last day of pesach (7)

the last night i went to kenny's with resnick.
resnick is a genius, who thinks i am smarter than him. a false opinion based on the fact that i knew how to learn gemorah better than he did, because i had learned by lichtenstien and he hadn't. my ability at learning gemorah is unmeasured since i haven't used it much in recent years. since 74 very little and since 77 very very little.
but resnick, three years younger than me, is alike a fetus who walks. very dependent. can't control his mouth.
at kenny's house was a very tired nomi. tzviki who referred to obama as hussein and his pretty thin vegetarian jewish nosed wife.
also present eitan who entertained resnick and nomi's younger sister rivi and her husband chaim and six of their kids. two very pretty females about twenty years old. one son about eighteen. one little daughter about four or five and one daughter about ten. also: one eight year old son with a devilish (looks like a hughie auman kid) smile.
this time i told kenny that resnick is a bookish intellectual and they had something to discuss and so we or resnick by himself will go there again for a shabbat.
chaim invited me to hoshaya up near nazareth and i am tempted to go mostly because of his pretty daughters and a bit because of the glimmers of adventure.
why are you studying arabic. kommandant.
what is hoshaya like, small, but bigger than tzipori and in nazareth there are those who want their land back.
on the way to walking resnick halfway home, we stopped by a mizrachi layl mishmar where they needed us for a kaddish. of course resnick was impressed and sentimental at the singing from the windows of katamon that he accused me of wishing to return to the rightful owners from 47.
i gave him a bit of my adventures in concordance when we passed by ohel rachel.
my shoes are loafers and therefore cannot be tied to help my feet and they give me blisters when i walk in them (rather than just use them for show)

the next day i went to the kalush man, from whom i can tell he hates me and he didn't tell his wife that i was coming. micha showed up and could barely conceal his disdain. yaakov was also there and he wants me to support his family. steve peskoff was also there and he shared some ganga with a lot of tobacco and i got less than a shiur high. there was a jew whose grandson was getting a bris in caracas as we ate. the upshot were quite a few puns thanks to kalish and much agita thanks to micha.

should i visit pessie and pay a shiva call. i guess so. (the father who i didn't like is dead.)

i got upset with mondoweiss comparing gaza to warsaw ghetto and he somewhat apologized.
i read a bit more of shlomo sand.

mourning becomes electra (M5)

O'neill does greek tragedy. difficult to take, plotwise, but the acting by michael redgrave and especially rosalind russell carries it through. a civil war family, this time from the north. mother loves a man (not hubby) and daughter loved the same man until she discovered that mother loved him. hubby returns home from war and wife tells him of her cheating heart and when his faulty heart trembles and he asks for his medicine she gives him poison instead. daughter (rosalind) comes in to discover mother's deed. brother returns from the war, touched. daughter proves to brother (michael redgrave) that mother loves a cheater. brother kills the cheater. when they bring the news to mother, mother kills herself. (her last word- Life! disdainful. and then a gunshot). brother cannot recover from his mother's suicide and his role in it, so he commits suicide. daughter is not weak like brother and mother, but she will remain in the mansion with the shutters nailed shut, unable to be anything other than faithful to the dead. father played by raymond massey (whose greatest role was as john brown and also the guy from the other planet). the mother was some foreign lady i've never seen before. solid B

also saw another movie "a few dollars more" about two bounty hunters who team up against a particularly evil man. highly rated, but i didn't like it. solid C. first team up of lee van cleef and eastwood before good bad and ugly.

Hang em High (M4)

Trying to catch up on Clint's western phase. This is a worthy movie with sufficient depth, dealing with the Oklahoma territory and a judge who has sole responsibility for being the law. as such he is in charge of hanging (the hanging judge was sober/he hadn't had a drink). played by pat hingle. clint is lynched on a false charge of stealing cattle. a sheriff cuts him down as he hangs and takes him to prison where his claims are found to be true. the judge hires him as a marshal. clint tries to arrest one of the men who was responsible for his lynching (near lynching) and he guns him down when the man draws on him. the judge warns him in the future bring back the men alive. eastwood arrests bruce dern for rustling and dern was also involved in the lynching. together with dern two young men were also arrested for rustling and despite their youth and their general goodness they are hung as well, disgusting eastwood with the judge's justice that knows no nuance. when eastwood can't be bribed to forget the near lynching, those responsible (ed begley and two lackeys) try to shoot him down, but eastwood survives. inger stevens nurses him back to strength. stevens is also set on revenge for a killing of her husband and the rape that she suffered but when she nurses eastwood back to health, she forgets her fixation on vengeance and is willing to live again. after eastwood recovers he kills begley and his lackeys. he agrees to remain as marshal when the hanging judge shows a modicum of mercy. not a great movie but the script contains enough nuance about revenge, pure justice, mercy and the hanging judge is interesting enough or the acting is interesting enough to give the movie a B minus.

From Paris with Love (M3)

Spoiler alert
This movie was of interest to me because I am writing a terrorist oriented thriller.
The relationship between James and Caroline was believable only on the basis of Caroline's looks. When she turned out to be a terrorist and when Jame ended up killing her, it was not all that difficult to believe and also not very upsetting, which it should have been if this were a movie about real characters rather than characters built on a sketch pad with a crayon. Travolta's character is good enough, but he just is not enough to sustain a movie on his own and his love for Burger Royale's a reference to his line in Pulp Fiction, again asserts the two dimensionality of his character. There is plenty of action and it moves easily enough but this movie cannot get a thumbs up and I give it a C.

Dr. King's Yahrzeit (6)

42 years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis Tennessee by James Earl Ray. Although the identity of his killer (or who paid his killer) was not apparent at the time, the death and its historic importance was immediately clear. I was watching "Bewitched" when the episode was interrupted by the news of the assassination. Robert Kennedy, who had just announced his candidacy for the president, was in Indianapolis and told a black crowd the bad news. Chicago, where I lived at the time, erupted in riots, which hurt the Jewish store owners in black neighborhoods. RFK was killed two months later by a Palestinian, which can be blamed on Israel.

MLK was about to embark upon a poor people's march on Washington and some of his advisers were opposed because unlike previous marches this one did not have a clear legislative objective. In fact in the 42 years since that time the gap between rich and poor in America has widened, although as far as lifting certain populations from certain types of poverty (malnutrition) the record is not as clear. In the world as well there have been major changes in the distribution of wealth, with India and China specifically creating new middle classes where there was no middle class before.

Still MLK stands for equal rights before the law and it is his name (and my allegiance or prejudice in favor of what he stood for) that comes to mind when confronting Israel's spotty record in regards to its Palestinian population in the 48 borders and its rather terrible record in regards to the Palestinian population outside those borders.

There are two problems involved with my personal position vis a vis the Palestinians (both those within and those without). Firstly what is my position. Secondly since I am not in power, what should be my position vis a vis the government's position. Must I demonstrate, must I voice my positions at Shabbat tables. Since I am still very much an outsider in Israel (unemployment adds at least one "very" to that description) this effects my openness to fully commit myself to the struggle for Palestinian rights.

Tonight my uncle's brother in law who lives in the overwhelmingly Arab Galilee will be present and he of the opinion that Israel must attempt to convince its Arabs to move elsewhere, a position that might be reasonable if it were feasible, but I doubt its feasibility. I have spent the meals of the last two holidays or holiday and a Shabbat where the overwhelming attitude has been anti Obama and also anti Arab. This does not increase my love for Israel or decrease my desire to leave Israel or at the very least to find some intoxicant to give some permission to my freak flag to fly.

Post Chashmonaim (5)

I spent shabbos with my first cousin and his family.
They've lived here almost four years, but next year they're moving back to Skokie.
My cousin has been traveling back and forth, making a living there and visiting his family one week out of four or something like that and that's no way to live.
The place is pretty enough, saw it mostly at night, but it's pretty enough. but it's in occupied territory. Morally it's dubious- two sets of laws, citizens and occupied. but mostly it's the pragmatics- assuming that the Palestinians don't really want peace, which is not an outlandish assumption, then a military occupation without settlements is somewhat sustainable, whereas a settlement occupation is not sustainable.
visited an old friend, i had last seen in 1981 when he tried to bring a rocking chair into my cab and we had nothing to discuss, which was a bit of a letdown. although he told me some gorelick stories which were okay. seems to me that he and menachem don't talk about each other at all.
as per usual, friday night was okay and once the sun rose it was no longer any fun being there. i think it was good going there to build a connection with some of my younger cousins, but my anticipation of it was such dread that it kind of messed up a few days there. i learned that my sister injured her wrist ice skating and my feeling towards that is that she should stop going on such excursions.
an e mail from my cousin (father's side, not mother's side) told me that my aunt turned a corner in terms of the white blood cell count, but i don't know what that means in terms of long range prognosis. i got some books to take to my uncle tomorrow night and my friend from america is coming with. hope it goes okay. but compared to my nervousness before shabbat, i am rather calm now.

"Make Way for Tomorrow" [M2]

Inspired to see this by a column in Slate upon a new release by Criterion.
This is one downer of a movie about a couple married for 50 years, whose kids cannot get it together to take care of their parents when their parents lose their house. At first the father stays with a daughter and the mother stays with a son. The daughter treats her father like dirt, although the father befriends a Jewish owner of a newsstand. The son treats his mother a bit better, but still the daughter in law blames the mother for their daughters running around town- for with grandma in the way, the daughter can't bring her friends home and so the only other choice is running around. So when the father catches cold they decide to send him off to the unseen daughter in California, but she has only room for one and not for both. And they send the mother off to a home for aged women. And mother and father get to spend one last afternoon together in New York City, the place where they spent their honeymoon.
This is a tear jerker, but because I am considering abandoning my parents to my siblings and their fate, it made me feel real bad and I did not like watching this movie.
Thomas Mitchell is a bit of a plus (It's a wonderful life and Only angels have wings) plus the black maid I recognized from "imitation of life" and Ma played Jimmy Stewart's ma in Mr. smith goes to washington. but to consider these recognized faces a joy, in the midst of the grief of bad children is untrue.