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But a light on each quarter low down by the water
For the first time in more than a year, I visited Broad Canal. Next time I will remember to take my camera, but my phone served for the purpose this afternoon. The canoe and kayak rentals were doing brisk business. The sodium light still burns over the loading dock. No one was smoking there, but after last winter there really shouldn't be. I hadn't seen the tarp before.
Have some links.
1. Last night I fell down a heap of articles about Leslie Howard, all of which have been worth reading so far—and even allowing for the inevitable filter of publicity, it is nice to have confirmation that the weirdness I find so resonant in so many of his characters was authentically come by—but I was fascinated by the interview from just a few months after the enforcement of the Production Code in 1934, straightforwardly titled "Leslie Howard Talks about Sex Films." It's so reasonable, it hurts. He doesn't think "this purity campaign . . . the present drive against sex plays" can or should last. I'm skeptical of his explanation for the flowering of American film during the Depression, but he is right that one happened—and the Code cracked down on it. And he can't have been the first person to comment on the divergence of Hollywood's attitudes toward sex and violence, but he's the earliest articulation of the painfully familiar sentiment that I've seen:
Personally, I think there is a lot of ballyhoo being written and talked about this much vexed question of sex. As a father who is devoted to the welfare of his children, I would rather let my children see a clever sex play than an objectionable, ugly, or vulgar gangster film.
There is so much ugliness – which is so repellent to me – in many of these gangster pictures.
An attractive sex picture will do a lot less harm than an unattractive, vulgar and ugly gangster picture, as far as the mind of a child is concerned.
There is nothing wrong with sex. There is everything wrong with gangsterdom.
And almost ninety years later, the MPA rating system continues to feel otherwise. Damn it, Joseph Breen.
2. Continuing the Wimsey theme, I ran into a podcast with Edward Petherbridge recorded last November. Just after the five-and-a-half minute mark, you can hear Paul Hunter ask Petherbridge if he ever regretted losing his Bradford accent and Petherbridge's Bradford accent answering right back. I was glad to hear this excerpt from November Day (1963), too.
3. David Schraub has written a kind of secular litany for Israel/Palestine; like so much of Judaism, it is also an argument. Whether you feel you are the target audience or not, its call and response is worth reading. It matters how you can answer.
We do feel it is past time for those who wish to talk confidently about Jews know something about Jews, and commit to learning about Jews as we know ourselves, rather than through the distorted histories and narratives others have proliferated about us.
Do we refrain from talking confidently about Palestinians or Arabs unless we truly do know about them, not just the distorted histories and narratives promulgated by others but the histories and narratives they would recognize as their own?
4. On those lines: for those who missed the Palestinian special issue of Strange Horizons.
5. I don't know who doesn't need Big Mycenaean Mermaids, really.
Inevitably, because I have been thinking about the casting of Peter Wimsey: Albert Campion is more difficult for me to cast. Wimsey admits to a silly face, but Campion's is canonically a vague and forgettable one, effaced helpfully further by his horn-rimmed glasses; it is a nice side effect of the series running in real time that as he moves through middle age Campion finds himself acquiring, counterproductively to his profession, lines of character and experience that make him much less easy to overlook and underestimate than in his youth. I enjoyed Peter Davison very much in the 1989 BBC TV series, but I don't know that he was my definitive image. On the other hand, the entire concept of a definitive image of Campion is, as alluded, tricky.
Have some links.
1. Last night I fell down a heap of articles about Leslie Howard, all of which have been worth reading so far—and even allowing for the inevitable filter of publicity, it is nice to have confirmation that the weirdness I find so resonant in so many of his characters was authentically come by—but I was fascinated by the interview from just a few months after the enforcement of the Production Code in 1934, straightforwardly titled "Leslie Howard Talks about Sex Films." It's so reasonable, it hurts. He doesn't think "this purity campaign . . . the present drive against sex plays" can or should last. I'm skeptical of his explanation for the flowering of American film during the Depression, but he is right that one happened—and the Code cracked down on it. And he can't have been the first person to comment on the divergence of Hollywood's attitudes toward sex and violence, but he's the earliest articulation of the painfully familiar sentiment that I've seen:
Personally, I think there is a lot of ballyhoo being written and talked about this much vexed question of sex. As a father who is devoted to the welfare of his children, I would rather let my children see a clever sex play than an objectionable, ugly, or vulgar gangster film.
There is so much ugliness – which is so repellent to me – in many of these gangster pictures.
An attractive sex picture will do a lot less harm than an unattractive, vulgar and ugly gangster picture, as far as the mind of a child is concerned.
There is nothing wrong with sex. There is everything wrong with gangsterdom.
And almost ninety years later, the MPA rating system continues to feel otherwise. Damn it, Joseph Breen.
2. Continuing the Wimsey theme, I ran into a podcast with Edward Petherbridge recorded last November. Just after the five-and-a-half minute mark, you can hear Paul Hunter ask Petherbridge if he ever regretted losing his Bradford accent and Petherbridge's Bradford accent answering right back. I was glad to hear this excerpt from November Day (1963), too.
3. David Schraub has written a kind of secular litany for Israel/Palestine; like so much of Judaism, it is also an argument. Whether you feel you are the target audience or not, its call and response is worth reading. It matters how you can answer.
We do feel it is past time for those who wish to talk confidently about Jews know something about Jews, and commit to learning about Jews as we know ourselves, rather than through the distorted histories and narratives others have proliferated about us.
Do we refrain from talking confidently about Palestinians or Arabs unless we truly do know about them, not just the distorted histories and narratives promulgated by others but the histories and narratives they would recognize as their own?
4. On those lines: for those who missed the Palestinian special issue of Strange Horizons.
5. I don't know who doesn't need Big Mycenaean Mermaids, really.
Inevitably, because I have been thinking about the casting of Peter Wimsey: Albert Campion is more difficult for me to cast. Wimsey admits to a silly face, but Campion's is canonically a vague and forgettable one, effaced helpfully further by his horn-rimmed glasses; it is a nice side effect of the series running in real time that as he moves through middle age Campion finds himself acquiring, counterproductively to his profession, lines of character and experience that make him much less easy to overlook and underestimate than in his youth. I enjoyed Peter Davison very much in the 1989 BBC TV series, but I don't know that he was my definitive image. On the other hand, the entire concept of a definitive image of Campion is, as alluded, tricky.
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It's not a complete record, but at least a cross-section of a bunch of things that were in my head today.
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Yes! I love when people grow into their faces. I know I have other examples that aren't coming to mind at the minute, but Jared Harris did that, too.
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You're welcome!
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I am thinking that the best route would have to be a character actor or a chameleon who can make themselves disappear into a part that is itself almost a disappearance—like Jean-Louis Trintignant in Z (1969), the nameless "investigating magistrate" with his conservative suit and his thick-framed tinted glasses, so that we can't tell anything from looking at him and have to watch closely how he actually behaves. I've even seen stars do it, Michael Redgrave in The Browning Version (1951), Robert Mitchum in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), actors with natural +10 charisma who just checked it at the door. I don't know who's doing that lately. I really fell out of touch with current cinema over the last year and change; I used to see all my new releases in theaters and, well.
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I am afraid I have somewhat gone off Depp in recent years (I make an exception for his presence in the original three Pirates of the Caribbean, the latter two of which especially soldered themselves into my brain), but your comment reminded me irresistibly of Peter Sellers on The Muppet Show (1978):
"You know, I just love all your wild characters, Peter, but, you know, backstage here you can just relax and be yourself."
"But that, you see, my dear Kermit, would be altogether impossible. I could never be myself."
"Never yourself?"
"No. You see, there is no me. I do not exist."
"I beg your pardon?"
"There used to be a me . . . but I had it surgically removed!"
". . . Can we change the subject?"
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And one of his last performances (arguably the last good one) was "Being There", where he played a cipher.
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That was, of course, the very first thing in which I saw him.
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I one hundred percent don't disagree.
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Thank you for the link to that issue of Strange Horizons. I had lost track of it.
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Doesn't see nearly enough airplay these days, either.
And of course Leslie Howard was right and of course he would have made the best Wimsey.
I will stand by this forever. I am glad you concur!
Thank you for the link to that issue of Strange Horizons. I had lost track of it.
You're welcome! It seemed relevant.
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You're welcome!