ends with the beginning of a film review
I can’t seem to recall anything much of yesterday. Did some more gardening work at Sarah’s, clearing away the last of the potato vine, and collecting it all and dragging it down to the back of my yard. Made a pasta sauce, with zucchini from my garden, lots of zucchini sprouting at present. Also finally started composting, in a very small way.
I noted that in spite of good pedo work, a definite improvement in general activity, my belly really is hanging out, and sit-ups and Pilates, which I’m really not into currently, need to be a big focus. Sarah kindly tells me I’ve surely lost weight, which the scales don’t corroborate. It probably really does seem so, because my greater air of confidence and energy may make me look slimmer. Perhaps I should do another graph (I’m only doing a pedo graph presently, my sit-ups graph hasn’t really happened) for my weight, as part of a more serious focus on shifting some of my belly flab.
Probably the most interesting activity yesterday was the viewing of Michael Moore’s ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’, which I got out on DVD at the insistence of Sarah. Unfortunately she fell asleep before the end of the film, as often happens, in fact more often than not. It’s strange to me that Sarah insists on watching movies at home rather than at the cinema (I much prefer the cinema), as she’s much more liable to fall asleep while watching them at home, which pains me, even though I understand that she’s not a night-time person, that she might be exhausted after running around after Courtney etc etc. Also there are so many distractions and interruptions at home, the screen isn’t so dominant, you can’t lose yourself in the experience. Cinemas are set up solely for Viewing, like churches for worshipping, organised to so focus the mind. There’s an element of secular ritual about it that’s deeply satisfying. I honestly think that it’s the very lack of ritual in watching a film at home that allows Sarah to tune out, though she would always insist that it’s just through sheer exhaustion.
Fahrenheit 9/11 definitely hits more targets than it misses, though some targets really were unmissable. For example, I think it’d be much harder for any documentarian to present George W as a person of even reasonable intelligence than it would be to present him as what he clearly is, a clueless fool. Much of what Moore covers too is old ground, though not always old to me. The hasty, state-supported flight of the Bin Laden family immediately after the attack, the unseemly focus on Iraq when in fact the Saudis could be argued to be the real harbourers of terrorists, since most of the hijackers were Saudi citizens, the recruiting of the poor and disadvantaged as cannon-fodder in the regime’s foreign wars, the securing of the oil pipeline in Afghanistan, the exploitation of Iraq’s oil, all of these things have been observed before, yet even so the outcry, especially from the media, has been minimal. And Bush is in again. I think Moore’s right in pointing to this regime’s exploitation of fear as being one of the keys to its success, though he largely left out another major element, the simple bible-thumping patriotism so bewildering to the rest of us.
I noted that in spite of good pedo work, a definite improvement in general activity, my belly really is hanging out, and sit-ups and Pilates, which I’m really not into currently, need to be a big focus. Sarah kindly tells me I’ve surely lost weight, which the scales don’t corroborate. It probably really does seem so, because my greater air of confidence and energy may make me look slimmer. Perhaps I should do another graph (I’m only doing a pedo graph presently, my sit-ups graph hasn’t really happened) for my weight, as part of a more serious focus on shifting some of my belly flab.
Probably the most interesting activity yesterday was the viewing of Michael Moore’s ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’, which I got out on DVD at the insistence of Sarah. Unfortunately she fell asleep before the end of the film, as often happens, in fact more often than not. It’s strange to me that Sarah insists on watching movies at home rather than at the cinema (I much prefer the cinema), as she’s much more liable to fall asleep while watching them at home, which pains me, even though I understand that she’s not a night-time person, that she might be exhausted after running around after Courtney etc etc. Also there are so many distractions and interruptions at home, the screen isn’t so dominant, you can’t lose yourself in the experience. Cinemas are set up solely for Viewing, like churches for worshipping, organised to so focus the mind. There’s an element of secular ritual about it that’s deeply satisfying. I honestly think that it’s the very lack of ritual in watching a film at home that allows Sarah to tune out, though she would always insist that it’s just through sheer exhaustion.
Fahrenheit 9/11 definitely hits more targets than it misses, though some targets really were unmissable. For example, I think it’d be much harder for any documentarian to present George W as a person of even reasonable intelligence than it would be to present him as what he clearly is, a clueless fool. Much of what Moore covers too is old ground, though not always old to me. The hasty, state-supported flight of the Bin Laden family immediately after the attack, the unseemly focus on Iraq when in fact the Saudis could be argued to be the real harbourers of terrorists, since most of the hijackers were Saudi citizens, the recruiting of the poor and disadvantaged as cannon-fodder in the regime’s foreign wars, the securing of the oil pipeline in Afghanistan, the exploitation of Iraq’s oil, all of these things have been observed before, yet even so the outcry, especially from the media, has been minimal. And Bush is in again. I think Moore’s right in pointing to this regime’s exploitation of fear as being one of the keys to its success, though he largely left out another major element, the simple bible-thumping patriotism so bewildering to the rest of us.
posted by Stewart at 10:27 pm
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