1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 43: Escape from L.A.

These movies came to mind while I was watching Escape from L.A.:

• the Rambo series
• Independence Day and The Rock (both from 1996)
• The Day After Tomorrow
• Children of Men
• and, weirdly, Labyrinth

I guess this movie is a kind of a Labyrinth for grownups. But better than Labyrinth.

Kurt Russell reprises his role as “Snake” Plissken, from Escape from New York (1981). Like Ed Harris in The Rock, he’s a war hero who has gone rogue; and like Sean Connery in The Rock, he is captured by the U.S. government and forced to go up against a rebel group that is threatening the nation’s security. I doubt that either movie plagiarized from the other, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they both took these elements from Escape from New York.

As in The Rock, the hero must travel to an island. The island is Los Angeles. It has been cut off from the mainland by earthquakes and tsunamis, and now it is used as a deportation site for misfits who have been stripped of their citizenship by the ultra-moralistic U.S. President. Gangsters rule the island. (The joke is that the dystopia is not so unlike certain common ideas of the real Los Angeles.) The main gangster is “Cuervo” Jones, a “Che” Guevara figure from Peru’s Shining Path. “Snake” Plissken must track “Cuervo” down and retrieve the doomsday device that he has stolen.

“Snake” has a series of bizarre encounters with the inhabitants of L.A. This is what the movie is really about, and the reason it reminds me of Labyrinth – and, for that matter, the Inferno (which I continue to read). A lot of the people “Snake” meets are depicted by classic oddball actors. One of my favorite characters, played by Peter Fonda, is an old surfer who rides the tsunamis; another is played by the haunted-looking, scene-stealing Valeria Golino. She is a beacon of warmth in a mostly cynical movie.

There are chase scenes and fight scenes. “Snake” likes to shoot first and ask questions later. Sometimes, I’d feel a little sorry for the gangsters.

In the following still picture, Golino and Russell are tied up so that their features can be harvested for plastic surgery. (You know: L.A., and all that.)

The visuals are slick, except when they’re obviously meant to be goofy. There are some good laughs. I had a good time.

Still ill

Saturday

Blades of grass I mowed: zero. I’ve been feeling lousy.

COVID test results: negative (Karin’s and mine).

Karin & I went to our new house and cleaned for several hours. I was holding up all right until I swept the very dusty basement stairs and window ledges; afterward, it felt like a gallon of glue was in my nose. I took pills and felt OK. Then I felt lousy again. I took more pills. This illness should continue for a week.

Our neighbor who mows lawns mowed ours without having been asked to. Then he came over and hung around until we paid him.

It won’t be like this after we’ve moved in.

When we left, after dark, our little street was jam-packed with cars. These neighbors party. This will be a change from Mishawaka.

Sunday

Feeling worse. We stayed home from church and watched the service online. Samuel was grumpy all day; finally, I took him out in his stroller, about fifty minutes. He slept the last twenty and woke up as soon as we came home.

He recites passages from his books:

Kite oom
Kite moon
Kite boon
Kite kittens

I have been keeping up with the Dante reading, which is not strenuous, though some nights I don’t finish my canto until it’s time to sleep.

A conference

“John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice at Fifty: An Anniversary Conference” – today and tomorrow, at Notre Dame. Look at the nice lineup of speakers. (Alas, one of them, Charles Mills, died earlier this week.)

I was to have gone with my Uncle Tim. It would have been my first academic conference in several years. But this morning I woke up with COVID symptoms – mild, cold-like ones.

Karin and Samuel have them, too.

It probably is just a cold, what with the changes in the weather. Even so, I have withdrawn from the conference and scheduled a COVID test.

This is the second conference I will have missed because of the pandemic.

If I continue to feel well enough, I’ll mow the grass.

Benton Harbor and Saint Joseph; Sample Street

Benton Harbor, Michigan, and St. Joseph, Michigan – adjoining cities one county to the north of us – are featured in this Guardian report. And not for a very lovely reason.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Fall’s equinox will occur tomorrow. After several bright, hot days, the weather is obligingly misty.

My dad and I moved a carload of books to my new house. We rode along Sample Street, which goes in a straight line forever. One side is bleakly industrial; the other, bleakly residential. The street is dotted with sad little shops and gas stations.

More than any other part of South Bend, this area reminds me of the grim outlands of southern Quito.

When I was younger, I would project a certain romantic feeling onto such places. I guess I still do; but now I face the prospect of spending the rest of my life in one. (Or very near to one; the house’s immediate surroundings aren’t quite like this.) I am a little too old, and too tired, to relish this possibility.

Self-care

Well, here I am out on the porch at five in the morning. This is another of my routines. I’ve been waking two hours earlier than Karin and Samuel: it’s the only quiet time guaranteed to me.

I alternate days of exercise and days of rest; on the days of rest, I sit out on the porch, in the dark. The porch bulb doesn’t work.

I daren’t remain inside the house – I daren’t make noise or inspire the kitties to make noise – I daren’t wake the boy.

The sun rises pretty late (we’re near the time zone’s western edge). Even though it’s dark, I take plenty of reading material with me. Today I have four volumes, and a printout of a philosophy article. I won’t be able to see any of it until fifteen minutes before Karin and Samuel wake up.

I hardly ever watch TV at this hour. All I do, besides pray, is type on the computer, drink tea, and listen to insects and trains.

It’s lovely. No wonder it has become a habit.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

100 Days of Dante (hat tip: Mr. Quiring) – a schedule for those who like to read the same thing as many other people. One hundred days, one hundred cantos.

The philosopher Eleonore Stump has taught a two-semester sequence pairing Dante with Aquinas (fall and spring). That schedule, also, is an intriguing possibility. It is not all bad to be out of collegiate work; I can read whatever I choose.

Now, if only I could change that porch bulb. …

September’s poem (and TV show)

T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” (no. 1 of Four Quartets):

Garlic and sapphires in the mud / Clot the bedded axle-tree. / The trilling wire in the blood / Sings below inveterate scars / Appeasing long forgotten wars. …

Is Samuel too young to watch Wire in the Blood, my favorite serial killer profiling show? Maybe, but it has become our routine: he approaches me when ready to sleep; I change his diaper; we sit together and watch Wire in the Blood until he drifts into unconsciousness.

We have only three more episodes to view. There will be a hole in my life when we have finished with Wire in the Blood.

Karin has stayed away from this show; but not long ago she did join me in watching a rather anomalous episode, in which the profiler, who lives in Northeast England, travels to Texas to solve a crime. The fish-out-of-water plot reminded me of “Paul Bunyan Goes to Texas”; I wrote that story in the seventh grade.

Arrival

My parents are in town. Today they toured their house, which they had never seen. Their next task will be to help Karin & me to pack up our belongings so that we can move into our new house, so they can move into theirs.

This will take weeks to do.

Leading them around their yard, I urged them to buy a weedwhacker and to have their trees trimmed.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This fall I am reading Compulsory Games, in which are reprinted fifteen “uncanny” tales of Robert Aickman. He seems to have had two great interests: this literary genre, and the conservation of Britain’s canals (he co-founded the Inland Waterways Association). He strikes me as having been an offbeat, fastidious person.

I like his stories very much.

A tragedy

This is an update about the hospitalization that I mentioned a few days ago.

Most readers already know what has happened; in any case, it isn’t my story to tell.

For now, I’ll only say that my family is anguished. I am anguished. Karin is anguished. Samuel doesn’t understand, but I think he knows that we’re sad.

In our family, though, we really do love each other. And many other people love us too. These things have become crystal-clear.

(I know this will sound terribly cryptic if you don’t know the sad news. If that’s the case, feel free to get in touch and I’ll relay what has been announced by those most affected. This isn’t a wholly private matter; it’s just that, as I said, it isn’t my story to tell.)

A song I’ve listened to when I’ve run out of prayer:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases

His mercies never come to an end

They are new every morning

New every morning

Great is thy faithfulness, oh Lord

Great is thy faithfulness

🙠 🙢

Ecuador 0, Chile 0

We had the Chileans on the ropes, and then one of our players was ejected for an unlucky foul.

Next qualifier: Thursday, in Montevideo – in Peñarol’s stadium, not in the famed Estadio Centenario.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Today I mowed one of the lawns and pushed Samuel in his stroller for an hour, which didn’t put him to sleep. He’s been napping less and less. The good news is, he is very interested in numbers. He calls out the numbers he sees in books … and on billboards, keyboards, athletes’ uniforms, etc. He also has been saying color and animal names.

I can’t take credit for this. What has inspired him is Baby Einstein. Let no one disparage that show.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Today, also, Karin & I cleaned house. Not the house we just bought, but the one we’re living in, my parents’ house.

In Ecuador, my parents loaded their belongings onto a truck and bought plane tickets to the United States. They’ll come to Mishawaka on Sunday. They’ll stay at Mary’s & Martin’s house until their things arrive.

Ecuador 2, Paraguay 0

Hardly a comfortable victory: the goals arrived in minute 88 and in stoppage time. Paraguay defended well but posed little offensive threat. We were devoid of ideas and sharpness until the last quarter of the game; the substitutions helped.

So, due to a couple of goals in less than ten minutes, our streak of winless games – seven, counting the two previous World Cup qualifiers and five games at the Copa América – was ended. Perhaps this will make us bolder.

Yesterday’s other results allowed us to increase our lead over the teams beneath us in the standings.

Our next game, on Sunday against Chile, also will be at home; then we’ll travel to Uruguay for this month’s curtain-closer.

I finished reading Tana French’s In the Woods, which had lain forlornly on my shelf for several years. I didn’t expect it to be such a downer.

Now can we watch The Dublin Murders?, asks Karin.

Well, no. The Dublin Murders relates the stories of In the Woods and The Likeness simultaneously. So, first, I have to read The Likeness.

The weather in Indiana is turning autumnal, which is good for jogging.