Run-On Sentence, Run-On Swoon
…I took a nap after a screening of a film I didn’t mind, a walk as mild in temperament as in temperature, a so-so lunch with a sort-of friend, and some busy work deserving no parallel phrase. I mention all this by way of saying that my brain battery was running on empty and, with assignments looming and cleverness left to crunch, the only solution was sleep. (Caffeine in these matters is greatly overrated.) Besides, moon was void of course and mercury was retrograding and on top of everything there was that big old lunar eclipse in Pisces on the horizon. A lot of stars under which to snooze.
I hadn’t intended to dive so deeply as to have a dream–had thought more along the lines of quick and pretty shut-eye–but also didn’t mind when I found myself stepping clear into another world. It halved the day in a way I needed.
–I dreamed that [name redacted] and I had an opportunity to sleep together after all–to roll into each other lazily sloppily easily on a divan I hadn’t known was there–and as I’d expected it was good, not just decadent. Continue Reading →
Suria 8/27/71-9/11/01
I’ll never forget the morning, only months before her death, when she taped a hair to the bathroom mirror with a note. In her big gorgeous calligraphy she had written: “MY FIRST GRAY HAIR.” There’s more to this story–in some ways it’s the story of my life and of a soul family I’ve been traveling with for many lives–but fifteen years later it still doesn’t feel like I’ve earned the right to tell it. All I can say is every time I curse all the gray now mixed into my blonde, I flash on that note–her characteristic bemusement, her breezy assumption there’d be many more to come–and I cry. Suria.
‘Sully’ and the 208-Second Molehill
“Sully” begins with a plane crash – a wobbly, fiery descent right into a Manhattan skyscraper. It’s a nightmare of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who in 2009 saved 155 people by landing U.S. Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River, and whose subsequent memoir, Highest Duty, provides the backbone of this film. It’s also a traumatic, what-if reference to September 11, 2001, which makes the timing of this release a mite cynical. In fact, undertaking this film at all is a mite cynical, or at least misguided. Because Captain Sullenberger’s heroics took only 208 seconds, fashioning a full-length feature worthy of it would entail another feat of heroism, and director Clint Eastwood isn’t the right knight for the job, not even with a white-haired, white-mustachioed Tom Hanks at the helm as the titular character.
Working from Todd Komarnicki’s screenplay, Eastwood attempts to build out dramatic tension, not only with that dramatic CGI opener (an echo of the opening sequence in his tsunami clunker, “Hereafter”) and by slowly meting out details of what really happened in the ill-fated flight. The conceit here is that, once the waves calmed on Sully’s save, National Transportation Safety Board investigators questioned whether the flight captain had unnecessarily endangered his passengers’ lives with his emergency water landing.
According to protocol, Sully should have returned to LaGuardia Airport or tried to land at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport, and both the airline’s insurance company and Sully wrangle with the consequences of his decision. But while zooming in on the pilot’s growing self-doubt and post-traumatic stress adds a much-needed depth to this tale, demonizing the commission feels like a flimsy effort to make a mountain out of a 208-second-long molehill. Continue Reading →