Solstice Day

The week leading up to the winter solstice is one of the most beautiful weeks of the year, particularly when the daylight hours are tenebrous, filtererd through lowered, occluded skies.

The effect is that of the silver backing on glass, throwing mirrored images from earth to heaven and back down again, punctuated by the brilliant colors of the holiday lights lighting windows, buildings and streets with as much cheer as at night.

Yesterday the temperature was firmly set just at 32, so, no happy birds dancing about in the Nativity stable. A slight flurry of snow sparkled around me as I bustled along. Apartment mates were shopping together for the Christmas tree to be the centerpiece of their Christmas party. A pedestrian sauntered along wearing a wool hat with reindeer antlers. Young women carried shopping bags blazoned with the logos of expensive stores, filled, no doubt with what they wear to this weekend's parties. Raffetto's (est. 1906!) was packed with people. I felt alive-O! I also knew the snow flurry was just that and wouldn't last long.

Feeling so Christmassy, then the arrival of unexpected news (which can't be spoken yet) that is like a huge gift out of the blue, planning the preparation of the pork shoulder for the Christmas Eve pulled pork, looking forward to today's Solstice party.

Then we wake to learn of this.

A lone, mentally ill, black man shot someone in Baltimore and then came here and shot two cops sitting in their car in Brooklyn, then went a subway station platform and shot himself. The NYPD union heads, already furious with the Mayor, are screaming that de Blasio is the one who murdered these police, and started a twitter feed with #bluelivesmattertoo.  That hashtag is a declaration of war on the rest of us.  They are COPS and we, we are merely civilians.  That

language is militarized, not the language of policing.  This shooting is NOT the same issue as "Hands Up Don't Shoot", which is about being killed by police for being a person of color.  Most of all, what does de Blasio's actions have to do with this murder?  The man who is responsible didn't even live here, at least not at this time -- he seems to have some connection with Brooklyn in his earlier years.

OK. Why it is when a white guy does something awful, it's always just a lone deranged white guy, not a conspiracy, i.e. as with John Wilkes Booth, which was a conspiracy. Why is it that those who want to go back to the conditions of, at least, Jim Crow, always need to steal music and slogans from black people and progressives?

OTOH, my own sense is that the Black Lives Matter -- I Can't Breathe -- Hands Up Don't Shoot -- protests have focused rather too much on the cops per se rather than on the broken and delegitimated justice system, which is about feeding poor black bodies into privatized prisons, supported with tax dollars, which further are a pool of basically unpaid labor providing even products to the luxury market such as fine bed linens.  But that's too complex for a march, right? Nobody knows all that history or cares about it, right?

I am conflicted about pushing these thoughts away for a few days, and concentrating on feeling as good as I get to feel ....

Holiday Movies - Winter Solstice

I'm looking for some.

Not what passes generally as a Christmas movie release these days -- they are all horrible, most horrible.

But films on the order of Hercule Poirot's Christmas or Desk Set or action historicals like Beowulf & Grendel (2005) -- not that Zemeikis thing!  Why o why hasn't the BBC poured millions per episode to create a full series of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?  That would be the perfect Yule season watching!  For a while the extended Lord of The Rings was the perfect darkest week of the year watching, but I've watched them now so often that the bad Jackson choices are far outweighing the good parts -- and there are so many very bad -- not to mention just stupid -- choices Jackson made.  There just aren't enough dark, cold, historic - fantasy adventure movies made that are filled with landscape, fascinating heroes and brilliantly beautiful horses and weapons.  Sir Gawain isn't any of these, of course, but more in the tradition of Desk Set, I guess.  :)  I love nordic, germanic, saxon, gaelic, celtic, roman adventure hero films -- they are so in the season of the darkest week solstice.  I think Europe does more of these than we do.

Finding a good one isn't easy.  Braveheart does NOT qualify; you simply cannot have a royal princess galloping all over the country by herself in the 13th century.  I can't sink into that. Neither does The 13th Warrior, which has some marvelous things, including one of the best horses, but way too much sillyness.   Ring of the Nieblungs is a good one.  But over here, released as The Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King, over an hour of the German production has been cut.  I've watched The Vikings too lately, and besides, it's really sunny, not dark, with boy gets girl, and in the sunshine no less.  There aren't enough leaps into the wolf pits to make this one work for the long nights. Ah, we need a BBC series of Bernard Cornwell's Saxon berserker warrior Uhtred, who perceives of himself as Danish, committed to Thor, despite his place as one of King Alfred's Christian soldiers.

I have the Thanksgiving week films: Walk on the Wild Side and Buccaneer's Girl -- both with some connection to New Orleans.  I think I've run to the end of New Orleans films, alas, having watched last week Sean Penn's All The King's Men, which I thought was excellent, though evidently I'm the only one.  I wonder why.  For a long time the right movie for Thanksgiving was My Fair Lady with Audrey Hepburne.  But as these days AH makes me want to throw cold water into her face so she stops pretending to impersonate a sleepwalker as her idea of ingenue, or tape her mouth closed to stop the silly supposed idea of ingenue breathy babble, the wardrobe no longer is the focus.  Dang, I hate it when that happens.