There’s a reason Address to a Haggis is at the top of my Top Posts list today. Tonight is Burns Night! Here’s my favorite Robert Burns poem.

To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough

by Robert Burns

Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murdering pattle.

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
An’ fellow mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
‘S a sma’ request;
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss’t.

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s win’s ensuin,
Baith snell an’ keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.

That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turned out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld.

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Still thou are blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

Here it is beautifully read for Librivox by Charles MacDonald.

There’s a translation into standard modern English on wikipedia. It’s not the translation I’m familiar with, though. Instead of “The best laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry,” it has the less rhythmic “The best laid schemes of mice and men go often askew”. I wonder if the translator thought they shouldn’t use the common expression, for clarity’s sake. Or maybe it’s something only I grew up hearing, and is not as common as I thought it was.

Anyway, happy Robert Burns Day, or Burns Night, as the case may be.

Seems like other poets ought to get holidays, too. Who would you nominate?

More poetry

I’m thinking about making one of these in the smallest size, in a slightly fluffier grayish blue. What do you think?

Here are the patterns.

More knitting patterns

R.I.P. Etta James.

Photo courtesy of Helsinki City Tourist Information.

More photos

Happy Martin Luther King Day.

I’ve seen Roman Holiday a couple of times on television over the years, but it was so much more fun to watch on the big screen with a crowd of like-minded fans. Roman Holiday is the perfect antidote to a princess fixation, should you or someone you know happen to suffer from one. Bored and exhausted by her duties as a princess, the hero of the film runs off for one exciting, wonderful day in Rome. The story is satisfying, the characters are quirky and delightful, and the location filming in 1950s Rome is fascinating. Here’s one of my favorite scenes.

Midnight in Paris was a fun little movie. I’m a sucker for a time travel story. The basic idea is, wouldn’t it be great to meet [insert favorite artist here] in person? I don’t think I’m as interested in meeting famous people as Woody Allen is. I’m content to enjoy their work, I guess. But it’s an entertaining movie.

I was excited when I saw the preview of The Mill and the Cross. It was uncanny how it used sets, costumes, and CGI to bring Bruegel paintings to life and give the film a look unlike any I’d seen before. For a Bruegel fan like me, it was like a game trying to notice all of the places where they snuck details of his paintings into the film. But what if you’re not a Bruegel fan? It would still be extremely interesting visually, but the story itself was a bit opaque and unsatisfying. I’m more familiar with the biblical themes than many viewers, I think, and I still found it hard to follow. Maybe I needed to know more about Dutch history.

Check out the awesome effects, though.

I saw Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle years ago, and it stuck with me. My friends and I started saying oui like Reinette does in the film (weh, with a sort of glottal stop at the end), I recounted the film to friends who’d never seen it, I thought of it whenever I was awake at the moment between night and morning, I looked for it at the library and the video store, but never found it. So as you can imagine, I was very happy to hear that it was going to play at SIFF cinema. I was also worried that I wouldn’t enjoy it as I did when I was in my twenties, or that after all these years of hearing about it, Rick would see it and say, that’s it? But I still enjoyed it very much, and so did Rick. It’s nothing earthshaking, just a little set of four stories about friendship. So sweet and funny.

I always enjoy Aki Kaurismäki’s films, and Le Havre is made in the classic Kaurismäki mold – a story of humble, working class people struggling to do the right thing, shot with the beautiful color,  minimal dialogue, and melancholy humor that you expect from his films. Here’s a scene.

I posted last month about Hipsters, a musical about teenage nonconformists in Soviet Russia, but this is a good opportunity to post another musical number from the film. They didn’t skimp on this movie – it’s a real musical with all the fixings, plus its got the special Russian sauce.

And we finished off the year watching The Muppets. When I heard that the music was by Brett McKenzie, I knew I had to see it. Here’s one of the songs, interspersed with film excerpts. Yep, sounds like Brett McKenzie alright. Perfect.

I think we watch a lot of movies. This doesn’t even count the videos we rented.

Did you see any good movies last year?

It seems we went to a lot of movies in 2011.

The King’s Speech was worth seeing for the sets alone, and had some wonderful performances. I found the scenes of the royal family watching film of Nazi rallies and discussing it with their children very interesting. But the film was marred by an over-glorious ending. The soaring music was particularly grating in the scene of the eponymous speech. It would have been so much better to experience the speech as the British public did, unadorned, important, serious.

I knew I would enjoy The Illusionist, but was hesitant about whether an animated character wouldn’t suffer in comparison to the delightful corporeal reality of the real Jacques Tati. Turns out I needn’t have worried. The film doesn’t make any attempt to do what only Tati in person can do, and instead does what animation does best, creating a fascinating alternate world by hand, a world which is incidentally even more interesting and beautiful than the animators’ Triplets of Belleville, which I also enjoyed.

Source Code. Fun, silly, and entertaining. Jake Gyllenhaal is wonderfully believable in it. More thoughtful than most thrillers, which isn’t saying much, but you do at least have to think while you watch it. Just don’t think too much, or you’ll start thinking it doesn’t actually make any sense.

In a completely different vein, we made it to only one film at the Seattle International Film Festival this year. It was a goody – the Finnish film Steam of Life. This is the ultimate confessional documentary. The film joins Finnish men, famous for their reticence, as they sit in the sauna, relax, and talk about their deepest feelings and most profound experiences. There were a lot of teary eyes in the theater after watching this film, including my own.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a Werner Herzog movie about the world’s oldest known paintings, filmed in a cave in 3D. It’s like a TV documentary about a truly fascinating subject, only in 3D, and the narrator is Werner Herzog. Turns out, though, that Herzog is not that different from your typical narrator for a film like this. Philosophizing is, after all, de riguer in such films. Best use of 3D I’ve seen so far.

Are you like me, and maybe saw Pillow Talk as a kid on TV, and liked it a lot, but now you assume that it’ll be too sexist and silly to enjoy anymore? Actually, it’s not the sexism so much that struck me when I watched it this summer – after all, Doris Day was the embodiment of the 50s “career girl”, which was a far better gig than most women got in the films of the era – it was the homophobia. Particularly since the film stars Rock Hudson. It was part of a Rock Hudson retrospective at the the Seattle Art Museum.

But the candy-coloured delight of the film, the clean-scrubbed beauty of Doris Day herself (who seems to wear minimal stage make-up to better show off her adorable freckles) and the good fun everyone seems to be having making the film really fun to watch, particularly on the big screen.

And then there was The Tree of Life. Like many people, I saw the trailer for this film in the theater and thought, That’s the most beautiful, most evocative film trailer I’ve ever seen. If there are no other worthwhile moments in the entire film, it will be worth seeing just to see those images again. There are lots more worthwhile moments in the film. It’s one of those rare films that strives to be a great work of art. And it mostly succeeds. It reminded me very much of Andrei Tarkovsky‘s film The Mirror. I don’t know if I bought into the overtly expressed themes of the film very much, but it hardly seemed to matter. The meaning of the film for me was in its images.

And that, my friends, is only half of the movies we went to see this past year. Tune in tomorrow for more discussion, and let us know about the great films you saw in 2011!

I recommend her web page. Everything she makes is so pretty.

More animation.

I also vividly remember seeing the Nicholas Brothers on television when I was little and marveling at their springy steps and signature split jumps, which are featured heavily in this video.

This is a clip from Stormy Weather, and the song is shortened a bit here to make room for the dancing, but if you’d like to hear it in its entirety, here is a copy of the recording I was raised on. It’s so great.

In 1993, I saw Cab Calloway perform at the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle. When I saw his name on the program, I thought, You mean he’s still alive? He was, in fact, only 86 years old, and while he couldn’t quite dance as he used to, his clever wordplay and booming voice were still a delight. Because he started so young, playing nightclubs while he was still in his teens, he lived to become a sort of living ambassador of a lost era, a time traveler from the heyday of Harlem. He died the following year.

May we all live to be time travelers and relish it as much as he seemed to.

Happy New Year everyone!

More Cab Calloway