I Was the Block!

One of my friends most recent blog entry was about how she thinks she might be boring her readers with the stuff she's been writing lately. I made the following empathic (at first, I put "empathetic") comment:

I think about this too when I feel the blog urge. Should I or shouldn't I tell my readers about the 2.5-hour walk I took today in Spanaway (bumblefuck), during which the most interesting thing I saw was a garage band? I thought it was interesting. But would they? What a quandary...

For me, there are boring blog entries, and there are boring blog entries by friends, which are not boring. Sometimes I find interesting blogs, but I usually stop reading them eventually unless they are really good because I don't really care about the person behind the blog. For example, if they wrote about how they got into a grad school, I would feel no elation for them. But if a friend-blogger wrote that she got into grad school, I'd be thinking 'Woo! yeah! sweet!" and feel happy for her.

So about that Walk: I went out thinking I was going to be out for only an hour and a half, in order to drop off a dvd at the nearest grocery store (yeah, that shows you just how rustic an area we live in), but on the way back, I decided to take a little detour, and ...you know that block game I might have mentioned a while back, where you have to push a block around a maze and try to drop it into a hole?

I was the block!

And whoever was pushing me was really really stupid and had no sense of direction. Okay, I suppose it had less to do with sense of direction than the dead end after dead end and "not a through street" streets and "no outlet" lets that I encountered. Whew, good thing it didn't start raining. In fact it was so sunny that there was a good number of people out washing their cars or doing yard work. Hehe, I faked a British accent when I asked one of them if there was a way out that way (there wasn't of course).

Later, after I found out who won Best Make-Up Artist, I went to see Persepolis with some people I met at the French club meeting. And BOY was it lovely! The drawings and animation I mean, not the torture and war and loss of basic human/women's rights. I definitely want to get the dvd for this one, as well as read the graphic novel the film was based on.

A political story on the surface, I would say it's as much a love story and coming-of-age story. Despite the harsh nature of the political one, there were a lot of funny moments as well as quite a few sad ones that moved me in a way that Reading Lolita in Tehran never did (this sentence would read totally differently if that book title was not capitalized). It's not a matter of one story being sadder or funnier or better written than the other; rather it's a testament to the power of images over words. Or maybe my imagination just sucks.

At any rate, Persepolis (the film) captured in a few second-long images the sadness of separation, or the desolation of being homeless. What I love about animation is how it can make even the act of hitting a homeless man seem funny. Which sounds terrible, but it's true! In animated form, I guess, we sort of forget the live, 3-D consequences of hitting someone in the face with a bag, or repeatedly smashing a box of mashed potatoes over someone's head. Satrapi, the author of Persepolis, made a brilliant move in choosing to tell her "growing up in Iran" story visually.

So goes the story, but it was the artwork that I loved the most. It was done mostly in black and white, & speaking as one who doesn't know much about animation, it was inky and swirly with spongey areas showing light. There were falling jasmine petals, butterflies fluttering away like an Escher Metamorphosis, flying cars, sea waves drawn as curly-cues, even an (possibly unintentional) homage to Edward Munch's The Scream.