I am so excited about this event. I was just added to the schedule last night, and it gives me a way to travel in my pathetic unemployed state. Plus teach, sign books, and hang out with dear friends.
I will be teaching the full three-part Structure of Spellcasting course, which is one of my favorite things to teach. I am so excited I just feel like packing right now.
Hope to see you there!
As of yesterday, I join the ranks of the downsized.
It hasn’t quite hit me yet. I am making plans, sending resumés, networking, thinking things through. I grieve, oddly, the products I worked on quite a lot. My products were “sunsetted” and hence, the writer who documented them had no more work. That was me.
I have to say I think it’s a poor business decision. Big corporations are responding to market changes like they have the hiccups, killing off jobs in the hopes of making stockholders happy. But there’s more to strategy than being in-the-moment. Three years from now, the crisis will be over, and the products and brainpower will have moved on. Then they’ll be hiccuping again, wondering why it’s so hard to hire the right people.
I’ll be okay. I have a wee bit of savings which will, with my severance, tide me over. I don’t anticipate a life of soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Neither do I plan on living beyond my means. Vacation cancelled, priorities reorganized. And amazingly calm throughout the entire thing.
If you know of anyone interested in hiring a brilliant, personable, focused writer/designer/business analyst, do please get in touch.
It was Denzel Washington.
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Actors:
1. A delusional northerner, an addicted teacher, the young self seen in flashbacks.
TIE: Solved by maurinsky (comment #4) and Christina (comment #5).
2. A prison warden, the First Lady, a woman accused of witchcraft.
TIE: Solved by Christina (comment #5) and maurinsky (comment #7).
3. A white outsider in an Asian family, a white member of a Native American family, a one-eyed gang leader.
Solved by George (comment #21).
4. A reporter pursuing a rodeo star, an embittered dancer, a court-appointed psychiatrist.
Solved by Tom Hilton (comment #1).
5. An army surgeon, a compulsive gambler, a burlesque club owner.
Solved by Tom Hilton (comment #2).
6. A baseball fanatic, a cellist, a “heroine.”
Solved by Steve H. (comment #9).
7. An Olympic athlete, an evil newspaper columnist, second in command on a submarine.
Solved by Hogan (comment #18).
Wednesday trivia lacks that jazzy alliteration. Forgive me.
Things We Lost in the Fire (2007) 7/10
Audrey (Halle Berry) and Brian (David Duchovny) are happily married, but fight over Brian’s friend Jerry (Benicio del Toro). Jerry is a drug addict whom Audrey distrusts, but Brian insists on helping. When Brian is killed, Jerry and Audrey need each other’s help to mourn.
Things We Lost in the Fire is a beautiful movie, in that it is gorgeously filmed, and that it is about its characters, and doesn’t go for easy answers. The thing that is most remarkable about the script here is that Jerry and Audrey are individuals, they are not “the widow” and “the junkie,” and I think ninety percent of writers who attempted this script would make them exactly that.
On the down side, it’s also a very self-conscious movie. For every exquisite shot, there’s a look-at-me-I’m-exquisite shot. And while these look-at-me shots are genuinely beautiful, waving at the camera detracts from the story.
The same could be said for the script, with writing that occasionally underlines that the story will not play out in a conventional way. There is one conversation, between Jerry and one of the Burke children, that is more or less, “I want this story to follow conventional movie arcs.” “But it won’t.” And it was smartly written, make no mistake, but a little obvious.
And yet, I am so touched by the vulnerability of these people. Audrey, who is wealthy and apparently competent, and strong and smart, all these things, and yet broken, and not broken because her husband died, but broken because she’s a human being with parts that break, those parts we all have, and losing her husband removed all the veneer from the brokenness. Berry is at her best in these vulnerable roles. Give her a superhero or someone street smart to play and she’s flat and relies on her beauty and a certain snappiness, but give her some pain and some weakness and she sinks deep into her huge round eyes and digs in. This is her best work since Monster’s Ball.
Del Toro, on the other hand, really isn’t an uneven actor. He’s always this good. And Duchovny? I have no idea why he gets as much work as he does, but he doesn’t detract.
The pacing is slow, sometimes glacial, but it works. This isn’t an action movie, it’s a story of healing, and of not healing, and it’s lovely.
I’m having an ironic first day of Spring here, as it’s snowing out.
The equinoxes have a poorly-formed tradition in most of the Pagan community, and I don’t know if I’ve ever attended a really dazzling Spring Equinox or Fall Equinox ritual. (I’m talking community rituals, here, not oathbound Tradition stuff.) For six of the eight holidays, there is plentiful folklore and a rich and varied ritual tradition throughout Neopaganism. The equinoxes, not so much. Fall tends to be a Thanksgiving sort of thing, “Harvest Home,” but both the festival before and after are also harvests, and have other distinctive and beautiful features.
Spring equinox, which some call Ostara, tends to be a bit of a piggyback on Easter. Colored eggs and all that. Which is fine; Pagan holidays and Christian holidays are often related. But the colored eggs don’t figure prominently in ritual behavior—no egg hunts under the High Priestess’s robe, although hey, that’s a thought.
In much Western occult tradition, equinoxes are considered unlucky. Balance is always sought in magical work, but healthy balance is dynamic and fluid. Perfect balance is stasis, so on the equinox, change cannot be effective. Initiations and marriages are not performed.
Spring equinox is when we plant early seeds. Where I live, peas are ideal, as they are harvested about the time other planting is done. If you use starter seeds (rather than planting from seedlings), they should be started now in temperate climates. My normal spring equinox ritual is a consecration and planting of seeds, and this can be quite beautiful (despite my grumpiness).
This weekend, I met my son’s girlfriend. But wait, that’s not the information. This sophisticated young lady, who has taken film history classes, had never seen Four Weddings and a Funeral. So that’s what we did. We laughed, we cried, we bitched about Andie MacDowell.
So I taught her my trick. Here’s how it works: You take Four Weddings and a Funeral, and you stand it next to Notting Hill. Then you squint really hard.
The result is Four Weddings and a Funeral, starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. The perfect movie.
Mostly by Evn:
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1. “You ruthlessly slept with me twice.”
Solved by Evn (comment #1)
2. Based in part on a real-life incident, the movie’s pinball machine was a pool table in reality.
Solved by Evn (comment #1)
3. River Phoenix was scheduled to appear in this film. The actor who replaced him upon Phoenix’s death donated a large sum from his salary to two of Phoenix’s favorite charities.
Solved by Evn (comment #1)
4. “We knew the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love, and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”
Solved by Evn (comment #3)
5. “All radio is dead, which means that these tape recordings I’m making are for the sake of future history – If any.”
Solved by Evn (comment #3)
6. A real-life former Supreme Court Justice plays a Supreme Court Justice in this film.
Solved by Evn (comment #3)
7. “You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean back then.”
TIE: Solved by Melville (comment #2) and Evn (comment #3)
