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barn red house
Tuesday, May 25 2004
The weather finally relented today and the painters could begin work on changing the color of our house from its original subdivision grey to a color we'd carefully selected, barn red. They accomplished much today, completely painting the north and south ends of our house and doing much of the west side as well. The biggest part is the east side, which is full story taller than the west side, but they didn't touch that at all today. Still, in terms of curb appeal bang for the buck, today was a big one: most of what one can see from the road has now been painted. The lead painter told us that some passing cyclists were so impressed by the improvement that they pedalled into our driveway and gave their unsolicited approval.
This evening Gretchen and I drove with the Meat Locker People to the snooty hamlet of Rhinebeck to see the fresh new documentary Supersize Me, a documentary built around the health consequences that come when someone, in this case the narrator (Morgan Spurlock), decides to eat nothing but McDonalds food for a month. With an intake of over 5000 calories each day, our hero manages to gain a pound a day. Most of the plot tension came from the hysteria of the doctors who look on helplessly as the steadfast Spurlock's liver slowly begins to fail from the overwhelming fat-processing assignment.
Along the way we're exposed to a number of dirty nutritional secrets, the most troubling of these being about America's public school system cafeterias: they've been completely taken over by corporate interests intent on marketing unhealthy brands to children.
There was something intangibly dissatisfying about this movie, and I think it had something to do with the tension between the obvious enjoyment our narrator seemed to get from eating at McDonalds and the politics of the point he was trying to make. Mind you, I'm not beyond making such confusing statements myself, but it takes a certain nuance of balance or else a deluge of context to pull off successfully. Another thing that made this movie difficult to watch was the cheapness of the media on which it was recorded. It seemed to be some sort of low-grade digital video, the sort that left halos of insufficiently-mixed colors around objects on the screen.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?040525 feedback
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