High Heels!

Brilliant musician Greg Scheer writes:

I didn't write a poem about high heels, but I included high heels in a new song. I hope there's a prize or something, because I just ate up a half of a day on this absurd little venture: http://musicblog.gregscheer.com/2011/12/15/baby-youre-not-wearing-pants-again/

Listen to his song now before you hear it on Top Ten on your favorite radio station.

PLUS. . .Heather Long McDaniel submitted this beaute about a callous aunt from Pennsylvania:

There once was an aunt from PA
Who gave neices sharp heels for play
The aunt did not know
Of the pain in the toes
She doomed me to suffer that day


Don't be intimidated. Submit your art/poems/etc. about high heels and win Wazoo's fabulous (virtual) prize!

Ninety and then Sixty. . .(we're moving in the right direction)

The rain is dripping and plunking off the thick leaves of the Bird Tree (actually a young Black Walnut) outside the dining room window, and the smell of a chicken stewing fills the house. It's thirty degrees cooler today than it was on Saturday, when Martin, the girls and I swam through the soupy air down to the Monongahela River, where crowds of artists and families had gathered for the Arts Fest. Martin and I are in a band (Martin on guitar and vocals and me on vocals only plus the occasional egg shaker), "The Unreliable Sallys" and we had an hour long gig, which is much longer than usual. My eyelids were sweating and Amy, our lead singer and songwriter, was so warm she had to step away for breaks to mop her face. We sang some good Louisiana and Texas tunes, so the weather felt just right--bayou-like. The girls sat on a bench and behaved fairly well (Bea spent much of the gig on my hip) except when Elspeth shimmied down to sing in Martin's guitar mike and later hiked up her mother's dress to an unacceptable height. Some people dance and march around the stage; I chase children.

Oh, I love it when September feels like real Autumn. I feel like lighting candles, baking bread, stewing apples. I feel like rearranging furniture, packing the larder for winter, double checking the shelves for tea.

Someday We'll Find the Rainbow Connection

Darkness is falling and Kenny Loggins is singing.

You probably have one of two reactions to Kenny Loggins (not classic, but after he went through his new agey transformation). It's probably a reaction similar to your intense hatred or melting love for the music of Neil Diamond. The girls seem to be calmed by his kid's album. Playing now: a cover of the Willy Wonka song, "Pure Imagination."

Somebody stop me--I'm just blathering on. This is probably because the real me is completely distracted and rather wound up with leaving the house and garden and packing up for the summer. Doubtlessly the summer away will be enchanting and lovely, but the process of leaving is not as much fun, especially when you come from genetic stock that makes you feel that everything must be neat and clean before you leave (just in case:
a. you are tired when you come home (given);
b. you never come home and you don't want the people cleaning out your house to be grossed out;
c. the house just feels happier that way.

I'm still mourning the fact that I will not be able to mulch the rest of garden before I leave after spending endless days weeding. How the wicked weeds will thrive as soon as they see me drive away! And the rabbits seem to be attacking the vegetables--they're even munching the zucchini vine, for heaven's sakes.

Currently Kenny (in a duet with Amy Grant, of all people) is crooning the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's "Pooh Corner." I know this pains some of you acutely. Ooo. Mellow guitar solo. (Children laughing in background?) It's good stuff.

Schedule for summer is as follows: Drive to beach, NC. Drive to Mississippi, then to Texas. Drive all the way home. Repack and shake head over garden for one day. Fly out to WA the next morning. Drive to MT. Drive back to WA. Return home.

Books I must read/reread: Essays, ed. by Annie Dillard; Flame Trees of Thika, Elspeth Huxley; Woman Warrior, M. H. Kingston. Columns to write from interviews I've already recorded: plenty.

Indeed, we are incredibly lucky folks to be able to visit our wonderful family scattered over the country. Please come and pick the raspberries, those of you who live close. And the flowers. Is it Kenny singing "The Rainbow Connection" that makes me sentimental for you good folk? We'll miss you.

(this is not a poem)
Guess who just sang in her first big real concert? MEEEEE! "The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down," "Leaving Lousiana," and a new one from songwriter/singer Amy. Tonight our band was called "The Unreliable Sallys" and we had a fantastic bass player, mandolin player, and an electric guitar player. . .and though I felt like a bit of an outsider with such talented musicians, I managed to remember the words and not put my sweaty foot in my mouth.

This is the only picture I have, though the concert was taped. . .our dear friend Kevin snapped it on his cell phone. That's Martin next to me (I'm the white blob in the middle wearing the lucky scarf my mother gave me for my birthday). Special thanks to Kevin and Sally for adopting our daughters all afternoon, bathing them, and making them (and us) feel oh, so loved.

Wait for it. . .

Our band's last gig at the Harvest Festival, photo courtesy B. Randolph
Martin's beside me, picking out chords and trying to play Kings of Convenience's "Gold in the Air of Summer." The alternate tuning sounds really nice, even though he just stretched on new strings--the ends are sticking out like six lethal whiskers. New strings always sound cold and tinny, but he's warming them up.

Our friend Amy was just here practicing with us for our band's slot in. . .wait for it. . .the Faculty Talent Show at the U! Tonight Amy said we should all just quit our jobs and go on tour--our three girls and her daughter could ride along in the bus, do our accounts, set up and tear down for us. Who needs school? Tonight, over tomato soup and grilled cheese, Merry tried to get Martin and me serious about becoming famous. "You could go on the Prairie Home Companion," she breathed, her eyes round, "Or Mountain Stage!" (When you don't have TV reception, radio provides all points of reference. When asked at school to name a famous person, Merry named Carl Casell, who among other things, is the official scorer for "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," the NPR news show. . .and he IS in the Radio Hall of Fame.)

I said, "Merry, if Daddy and I were famous, we wouldn't get to spend so much time with you girls."

She took this as a valid point, though she finally concluded that Martin's and my dreams were old ones, and we'd probably fulfilled all of them already.

In a flash of warmth, Martin told her one of our dreams was to have three girls, and we did, and one of his dreams was that he would marry me, and he did,

to which I said, "That was one of my dreams, too." (I meant, to marry Martin, of course),

and Merry looked at me and asked, "You wanted to marry YOURSELF?"

I said, "One of my dreams was to have a smart-aleck eight-almost-nine-year old, and that came true." And she grinned.

I am losing any cohesive thread that might have linked this blog entry together. Oh, well. The girls get school off tomorrow for. . .wait for it again. . .the first day of hunting. They will not be hunting, but most of the county will. I will be doing laundry and writing an article and praying for the deer.

Just A Small Town Girl

I have had the Journey song, "Don't Stop Believing" stuck in my head ALL DAY LONG. I kid you not. As I type, it's reeling in the back of my brain like the handle on a meat grinder. I am about to be driven to distraction. I am about to. . .

break open another Troeg's Dream Weaver Wheat Beer. I'm afraid the song "Dream Weaver" is not sticky enough to displace Journey, though. Blast it all. If I could only. . .

hold onto this feeling.

Attended an eight year old's birthday party today; there were all these young children running about in fairy wings and stuffing red velvet cake with black-green icing into their mouths. The icing covered an Eight-dollar Bill Cake, embossed with the birthday girl's head. Also on the cake platter: three or four cupcake coins in the front. I hear that we will see evidence of this bright and delicious cake tomorrow at noon. They tell me this is something I can look forward to, since Thanksgiving is still some days away. It's the next big thing.

Don't Stop!

Oh, man. This is worse than the hiccups.

guitars

Downstairs, a round plung of a guitar being tuned. Now something bluesy: dup, dup, dup, daoooa, dup, dup, dup--the hollow thunk of a guitar being put down, murmur of voices. Outside the rain falls straight down on the mail carrier, a man with square shoulders and square red face who, on hot days, flushes as red as Santa Claus. Like a spoon serving up mashed potatoes, the sunshine rounds off thick cloud cover. Does that make any sense? I know that last sentence didn't, and neither does this day--sunny, cold, rainy, sunny and rainy, drafty, warm. . .a capricious day.

Oh, the guitars are picking up. Soon Frank's harmonica will cut through the strumming. I should be down there--we're supposed to be practicing to play in the Harvest Festival this weekend. But I just needed a few minutes to surface from the sea of friends and children who have jigged through the house today. My head feels a bit ragged, the coffee I poured three hours ago is (surprise!) cold, and I just now--at four o'clock in the afternoon--managed to brush my hair from my morning shower. One of those good days, packed like fresh basil leaves into a cup--fragrant, dense, a whole summer in an hour.

I'm not making too much sense, people. Better go down and join the musicians.

The Inside of Music

I told Martin last night, "I bet nobody has ever done Lenten dancing to Better Than Ezra," and he agreed.

"I really don't feel like dancing," Martin said, all bleary-eyed from too much grading. I know how he feels, though I think he is, in general, a more patient and wise person than I, and that's why he's a teacher and I'm not. I absolutely hate grading a stack of papers--there's the writing that makes me hope for the future, but there's also so much bad writing--and then I'm torn between relationship with the student and the righteous indignation I feel when I write F, just stopping myself from adding, "Excruciating to read. After reading your drivel, I feel closer to despair than I did before I started."

Martin shows real patience, though, and he sees real progress with his students. He delights in their progress the way I find joy in the burgeoning of a story I'm writing. When we were in college, our graded papers bore--maybe--two or three comments, or check marks or just a grade. Martin fills his student's papers with comments and scribbles and marks, and he's gained a reputation for being a hard grader. But if they have any sense, his students know that this is the way Martin, as their teacher, pays them respect.

And so Martin emerged from the murky tunnels of essay grading not a little wall-eyed. And some weird dancing followed, people. Occasionally I'd see him behind me, with the purple hat pulled down over his eyes, writhing in inner pain. "Are we done?" I'd say, ready to turn off Ezra and go on to TV. "Another one," he'd answer, and pull down that hat again. "Can you even see?" I asked, and worried for his safety as he wriggled and dove all over the room. At one point he was thudding on the armchair with his fists.

"I'm inside the music," he said.

Let me give a little background here. Martin's and my first days together were marked by his musical snobbery. Minute by minute, he pulled down my castles of feel-good music and happily trampled on my preferences for show tunes and Roger Whittaker--in order to educate my tastes and raise me to his erudite mesa of artistry. In our little, two-door Honda with the bad sound system, he played tapes and CDs of music that literally made me want to jump out of the window. Or pound my head repeatedly on the dashboard. It was so unlistenable, so wretched, so discordant and NOISY. I resisted education at every possible, painful juncture. I had never cared about musician's or songwriter's histories or stories or approaches, and I jolly well was not going to start caring about what I thought was mere trivia.

BUT. . .ten years later, I'm opting for The Decemberists or The Weepies and saying things like, "That song is very Dylan, but he's totally butchering the approach--there's only one Dylan, and this guy is not him" or "That song has a real Beatlesque sound, but it's actually more like. . ." Blah, blah, blah. I can actually listen to a song and say who's singing it. And I enjoy a much wider range of music. But I still have little patience for music I don't like.

So this is why Martin, who's absolutely gaga for music and listens to the most appalling noise, got inside the music and was moving around our library like a bear with a toothache. Me? I was practicing kicking my leg and lifting my arm ballet-like. I was still aware of droopy boobs and how I wanted to take some more off the thickening wintry middle area of Kim Cockroft. But then. . .I shut my eyes.

And the whole library was gone, and so was Martin, and so was I. I was suddenly inside the Better Than Ezra song, and I was exploring the complexities of the music with my body. Mostly, I was pulling my arm toward my head, over and over again, like somebody caught in a loop, but this repetitive motion worked like a meditative prayer--I mean, it cleaned me out and took me to a place beyond sight or words. Needless to say, if I could have seen myself, I would have laughed myself silly or blushed beet-red. But I couldn't see myself--I just was.

I've always both envied and also kind of looked down on people who lose themselves in something. As a writer, I'm always writing about an incident as I'm living it. There's often the Voice narrating action and reaction and there's little chance of getting so lost in an experience that I haven't already formulated one or two descriptions of it. I'm rather embarrassed and anthropologist-like about ecstasy, of all kinds. My ears light up like ambulance sirens or I break into hives if I become too emotional with anyone I don't know too well. And if anyone had come into the library last night, I would have given a good explanation of our craziness and offered them tea. I mean, no way would Martin and I dance like this around other people.

And yet. . .maybe we should. Or maybe we shouldn't. There's no real cultural home for this kind of expression in our tradition. My stripe of Caucasian American doesn't do any kind of ritual drumming or chanting or dancing. The only venue for publicly losing self-consciousness is a charismatic church or. . .a bar? Or maybe a group therapy session? Though I am duly grateful for all The Enlightenment did for us and our culture, it ruined us in some ways, don't you think? It saved us from superstition, cleared our minds, gave us scientific method, and absolutely ruined our capacity to dance like fools. Or maybe the two have nothing to do with each other. Maybe, if we loosen up some, we who are tied up in self-important knots dance MORE like fools because we HAVE to--we have to give ourselves up to some expression that doesn't rely on the entanglements and pomposity of words.

The Real Thing

Mmmm. CRAVING Pad Thai. What would I give for a big hot bowl of steaming Pad Thai? My first born? The deed to my house? Our blue Subaru? Don't tempt me, man.

Our dear friends dropped off a bag of purple grapes at our front door this morning, freshly plucked from a friend's arbor. They are beautiful, variegated blue and lavender, green as spring grass and blue as a deep summer patch of sea. The slick innards of the grape explode in my mouth, followed by an eruption of intense flavor, and suddenly all the imitation grape flavor I have ever experienced is a distant shadow.

(This morning I plucked a red tomato and breathed in an almost-perfect white rose.)

* * * *

In a pathetic attempt to fill my intense Pad Thai-shaped-hole, I succumbed to weakness and actually bought a Real Thai box at discount. I never do rash things like this, so I was careful to scan the ingredients before I paid my 1.50. The box sat on my counter, tempting me, until finally today I gave in. Have you labored over Pad Thai, browning egg, carefully setting it aside, working then through a long list of ingredients, ending by feverishly stirring curling noodles as the sweat pours from your brow?

I had my own Real Pad Thai, in its rectangular plastic container (fork included), in three minutes. I panicked briefly over the missing vacuum-packed peanut packet (had I thrown it out with the sealed dehydrated vegetable packet???) for a moment, but all was saved and I sprinkled the pale nut bits over my reddish noodles. It smelled delicious, and I was hungry enough to gobble it quickly as I read the somewhat myopic, self-indulgent account of Alice Steinbach's jaunt to find lemon curd in the Cotswalds.

After lunch, I lingered with my pile of non recyclable trash, an odd aftertaste, and a greasy container. The verdict? Not good. I popped a few grapes and drank two glasses of milk to free myself from the Real Thai taste, though I could not completely rid myself of regret as I filled the garbage can with the proof of my instant lunch. Just goes to show, there's nothing like the real thing, baby. No matter how much you want Pad Thai, you can't have it in three minutes.

* * * *

Yesterday Merry attended school at the home of said grape-friends above. She enjoyed it immensely and I enjoyed a trip to Big Lots and then to the grocery. Beyond the pleasure of the flat of organic canned tomatoes and promising Real Thai meal I bought at steep discount in the brightly lit aisles of Big Lots (accompanied by the half-pleasure, half-pain screams of Elspeth, who insisted on chucking her shoe into the aisle), I lingered in parking spaces with the air conditioning on while Elspeth and I drank in the voice of Luciano Pavarotti, booming out arias and taking us up, up, up, away from the parking lot of Giant Eagle in Greene County, away on the pure strains of Ave Maria.

To bear such a voice within your ribs! The sheer responsibility of it! (Though my father tried to convince us that it was him singing on the tape, not Placido Domingo, no astounding operatic voices have occurred in our family history).

My earliest experience of Pavarotti began with my uncle Ken's trip out to Kenya. I must have been 13 or so, living in a whitewashed maisonette in the middle of the dirty, bustling city of Nairobi with its bumpy back roads and stunning flowers that grew everywhere--bougainvillea on garbage piles, morning glories on our thorny hedges! Uncle Ken, clad in safari hat and equipped with camera, came bearing an unbelievable Christmas gift for us: a CD player (rare in that year!) and a whole collection of CDs. Among the gleaming discs were Bette Middler, which I listened to repeatedly, and Pavarotti and Friends. I gloried in this opera for the plebeian, in the unbelievable soaring strains of three male voices, vocal cords opened to the heights of mountain winds and speeding trains and endless blue ocean!

And in my older, slightly more weary day yesterday, shut up safely in the walls of our blue Suburu, among the litter of children and a flat of canned tomatoes and bags of boxed macaroni and cheese, as people backed out cars onto the dirty tarmac, Elspeth and I gloried in the otherworldly experience of a truly great voice. We thrilled with joy and longing, entered into the boundless world of beauty.

There's nothing, nothing like the real thing.

Contributions

Wazoo Farm craves the contributions of other imaginative gardeners, avid readers and film critics, and discerning music-lovers!

To become a Guest Gardener or Book (Children's/Adult), Music, or Film Reviewer, send your proposed contributions or question to: wazoofarm@gmail.com.

Thanks, good people!

BY M: Music Review (Sort of): Who's Your Daddy?

Music Review by M

Ok. First a couple of qualifiers:

I am a music geek, I guess, but I am not a music guru. I am not like John Cusack in High Fidelity, though I wish I were. I am not one of the purists who felt betrayed when British director Stephen Frears set the movie in Chicago, rather than London (where Nick Hornsby's novel takes place). With Jack Black I will raise my goblet of rock, but I will not claim to be able to name ten underrated hair metal bands, or ten Beatles B-sides, or ten best prog rock albums. I'm doing good to know what prog rock is. I have a flimsy album collection, mostly because we have no money for such excesses--not because I don't think it's important to own Dylan's Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks.

Kim calls me a music snob, too, and I guess if by that she means I get physically ill when someone begins singing Culture Club's Karma Chameleon, or that I respond with "rage and contempt" (to steal a phrase from poet John Berryman) when someone calls "Sound of Silence" a great song (it's sophomoric) or Dave Matthews Band the best in the world (they're pretentious) or Disturbed really, well, disturbing (shallow emotionalism), then, yeah, I'm guilty as charged.

I'm also an English teacher, which means I'm allowed to write long sentences like that.

I'm a poet, too, so I'll invoke Whitman: I will freely contradict myself. (I like a little cheese now and again. I actually enjoyed Lindsay Lohan's "Confessions of a Broken Heart" the first time I heard it, and I'll go to the mat for Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.)

By way of introduction, here are my ten favorite songs of the moment, in no particular order:

--Time of the Season, Zombies (and not because some chump on American Idol covered it a few weeks ago. I don't watch TV and didn't know anything about it until I searched for the song on YouTube. Now I feel like something's been stolen. And I did watch a bootleg of that version, and while passable, the Idol house band didn't even attempt Rod Argent's insane organ solo)

--Wear Your Love Like Heaven, Donovan

--Your Touch, Black Keys

--Bennie and the Jets, Elton John

--Peace Train, Cat Stevens (as a dad, I happen to know that it's of the more listenable songs on the Little People's album Things That Go--a better cover, for instance, than their rendition of the 5th Dimension's Up, Up and Away, which isn't a good song no matter who sings it)

--Feeling Yourself Disintegrate, Flaming Lips

--Crazy, Gnarls Barkley (though I'll probably get sick of it soon; I don't think it has staying power)

--Wonderous Stories, Yes

--Requiem, Eliza Gilkyson, or maybe Susan Warner's Did Trouble Me

--Spirit in the Sky, Norman Greenbaum (Merry's actually been requesting this as a bedtime song; you have to love lines like "You gotta have a friend in Jesus/So you know that when you die/He's gonna recommend you to spirit in the sky")

I guess that's ten. That's all the review I'll do this week.

Now you out there. You know who you are. Post your top ten of the moment.

NEW MUSIC COLUMN STARTS NOW

Now, GIVE IT UP
for the new music column, weekly this summer (and hopefully longer),
by music geek and jive turkey
M.

In Celebration of All That's Petty (and a Few Things That Aren't)

GOLD TOE SOCKS: AMAZON: (5 CUSTOMER REVIEWS)

This morning found Merry, Elspeth and me sorting through a sea of mismatched socks in time Chattanooga ChooChoo. Pardon me, boys. . .

Estranged socks drive my sister batty, so it's a good thing she doesn't live with the mountains of single socks that mark my failed attempts at organized laundry. I've taken to pairing socks that look somewhat alike (patterned and patterned, pink and pink, etc.); Merry and Elspeth certainly don't care.

She's gonna cry till I tell her that I'll never roam. . .

Look, when you're in college you vow NEVER to be taken over by the petty cares of the world. No siree-Bob, you're going to rise above the rat race scrambling around like idjits squeezing tubes of toothpaste from the end and separating laundry and sorting silverware into little sections in kitchen drawers. You're going to shake, rattle and roll the world, baby. There will be absolutely no time for folding fitted sheets or paying bills.

Hah! But now you're out of college and one night when you're all grown up, you catch yourself writing a review on an ice cream scoop on Amazon.com. What's the matter with you? Not rattled the world's teeth yet? You've settled for a moment of fame on Amazon as you wax eloquent on your favorite forged steel ice cream scoop. Very nice. There are your ideals, swirling down the drain.

And as you consider many things, such as what cycle to dry your new wrinkle-free pants on, and how many days elapse before Netflix will send you your new film, and whether or not the kid's sheets really need to be changed more than every month, you feel your nose quivering with the inevitable sprouting of whiskers. You've joined the rat race.

* * * *

But only occasionally am I the rat in the maze, sniffing out cheesey nibbles and reading the backs of boxes for sodium content and transfat. Other times I actually take the time to read books or listen to good poetry, like

Gary Soto. What a breath of fresh air his poems are! Martin read them out loud to me last night. Soto will blow the top off your head. His narratives, if you can use such a heavy term for his precise, spare language, are startling in their layered transcendence. That sounds like a bunch of gobbelty-gook, so just let me say: if you want to read some really terrific poetry and have a good time doing it, read Gary Soto.

And here's the rundown on NPR's weekend music. In the future, I'll let Martin guest write this feature since he's genius-musicman. But for now,

Check out The Magic Numbers, a brother-sister, brother-sister group from UK. If you want to kick back and enjoy yourself or if you've got a long drive, you'll love their easy-going 60's vibe. And their songs are diverse enough that you won't tire of them. I'm the kind of person who goes for a CD out of pure enjoyment, and I can see myself wearing out The Magic Numbers' jewelcase. Four to five stars.

Stuff your ears with cotton balls before you listen to Tina Dico. Dico channels an Alanis Morissette sound accompanied by all the self indulgence and pseudo poetry that makes me cringe. Apparently Dico's passed up Coldplay and U2 in her native Denmark--chalk it up to personal taste but I find her groaning sound grating and (as Martin says) her cliched "Long Goodbye" definitive of her music in general. One star.

In contrast, Cara Dillon's got a clear, lovely sound that will knock your socks off. This singer-songwriter from Ireland is a pure pleasure to listen to, not just for her unaffected voice but for her thoughtful lyrics (she writes about topics like immigration, etc.). Though I think she could stick with more of an unadorned acoustic sound instead of the distraction of occasional orchestral swells, I give her four stars.

Oh, and here's an up and coming artist you shouldn't miss. Merry. She's already got a selection of songs and her album cover. (Check out Uncle Luke who sings background).

Nibble, Nibble, This and That

I am full of good things and I wanted to spread a tasting table for you:

MUST-SEE NEW MUSIC
Matisyahu. Orthodox Jewish Rapper. Need I say more? Go and watch his "Jerusalem" (click on "Matisyahu," above).

GOOD BOOKS LATELY READ

Sandra Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek
I hadn't picked this up in a long time, but in Arizona I plunged into the often lyrical, imagistic writing that Cisneros masters so well. Add to this that her stories are often as short as a page and a half, and add to this that her characters are engaging and engrossing, and most of her stories stylistically hit slam-wham on the head, and you've got yourself a good read.


Wendell Berry's Hannah Coulter
W. B. is known most widely for his essays, and there's a good reason for this. However, I thoroughly enjoyed this fictional work; WB sketched the character of this mother, farm owner, wife, and hard worker well. Some passages, (the last page of the book where Hannah Coulter dies, for example) are lovely and convincing. You never forget it's Wendell Berry writing; if you want a gentle impression of the prophet's philosophies, pick up this book.

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children
I did not expect to find Rushdie so accessible and engrossing. But I did. Combine politics, humor, quirky characters, a twisting plot, violence, philosophy, supernatural and religious experience, history, imagination, lyricism, and the longest sentence I have ever read in my life, and you've experienced just a little bit of Midnight's Children. I never expected to laugh out loud and then be so disturbed as I was while I travelled through this book. It made me stay up far too late, and that's a sign of a good story.

ENCHANTING MOVIES
Let me just say: Miyazaki. I've never gone absolutely gaga-waga about anime, but on the recommendation of friends with taste we ordered Tatoro and Kiki's Delivery Service from Netflix. We were not disappointed, and although I felt Merry might be frightened by Spirited Away, the other two were child-friendly and charming.

A few things I really love about Miyazaki:
scenery of his films, especially the clouds and trees
strong, courageous female characters
good story line
supernatural worked seamlessly (and unspookily) into everyday existence
celebration and respect of the natural world
celebration and respect of the elderly
way the characters giggle at odd times (at least to the Western ear)

There's one scene in Totoro (the stronger movie of the two) that set me laughing out loud in sheer delight, when the spirits and the children are bowing at chestnuts as they sprout and bloom. It's absolutely magical. The father character is Totoro is exceptional; a favorite scene of mine takes place in the bath while he and his two daughters guffaw at the top of their lungs to chase the soot mites. If you want a numinous experience, order a Miyazaki film as soon as you can.