It's very hot.
I just got back from Park Slope Yoga where I took a Jivamukti class with Elizabeth. Elizabeth is a good teacher (hers was the first J-mukti class I'd ever taken, way back in '99), but she almost always "teaches up" to the advanced students, piling one ridiculously difficult posture on top of another, without offering modifications for those who can't do them. Therefore, when you're an intermediate student like me, you spend much of her class just kind of standing or sitting there sweating and not really doing much of anything. I love a challenge, but some classes are just unrelenting and I lose the inner connection to the work. I like the way she instructs the postures, though, with an Iyengar-like precision and attention to detail. Her approach offers a different entre in to the postures...
This leads me to wonder if there's any vinyasa-oriented yoga center that offers an intermediate class. Beginner classes are usually too easy and "open" classes are a crapshoot--sometimes I can handle 'em, sometimes I can't.
A.M.A.'s band mate FlyBoy came up with an explanation for the nonsensical ending of Planet of the Apes, which goes as follows:
Doug says that at the beginning, they say something about how the
electromagnetic field disrupts their instruments but still, not particularly
made clear that you need to throw that data out entirely.
Anyway, Doug's reading is that when Marky goes into the electromagnetic
field, he goes *backwards* in time, and the space station, following him,
goes even further back. The place he lands on is in fact Earth, and the
ship colonizes the planet with this band of intelligent monkeys while humans
still don't have it together. They Marky comes along and frees the humans
but doesn't kill Thade. Then, after he leaves, Thade escapes and leads the
monkeys to rebellion and the monkeys take over again. When Marky heads back
into the storm, he goes back into the *future*, but it's a future that
happens after the monkeys reassert their control.
Problems? Well yes, many, not the least of which is that Thade, running
around in leather armor all his life, was not likely to have converted his
wardrobe to that of Ape Lincoln. Thade just didn't strike me as a hat
person unless it was a helmut. Also, you would have expected the humans to
be more primitive, not speaking etc. if the apes had caught them at a
evolutionary disadvantage. The idea that apes would have built Washington
DC the same way we did is highly unlikely and then there's the problem of
the spaceship clock. But I think a story with only 4 or 5 major logic holes
is better than the stuff we came up with, which had 7 or 8 major logic holes
and involved more radical departures from the idea of time and space as we
know it.
Meanwhile FilmThreat disagrees:
My English professor once admonished the class to "build analysis from the
text, not from the imagination." (He said this in response to one student's
suggestion that, in TURN OF THE SCREW, the sexually repressed heroine was
neither a) seeing real ghosts nor b) imagining the ghosts, but possibly: c)
One of the other characters was scaring her with large, cardboard cut-outs.)
Doug's analysis of the end of POTA presupposes the following:
A) The movie is "mistaken" about whether Marky is going forward in time at
the beginning.
B) Later, the movie is, oops, wrong again about whether he is going back in
time at the end. (I mean, they went so far as to include a shot of a totally
ridiculous "year" display on the dashboard... and we're supposed to think,
"I'd better assume the opposite of what I'm being told"?)
C) The movie is further mistaken about Marky's having homed in on Earth using
his navigation equipment, as we see him do, and travelled there from
somewhere else (ergo, not Earth).
D) The crew of the space station forgot to mention (in their extensive
remarks on the video record Marky finds) that there were already humans on
the planet when they landed. Nobody says anything about other humans.
('Course, where they really went wrong was trying to "land" that space
station in the first place.)
Basically, Doug's explanation forces us to completely disregard what few
facts the movie gives us, and make up two or three more to boot.
Friends, the answer is simple: Some doofus thought, "Ape Lincoln." And they
just did it. They just did it, because they didn't care. They didn't care
that it makes no sense at all, that it betrays what scant integrity the movie
manages, despite its clunky dialog and muddy action and cheap self-reflexive
gags and supermodels, to cling to right up to those last moments. They just
did it, because they are cynical Hollywood hacks who know that those first wee
kend grosses are all that matter and the audience is a buncha chumps. Or
chimps, as the case may be.
Helena Bonham Carter and the make-up designer were the only two who were
really on board for this operation, and I salute them. And if the DVD
includes the edited scene in which Marky and the chimp get busy, I guess I'll
rent it.
Sister M adds:
Clever theories, all, but the truly important point of all this is that I am learning how to change font color, allignment and size in HTML.
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