And shoot me back my cutie, my supersonic beauty, send me back my Martian gal

[austin_dern]

I don't know if I'm going to go see The Astronaut Farmer. On the one hand, ``guy building his own rocket ship'' sounds like it should appeal to me, and I'm a sucker for any attempt to tug at sentimentality. On the other hand, I don't naturally go to movies very often, and from what I gather the movie theaters have been doing their best to make the process of going to movies all the more expensive and aggravating in my Singaporean absence. Likely as not I'll forget all about it until it shows up on cable some day, then plan to watch it, and then forget. I'll go out on a limb and guess that the soundtrack includes pieces that sound vaguely like Gustav Holst, though.

The commercials have got me wondering when's the last time a farmer in a movie actually did any farming. I'm not positive, but it might have been Auntie Em and Uncle I'm Sorry, Dorothy Doesn't Care Enough To Feel Guilty About Running Away From You Much Less Remember You By Name back in The Wizard of Oz. They were just battening down the hatches and recovering from a natural disaster, but at least that's unmistakably a farming-related activity. Otherwise farmers are always going off building rockets and baseball parks and having adulterous affairs with Clint Eastwood and discovering strange meteorites crashed on their property and cracking open the little croquet balls the giant invading spiders come in and who knows what. If that's a fair view of what goes on in agriculture-based territories then it's no wonder most people in the United States eat a diet of Big Macs and Doritos instead. There's not enough actual food being produced to feed a small village.

A little human-interest piece in The New York Times mentioned that once a month at Andy Warhol's gravestone someone leaves a can of Campbell's soup and some spare change. Occasionally there are also silk-screens, Brillo pads, and boxes of crayons. It's a quirky twist on the flowers left at Rudolph Valentino's grave, and I'd think it was really sweet except I can't shake the feeling he probably arranged for it.

Trivia: In May 1956 the United States Air Force decided to build a $41 million guided missile production facility in Sorrento, California, to build the Atlas rocket. Source: Project Mercury: A Chronology, James M Grimwood, NASA SP-4001.

Currently Reading: 1215: The Year of Magna Carta, Danny Danziger, John Gillingham. They can try giving me context but for me the signing of the Magna Carta will always be the way it was depicted in an episode of My Favorite Martian, and I love it that way and don't care if you think that's sad.

Comments

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

I can certainly understand the romantic appeal of the film, particularly being as anti-government as I am (a private initiative - woo hoo!). However, I also understand your aversion to seeing it in the theater. I simply do not go to see movies in theaters any more, period. I'll wait for it to come to cable.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I ever mentioned but after my anger at being forced to wait for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow Golden Village had the audacity to claim customers actually liked sitting through twenty minutes of ring tone commercials and Toyota ads.

Secret grave commemorations

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

:::It's a quirky twist on the flowers left at Rudolph Valentino's grave.

And upon the annual commemoration at the Baltimore grave of Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849), in which a secretive lone visitor leaves three red roses and a bottle of cognac (http://baltimore.about.com/b/a/000023.htm).

This has been happening for fifty years. I suppose somebody could be inheriting the duty, like the Phantom, but I hope it's organized; if multiple Poe fans independently decide to undertake the tradition, the cemetary could get crowded.

Re: Secret grave commemorations

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Huh. I didn't know about the flowers and cognac at Poe's grave either. At some point these things have to be organized. I'm a little surprised no well-intentioned but antiromantic fanboy hasn't gone to watching a grave the entire day to catch whoever does it. I wouldn't want minor mysteries like that to be deflated, but I understand the feeling of wanting to catch the souvenir-leavers out.

And of course, then what becomes of the discarded flowers and all that? Or what became of them in the days before eBay?

Where do they get the time?

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

:::Otherwise farmers are always going off building rockets and baseball parks and having adulterous affairs with Clint Eastwood and discovering strange meteorites crashed on their property and cracking open the little croquet balls the giant invading spiders come in

Not to mention adopting children from alien worlds who are capable of lifting pickup trucks, fighting off water-allergic Greys who've come to Earth as naked thrill-hunters, and having their cattle abducted so they call in the FBI. Why is it always cattle? Why not goats, or chickens, or minks? Or groves of avocado trees? I suppose they could be abducting moles and earthworms, and nobody would notice for a while.

Re: Where do they get the time?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, there was a made-for-TV movie about a decade back about a guy who picked up an old Redstone rocket in a junkyard and refurbished it and the Mercury capsule he got from I forget where. Used it to rescue the space shuttle, too. He must have been a farmer.

I think the thing with abducting cattle is it's so easy to see when they've been put on top of the dome at the MIT campus and such. Nobody ever admired a groundhog put on top of a dome.