Weblog 226

June 6, 2010~ 1:15am
What I'd like is a return to a quieter age- one that allows for hours to get from here to there, not the speed of light we've become accustomed to- I'd like a return to patience among my fellow men. I'd like the noise to stop.

I'd like a buggy ride on an afternoon so still you can hear the crops grow.....



(Isn't that lovely?)
Of course, such a thing would preclude things like this internet business, and I have to confess I'd miss the ability to communicate this way, to create stuff out of air) -so yes, I'm one of those pains in the ass who want their cake and want to eat it too. LOL!! (What else is new, right? Aren't we all like that- wanting to be able to pick and choose, take only the good with the GOOD?)

I suppose my focus on 'time' right now, has a lot to do with this restoration business. Slowly....(and I mean sloooowly)....I've been uploading all 3000+ images to my new host. It's time-consuming



but this place is being rebuilt block by block, from the lastest weeks first, back to the earliest.

Tonight was supposed to be a movie night, but Pittsburgh got HAMMERED with downpours, tornado warnings and flash flooding. Saturday afternoon, Wayne and I went out to eat an early supper at 3:30, but in coming back to my place, we encountered a major intersection under 6 inches of rapidly coursing water-- and a creek that runs parallel to the road about to spill its banks with current like a river.

When we got in the house, I rushed up to the bedroom to look out the window toward the creek-- the bird's eye view was what I needed, and it was scary- only inches separated the asphalt from becoming a major stream.

Not knowing if he'd be able to get home again if he didn't leave right then, Wayne decided to get out while the gettin' was good- and I don't blame him. It's impossible - or, if you think you can make it -downright dangerous to drive through a flooded area, so off he went.

We'd both done our respective grocery shopping for the week, so I'm loaded up on peanuts, suet and cracked corn for my backyard friends. (As soon as I hung the new block of suet in its cage, the little things were hitting on it, hanging like acrobats and pecking. LOL!!)

THE BIG NEWS...(and certainly the most delightful) ...is that the tiny chickadees who have been busy building a nest in my small birdhouse that sits on the back porch railing, now have THREE HATCHED BABIES. I'd been reading stuff online about bird feeding areas, etc- and came upon a suggestion to allow birds access to hair and fur: "Don't throw those dustbunnies out! Birds love 'em for nest-making!" - so I swept up some corners till I had a nice, six inch ball of fluff, and I put it in little wire basket so they could pull out what they needed -but I heard something as I was fastening it onto the railing. A noise that stopped me in my tracks.. it was loud, frantic cheeping coming from the birdhouse. I thought: "Looks like I'm too late to help with nest-building. These guys not only finished their nest, they filled it!"

I saw two chickadees sitting on the fence, mouths stuffed with things, waiting to feed their young. I peeked inside the round-hole opening and there were three OPEN BEAKS, carrying on like crazy! I was over-joyed!

To give you an idea of how teeny those little guys are, I found this picture on a Canadian wildlife rescue site-



(I inserted the yellow-outlined picture so you can see what greeted my eye when I peeked inside the birdhouse.)

Those triplets are as active and insistent as can be... and their poor tired parents over-worked, I'm sure, making trips back and forth. (Tonight, however, I'm happy to say they had ready access to the suet block and man o man, back and forth they went, feeding.....feeding, their little guys raising a holy ruckus.)

That's the news hereabouts. Now back to my restoration chores. That'll be me for another week or so, searching, uploading, recoding. It will consume all my time when I'm not at the office, so it's gonna be a while till I'm just doodling my online drawings and writing poetry daily, etc.....but finally......guess what?



The "HAPPY STAR-FLIGHT LADY" will be living inside of me again- the whole internet wide open to a more relaxing soar-about, enjoying myself without things feeling so much like 'work'. (And the pictures now have unlimited bandwidth access, and are fully paid for a year....YAHOO!!) TAKE THAT, Snapdrive. I never did become a paying customer because of your crappy service.

Somebody else stepped up to the plate who provides customer support and ready information. (That's a lesson to the scads of hosts out there who are selling and re-selling themselves....folks get tired of it, guys.) Something to think about as you pass those trusting members back and forth like a plain old pyramid scheme. If you're serious about building a real business, don't jerk folks around. Amen.




June 6, 2010~ 3:00am
Well, it was a movie night afterall. I watched Part II of 'The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl' by myself. In doing so, I watched in horror and fascination, one of the most supremely talented and visionary film directors I've ever come across, who was nevertheless in absolute denial of her involvement in Naziism, if only by virtue of the inspirational brilliance of her pro-Hitler, pro-Nazi films in the spread of rampant German nationalism and the rabid Nazi tide that swelled with it. I took some photos right off the television screen because so much of her work is breathtaking.

But how could a woman so very critical with her lens



miss what was taking place all around her? I think the answer is because Leni was first and foremost an escape artist and a weaver of dreams. The fact that she chose some of the most remote places on the planet to slip into- the highest mountains and the depths of the ocean -both to film and to seek recreation, is telling. Even after her exoneration of direct Nazi involvement, she escaped to Africa and lived there with the Nuba tribesmen in the 60's, photographing a people as alien from both Leni and from modern world history as possible.

In the film, she states over and over that she had no idea what was going on -or what Hitler was actually doing. When unable to deny it, when sent with a crew to film the invasion of Poland -and upon seeing the cruelty shown to the peasants there by the German soldiers -she fled. And embarked on the making of 'Tiefland'



(a film based upon an opera) -and as far from the front and from reality as she could get. It was in this film that the 'extras' were gypsies from concentration camps, but Leni claimed till the day she died that at the time she did not know this-- was not aware that after filming, her film extras would be shipped off to Auschwitz. How could someone who began by starring in her own first film, a visually superb achievement called 'The Blue Light'-



a fairytale of an innocent mountain girl, thought by the locals to be a witch, end up being precisely that in the eyes of the world? It's because the only thing Leni was better at than filmmaking was lying to herself when things became either too painful or too shameful to bear.

But of all the striking and startling images in the film, the one that was not shot by Leni Riefenstahl is the one that had the greatest impact. It's possibly the most moving, the most emotionally wrenching photo I've ever seen of WWII's Jewish dead.



Just look at that child's face.....my God



it's as though she'd fallen asleep among corpses too quickly to even realize she'd become one herself. When I saw that photo in the film, I wondered what Leni thought when she saw the finished product?

I pondered how the tragedy of Leni Riefenstahl's life had been her running from that very image-- how her early work played such an important role in bringing it about, her lens so exquisitely expressive of everything but truth.

This was a long and sometimes arduous film, but a fascinating study in the self-protective shields that can be thrown up around the human psyche to protect it ....from itself.





***

(Return To Weekly Archives)