Rabbit Trap

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Reviews

When I see wildly divergent movie reviews I know to head straight to the theater. Such was the case with a new film, Rabbit Trap. Reading between the lines of the, mostly, bad reviews I could tell that this was probably going to be an interesting film that breaks the mold of Hollywood’s tired formulas.

Rabbit Trap is, in fact, a very good movie. As the Weird Studies podcasters point out in an episode about the film, Rabbit Trap resembles a decadent, fin du siècle Arthur Machen story come to life: the Welsh mythology, the eerie mood, and the emotional transformation of the characters.

I won’t do any spoilers here but the film owes a lot to 1970s British folk horror both visually and in terms of a slower pacing than most new movies. The film is heavy on atmosphere but also rich in character study and drama. It fulfills my main requirement of a good movie, that the actors are transformed over the course of time, different at the end than at the beginning. For those who don’t like horror I’ll note that there’s no slasher or violent content.

The cast is made up of only three characters. Rosy McEwen portrays Daphne Davenport, an experimental electronic composer and Dev Patel is her husband who collects field recordings for her music. Jade Croot is a mysterious and ambiguous child who appears appears at their isolated, rural house. The experimental music and the field recording conceit allows for a rich sonic texture in the film and a good reminder that, in my opinion, sound is just, if not more, important in a movie than image.

The conclusion of my favorite Machen story, A Fragment of Life might be the best, if oblique, way of summing up Rabbit Trap,

So I awoke from a dream of a London suburb, of daily labour, of weary, useless little things; and as my eyes were opened I saw that I was in an ancient wood, where a clear well rose into grey film and vapour beneath a misty, glimmering heat. And a form came towards me from the hidden places of the wood, and my love and I were united by the well.

Always Be Modeling

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Design
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One of the many benefits of woodworking as a hobby is the privilege of customizing furniture to fit your house. You can make a unique piece to fit a unique room. See also Gesamtkunstwerk, of which I’m an adherent, somewhat to the annoyance of my forgiving spouse.

Most, but not all, of my furniture pieces are reproductions often extracted from auction photos. I spotted the Stickley chair with inlay, designed by Harvey Ellis, at the top of this post and immediately wanted to make a copy. I suspect this chair was a one of a kind prototype that I thought would make a good dining room chair to replace the thrift store chairs that offend my vision every single day.

To do all this pretentious Gesamtkunstwerking takes forethought. Wagner didn’t toss off those operas in an hour, after all. As a wise shop teacher once said, “always have a plan.”

Towards that end I recently spent a few days reviewing the finer points of the 3D modeling program Sketchup. I’ve used it for years but it really helps to know, in detail, what all the tools do and also to commit to memory the many keyboard shortcuts. FYI: the Los Angeles Public Library, like many other libraries around the U.S., offers free digital resources including Linkedin Learning (formally Lynda), which has a great Sketchup class.

Note–the chair rails would have curves that I did not cut in the model.

Chairs, even rectilinear examples like this one, are complicated objects with many oddball angles. They also are subject to more stress than most furniture as we haul our heavy asses up and down out of them many times a day. Due to all these angles, the 3D model took longer than usual. That this chair also has intricate inlay work means a big commitment and I wanted to make doubly sure that the chair would work in our house so I also took the step of making a full scale model out of scrap wood.

Cat for scale, but the photo does not do justice to how ridiculously oversized this chair seems in our tiny house.

I’m very thankfully I made this janky model as it became immediately apparent that the chair would be way too big for the room. It’s like something for your Edwardian era baronial dining room, not a scrappy Los Anglees bungalow. I’m a lowly blogger, after all, not a captain of industry.

While I’m disappointed the chair won’t work, I’m happy I didn’t waste wood and a lot of time. Thankfully I spotted a very strange chair from the same period in the De Young Museum in San Francisco and I think I might draw up a model of this chair. Story to be continued . . .

As Usual: a Smoky, Noisy 4th

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Thoughtstylings

Forth of July fireworks here in Los Angeles start up in June with random explosions, including a few at odd hours, like 4:30 a.m. The identity of the weirdo early morning fireworks revelers is a great mystery to me. By around 8 p.m. on the 4th there’s a constant roar of fireworks all over the city that doesn’t die down until the early morning hours.

I have a theory about this day and it has nothing to do with patriotism, hot dogs or Yankee Doodle. The 4th is simply an “upside-down” or “misrule” day like Mardi Gras, Saturnalia, Halloween or the Medieval Feast of Fools. It’s a day when social order lets off some steam and the authorities look the other way. Another example would be the large packs of dudes on dirt bikes (now sometimes electric motorcycles) popping wheelies. A mass act of civil disobedience, on the other hand, would receive a very different response from the authorities.

If just from the reaction of our terrified cats and dog I’m not a fan of the 4th. When I woke up and peered out the window at 6 a.m. the next day I saw so much smoke I that I mistook it for fog. The air quality was in the “very unhealthy” range.

We could get into the NextDoor fireworks freakouts but that would be the length and tediousness of a grad thesis for a sociology degree. I’ll just say I’d be happy if the holiday went away especially now living in a city occupied by a masked force of Federales. I’ll leave the last word on the 4th with:

L.A. Taco reading the Declaration of Independence and Alan Ginsberg’s thoughts on Independence Day, written in the 50s but still remarkably prescient. See also Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age starting around page 46 for a lengthier history of misrule days and their historical consequences.

LA Still LA

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Thoughtstylings
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An errand took me back into Los Angeles from my Pomona pet sitting gig today and I wanted to follow up on yesterday’s post about what’s going on.

Whenever some big news event happens here, such as Trump’s chaotic immigration crackdown or the horrific fires back in January, the media tends to make it seem like the entire city is on the verge of collapse. I don’t want to minimize the events of this year–I’m appalled by what’s going on–but life in most places outside of downtown is pretty normal. Los Angeles is an enormous city both in population and geographical size. My journey today took me through Union Station, the subway and Hollywood. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The muffler colossi still overlook the sun baked streets (though this one installs glass so, apparently, put down his muffler).

I say nothing was out of the ordinary except for the disruption to the bus route I take to get back to Pomona. Due to street closures the stressed out bus driver got lost and had to make a u-turn on a busy, narrow street with a long, double articulated bus. This bus route caters to lower income working class folks and elderly people and the disruption is a major inconvenience. If the strategy is to “own the libs” it’s hurting the wrong people. Libs don’t take the bus. The disorganization of the current administration seems to result more in chaos and cruelty than any consummation of their goals (that, to be abundantly clear, I disagree with). And sending troops here right now is completely ridiculous.

If you want to know what’s going on my city councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez has been a voice of sanity. I feel like I’m better off listening to him than all the sensationalism in social media and in the mainstream press.

Opening Borders

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Thoughtstylings
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To travel from one place to another, particularly in this, our fragmented postmodern age means to traverse liminal border spaces: highways, airport waiting rooms, bus depots, interstate highways–what Fredric Jameson calls the “hyperspace” of late stage capitalism. Yesterday I found myself on a longer than expected liminal journey, making my way, via public transit, from central Los Angeles to pet sitting duties in Pomona, a little over 30 miles east.

As coincidence would have it this journey coincided with the protests that were taking place in Downtown Los Angeles surrounding Trump’s ICE raids and the arrest of union leader David Huerta. My trip kept skirting the zone where protestors faced off with an alphabet soup of law enforcement agencies. The bus I was on diverted as did the long range commuter bus I was expecting to catch. Stops were re-positioned unexpectedly. I jumped on the subway to get to Union Station thinking I could get my commuter bus there only to find it diverted to a stop outside the station. While I couldn’t catch the bus I found myself with a view of hundreds of police cars streaming towards a blockade of the 101 freeway. I ended up giving up on the bus and catching a train. The minor inconveniences I faced are, of course, nothing compared to the journeys many immigrants have made to this country in search of a better, peaceful life.

Ironically, I was in Los Angeles to attend Pentecost services, a day that celebrates an abolishment of borders, when the apostles found themselves communicating in languages they didn’t speak and implying a new way of doing things outside the boundaries of identitarian affiliations. As the new pope, Leo XIV put it in his Pentecost homily,

The Spirit opens borders, first of all, in our hearts. He is the Gift that opens our lives to love. His presence breaks down our hardness of heart, our narrowness of mind, our selfishness, the fears that enchain us and the narcissism that makes us think only of ourselves. The Holy Spirit comes to challenge us, to make us confront the possibility that our lives are shrivelling up, trapped in the vortex of individualism.

“I dreamed I could Fly” by Jonathan Borofsky in the Civic Center subway station.

During my trip I kept encountering something I find very odd: the use of classical music to, somehow, magically make unwanted homeless people go away. I went to grad school to study music and can’t help but notice this. The 7-11 near the beginning of my bus trip blasts classical music. I encountered it in the Civic Center subway station and in the bathroom at Union Station. Instead of using our national resources to provide health care, housing and education we spend it on the military that Trump is sending to Los Angeles and on the obscenely expensive gadgets monitoring us from the air. When this diversion of resources leaves people homeless, rather than get people housing and the help they need, we put up some speakers and blast Bach. Welcome to dystopia.

No, despite the propaganda, the whole city of Los Angeles is not somehow out of control. Most people are going about their normal business–remember, this is an enormous city both in population and square mileage–but I think it’s safe to say that most people here are angry at the hatred directed at our immigrant neighbors. If the hope was to intimidate us it’s not working. We’re coming together instead. As the pope says in that same homily, “Where there is love, there is no room for prejudice, for “security” zones separating us from our neighbors”