Ride of the Valkyries....Really?

So, I watched the post convention blowout for Kerry. John Williams and the Boston Pops, fireworks, and so forth. Nice display. Kind of grating to hear John Williams music (like Superman, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, etc.) against that scene.

I kept wishing for Born on the Fourth of July. No dice, but what I got may have been better. It was certainly more...odd.

Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries." You know the one, with the blaring french horns and all. The problem is that its most famous use in the last several decades was as source music in Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

We all know that Kerry, by the way, served in Vietnam.

But we also know that the scene in Apocalypse Now that Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" overlays is one in which American soldiers in helicopters massacre Vietnamese civilians with machine guns.

Kerry's admitted to committing atrocities in Vietnam. Perhaps few people know that, but the collision of John Kerry, Vietnam vet, with "Ride of the Valkyries" is most unfortunate because of the reminders that it dregdes up from our collective movie-going past.

The Night Owl Strikes Again

Finished Motherless Brooklyn. Great book. Am excited about the prospect of the movie. If nothing else, it'll be a tour de force for Norton.

Also, need to mention that I have to be at work in seven hours. Ick.

Lyle Lovett and Antiques Roadshow coming up this week, both on Saturday. Should be fun, but maybe a bit hectic.

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.