Tattoo of the seventh shield still wet on my skin
I seem to have ended the day under the impression of a lead weight, but before then ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I finally saw Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) at the Somerville Theatre, where it looked gorgeously shadowed and bleached on 35 mm and remains essentially stuck between the tight-wired claustrophobia of its radio original and the more expansively Gothic noir its rationale for murder has complicated into, although Barbara Stanwyck does her white-knuckled best to bridge them. Because it was produced by Hal Wallis for Paramount, I appreciate the fix of Wendell Corey my brain did not have to dream up for me. Poor Dr. Alexander, who thought he was only in a normally Freudian post-war marital psychodrama. In Hitchcock it would have killed him, but thanks to Lucille Fletcher he's just going to have a bad morning when he sees the news.
I have not seen the two-strip Technicolor 1922 Anna May Wong film from which Sally Wen Mao's "The Toll of the Sea" (2015) takes its title and the palette of its argument, but I am very struck by the poem. Over the weekend I made an honest effort to watch Daughter of the Dragon (1931) and even for Wong and Sessue Hayakawa I wiped out on the high-test Orientalism of the plot. The internet informs me that unless you count the tragic ending, they don't even end up together. That cannot be more insulting than Warner Oland's Fu Manchu, but it feels like it.
I keep tapping at B. Pladek's "The Spindle of Necessity" (2024), partly because I am not the target audience while knowing all the references. As a short story, it reads like a direct interrogation of its author's relationship with the life and works of Mary Renault which on the one hand needn't have been fiction, but on the other hand I write ghost poems. Apropos of almost nothing in the story except vibes, I can't believe I've never read Bryher's Blitz novel.
spatch and I finally saw Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) at the Somerville Theatre, where it looked gorgeously shadowed and bleached on 35 mm and remains essentially stuck between the tight-wired claustrophobia of its radio original and the more expansively Gothic noir its rationale for murder has complicated into, although Barbara Stanwyck does her white-knuckled best to bridge them. Because it was produced by Hal Wallis for Paramount, I appreciate the fix of Wendell Corey my brain did not have to dream up for me. Poor Dr. Alexander, who thought he was only in a normally Freudian post-war marital psychodrama. In Hitchcock it would have killed him, but thanks to Lucille Fletcher he's just going to have a bad morning when he sees the news.I have not seen the two-strip Technicolor 1922 Anna May Wong film from which Sally Wen Mao's "The Toll of the Sea" (2015) takes its title and the palette of its argument, but I am very struck by the poem. Over the weekend I made an honest effort to watch Daughter of the Dragon (1931) and even for Wong and Sessue Hayakawa I wiped out on the high-test Orientalism of the plot. The internet informs me that unless you count the tragic ending, they don't even end up together. That cannot be more insulting than Warner Oland's Fu Manchu, but it feels like it.
I keep tapping at B. Pladek's "The Spindle of Necessity" (2024), partly because I am not the target audience while knowing all the references. As a short story, it reads like a direct interrogation of its author's relationship with the life and works of Mary Renault which on the one hand needn't have been fiction, but on the other hand I write ghost poems. Apropos of almost nothing in the story except vibes, I can't believe I've never read Bryher's Blitz novel.
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I liked this:
white the color of the screen before Technicolor
white the color of the master narrative
green the color of the ocean, so kind, not leaving a stain on the white shirt
green the color of the girl, so kind — but why?
And then this:
blue the color of our reclaimed Pacific
blue the ocean that drowns the liars
(and the ending too)
The whole poem is great, though.
Will check out the story next.
Also, I smiled at Poor Dr. Alexander, who thought he was only in a normally Freudian post-war marital psychodrama. In Hitchcock it would have killed him, but thanks to Lucille Fletcher he's just going to have a bad morning when he sees the news.
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I'm glad I linked it! I should read more of the poet; I realized I had read—and loved—another poem of hers about Wong years ago.
[ETA: realized my light-to-pigment thing didn't work...]
It does work! Two-strip Technicolor can make use only of the additive primary colors green and red, of which blue is the third color. You were picking up on the conceit exactly!
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I’ve left my landline so ghosts can’t dial me
at midnight with the hunger of hunters
anymore. I’m so hungry I gnaw at light.
Some kind of a gut punch--or maybe I'm feeling susceptible. Thanks for this additional poem!
(Also thanks for the reassurance about my original reading! I lost confidence.)
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You're welcome! I think it's that kind of a punch of a poem.
(Also thanks for the reassurance about my original reading! I lost confidence.)
*hugs*
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Aw, I am sorry. I'm very glad you got to go out and see something good, though! That is nice. ♥
even for Wong and Sessue Hayakawa I wiped out on the high-test Orientalism of the plot.
Sometimes there really are limits. It's always nice not to have to discover them, but :-/
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Thank you! I am not sure if I am easing back into movies in theaters or just occasionally risking them, but it was worth the exertion.
Sometimes there really are limits. It's always nice not to have to discover them, but
Per the premise of the film and allowing for the presence of Fu Manchu, Anna May Wong is searching for her never-known father while Sessue Hayakawa is the one detective on the scene who believes the master criminal is still alive, so obviously a movie with half an ounce of sense in its head would have had their diametrically opposed quests dovetail in a fashion which complicated their romance and instead it appears that she's stuck on Bramwell Fletcher who's stuck on Frances Dade while Hayakawa is stuck on her and it all gets very racist and love-quadrangly and I am disappoint!
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I am relieved that you made the saving roll for your sanity. (Paramount! What were you thinking?)
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I didn't know there was a Bryher Blitz novel!
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I'm so glad that's true of it. Just as a poem, I ran into it cold and it blew me away.
I didn't know there was a Bryher Blitz novel!
Me, neither, until last night! I need to get hold of it. I am pretty sure the Timothy Schaffner who founded the small press which has republished it is one of Bryher's grandchildren through Perdita.