Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

Today – Today (10 August, 2019) is the 35th Anniversary of the movie called "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension"

What is this movie with such an unwieldy title, you ask?

It’s a:

• Sci-fi spoof
  
• Comic book hero movie parody (for a comic book hero that doesn’t actually exist)
  
• Anti-fascist
  
• Anti-military-industrial-complex
  
• Unabashedly Chaotic Good (with emphasis on chaotic)
  
• An art film
  
• Underrated to an almost criminal degree
  
• FREE on YouTube – Legally free; not a bootleg (~ 102 minutes)

It also saved my relationship with my mother.

Our relationship had always been strong, but after flunking hard out of my Freshman year at university, it was clearly at a tipping point, and it was hard to be around each other in the muggy heat of August without feeling angry, sad, or both at once. It's a testament to my mother's wisdom that she suggested we take a break, go to a movie theater with air conditioning, and see this movie that had just opened and looked interesting. We emerged back into the sunlight with our diaphragms aching from laughing. And from that day forward, whenever things got tense, we'd quote lines to each other to lighten the mood.

We were both convinced at the time that it would rise to the status of Cult Classic on par with “Rocky Horror Picture Show” – that even people who hadn’t actually seen it would at least recognize catchphrases and characters for cosplay and the like. That didn't happen at the time. But maybe it will happen someday.

"Spoilers" below the cut, if you want to call them that. Though I'm of the opinion that the strength of this film has less to do with plot points than it does with execution:

( Why I believe 'The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension' is a wonderful, uplifting, and ultimately Antifa, Political film (an enumerated list): )

These Mother's / Father's Days always make me feel a little bit bitter, because A) they remind me that I no longer have either parent in my life, anymore, B) both my parents were scornful of the Greeting Card Industry's commercialization of parenthood while they were alive, anyway, and C) Google's horrible gender-normative animated "doodles" make me want to "GRAH!"

However, as I was toddling to bed, turning out lights, after midnight (with these thoughts fresh in my mind), something caught my eye, and I found this photo had slipped from between some books on the shelf, probably, and had fallen onto the floor. So I took it As A Sign that maybe I should Celebrate Anyway, because, dammit: Celebrations are Good on Principle! So:

( Happy Father's Day, Everyone!* )


*(If your biological father does not deserve celebrating, for his own sake, celebrate surviving him).

And this time, I'm actually doing stuff about it, not just thinking about it. At the moment, I'm working on adapting this image into something suitable for a mug:


Description: a cartoon image of rabbits -- two normal, with nine "monster, hybrid" rabbits and one rabbit-shaped cloud above a quote attributed to John Steinbeck: "Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."

I'm doing it in two halves -- and plan making both "right-handed" and "left-handed" versions -- so that the normal rabbits would face outward, and the "Crack!fic" bunnies would be staring down the drinker. So I'm rearranging the image to be split horizontally instead of vertically.

I also found this old photo of my mother as a little girl, and it cracks me up, because that outfit is so antithetical to her personality, it's like a meeting of matter and anti-matter, and you can see it in her face:


Description: Old black and white photo of a little girl in a white dress with embroidered bodice, peter-pan collar and puff sleeves. Her dark hair has been curled and parted in the middle. She is fidgeting with her dress and pouting.

I want to give it the caption: "All dressed up... And I don't wanna go!" ... How wrong would it be to put that on a CafePress design for sale?

BTW, I'm thinking of staying away from t-shirts and focusing on mugs, for the most part. Most people I know have a surfeit of shirts, and there aren't many places, honestly, where it's appropriate to wear decorated shirts in public -- not at the workplace, anyway. But the social rules for coffee mugs seem a little bit more lax, as long as they're not rude or crude. And that's not my style anyway.

... Am I right about that, btw?

My father never told many stories about his father (my grandfather).

There was the story about how he worked, in the early years, on the new invention of the telephone, climbing the poles, testing the lines, and how he fell in love with my grandmother when she answered her phone during one of those tests.

There was the tidbit about how he became one of the earliest electrophysicists, and how it was so early in the field, his official title was "Professor of electricity."

There was the maxim, of sorts, that the point of going camping is not to "rough it," but to figure out what you need to be comfortable, and be as efficient as possible so you can carry what you need to where you want to be.

And then, there was this story, which my father told repeatedly, and I will now try to remember:

When Dad was about 10 years old (1937), he went for a walk with his father, who started to tell him about the structure of atoms, and how it seemed like atoms and the solar system had the same structure, but just on a different scale. How all protons, electrons, and neutrons in atoms are identical -- that it's not the stuff that differs from one thing to another, that makes us unique -- it's all in how this stuff is arranged in different patterns.

Dad nodded along, yes, he could see that.

And then, his father asked this question:

---

ASIDE BREAK:
Now, my father's family were, for the most part, Orthodox Friends (Quakers) who were taught that all our actions must be in accord with the Christ (or Light) Within, and that, no doubt, was what was prompting this question from my grandfather.

---

"If we are inside the universe, and there is no way for us to view the system from outside, than how is it possible for us to know whether or not what we are doing is working in harmony with the whole, or working against it?"

Grandfather had no answer, himself, it was just something he was pondering. And he left the question in the air for my father to ponder, too. Personally, I think he was coming up against the boundary between his personal faith, that there is an Light Within, but (maybe) not an external God in charge of setting down the rules, and keeping score for us.

...

So, for eleven years, or so, that question rolled around in my father's head, and then, one night, as he was riding home on the train from his period of duty in the Coast Guard (I think), he looked out the window at the stars, and the answer to that question popped into his head. And it was one of the first things he told his father when he got home:

"We know that we're doing right when what we're doing is fun."

( And that's why finding this vid the other day made me get a bit teary-eyed )

( It wasn't until the last year of his life (it may have been in one of our very last conversations, either over the phone, or literally beside my father's deathbed) that Dad let the shadow-side of this story drop )

And that's why my cousin Toni laughed out loud when the nurse at the hospital asked if father would like to speak to a priest, to administer last rites. "He'd be friendly and polite to the priest," she'd said. "But I think he'd rather talk to a quantum physicist."

But I don't have a camera. And even if I did, my kitties are so black, they'd just show up as vague, shadowy, shapes. So this last week, I made it a special point to draw my impressions of them that would show off their personalities:

Here's Trixie: She doesn't meow much, but she's a great purrer, and she often raises one paw to pull you in, just like a maneke neko kitty:


She's the one who loves to ride on the back of my chair, and she often jumps up there just to peek over my shoulder and see what I'm up to.

And here's her sister, Amanda: She's somewhat shy with her purrs, but she loves to talk (She has also claimed, as her own, the plush Bagpuss that gordon_r_d sent me a while back, doing kneady paws on it almost every night before she curls up in bed with me):

Oif -- looks like it might be one of those days...

First, before I indulge in my own whinging, and since so many of my f'list seem to be having bad, and/or frustrating days, I give you this Cute Overload link to cheer you up:

I'm crawling up your pantleg and you are powerless to stop me*

I ordered pizza delivery last night.** It never showed up. By the time I realized it wasn't going to arrive at all, it was a) after the pizza place had closed for the night, and b) too late to start cooking my own dinner. I got my calories for the evening with a bowl of shredded wheat, soynut butter, and instant mashed potatos with lots of milk.

I don't sleep well, when my tummy is not full. In the half waking, half sleeping state, the feeling / image / phrase came to me that my mind was fluttering around like a bat. And I said, in my mind's voice, to whomever might be listening, that while I like bats, I don't like it when my brain flutters around like one.

I have absolutely no recollection of what I dreamt. But whatever it was, Madonna's song "Material Girl" was stuck in my head from the very moment I woke up. It's still there, over two and a half hours later.

*head desk*

Where did that come from? I don't even like Madonna's music.

---

*ETA: Oh, oh, oh! and the very next entry in Cute Overload was this C. Barsotti cartoon from the New Yorker. C. Barsotti was my dad's favorite New Yorker cartoonist; he'd clip the cartoons out of the magazine and pin them up on the bathroom wall, around the mirror, and stick them on the fridge. One specific one I remember showed a teary-eyed man on a psychologist's couch, and the psychologist (with note pad and pencil) was a dog; the caption read: "Well, I think you're wonderful..."

**A small eggplant pizza with a side order of garlic knots (bread "sticks" rolled into a half hitch before baking, drenched with olive oil, sprinkled with fresh minced garlic, and liberally dusted with dried basil and parmasan cheese). I'll try again tonight. Heck, the check is already made out, and everything...