Once again the grass is green
Mr. Baby (aka Tater) found more of that deer today. The thing has to have had at least nine or ten legs. I don't know where he keeps coming up with all of these pieces.
Today was a sureally beautiful day, seventy degrees and sunny, with the last of the colored leaves still sparkling in the trees and a warm earthy smell permeating the garden. I spent the morning there dealing with bee stuff and visiting with a friend who was holding a workshop about dye plants. They had three spinning wheels set up and a big basket of wool to be spun and dyed. The red was my favorite, from cochineal (rare and beautiful – it's made from bugs!) – it came out a gorgeous clear, warm crimson.
About the bees – a couple of weeks ago I gave them a bunch of wet frames and cappings to clean. Wet frames are rectangular wooden frames of wax from which the honey has been spun out, and cappings are the thin layers of wax that "cap" each cell, which you cut off in a thin sheet with a long, sharp knife in order to get the honey out.
When I put the cappings into the hive, they consisted of a cantaloupe-sized ball of shredded beeswax, saturated with so much honey it would run down your arm if you held it up for more than a minute or two. I knew that the bees would lick up every droplet of honey they could find, but I didn't realize they would do such a good job of it. When I opened the hive all that was left of that big sticky mass was a thin scattering of bone dry, clean, white flakes – the wax. I brought it home in a big zip-loc bag and looking at it now, it looks like a big bag of bread crumbs, or really white oatmeal, and smells like honey. Nice.
This afternoon we watched My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski, the Herzog documentary about Klaus Kinski, who reminds me in a weird way of the college boyfriend who introduced me to his work – such an egomaniac! I want to see all those old movies again now. Not just Nosferatu, but Fitzcaraldo, Woyzeck, Aguirre the Wrath of God, and new ones like Grizzly Man, and a few others I haven't seen before. Like Herzog I am interested in fringe characters, people whose obsessions and intensity relegate them to the edges of society. They're not really crazy, or not completely – they're still sane enough to see that other people are freaked out by them. In fact, that's part of their pathos. They can't help the way they are. In a way, they're even kind of proud of it. But it also hurts.
In this movie Herzog recalls an incident in which Kinski responds to a theater critic who's having dinner with them, who's said he will commend one of Kinski's performances as outstanding and extraordinary, by throwing food in the guy's face and screaming, "I was not outstanding and extraordinary! I was monumental! I was epochal!" Many scenes of Kinski flipping out on location in the Amazon basin. He was a perfect person to play those parts.
I've always been fascinated by this type of intense character. Something about their feral, aggressive energy attracts and also repels me – their unquestioning self-confidence and their ability to express themselves in ways I never have.
In other news, early this evening I walked back to the creek and sat on a rock for 40 minutes or so as the sun went down. It was nice, throwing sticks for Tater and listening to the water and watching the colors fade.
Today was a sureally beautiful day, seventy degrees and sunny, with the last of the colored leaves still sparkling in the trees and a warm earthy smell permeating the garden. I spent the morning there dealing with bee stuff and visiting with a friend who was holding a workshop about dye plants. They had three spinning wheels set up and a big basket of wool to be spun and dyed. The red was my favorite, from cochineal (rare and beautiful – it's made from bugs!) – it came out a gorgeous clear, warm crimson.
About the bees – a couple of weeks ago I gave them a bunch of wet frames and cappings to clean. Wet frames are rectangular wooden frames of wax from which the honey has been spun out, and cappings are the thin layers of wax that "cap" each cell, which you cut off in a thin sheet with a long, sharp knife in order to get the honey out.
When I put the cappings into the hive, they consisted of a cantaloupe-sized ball of shredded beeswax, saturated with so much honey it would run down your arm if you held it up for more than a minute or two. I knew that the bees would lick up every droplet of honey they could find, but I didn't realize they would do such a good job of it. When I opened the hive all that was left of that big sticky mass was a thin scattering of bone dry, clean, white flakes – the wax. I brought it home in a big zip-loc bag and looking at it now, it looks like a big bag of bread crumbs, or really white oatmeal, and smells like honey. Nice.
This afternoon we watched My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski, the Herzog documentary about Klaus Kinski, who reminds me in a weird way of the college boyfriend who introduced me to his work – such an egomaniac! I want to see all those old movies again now. Not just Nosferatu, but Fitzcaraldo, Woyzeck, Aguirre the Wrath of God, and new ones like Grizzly Man, and a few others I haven't seen before. Like Herzog I am interested in fringe characters, people whose obsessions and intensity relegate them to the edges of society. They're not really crazy, or not completely – they're still sane enough to see that other people are freaked out by them. In fact, that's part of their pathos. They can't help the way they are. In a way, they're even kind of proud of it. But it also hurts.
In this movie Herzog recalls an incident in which Kinski responds to a theater critic who's having dinner with them, who's said he will commend one of Kinski's performances as outstanding and extraordinary, by throwing food in the guy's face and screaming, "I was not outstanding and extraordinary! I was monumental! I was epochal!" Many scenes of Kinski flipping out on location in the Amazon basin. He was a perfect person to play those parts.
I've always been fascinated by this type of intense character. Something about their feral, aggressive energy attracts and also repels me – their unquestioning self-confidence and their ability to express themselves in ways I never have.
In other news, early this evening I walked back to the creek and sat on a rock for 40 minutes or so as the sun went down. It was nice, throwing sticks for Tater and listening to the water and watching the colors fade.
1 Comments:
You must see Aguirre Wrath of God and Grizzly Man if you haven't seen them. If you have, see them again.
Excellent examples of the Kinski Spiral™ in Aguirre, BTW. Wow. It's one of my favorite movies of all time.
I think it was in My Best Fiend that they showed a screen test of Fitzcarraldo in which Mick Jagger was "trying out" for the Kinski role. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Jagger's interpretation was just laughable. That role was made for Kinski.
Also, how bout the fact that some of the Indian extras came to Herzog and offered to kill Kinski for him, figuring that anyone in his right mind would want someone as out of his gourd as Kinski dead?
P.S. I think Herzog is nearly as big a nut as Kinski was. There was an article in the New Yorker about a new movie he's doing about a POW escape during the Vietnam war. The actors get increasingly emaciated as the film progresses and so Herzog went on a starvation diet "in solidarity" with them. Maniac!
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