http://thepeoplestherapist.com/2010/05/22/exchanging-vows/
Really, the American "wedding industrial complex" has become so ghastly that one looks back longingly on those scenes in Forties movies when the eloping couple wakes a Justice of the Peace out of a sound sleep at 2:00 A.M.; that seems considerably more romantic than our fabulously rococo and/or tacky modern productions. Admittedly, weddings have always been a bit of show and conspicuous consumption for the neighbors (check out Spencer Tracy's discomforts in 1950's Father of the Bride). But nowadays a huge part of the point of a wedding is to make it re-consumable through the use of photography, videography, and probably eventually holography; and this requires rehearsals, blocking, re-takes, and possibly the hiring of Ron Howard to manage it all for you.
A more basic and scarcely new problem with weddings is that the ceremony relies, as Meyerhofer points out, on a kind of "magical thinking" that has unhealthy aspects. Weddings offer the promise of a day of perfect happiness (for which people get seriously indebted and emotionally worn out) that can be "frozen" as the state of a marriage forevermore. Consider some of the traditional words: "from this day forward...until death do us part." That's not a vow, it's a spell, intended to ward off the corrupting influence of any and all future developments on the love we are trying to fix in place. Well, it's an ambitious thought; but I think it not only impractical and ungrateful, but even irreligious, to try to wish away all the aspects of the future that we can't control (which include love fading, people growing apart, and so on). This is why Will Meyerhofer sensibly recommends re-writing wedding vows to concentrate on what can be meaningfully and truthfully be said in the present.
Although I wrote a "Goodbye to Sports" two years in this blog, I've backpedaled a bit on that, allowing myself to renew my spectator interest in golf and baseball. I never really gave up baseball altogether, as I attended plenty of Wisconsin Timber Rattlers minor league games while I was in Appleton. I wrote about my ups and downs with that; I enjoyed the atmosphere in the stadium and knowing all the front office staff, but I became antsy watching the games. Partly that was a matter of the quality of the product -- A-level ball is nothing much compared to the bigs -- and partly, too, it was because I've always enjoyed watching baseball on television more than in person; it is the ideal television sport.
Last night I happened to be watching the Giants-Diamondbacks game, and was privileged to witness one of the best-pitched games I've ever seen, a one-hit, no-walk, nine-strikeout shutout masterpiece by the Giants' Matt Cain. I enjoyed what Bruce Jenkins wrote about it afterwards:
I was in the stands last night, as a fan, enjoying what might go down as one of the Giants' most significant games of the season. Afterward, I ran into Duane Kuiper, who smiled and offered a single word: "Seaver." Couldn't have said it better. Matt Cain was Tom Seaver last night, a thick-legged bull of a right-handed pitcher with a nasty fastball and the kind of command that says "nine innings: forget the bullpen."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/threedotblog/detail?entry_id=64649
As someone who grew up watching Tom Seaver in the New York area, I concur. It's about the highest compliment you can pay.
David Cairns at Shadowplay has a nice touch with half-forgotten French directors such as Julien Duvivier (1896-1967):
http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/black-forest-gateau/
And Rene Clement (1913-1996):
http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/1853
I've already read a number of mixed-to-negative reviews of George Romero's latest zombie opus, Survival of the Dead, but Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at Mubi (Mubi?) demurs from the general dismissal:
...if it's a minor film, it's one full of major ideas—and if it lacks overt ambitions, it more than makes up for it with unforced intelligence.
http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/1804
The Japanese playwright and theater director Shu Matsui, starting to come in for international attention, has this in common with Romero:
I prefer the image of a zombie. Why? Because zombies represent the future of mankind: they have no soul, no interior, no emotions. They wander about with no purpose, they respond to stimuli — for example if there is an escalator at a shopping center they’ll go up and down — but that’s all they do. Their form to me somehow represents what humans are heading toward.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/arts/27iht-shu.html
The image of the shopping center in that quotation suggests a direct influence from Dawn of the Dead, of course. Matsui would also seem to be in the line of playwrights such as Fernando Arrabal, Edward Bond, and Sarah Kane, who add an overt Grand Guignol element to Artaud's conception of "the theater of cruelty" (which might be better expressed as "the theater of uncomfortable truths," a phrase I think Matsui might endorse).
Among notables born on this date are President John F. Kennedy, Founding Father Patrick Henry, philosopher Oswald Spengler, novelists G.K. Chesteron and T.H. White, poet Alfonsina Storni (Argentina), film director Josef von Sternberg, composers Isaac Albeniz, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Iannis Xenakis, film composer Danny Elfman, conductor Helmuth Rilling, rock singer Melissa Etheridge, and actors Bob Hope, Beatrice Lillie, Annette Bening, Anthony Geary, and Rupert Everett. The only daytime soap opera I have ever followed, because it is like a religion in my family, is General Hospital, which during the years I watched in the Eighties and Nineties featured good, sometimes very funny writing, and a host of excellent actors, such as the gifted comedienne Lynn Herring, and today's birthday boy Anthony Geary, Luke of "Luke and Laura" fame. Geary has deservedly won six Daytime Emmy Awards; he is a terrific actor who has simply chosen soaps as his canvas (or been chosen by them, it comes to the same thing). He is hardly the only one; for every Julianne Moore who graduates from soaps to movie acclaim (and who recently paid a warmly appreciated return visit to As the World Turns), there is a Geary who stays in soaps and shines.
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