I keep thinking how great a movie Juno is; for one thing, it’s one of those rare jewels that passes the Bechdel Test. Obviously it’s a meditation on motherhood, but less obviously it’s a meditation on blood and non-blood relations. Juno’s real mother has skipped out and her sole contribution to the story is an annual gift of cactus. Juno’s stepmother is the pitch-perfect Allison Janney, and while their relationship is also fairly prickly, it creates a very believable context for Juno’s choices around her pregnancy. Motherhood, as embodied by Janney’s character, is a matter of showing up and paying attention. To do which you do not need to have actually given birth to the person in question.

One thing I would have liked to see is a scene between Allison Janney and Jennifer Garner. There was a great scene between her and J. K. Simmons as Juno’s dad, but even so… Garner is also stellar, in a much more difficult and less sympathetic role than Janney’s. She connects with this character with absolute empathy and compassion. Her big scene at the end had Kathy and me clutching each others’ hands and sobbing – err, I mean, getting specks of dust in our eyes, and having allergies.

*Ahem.*

I’m often hesitant to recommend a little jewel of a film if I think that doing so might raise peoples’ expectations, only to dash them (hi, Once! Everyone rush out and see it on DVD please) but I’m going to go ahead and recommend Juno anyway. For one thing, I greatly prefer small films to big ones. I call this my “gun, what gun?” principle. As in, Chekhov famously said that if there’s a gun, yada yada, but I say “What gun?”

My life has been largely gun-free; the only gun ever pointed at me was pointed at me by a young, scared British soldier in Derry. My life is small and indie and I am, as I have pointed out elsewhere, a sardonic supporting character. So while I acknowledge the technical skill and cultural cachet of (for example) heist films, I am on a practical level bored to death with most of them. I am not the demographic. Whereas Once and Juno take place in world that, if they are not recognizeably my own, are at least connected by land bridges.

(For what it’s worth I think screenwriter Diablo Cody explicitly acknowledges this by giving Juno the surname MacGuff.)

So who is the demographic, and what is the gun? Put like that the question pretty much answers itself. I’ve been thinking a lot about disability lately, partly because Liz writes about it so well, and partly because the experience of watching a friend become gradually more disabled over the course of a few months, however wittily she blogs about it, is existentially terrifying and curdles your blood. One of the side issues, though, is that her descriptions of a world optimized for the able-bodied have made me more aware that I live in a world optimized for One Standard Unit Man. Things that are too heavy or too high for me were typically packed or put there by someone four inches taller than I am, and able to lift twenty more pounds.

Take sushi! Julia just recently became capable of sitting up at the bar at Yo’s, which has greatly improved our sushi experiences. Yo just makes us whatever’s good. A few weeks ago he served maki cut to size for the children, about half the size of a normal roll. I started eating them and couldn’t stop. I could manage them in my chopsticks! I could eat them in one bite without gagging! It dawned on me that this is what eating sushi is like if sushi is designed for the size of your mouth: ie, if you are a man.

I am glad to be alive right now because this is one of the things that, over the course of my life, has slowly changed. It’s easy to get scared and distracted by newspaper headlines, and one of the best reasons to read history is to identify the movements where a small push from your small hand may combine with many others to change the world in ways that you need it to change. Sure, we are frying the atmosphere as we speak, but let me point out a few ways in which things are substantially better than they were forty years ago.

In my generation we have come from the Referendum to Bringing Them Home; from Stonewall to the winter of love; from the Cold War to the International Criminal Court; from apartheid to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; from Tuskegee to the candidacy of Barack Obama. These have all been intensely difficult, fraught journeys, beset with many reversals, efforts whose work is unimaginably far from being done; but they happened. And they have all given voices to people on the periphery of the world. They help us do our most fundamental work, which is to bear witness.

It’s a matter of showing up and paying attention.

Small, perfect films like Once and Juno do the same. They assert one’s right to be in the world, even if one is not One Standard Unit Straight White Man, with a gun.

We converted Jules’s crib to a toddler bed. She’s completely thrilled about her new freedom of movement, and much too excited to go to sleep.

You used to be able to rock her to sleep in your forearm. Now she can take me in a fair fight.

yarnivore: your trip to calistoga sounded so wonderful
yatima: it was just redonkulous
yatima: we sang all the way home
yatima: “the fitzhardinges… went to the hot pools…
yatima: “and then… they saw the geyser…
yatima: “and it was very fun”
yatima: “yes it was”
9:55 PM
yarnivore: you’re making it up
yarnivore: there aren’t families that happy

Instead of please she says “Mees?”

Instead of adios she says “A-JOS!”

Instead of Claire she says “Lair” or “Lur.”

Instead of I love you mama she says “I, you, mama,” as if in her case, love is axiomatic.

Which it is.

Bryan called first thing in the year to invite us to brunch at Castle O’Sullivan, but I declined with thanks:

“We have a plan!”

It’s so unlike us. To have a plan. And to decline brunch, for that matter. Yet without undue shouting or sarcasm I had both daughters, one husband, a freshly synched iPod and an Ikea bag full of swimsuits loaded into Hedwig the silver Jetta by half past ten. And then we drove and drove and drove, to Ritual for coffee and then onto I-80, past Berkeley and Golden Gate Fields, through Albany and left at Vallejo and right towards Napa and on and on through Yountville and St Helena while the girls snoozed in the back. And we arrived in Calistoga and parked the car.

It was brilliantly sunny but cold, and as we changed I doubted the wisdom of my crazy scheme. But the hot springs were just as hot and sweet as I remembered, and we lolled around for an hour and a half while the girls splashed and played. I swam laps in the coolest pool – I am too ashamed to tell you how few laps – and my shoulders and arms cried out for mercy; but a dip in the hottest pool was enough to shut them up. We oozed out of the baths and into our clothes just absurdly happy and relaxed.

Lunch at a place on the main drag then on impulse we drove around to the Old Faithful Geyser, a Calistoga roadside attraction that features regularly scheduled geothermal eruptions and fainting goats. Why fainting goats? Why are you asking me? As we waited for the geyser to, um, geyse, a goatherd alarmed the goats for us, demonstrating their not-unimpressive fainting chops.

We waited about forty minutes. The geyser sent up two disappointing squibs, both of which Claire missed. We were about to pack up and go, with Claire on the verge of tears, when the GEYSER SHOT UP SEVENTY FEET INTO THE AIR WITH THE STEAM AND THE SULFUR AND WE SCREAMED AND SHOUTED AND APPLAUDED IN OUR JOY!

As we left I scratched the head of a friendly four-horned ovine gentleman, who smelled pleasantly of lanoline.

“He’s rambunctious,” I said as he cantered away.

“He’s on a spree,” said Jeremy.

“No,” I said; “a rampage.”

It was pretty much the best day ever.

We saw Atonement at one. I just wanted to point that out. I had read the book but had only vague memories of it; I was much more taken with Saturday. This film is intelligent, gorgeous to look at and so sad that even a tiny spoonful of it in your local reservoir would make your entire neighbourhood melancholy for a week. Consider yourself warned.

Keira Knightley is a revelation. She’s been beautiful since Bend It Like Beckham and interesting since Pride and Prejudice (by the same director, as a matter of fact); here she becomes the anchor of the film.

Everyone is mentioning the amazing scene on the beach at Dunkirk so I’ll add my voice to the choir. It looked like the end of the world, which, for a lot of people, is what Dunkirk was. The shot reminded me of some of the street scenes in Children of Men, a film I adored.

Jeremy claims there is a sibling incest subtext, but he read The Secret History at an impressionable age, so make of that what you will.

We’ve had a lucky run recently; I can also highly recommend Juno and The Water Horse.

Today we went with the Murgisteads to SFMOMA see Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson. I went in without any expectations or context at all, a state of unspoiled grace I shall now deny to you, my beloved readers.

We walked out of the lifts into Room for one colour, a lobby lit with yellow lights, the effect of which was to turn everyone greyscale. It was eerie and awesome, like living and talking to each other in newspaper photographs or sepia prints.

“We’re in the past!” I told Jack. I looked down at my beloved brown leather bag and my brain almost refused to see that the colour had been leached out of it. The kids looked especially startling, as they had all been dressed in pink and orange and purple and blue and green the instant before. When we walked out of this room my eyes remained grateful for colour for minutes and minutes afterwards, and everything looked vivid.

Next came Yellow versus purple, a room with a white spotlight shining at a large transparent disk so that it projected yellow and reflected blue lights onto opposite walls. After that was Model room, absolutely crammed with miniatures for larger projects. Didn’t get to look at these much because the children towed me into 360 degree room for all colours in which a circular, translucent wall had been built in an almost complete circle about eight feet high. You stood inside the circle and the colours slowly shifted and changed. We started out white so everyone looked like the subjects in an Elsa Dorfman portrait. Then the colours shifted to blush and lavender and lime and sky, so the vividness of that light was superimposed on the existing-vividness of the kids and their clothes. Abundance.

Even more beautiful was a brand-new site-specific piece called One way colour tunnel, built over the bridge that crosses SFMOMA’s atrium. This had triangular glass panels in sunset colours – blue, royal purple, pink, apricot and gold – offset against each other in a black steel frame. As you walked through the tunnel you got the kaleidoscope effect of the changing lights, plus your own reflection multiplied many times and idealized by the softening and flattering effect of the colours.

I missed a bunch of stuff when Julia escaped and had to be pursued through three installations. We reconvened in Notion motion, a darkened room with a screen on which was projected the surface of a hidden pool of water. If you bounced on certain floorboards you could make ripples in the water, but the effect was subtle and obscure. Which made it insanely fun to turn a couple of corners and find the water pool and the light and the back of the screen, with the mechanism all laid bare.

Multiple grotto deserves a better name, looking as it does like a twelve-foot, three-dimensional Star of Bethlehem or similarly menacing Doomsday Device. It’s designed as a sphere made of kaleidoscopes; you stand inside it and the shiny inner surfaces of the projecting triangular prisms reflect the light of the gallery outside. The walls here were lined with Eliasson’s very disciplined photographs of Icelandic landscapes; horizons, waterfalls, islands, a single valley over the course of a day. Their formal beauty reminded me a lot of some of Jeremy’s photographs of urban and natural patterns; that probably makes me sound excessively fond, but there it is.

Next was Moss wall, exactly what it sounds like, an entire gallery wall of reindeer moss; then Space reversal, two windows, one projecting out of SFMOMA and the other inside its walls, and when you stepped or peered into the window mirrors reflected you to infinity in every direction.

My preference for interactive, witty, Burning Man-style art over the smug dreck that’s sold at auction these days is a matter of historical record. What I particularly loved about this exhibition was its combination of funny, playful installations that the kids could fully grok, with a formal and technical mastery you don’t often see in the desert but would kind of like to be able to expect from your major artists. This is a generous, insightful and profound body of work, and it runs through February 24. If I were Bjork I would totally be dating this guy instead.

This is not a top ten, because that would be LAME. Just some posts you may have missed, from Yatima: the early years.

They fight crime!

Quick, give her some moral guidance.

Count your blessings.

The big fierce predators are coming back.

Two three!

Peepee-you is a baby chicken.

More to the point, it loves Claire.

We really are nerds, huh.

I thought you said you were fragrant!

She is given food.

Sung by a chorus of astronauts:

“I am the king
So blue and bright.
When worlds collide
It’s so good and right.

“He wrote both of those
In Spanish and English too.
Whenever he went with both of those letters
The water horse came too.
He named him ‘Hat’
Which wasn’t that good.

“He got down his keyboard
Which had two switches
An off switch and an on switch as well
You
can
have
those
on your computer, your toy computer.

“And everyone had to
Do
Some
Thing.”

Lunch and dinner for eighteen or so, plus a midnight snack for me and Mister J. And enough left over for at least a week of poulterer’s pie.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Yoz: Hi, I’ve brought the casserole!

Me (arrested beside rug, on which is displayed a dead Mouse): EEK!

Yoz: Have I startled you?

Me: No! Bebe the cat has startled me!

Jeremy: How?

Me: With a gift! Mr Squeakums! Or should I say the late, Mr Squeakums!

Yoz: Eek!

Me: Not a creature is stirring! Not even a mouse!

I can’t tell whether Armistead Maupin’s Michael Tolliver Lives is actually his best book, or only my favourite of his books. I read through the entire extant Tales of the City, along with Mirrorshades, one dark winter at Moira’s house in Newtown, indulging my customary lack of clue that it was my own future I was reading about.

Now Michael Mouse is hanging with a grrl sex journalist a la Annalee and marvelling that people are blogging about Ishi. It feels as if Armistead has walked into my world, whereas in fact it was I that walked (joyfully, thankfully) into his.

“Are you my kitten?”

“Meow, meow, meow.”

“Tell me about the time before you were born. When you were inside Gemma.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Oh.”

“Do you remember before you were born? When you were inside me?”

“Yes.”

“Really? What was it like?”

“I could hear your heartbeat.”

“Oh. Okay then. What made you choose me and Daddy to be your mum and dad?”

“Because I touched you and you were warm. And I touched Daddy and he was warm.”

“Dude.”

After the miracle of the backpacks, my Dad wrote:

In my experience, it is more likely that other people will deal with you honestly.

He pointed out that he lost his wallet in Bathurst and got it back. He doesn’t have to convince me, though, because as well as Rajit Singh I have Suzanne I-am-so-sorry-I-lost-your-cellphone-number, who took Claire to the police station in Glebe when we lost her in January, the memory of which still makes me sick with fear at what might have happened.

May their blessings multiply like galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field.

Human beings are, yes, a savage little virus that is giving the Earth a fever. We are nasty belligerent chimpanzees. But that isn’t all we are. We are chimps that can choose to be bonobos. Human hands made Spirit and Opportunity, those brilliant intrepid travellers on Mars. Human hands made New York City, the most awesome and civilized place on Earth.

My absolute best moment at Viable Paradise was after reading Norman Wood‘s story. Norm is a retired insurance salesman from Florida. Think shorts and Hawaiian shirts. His story was an achingly sweet coming-of-age tale about a prepubescent girl. I remember looking up at him and catching his eye – he grinned at me – and thinking how easily I might have overlooked him in an airport or a mall: and yet he has this inner life that sparkles like a jewel.

I remember thinking, people are geodes. Whatever they look like on the outside, inside there is amethyst and stardust.

Just tired. Lots to tell you, but it’s hard to type with cat asleep on right arm.

“I married him for his luck. I’m a fortune hunter.”

“Remember, there’s no ‘me’ in Met.”