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Arts & Life
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- Written by: Ted Kooser
Those of us who have been fortunate enough to have been new parents will recognize the way in which everything seems to relate to a baby, who has by her arrival suddenly made the world surround her. D. Nurkse lives in Brooklyn.
First Night
We brought that newborn home from Maimonides
and showed her nine blue glittering streets.
Would she like the semis with hoods of snow?
The precinct? Bohack’s? A lit diner?
Her eyes were huge and her gaze tilted
like milk in a pan, toward shadow.
Would she like the tenement, three dim flights,
her crib that smelled of Lemon Pledge?
We slept beside her in our long coats,
rigid with fatigue in the unmade bed.
Her breath woke us with its slight catch.
Would she approve of gray winter dawn?
We showed her daylight in our cupped hands.
Then the high clocks began booming
in this city and the next, we counted for her,
but just the strokes, not the laggards
or the tinny echoes, and we taught her
how to wait, how to watch, how to be held,
in that icy room, until our own alarm chimed.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation ( www.poetryfoundation.org ), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright 2012 by D. Nurkse from his most recent book of poems, A Night in Brooklyn, Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. Poem reprinted by permission of D. Nurkse and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2013 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
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- Written by: Lake County News Reports
PACIFIC RIM (Rated PG-13)
Directing a sci-fi action adventure where giant robots clash with monstrous creatures from the center of the earth is a natural wish fulfillment for Guillermo del Toro.
A self-described “fanboy,” del Toro is within his element for directing “Pacific Rim,” which seems pitched to the sensibilities of Japanese cinema that celebrated such monsters as Godzilla and Mothra.
With the annual Comic-Con geek fest taking place in San Diego, the Mexican-born filmmaker could arrive at the event as a conquering hero. Maybe he did in the past, and I am just not aware of it.
Set in the near future, “Pacific Rim” finds that the human race is at a critical crossroads, following apocalyptic attacks on coastal cities around the world, including San Francisco, Manila and Hong Kong.
Creatures emerging from the depths of the sea look like a mixture of dinosaurs, sea serpents, and horribly deformed alien creatures. These legions of monstrous creatures are known as Kaiju, the Japanese word for giant beast.
The monsters destroy bridges and tall buildings as if they were rambunctious kids knocking over building blocks or Legos. Goodbye, Golden Gate Bridge. Too bad they didn’t attack London because I would love to see a monster tangle with the London Eye.
To combat the Kaiju, a special type of weapon was devised: massive robots, called Jaegers (German for “hunters”), controlled by two pilots whose minds are synched via a neural bridge, called “The Drift.”
Unfortunately for mankind, the sea monsters keep mutating into every more powerful creatures, bent on nothing short of complete annihilation of the planet.
On the verge of defeat, the forces defending humanity have no choice but to turn to two unlikely heroes – a washed up former pilot (Charlie Hunnam) and an untested trainee (Rinko Kikuchi).
Hunnam’s Raleigh Beckett was a Jaeger pilot in the initial Kaiju wars when co-piloted a giant robot with his older brother on a mission that went badly.
After the death of his sibling, Raleigh had dropped out of the monster bounty hunting, doing odd jobs along the Alaska coast while others tried to figure out ways to fortify the coastal areas from the monster invasion.
As the world hangs in the balance, Raleigh is dredged out of retirement by his former commander, Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba, a suitably no-nonsense tough guy), for a desperate play showdown with the Kaiju.
The problem, of course, is that it takes two to pilot the 25-story tall robots, and a pilot’s partner has to be someone with whom sharing your brain requires the utmost bond of trust and confidence.
Full of bravado and swagger, Raleigh may be willing to put his life on the line despite any risks, but he’ll only do so on his own terms.
Meanwhile, Kikuchi’s Mako Mori is a beautiful Japanese martial-arts expert who’s a candidate for a robot pilot position, though she must first prove herself capable of enduring the intense training.
Known only to commander Pentecost, Mako’s past includes a dark secret about a childhood encounter with the Kaiju that still brings nightmares that must be purged from her memory. Interestingly, a red slipper is a symbol of the mental torment.
Not surprisingly, there is a severe competitive streak in the international cast of robot pilots, and after Raleigh and Mako tangle in a martial arts contest, they become partners in the robot called Gipsy Danger.
Del Toro has an affinity for Ron Perlman, having used him in his “Hellboy” films. Fittingly, Perlman’s Hannibal Chau is a sleazy black market operator in Hong Kong, selling the salvageable body parts of dead Kaiju.
More comic relief comes from a pair of wacky scientists, Charlie Day’s high-pitched voiced Dr. Newton Geiszler thinks he create a neural bridge with a Kaiju, while his partner (Burn Gorman) is just plain eccentric.
The success of the Jaeger program requires Raleigh and Mako to become a well-connected team. For his part, Raleigh is a loner who grapples with trust issues, and so it is no easy task.
Fans of this genre are anxious to move on from the obvious plot contrivances and get to the essence of what is expected from an action film with roots in the anarchic Godzilla genre.
“Pacific Rim” does not disappoint those who want to enjoy the spectacular clash of the titans, as robots and monsters bang away at each other with ferocious intensity.
Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.
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- Written by: Editor
LAKEPORT, Calif. – Local artist Diana Liebe will demonstrate how to create and use a silk screen in an August class at the Lake County Arts Council's Main Street Gallery.
The class will be held from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 24, at the gallery, 325 N. Main St.
Demystify this wonderful art form and learn how to incorporate silk screen images into your art.
The cost is $20 and includes a T-shirt.
To sign up, contact Liebe at
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- Written by: Ted Kooser
Here’s an observant and thoughtful poem by Lisel Mueller about the way we’ve assigned human characteristics to the inanimate things about us. Mueller lives in Illinois and is one of our most distinguished poets.
Things
What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.
We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,
and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.
Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation ( www.poetryfoundation.org ), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press from <em>Alive Together</em> by Lisel Mueller. Copyright 1996 by Lisel Mueller. Introduction copyright 2013 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. They do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.