Worked and paid our union dues—what did years of that produce?

[sovay]

When I got to Davis Square this evening to pick up a medication and meet spatch for dinner on his half-hour break, a busker with good queer style and an electric guitar was performing the English-language verses of Daniel Kahn's "March of the Jobless Corps." I left money in their guitar case because I spent a portion of this afternoon seriously considering applying for a job that would require me to move half a dozen states down the Eastern Seaboard, which is not my first choice despite a strong ancestral tradition of going where the work is, but there's real money in it and health benefits and I am sick of clearing the rent by an ever-narrowing margin of not being able to afford anything else. I think we exceeded the metaphor of drowning and struggling for breath some months ago and are now firmly in the realm of waterlogged corpse somehow keeps screaming.

Last weekend I patched two pairs of my jeans so that I could keep wearing them. Tonight the zipper on the less-worn of the two pairs abruptly broke. So I guess I get to spend this weekend replacing a zipper. It is not an option to replace the jeans; they have been discontinued by the manufacturer, which infuriates me because they were the one style of 100% cotton, non-stretchy jeans I was able to find in more than ten years that actually fit my body and didn't make me want to peel off my skin. They fit so beautifully that I bought three pairs. I expected them to last longer than two years. For that matter, I didn't expect them to be discontinued within two years. Nothing is made to last anymore and we are always supposed to have the money to buy the next thing.

I rewatched Metropolis (1927) this afternoon, the 149-minute Kino restoration currently on Kanopy that's as close as we're going to get to the full original release without another broom closet in Argentina. I'd seen it last in 2010, accompanied by the Alloy Orchestra. This one had a re-recording of the original score by Gottfried Huppertz, which oddly I feel I paid less attention to except when it was quoting from the "Dies Irae." I love the movie; I did from the time I saw a scratchy videocassette of the butchered short cut in high school; it is still such a weird and beautiful thing. I'd like to write about it properly sometime, but I am so tired that that time is not going to be now.

I am glad to see that HIAS is throwing itself into the border crisis. The Supreme Court decision on gerrymandering really scares me.

I've just been working so much and I want to do something else and instead I find myself thinking about moving to another state so that I can work more. That can't be right.

Comments

[moon_custafer]

I fell in love with it as the scratchy, semi-coherent version with a rock soundtrack that MuchMusic ran when I was high school. At university a friend of mine found an English translation of the novelization of Von Harbou’s script, which explained a lot of the missing plot elements (like what Jehoshaphat is off doing for half the story). Each restoration added a bit more back in, and there was a huge jump 10-15 years back when the Murnau Foundation did a frame-by-frame clean-up, and I could suddenly see that the acting and makeup had been much more naturalistic than I’d originally thought.

Recently I also found out that we kind of owe Curt Siodmak’s screenwriting career, and possibly his brother’s directing career, to Metropolis: Siodmak was a journalist who visited the set to write a behind-the-scenes article (I think he actually became an extra for the inside scoop) and decided to switch to moviemaking.

[sovay]

(like what Jehoshaphat is off doing for half the story)

I love Josaphat. (The novelization and the film may spell his name differently—it's definitely the shorter version in the German intertitles. I've never read the novelization.) I realized this time around that one of the reasons I love him is not just that he's a steadfast friend to Freder and a fearless co-rescuer of the workers' children at the climax and stands up to the Thin Man and so forth, it's that he does all of that while being a middle-aged former secretary introduced to the audience so stunned by his summary dismissal from his master's service that he can't even find the doorknob to let himself decently out. I think the internal timeline of the film is about two weeks and he's just quietly—or occasionally loudly, as when he yells at Freder and Maria to save their reunion scene until they're all out of danger of drowning—awesome for damn near all of it. It has always been important to me to have heroes in a narrative who don't conventionally look it, but I hadn't understood how much that was driving my affection for Josaphat until now. (I mean, I also think he has a nice face, but I think that because of the character inside it. Theodor Loos himself I think turned into a Nazi, which always makes pre-WWII German cinema a bit of a problematic fave.)

Each restoration added a bit more back in, and there was a huge jump 10-15 years back when the Murnau Foundation did a frame-by-frame clean-up, and I could suddenly see that the acting and makeup had been much more naturalistic than I’d originally thought.

I think that was the 2005 restoration, which I watched on DVD with friends in grad school and it just blew me away. I couldn't believe that so much had been excised that was obviously critically important. It was a fever dream, but it was a fever dream with a plot.

Recently I also found out that we kind of owe Curt Siodmak’s screenwriting career, and possibly his brother’s directing career, to Metropolis: Siodmak was a journalist who visited the set to write a behind-the-scenes article (I think he actually became an extra for the inside scoop) and decided to switch to moviemaking.

I didn't know that! I'm so glad he did.

Menschen am Sonntag (1930) is currently on Criterion and I'm thinking I should really watch it. It's whatever that inverse of a supergroup is called—where absolutely everyone involved in the band went off and become stupidly famous, even though they only released one EP and a couple of tracks on compilations.

[moon_custafer]

Yeah, I’ve always loved the little moment of him groping for the door handle.

I seem to recall he was described as a “pale-faced youth” or something in the novelization, but then I’ve given up trying to guess what age anyone in an old movie is *meant* to be, because hair and clothing styles, etc, often cause me to perceive them as older than the actors actually were, plus I live in an era where social adulthood seems to be pretty fluid and often delayed. Also I googled Otto Wernicke’s birth date and Inspector Lohmann, in the second movie, is five years younger than I currently am (I have multiple diegetic and non-diegetic thoughts about that), so at this point I’ve just given up and embraced the fact that I’m ancient and also unable to identify anyone else’s age, which is kind of fun because I can pretend I’m a slightly bemused supernatural being who has trouble with human timescales.

[sovay]

Yeah, I’ve always loved the little moment of him groping for the door handle.

It's a piercing emotional gesture and also a great piece of physical acting. The whole movie is full of them. I was amazed this time by some of the things Brigitte Helm does with her body as the false Maria; she looks like she has too many joints in her fingers, like her arms and her torso and her hips are all separately articulated or possibly dislocated. I always loved that one slow lolling broken-doll wink, but the way she laughs as the workers are hauling her to the stake—the way she laughs in the fire—is exactly the way she laughed at the young men fighting over her in the Yoshiwara. It's like a combination of broken programming and demonic possession.

I seem to recall he was described as a “pale-faced youth” or something in the novelization, but then I’ve given up trying to guess what age anyone in an old movie is *meant* to be, because hair and clothing styles, etc, often cause me to perceive them as older than the actors actually were, plus I live in an era where social adulthood seems to be pretty fluid and often delayed.

I was going by the actor's age, which is the kind of thing I tend to look up because I am terrible at people's ages full stop. I have always been able to gauge "generally younger than me," "vaguely in my age range," and "obviously older," and otherwise I have no clue. What I find ironic is that this interdeterminacy also appears to apply to me—I spent much of high school being mistaken for a college student and much of college being mistaken for a grad student and now that I haven't been near a university in more than a decade I am regularly mistaken for a college or grad student, which actually bothers me quite a lot, but it's been a constant of my interactions with the Yiddish chorus. I don't know what to do about it. I'm not sure there is anything.

Also I googled Otto Wernicke’s birth date and Inspector Lohmann, in the second movie, is five years younger than I currently am (I have multiple diegetic and non-diegetic thoughts about that), so at this point I’ve just given up and embraced the fact that I’m ancient and also unable to identify anyone else’s age, which is kind of fun because I can pretend I’m a slightly bemused supernatural being who has trouble with human timescales.

I am now older than Hans Conried in The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953). That's nuts.

[moon_custafer]

What I find ironic is that this interdeterminacy also appears to apply to me

Same here. I think it may be a geek/fannish thing: as kids/teens our research into our hyperfixations and/or fear of screwing up socially can get us read as unusually mature; as adults the same thing can make us seem younger than we’re supposed to be. In my late teens to early twenties either could happen, depending on the situation and what I was wearing.

[sovay]

as kids/teens our research into our hyperfixations and/or fear of screwing up socially can get us read as unusually mature; as adults the same thing can make us seem younger than we’re supposed to be.

I recognize it was meant in the spirit of solidarity, but this comment had the approximate effect of tossing a grenade into my suicidal ideation. I'm also not sure it's actually the problem I'm having.

[moon_custafer]

Oh no, I’m so sorry.


Should I take it down?

[sovay]

Should I take it down?

I don't think so. I imagine it's a useful take for other people. It just wasn't for me.

Thank you.

[edit] You are not responsible for the minefields in my head and I do not think you were aiming for them. I wanted to explain what had happened.