Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
Month: February 2009
About Hallucinations
Posted on February 12, 2009 in Bipolar Disorder
About Hallucinations on 12seconds.tv
Dream
Posted on February 11, 2009 in Dreams
I’m driving my father around San Bernardino. We’re looking for a street called Sierra Way ((Sierra Way actually exists, but not like in my dream)) . Sierra Way, I explain to him, has an unusual problem because when it rains the drainage system has been engineered to shunt all the water through it. This makes it a bad place to buy property. Evidentally we have acquired some. To get to it, we have to maneuver through a series of streets fronted by square buildings decorated with Victorian geegaws and Baroque scrollwork. My mother greets us at the door of the house where we are due to live ((She is younger than I am — in her thirties or early forties at worst)) . I tell her about the problem and she explains that we have only leased the house until something opens up around the corner.
There’s been a murder on the street in front of our house. It’s my duty to solve it because the police are incompetent. So I start wandering the nearby streets, seeking clues. As I pass a very upscale grocery store, I notice a park where some men are playing basketball. I go there. The contests are curious: several different games are happening using the same hoops. I find a couple of men who were there when the crime was committed, but their accounts are vague and one of them seems afraid. I deduce that the son of an important person — a lanky blond with a full beard — is involved. When I go back to the scene of the crime, leading my witnesses, I must pass through a ornate lobby with crystal chandeliers and climb a set of crystal stairs to get back to the street where the grocery store stands. I call my wife and beg her to come back to me.
25 Movies Meme
Posted on February 9, 2009 in Film Memes
This meme begins here.
It works like this: choose twenty five movies and write a one-sentence description for each. If you want to approach Dickensian lengths as you do, that’s fine, but it has to be one sentence and no more. You can choose whatever movies you want. If you choose to do this meme, you must reprint the rules and name the person on whose blog you saw it first.
- A Beautiful Mind: Brilliant mathematician finds himself perplexed by the unsolveable equations of his own delusions.
- The Seven Faces of Doctor Lao: Tony Randall undergoes multiple makeup changes in charming caricature of multi-generationed Chinese sorceror.
- My Life as a Dog: Youngest son withstands mother’s death and obnoxious older brother, barking some of the way.
- Hiroshima Mon Amour: French actress explodes with nuclear passion over a Japanese architect in the dark streets of the glowing night city.
- The Shooting Party: English gentry enjoy some killing where the savory targets don’t shoot back the autumn before the First World War.
- The Day of the Triffids (1963): Humankind is blinded by a cosmic storm and eaten by an equally blind, but mobile plant.
- Emperor Jones: Low man on the railroad becomes the king of a Caribbean island, but the natives work their magic on him when he becomes a Papa Doc then tries to run away with the loot.
- The Pajama Game: Union fights management in this story of those who sew our bedclothes — with not a single nude scene or episode in bed.
- Hilary and Jackie: Genius at the cello loses her mind and then control of her muscles to multiple sclerosis while her flute-playing sister lives a rather plain life.
- The Trojan Women: Survivors of the war become its booty and argue about who is at fault, who must suffer what.
- Suspicion: “Monkeyface” knows he’s a wastrel, but marries him anyways, then wonders why he’s asking her mystery novel-writing friend about undetectable poisons.
- A Good Woman: Mrs. Windemere has a fan and another of a different sort that she doesn’t know about.
- Gone with the Wind: Rebel romance that rewrites the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction to suit lovers of seamy bodice rippers.
- Oyster Farmer: Robber puts his haul in the mail and waits on an Australian river but the loot floats away, leading him to pursue a fortune with a hard shell.
- Le Placard (The Closet): He’s a wimp, but when they start thinking he is gay, everyone thinks he is virile and even the office bully tries to win him.
- The Bridge: Someone is watching when they jump and tries to find answers to the Big Question.
- Picture Bride: He mailed away for her, but he cheated on his photograph — at 43 he’s an old man — and now she’s stuck cutting sugarcane in Hawaii.
- Le dîner de cons (The Dinner Game): Their little game is to bring the most idiotic people to their weekly soiree for some private laughs, but Francois’s toothpick castles pale in comparison to Pierre’s hidden lunacies.
- Winged Migration: Flap flap flap — Emperor penguins have nothing over these feathered aeronauts trained by the best Lorenzian imprinting techniques.
- Open Your Eyes: He’s horribly maimed in an automobile accident engineered by the ex who doesn’t want him to love the sweet little, doe-eyed thing he stole from his best friend, but then experiences an unbelieveable recovery through the wonders of medicine — really unbelieveable.
- Amadeus: When Mozart was my age, he’d been dead for 18 years — I stole this joke from Tom Lehrer — and this is how a jealous rival engineers the haunting that killed him.
- Eyes Wide Shut: Guy has no luck in this one — when everyone is trying to get him to be bad he’s too decent and when he decides to throw chivalry out the window, he either finds potential lovers unavailable or gets into trouble with the naked power elite.
- Fargo: Just how far will the desperate manager of the auto dealership go and just how long will it take for the pregnant cop from Paul Bunyanland to catch him and his cronies in this examination of the banality and sheer patheticness of Evil.
- Memento: Brain-damaged investigator gets his clues from notes, polaroids, and tattoos, but he can’t remember how this got started and neither can you until the end.
- Rashoman: Sitting out a rainstorm beneath a rashoman gate, a monk discusses a trial with one of its witnesses and ponders the immutability of the Truth beyond the mutability of eyewitness testimony.
The Slow Moving River of Crude
Posted on February 7, 2009 in Depression
Contrary to what you have heard, it is not cold to the touch.
Dream
Posted on February 4, 2009 in Dreams
I’m painting the grass with spar varnish using a broad brush.
Book Review: Soaring and Crashing (Mostly Crashing)
Posted on February 2, 2009 in Mania Reading
The difference between me and Hollans is that I never trusted the miracle workers.
Drake Goes on a Spree
Posted on February 2, 2009 in Dogs
Cats don’t do this!
Two nights away at the Lawrence Welk Resort didn’t seem like much — we knew the cats would recognize us when we came back — but Drake agonized over our absence despite the twice-daily visits of a guardian. He greeted us enthusiastically at the door until we noticed the detritus of a bender he’d had. The door to the bedroom had been barred to him by our design, so he explored the space under the bathroom sink, dragging out toothbrushes, toothpaste, a bottle of Grecian Formula that I’d forgotten I had, razors, and other plastic accoutrements peculiar to our bathroom. He chewed these into lumps and seedlike fragments, tore open a box of bandages, and squeezed the toothpaste out of a sample-sized tube.
Oh! The second I stopped the celebration of our return by noticing these, his SPU went into operation and he stalked over to the bed. I had mixed feelings about scolding him so soon after our return. For the rest of the day, he favored Lynn over me except when I had a biscuit to present.
