A carnival of technology

You know how sometimes it rains when the sun is out? Folk sure do have some funny sayings to attach to it.

When Kat passed through here a couple of days ago on the way to the ‘rents’ place, we somehow got onto the topic of sunshowers. She mentioned that a Bulgarian friend described it as the bears getting married. I remember one time during a sunshower, I was sitting in a car next to the baseball fields by the Aquadome, probably before or after one of Kat’s softball games. Some lady ran by through the rain with her children in tow and shouted, “The devil’s beatin’ his wife with a fryin’ pan!” That phrase struck with me, and I can’t help but remember that woman’s crazy yell and that imagery of demonic spousal abuse every time a few drops of rain fall while the sun is shining.

Kat sent me a wiki link today about sunshowers, and one of its references was a post to linguist list compiling some sunshower phrases across a variety of languages and cultures. The most common themes are animals getting married, animals giving birth and some sort of ruckus going on in hell. Baby Yaga gets involved at one point. Of course, the cheery Russians have to go off on their own tangent: “Rain with sunlight deplores a drowned corpse, or death of a man of virtue.” Rock on!

The sun isn’t supposed to be out when it rains. That’s just not the way things usually work. We know why and how it happens, of course, but that doesn’t take away any of the mystery or awe in this upheaval of the norm. Regardless of the angle between the cloud and the sun, sunshowers are signifiers of something gone wrong, just as the beauty of a rainbow shows us that Noah finally found land, or that there might be a pot of gold if you’re lucky, or that things are about to get totally fabulous. Science can, and should, do what it wants to describe and understand these phenomena, but it can’t take away the wonder and our need for poetry to cope with such an event. I think it’s great and amazing that every culture has its own myth and symbols for this occasional and strangely specific event. I do feel kind of sorry for the devil’s wife, though.

So my shaving stuff arrived last week. In addition to the old-fashioned safety razor I bought a while back, I now have a brush, a stand to hold the brush while it drys, a mug, a cake of bay rum scented soap and some new blades made by Feather, a Japanese company, which are supposed to be sharp as ninja’s sword. The blades are a little more expensive, about 60¢ apiece, but they are pretty damn sharp, and the one I’ve been using for the past week doesn’t seem to have yet lost any of its edge. Granted, I don’t have a very thick beard, but those Gillette pieces of crap ended up in the trash after about five shaves, so I’m quite pleased. I can’t yet say how they compare to Merkur’s blades since I’m still trying to figure out what in the hell I’m doing. As for the change from Barbasol to a cake of soap, man, it feels good. It really is the best of both worlds. I’m being alls kinda old-school, so there aren’t more macho methods of removing hair from my face short of a straight razor or a Crocodile Dundee knoife, and it leaves my skin all soft and smooth without drying it out or leaving a weird oily residue. And then I wrangle some cattle and fight a bear with my silky chin.

The biggest problem with the safety razor and brush is that very little I know about shaving applies anymore. I found some videos made by some guy on Youtube about shaving, and I did have the good sense to watch them before getting out the brush. I kind of wish I’d had his advice before I tried the new razor. Even after I started using this dude’s technique, it took me a couple of days before I could shave my neck without getting a little razor burn. I think I’m getting the hang of holding the razor at the right angle and shaving in a pattern that’s efficient and not too harsh, and the wet lather feels a lot better than the canned cream. I end up with a much thinner lather than the guy in the videos, but I think that’s just because I’m using a soap while he’s using a cream. The soap works well enough, and the bay rum scent sure is nice, but I might have to try a cream in order to compare. As for the brush, I’m not totally sure what to think yet. There are a lot of different grades of brushes, divided by material among those made with synthetic fibers, boar hair and badger hair. There are different grades of badger hair—pure, best, and super or silvertip or something like that—and I got one from the bottom of of the badgers (badger badger badger badger), a Vulfix Pure something or another. Internet says that Vulfix is on the Isle of Man, but the logo on the brush says it’s made in England. Is the Isle of Man a country or not? The best I can tell from lazy research is that they’re associated with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but they do their own thing. I guess that means that, politically, they’re more like Australia than Wales. Maybe. Their flag is weird. Anyhow, the synthetics were tempting for a second, since they aren’t made of animals, but you know what? Screw the badgers. I want a good shave, and nature has made some fibers a lot nicer than nylon or whatever goes into those things. I have a hard time judging the up-front cost of an item against its expected lifespan, especially when I don’t know if I’ll like it or not, so I decided not to spend a hundred freaking dollars on a brush and got one of the cheap ones. It works about as one would expect, but it’s just a tiny bit prickly.

I haven’t yet made up my mind on aftershave. Video dude says I should toss my alcohol-based Old Spice (shut up, I like Old Spice), but slapping a nice astringent on my face after those two or three passes with a sharp metal blade doesn’t seem to me like such a bad idea. Besides, I like the smell.

Since I don’t think this entry is long enough yet, I’m going to talk about movies now. I’ve been perusing the the foreign section of Blockbuster lately trying to increase my level of annoying pretentiousness, and I’ve had three recent rentals from there: a Japanese film, a Swedish film and a French film. The Japanese movie was Seven Samurai (????). I own a copy of another of Kurosawa’s films, Yojimbo, and from that I’ve decided that I really like samurai movies. I learned about Yojimbo because it’s the movie that A Fistful of Dollars totally ripped off, and, having watched them both, I agree with the court’s assessment that Leone was totally infringing all up ons. They’re the same movie, but, more importantly, they might as well be the same genre. Samurai movies are just spaghetti westerns in disguise. Or maybe the other way around. It doesn’t matter. Samurai movies and Western movies are the same thing, and I like me some Westerns, therefore I must like me some samurai movies. Seven Samurai was a one of Kurosawa’s big epic samurai movies, but my searches for it in stores have only turned up $40 Criterion copies. I don’t really want to pay $40 for a movie, so I rented it, and it was pretty badass. One thing I found interesting was that the trailer included on the DVD tells you the ending right up front. Four of the samurai die and they totally save the town but they’re still all moody and brooding at the end (warning: spoilers). There’s a place for suspense and surprise, but it doesn’t apply to all movies. I think that the fascination with keeping the essential details of a film secret is often damaging to the appreciation of a story. Rather than needing to watch something twice, you could just read or watch a synopsis and get the same effect the first time through. I wonder if that demand for suspense is a cultural thing? Not all movies are about the end. This one is about the middle.

The Swedish film is The Seventh Seal (imdb says “Det sjunde inseglet”, but the title screen was in English, so I don’t know what the deal is), a rumination on death and nothingness by Ingmar Bergman. Firstly, watching a movie in Swedish was kind of weird. The foreign-people-language movies I own are in French, Spanish and Japanese, and I don’t have any trouble watching those with subtitles. With French and Spanish I can understand just a little bit of what’s being spoken, but it’s enough that I can keep myself synchronized between the voices and the text. With Japanese I don’t understand a damn thing outside of “hai,” so the words and text are disconnected. I read the text and the speech becomes a sort of background that adds to the ambiance but has nothing to do with comprehending what’s being said. Swedish, on the other hand, is a Germanic language, similar in background to Old English, so it has a small intersection with English but none of the Romance bits I would find familiar, making it just barely recognizable enough that I can tell when a spoken word or two matches the subtitles and start to question whether the text is lying. It was difficult to keep up.

The plot of the movie was familiar since I’ve seen it parodied so many times: some knight or something plays chess for his life with Death, whose character embodies everything I know about Swedish film. Seriously, Death is hardcore. The image on the cover is the reason I picked the movie.

Anyhow, there are a lot of symbols and whatnot, but the message is pretty straightforward: God, if he exists, is punishing you, and the only thing that death can bring is nothing. It’s very nihilistic. I’m afraid I didn’t pay enough attention to my lessons on Kierkegaard to comment sensibly on the knights of faith and knights of infinite resignation as they appear in this film, but it still didn’t seem very difficult. Maybe Gravity’s Rainbow has spoiled overwrought art for me. Knight dude believed in nothing but wanted to find faith as an escape from the coldness of reality, squire dude believed in nothing and was comfortable with it, and actor dude had faith, which was his salvation though it also was a source of fear and ignorance and caused those around him to doubt his sanity. Was actor dude right? I guess that’s one of the ponderables the movie provides. I think it was saying no. I did not see any flat-packed furniture anywhere.

The French movie is Notre Musique, by Jean-Luc Godard. I’ve never seen any of M. Godard’s movies, but his is a name I indelibly associate with pretentious art flicks. I want to see if his reputation is true. Notre Musique is one of his newer movies, and I haven’t yet watched it. I wanted to get Masculin Féminin, but I couldn’t find it. I hope this new thing is as much representative of the nouvelle vague.