Honk if you love reading

For two days in a row now, I have driven by my closest branch library on my way home from outings with Robinson. Both times, I spotted two rather forlorn looking picketers, and both times I honked loudly and waved. The picketers beamed at me and waved back. I don't think they're getting much of that, which is unfortunate.

I would exhort all the locals on my flist to follow my example, were it not for the fact that except for wendymc I think none of you has a car! Somehow it wouldn't surprise me if lidocafe had not been down there with hot chocolate and oranges, though.

For those on my flist who are NOT local, and have no clue what I'm talking about, and especially for those two or three who are librarians, you will be interested to know that our library staff is locked out. They have been in negotiations with the city for wage equity for months and got nowhere. Among their minor job actions has been a refusal to collect fines, and the city is using lost revenue (!!!) from this as an excuse to lock them out.

I'm not normally very political, but this issue really gets me steamed. The wage imbalance (a parking lot attendant makes more money per hour than the person who checks out books in the library) stems more from gender issues than anything else - library workers are more likely to be female than are parking lot attendants, road workers etc, and I think the city is banking on the fact that the public will get pissed off fairly quickly if they are unable to access the library. I hope people will keep up the solidarity, but I can imagine frazzled mothers with young children wanting books and videos, or seniors, or those who just need a place to go for company or to stay warm, beginning to lose patience with having their libraries closed down.

I shall try and drive by a branch every day and honk and wave.

There Will Be Blood

I can't imagine what it must have been like for Daniel Day Lewis to inhabit the role of Daniel Plainview for however long it took to film Paul Thomas Anderson's near-masterpiece, There Will Be Blood. Inhabit it he does. At first, listening to the cadences of a voice that some critics have likened to an imitation of the late John Huston, I thought "oh, this is just mannered," but gradually you realize that the character lives behind the actor's terrifying eyes, in turns glittering, manic, cold as a great white shark, and equally deadly. If Daniel Day Lewis did, in fact, base the voice on John Huston, you can't help thinking of the character Huston played in Chinatown, and the bleak vision of amoral capitalism presented in that movie. Or of Huston's own Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Humphrey Bogart's obsessed, almost insane character.

Plainview has been likened to Satan, but I fear that he is all too human, representing a side of humanity, an aspect of American identity and aspirations that most of us would fear to touch or even come close to. The excesses of both capitalism and religion - the US's twin obsessions - are what are on show here, in a vision so black, so darkly humourous, that it recalls Beckett or Ionesco, or Kubrick.

What is almost another character in the movie is the remarkable score. Beginning like a hive of demented bees, and in turns atonal, dissonant, mesmerising or frantic, it jars, disrupts, sets on edge in the same way as Daniel Day Lewis' eyes contrast with his cultured, almost plummy voice. At peak moments, we suddenly hear Brahms violin concerto as yet another signal of the contrast between the romantic ideal of the American Way and the vicious, amoral behavior on the screen.

This is in many ways not a pleasant movie; it is sometimes difficult to watch. But it is risky, bold, confident filmmaking, by a director in complete control of his craft in partnership with an equally fearless actor.