November 2007 Archives

I was pleased to notice in a photo with the article on Lauritzen Gardens' holiday poinsettia show that the Model Railroad Garden buildings are used, Central High and the Rose Theater amid the bright Christmas flowers.  An even better chance to see them up close.

I was displeased to be reminded of my age by Knocked Up, which had been recommended as very funny by family and had gotten generally good reviews as the best summer comedy (now on Pay Per View/PPV).  Supposedly it showed off Katherine Heigl's real acting talents and made a star of a chubby, curly-headed Seth Rogen.  I knew Heigl best for her being the sister in an alien pair in the sci-fi series, Roswell, though she's more famous now as Dr. Isobel (Izzie) Stevens on Grey's Anatomy, that tedious soap about randy doctors playing musical gurneys.  (And it's true:  we had some of those medical tomcats and their mehitabels in divorce trials, notably a specialist who kept screwing his nurse, who became his next wife, only to lose him to his next nurse, who became his next wife, etc.  It cost him a lot of money, since he was on his fourth, I think, the last I knew, but he just couldn't help himself.)  That's probably why I am not impressed by Dr. McDreamy and the rest of the unzipped.

Anyway, briefly, Knocked Up is this really trashy Hollywood fairy tale about a pretty, ambitious, rising TV star drunkenly having an improbable--well, desperate is more accurate--one-night stand with an overweight, average-looking slacker whose goal is a website for those who want to find by timing every sex/nude scene in every movie (already done, as the movie jokes), but otherwise is content to be unemployed and to get high with his equally moronic friends with IQs somewhere south of, say, 70--average is 100--as when they argue that if the woman's on top, the man's sperm won't rise and impregnate her.  Because, of course, as a result of the one-night stand, Alison Scott (Heigl) finds herself pregnant, inexplicably decides to keep the baby and somehow integrate Sweetly Stupid--uh, Ben Stone (Rogen)--into her upwardly mobile career life, and in a quick jeez-let-me-out-of-this-mess we have the slacker reformed, living neatly on his own, holding a job, forsaking his buddies, marrying the TV star, and the two happily raising their little girl together, all shown in a rapid blurring including future photos of the fairytale trio so the ditwads watching will swallow this swill.

The dialogue definitely dated me, which is why, to repeat myself, I have to flee again back to good ol' Will Shakespeare.  The single line I could remember of what the movie presents as sparkling repartee was "Don't let a vagina hit you on the way out!"  But I find on the IMDb entry a whole page of "Memorable quotes," including the following:  "Fuck me in the beard!"  "Because your face looks like a vagina," "Steely Dan can gargle my balls," as well as the outrageous tirade Heigl throws in overaged brattiness and Me Generation (MyFace) egoism at a doorman with that frequent favorite F word, including, "You're a doorman, doorman, doorman, doorman, doorman, so . . . Fuck you!  You fucking fag with your fucking little faggy gloves."  Granted, there are a few mild drolleries amid the obscenities:  "Marriage is like a tense unfunny version of Everybody Loves Raymond, only it doesn't last 22 minutes.  It lasts forever."  But if you think I've misrepresented the page, you're welcome to read them all yourself.  "Memorable Quotes, Uh-Huh."

How about some genuinely memorable quotes, decided by the ages?  "I am sick at heart."  "Not a mouse stirring." "A little more than kin, and less than kind."  O! that this too too solid flesh would melt."  "Frailty, thy name is woman."  "I shall not look upon his like again."  "Neither a borrower, nor a lender be . . . This above all:  to thine own self be true,/And it must follow, as the night the day,/Thou canst not then be false to any man."  "It is a custom/More honor'd in the breach than the observance."  "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."  "Murder most foul."  "Leave her to heaven."  "The time is out of joint; O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!"  "Brevity is the soul of wit."  "Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't."  "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."  "More matter, with less art."  "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."  "When sorrows come, they come not single spies,/But in battalions."  "Sweets to the sweet, farewell!"  "There's a divinity that shapes our ends,/rough-hew them how we will."  "A hit, a very palpable hit."  "The rest is silence." 

After checking the thudding vulgarities ("Memorable quotes") of Knocked Up, consider instead this typical exchange with its wordplay, between Hamlet and his mother, dependent upon Hamlet's anger that his mother has married his uncle very soon after his uncle murdered Hamlet's father to become king, becoming Hamlet's step-father.  As we aged know, the play rests on Hamlet's learning of that murder through his father's ghost at the beginning of the play and deciding whether to make it public and take revenge.

HAMLET:  Now, mother, what's the matter?  QUEEN GERTRUDE:  Hamlet, thou hast thy father [Hamlet's uncle-stepfather] much offended.  HAMLET:  Mother, you have my father {his real father]  much offended.  QUEEN GERTRUDE:  Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.  HAMLET:  Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.

Sometimes I am downright overjoyed to be old.

I didn't add this entry chronologically.  This was a quick stop on the way back from Wildlife Safari, due to my architectural interest.  This building sits on the brow of a hill to the east overlooking I-80, a bit north from the Platte River bridges, considered about the mid point between Omaha and Lincoln.  It will be easier to get to once a new viaduct and roadway are completed, now in progress, though it's certainly not difficult to reach.  Where I-80 passes between the Nebraska Crossing outlet stores and a large truck stop, get off eastbound and drive south of the truck stop two miles, then one mile west on a gravel road, to the narrow entrance to a small paved parking lot.  The visitors center, as it were, is a Greek cross--that's a + (plus sign)--covered with the prairie, in effect underground, though it's to avoid distracting from the bucolic site/sight of the striking chapel.  It has offices, brochures, photos, some kind of library.  I simply walked through it, turning north to the outdoors again, following the small water channel cut in the sidewalk the short distance to the shrine.  

This is what it looks like from the east, on the gravel road.  Obviously, the shape has rustic reference to granaries and barns.

Seen from the slope above the parking lot, the shrine shows off its stylized adaptation with wood and glass.  Left center in the background is Interstate 80 and rest stop to the west, below the shrine's hilltop vantage point.                                                                                                                                                                 

Whenever I'm feeling old, I like to stare at my Sago palm bonsai from Calyx & Corolla, not a palm but a cycad (Sycas revoluta) from a family alleged to date back 380 million years, with some controversial cousins even earlier.  When I think of cycads today, I think of New Zealand and series like Xena Warrior Princess, Beastmaster, or Hercules (with Kevin Sorbo), filmed there where cycads are commonly in the forest backgrounds.  Supposedly my plant is difficult and touchy, which seems strange for something with that ancestry.  Contrary to instructions, once a week, when I notice it is dry, I set it under a slow-dripping faucet and remove it only when the pineapple-like body and the planting compound are wet, when it goes back to its preferred sunny spot.  I do try to occasionally mist it along with my two troughs of Spathiphyllum or peace lily.  I'm always happy to see the much larger specimens, one quite huge, at Lauritzen Gardens Visitors Center.   Already mine has grown four much larger fronds above the three original fronds just developing when I received it.  Green consolation.

This is the Mama Bear size in the Lauritzen in the hallway through to the gardens out north.

And this is the Papa Bear size next to one of the handsome Mission style benches, which indicates, I hope, what mine might someday become with continued TLC.

I've various reasons for feeling too old, one being showing a Luckert family scrapbook to my youngest nephew, a college junior, who'd done a paper on his great grandfather this term.  It was only too clear that all the faces of my childhood were ghosts to him, difficult to relate to or keep straight.  That's not strange, inasmuch as most of them are dead.  After all, I don't remember the people he grew up with or lives with daily because I don't see them any more than he does our few remaining long-distance relatives.  Out of sight, out of mind works even for the living, as anyone who retires from the courthouse learns.  (You can't go home again, and you can't go back to work again.)  I've had the light shock before when I realized people in my home area under the age of, say, 40 or even 50 no longer remember Dad's hunting and fishing or Mom's singing, though I stoically know that memory chasm occurs every third generation.  It's just that it doesn't seem so long ago that we were taking Grandpa Luckert down to Aunt Lizzie's for Christmas or having family picnics with cousins now mostly in the Bloomfield cemetery, and the very young children in the photos are now grandparents.  It also means those who care about their families should be more attentive to their elderly and record their aging grandparents' and parents' memories while they can and keep their children aware of their roots.  I had yet other friends at a recent funeral of one of Center's widows do the "Yes, we should.  Yes, we meant to get around to that but never did."  With today's technology that is not even as difficult as putting old photos in scrapbooks.

We are not cycads, and, of course, I know how short a time I'll take to sink out of memory and be another photographic ghost, not having children.  But that's being part of the earth cycle, and, for right now, I'm more like this live tank below.  I was just thinking how lonely zoo animals must be--but they're alive, as I am.  As remarked frequently, for now it beats the alternative.

Monday afternoon it was in the low 70s at the zoo.  We had our first snow yesterday morning, all morning.  Tonight, Thanksgiving, it's 18 outside after a sunny, cold day.  The kind of roller-coaster weather that makes life hard to plan for and consequently interesting.  Just because it's so cold out, I'll include one of my Lied Jungle photos to warm to my entry.

Like the Desert Dome, the Lied Jungle is tripartite, based on jungles in Asia, Africa, and South America, "the world's largest indoor rain forest," about eight stories high, with trails on two levels past waterfalls.  This particular photo has three (?) blue monkeys in a fake tree, though all the greenery is real, actually a huge plant collection besides the birds and animals.

When I wrote about the contemporary Australian Macbeth, I neglected to mention that my kitchen cooking that afternoon had been, coincidentally, to Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the 1934 opera, initially a huge success, that sent Stalin storming off, with governmental condemnation so strong that the composer feared for his life.  I happen to like the score, much of it sounding like dramatic film music, though it's more like Madame Bovary than Lady Macbeth in that Emma Bovary and Katerina Izmailova are not the aggressively ambitious wife so much as bored middle-class wives with wealthy older husbands, who want younger sexier men, and are doomed when they get them.  The Russian Lady Macbeth does commit two murders, her father-in-law and her husband, aided and abetted by the young stud who becomes her second husband and then faithlessly abandons her, though Katerina has her revenge on the new trophy girlfriend at the finale.  So sometimes the variation on a theme isn't really one.

Actually, Macbeth has been gory before all the Australian gangland shootouts.  Kept to historical Scottish context, Roman Polanski's 1971 version has Lady Macbeth do her sleepwalking scene nude ("Out, out, damned spot") and at the climax has Macbeth beheaded, the head then rolled down a stairs directly at the shocked viewer.  One of the best modern productions is only in small bits seen in the fine Canadian series about a theatrical troupe, Slings & Arrows, starring Paul Gross, who was the out-of-place Canadian Mountie with the splendid husky helping Chicago police in the Due South series.  That version of Macbeth is set in World War II, with a banquet at which Banquo's ghost is imagined in an empty chair, and climaxes in thrilling swordplay, that clanging of broadswords how a good local Brigit St. Brigit production here last year charged up and down the aisles to spectators' delight.

The most impressive, most memorable reinterpretation is Kurosawa's 1957 Kumonosu jo, known here as Throne of Blood, sometimes rated his best, supposedly T.S. Eliot's favorite film, a necessity for anyone interested in Shakespeare. Kurosawa did brilliant Shakespearean movies, including his versions of Hamlet (The Bad Sleep Well) and King Lear (Ran), though he is better known to the American public for The Seven Samurai (turned into the American version as The Magnificent Seven); Rashomon  (the mediocre American version titled The Outrage), which I rank with The Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood as his top three; Yojimbo (which became the spaghetti western, A Fistful of Dollars);  and The Hidden Fortress, said to be George Lucas' inspiration for Star Wars.

Just one bit of his Macbeth-Throne of Blood artistry:  the prophecy of Macbeth's doom is predicated on the third witch's prophecy in the famous "Double, double, toil and trouble" scene:  "Macbeth shall never vanquished be until/Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill/Shall come against him," to which Macbeth replies, "That will never be.  Who can impress [forcibly make] the forest, bid the tree/Unfix his earth-bound root?"  But, of course, a messenger comes with that very news, and then the next scene notes that Macbeth's foes enter "and their army with boughs," "Your leafy screens" obviously trees cut down for camouflage.  In Kurosawa's samurai version, suddenly Macbeth's castle is besieged by wildly fluttering birds.  Why?  Because Birnam Wood has been cut down, and the birds need new roosting sites.  How cool is that.

The wind chill is now 33, but yesterday was a sunny 73--actually higher on some thermometers--so I went to the zoo and nearly did my knees in.  I hadn't yet photographed the Lied Jungle or the Desert Dome and managed both and more.  That's how I'm able to show the signature original for the model in the last photo of the previous entry, as noted, "the world's largest glazed geodesic dome"--it's acrylic--over "the world's largest indoor desert," which has probably been surpassed somewhere now as other zoos have been catching up to what the Reader's Digest named the best American zoo in 2004.  Three different kinds of acrylic panels warm it, cool it, let in sunlight.

A visit to the zoo's website will explain the dome is 13 stories tall, covers over an acre, and sits on top of "the world's largest nocturnal exhibit," the Kingdoms of the Night, in its dark basement.  The central "mountain" is 55' high, centered over three deserts, the Namib, the Australian Red (think of Ayers Rock), and the Sonoran.  The black ball at the photo right is a stone global map supported and slowly turned by a large water jet in the summer.

"Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness!/Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun"--John Keats, "Ode to Autumn"

"October its brilliance/In its arms/the condemned leaves/the obsession/with dying beautifully"--Claire Malroux, "In October," trans. Marilyn Hacker

"Oh!  l'automne l'automne a fait mourir l'ete/Dans le brouillard s'en vont deux silhouettes grises"  "Oh the autumn the autumn has been the death of summer/In the mist there are two gray shapes receding"--Guillaume Apollinaire, "Automne," trans. W.S. Merwin 

"Automne malade et adore/Tu mourras quand l'ouragan soufflera dans les roseraies/Quand il aura neige/Dans les vergers"  "Adored, invalid autumn, you will/die when the hurricane/blows in the rose/parks, when the snow will have come/among orchards"--Guillaume Apollinaire, "Automne Malade," trans. Paul Blackburn

"Now, when the wind rises/I am prompted to turn my head/And listen to you, leaf,/As you quiver on your twig."--Shu Ting, "Maple Leaf," trans. Carolyn Kizer

"Tanned towheaded surfer slouched across/the hills mellowed, mindlessly grinning his winning/ways in brashly bright rags he drops/in sloppy housekeeping, headed for dreamy bed."--GDL, "Seasonings--Verse 4"

"Topaz amber gold/lemon honey ochre bronze/orange sunflower pumpkin

Crimson scarlet flame/maroon vermilion oxblood/russet madder beige

Mushroom chestnut dun/copper sepia umber/cinnamon tawny

Silver pearly taupe/charcoal sable ebony/pewter lead steel soot

Surging autumn's leave/bleeding life into chilling/hills mutely misty."  GDL, "Leave-taking"

These are the real reasons I go to Wildlife Safari, Canis lupus, the grey wolf, the progenitor for all our dog species, Canis lupus familiaris.  Handsome, very wary, ferociously intelligent, and fiercely physical, the wolf has been one of mankind's favorite villains, even more than his smaller brothers, the slyly cunning coyote and fox.  (The family also includes jackals and various wild dogs, such as the Australian dingoes or Asian dholes.)  From "Little Red Riding Hood" to Lon Chaney's 1941 The Wolf Man and all subsequent werewolf movies like The Howling series or even Charmed TV episodes, we've persecuted unfairly the animal Farly Mowat discovered in the quasi-documentary, the 1981 Oscar-nominated Never Cry Wolf, to the extent--against ranchers' protests--that we have re-introduced these valuable animals in wilderness areas.  I give short shrift to horror movies, generally finding them inexcusably perpetuating false stereotypes, superstitions, and ugly violence; but one I've watched at least 15 times is the award-winning 1981 Wolfen, with its fascinating photographic technique--for its time--of making the spectator one of the infrared or heat-seeing predators of the title, starring Albert Finney as a New York detective, with Edward James Olmos as a Native American shapeshifter and some of the most beautiful wolves I've ever seen. 

Anyway, having always had dogs growing up, I also have lots of wolf paraphernalia given to me by the family over the years, always have at least one wolf calendar, and, of course, own several books about wolves. 

Wolf Canyon is really just a small ravine, with the steepest side to the east covered with trees and shrubbery.  One of the few areas where people are allowed out of their cars to walk to, the first-front enclosure is for black bears with a wolf or two, but the day I was there, the bears were in at the Doorly Zoo having their physicals.  Since last year a new boardwalk viewing platform has been installed over the juncture of the bears' pen and the wolf pack's area.  Last year there were 13 wolves, but I heard a ranger docent tell a group of schoolchildren that some of the wolves had died.  If one walks north around the end of the wolf ravine and back along the steep hillside, he has more proximity to the wolves, as illustrated in these three smaller photos.  Clanging from the feeding-time process and a noisy crowd had three wolves nervously loping in a loop (a bad pun: the French loup, pronounced loo, means "wolf"), passing me every five or ten minutes in their circuit.  This is the area where, earlier in the summer, parental stupidity allowed a four-year-old to go past the wooden barrier and stick his fingers through the wire mesh, but the "nice doggy" was a wild animal and bit some off.  Gee, what a surprise. 

Later, on the new viewing deck, I had no fence between us, catching one coming down the western side and standing on the large rock.

While still on the viewing platform, I looked back up the hillside to the east, where I had been so close, and caught the one below checking me out.

This happens to be the last weekend for the Wildlife Safari, about halfway between Omaha and Lincoln, just south of the Platte, east of Interstate 80 across from the extremely popular Mahoney State Park and Strategic Air and Space Museum, once at Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue.  I went a few weeks ago because every autumn I like to see and hear the huge elks bugling in rut, an unforgettable sound like that of the sandhill cranes also in residence--or, for that matter, wolf howls, though I have never heard the wolf pack there make any sounds.

This amounts to a small, hilly, drive-through reserve with all native animals, including a circular enclosure by the visitors center with the larger predatory birds, a pair of well-worn bald eagles and a trio of red-tailed hawks, plus some small animals, the center with various common snakes in terrariums among the souvenirs.  I've always been a kind of amateur birder, not the sort to keep notebooks and lists or sit for hours waiting for a rarity but still on the lookout, and I've had some very unusual experiences for later telling.

On this fine day, after the initial elk and deer pasture, on the wetlands pond swam a small flock of American white pelicans, one of the oldest of the world's birds and the subject of Dad's favorite limerick.  (I think it was the only one he could remember, and, as a hunter who'd seen plenty of them, he was always tickled to recite it.)  "A wonderful bird is the pelican,/His mouth can hold more than his belly can,/He can hold in his beak,/Enough food for a week!/I'm damned if I know how the hell he can!"  According to a pelican website, that famous limerick dates from 1910, written by a Southern newspaper editor, Dixon Lanier Merritt.  It refers to the elasticized bottom pouch of the huge beak, the longest in the bird world, that stretches to fill with fish and other food.