Florida Memory, state archives, Vehicle assembly building at the Kennedy Space Center, 1973, flickr
How are you? I went out of town to see my parents last weekend for Mother’s Day. This weekend, I’ve given myself some downtime with movie therapy. Actually, I’ve given myself lots of time off for this. I keep telling myself that I’m going to let a couple of services drop for at least a month, but then, something good comes out and I lose my resolve. Some highlights over the past couple of months: Breeders, The Staircase, Ozark, John and the Hole, Gaslit, The Sound of Silence, Candy, Julia, Life & Beth, Jim Gaffigan’s Comedy Monster, Meltdown: Three Mile Island. I include the picture above to point out that I have considered watching the Challenger series on Netflix, but can’t quite bring myself to do it yet. My high school English class went outside to watch the Challenger ascend, and then we observed the tragedy. I just don’t know if I can watch the series. Maybe sometimes personal losses get attached to national losses, and it can be all too painful. Anyway, there are so many good series and movies streaming. I hope you are doing well this May and have some time to relax. Sincerely—Margaret
Tonight I watched an excellent film called Minari. It is about a Korean American family who moves out to Arkansas to farm and start a new life. I spent part of my childhood in Arkansas. There were farmers in my father’s congregation who endured some of the hardships depicted in the film. This was a unique take. I loved it.
I seem to be doing some documentary movie therapy this weekend. But some parts of my week have been stressful, trying to find some work in order to cover rising costs, medical appointments, diagnostic tests. Ah yes.
Today I watched the documentary Andy Irons: Kissed by God. Andy Irons was a world champion surfer who had bipolar disorder. The filming, setting, and beautiful people make this documentary truly breath-taking. And the story is captivating.
Something an uncle told me, an uncle who was a psychiatrist, was that people with bipolar can often achieve in spite of bipolar, not because of it. (Sometimes bipolar people stop taking their meds because they believe it is the bipolar that gives them their gifts and that the meds will take it away.)
This documentary presents a great story of a person’s journey to find himself, find love, create a legacy.
Surf culture is a part of life down in Florida and I have known at least one person who has done this on a competitive level. I love the beach and hope to live there and am actively looking for an opportunity. I hope to have the chance to walk my old bod down the shore on the reg.
I was diagnosed with bipolar about twenty three years ago. I take my medication and on the whole don’t struggle with addiction, excluding one over-prescribed drug I am now free of. Something the documentary reminds me of, however, is that bipolar is lifelong. Something I learned about from the film that I hadn’t heard from any doctor I see is that bipolar is now thought of as a whole-body disorder; it affects many of the body’s functions; it can contribute to more rapid aging. It is being thought of now as an energy disorder rather than simply a mood disorder. Here is an expert on the cutting edge who appears in the documentary.
The documentary is beautiful and in an interesting way, therapeutic with all of its incorporation of the natural setting of the ocean and water.
I want to recommend the documentary The Waiting Room, a cinéma vérité documentary about an emergency room in a public hospital in Oakland, California. Stories of people living on the financial edge and the dedicated care workers doing their best to provide help are often devastating and heartbreaking. But there are many moments of light and hope, especially embodied by a nurse who does health checks in admissions. She reminds me of a phlebotomist I used to see when I had to go into the hospital for treatment. She always knew where to find a vein, what to say to put me at ease, and how to inject the moment with humor. In The Waiting Room, the ER serves a patient population without insurance, those in danger of slipping through the system. There are stories and scenarios that caused me to tear up. So much of our entertainment can be derivative and deadening. Though this documentary concerns itself with life and death, it is truly alive in the most human sense.
If you love literature and you love to watch movies, I would recommend the movie Genius with Colin Firth, Jude Law, Nichole Kidman, and Laura Linney. Firth plays Maxwell Perkins, a book editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons who edited the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. Law plays Thomas Wolfe, the famous writer of Look Homeward, Angel which was also edited by Perkins.
If you watch this movie, be prepared to feel something. Well, I guess I should only speak for myself. I’ve watched it before but I find in revisiting movies during the pandemic, certain movies almost feel new to me. I don’t remember getting as emotional. Our world has changed so much.
There’s an excellent film on the life of Blaze Foley available for streaming on Amazon with an AMC subscription. I think it may be available through the end of September.
I only learned of Blaze Foley when I started listening to John Prine (for example, Prine’s cover song of Foley’s “Clay Pigeons”). Foley is a stage name the musician took up because of his admiration for the legendary country musician Red Foley. He also had a close relationship with Townes Van Zandt.
Sibyl Rosen, his wife, wrote about their life together in Living in the Woods in a Tree House. The film covers their life as detailed in the book, their life trying to start Foley’s music career, and the years following their separation.
Ethan Hawke directed and produced the film and just about everyone sings in this movie and does so beautifully – the actors who play Blaze and Van Zandt as well as the actress playing Sybil Rosen. Although he doesn’t sing in this movie, Kris Kristofferson plays a major part as Foley’s father.
After the movie, I watched an interview with Ethan Hawke and Ben Dickey—who played Foley—on KEXP (youtube). There is singing and guitar playing and insights about the movie and the choices made regarding why and how to film.
In this week leading into Labor Day weekend, our nation and my state is literally wracked with illness and death; Louisiana has been ripped apart by a hurricane; there is fear and uncertainty in Afghanistan and mourning for lives lost. Furthermore, there are school districts who will be financially punished for trying to keep children safe from a deadly virus and there are many people facing eviction notices. Last year, the inception of the pandemic was only preamble.
This morning, it was in an addled frame of mind that I opened my closet door to see a small open bin on the floor, something from my previous move I have been gradually sorting through. There on the top, I noticed a collection of pictures which were scattered face down. On the backs of the pictures, there were names and dates written in cursive in an unknown hand. I turned them over to see some glimpse of an almost forgotten history, a record someone else kept for interested parties. I don’t remember who took the pictures of me because I was a baby, but there I was supposedly and playing with a playmate I would never see again. There were also pictures of my biological mother as a child and and also as a young woman. There was a picture of my biological grandmother, a few of my grandfather, two of my half-brother. I hadn’t expected to see these pictures this morning. Oddly, I felt nothing. But years ago, when I first saw them, I felt a great deal. It was at that moment of being presented with them that I learned things that were hard to know. For years, I kept the pictures tucked away in a bookshelf in a manilla envelop, away from view as if they held an electric charge. But moving and disruption has a way of discombobulating everything, and there we are, our private things lying about like a tossed salad.
Watching the film Horse Girl this afternoon, I was drawn into a deep grief, perhaps primed by the pictures of my biological mother in various stages of her life. And there was something so disturbingly recognizable about the film’s main character and her story, something so recognizable in her foibles and derailing mind, her struggle with a mental illness passed down by her grandmother and mother. The major existential question she asks is: How much of their illness is also mine?
I have also been in a grieving process since the onset of the pandemic for I have begun to lose my adopted mother to dementia. It brings home more starkly than ever that sense that when everything is stripped away, we stand naked and alone.
I will not get into more detail about the film and I won’t go into my own history here, though I have done so elsewhere, having spent years keeping it to myself. But for now, I’ll just leave it at this: I could relate to so much material that was in this film. I was riveted. It broke my heart. It is worth your time if you care to explore.
Prefatory note by yours truly:I wanted to share this fascinating post. Several years ago, at the Florida Film Festival, I saw the film I Dream in Another Language. a dramatic and beautiful film exploring the stakes of the death of an indigenous language in Mexico. Though the film explores sometimes mystical concepts, it also explores an intriguing line of thought: When a language dies, whole realms of experience and culture die with it. If you are interested in this concept, I invite you to watch the film and read the reviews to start your exploration. And I hope you will follow the link to this website to read about this linguist’s inspiration and work in Southern Italy.
Written by Dyami Millarson This picture was taken during my last visit to Southern Italy, I played football outside like some of the locals. Whilst I was there, I had taken the opportunity to continue my Molesian fieldwork. Profoundly inspired as a teenager by David Crystal’s Language Death, David K. Harrison’s When Languages Die, Daniel […]