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mallorys_cameraNight before last, I went to see The Tree of Life with Deborah, an Israeli neighbor with whom I seem to be forging an unlikely friendship. This is a movie I resisted seeing in theatrical release. An exceedingly looooong movie with hardly any dialogue about boys growing up in Waco, Texas in which the afterlife is revealed to be a big beach where it's too cold to go swimming. No, thank you!
But the excellent Sheltercove Library does a film series, and the films are all freeeee! and Deborah asked. So I went.
It's actually an amazing film.
In my own mind, thought exists on two levels. There's an internal monologue, a running commentary on the great DVD of my life, into which I cram salient observations, historical footnotes, jokes, trivia contests and barometric readings of my moods. These are the things I long to share with someone, I suppose.
But then there's this stream of seemingly random images, dredged up from the subconscious, who knows why. They're memories, but they're not memories. They're dreamier around the edges. They're achingly beautiful even when the actual sights were ugly. And they don't have a sound track beyond the muffled noises embedded in the flashes.
The Tree of Life captured that substrata of visual thought perfectly. I wouldn't have thought that could be done. Kind of a pointillist take on a Ray Bradbury short story, except instead of paint, the artist was using film frames.
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In other news, I baked my second German chocolate cake from scratch yesterday. Cassandra is having a dinner party tonight. That was my contribution to the menu.
Since I'd never baked a German chocolate cake before, I did a trial run earlier in the week. Cake turned out great, but the icing was problematic. It was a boiled icing, your basic dulce de leche, but I'd never made a boiled icing before and the consistency was all off. Too runny. For Take II, I cooked the icing longer and got it to the right consistency.
Cassandra has a well-equipped kitchen, and it's a pleasure cooking in it.
But the excellent Sheltercove Library does a film series, and the films are all freeeee! and Deborah asked. So I went.
It's actually an amazing film.
In my own mind, thought exists on two levels. There's an internal monologue, a running commentary on the great DVD of my life, into which I cram salient observations, historical footnotes, jokes, trivia contests and barometric readings of my moods. These are the things I long to share with someone, I suppose.
But then there's this stream of seemingly random images, dredged up from the subconscious, who knows why. They're memories, but they're not memories. They're dreamier around the edges. They're achingly beautiful even when the actual sights were ugly. And they don't have a sound track beyond the muffled noises embedded in the flashes.
The Tree of Life captured that substrata of visual thought perfectly. I wouldn't have thought that could be done. Kind of a pointillist take on a Ray Bradbury short story, except instead of paint, the artist was using film frames.
In other news, I baked my second German chocolate cake from scratch yesterday. Cassandra is having a dinner party tonight. That was my contribution to the menu.
Since I'd never baked a German chocolate cake before, I did a trial run earlier in the week. Cake turned out great, but the icing was problematic. It was a boiled icing, your basic dulce de leche, but I'd never made a boiled icing before and the consistency was all off. Too runny. For Take II, I cooked the icing longer and got it to the right consistency.
Cassandra has a well-equipped kitchen, and it's a pleasure cooking in it.
