Running for Your Life: “It Follows”

I don’t really go for horror movies all that much. But there’s a lot to like in “It Follows” by David R. Mitchell, now at your local Bijou.

A friend and one of my favorite movie critics, Michael Wood, has this to say, “[It] offers an extraordinary mixture of over and under-statement, with almost nothing in between.”

There is a scene that crystallizes its message for me: When the girlfriend hero asks her boyfriend to play the game in which a person reveals his secret desire: who he would like to change places with. He chooses a coddled toddler.

These are teens with outsized fears before adulthood scrapes the life (the sex?) out of them. Could it be even teens see so much of their life has passed them by? If only we could do it over. But we can’t. “It Follows,” that we can’t. Mitchell is definitely on to something here.

Next: Running for Your Life: If-the-Greats-Were-With-Us Thursday

Running for Your Life: Running Season?

I do understand the idea of running season. That for five months of cold weather a person who considers herself fit turns away from lacing up her Nikes and instead goes to the pool and does laps, or takes a class. Zumba.

What’s at issue is the underlying premise. That running as a pursuit, as a pleasure, isn’t what we are talking about. Rather the premise is that it’s a necessary evil. As in, what’s necessary to reduce weight, or to keep weight off, to forestall memory loss, to keep looking young.

For me, though, running isn’t confined to a season. Thus the title, Running for Your Life. And not only due to my condition that I’ve written about here: My deep vein thrombosis.

Last Sunday (April 12) at 8:30 a.m. I had the simplest of accidents. I tripped over my dog, and with my hands full, stumbled forward, and landed with considerable force on my chin. One of the funniest words in the English language: Faceplant. A nasty gash opened, requiring five stitches to close. Because I am a “bleeder,” due to taking blood thinners, a doctor watched me carefully for any signs that I was having head trauma, as in intracranial hemorrhaging.

Thankfully, I wasn’t. Part of my reasoning? Because I'm careful with my medication. And I run. I keep myself in shape. All seasons. (I don’t swim and find running is the lone pursuit that works for me.) It keeps the swelling of a damaged DVT leg in check. So I run. Not just in running season. But every other day for as long as I can.

Next: Running for Your Life: “It Follows”

Running for Your Life: Hockey Hockey Hockey Hockey

It’s that time of year. What my pal Coach Tully and I call the best time of year, the last two weeks of April, the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs !

My team, the Penguins, limped in, and any reasonable observer would say their odds of getting past the first round and the powerfully built Rangers, the best team in the league, are pretty much nil. Indeed, these guys should harvest my Penguins in a sweep, like park rangers on a church group without a permit.

But wait a minute. The Penguins have a Sutter. Brandon Sutter. The only starting Sutter among the 16 teams in the tournament.

For the uninitiated, the Sutter family is hockey gold. His father Brent won the Cup twice with the New York Islanders. (The family from Viking, Alberta, counts six Cups as players, two as head coach [Darryl of the LA Kings]). And Brandon played hockey gold in the final game of the year, scoring both goals for the Penguins in a 2-0 victory over the Buffalo Sabres.

The odds are long. But we got Sutter gold. (Even Uncle Darryl’s Kings are in the show.) Let the games begin !

Running for Your Life: Running Season?  

Running for Your Life: If-The-Greats-Were-With-Us Thursday

This post is a shout-out to my cousin, Joanne, during the birthday month of William Samuel Neath (1889-1973). In so many ways, our grandfather is still with us.

Joanne wrote to me recently to say, that on his death bed forty-two years ago, Grampa told her, a then-college student: “Two things they can never take from you is your education and land …” She says she carries his philosophy with her to this day.

Next: Running for Your Life: Hockey hockey hockey hockey

Running for Your Life: Freethink this

The lead Talk in the New Yorker this week by George Packer http://nyr.kr/1DCf4u8 has me wondering about what is original in a land that is chilled into groupthink and away from freethinking … Isn’t that why so much of what we read, or see on stage and screen doesn’t vary much from what we have seen before? These horribly murdered young men are martyrs to a faith in taking risks. This is true no less in art than in politics. Consider this: stand for something. There is a deep message for all of us in the hashtag #iamavijit.

 Next: Running for Your Life: Hockey hockey hockey hockey