Sunday, Laundry Sunday

As is usual on Sunday, I'm doing laundry. I actually prefer to do laundry on Friday night or Saturday, but sometimes it gets put off a day. Yesterday, I went with my cousin and my mom up to Ripley, Tennessee, to an estate sale. Pretty stuff, some of it, but I wound up with more questions than answers about some of the more expensive items there, so I didn't buy anything except a couple of ceramic bowls that will be ideal for proofing bread and the like. You can never have too many giant mixing bowls.

I'm hungry. I'm also feeling vaguely sociable tonight, but it's too late, really, to call anyone and instigate anything.

So perhaps I'll just dry my clothes and try to finish Motherless Brooklyn. I'm close, but I think I may be just far enough away from the end of the novel so that finishing it will keep me up later than I ought to be.

I did see two great movies over the weekend, The Magdalene Sisters and City of God. The former I may never watch again, but it was a brilliant piece of work about a chapter of history of which I am completely ignorant. The latter also concerns a place about which I knew little, but cinematically it was reminiscent of De Palma, Scorsese, Tarantino, Coppola, and Soderbergh, to name a few. I was expecting depression from City of God, but it wasn't depressing; the violence, poverty, cruelty, and corruption present in City of God were assumed to be the norm and thus were not questioned, just stated. Alternately, The Magdalene Sisters has a moral tone; implicitly, a place outside the asylum exists from which actions inside it are judged. Judgments, if any, in City of God are more tenuous, because the only world present in the film is that of the City.

That's not to say that City of God doesn't view what goes on in the City as being wrong and horrific, but the two films deal with violence and depravity in completely different ways.