The small screen

This is one of my favorite scenes from a very famous movie. I may go back and take more pictures of it, actually; I'd love to get a good one of Max Von Sydow's jaw. Is there anyone in the world more starkly beautiful than that man in that movie? He's so lean and spare and tightly strung ... and that white blond hair. Hmm.

Wait – I found one online. Not from that movie, but from the same era. In real life I usually prefer people with quite a bit more meat on their bones, but. Well. Anyway. I still like this picture. Maybe in my next life I will be blond and gaunt and Swedish. And/or a man. Why not?

I've been enjoying photographing what's on TV lately. I have to do something, if it's going to be on, besides just watch it. Television watching is such a strange and useless activity – sitting still and staring at images on a box. If the box was missing you would be just sitting there alone, all wrapped up in your own mind. I suppose that may be that's why people like doing it. Letting your mind go blank and passively fill up with surreal images is kind of like being drugged, or sleeping ... and isn't everybody a little sleep-deprived these days?

We are, around here. It's sulfuring season again, which means all night long a team of noisy ATVs is driving up and down, up and down, up and down each row of vines across the road, engines humming louder and then softer and then louder again, making it impossible to ever fall asleep. I can hear them right now – I can feel them. Even with earplugs the energy or vibration of that kind of movement in this normally very still and quiet place is highly disruptive. Luckily it doesn't go on for long – they usually finish in one night. And they only do it a few times each season. It's all organic and completely harmless, supposedly, but I can always tell when they've been doing it – everyone in the house gets all sneezy and lethargic.

Anyway. Here's another scene from a TV movie, the name of which I no longer remember ... the plot has to do with a pair of teenaged and utterly unlikeable siblings who, while on a forced family vacation with their parents in an abandoned ghost town, happen upon a time machine that takes them back to "the 1800s!" where they encounter not only the usual white and black hats, but also an alien space ship (complete with furry, big-eyed "adorable" baby aliens), rioting villagers carrying torches (a la Frankenstein), and of course the obligatory "Important Life Lesson" embedded in a forbidden/unrequited love subplot. It was so bad I still can't believe we let it play all the way through til the end. But I did get a funny picture out of it. Who puts up the money to produce these things, anyway?

So yeah. I guess you could say my taste in television viewing pretty much runs the gamut.