be thankful for? That No Country for Old Men has graced us with its presence in the world with its devastating landscapes, perfectly executed monologs (THANK YOU Tommy Lee Jones), uncomfortable comedy, horrific gore, understated social commentary, and literary regard. I've not read this Cormac McCarthy novel, but back in film school, I read All the Pretty Horses as part of a Westerns class. When I heard that this film was based on a McCarthy novel, I knew the stakes would be high in the despair department. No question, they were.
Despite my emotional reactions to the gut-wrenching and intimate nature of the drama, I feel compelled to include a more clinical film school analysis. My disclaimer here is that the professor for my aforementioned westerns class was pretty hung up on Ronald Reagan's presidency. Oh, and I'm also currently reading Al Gore's The Assault on Reason. Sorry, everybody.
Given the time this story is set (the dawning of the Reagan era in which the romanticized ideology of the American West was the backdrop for covert military actions, imperialism and laissez-faire economic policy) and the time this story was written and produced (the pinnacle (I hope) of American world domination fueled by fear and corruption), I have to believe the Coen brothers chose to tell this story to reflect a growing sense of helplessness and dread in this country and to remind us a little about the nature of man in the face of hopelessness. Lawlessness does not create heroes.
There. That's the abstract for a thesis that'll never be written.
While it's clear to me that every aspect of this story is precisely contrived to elicit a sense of the past while showing us our present, sometimes I prefer to believe the process happens the other way around. I like to think creators involuntarily reflect their influences filtered through the most emotional parts of their brains. The commentary on reality is communicated intuitively while the creator remains completely focused on the subject matter at hand. When done well, the result reveals some intelligence about the world in which we live that could not have otherwise been expressed...the immortal wisdom of Moe Szyzlak's dad notwithstanding.
I must have been in a mood on Wednesday when I decided to break in my latest pair (of two) of blue patent leather shoes, but I mean, come on...
Usually, a reasonable amount of comfort is required in my shoe purchases, no matter how high the heel. I'm not quite sure where my pain tolerance lies on the scale with most women. I've endured pointe shoes and ski boots for hours at a time. I'm no stranger to (broken) blisters on my heels and toes, bruises on my shins and ankles, muscle cramps in my arches and calves, and that aching throbbing feeling of my feet warming and swelling inside a constricted space. My feet are deformed from the experiences. (Not as bad as Uma's in Kill Bill. Her feet are evidence, I'd say, that perhaps my tolerance is not up to par with the professionals. Then again, I've not had the opportunity to cram my feet into such a wide assortment of unbelievably expensive shoes.)
Why blue patent leather, you may ask? When I bought the first pair, I was on a quest for a blue pair of shoes to wear with a particular shirt and a particular skirt I wanted to wear to a housewarming party in Oakland. The pieces, themselves, aren't of such particular note...well, except for the skirt. A knee length gray lycra skirt that I've had for eight years and only occasionally have the nerve to wear when I'm feeling particularly self-confident. It doesn't happen much. I'm not sure Chris really approves of me wearing it out, but I think he's conflicted. I think he'd rather see me wearing it than not, so...Dare I say that I got some thoughtful compliments from some young gentlemen on the street in Oakland.
The skirt has its challenges, however, and I haven't found too many shirts that I like to wear with it. One day I was in the Vans store at the San Francisco Shopping Center and found not only the perfect hoody (which is what I was shopping for), but also, by sheer luck, the perfect blue and gray striped tshirt (on sale!) to wear with the skirt. But a dilemma arose. Gray and blue. What shoes to wear? Gray shoes have never appealed to me. (I may come around on that yet.) The best I had in my arsenal (which isn't very big, really) was a pair of sparkly silver shoes from the late nineties that I like to wear with my silver sparkly skirt (coincidetally, styled much like my lycra skirt). The heels on the silver shoes are dated enough that I can really only get away with wearing them with the sparkly skirt. Time for new shoes.
The Shoe Pavillion at Potrero Center (in the old Old Navy space where there was always a cop car sitting out front) had only one acceptable offering. They happened to be blue patent leather. The heels were only 2" and a little too spiky for my taste, but they gave the whole outfit a little 80s flavor that I deemed to be perfectly serviceable. (Had I known I'd be standing on a lawn for a portion of my afternoon at the party, I might've thought twice. I didn't fall down, though.) They didn't fit terribly well, and I even tried to purchase one shoe in one size and one shoe in another on the basis that the right shoe of the only pair of size 8s had a broken buckle. As it turns out, I was wrong. The shoes had already been mixed up in the boxes, and we were able to locate the correct size 8 shoe with buckle intact. My trick almost worked.
Several months later, I walked into DSW on Powell after buying a replacement bra and a clutch of panties (as my husband likes to call them) at Victoria's Secret. Lo and behold, there they were, the shoes I really wanted in the first place. I swear I tried them on at the store and they weren't too bad. Although, I do recall that when I checked out, the woman at the register asked me if they were comfortable, and my response was 'not especially'. But, I mean, come on...
I couldn't not get these shoes.
After a couple weeks in the closet, I pulled them out to wear to work, of all places, a scenario in which I knew they'd have to stay on for at least ten hours. I tried three times to put the shoes on, wondering if I'd perhaps picked up the wrong box before I checked out. After finally shoving my toes into the front of the shoes - all crooked and stuck in awkward positions that I thought might drive me insane thoughout the day - I realized that even if I did have the opportunity to take my shoes off in my office, I dared not in fear of not being able to get them back on after all the swelling.
What's the good news? Well, I didn't have to stand up to much during the day, and after the strange achings and swellings and chafings subsided, they didn't feel too bad. Also, I didn't fall down.
I saw this great band last night at The Mezzanine here in San Francisco - Do Make Say Think. I hadn't heard them before, but since I've been listening to Explosions in the Sky's All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone non-stop since mid-summer, I was won over pretty quickly.
First of all, this band has two drummers. All told, there were eight people on stage. What were the other six people playing? Two guitars, a bass, a violin, a trumpet, and a saxaphone...at least that's what I saw at one point. At another point, there were two trumpets and a sax. All the horns gave me a bit of a Calexico flashback. The weed also helped with that. I generally like my psychedelia with a tad less math, and a smidge more noise, but these guys were undeniably good. I tend to avoid talking or writiing about music very much. My excuse is that listening to music is too much of an emotional experience. The truth is that I'm just not that good at it. Since I'm neither very interested nor very capable of being clinically critical about music, I''d prefer to write metaphorically to describe the feelings a song elicits without sounding too...florid. I'm gonna work on that. In the meantime, how hard is it to just provide a link so you can check it out for yourselves? Well, the challenge is, of course, is finding a clip worth sharing. It's always a choice between video quality and audio quality, isn't it? And usually neither are that great.
For better or worse, you can't find these guys on iTunes. It troubles my need for instant, legal, gratification. I could buy their CDs online, but that somehow seems worse than an illegal download. It would be a crime for me not to stroll down to Aquarius Records and pick some of this up with my own two hands. You and I both, dear reader, could order these discs directly from the Aquarius website, but since I cannot link you directly to the pages of interest, I can only give you general guidance. Now that I think of it, iTunes doesn't allow me to do this, either. So many things are wrong with the business of selling music.
My Veoh videos don't play back very well for me, but apparently those of you using other browsers and OSs might be having better luck. Until I figure out something better, I guess I'll just live with it. If you prefer, you can download the MPEG-4 versions from the RSS feed or the REELS archive page...once I've updated them.
