May 12, 2011

Ethernet blasted by the storm. Surprising how helpless I feel with the accustomed access to the outside world. Replacement was an ordeal of unplugging this and plugging that in the exact esoteric order. The tower of rage over my head punctured the roof.

The blue house up the street lost at least a corner to the falling of a tree. The offenders seem to be pines, that a stiff wind will haul up by the roots. I eye my two huge and one little pine suspiciously. One leans over DJ’s roof as if picking its moment.

Threw a few pieces of past-its-prime fried chicken into the yard for the crows. One piece anyway the crows did not get; a squirrel did. It was disturbing to watch a squirrel with a chicken leg in its jaws, nibbling away. Maybe we catch the squirrels at a juncture in their evolution, some clinging to the paths of nuts and berries, others veering off into the life of hunters. For anyone with a suburban yard the idea of squirrels in every niche is not a stretch.

Close evening, between rain and not rain.

My Netflix selections lately have been Hollywood musicals with Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Mickey Rooney, and the like. It was Babes in Arms last night. The night before DJ and I had gone to the movies to see Thor. Thor and Babes in Arms are essentially the same movie, filling the same role in the lives of their audiences, equally preposterous, equally escapist, their imaginative extravagances very telling of their times. The Garland-Rooney musical assumes a conspiracy of government and circumstance which can be overcome by strengths drawn from within the characters themselves. When all goes to hell, do a show, and your will that it should will make everything turn out all right. Thor assumes a conspiracy of government and circumstance which must be overcome by a super-powered outsider, one somehow free of the constraints that weigh down other men. I suppose that makes us sadder than Judy’s public, with a learned helplessness and sense of despair at injustices which can be overcome only by a god.

Mickey and Judy’s backyard production is a minstrel show, with everyone in blackface. I suppose it was more innocent in vaudeville times. Judy’s in Aunt Jemima blackface, too, except for a later scene when she returns with subtler makeup, so that she looks like an actual black person, even Lena Horne, which, in the allusive and name dropping mood of things, might have been intentional. Everyone else was still in coon blackface but that one woman, darkened up Judy, who looked natural and beautiful. I suppose this was part of a kind of code now lost, from a time whose understanding of color was more public and more subtle. But even considering one movie was about the gods of Asgard, Judy made up as a natural black person amid the actors in blackface was the single strangest thing I had seen in two nights at the movies.