The blue gels are just beginning to illuminate the sky above the trees at 5:14 AM.
Here’s a great lyric. It’s from R.E.M.’s song, “Falls to Climb.” “My actions make me beautiful/They dignify the flesh.”
I have come to accept that as I age I become increasingly more clumsy. But as my clumsiness continues to has engendered what I think of as the “Rube Goldberg Effect.” Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist back in the 1910s and ‘20s who drew ridiculously complicated machinery, where when things causes another that causes another. The game Mousetrap is a Rube Goldberg device. So my clumsiness has expanded so that I know when I knock over anything, it will hit something else, that will bump something else, that will spill a cup of coffee into my computer. However, instead of getting angry, I now watch amusedly as it plays out, then clean up the mess.
I directed an episode of Xena in the late ‘90s that had Xena’s sidekick Gabrielle locked in a coffin being pulled by a chain into the fires of a crematorium. In pre-production I met with the brilliant production designer, Rob Gillies, and said, “I want the contraption that pulls the coffin to be a Rube Goldberg device. Rob grinned and said in his New Zealand accent, “You mean a Heath Robinson device.” He explained that Heath Robsinson was a British cartoonist who did exactly the same thing as Rube Goldberg, but pre-dated him. I’m not sure why, but I was devasted. For the sake of weak self-promotion, that Xena episode is “Blind Faith.”
Oh, this is awful. As a kid of twelve or thirteen I just loved the actress Joan Leslie. She had a particularly impressive, and shockingly short career. She co-starred in “Sergeant York” with Gary Cooper in 1941. Wearing overalls and sporting a broad southern accent, she plays the girlfriend of Alvin York, concientous objector, then hero of WWI, and Joan Leslie is so cute you could die. She also co-stars with James Cagney in “Yankee Doodle Dandy” in 1942. Cagney and Leslie sing the song, “Mary, Plain as Any Name Could Be,” together. Maybe ten years ago I decided the buy the song “Yankee Doodle Dandy” from the original soundtrack from the now defunct iTunes. They had a special that for two more dollars I could have the entire soundtrack, so I went for it. As I listened I immediately realized that it was not Joan Leslie singing, even though she had clearly sung her part in the movie. I got on the internet, looked up Joan Leslie, and gosh darn it if she wasn’t about 90 and still accepting fan mail. I wrote her a gushing fan letter — something I don’t do — ending with, “Why aren’t you on the soundtrack recording?” She wrote back, “I’m not? Well I certainly did my own singing in the movie.” She died soon thereafter. But long after she thought the misery of Hollywood was over, I was able to bring her just a little bit more grief regarding her short, though glorious, Hollywood career.
I’m a fan of cliches. I own a dictonary of cliches, and visit cliche websites. My friend sent me a Utube video of a newer, meaning twenty years old anyway, rampant cliche in movies and TV. It’s the speech that begins with, “You just don’t get it, do you?” The video has hundreds of examples from everything.
Here’s a clever joke: Why is Ireland the richest country in the world? It’s capital is always Dublin.
It’s 6:29, and appears through my window to be a beautiful day.
As my LG television alerts me every time I turn it off, Life’s Good.