Observables #32

on art films, mundane lists and my outward ostrich

Films, people. Films! Of course, we also watched many episodes of Abbot Elementary, which made great family day viewing and my sister laughed out loud, but let’s get back to the films.

I told the family that this weekend I needed to input something more artful. I was dying inside from too many runs of Encanto (even though I cry everytime) and The Hustle. Something was happening to me that wasn’t good—like the possibility that I was turning globular—just a mess of orb beads instead of brains and life. It was possible I couldn’t even sit through an art film. Lately, when I sit down to write I have to set a 30 minute timer in order to stay focused and keep myself from checking my phone or email. And I’m not always successful. You see how dire it is.

So, we sent the children along their merry way and watched The Power of the Dog by writer/director Jane Campion. Hark! My film spirit is rejuvenated. I loved the subtlety and its slow pace, along with the story twists and the female gaze directed at men’s sexuality. Plus, we all made it through without checking our phones.

We also made use of my subscription to the Criterion Channel and watched half of Happy Hour by Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, which is five hours long! Oh, to have that kind of confidence: I’m writing an epic. The slow pace of this film challenged us at first but then we settled in—some of us more than others. Simon had to tell Elsie about it:

“You know how in a movie, if there’s an event or workshop, normally they skip to the end? In this movie they showed the WHOLE workshop. All 30 minutes of it!

Cue peals of laughter from both of them.

I, on the other hand, was reminded of how much I like watching life when nothing happens.

Speaking of which. . . A Ghost In The Throat by Irish writer Doireann Ni Ghriofa. The prose is beautiful, but so is the protagonist, whose life is made up of her obsessive research on a dead female poet, but also her constant mothering tasks—which she likes to list. For many years I was ashamed of the tasks that made up mothering because they seemed too boring. Pack snacks, play with hamster stuffie, pick up noodles, offer up breast. But this character loves her lists. . . thinking about her tasks, crossing them off her list and then rewriting them the next day. In some ways the book is a celebration of the mundane! Which is something I am trying to do here. Tell me your boring list—it would be my lullaby.

A bruise on my left shin due to our farm couch wars! With a little gin in my system, I decided to press pause on our show and run downstairs to get the beanbag chair. Obviously channeling my inner gazelle. But as I was bringing up the bulking beanbag through the passage of our ungodly (narrow) stairwell, I knocked a photograph off the wall, ramming my shin in the process. It’s miraculous the picture didn’t hit me in the face. Possibly it ricocheted off the beanbag chair. I tried to use this incident as a teaching moment for Violet later in the weekend when she came running to me crying:

But at least you didn’t catapult a bean bag chair up the stairs sending a picture flying into a thousand pieces and then you hit your leg so hard you had to ice it with a pack of peas. Imagine the embarrassment of all that, Viva! My inner gazelle colliding with my outward ostrich for all the world to see.

True!

She was fine after that.

This week on Sister On! we do a check in on our Episode 11 life questions. Also, we recorded it at 7:30 a.m. Happy hour!

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