Of muscle aches and wicker men
My leg and back muscles have just about finished griping after their sudden and rather rude awakening over the weekend. We had our winter intensive to close the semester (my second; I’ve now been at Siebold a full rotation!) and took 13 students and five native speaker guests for just under exactly 48 hours of as much English immersion as we can provide without shipping them overseas. This was my second one of these, and I must say, I think they’re a lot of fun. Getting to know some of our students better, especially the ones who care about learning English, and having fun while doing so is a blast. Well, except for the sore back, maybe.
Folks here like to say that if you get sore soon—as in the next day or so—you’re still young, but if it takes a few days to catch up with you, then you’re getting a bit … advanced, shall we say. So, in the end, my being sore less than 24 hours after our morning of ultimate frisbee and soccer may be a good thing. If you believe what They say, anyway.
In artistic consumption news, one of the guys at work lent me the original 1973 version of The Wicker Man. He warned me not to read anything about the movie before I watched it (always good advice), and reiterated his disbelief that I’d never seen such a cult classic. After watching it tonight, I’d say I agree with the cult part. Classic, not so much. Forty years ago it was probably cutting edge and disturbing, but to my 21st century desensitized self, it’s mostly just silly. There’s literally a song about how the May pole is just a phallic symbol. And it’s got choreography. The story was fun, I’ll give you that. It’s a playful murder mystery, if you can call a murder mystery that. Still, compared to other films—even 2001: A Space Odyssey that came out five years earlier—it’s lacking quite the impact it could’ve had, especially coming just two years after A Clockwork Orange, which is a few million times more strange and disturbing. I suppose I liked The Wicker Man more than disliked it, though, and it was fun to watch with no idea what was coming going into it.
