Life AM: After the Move.

It's a truth Protagitronly acknowledged that moving sucks. It's annoying to pack- where does the bundt pan go? It's both round and bumpy! It's useless. It's annoying to lug things up and down the stairs, particularly armoires silly people blithely purchased from the New Rez furniture sale only to realize they weren't even going to provide a furniture cart. And it's annoying to unpack, when you realize you have to figure out how to hang things on walls when you have a pathological fear of banging things into walls. How would one manage a major drywall malfunction? 

And then there's the Ikea furniture. Allen wrench, my ass. 

Anyway, I've been pretty busy with that and running errands for it, so there's been little knitting or blogging happening lately. Fortunately, I met a woman at my job who also knits, which means a new recruit for the Knitting Club. 

Also in the plus column: seeing Dark Knight for the second time. I don't think it's a perfect movie, but I think it's the best super-hero movie I've seen so far. In spite of taking some liberties with the canon, it stylistically hews closer to the source material, or at least the source post-seventies O'Neill and Adams. What bothers me though is the coverage in the press, which now frequently runs a companion piece all about what the film is saying about the Bush administration. Read the rather unfortunate Klavan piece that started it all here, and then the NY Times follow-up. Now, don't be mislead. I'm a good little cultural studies student, so I know that context matters; that every movie, even the seemingly benign, has an ideological agenda; and that that ideological reading depends on a complex, fluid relationship between the art and the viewer. I read the books. I passed most of the courses. But it's this dogged insistence that every movie be projected through the lens of post-9/11 America that bugs me. Klavan's article was mocked in blogland, but it wasn't a wild connection to make about a blockbuster. I remember when 300 came out, and every review I read saw it as naked (rather, shirtless and oiled) propaganda for the Iraq war. I don't think the current mess hasn't had an effect on cultural consciousness. Rather, there are other factors, and simply focussing on the Iraq War as the only way to read new movies is, well, myopic.