If you ever feel like taking a gander at Disney’s old “Silly Symphonies,” they’re available on Youtube. A lot of them are trippy, and a couple depict some pretty dark subjects.
Here’s one I just shared with a friend.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Last Nolan on Earth
Last night’s post-apocalyptic dream: Last Man on Earth.
No zombies, no nukes, just literally the last man on earth, as everyone else has vanished. A weeping willow, a waning sun, and a great red barn on the opposite bank of a slow moving river, like rippling black glass.
Fauna, fauna everywhere …
And not a camera to click.
Seriously, I can no longer leave home without my camera. There is a veritable County-wide Inter-species Conference commencing right now at a single segment of my local creek. (We need to give that creek a name at some point.)
I saw a beaver for the very first time, and it was kind of a big deal to me, and if you crack the obvious joke, you’re a nine-year-old. Beavers look a hell of a lot like groundhogs, as it turns out, except they’re flat-tailed swimmers, of course, and they’re slimmer and far more graceful. A coffee-colored mama duck had marshaled forth her squabbling, fluttering, barely ordered brood on the opposite side. They seemed as interested in the beaver as I was. (Field trip?)
I endeavored to follow the beaver down the narrow waterway, trying to channel Meriwether Lewis without spilling the 7-Eleven “Double Gulp” Dr. Pepper that my doctor keeps telling me I shouldn’t have. (Donald Trump has inspired me to drink them to honor the police and firemen at 7-Eleven.)
A couple of still, solitary, cranky-looking snapper turtles were sunning themselves, too. They launched themselves like lightning onto the water at the sound of my approaching footsteps. A pissed-off bullfrog did the same, only very awkwardly, and while cursing me out with a “GROAK!” (The preceding term is an example of onomatopoeia, by the way. This is the only meaningful advice I will ever render to you as a writer.)
All of this was maybe 200 feet from that spot where I saw deer and heron commiserating a week ago. I am precisely the kind of guy who gets lost in the woods, so I’m no naturalist. (Seriously, that $+I+ happened when I went to New York in January, in the very same woods I grew up in.) But even I am starting to understand that diverse animals will be drawn to wetlands.
I might just finally figure out my camera’s zoom function and stake that whole area out, on a lark, at some point before Virginia gets too hot. If anything interesting transpires, I’ll post it here.
Donald Trump is an @$$+073.
What kind of name is “Meriwether,” anyway? That guy must have caught some heat in gradeschool.
I think the sugar and caffeine in this “Double Gulp” is doing a number on me.
Angelo Badalamenti, Summer 1990
I’m relaxing with the “Twin Peaks” soundtrack this Sunday afternoon; it was a favorite for Kathleen Nolan.
Once upon a time, when she was preparing a quite difficult teenager in Lake-of-the Woods, VA, for college, it was one of the few things that we could agree on. (Another that year was Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” on cassette tape.)
Click here:
“Twin Peaks” Soundtrack on Youtube
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 4/22/16 (Photos)
These were among some finds at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. yesterday — they were taken by a very dear friend and my traveling companion. She is not only extremely versed in art, but is also a far better photographer than me. (Very few of my pictures turned out well.)
This Internet thingy, however, allows me to easily abscond with her work and then share it with you. (I’ll run my inferior shots tomorrow.)
Operation Overlord, June 6, 1944 (Photo)
Operation Overlord (the Normandy Landings), D-Day, 6 June 1944. Men of the 13/18 Hussars on board LCT’s (Landing Craft Tanks) heading towards the Normandy beaches.
Photo credit: By Mapham J (Sgt), No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
A quick review of “London Has Fallen” (2016)
“London Has Fallen” (2016) includes two very good action sequences. The first is an establishing major action set piece in which a state funeral in London is the occasion of a major terror attack. (SPOILER!) The second is a finale that should really please action fans — it’s fun and exciting to watch; the first-person-shooter style of it actually works, rather than coming across as cheesy.
That’s probably about all the positive things I could say about it … as others warned me, it was a pretty brainless movie. It’s a thin, poorly scripted story that isn’t nearly in the same league as 2013’s outstanding “Olympus Has Fallen.” The dialogue is painful to hear. And that’s especially sad considering that the film’s two fine lead actors (Gerard Butler and Aaron Eckhart) have terrific chemistry with each other.
The terrorists pull off an operation that is logistically incredible in this movie. No exposition is given about how the @#%$ they accomplished what they did, and in so little time. (Two years to put those assets in place?)
How does the entire population of London become invisible within minutes — even if they were told to stay indoors? Why did this movie suddenly turn into “The Quiet Earth” (1985)?
Am I mistaken, or did a Butler’s Secret Service Agent actually tell the terrorists exactly where he and the president were, as part of a macho personal challenge?
And if Butler and Eckhart are alone and on the run on the streets of London, doesn’t it make sense to seek refuge in a random home or apartment? The odds are astronomical that they person from whom they’d seek quarter would be in league with the bad guys.
I’d rate this movie a 6 out of 10. Honestly? I’d really recommend you wait until it comes out on DVD. Then watch only the opening and closing set pieces, and imagine your own coherent story and engaging dialogue in between. You’ll enjoy it more.
Cover for “Startling Mystery Stories,” Fall 1967
This was the home of Stephen King’s first published short story, “The Glass Floor.”
Vintage “Nosferatu” posters.
Just for fun, here are a few images of period-era posters for F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens” (1922).
I’d love to have one (or more!) of these professionally framed. Anyone aspiring to be my wealthy patron, get right on that.
“Blue Wolves Move In An Indigo Wood,” by Eric Robert Nolan
Blue Wolves Move In An Indigo Wood
“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”
— Carl Gustav Jung
All the colors are off —
Blue wolves move in an indigo wood
Their cobalt backs arrive, arising
Like coarse dorsal fins over
low-lying orange flora,
their beryl heads hung low — every
aquiline cerulean nose is angled down —
tracing the escape of a flaming hare —
their racing red rabbit has evaded them again.
Dreams leave all our long nights’ inner canvases
in singular tints and incongruous
strange iridescence.
Reason, here, is pariah.
Senses are its surrogates.
Vision its impostor
in the illogic’s ether:
Slow stars arc in scarlet.
Racing sable comets
make black wakes against
blinding white night.
A full moon rises in violet —
the fat and full and low-lying fruit of a
dark and overripe plum.
Yellow bucks bounce
high and away in the wolves’ wake —
sun-colored stags beat bright retreat
a running herd of burning gold —
all sunlit sinewed limbs and flashing hooves.
Flurries of green quail flutter,
flushed from fushia grasses —
alate bladed emeralds, blazing away.
The verdant birds burnish silhouettes —
angles on lunar lavender.
But ever all the blue wolves ignore the moon.
Each arrows forth in formation
ardently advancing —
oblivious to bucks and disregarding birds.
It’s the hare that they’re after —
its crimson prints
lure azure noses
and bait the ordered forward pace
of the great broad and blue padded paws.
In a surprising eloquence,
one predator’s head
rises and sonorously
sounds its disinterest.
“See, then, dreamer, see,
“what evades the lucid wit at dawn.
“The obvious moon is the obvious girl;
“your love is a glaring suggestion —
“as bare-faced and as common
“as a hundred thousand loves that came before — her face
“turning and facing away is as plain
“as a routine moonrise, but we,
“we are the Jungian Shadow.
“And our red hare is your red hare
“And hare for one and all.”
The predator’s head is an arrow —
its broad blue ears angle back
as its blue nose rises and scents.
And its voice is song.
“See then, dreamer, see
“what confounds the heart at noon.
“The stags to which we’re indifferent
“Are the heroes of your childhood.
“The flight of every bird is your every
“moment of loss, but we,
“we are the Jungian Shadow.
“And our red hare is your red hare
“and hare for one and all.”
Then the blue nose dips
to sniff the ground again
in the predator’s diligence. If
this wolf’s tones were physical,
they would be blue tears.
“See then, dreamer, see
“what escapes the brain at day, see,
“Arriving at your reservoir,
“that its pedestrian waters
“though shallow, still may drown
“in existential death, so rather
“hunt at its circumference
“the red of a Collective hope.
“We are the Jungian Shadow.
“And our red hare is your red hare
“and hare for one and all.”
Finally its eyes soften,
running from burning blue cobalt
to the warm sky-blue of hopeful new boyhood summers, and yet,
its sad irises reflect
a distant dancing red:
a spinning flame –a prancing hare.
“See, then, dreamer, see
“what renders your pain as prosaic —
“the racing red flame of the hare.
“It might have tempted Ovid once
“or pained the painters of caves,
“baiting them as their discovered fire
“first turned stone to a nocturnal
“canvas — the clay
“reddened their hands but they
“could only glimpse an inner quarry,
“as you glimpse it, now,
“turning away
“from your minutiae.”
“See, then, dreamer, see.
“See a universal grief
“and a shared catharsis
“rendered in red in your sleep:
“blood red, the color of prey,
“sunset red at end of day,
“flame, the color of pain
“and, yet, created light.
“See, then, dreamer, see.
“Hunt with us and hear our call.
“Our red hare is your red hare
“and hare for one and all.”
— (c) Eric Robert Nolan 2016
Photo credit: By Dennis Cowals, 1945-, Photographer (NARA record: 2196327) (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 