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anastasiavA delightful and stress free weekend. Lots of sleeping. Sleeping is good. I'm finally starting to feel like I'm not deep-to-the-bone exhausted all the time, which is a good thing.
Friday I was scheduled to work, but got sent home early (its very slow there, probably because everyone is watching the olympics rather than buying mail order). I came home, watched some skating and a little House and went to bed.
Saturday, I was scheduled to work, but they called and gave me 'lack of work' (ie: nothing for you to do, don't come in). Josh was off helping a friend move, so I basically lounged and read and napped until he got home at 4-ish, then finally took a shower and we went baby stuff shopping! (More on that in a moment...)
Sunday, we hung out and ate breakfast and I caught up on some computer stuff ... and then around 3:45 I said to myself (I said) 'I'm Bored' -- and checked some movie times and ran downstairs and pulled him off the sofa and said "we're going to a movie". And thus we did. And we liked the first one so much we went and got Indian food, then went back for a second movie. A wonderful day. I think we forget or underestimate the all-encompasing joy of sitting in a dark theatre with a lot of other people and letting that oversized story wrap all around us.
Today, we clean some parts of the house, and Josh has the singers over tonight for supper and practice. I may, in fact, go to a third movie tonight, so inspired am I by the fun had at the first two.
Some other thoughts....
I am, by turns, appalled and overwhelmed by the volume and ugliness of most baby-related items in the marketplace today. We spent some time on Saturday night visiting Babies-R-Us, at the end of which we actually fled the store, overwhelmed by the idea that we would be forced to buy some of these things, none of which we would (esthetically) ever, by choice, have in our home. I think I may schedule a visit to the only other baby-stuff-store in the area -- the dreadfully named "Tiny Totland" but I don't hold out much hope.
I’ve been doing some research on the internet for other options, and there are some, but most of the baby blogs, etc, that are out there that focus on alternative esthetics for baby gear have a very modern (as in Danish Modern) focus, which isn’t our issue. Very modern style, be it the IKEA look or a more sleek industrial style, is out there if you look. Our house, on the other hand, is filled with lovely Victorian and turn-of-the century items. I'm not so into interior design as to think that everything has to match the scheme we haven now, but being able to find things that will at least "work" with our current belonging would be nice. We did find a crib that will work (it’s a sort of Stickley Arts and Crafts style that was just coming into vogue at the time our house was built), and is even on sale (so we need to figure out a way to purchase it before it goes the way of the dodo), but for the rest of it …. Bleah.
What, I ask you, is wrong with covering a car seat or a portable crib in a basic, neutral, solid color fabric? Are there parents out there who really crave jungle prints? Do babies really respond better to pastel duckies and bunnies? I think not.
The other problem is that our travel-heavy life may lead, I think, to us becoming “over-stuffed”. It was the moment that I realized we were looking at a formal crib (hardwood, for the baby’s actual bedroom – it actually converts to a toddler bed, then a twin bed later, which I find kind of nice), plus a co-sleeper (for our bedroom), plus a pack-and-play sort of thing (for event travel) that I started to … well, panic isn’t the right word. But at that point I started to say “wait, we’ve been saying all along all we need is a car seat (with two bases) and a place of the baby to sleep, right?” So why are we looking at three different pieces of furniture that do the exact same thing??? I’m all good with the hardwood crib (and future bed), so now I guess my task is to find a co-sleeper that will easily break down for travel. Which is going to be a chore given that we have basically no retail options locally – its either the internet (where its hard to judge size and break-down-ability) or travel to “the big city” to find something that will suit. Sigh.
Strollers are my other sticking point. I’m still naïve enough to believe that we can get along fine without a stroller – that we can use a sling/bjorn for most outings, or just keep the baby in the car-seat/carrier for trips to the supermarket and such. Josh is advocating for a full size convertible stroller thing, with big wheels (called “travel systems”, I guess) which also comes with a car seat, and you can move the car-seat carrier from the stroller to the car and back again. Sigh. I really, really, REALLY don’t want one of those things in my life. I keep pointing out to him that we’ve never seen any of the parents whom we really admire using such an awful thing, but he’s fallen into the trap of “we’ll need this” – in part, I think, because he fears that he’ll end up being the one to lug the car-seat/carrier around and would prefer to push than to lug. I will continue to resist, however.
My Saturday reading was Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Live in Victorian England (Judith Flanders, 2003) which I highly recommend to all. It is extremely well sourced, and written in an authoritative yet sometimes amused (or amusing) voice. The book itself is divided into chapters based on rooms in the house and their function (so, The Bedroom, The Scullery, The Dining Room, The Sickroom, and so on), but within those chapters is one of the most complete and insightful discussions of the Victorian middle-class family that I have ever read.
I was struck most by two things.
First, in her chapter on The Drawing Room, I was struck at the many similarities between the Victorian world and our own (as I am sure I was meant to do), in relation to they near-tyranny of the Advice Book. I came away drawing a clear analogy in my mind between Victorian publications such as Cassell’s Household Guide and our own Martha Stewart Omnimedia and others of her ilk.
Second, the chapters on The Bedroom and The Nursery leave me with a much greater understanding of how We Modern People have gotten into some of the odd and (may I say) twisted and wrongheaded ideas that we instill in women about childbirth today. Flanders covers in some depth the transition between the time when only women were allowed to attend at childbed, and the sudden dominance of the Doctors (all of whom were male), who felt it was necessary to first banish all women (especially midwives) from the birthing room, and then convince Victorian women that the pain of birth was a punishment for Eve’s sin, but that the modern invention of chloroform (which really caught on when the public learned that Queen Victoria had used it) could free them from this punishment and pain.
The results of the combination of the “good works” of those Doctors and the sage-like advice of the ubiquitous Mrs Beeton (and her famous Book of Household Management), who called a breastfed child a “baby vampire” and cautioned mothers that breastfed children might develop “infantine debility which might eventuate in rickets, curvature of the spine, or mesenteric diseases” carry forward to this very day, when Barbara Walters can, on national television, compare breastfeeding to public urination and when television continues to try and convince us that childbirth is unnatural and dangerous, and is something in which the mother should have a mostly passive role, flat on her back and strapped to machines.
I will close (and try to be more brief) with two movie reviews:
George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck is a subversive noir masterpiece that I strongly urge everyone to see. You probably know by now that it is a film about the legendary CBS broadcaster and newsman Edward R Murrow, specifically focused on his exposure of Senator Joseph McCarthy as the bully and witch-hunter which he actually was. You may also know that it functions as a sort of parable, drawing lines between McCarthy’s communist hunts of the 1950’s and the modern day. What becomes apparent once you see the film is that it is not really a film about Murrow and McCarthy at all. Instead, it is strong and strident indictment of the modern media and their overt failure to expose the excesses of the current administration.
The film is book-ended by Murrow’s 1958 speech to the RTNDA (Radio and Television News Directors Association), which I will not quote here (despite my strong temptation), but will instead link to in hopes that you will take ten minutes or so and read it. It’s a masterpiece, and foretells the current state of affairs in much the same way that Eisenhower’s famous “Military Industrial Complex” speech would three years later.
It is also one of the most beautiful films I have seen in a long while – expertly filmed and directed, with superb performances called forth from formerly respected but fairly obscure actors (David Strathairn as Murrow) as well as more famous faces and voices (Jeff Daniels, Robert Downey, Jr, Frank Langella, Clooney himself) who blend seamlessly into a understated ensemble.
My one gripe, if you could call it that, is that for those viewers who might not realize the consequences of being called before McCarthy’s Committee, of being accused, those consequences are not really spelled out or made clear. CBS head Paley often seems to be more of the immediate ‘villan’ than McCarthy does. American audiences today do often need a history lesson, and while I applaud Clooney’s editorial decision not to sensationalize the topic, I find myself wondering of many ‘mainstream’ viewers will understand the impact of McCarthy calling Murrow a Communist, or the possible repercussions for Murrow had anyone actually believed it. My guess is that the story of CBS journalist Don Hollenbeck was supposed to illustrate the personal and professional dangers involved for anyone who was 'named', but his story (sad though it was) seems to be more about a man whose entire life is falling apart for a variety of reasons, rather than a man who is brought down simply because he is thought to be a 'pinko'.
At the SAG awards, Oscar frontrunner Philip Seymour Hoffman led off his acceptance speech by paying tribute to Straithairn, and I find myself wondering of Hoffman’s endorsement of both the actor and the performance will tip the scales a little. I’m hoping so. For Straithairn this was, I think, the performance of a career. For Hoffman, this is only the beginning.
The second film of our Sunday Double-Feature was Mrs Henderson Presents, a film which I was prepared to like -- I was hoping for a fairly light, feel-good counterpoint to the heavy political parable we'd seen earlier in the afternoon. Instead, I found it to be a sort of Lifetime-films-meets-Masterpiece-Theatre creation which was neither as funny nor as poignant as I would have liked. It was a bit too slowly paced even for me (who adores languid films) with slightly sub-par musical numbers and a somewhat faceless an anonymous supporting cast. One of the most distracting parts was Christopher Guest’s casting as Lord “Tommy” Cromer, the Lord Chamberlain – Guest is, as I’m sure you know, American, and I suppose he has only the one serviceable upper-class British accent … but I found it very, very distracting to hear Count Rugen’s somber and sonorous voice coming out of the Lord Chamberlain. I kept expecting him to intone "If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything".
Dench’s character (the Mrs. Henderson of the title) is supposed to strong and sympathetic. And she makes a good start. But its tough for even such a likeable actress and Dench to make such an anti-Semetic, spoilt, and overbearing character into someone you’re rooting for. Instead, I often found myself hoping that Van Damm, her theatrical manager, (Bob Hoskins) would either tame her, or succeed in his efforts to have her permanently ejected from the theatre. I do, however, admire Dench for managing to make Laura Henderson into a real person, rather than a caricature. This is, I suppose, what her Oscar nomination is rewarding her for.
Dench and Hoskins’ characters are apparently meant to have some sort of unspoken or unrequited romance, similar in spirit to that between Stevens and Miss Kenton in The Remains of the Day. But, despite the great chemistry between Dench and Hoskins, I’m grateful that this sub-sub plot never goes much of anywhere. I wish more that it had never been introduced – not only because it serves to take up valuable screen time that might have been better used letting us get to better know some of the supporting characters. In particular, I wish more time was spent developing the character of Maureen (whose name I actually had to look up – she remained simply “the blonde dancer” in my mind), whom we are supposed to view sympathetically later in the film, but because so little time has been spent differentiating her from the other chorus girls earlier, the impact of her storyline leaves the viewer thinking of her as simply another casualty of war.
While there are some excellent and interesting individual moments, much of what happens in between is fairly formulaic and predictable. (Also, we get to see Bob Hoskins in a fully frontal nude moment – something I hope to never see again.) Add this to an extraordinarily weak ending, and we’re left, I’m afraid, with a film that contains classic performances by Hoskins and Dench, but not much more to recommend it.
I didn't realize I had so much to say! I guess that's part of the whole getting enough sleep thing -- I've been saving it all up!
Friday I was scheduled to work, but got sent home early (its very slow there, probably because everyone is watching the olympics rather than buying mail order). I came home, watched some skating and a little House and went to bed.
Saturday, I was scheduled to work, but they called and gave me 'lack of work' (ie: nothing for you to do, don't come in). Josh was off helping a friend move, so I basically lounged and read and napped until he got home at 4-ish, then finally took a shower and we went baby stuff shopping! (More on that in a moment...)
Sunday, we hung out and ate breakfast and I caught up on some computer stuff ... and then around 3:45 I said to myself (I said) 'I'm Bored' -- and checked some movie times and ran downstairs and pulled him off the sofa and said "we're going to a movie". And thus we did. And we liked the first one so much we went and got Indian food, then went back for a second movie. A wonderful day. I think we forget or underestimate the all-encompasing joy of sitting in a dark theatre with a lot of other people and letting that oversized story wrap all around us.
Today, we clean some parts of the house, and Josh has the singers over tonight for supper and practice. I may, in fact, go to a third movie tonight, so inspired am I by the fun had at the first two.
Some other thoughts....
I am, by turns, appalled and overwhelmed by the volume and ugliness of most baby-related items in the marketplace today. We spent some time on Saturday night visiting Babies-R-Us, at the end of which we actually fled the store, overwhelmed by the idea that we would be forced to buy some of these things, none of which we would (esthetically) ever, by choice, have in our home. I think I may schedule a visit to the only other baby-stuff-store in the area -- the dreadfully named "Tiny Totland" but I don't hold out much hope.
I’ve been doing some research on the internet for other options, and there are some, but most of the baby blogs, etc, that are out there that focus on alternative esthetics for baby gear have a very modern (as in Danish Modern) focus, which isn’t our issue. Very modern style, be it the IKEA look or a more sleek industrial style, is out there if you look. Our house, on the other hand, is filled with lovely Victorian and turn-of-the century items. I'm not so into interior design as to think that everything has to match the scheme we haven now, but being able to find things that will at least "work" with our current belonging would be nice. We did find a crib that will work (it’s a sort of Stickley Arts and Crafts style that was just coming into vogue at the time our house was built), and is even on sale (so we need to figure out a way to purchase it before it goes the way of the dodo), but for the rest of it …. Bleah.
What, I ask you, is wrong with covering a car seat or a portable crib in a basic, neutral, solid color fabric? Are there parents out there who really crave jungle prints? Do babies really respond better to pastel duckies and bunnies? I think not.
The other problem is that our travel-heavy life may lead, I think, to us becoming “over-stuffed”. It was the moment that I realized we were looking at a formal crib (hardwood, for the baby’s actual bedroom – it actually converts to a toddler bed, then a twin bed later, which I find kind of nice), plus a co-sleeper (for our bedroom), plus a pack-and-play sort of thing (for event travel) that I started to … well, panic isn’t the right word. But at that point I started to say “wait, we’ve been saying all along all we need is a car seat (with two bases) and a place of the baby to sleep, right?” So why are we looking at three different pieces of furniture that do the exact same thing??? I’m all good with the hardwood crib (and future bed), so now I guess my task is to find a co-sleeper that will easily break down for travel. Which is going to be a chore given that we have basically no retail options locally – its either the internet (where its hard to judge size and break-down-ability) or travel to “the big city” to find something that will suit. Sigh.
Strollers are my other sticking point. I’m still naïve enough to believe that we can get along fine without a stroller – that we can use a sling/bjorn for most outings, or just keep the baby in the car-seat/carrier for trips to the supermarket and such. Josh is advocating for a full size convertible stroller thing, with big wheels (called “travel systems”, I guess) which also comes with a car seat, and you can move the car-seat carrier from the stroller to the car and back again. Sigh. I really, really, REALLY don’t want one of those things in my life. I keep pointing out to him that we’ve never seen any of the parents whom we really admire using such an awful thing, but he’s fallen into the trap of “we’ll need this” – in part, I think, because he fears that he’ll end up being the one to lug the car-seat/carrier around and would prefer to push than to lug. I will continue to resist, however.
My Saturday reading was Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Live in Victorian England (Judith Flanders, 2003) which I highly recommend to all. It is extremely well sourced, and written in an authoritative yet sometimes amused (or amusing) voice. The book itself is divided into chapters based on rooms in the house and their function (so, The Bedroom, The Scullery, The Dining Room, The Sickroom, and so on), but within those chapters is one of the most complete and insightful discussions of the Victorian middle-class family that I have ever read.
I was struck most by two things.
First, in her chapter on The Drawing Room, I was struck at the many similarities between the Victorian world and our own (as I am sure I was meant to do), in relation to they near-tyranny of the Advice Book. I came away drawing a clear analogy in my mind between Victorian publications such as Cassell’s Household Guide and our own Martha Stewart Omnimedia and others of her ilk.
Second, the chapters on The Bedroom and The Nursery leave me with a much greater understanding of how We Modern People have gotten into some of the odd and (may I say) twisted and wrongheaded ideas that we instill in women about childbirth today. Flanders covers in some depth the transition between the time when only women were allowed to attend at childbed, and the sudden dominance of the Doctors (all of whom were male), who felt it was necessary to first banish all women (especially midwives) from the birthing room, and then convince Victorian women that the pain of birth was a punishment for Eve’s sin, but that the modern invention of chloroform (which really caught on when the public learned that Queen Victoria had used it) could free them from this punishment and pain.
The results of the combination of the “good works” of those Doctors and the sage-like advice of the ubiquitous Mrs Beeton (and her famous Book of Household Management), who called a breastfed child a “baby vampire” and cautioned mothers that breastfed children might develop “infantine debility which might eventuate in rickets, curvature of the spine, or mesenteric diseases” carry forward to this very day, when Barbara Walters can, on national television, compare breastfeeding to public urination and when television continues to try and convince us that childbirth is unnatural and dangerous, and is something in which the mother should have a mostly passive role, flat on her back and strapped to machines.
I will close (and try to be more brief) with two movie reviews:
George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck is a subversive noir masterpiece that I strongly urge everyone to see. You probably know by now that it is a film about the legendary CBS broadcaster and newsman Edward R Murrow, specifically focused on his exposure of Senator Joseph McCarthy as the bully and witch-hunter which he actually was. You may also know that it functions as a sort of parable, drawing lines between McCarthy’s communist hunts of the 1950’s and the modern day. What becomes apparent once you see the film is that it is not really a film about Murrow and McCarthy at all. Instead, it is strong and strident indictment of the modern media and their overt failure to expose the excesses of the current administration.
The film is book-ended by Murrow’s 1958 speech to the RTNDA (Radio and Television News Directors Association), which I will not quote here (despite my strong temptation), but will instead link to in hopes that you will take ten minutes or so and read it. It’s a masterpiece, and foretells the current state of affairs in much the same way that Eisenhower’s famous “Military Industrial Complex” speech would three years later.
It is also one of the most beautiful films I have seen in a long while – expertly filmed and directed, with superb performances called forth from formerly respected but fairly obscure actors (David Strathairn as Murrow) as well as more famous faces and voices (Jeff Daniels, Robert Downey, Jr, Frank Langella, Clooney himself) who blend seamlessly into a understated ensemble.
My one gripe, if you could call it that, is that for those viewers who might not realize the consequences of being called before McCarthy’s Committee, of being accused, those consequences are not really spelled out or made clear. CBS head Paley often seems to be more of the immediate ‘villan’ than McCarthy does. American audiences today do often need a history lesson, and while I applaud Clooney’s editorial decision not to sensationalize the topic, I find myself wondering of many ‘mainstream’ viewers will understand the impact of McCarthy calling Murrow a Communist, or the possible repercussions for Murrow had anyone actually believed it. My guess is that the story of CBS journalist Don Hollenbeck was supposed to illustrate the personal and professional dangers involved for anyone who was 'named', but his story (sad though it was) seems to be more about a man whose entire life is falling apart for a variety of reasons, rather than a man who is brought down simply because he is thought to be a 'pinko'.
At the SAG awards, Oscar frontrunner Philip Seymour Hoffman led off his acceptance speech by paying tribute to Straithairn, and I find myself wondering of Hoffman’s endorsement of both the actor and the performance will tip the scales a little. I’m hoping so. For Straithairn this was, I think, the performance of a career. For Hoffman, this is only the beginning.
The second film of our Sunday Double-Feature was Mrs Henderson Presents, a film which I was prepared to like -- I was hoping for a fairly light, feel-good counterpoint to the heavy political parable we'd seen earlier in the afternoon. Instead, I found it to be a sort of Lifetime-films-meets-Masterpiece-Theatre creation which was neither as funny nor as poignant as I would have liked. It was a bit too slowly paced even for me (who adores languid films) with slightly sub-par musical numbers and a somewhat faceless an anonymous supporting cast. One of the most distracting parts was Christopher Guest’s casting as Lord “Tommy” Cromer, the Lord Chamberlain – Guest is, as I’m sure you know, American, and I suppose he has only the one serviceable upper-class British accent … but I found it very, very distracting to hear Count Rugen’s somber and sonorous voice coming out of the Lord Chamberlain. I kept expecting him to intone "If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything".
Dench’s character (the Mrs. Henderson of the title) is supposed to strong and sympathetic. And she makes a good start. But its tough for even such a likeable actress and Dench to make such an anti-Semetic, spoilt, and overbearing character into someone you’re rooting for. Instead, I often found myself hoping that Van Damm, her theatrical manager, (Bob Hoskins) would either tame her, or succeed in his efforts to have her permanently ejected from the theatre. I do, however, admire Dench for managing to make Laura Henderson into a real person, rather than a caricature. This is, I suppose, what her Oscar nomination is rewarding her for.
Dench and Hoskins’ characters are apparently meant to have some sort of unspoken or unrequited romance, similar in spirit to that between Stevens and Miss Kenton in The Remains of the Day. But, despite the great chemistry between Dench and Hoskins, I’m grateful that this sub-sub plot never goes much of anywhere. I wish more that it had never been introduced – not only because it serves to take up valuable screen time that might have been better used letting us get to better know some of the supporting characters. In particular, I wish more time was spent developing the character of Maureen (whose name I actually had to look up – she remained simply “the blonde dancer” in my mind), whom we are supposed to view sympathetically later in the film, but because so little time has been spent differentiating her from the other chorus girls earlier, the impact of her storyline leaves the viewer thinking of her as simply another casualty of war.
While there are some excellent and interesting individual moments, much of what happens in between is fairly formulaic and predictable. (Also, we get to see Bob Hoskins in a fully frontal nude moment – something I hope to never see again.) Add this to an extraordinarily weak ending, and we’re left, I’m afraid, with a film that contains classic performances by Hoskins and Dench, but not much more to recommend it.
I didn't realize I had so much to say! I guess that's part of the whole getting enough sleep thing -- I've been saving it all up!
