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Ramblings (May 2004)

05/18/04 -- 1:12 a.m.

Part of being newly married is that I'm moving into M's house, which is a bit small for two people. Consequently, the place is full of cardboard boxes of my stuff. This is all part of the slow process of moving out of my former place, which we all know as The White House. It's a good sturdy house, about a hundred years old, but with it's fair share of horror stories.  So I'm moving into M's cozy little cottage, which I guess is legally now my cozy little cottage, too -- but I'll never get used to that.

At any rate, this brings about one of the enduring themes of my life: Andy's Brushes with Nature. Now, I didn't grow up some wheezy little child who squealed in terror at the sight of a chipmunk (although if I'd grown up around monkeys, it might have been a different story). I had a yard, I fished, I've humanely scooped  more spiders out of bathtubs for squealing ladyfolk than can be counted. Nevertheless, Nature and I sometimes have an antagonistic relationship. Anyone who remembers my harrowing experiences battling the yellow jackets or the dirt dobbers can shout "amen!"

At any rate, I'm on the phone with M, who's on the road, and I'm standing in the kitchen opening a small box full of action figures that I'd brought over. And they're moving! No, wait, something else in there is moving! Good god, the box is awash in roaches! I make a girly-yet-gutteral-and-manly sound, and meekly ask M, "Can you hang on for a second, I need to take something outside..." I grab the box -- nothing has gotten out yet -- and head for the door. There are, naturally, cats in the way. The cats aren't allowed out, because they're stupid, with an unnatural attraction for the siren call of the yellow line in the middle of the road. So I'm backing my way out the back door, and I try to fend off the cats with the box. Bad move. They see the skittery movement in the box and go nuts. They want some bugs! So now I have to kick the aluminum part of the back door as hard as I can to get the cats to scatter and I make it out onto the deck. Amazingly, somehow, nothing's gotten out of the box. So I go to the corner of the deck and dump everything out. Good God, it's like a scene from John Carpenter's <i>Prince of Darkness</i>. They go everywhere. I tap out the box as forcefully as I can to get the droppings out and shove everything back in.

I go back in the kitchen, and open another box, this one full of loose CDs. Nghghhhh!!!! More roaches! So I repeat the same scene, and realize that in today's moving, I've brought in about six boxes of various things. So I spend my night (after I get off the phone with M, whose fairly unaware of what's going on, since my on-the-phone explanation to her consisted of "This box is kinda nasty. I'm taking it outside.") taking cardboard boxes out on the deck, dumping them out, and then refilling them. Amazingly, no other boxes have anything, I guess because they came from a different part of the house. Still, nghggghh!!!

So then I had to get clean boxes, since my sister wisely reminded me of the possibility of eggs. So that was a lot of fun, switching all of those boxes out. To begin to explain The White House, and how this could have happened, is a tale that would probably require its own website. Maybe someday. Sigh.

05/07/04 -- 1:03 a.m.

Saw Kill Bill, Volume 2 the other night and can't stop thinking about it. I was really hesitant to recommend Volume 1 to lots of people because of the massive amounts of violence (although I was surprised to find out that my sister loved, loved, loved it -- who knew?).

But Volume 2 was quite the different beast. Slowly paced, meditative, concerned with the ways that people interact with each other, and not very gory at all (well, there's this one scene ...). It had a lot of heart. You couldn't help but feel sorry for Bud, despite the fact that he was a mad-dog killer with no redeeming values. The scenes between Bill and the Bride -- especially the climactic death scene -- were done with an amazing amount of tenderness. Yes, the vengeful murder of Bill, after the Bride has gone on her rampage through two movies, is actually a very sweet scene. So many good things to say about the movie, from the humor of Darryl Hannah's Elle continually banging her hands against a trailer home's walls every time she tries to draw her sword because there's not enough room, to the weird domesticity of Bill and the Bride, to a truly harrowing scene where a character is buried alive. Can't recommend it highly enough. To me, it feels very similar to Jackie Brown, in that way that Tarantino has -- for all his verbal hyperactivity -- of letting characters find their comfort zones around each other.

Carradine's simply amazing in a way I didn't think he was capable of, and Darryl Hannah is absolutely compelling and dangerous as Elle.

(c) 2004 Sweet Tea Prohibition