sovay: (Silver: against blue)
Rabbit, rabbit! Thanks to the aftermath of out-of-town relatives, last night's dinner of lobster and brie and crepes was the most decadent meal I had eaten in ages. Seven monarchs which eclosed all in the same afternoon took flight into the late blue sky.



Overnight adventures with ants and asthma notwithstanding, I managed to sleep nine hours. I am informed by my mother that four more monarchs have taken flight. Two more repose in chrysalis and another two are still mowing their way through the milkweed, storing up for their wings.
sovay: (Viktor & Mordecai)
It doesn't sound like much to call a movie the most important film about the Holocaust to come out of wartime Hollywood. Once you get past the handful of outliers headed by Lubitsch, the bar is in hell, baking bagels. The Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations did not pull in the crowds in Peoria. Thanks to the combined filtration of the Production Code Administration and the Office of War Information, even films that engage with the ideologies rather than the aesthetics of Nazism can start to feel as thin on Tinseltown ground as a minyan in Sodom. I don't know what else to call None Shall Escape (1944), a Columbia B-effort that does not play like any other American propaganda of my experience. It plays like a pre-Code at the height of World War II, a crash-in from some parallel dream factory with far less need to cushion the reality shock of genocide or the humanity that commits it. It's harsh, cheap, uncannily unstuck in time. Nothing in the literature has knocked me for such a loop since Emeric Pressburger's The Glass Pearls (1966).

In part it is a study of a kind I had not thought popularly available until the publication of Adorno et al.'s The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a case history of terminal Nazification. The film isn't subtle, but neither is it stupid. The age of onset is World War I. To the small and oft-annexed town of Lidzbark, it made no difference for years that their schoolteacher was ethnically German, especially since the culturally Polish community around him was territorially Prussian at the time, but in the demobbed spring of 1919, as the restoration of Poland and the breaking of Germany rest on the same table at Versailles, it matters fiercely to Alexander Knox's Wilhelm Grimm. He greets his homecoming ironically, cautiously: "You're very generous to an enemy." It would go over better without his newfangled Aryan hauteur. It marks him out more than his soldier's greatcoat or his self-conscious limp, this damage he's taken beyond shell-shock, into conspiracy theory that horrifies his long-faithful fiancée of Marsha Hunt's Marja Pacierkowski all the more for the earnestness with which he expects her to share it. Disability and defeat have all twisted up for him into the same embittered conviction of betrayal, all the riper for the consolation of the Dolchstoßlegende, the romantic nationalism of Lebensraum, the illusion of Völkisch identity as an unalterable fact to cling to in a world of broken bodies and promises where even the home front is no longer where he left it. "You don't understand. Nothing's the same anymore . . . The future lies in victory, not in freedom." Like an illness that protects itself, even as his nascent fascism kills his romance deader than any disfigurement, it feeds his hurt back into the seamless cycle of grievance and justification until his frustration finds itself a suitably inappropriate outlet—raping a smitten student to revenge the slur of his jilting on his Teutonic manhood. More than proto-Nazisploitation, the assault seals his willingness to take out his insecurities on the innocent. By the time the action rolls around to Munich in 1923, it suspends no disbelief to find him serving a comfortable six months for his participation in the Beer Hall Putsch. By 1934, he's a decorated Alter Kämpfer, a veteran of the Reichstag fire and the Night of the Long Knives, a full oak-leaved SS-Gruppenführer who can turn his own brother over to the Gestapo without a blush and effectively abduct his nephew into the Hitler Youth; in short, exactly the sort of proper party man whom the seizure of Poland in 1939 should return to Lidzbark in the sick-joke-made-good plum role of Reichskommissar. Technically quartered in Poznań, he can't miss the chance to grind the supremacy of the Reich personally into the faces of the "village clowns" who last saw their schoolmaster fleeing in disgrace. "The best," he remarks pleasantly over his plenitude of coffee and brandy, the likes of which his silent, captive hosts have not seen in war-straitened weeks, "and not enough of it." He has already presided over a book-burning and the filming of a newsreel of propaganda, a casually cruel calling card. All the rest of the Generalplan Ost can wait until the morning.

None Shall Escape would be historically impressive enough if it merely, seriously traced the process by which an unexceptional person could accumulate a catalogue of atrocities that would sound like anti-German propaganda if they had not already been documented as standard operating procedures of the Third Reich. Concentration camps in their less crematory aspects were old news since 1933. The 1970's did not invent the Wehrmachtsbordelle. Knox ghosts on his German accent after a few lines, but it doesn't mar his performance that could once again come off like a national metonym and instead makes a mesmeric awful object of a man accelerating through moral event horizons like a railgun, never once given the easy out of psychopathology—in a screen niche dominated by brutes, fools, and sadists, the demonstrably intelligent, emotionally layered Wilhelm who has outsourced his conscience to his Führer stands out like a memo from Arendt. The political detailing of his descent is equally noteworthy and particularly acute in its insistence on a ladder of dreadful choices rather than irresistible free-fall, but I can get nuanced Nazis elsewhere in Hollywood if I need them. I can't get the eleven o'clock shocker of this picture which feels like a correction of the record, not a first-generation entry in that record itself. It goes farther than uncensored acknowledgement of what no wartime production would call the Shoah, remarkable already in light of official directives not to dramatize even the known extent of Nazi antisemitism unduly. Shot in the late summer into fall of 1943, it is the earliest film I have seen in my life to show that the Jews fought.

Horses are more important than Jews, that's all. )

It was not clairvoyance, even if None Shall Escape often gives the impression of working just ahead of the rim of history. Its Oscar nomination for Best Original Motion Picture Story was shared between the German and Austrian Jewish refugees of Alfred Neumann and Joseph Than, who had brought their respective border-crossing experiences to Hollywood—Neumann had even been born in Lidzbark when it was still German Lautenburg. Director Andre de Toth was Hungarian and, for a change, not Jewish, but his very late exit from occupied Europe had gifted him with a disturbing, exceptional qualification to treat the subject of Nazi atrocities on screen: caught in Warsaw when the balloon went up, he had been pressed into service in Nazi propaganda. One of the sickest, most pungent details in the movie is the Theresienstadt-like newsreel of a queue of desperately smiling townsfolk to whom the Nazis dispense a largesse of bread and soup which is snatched from their mouths the second the cameras stop rolling, the rabbi himself unceremoniously jerked from the line he was originally forced into so as not to spoil the picture of placid, grateful Poles with a Jew. It was de Toth's recreation of an incident it had haunted him so much to participate in that he spoke of it only toward the end of his life, its ghost hidden until then in the plain sight of the silver screen. Did he lend his piratical eyepatch to the wounded Wilhelm for the same reason, like Pressburger's stolen memories to Karl Braun? Who among this émigré crew had seen the loading of a night train bound to the east? The closeness to reality of this film is a double edge. Wrapped in its near-future frame of a post-war, Nuremberg-style trial in whose hindsight all these horrors are supposed to be safely past and in the process of redress, None Shall Escape locks itself into uncertainty because it knows, as its more sanitized age-mates do not have to, that when the lights come up the trains are still running on time. It can't close the loop of its own title. When all the testimonies have concluded in the case of Wilhelm Grimm, Reich Commissioner of Western Poland, charged in the absence of a definition of genocide with the "unspeakable miseries" of "the wanton extermination of human life," the notably international tribunal does not pronounce sentence: it turns the future over to the audience. The verdict is left to the fourth wall to render as a line of Allied flags flutters expectantly as if over the as yet unimagined headquarters of the UN. Like a lost soul stripped of everything but the doctrine that cost him it all, Wilhelm screamed out his die-hard Reich-dream straight to us: "You've just won another battle in a fight which has not ended . . . You cannot crush us! We will rise again and again!" In a more recognizable war movie, his cry would be the impotence of defeat, but in this one? Is he right? Is there such a thing as justice for crimes against humanity? Is it enough to keep us from churning out more conspiratorial ideologies, more genocidal wars? It isn't spellmaking, it's a thought experiment so suddenly, darkly reflective that if Technician Fourth Grade Rod Serling hadn't been in boot camp with the rest of the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment at the time of production, I'd blame him for a hand in its black mirror. If I shake it under the present world-historical conditions, the magic eight-ball seems to be coming up SOL. Do I need to state that this picture commercially flopped?

Fortunately for historical memory, None Shall Escape was never entirely lost. I found it in the Criterion Channel's Noir and the Blacklist and while I could argue with the first categorization, the second was an indisputable hat trick: Marsha Hunt, Alexander Knox, and screenwriter Lester Cole, the card-carrying Communist of the Hollywood Ten. Sucks to McCarthy, it can be readily watched on YouTube and the Internet Archive and even to my surprise obtained on Sony Pictures Blu-Ray. DP Lee Garmes does his low-key considerable best to compensate for a budget like Samuel Bischoff turned the couch upside down and shook it for change and a moth flew out. The resourceful art direction of Lionel Banks does the same for a Western set that needs to be in Poland. I am afraid that after catching the back-to-back breadth of his shape-changing in The Sea Wolf (1941) and this film, I am unlikely ever to be sensible on the subject of Alexander Knox again, especially when his performance is one of those high-wire acts that can't once glance down at the actor's vanity for reassurance or out to the audience for sympathy, but Hunt matches him so intensely and effortlessly over their quarter-century entwined like a marriage on the wrong side of the mirror, somewhere off in the forking paths of alternate film history they should have been less inimically reteamed. "There's your Weimar Republic for you." Of course I don't need to reach back into 1919 or even 1944 to find a Wilhelm, but it matters to have the reminder of a Rabbi Levin. We will outlive them. This choice brought to you by my free backers at Patreon.
sovay: (Haruspex: Autumn War)
We never heard back about the broken central air which I had to repair myself, but apparently the time could be found to send contractors to scythe down almost every green thing on the property. There was a mulberry tree in the back yard which I had been enjoying as it fruited. Now it's a naked raw stump in a buzz-cut of brown stubble. A rose-tree in our driveway had been nodding its green shade against my office window and reaching its leaves up to the casement in the bathroom and it's gone, too. Nothing is left in the back except the lilac which looks crisped and desolate and some thin ornamental with the yew trees in the front. We weren't warned. The house doesn't look landscaped, it looks slaughtered. I had seen squirrels and birds in the mulberry. I had just taken some pictures of our wild yard and [personal profile] spatch had taken some pictures of me in it. The black swallow-wort they could uproot any time, but I had been photographing that rose for almost three years now, growing like a metaphor from the cracks in the concrete gutter.

sovay: (Rotwang)
I sent this post in memoriam Tom Lehrer to [personal profile] selkie, after which it hit me that the funniest part about Lehrer working for a born-secret agency was that he said as much in public. It's in the Revisited introduction to "The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be" (1960): "Now if I may indulge in a bit of personal history, a few years ago I worked for a while at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico. I had a job there as a spy. No . . . I guess you know that the staff out there at that time was composed almost exclusively of spies . . . of one persuasion or another . . ." It's a hit with the audience, who did not have a chance of knowing for another thirty-odd years that he meant it. What Lehrer actually did for the NSA still appears unconfirmed, but writing in the second edition of Quantum Profiles (1991/2020) his one-time fellow Harvardian Jeremy Bernstein guessed—the classical combination of mathematical skill and being an absolute weirdo—"probably codebreaking." I'd never thought about it and I'd believe it. That line run on the audience in MIT's Kresge Auditorium in 1959 is a cryptographer's joke: it works in its own right, but to get it properly requires a key. Jesus, can you imagine him and Leo Marks in a room together? It would have been an arms race which of them could be self-deprecatingly funnier without giving a thing they didn't want to away.
sovay: (PJ Harvey: crow)
Tom Lehrer had entered my household's dialect before I was born. That's not my department. I am never forget the day. Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air. Only be sure always to call it please research. More, more, I'm still not satisfied. Lucky Pierre! Who's next? Songs not on rotation in my parents' record collection could be encountered lyrically and traumatically in Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer with Not Enough Drawings by Ronald Searle (1981). One could in fact call him one of my idols since childbirth. With just a handful of music, he touched the hearts of millions, and in the spirit of his own liner notes, I hope he died mad about it.
sovay: (Otachi: Pacific Rim)
It has not been a good week for sleep in the sense that I have managed about three to four hours out of every twenty-four and generally not when it's night out, but it has been an excellent week for ocean. After contemplating the question and decisively answering that she would rather be a dragon than a cat, my niece who was part of this afternoon's excursion with out-of-town family to Castle Island showed her fire by the sea.

sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
I am delighted to announce that my story "Twice Every Day Returning" has been accepted for reprint by Afterlives 2024: The Year's Best Death Fiction, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas and forthcoming from Psychopomp in October. It was published originally in Uncanny Magazine #61, in winter to match its ice-memories as opposed to the heat wave it was written in; it is queer, maritime, diasporic, the latest pendant of an unplanned sea-cycle, and it's lovely to see it described as "Lyrical Magical Realism." The table of contents is exactly the kinds of liminal fiction I would plunge myself into even if I did not have the honor of being included among them. We're still finishing out the ghost-month of summer, but I have further reason now to look forward to the ghost-month of fall.
sovay: (Otachi: Pacific Rim)
Michael Curtiz's The Sea Wolf (1941) is spectrally salt-soaked, ferociously anti-fascist, and gives great Alexander Knox. On the first two of these factors much of its reputation justly rests; the third, if you ask me, is criminally overlooked.

Famously, in adapting Jack London's The Sea-Wolf (1904) for Warner Bros., Robert Rossen took the opportunity of the studio's impatient politics to kick an already philosophical adventure into high topical gear, explicitly equating the maritime tyranny of the novel with the authoritarianism that had been rising in Europe since the end of the last war while America stuck its fingers in its ears and occasionally hummed along with Lindbergh. It would be more than idiomatic to call the schooner Ghost a floating hell: its master takes his motto from Milton and reigns over the crew of his fin-de-siècle sealer with the brutal swagger of a self-made superman until like the true damned they become one another's devils, outcasts of the sea-roads, their only berth this three-masted, fog-banked Room 101. "No work is hard as long as you can remain a human being while doing it. I wouldn't sail on a ship like the Ghost if she were the only sailing vessel left on the Pacific Ocean." Its captain is no dictatorial caricature, however, as comfortably distant as a foreign newsreel. Edward G. Robinson had been in the vanguard of anti-Nazi pictures since Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and his Wolf Larsen has more than main force on his side, the heartless charisma of a demagogue whose sucker punches comprise as much of his unrepentant attraction as his short-cut promises, all-American as late capitalism and always a scapegoat in it to keep the crab bucket crawling. Press from the time indicates that the rest of the cast were on the same double-speaking, not overplayed page. Whether audiences recognized him from the headlines or the workplace, he had reality enough to break ribs on. But Rossen did more with his source material than just sharpen its critique or concentrate its villain—in a bold move even for infamously transformative Hollywood, he redistributed its hero, teasing out the shanghaied stand-in of London's narrator into the less autofictional, more expressive components of the rebellious drifter of John Garfield's George Leach and and the literary misfit of Knox's Humphrey Van Weyden. The effect it produces on the film is fascinating and slightly unstable. As they sweat out their different flavors of servitude under the shadows of the rigging that creak like nooses and chains, the characters seem sometimes to intersect, sometimes to contrast, sometimes to be switching off who gets the talk, the action, the future, the girl; until the drowning swirl of the climax, they function so clearly as a kind of double lead that it feels as though it should be possible to slip them back under one another's skins, like separable selves in a novel by Diana Wynne Jones, except that their ultimate disambiguation is riveting. Without disrespect to Garfield, the role of Leach fits vividly into his catalogue of proletarian heroes, a forgotten man with a prisoner's duty to escape, not too embittered by his rage against the machine to be romantically reachable. "Men like Larsen can't keep on grinding us down because we're nobodies. That ain't true. We're somebodies." Defying the captain even when he has to grin his insolence through the latest bruise, he looks less like the ringleader of a mutiny and more like the core of a resistance. Personally as well as politically, Van Weyden is something much more ambiguous; it inclines the viewer to stick around to try to find out what.

Even the allegorical frame of the film offers little assistance in placing his studious, reticent figure, his education and elocution confirming only that he's thoroughly at sea in more ways than one. Is he a neutral, an appeaser, a well-bred case of obedience in advance? Respectably anonymous aboard the ill-fated ferry Martinez, he signally retreated from the agitated pleading of Ida Lupino's Ruth Webster, apologetically citing "the law" as excuse for inaction when it would have been more like justice to lend a hunted ex-con a hand. Fetched up in flotsam bewilderment aboard the Ghost, he's the odd sailor out with his writer's profession that seems ironically to have done more to insulate him from the workings of life than instruct him in them. It's an inauspicious start for a hero, if he should even be considered one. Not actually all that tall for a man, he has the height in any scene with his higher-billed co-stars, but it diffuses him lankily against their compact authority and Knox in his early scenes is willing to make a lubberly spectacle of himself, pointedly overaged for his cabin boy's duties, a long-limbed jumble in the sealer's close-quarters roll—as the full panic of his captivity crashes in on him, he loses his head and shouts for help as futilely and demeaningly as any of the sots and jailbirds with which Larsen keeps his pleasure well supplied. "You're in a bad way," the captain contemplates his newest inmate, bitterly sick at himself for an instinctual blurt of empathy that couldn't have been less calculated to win him respect or reprieve aboard this devil-ship, "sort of in the middle. But then I suppose you're used to that. Your sort usually is." A dig at the privilege of the ivory tower which can afford not to have to choose sides, it sounds offhandedly like a sexual slur as well. London's Van Weyden romanced the novel's equivalent of Ruth, but Rossen's has already been judged "soft like a woman" and claimed as the captain's property according to "the law of the sea, which says anything you find in it is yours to keep," tacking close to the wind of the Production Code with the suspicious hours he spends in congress with the captain who will never admit how greedily he thrives on the company of this bookish sea-stray. Who else aboard this Pacific-moated prison hulk can appreciate not just his ravenous will to power, but the intelligence behind it which stocks his cabin with the unexpected culture of Darwin to de Quincey, Nietzsche to Poe? Who else will give him a run for his philosophy, however confident he may be of the contest's end? Derelicts off the docks of the Barbary Coast offer little more than the routine diversion of breaking, but Van Weyden still has innocence to be relieved of, the clean-handed illusion of himself as above the casual viciousness of this shark-world he's sunken into, the only one its captain recognizes: "Is this the first time you ever wanted to commit a murder?" Freezing at the coup de grâce still leaves the shame of seizing the skinning knife in the first place, the worse stain of Larsen's paternal beam. Any number of intellectuals went for fascism in its first-run days and our half-protagonist despite his ideological resistance may be nothing more than one of their cautionary tales, accommodating himself to his enthrallment by Renfield's degrees. Either way, his tarred standing as the captain's confidant counts him out of any organized effort to topple Larsen as contemptuously as a collaborator, an impression the writer does nothing to dispel when he silently holds the lantern for a midnight inspection of the faces of potential mutineers and his notes toward a memoir of his time aboard the Ghost have been appropriated for a manifesto of Wolf Larsen. It seems short-sighted of the captain not to consider that his vanity could be just as dangerous to reveal as the torturous headaches that periodically crush him blind, but not when we can watch him swell in the knowledge that only great men are anatomized for the attention of history, the mass-market immortality he deserves as much as the fallen hero of Paradise Lost. Who else of his plug-ugly crew is going to lean suddenly forward at the captain's own desk like a schoolmaster in sea-boots and a slop-stained work shirt and clinically read the man who holds his life in his hands for filth?

"The reason for his actions then becomes obvious. Since he has found it so difficult in the outside world to maintain that dignity, he creates a world for himself—a ship on which he alone can be master, on which he alone can rule. The next step is a simple one. An ego such as this must constantly be fed, must constantly be reassured of its supremacy. So it feeds itself upon the degradation of people who have never known anything but degradation. It is cruel to people who have never known anything but cruelty. But to dare to expose that ego in a world where it would meet its equal—"

The Sea Wolf keeps Van Weyden so close to its vest for so long, it's a sharp little victory in its own right to find that after all he's got a spine to go with his sea legs. His weeks in the barnacled snake pit of the Ghost have indeed altered him from the fine gentleman whose squeamish morals Larsen mocked with such barbed affability, but mostly, as so often in adventures and sometimes even real life, to wake him up to himself rather than grind him down. God bless the Warners grit, with a five o'clock shadow roughing in his disillusion and his thick dark hair stiffened with sea-spray he's better than handsome, he's delicious with those doe-lashes that show every deflecting flick of his gaze, his solid brows that can hold a straighter face. "You're wasting time," he says only, curtly, as if he had just revealed worse about himself than his loyalty to a pair of last-chance lovers and their private mutiny, not Larsen's creature after all and not interested in talking about it. What he is in the end is a trickster, Scheherazade-spinning the lure of his never-written book that stings and entices Larsen in equal measure, as good as a siren's bait of memory. Knee-deep in the tilting, salt-swollen cabin of the derelict Ghost with a pistol trained on his peacoat and time gulping out as fast as air through cannon-shattered decks, Van Weyden doesn't turn the tables with the captain's contagious brutality but the proof of his own incurable softheartedness, shadow-sided as the warning he quoted more than once to Larsen: "There's a certain price that no one wants to pay for living." Those liminal sorts, you have to watch out for them even between their own words. It was Knox's Hollywood debut and it confounds me that he was most acclaimed in his American period for playing Woodrow Wilson. But then the film is studded with these turns like nothing I have seen asked of their actors, even Robinson who stretches beyond the confines of current events and the extra-maritime echoes of Conrad into the kind of performance it would be fair to call titanic if it weren't so upsettingly human. Gene Lockhart stops the show as Louie, sodden beyond even the usual standards of pathetically drunken doctors in marginal haunts of the world—tormented past the last literal rags of his dignity, he doesn't just call down his curse from the rigging like some God-damned Melvillean oracle, he seals it to the ship with his own blood. The Sea Wolf would lose much of its jolt if it could be relegated to the twilight zone of a supernatural picture, but there is something weird and maudit about the Ghost which shuns the sea lanes, touches no ports of call, preys on other ships like one of the more piratical incarnations of the Flying Dutchman, its crew bound as if for their lives and its captain stalked by a brother with the implacable name of Death. It needs nothing more than its own manifest to be doomed. Howard da Silva's Harrison makes a surly enough, mob-minded representative sailor, but no one before this mast is as gleefully repulsive as Barry Fitzgerald's Cooky, all his familiar impish mannerisms curdled into real malevolence, knifing an argumentative seaman one minute and the next merrily suggesting a rape. "I'll not shut up! Let the chills of fear run up his spine, like they did mine when I made my first voyage aboard the foulest ship in creation." Especially with its fog-sweated photography by Sol Polito that bears comparison to the deep-focus, silver-carved shadow-work of John Alton or Gregg Toland, the film at times resembles a grimier, diabolical companion piece to my long-beloved The Long Voyage Home (1940), the oyster-gleam of overcast on the wave-splattered roll of the decks a testament to the model effects of Byron Haskin and the flood-capabilities of the studio's Stage 21. The spare, corroded, swirling score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold makes equally technical and expressionist use of a Novachord. How this film made it through the strainer of the PCA when its close contemporary Out of the Fog (1941) was depoliticized into meaninglessness, I give thanks to Neptune and have no idea.

The trick to The Sea Wolf is seeing it. Thanks to the lifesaver of the Minuteman Library Network, I was able to enjoy the 100-minute restoration released by the Warner Archive on Blu-Ray/DVD, but any shorter version is the hack work of the 1947 re-release, shorn of a quarter-hour of its more political scenes and some collateral connective tissue. It made the film fit on a nautical double bill with The Sea Hawk (1940), but in the year of the ascendance of HUAC and the Hollywood Ten, it is impossible not to wonder a little if the studio was already coming around to the prevailing Red-scared wind—for a film as far left in its capitalist-fascist indictments as The Sea Wolf, it may be impressive that the blacklist claimed only Rossen, Robinson, Garfield, da Silva, and the Canadian-born Knox, whose eventually permanent relocation to the UK in 1950 explains my previous experience of him strictly in British productions. As with so many of this country's self-devouring frenzies, it was America's loss. Van Weyden never feels like a spokesman for liberal democracy; he feels like a frightened, sheltered, ambivalent man with a trick up his sleeve he needs the strength to look for, which still puts him allegorically ahead of his resident country in the spring of '41. He is surprising beyond the wild card of his recombined plot. I like the Canadian flicker I can hear in his otherwise acceptably mid-Atlantic voice, another marker of difference from the Frisco-scraped rest of the crew. Without crudity, I would hope he was appreciated by Boyd McDonald in his late-night TV-cruising sometime. It is more slantly done, but there is something in this film of the same kind of spellmaking as Pimpernel Smith (1941), speaking itself into the future: all you fascists bound to lose. Or as Larsen remarks like a person who should know, "Milton really understood the Devil." It's a useful knack, these days when circles close. This price brought to you by my equal backers at Patreon.
sovay: (Jeff Hartnett)
Major props to the Somerville Theatre for accommodating the accessibility needs of my still-healing mother so that she could get out of the house tonight for the first time in a month and a half and watch the original 3:10 to Yuma (1957), which she first showed me in high school on rental VHS. It was my introduction to Glenn Ford and my second experience of Van Heflin and remains on the long list of movies I love and have never written about, but I had never seen it on a big screen, either, and its silver drought winter-for-summer looks like nothing else in the Western catalogue. It's full of tensions and strange tenderness, high-angle shots like the sky soaring back, sweat beading like the rain that doesn't fall. It's a film about failures and fisher kings: how could I not love it? My mother had a wonderful time. I am so glad she had a wonderful time. It was her first movie in theaters in five years.
sovay: (Silver: against blue)
[personal profile] sabotabby did me as a mermaid!

sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
Before the thunderstorm broke in such steel-drum sheets of solid rain that we realized only after the fact that we had accidentally driven through a washed-out bridge on Route 127, I lay with my face against half a billion years of granite cooled in the volcanoes of Avalonia and weathered across aeons of which the ice ages were only the finishing touch to a boulder as rough as rust-cracked barnacles: it pushed into my palms like the denticles of sharkskin, my hair clung to it in the wind that smelled of high tide and the slap-glass of waves coiling around the sunken cobbles and combers of weed. The stone itself smelled of salt. I found a fragment of gull's feather tangled afterward in my hair. [personal profile] spatch had driven me out to Gloucester for a bonanza of fried smelts and scallops eaten within sea-breeze earshot of the harbor while the clouds built like a shield-wall against the sunset and the thunder held off just long enough for us to get back to the car, following which we were theoretically treated to the coastal picturesque of Manchester-by-the-Sea and realistically corrected course back to Route 128 when we saw a taller vehicle than ours headlights-deep. The sunset that came out after the rain was preposterously spectacular: a huge cliff of cloud the peach-pearl color of a bailer shell, the gold-edged stickles of smaller reefs and bars, the mauve undershadow of the disappearing rain, all sunk to a true ultramarine dusk by the time we were doing the shopping for my mother back in Lexington. I used to spend a lot more time out in the world and I need to be able to again. It is self-evidently good for me.

sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
Obviously I am not at Readercon, but on the other hand I may have fixed our central air: it required a new filter, a section of insulation, and a quantity of aluminum tape, but the temperature in the apartment has in fact followed the thermostat down for the first time all week. Fingers crossed that it stays that way.

Although its state-of-the-art submarine is nuclear-powered and engaged in the humanitarian mission of planting a chain of seismometers around the sunken hotspots of the globe, Around the World Under the Sea (1966) plays so much like a modernized Verne mash-up right down to its trick-photographed battle with a giant moray eel and its climactic ascent amid the eruption of a newly discovered volcano that it should not be faulted for generally shorting its characters in favor of all the techno-oceanography, but Keenan Wynn grouches delightfully as the specialist in deep-sea survival who prefers to spend his time playing shortwave chess in a diving bell at the bottom of the Caribbean and the script actually remembers it isn't Shirley Eaton's fault if the average heterosexual male IQ plummets past the Marianas just because she's inhaled in its vicinity, but the MVP of the cast is David McCallum whose tinted monobrowline glasses and irritable social gracelessness would code him nerd in any era, but he's the grit in the philanthropy with his stake in a sunken treasure of transistor crystals and his surprise to be accused of cheating at chess when he designed and programmed the computer that's been making his moves for him. If the film of The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) had not made its inspired change in the nationality of its aeronautical engineer, McCallum could have knocked the part out of the park. "No, you don't get one," he almost gets the last word, distributing his sole precious handful of salvage among his fellow crew with the pointed exception of the captain played inevitably by Lloyd Bridges: "You blew the bloody submarine in half."

[personal profile] spatch and I have seen four films now by the husband-and-wife, director-and-editor team of Andrew L. and Virginia Stone and on the strength of Ring of Fire (1961), The Steel Trap (1952), The Decks Ran Red (1958), and just lately The Last Voyage (1960), the unifying theme of their pictures looks like pulp logistics. So far the standout has been the nail-biter noir of The Steel Trap, whose sprung ironies depend on an accumulation of individually trivial hitches in getting from L.A. to Rio that under less criminal circumstances would mount to planes-trains-and-automobiles farce, but Ring of Fire incorporates at least two real forest fires into its evacuation of a Cascadian small town, The Decks Ran Red transplants its historical mutiny to the modern engine room of a former Liberty ship, and The Last Voyage went the full Fitzcarraldo by sinking the scrap-bound SS Île de France after first blowing its boiler through its salon and smashing its funnel into its deckhouse without benefit of model work. The prevailing style is pedal-to-the-metal documentary with just enough infill of character to keep the proceedings from turning to clockwork and a deep anoraky delight in timetables and mechanical variables. Eventually I will hit one of their more conventional-sounding crime films, but until then I am really enjoying their clinker-built approach to human interest. Edmond O'Brien as the second engineer of the doomed SS Claridon lost his father on the Titanic, a second-generation trauma another film could have built an entire arc out of, and the Stones care mostly whether he's as handy with an acetylene torch as all that.

We were forty-four minutes into Dr. Kildare's Strange Case (1940) before anything remotely strange occurred beyond an impressive protraction of soap and with sincere regrets to Lew Ayres, I tapped out.
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
The first weekend in May, [personal profile] spatch and I day-tripped to the Coney Island Film Festival in order to catch the short film debut of Steve Havelka and Nat Strange's Pokey the Penguin (1998–), which I described at the time as "a five-minute delight of shyster shenanigans including an accidentally combination cathedral and DMV and an international offer cautioned to be void in Lemuria. It loses nothing and in fact gains an inventive layer of detail in the translation to traditional animation from all-caps MS Paint, e.g. a beet instead of a carrot for the nose of a fast-talking snowman who could outbooze W. C. Fields. Steal a seat if it comes to a film festival near you." Fortunately, it is now necessary only to steal a seat on the internet: The Animated Adventures of Pokey the Penguin Presents: The Lawyers' Lawyers (2025) is freely streaming and still a delight. Guaranteed even on mythical continents.
sovay: (Rotwang)
During one of the four discrete hours I may have managed to sleep in my own apartment, I dreamed of a trio of dark-masked, clever-clawed, civet-bodied animals tumbling across the carpet of the front hall that I recognized finally as orries, which I realized I had never known were marsupials of the real world as opposed to inventions of the 1970's children's trilogy where I had encountered them in elementary school, the companion animals of the nuclear-winter breed of human traveling in secret across a post-rain-of-fire Australia, in some places reverted to a sort of colonially reconstructed medievalism, more indigenously enduring in others. I had so wanted an orrie of my own as a child reader, not least because they were a mark of the strange: bonding with one could get an adolescent suddenly exiled from their pseudo-medieval settlement, as had of course happened to one of the protagonists; they too were creatures of the fallen-out world. In this one, they were inquisitive and quick-moving, slithered themselves into the tub as eagerly as yapoks, and Hestia hissed at them. Awake, I am even sadder about their nonexistence than the more predictable fictitiousness of the books and their famous Australian children's author. I dreamed also of Stephen Colbert, I assume because I am worrying about him. It does not feel actually out of character that he had read much of the same random science fiction I had.
sovay: (Sydney Carton)
Exiled for the second night running on account of the bustedassedness of our air conditioning, I have been self-medicating with college radio, old movies, and pulp novels. WUMB netted me Cordelia's Dad's "Granite Mills" (1998) and WHRB Thanks for Coming's "Friends Forever" (2020). Killer Shark (1950) is pretty much the other way round from its title with its setting of the mid-century shark fishery in the Gulf of California, but its call-it-courage adventure makes a cute B-showcase for Roddy McDowall just aged out of his child stardom, all his scene-stealer's tilts and flickers in place even if he was directed to give his best shot at sounding like an all-American teen. Night Nurse (1931) remains one of my favorite and endlessly watchable pre-Codes: steel-true Stanwyck, Blondell cracking gum and wise, and Ben Lyon as the sweetest bootlegger in the business, the kind of romantic hero who lets the heroine take the lead while he takes her at her word. Nancy Rutledge's Blood on the Cat (1945) does contain a most excellent black cat, tester of gravity, router of dogs, unendangered throughout the novel despite its human body count. The number of monarch caterpillars is now something like sixteen.
sovay: (Claude Rains)
Because I am more familiar with the operas than the film scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold and tend to avoid even famous movies with Ronald Reagan in them, it took until tonight for me to hear the main theme for Kings Row (1942), at which point the entire career of John Williams flashed before my eyes. Other parts of the score sound more recognizably, symphonically of their era, but that fanfare is a blast from the future it directly shaped: the standard set by Korngold's tone-poem, leitmotiv-driven approach to film composing, principal photography as the libretto to an opera. I love finding these taproots, even when they were lying around in plain sight.

I don't think that what I feel for the sea is nostalgia, but I am intrigued by this study indicating that generally people do: "Searching for Ithaca: The geography and psychological benefits of nostalgic places" (2025). I am surprised that more people are not apparently bonded to deserts or mountains or woodlands. Holidays by the sea can't explain all of it. I used to spend a lot of my life in trees.

I napped for a couple of hours this afternoon, but my brain could return any time now. The rest of my week is not conducive to doing nothing. The rest of the world is not conducive to losing time.
sovay: (Morell: quizzical)
My week seems to have started with catapulting myself on zero sleep to a specialist's appointment starting half an hour from the end of the phone call, so I am eating a bagel with lox and trying not to feel that the earth acquires a new axial tilt every time I turn my head. Paying bills, shockingly, has not improved my mood.

After enjoying both The Big Pick-Up (1955) and The Flight of the Phoenix (1964), I was disappointed by Elleston Trevor's The Burning Shore (U.S. The Pasang Run, 1961), which ironically for its airport setting never really seemed to get its plot off the ground and in any case its ratio of romantic melodrama and ambient racism to actual aviation was not ideal, but I am a little sorry that it was not adapted for film like its fellows, since I would have liked to see the casting for the initially peripheral, ultimately book-stealing role of Tom Thorne, the decorated and disgraced surgeon gone in the Conradian manner to ground in the tropics, because of his unusual fragility: it is de rigueur for his archetype that he should pull himself out of his opium-mired death-spiral for the sake of a passenger flight downed in flames, but he remains an impulsive suicide risk even when his self-respect should conventionally have been restored. He is described as having the face of a hurt clown. He'd have been any character actor's gift.

Mostly I like that Wolf Alice named themselves after the short story by Angela Carter, but the chorus of "The Sofa" (2025) really is attractive right now.
sovay: (Sydney Carton)
I dreamed of taking a transcontinental train with as little difficulty as traveling to D.C., which I am not convinced has been the state of American rail for decades. Otherwise since my sleep has gone principally to hell again, I feel burnt and friable and past my last fingernail of whatever I am supposed to be doing. On the one hand we are a communal species; on the other I would like to feel I had any right to exist beyond what other people require of me.

I am relieved to see that the enraging article I read last night about the deep-sixing of Yiddish at Brandeis has since been amended to a reduced but not eradicated schedule, but it would have been best to leave the program undisturbed to begin with. The golem reference is apropos.

My formative Joan D. Vinge was Psion (1982/2007), which even in its bowdlerized YA version may have been my introductory super-corporatized dystopia, but I had recent occasion to recommend her Heaven Chronicles (1991), which I got off my parents' shelves in high school and whose first novella especially has retained its importance over the years, of holding on to the true things—like one another—even in the face of an apparently guaranteed dead-end future, the immutably cold equations of its chamber space opera which differ not all that much from the hot ones of our planetside reality show. Not Pyrrhically or ironically, it chimed with other stories I had grown up hearing.

Jamaica Run (1953) is an inexplicably lackadaisical film for such sensational components as sunken treasure, inheritance murder, and a deteriorated sugar plantation climactically burning down on Caribbean Gothic schedule, but it did cheer me that it unerringly cast Wendell Corey as my obvious favorite character, the heroine's ne'er-do-well brother whose landed airs don't cover his bar tab and whose intentions toward the ingenue of a newly discovered heir may be self-surprised sincere romance or just hunting his own former fortune, swanning around afternoons in a dressing gown and getting away with most of the screenplay's sarcasm: "What is this, open house for disagreeable people?"

I cannot yet produce photographic evidence, but the robin's eggs in the rhododendron beside the summer kitchen have hatched into open-mouthed nestlings. A dozen infant caterpillars are tunneling busily through the milkweed.
sovay: (Rotwang)
It was helpful of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race (2021) to include a dedication to its inspiration of Gene Wolfe's "Trip, Trap" (1967), since I would otherwise have guessed Le Guin's "Semley's Necklace" (1964)/Rocannon's World (1966) as its jumping-off point of anthropological science fiction through the split lens of heroic fantasy. As far as I can tell, my ur-text for that kind of double-visioned narrative was Phyllis Gotlieb's A Judgment of Dragons (1980), some of whose characters understand that they have been sucked down a time vortex into the late nineteenth century where a dangerously bored trickster of an enigmatically ancient species is amusing himself in the Pale of Settlement and some of whom just understand that Ashmedai has come to town. I got a kind of reversal early, too, from Jane Yolen's Sister Light, Sister Dark (1988) and White Jenna (1989), whose modern historian is doomed to fail in his earnest reconstructions because in his rationality he misses that the magic was real. Tchaikovsky gets a lot of mileage for his disjoint perspectives out of Clarke's Law, but just as much out of an explanation of clinical depression or the definition of a demon beyond all philosophy, and from any angle I am a sucker for the Doppler drift of stories with time. The convergence of genre protocols is nicely timed. Occasional Peter S. Beagle vibes almost certainly generated by the reader, not the text. Pleasantly, the book actually is novella-proportioned rather than a compacted novel, but now I have the problem of accepting that if the author had wanted to set any further stories in this attractively open-ended world, at his rate of prolificacy they would already have turned up. On that note, I appreciated hearing that Murderbot (2025–) has been renewed.
sovay: (Viktor & Mordecai)
Last night's eight hours of sleep were more disrupted and fragmentary than the previous, but my brain wasn't wrong that in life Kenneth Colley was only a little taller than me and a year or so younger when he first sparked a fandom for Admiral Piett.

I read later into the night than planned because I had just discovered Irene Clyde's Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909), which would fall unobjectionably toward the easterly end of the Ruritanian romance were it not that the proud and ancient society into which Dr. Mary Hatherley awakens after a kick in the head from her camel while crossing the Arabian Desert has zero distinction of gender in either language or social roles to the point that the longer the narrator spends among the elegantly civilized yet decidedly un-English environment of Armeria, the more she adopts the female pronoun as the default for all of its inhabitants regardless of how she read them to begin with. Plotwise, the novel is concerned primarily with the court intrigue building eventually to war between the the preferentially peaceful Armeria and the most patriarchally aggressive of its neighbors, but the narrator's acculturation to an agendered life whose equivalent of marriage is contracted regardless of biological sex and whose children are all adopted rather than reproduced puts it more in the lineage of Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960) or Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) even without the sfnal reveal that Mêrê, as she comes to accept the local translation of her name, has not merely stumbled upon some Haggard-esque lost world but actually been jolted onto an alternate plane of history, explaining the classical substrate of Armerian that allows her to communicate even if it bewilders her to hear that the words kyné and anra are used as interchangeably as persona and the universal term for a spouse is the equally gender-free conjux. If it is a utopia, it is an ambiguous one: it may shock the reader as much as Mêrê that the otherwise egalitarian Armeria has never abolished the institution of slavery as practiced since their classical antiquity. Then again, her Victorian sensibilities may be even more offended by the Armerian indifference to heredity, especially when it forces her to accept that her dashing, principled, irresistibly attractive Ilex is genetically what her colonial instincts would disdain as a barbarian. Children are not even named after their parents, but after the week of their adoption—Star, Eagle, Fuchsia, Stag. For the record, despite Mêrê's observation that the Armerian language contains no grammatical indications of the masculine, it is far from textually clear that its citizens should therefore all be assumed to be AFAB. "Sex is an accident" was one of the mottoes of Urania (1916–40), the privately circulated, assertively non-binary, super-queer journal of gender studies co-founded and co-edited by the author of Beatrice the Sixteenth, who was born and conducted an entire career in international law under the name of Thomas Baty. I knew nothing about this rabbit hole of queer literature and history and am delighted to see it will get a boost from MIT Press' Radium Age. In the meantime, it makes another useful reminder that everything is older than I think.

As a person with a demonstrable inclination toward movies featuring science, aviation, and Michael Redgrave, while finally watching The Dam Busters (1955) I kept exclaiming things like "If you want the most beautiful black-and-white clouds, call Erwin Hillier!" We appreciated the content warning for historically accurate language. I was right that the real-life footage had been obscured for official secrets reasons. The skies did look phenomenal.

August 2025

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