A (Very Late) Top Ten Movies List for 2013

10. You're Next

Kitten krazy

I've gone kitten krazy. Pics related.

Eulogy

Since my mother was the oldest, she was the first to experience my granddad’s love of poetry. Over the dull roar of her little brothers being wrangled into bed by my grandmother, my grandfather would sit on my mother’s bed and recite works by Keats, Browning, Longfellow, Field and Kipling.

He had no use for Carl Sandburg, whose poems didn’t rhyme and seemed to break many of the conventions of poetry. He had, in fact, little use for anything written too far past the turn of the century. He loved the clever rhyme schemes of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the grandeur of Tennyson and the gothic imagery of Coleridge.

Those who heard my granddad recite his seemingly bottomless inventory of poems understood his passion, not just for poetry, but for life. He saw the joy and beauty of the world reflected all around him, and demonstrated this beauty to others throughout his eighty-four years on this earth.

His passion for music led to the accidental learning of two languages as a middle schooler. He wanted to hear Carmen, his favorite opera, in its original language. Since Carmen takes place in Spain, he spent three years learning the Spanish he thought necessary to understand the tormented love affair between Don Jose and the eponymous temptress of the opera. Once he was proficient in the language, he tuned in to a performance on his radio, only to discover that Carmen was in French, not Spanish. Undeterred, he adjusted his class schedule accordingly, allowing him to enjoy Georges Bizet’s magnum opus in all its glory after only a few more years of study.

My granddad had relentless sense of purpose that seems less common in this day and age. He once worked a full month without a day off, going to dental school classes in the morning & running the YMCA desk at night. He had many jobs over the course of his life: a mailman, a taxi driver, a caretaker, an assembly-line cream puff filler - and as a dentist who practiced in the town of Council Grove for 46 years.

Anyone in the Esssington family can confirm the first thing Granddad would ask you upon walking in his home was if you’d like something to eat. I have difficulty thinking of a time when I wasn’t immediately offered something from a long-simmering pot of chili or navy beans as I walked into the kitchen. His love of not only food, but of sharing, of giving - was an extension of the genuine sense of caring he felt for others. For all the times that he enlightened us with a bizarrely obscure (but almost always correct) answer in a game of trivial pursuit or simply encouraged us when we were feeling down, he knew that sometimes all we needed was a hot bowl of stew.

Even in his later years, when his memory wasn’t quite as good, his zest for life remained. My sister Emily was being honored as a finalist for an award at the University of Kansas and was scheduled to give a speech. As my grandparents and parents made the drive up from Council Grove to watch, my grandmother asked my granddad if he remembered what they were going to see. He replied, “I don’t know, but I must really want to hear it, because I brought eight hearing-aid batteries with me.”

When I was a child, and I would hear my little sisters being shepherded into bed by my father, my mother would sit on the edge of my bed and read to me the poems that my grandfather had read to her: the works of Keats, of Browning, of Longfellow, of Field, of Kipling. And in these moments when I lay halfway between waking and unconsciousness, I would feel the love that my granddad had passed onto my mother, that she in turn was passing onto me, and I understood something greater than myself: the importance and the meaning of family. For all the things that were close to his heart, this was what my granddad loved the most.

-From "Thanatopsis," one of his favorite poems:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan, which moves

To that mysterious realm, where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death,

Thou go not, like the quarry slave at night,

Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave

Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

Abandoned Amusement Parks

Takakanonuma Greenland - Fukushima, Japan

This park was long-abandoned before the 2011 nuclear disaster, although its ominous look suggests otherwise.

Photos: Spiral

Okpo Land - Seoul, South Korea

Okpo Land was abandoned after two deaths in the 1990s reportedly caused the owner to abandon the park. 

Photos: Trevor J. Tibbetts

Gulliver's Kingdom - Japan

Kamikuishi, the town nearest to Gulliver's Kingdom, was also home to the cult responsible for the 1995 Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo Subway. The notoriety of the Aum Shinrikyo likely discouraged tourists from making the trip from the city, resulting in the financial failure of the park.

Photos: Michael John Grist and UER

Pripyat Amusement Park - Ukraine

Yeah - that park - most recently featured in 2012's Chernobyl Diaries (which, based on the 10 minutes of it I watched on an overseas flight, was a special kind of awful). The park was scheduled to open days before the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant melted down. The bumper cars, the roller coasters, the ferris wheel - they all just sit there, never to be used by a single park guest.

Photo: Rebecca Litchfield

Jazzland - Six Flags New Orleans

Even seven years after Hurricane Katrina, Six Flags New Orleans (formerly known as Jazzland) has yet to be rescued from the disaster. Reportedly 80% of the park was corroded beyond repair by the salt water that engulfed the Big Easy.

Photos: Darrell Rhodes Miller

Spreepark - Berlin, Germany

Most of the rides were shipped to South America by the owners in failed attempt to re-launch the park in Lima. Authorities found £14 million worth of cocaine in the masts of the Flying Carpet ride when the owners tried to re-enter the country in 2004.

Photos: Sebastian Niedlich

As a bonus, I have two related videos to share. The first features a very strange ride, which seems to be China's take on Disney's "It's A Small World" ride, although this ride would most likely terrify kids instead of enthralling them. I'm pretty sure if I rode this I would lose my mind. It's scary enough just walking through the queue line, hearing the voices of damned children sing a nursery rhyme they learned in hell. By the time I saw the donkeys with the spinning heads, I would have thrown myself in the water.

And lastly, Mike Petty's excellent "No Joy," a short film shot at the now-defunct Joyland Amusement Park in Wichita, KS. When you're trying to sleep later tonight and you can't get that music out of your head, you'll thank me.

No Joy from Mike Petty on Vimeo.

Creepy Kids' Halloween Costumes, circa 1950

My favorite is holiday is Halloween. Easily. When I was a kid, we had a trunk in the garage where we kept all of our Halloween decorations. Around early September, I started asking my parents about when we could open up the so-called Halloween Chest. Once October rolled around, I would proceed to go crazy with the spider webs, scream mats, kooky skeletons and whatever else I found in there. I even convinced my Dad to construct an animatronic Frankenstein, Witch, Dracula and zip-line Ghost, allowing us to scare children all over the tri-county area. Sure, I got excited about other holidays too. Like other kids, I spent Christmas Eve intermittently waking up every few hours in anticipation of opening presents. Easter was exciting too I suppose. Thanksgiving - well, I never had much of an appetite in those days. Really, nothing came close to the colossal sense of excitement I got from Halloween. The seasonal TV specials on hauntings, witch burnings and urban legends filled me with a zest for life that perplexed everyone I knew.

Unfortunately, I was not born in the 1950s. If I was born in this decade, I could have worn super creepy costumes that would have terrified my adult self. I suppose we all yearn for decades we never actually lived in. This apparently is a common affliction of my generation (see: NY Times article about how no one lives in the "now"). I guess recognizing the problem is the first step towards recovery. Or not.

And now: a collection of photographs from Halloweens of yesteryear that are sure to stick in your subconscious.

Whatever you do, don't look into her eyes.

And this is not ominous. Not one little bit.

Shortly after this photograph was taken, someone died. Probably a mailman or something.

Sweet dreams, y'all.

David Sedaris reads Miranda July

If that the combination of words above made your eyes get big, well, you're a huge nerd, just like me.


Sedaris pretty much nails the delivery of the story because he and Miranda July are secret psychic soul mates or something. The story itself is over at about the fifteen minute mark, but I strongly recommend listening to his comments about the story at the end.

If you haven't seen any of Miranda July's films (Me and You and Everyone We Know, The Future), shame on you. And if you call her work "twee" or "weird" then...well, you'd actually be right about those things. But you'd be missing the bigger picture.

Miranda July's best work takes on the banality of human existence - all the awkwardness, all the weirdness and turns it into something strangely endearing. She's a true artist; not merely a filmmaker, writer, or performance artist - whatever that really means. Most importantly, she's a true original without equal in today's popular culture.

And now, Miranda July, doing what she does best - making you feel uncomfortable.

An extension of greeting from my hand to yours

Hello all.

This is my blog. I will try not to inundate all of you with the weekly progress of my baby bump, post about the color and shape of my daily bowel movements, write meandering diatribes on my very repetitive and pedestrian (yet still very Freudian) dreams or upload endless pictures of my fourteen children. Really, I make no promises as far as content. One thing that pretty much everyone on the internet struggles with is sharing too much of themselves. Daily perusings of your Facebook feed will attest to this fact. We all feel alone in this world. The internet makes us temporarily feel less alone. Really, it makes us simultaneously connected but alienated (all the while making us extraordinarily unhappy). And mostly, it keeps us from being in the moment. And being in the moment is what life is really about. Every time you get bored in public and open up the browser on your smart phone, every time you think about a past event or a potential future happiness when you're having a conversation with someone, every time you watch another episode of Downton Abbey instead of going out and actually participating in the world, put a penny in a jar. Then count those pennies over the course of a week. Guess what? You'll have a lot of pennies. Maybe enough for a pizza party with friends. Maybe enough for a trip to Bermuda, who knows. And yes, I struggle with this stuff as much as anyone. What can I say? Life is hard, dudes.

But I digress.

The purpose of this space is to tell stories. And I mean that in the broadest and truest sense of the word. This means other people's stories will be told, but my own will certainly come into play (as one inevitably informs the other). Posts will include, but will be not limited to, my thoughts on music, film, television, literature, current events and so on and so forth. Also: random things I find on the internet that scare me, because I'm a morbid bastard.

So come sit around the campfire. I'll tell you a story or two.