Happy May Day, Genossen!

Comrades, we raise our glasses to the international brotherhood of man!

Comments

[Card]

Comrade, I'm happy to report that you will also be able to raise your glass and celebrate at the end of the month. The 29th of May will mark the 13th anniversary of Erich Honecker's death. Good riddance to commie rubbish!

BTW, As this is May 1st, I would like to wish you a happy and prayerful celebration of the feast of St Joseph the Worker.

[Fiendish]

Speaking of Erich, the film The Lives of Others has an excellent collection of 1984 vintage Honecker jokes.

[Card]

Fiendish, I have been trying to see a couple of films for months, one of them being "The Lives of Others" (the other one being: "Last King of Scotland"). Mrs C and I finally got around to seeing "Others" last week. It was wonderful. I thought the sun joke about Honecker was very funny.

You know, Mrs C and I are rather lucky. Here in Bloomfield Hills we have one of only two theatres in the whole of metro Detroit that is an "art" theatre (in the sense of good films though not mass market films -- as opposed to RCB for Art films) and we had the good fortune to see "The Queen" (best actress), "The Last King of Scotland" (best actor), and "The Lives of Others" (best foreign language film). In other words, very few people in this metro region ever got to see those films --or even have knowledge of their existence. And that's a shame, because this year, unlike so many previous years, all of those films and the performances in them were truly excellent.

[Misspent]

I have heard it said that The Lives of Others could only have been written by a Wessie, since few Ossies believe that such a career Stasi man would have been so kind and that he would have put his career in jeopardy like that--he would likely have been watched as well. And that a major playwright would possibly think he wasn't bugged was also a joke.

But I actually thought that humanizing the main character made the horror of the Stasi and the DDR only that much more clear. It would have been too easy for some to dismiss it as Western propaganda had they actually portrayed it 100% accurately (which I actually did hear someone say directly as well as many times second hand).

[Misspent]

I have The Queen from Netflix now and will get King of Scotland before I go to Germany. I'm saving the Queen for when I see POPS and MOTHER in two weeks.