I know I’m addressing here what’s already appeared all over the news, but here are the seven words that the Trump administration has allegedly banned from appearing in The Center for Disease Control’s budget documents. (In fairness to the administration, CDC Director Brenda Fitzgerald tweeted Sunday to dispute those claims, which first appeared in The Washington Post. You can read about her response here.)
Cover of The Saturday Evening Post, published December 4, 1920.
“The Hateful Eight” (2015) might be the first Quentin Tarantino film that I entirely disliked. I’d rate it a 3 out of 10 for being an overlong, overwrought story inhabited almost exclusively by irritating, overly stylized characters who are constantly shouting. It was alternately boring and grotesque. It even managed to occasionally be glumly depressing, given the violence it depicts against defenseless innocents.
And I’m surprised, because this movie was highly recommended to me by my college-aged nephew — he’s a smart kid whose judgment I trust. I certainly hope that he has seen Tarantino’s classic “Reservoir Dogs” (1992), as that movie seems to be this one’s direct inspiration. Throughout “The Hateful Eight’s” lengthy running time (it clocks in at just over three hours), I kept thinking that this was a failed effort to transplant “Reservoir Dogs'” story setup to the old west.
That probably was the director’s strategy here. You see an attempt to recreate all of the story elements that made the earlier movie a success: quirky characters; idiosyncratic dialogue; unexpected violence; tragedy; and black humor.
Regrettably, it just didn’t work. The movie was so long — and so loud — that it even made priceless performers like Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson and Tim Roth come off as annoying.
For me, the movie’s sole bright spot was Jennifer Jason Leigh’s damned terrific portrayal of the plot-driving, brutal gangster, Daisy Domergue. I had no idea that Leigh had such incredible range (not to mention some Vaudeville-style comic timing). Her performance isn’t enough to redeem the movie, but it surprised me and easily stole the show.
Look — if this is the first Tarantino movie you’ve seen, then please don’t let it dissuade you from seeing the man’s other work. Seriously, go watch “Reservoir Dogs,” “Pulp Fiction” (1994) or “From Dusk Till Dawn” (1996).
This is one festive town. It seems like there is a parade every five minutes. Last night it was the local high school boys; they’d won their fifth state championship for … something or other. Football, given the season?
They waved and shouted “Merry Christmas,” so I responded in kind to be polite. Then a particularly friendly Salem woman commented to me that I must be a very proud father, and that got me feeling all weird.
A couple of the kids shouted, “Support Net Neutrality!” That’s some nice work there, Salem.
I’m including a picture of me here to show off an early Christmas present from an amazingly talented poet friend — a monogrammed, handmade scarf. I only had errands yesterday in the town, but I threw on my dress overcoat and pretended to be Bruce Wayne.
Comico.
How’s this for “found art?”
I have friends who are incredibly sweet and generous, and yet who are also a little out there.
These adorned a Christmas package I received. What we’ve got here is apparently a hatchet-wielding owl in the first drawing. And he’s not an empty threat, either — note the owl skulls bottom left.
The second sketch depicts nothing less than a Christmas tree flasher. (Note the consternation of the other trees.)
Tradition, ladies and gentlemen.
“As Silver as the Stars You Tried to Rival”
The
world grows
darker in increments,
earlier every evening,
as Autumn’s arcing swallow bends to curve
at long last, rounding down, to the hardening ground, where only brown
leaves outlast November’s burning rug of reds and flaming footprints,
cast-off scarlets,
now giving way
to the gunmetal gray
of winter’s coarse eagle, its ash-gray and annual, slow,
feathered rule of sky ascends hemispheres, its lead belly
groaning for hare or softer birds, its slate eyes searching, yet ridden with hints of silver —
— thin silver threads in the breast of the lead predator,
ascending
screaming “December,”
slow, as slow as frost, as cold as loss,
frigid, frigid like a still photo and its forever frozen face there,
black and white, its timeless smile a lie, exposed by common calendars and your indifference.
If those blacks and whites were shaken up in a glass bottle, the jumbled shades under glass might make
silver:
— thin silver threads out of memory:
— as silver as the slimming minnows that you kicked
out of shallow water onto sand at 9
with the other boys
birthing, then returning swimming platinum
to the warm-womb mine of that black lake, you knew
that summer would never end —
— as silver as your father’s hair, when you were 13, the last time that you thought
your father would never end —
— as silver as the cross you gave to your first love,
kissing you at 16, there in the stairwell at school.
She laughed at your
accidental piety.
You thought it was a curving swallow;
it was a tiny crucifix.
And you told her
love would never end —
–as silver as the stars you tried to rival, drunk at 21, drunk at Cape Hatteras during the storm, drunk at the face of the Universe.
At “Kill Devil Hills” you balked at God.
The stars shouted with light, the violet-sable sky reeled and vaulted purple-black, interminable, drunk in its excess of self, the rhythmic, clutching sea its unforgiving son.
Your friends
warned you away from the sea.
The curving waves would swallow you.
They warned you, “You get dark when you are drunk.”
“And, besides, you’ll die.”
You laughed and stormed the waves against their wishes.
And you were dark. Your violet-sable heart
reeled and vaulted purple-black. You laughed
and shouted back at the stars,
young-mad and piss-drunk,
the freezing forward ramparts stung you but
you stormed in headfirst, headstrong, and interminable:
this night would never end,
and if it never ended, how could you?
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2015, originally published by Dead Snakes 2015
Photo credit: bigwavephoto / Wikimedia Commons
The New York Times: “F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules”
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who has been well known for his opposition to net neutrality, is a Donald Trump appointee.
Just so you know who to thank if you have to begin paying more for various Internet sites, in the same manner as you pay for cable packages. Or if your ISP starts deciding which Internet content you can access.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 