NOONDAY MINI-RANT (MY RESPONSE TO A FRIEND'S POST THAT HOMESCHOOLING MIGHT BE THE ANSWER TO THE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS)

hardcore conservatives like sec. of ed. betsy devos et. al. WANT people to abandon public education for home schooling and religious based private schools etc.and they want to take tax money from public education and give it to homeschoolers and private schools to do it....because public education is what helped create the logic and reasoning and evidence-based liberal reforms that led to curbs on corporate and one percenters' greed etc.

FYI

here

25 YEARS AGO

[if you blow it up you can see me and mello-re houston on the program 25 years ago and many other friends, some long gone...poetry continues to save my life...thanks to mello for posting this today...]

NEW FAVORITE MEME

ANOTHER FAVORITE OLD QUOTE

"...human affairs still continue to be the consequence of mistakes, misunderstandings, and myths."

—William Saroyan (from Days Of Life And Death And Escape To The Moon)

HAPPINESS TO ALL

I want to wish a happy day to all those who
never had or knew their mothers…or whose
mothers were unkind, or even cruel to them…
may your day be filled with love and affection

...and to those who mothered the young and 
old alike who needed it and had no one else
to turn to, may your day be as happy as the
hearts of those who benefited from your love...

TULLY

I was at a discussion between Stephen Colbert and Ethan Hawke where a student in the audience asked Hawke something about RAGING BULL, and Hawke said it was a great movie and a great performance by DiNiro but he didn't like watching actors hurt themselves.

I was relieved to hear that, because I'd always objected to the acclaim DiNiro got for gaining so much weight (and in such a short period of time that his gut looked unnatural to me). When watching the movie I found myself distracted by the weight gain, thinking about the actor rather than the character.

I bring that up because in TULLY—a movie about the mother of two children pregnant and then giving birth to and caring for a third—Charlize Theron, playing the mother, has a body I kept wondering about, was it really that weight and shape or was it CGI or prosthetics or make up or?...

Theron does her usual amazingly competent acting, but I still couldn't help being distracted by her body, which she kept exposing as part of the plot about a woman overwhelmed by motherhood and its responsibilities and consequences.

Some of her scenes resonated with a kind of realism about being a mother that I haven't seen in any movie before, so kudos to the movie makers for breaking ground in some ways. And the story, by Diablo Cody, and the direction, by Jason Reitman, bring out the best in the cast (Mackenzie Davis is a revelation), so it's almost worth watching just for the acting, and maybe for the clever ending, unless you find it a little too clever.

But I don't applaud Theron for gaining the fifty pounds she is said to have put on for the role, because it seems to me like a very unhealthy acting technique. And because it kept me thinking about whether the weight was "real" and therefore too often focused on her acting rather than the story she was trying to tell.