The Best Movie of 2009

We sort of wanted to end this solar circuit with a ten best list or two. But 2008 stands alone as the only year in history without ten best things in any category. Six at most. Worse, the ever-popular Ten Best Movies list proved impossible to compile because 2008 saw the release of not even the minimum of two good movies needed to make a list.

So, we must skip ahead to 2009, which has already given us the Best Movie of the Year:

The Best Movie of 2009 is Hotel for Dogs. The title refers to an animal refuge and is not, as you might have thought, yet another disparaging Islamic term for the United States. Hotel for Dogs will be available to the hoi polloi no sooner than January 16th. As one of those polloi, I haven’t been allowed in to any advance screenings, but I still declare it Best Movie of 2009 because I have faith in Thor.

That is, Thor Freudenthal, the Germanic director. Faith also in the leads, Emma Robert and Jake Austin, who, in their capacity as professional actors, pretend to be a couple of kids who rescue stray dogs and house them in an abandoned hotel. In the picture above, the white dog under the toe of the photographer’s right bicycle shoe is a rough-coated Jack Russell Terrier named Friday. The Beauceron under the left toe answers to the name Henry.

It’s sort of a shame 2009 peaked so earlier. The prospect of eleven months of inferior movies following Hotel for Dogs chills the heart. True, we can always fill our idle hours with the Joy of Reading, but the Best Book (adult fiction category) of 2009, Dog On It: a Chet and Bernie Mystery, by Spencer Quinn, will come out in February. That still leaves ten months of undistinguished entertainment. No escapism to ease our impending slide into barbarism. Maybe as society crumbles throughout the year and a new Dark Ages settles in and people reorganize their embattled lives around tribal leaders, there will arise a new breed of itinerant entertainer, wandering from armed camp to armed camp, bringing news in the form of rhymes, riddles and songs; bringing dance, juggling, acrobatics, much-needed merriment, and perhaps a little barter on the side. Maybe we will soon be offering you a list of the Ten Best Troubabours of 2009.

Dog on It, A Chet and Bernie Mystery By Spencer Quinn
(Atria Books, Hardcover, 305pp.)

HAPPY LAST DAY OF 2008!

The Winter of Oughty-Eight

Many readers have expressed anxiety over the condition — even the fate — of the innocent fire hydrant who was knocked down by the thirst-crazed driver last summer near the intersection of Fallbrook Avenue and Vanowen Street in West Hills, California. We talked about the event here: HOWGREATWASHISFALL!

The purpose of this short update post is to set your hearts at ease and your minds at rest. Here is the scene as it appears today:

See? All is well. Pointing Hand indicates where the little yellow fellow stands. He’s back in the same old spot thinking the same old thoughts. He is touched by your concern and wishes you all a very happy New Year’s Day.

Tinned Can

As the planet Earth takes a deep breath and gets psyched up for one more circuit of its favorite star, we dwellers thereon grasp at any straw of comfort or encouragement, finding a word of uplift in the canopic jar of poetry left behind by the bard Edgar Guest.

Perhaps you look aghast at your ambitions for the near future, not waiting for abject failure to prompt the lament “What was I thinking?” but already stricken with doubt you cry out “What AM I thinking?” Tut-tut. You need a dose of ATTAPERSON! A cheerful slap on the back and a spine-stiffening, “You go, girl-boy!”

That’s where Edgar Guest comes in. Take heart from his great Can Do poem (edited so gals won’t feel left out of all the fun) ironically entitled “Can’t.” Give it lodgement in your brain!

Can’t
by Edgar Guest
from his collection A Heap o’ Livin’ (1916)

Can’t is the worst word that’s written or spoken;
Doing more harm here than slander and lies;
On it is many a strong spirit broken,
And with it many a good purpose dies.
It springs from the lips of the thoughtless each morning
And robs us of courage we need through the day;
It rings in our ears like a timely sent warning
And laughs when we falter and fall by the way.

Can’t is the father [also the mother] of feeble endeavor,
The parent of terror and halfhearted work;
It weakens the efforts of artisans clever,
And makes of the toiler an indolent shirk.
It poisons the soul of the man with a vision [or grande dame with a pigeon],
It stifles in infancy many a plan [or email];
It greets honest toiling with open derision
And mocks at the hopes and the dreams of a man [or female].

Can’t is a word none should speak without blushing;
To utter it should be a symbol of shame;
Ambition and courage it daily is crushing;
It blights a man’s [or woman's] purpose and shortens his [or her] aim.
Despise it with all of your hatred of error;
Refuse it the lodgement it seeks in your brain;
Arm against it as a creature of terror,
And all that you dream of you someday shall gain.

Can’t is the word that is foe to ambition
An enemy ambushed to shatter your will;
Its prey is forever the man [hominid] with a mission
And bows but to courage and patience and skill.
Hate it, with hatred that’s deep and undying,
For once it is welcomed ’twill break any man [or lady];
Whatever the goal you are seeking, keep trying
And answer this demon by saying: “I can. [O, baby!]“

Awright! I for one am ready to roll up my sleeves and locate a vein.

HAPPY SECOND TO THE LAST DAY OF 2008

Kyouk and Gobble, Revisited

We have looked in on James Whitcomb Riley, aka The Hoosier Poet, at least once before here in these eternally scrolling pages, but a glimpse or two hardly exhausts the fund of his wisdom. No, it would take many, many glimpses to achieve exhaustion.

Come, fetch the kerosene lamp and accompany me as I root around in the cellar where his poetry is kept in mouldering bankers’ boxes. Help me select something from his vast ouevre that will be suitable for the impending New Year, a year aeons in preparation and now, at last, almost ready to present itself for our delight… or for our doom.

Whoah! How about this quaint little offering? Here we find THP waxing nostalgic as he smokes and takes…

A BACKWARD LOOK

As I sat smoking, alone, yesterday,
And lazily leaning back in my chair,
Enjoying myself in a general way–
Allowing my thoughts a holiday
From weariness, toil and care,–
My fancies–doubtless, for ventilation–
Left ajar the gates of my mind,–
And Memory, seeing the situation,
Slipped out in the street of “Auld Lang Syne.”–

[Memories of the one-room schoolhouse, the ol’ swimmin’ hole, and so on, elided. He winds up...]

When life went so like a dreamy rhyme,
That it seems to me now that then
The world was having a jollier time
Than it ever will have again.

Wow. Ain’t it the truth?

Happy Third to the Last Day of 2008

The Hammer Box of Art

We went to the Hammer Museum yesterday. It’s yet another L.A. art spot. You can go there, too, if you feel like it. But you have to go just north of Wilshire Blvd and about half a mile east of the 405 Freeway, because that’s where it is.

Armand Hammer, a happy rich guy and art buyer and friend of Kruschev, has laid his collection of paintings and drawings before the feet of the public in the museum named after him. The collection — in which you will find treats from Rembrandt, Sgt. John Singer, Vuillard, Redon, Vincent “Van” Gogh, Gustave Moreau, Manet (“I am not Monet”), Monet (“I am not Manet”), Rubens, Eakins, Renoir and, gosh, the whole gang — reflects the collector’s outgoing personality. Lots of charm on display in the portion of the Hammer Museum wherein Mr. Hammer’s purchases are hung.

Unfortunately, Mr. Hammer left his bequest to UCLA. The dead hand of Institution of Higher Education is everywhere evident in the museum, from the cold austere exterior, to the boxy, loveless central wasteland of an atrium. The employees of the Hammer have perfected that impersonal mien just one tiny angstrom beyond rude that brought back fond memories of the collectivist (“If we do it for you we have to do it for everybody”) spirit of college deans.

Armand Hammer bought art because he loved it. You feel it in the two or three galleries that keep his personality carefully quarantined from the rest of the building. Quarantined? Well we can’t hide them altogether — he paid the bill, after all — but, we wouldn’t want to infect Academe with something as uncontrollable as humanity, now would we?

What — besides howling winds and shrivelled bamboo — fills that massive pale cube? Art-school rubbish: irony, safely transgressive boredom, stale food, empty paper cups, political correctness, multi-culti detritus, dust, despair, nullity. Also some backlit panels from Billy Wilder movies. To the left we see Barbara Stanwyck corrupting the young, impressionable Fred MacMurray.

The Summer of Oughty-eight

Let’s take a trip back in time. Come with me to the mean streets of Los Angeles in July of 2008 — not even half a year ago:

Here we see the funtime aftermath of a car having boinged into a fire hydrant. It was just standing there, whistling a tune, on Fallbrook north of Victory when an automobile-driver, mad with thirst, rammed it. The hydrant fell right over, unconcious, and from the exact spot where he had loitered there shot a geyser.

Laughing men and women from all around, even laughing fishermen from the shoals of Nova Scotia wearing their nor’easters, gathered gladly in the cooling shower, grateful to soothe their parched lips and throats, so hot was it that summer’s day.

Why are we time-travelling in this way? I’ll tell you why! Look at the price of gas-o-line!

UPDATE: Here is the same spot as it appears today, December 30, 2008.

Tiny Creche

Photo of the Month

LolBastet, Bronze with gold inlay, Egypt, 21st Dynasty (1090-945 BC)
LolBastet, Bronze, Egypt, Late Period (711-332 BC)

Harry Bosch Site IV

In Michael Connelly’s A Darkness More than Night, the FBI profiler (retired) Terry McCaleb is the viewpoint character, but it still counts as a Bosch mystery because Detective Bosch is the main suspect in a murder. Some louse is trying to frame him. In the scene quoted in the picture above, McCaleb consults with art experts at the Getty to find out about the 15th-16th century Dutch painter Heironymous Bosch.

In the next paragraph, not quoted, McCaleb is described as hurrying across the travertine plaza. Here’s a picture of the very travertine he hurried across and two shod feet that may be similar to his:

Travertine is a kind of sedimentary rock. It’s what the Romans used to build the Colosseum. In the Getty Museum Gift Shop you can purchase little hunks of travertine to take home and contemplate.

The photo of the Getty above — looking southwest — was taken from the top of the “Getty View Trail,” another project of the Santa Monica Conservancy and good ‘un. The 1.8 mile twisty trail takes you up 600 feet so you can look down upon the museum, or past it towards Santa Monica Bay and Palos Verdes. Or you can turn 90 degrees and look at downtown L.A. through a dozen blue miles of haze. You get a lot of bang for the buck, taking vista as the “bang” and physical exertion as the “buck.”

Speaking of bucks, the trail’s parking area — found on the north side of Sepulveda about eight inches east of the 405 freeway — costs three.

A Darkness More Than Night By Michael Connelly
(Warner Vision, Mass Market Paperback, 488pp.)

Picture of the Month

Drawing by E.K.A.