Spike is Best

Down with Feb and the Dark Ages!

Hooray March and the realization that your winter coat is getting a little too warm!

In the middle of January I stopped at the bottle depot with returns and there I saw a forsythia in bloom.

There it was, in the middle of January in yellow blooms, and I thought to myself, "Well now, that sure as hell doesn't look like Global Cooling to me!"

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I am so happy Pope Francis is visiting Japan this year. The bulk of my youtube viewing over the past several months has been Japanology stuff, bonsai, carving up of various fishes, all the amazing art and craftwork, stuff they do so well it's just completely out of left field. Like one film I watched on how they make charcoal. The sound the charcoal made when they clinked it - it was like the sound of metal it was so pure.

It is unfortunate that the western experience of Japan was initiated by effeminate prints exported in the 19 century, which sort of dictated what the aesthetic of Japan was, which it isn't. And it is not perfectionism that defines them, but attention. With attention is life and virility.

Japan is also very Laudato Si. There's something about the fact that they are the one country to have been attacked with nuclear arms, and also the problem of Fukushima.

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Oh look, the Fascists are here to claim Western Civilization and teach you about the Edenic Paradise that existed before the Fall that is the Enlightenment. Huh, imagine that.

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Been listening to a series of lectures while driving and at one point the prof repeats that stale chestnut about how "Jesus wasn't nice." And I'm thinking to myself, "What in the hell are you actually saying? That Jesus was a jerk?"

I am so tired of these blasé half-baked Fascistic pyrite turds that get passed around in Catholic circles like the common cold.

Remember when Fr. Corapi would say that O.L. "wears army boots"?

Right.

And St. Lawrence said turn me over, I'm done on this side.

Yeah. Not likely.

And St. Paul was "knocked off his horse."

Wasn't on a horse. Nor was he metaphorically "knocked off his horse" - as in his "high horse". This gives very short shrift to Christ's powerful revelation, powerful in mercy, and to the full weight of Paul's conversion, Paul who said, "Who are you, Lord?"

That and the fact that he was standing on his feet and fell down has in it the true drama of that instantaneous conversion. He fell down. He fell down prostrate, or on his knees. He wasn't "slain in the spirit".

But good luck with all that I guess.

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Speaking of February, the television networks were doing their due diligence to show Groundhog Day end to end as a repeating marathon the same day of that superstitious observation, so I watched it when visiting my sister and brother-in-law while dinner was being prepared.

The last time seeing the film was long ago, and I remember sort of disliking it, but not totally disliking it, when it first came out. But I was an adolescent then, and Groundhog Day is, for all its screwball lightheartedness, a film only adults can really appreciate. There are quite a number of nuances and nods I recognized in the most recent viewing that had me enjoying the film.

I'm sure thousands of sophomoric essays have been written about the film, and I have no interest in reading them. Murray's character Phil, certainly goes through the gamut of the seven deadly sins before trying to escape - that is, seek redemption. I was taken not so much with the enormous number of good deeds that Phil builds up to, but the keen level of attention and timing, down to the second, that this demands. I think the words of Ned the insurance salesman are key in this regard: "We-eh-eh-ellll! Watch that first step - it's a dooooo-zy!"

Ned is actually the key to Phil's redemption. He is the one character Phil dislikes the most and wants to get away from the most. So obviously Ned is there telling Phil the way out: "We-eh-eh-ellll! Watch that first step - it's a dooooo-zy!"

Exactly. Watch that first step - it's a doozy. It's the first step that Phil must realize. The first step is adventure.

But thinking about the film afterwards I realized that the premise cannot stand without all the characters in the film becoming in some way unreal. They become only objects for the aim of Phil to finally get it right. He can hit them, insult them, seduce them, steal from them, whatever, without any temporal consequences (beyond the one day), so even his seeking redemption is self-centered. Of course, the premise is just that - a premise, a screwball comedy: let's set it up and see where it goes. Still, it's certainly not a reflection of Christian redemption, or the Christian understanding of the eternal and temporal consequences of sin. For the film doesn't even have the temporal consequences.

Still, this very reduction of others, and oneself, to unreality, is the very picture of sin and what it does. Interesting that one of the selfless things that Phil comes to doing that makes for his redemption is the making of art.

What is perhaps an unintended hang-up of the premise of Groundhog Day is a deliberate and conscious point in Tarkovsky's Solaris. Our unrepentance makes us the center of the universe, which is a lie, and because of this, even our loved ones become merely our consciousness of them. We do not actually love. Our failures of attending to someone's reality becomes the "reality" we live, repetitiously - and this is hell. And we are doomed to the repetition in the very effort we make to expunge ourselves of it.

Groundhog Day makes that going back again and again an actual what-if reality scenario. It's a screwball comedy.

Solaris is much more truthful: you can't go back. Going back is precisely the doom of hellish repetition in which no one is real, including yourself, when you do not accept what you have done and what you have failed to do, and repent before your father. This is shown frankly, boldly, yet not preachingly, in the film's final shot, which is clearly reminiscent of Rembrandt's The Prodigal Son.

Yet to repent is to turn back, or turn around, or simply to turn. What is this paradox? Unless you turn back and be converted, you will be doomed to eternally revisit your sins and folly. Unless you turn back, you cannot go forward.

Another memorable film that belongs in the same arena as Groundhog Day and Solaris is Scorsese's After Hours. This is a dark comedy not as lighthearted in touch the way Groundhog Day is, but it is light in touch for a Scorcese film. Almost two decades now since viewing it, and I still remember the nightmarish slant Scorcese is able to give to certain mundane details, such as a set of keys dropping down from an apartment window like the approach of a train, and the equally unstoppable horror of an overrunning toilet.

Like Phil, Paul cannot escape from his own nightmare predicament, which is downtown New York late into the night, without any fare to get back, being pursued by a mob, and met at every turn with some new obstacle to prevent his ever getting back to his home and work, until he gives himself to the point of forgetting himself.

In his case, this means putting his last bit of money into a jukebox and slow dancing with a lonely woman in a seedy bar at something like 4 o'clock in the morning. Only when he has done this, giving up all his efforts to get out, does June, the woman he has danced with, encase him in a full body plaster cast, which hardens. He gets taken by the mob that has been searching for him, and ends up rolling out of the back of their van, whereupon the body cast shatters, and he stands up on the stairs of his workplace with the rising of the sun. A new day. A new man.

Three films that would make for an interesting marathon viewing.

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Today's Communist denies Communism of the past.

Says it wasn't real Communism, or it wasn't Communist enough.

Today's Fascist appropriates Fascism of the past.

Gives a slight dismissive smirk and says I'm not that caricature of the past.

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Each according to their kind.