I am spinning by the ocean all alone
I have my first pair of new shoes in something like six years! They were the last pair of Rockports in the store, but they were in my size. Hestia sniffed them all over as soon as I got home. Clearly they smelled like very strange cat. Have some links.
1. Mike Donahue's Troy (2023) is a nicely sketched, slightly absurdist, fortunately not cringe comedy slice of very New York life about the nonetheless universal experience of having far too much information about a neighbor without actually knowing them at all. Dylan Baker in just about sixty seconds of knocking on the wrong apartment door almost steals the sixteen-minute film.
2. Either Wendell Corey did less radio than I would have expected from his voice or less of it has survived onto the internet, but he's terrific in Inner Sanctum's "Strange Passenger" (1952), unraveling steadily over twenty-two minutes without ever flatlining into hysteria, just a constant erosion of nerves culminating in the wonderful hopelessness of a little gulp of breath as he catches himself singing with relief at having rid himself of his persistent phantom hitch-hiker, because it's the same tune that's threaded itself through the night's haunting and if it's coming out of his mouth, it's not over yet. It makes an instructive contrast with something like McGarry and His Mouse's "To Catch a Counterfeiter" (1946), where his eponymous rookie detective audibly couldn't outsmart a bag of rocks.
3. Over on Bluesky,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch has compiled a trucker film festival inspired by tracking the pop-cultural fallout of Smokey and the Bandit (1977). I had no idea it was such a specific subgenre. I am better versed in its predecessors like Hell Drivers (1957) and Thunder Road (1958).
I knew Iceland was preparing for a major eruption, but I just found out about the increased activity under the Campi Flegrei. Where I have been, on account of both of my trips to Italy centering around Naples. Bacoli was where a fellow classics student and I stalled out on the side of a hill and had to be rescued by a stranger on a motorcycle, which almost certainly would not have happened if we had been driving in a less ludicrous fashion than him steering and me shifting, but in our defense it worked great until we encountered a stop sign on an upward grade.
1. Mike Donahue's Troy (2023) is a nicely sketched, slightly absurdist, fortunately not cringe comedy slice of very New York life about the nonetheless universal experience of having far too much information about a neighbor without actually knowing them at all. Dylan Baker in just about sixty seconds of knocking on the wrong apartment door almost steals the sixteen-minute film.
2. Either Wendell Corey did less radio than I would have expected from his voice or less of it has survived onto the internet, but he's terrific in Inner Sanctum's "Strange Passenger" (1952), unraveling steadily over twenty-two minutes without ever flatlining into hysteria, just a constant erosion of nerves culminating in the wonderful hopelessness of a little gulp of breath as he catches himself singing with relief at having rid himself of his persistent phantom hitch-hiker, because it's the same tune that's threaded itself through the night's haunting and if it's coming out of his mouth, it's not over yet. It makes an instructive contrast with something like McGarry and His Mouse's "To Catch a Counterfeiter" (1946), where his eponymous rookie detective audibly couldn't outsmart a bag of rocks.
3. Over on Bluesky,
spatch has compiled a trucker film festival inspired by tracking the pop-cultural fallout of Smokey and the Bandit (1977). I had no idea it was such a specific subgenre. I am better versed in its predecessors like Hell Drivers (1957) and Thunder Road (1958).I knew Iceland was preparing for a major eruption, but I just found out about the increased activity under the Campi Flegrei. Where I have been, on account of both of my trips to Italy centering around Naples. Bacoli was where a fellow classics student and I stalled out on the side of a hill and had to be rescued by a stranger on a motorcycle, which almost certainly would not have happened if we had been driving in a less ludicrous fashion than him steering and me shifting, but in our defense it worked great until we encountered a stop sign on an upward grade.
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I no longer remember which of us proposed the compromise. I had learned to drive stick only recently, and the other student was out of practice by at least a decade, and we really were tooling around the suburbs of Naples just fine until the moment of maximal inconvenience/comedy, complete with entire street of traffic honking behind us and the young man who turfed out my co-driver and took the car to the top of the hill briefly, archetypally flirting with me.
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I absolutely thought of that scene near the end of This Rough Magic.
except you wouldn't catch any Mary Stewart characters not being able to drive a stick.
I learned mostly in parking lots in Florida.
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It seems to have been news for some time! I just hadn't seen any of it! My father mentioned it and all of a sudden my parents were listening to me say, "Oh, no," a lot as I caught up on the state of the supervolcano. I probably know more about the vulcanology of Italy than of Iceland.
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And thanks for the heads up that
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I'm so glad! I wasn't sure about it tonally at first, but wound up really liking it, from both sides of the audible neighbor divide. I just realized it reminds me also of a piece of really good film criticism about Rear Window (1954) which focuses, instead of alienation and voyeurism, on the social contracts of communal space.
And thanks for the heads up that spatch is on Bluesky!
You're welcome! I am not on Bluesky myself, but that doesn't mean that other people should not enjoy the pleasure of his internet company.
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Even if it looked more accessible, I am not sure it would be a good idea for me to have more social media. I am hoping, though, that eventually it will imitate the original Twitter in being free to read without an account, because I found a lot of really neat things that way.
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Yes! The sheer joy and relief of finally hearing unmistakable noises through the paper-thin wall again.
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"Okay, so you want me to book a massage with your neighbor, but the massage is actually sex, and you want me to ask him how he's doing, but you don't need me to fuck him, but you'll pay for it if I do?"
Dylan Baker is wonderful in it.
I seem to have become fond of him as an actor despite almost never seeing him in a substantial role. I'm not sure how it happened; it usually happens with people c. 1950.
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I mean, if a person has never heard of the Phlegraean Fields, that's fair.
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