It's two in the afternoon and thirty-four degrees
Actually the temperature crashed by a solid thirty degrees Fahrenheit and with any luck will stay this moderately cool and dampish until everyone has rehydrated. Or we could just skip the next heat dome entirely.
I had worked up an entire rant about the scaremongering of this article and especially its anti-intellectual characterization of Zohran Mamdani as automatically out of touch because his father teaches at Columbia and his mother has directed films in Hollywood as if he were a Cabot who talks only to God when both of these professions especially in these days of DEI demonization mean something very different without whiteness and then I discovered that the author's big shtick is that she "came out" as politically conservative while an undergraduate at Harvard, at which point her already tenuous right to slate anyone for attending Bowdoin fared poorly on the pot-to-kettle scale. Anyway,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch liked Monsoon Wedding (2001).
The Europeans (1979) turns out to have been the first foray of Merchant Ivory into costume drama and its modest budget gives it a slight, wonderful ghost-look of New England, nineteenth-century carriages on twentieth-century streets, the tarmac dirt-roaded over, telephone poles discreetly out of shot, the dry stone walls tumbledown in the picturesque rather than practically maintained day. I got such déjà vu from the Federal style of its historic houses—and the occasionally more modern construction of their neighbors—that I was reassured to see it actually had shot in Waltham, Concord, and Salem which I recognized from the red-bricked back side of the Customs House. Its autumn is the sugar-red drift of maple leaves, the pale punctuation of birches. Its actors have an indie air with their precisely characterful period clothes doing half the worldbuilding. Robin Ellis sports a moss-bronze corduroy coat and a waistcoat in pheasant paisleys I should like to bid for and a creditably mid-Atlantic accent, cast ironically on the colonial side of the plot of two sets of American cousins and their entanglement with a third, European set. I have not read its particular source novel by Henry James, but it has the light, sharp, not overly mannered observations, a sweet-sour bite in the chocolate box. In light of the setting, variations on "Simple Gifts" and "Shall We Gather at the River?" may have been unavoidable contributions to the score.
Because I had showedspatch a clip of a trumpet played into Jell-O, my attempt to explain Chladni figures netted us a 1989 Christmas lecture by Charles Taylor, after which we went through Delia Derbyshire's "Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO" (1967), Belbury Poly's "Caermaen" (2004), and finally thanks to what must have been a very confused sidebar landed on Les Luthiers' "Rhapsody in Balls" (2009). Today has been generally breaking-down-tired, but during the part of the evening where I was still working on implementing a bagel for dinner, WERS had the decency to play the Dead Milkmen's "Punk Rock Girl" (1988).
I had worked up an entire rant about the scaremongering of this article and especially its anti-intellectual characterization of Zohran Mamdani as automatically out of touch because his father teaches at Columbia and his mother has directed films in Hollywood as if he were a Cabot who talks only to God when both of these professions especially in these days of DEI demonization mean something very different without whiteness and then I discovered that the author's big shtick is that she "came out" as politically conservative while an undergraduate at Harvard, at which point her already tenuous right to slate anyone for attending Bowdoin fared poorly on the pot-to-kettle scale. Anyway,
spatch liked Monsoon Wedding (2001).The Europeans (1979) turns out to have been the first foray of Merchant Ivory into costume drama and its modest budget gives it a slight, wonderful ghost-look of New England, nineteenth-century carriages on twentieth-century streets, the tarmac dirt-roaded over, telephone poles discreetly out of shot, the dry stone walls tumbledown in the picturesque rather than practically maintained day. I got such déjà vu from the Federal style of its historic houses—and the occasionally more modern construction of their neighbors—that I was reassured to see it actually had shot in Waltham, Concord, and Salem which I recognized from the red-bricked back side of the Customs House. Its autumn is the sugar-red drift of maple leaves, the pale punctuation of birches. Its actors have an indie air with their precisely characterful period clothes doing half the worldbuilding. Robin Ellis sports a moss-bronze corduroy coat and a waistcoat in pheasant paisleys I should like to bid for and a creditably mid-Atlantic accent, cast ironically on the colonial side of the plot of two sets of American cousins and their entanglement with a third, European set. I have not read its particular source novel by Henry James, but it has the light, sharp, not overly mannered observations, a sweet-sour bite in the chocolate box. In light of the setting, variations on "Simple Gifts" and "Shall We Gather at the River?" may have been unavoidable contributions to the score.
Because I had showed
spatch a clip of a trumpet played into Jell-O, my attempt to explain Chladni figures netted us a 1989 Christmas lecture by Charles Taylor, after which we went through Delia Derbyshire's "Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO" (1967), Belbury Poly's "Caermaen" (2004), and finally thanks to what must have been a very confused sidebar landed on Les Luthiers' "Rhapsody in Balls" (2009). Today has been generally breaking-down-tired, but during the part of the evening where I was still working on implementing a bagel for dinner, WERS had the decency to play the Dead Milkmen's "Punk Rock Girl" (1988).
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Thank you!
I think there must have been something about this on one of the Merchant Ivory DVDs I have (one of them had a Merchant Ivory retrospective extra), because I was curious enough to look it up, I think. I was going to say I didn't know it had Robin Ellis, but that may have been why I was looking it up and I've just forgotten.
I recommend it for reasons even beyond Robin Ellis! It is the kind of movie where you can see how everything fits together, change and change partners, as neatly as a dance, except that something doesn't which makes it real. Can also throw in a free Tim Woodward, although you will have to accept his terrible mustache. Lisa Eichhorn has been totally overlooked by this not-a-review, which is unfair because she is particularly good as the real freethinker of the family, but she was new to me whereas Tim Choate turning up in the supporting cast was amazing because I had never before seen him out of alien makeup.
He has some great jackets and waistcoats in Poldark as well as one of my absolute favourite "they got the memo" TV costume choices in this leather jacket, which I cannot immediately find a good pic of, but it's an 18th C style version of a 1940s bomber pilot jacket - Winston Graham wrote Ross Poldark in the 50s based on WWII bomber pilots he knew who couldn't come back to earth, transposed to late 18th C Cornwall (as a soldier presumed dead in the Revolutionary War.)
That bomber jacket frock coat is (a) excellent (b) hilarious.
(He is usually very good, though, not just well dressed, lol.)
I even know he can sing! (The 1978 BBC She Loves Me, a musical dear to me and from which I periodically just play the leads' signature songs in various recordings. I own two.)
Oh, that's really cool.
I'm not even sure I have ever walked behind the Customs House in Salem. But I checked the shooting locations afterward and I was right.
(I have definitely been to the Lyman Estate in Waltham. The grounds are free if you don't want inside the house.)
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It sounds lovely! I am pretty sure, though, that my reasons for looking it up were more general but that it was sadly far less available than I had hoped - as usual. I'll have to check again, though!
That bomber jacket frock coat is (a) excellent (b) hilarious.
XD
I even know he can sing! (The 1978 BBC She Loves Me, a musical dear to me and from which I periodically just play the leads' signature songs in various recordings. I own two.)
Oh, I hadn't even heard of that! I looked it up and found it on YT, so I have just also heard a little bit of Robin Ellis singing too, and will have to see if I can manage to watch the rest. I like Gemma Craven, too - I know her from The Slipper and the Rose - and I enjoyed The Shop Around the Corner when I watched it last year. <3
I have definitely been to the Lyman Estate in Waltham. The grounds are free if you don't want inside the house.
LOL, I have also seen several grounds or gardens of places but not houses/castles etc for similar reasons.
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I wish you all possible haste of the proper region! And continue to be amazed in the wrong way by what isn't available in its countries of origin.
Oh, I hadn't even heard of that! I looked it up and found it on YT, so I have just also heard a little bit of Robin Ellis singing too, and will have to see if I can manage to watch the rest. I like Gemma Craven, too - I know her from The Slipper and the Rose - and I enjoyed The Shop Around the Corner when I watched it last year.
She's a very good Amalia—the role was originated in 1963 by Barbara Cook, so it requires a real voice—and it's a very good, slightly abridged version of She Loves Me which could have been done onstage. Diane Langton and Peter Sallis are marvelous as Ilona and Sipos. (David Kernan is a pretty much pitch-perfect Kodaly, the character just needs drowning in a bucket.) And until The Europeans, I believe this musical to have been my sole experience of Robin Ellis. He's a really lovely Georg.
LOL, I have also seen several grounds or gardens of places but not houses/castles etc for similar reasons.
Very popular choice!
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Other than the covers of my Mum's books (I didn't think much of him there; the Poldark TV ins chose very unflattering shots), I first saw him properly as Essex in Elizabeth R (so add another century to the count), and he impressed me enough that I gave in and watched my mum's TV show that she'd been going on about. So, then Poldark; also Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, The Moonstone (1972) with Martin Jarvis (RE as Franklin Blake, MJ as Godfrey Ablewhite) & as Edward Ferrars in the 1971 Sense & Sensibility. Oh, and he was Helena Bonham-Carter's father in A Dark Adapted Eye (one of those 90s Barbara Vine Mysteries we were talking about a little while ago) & he popped back up briefly in 2015's Poldark as another character. Like most people I take an interest in, he once played opposite Suzanne Neve, but not in a thing I can have.
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I am glad he was much improved when not on a book cover.
The Moonstone (1972) with Martin Jarvis (RE as Franklin Blake, MJ as Godfrey Ablewhite
I am afraid that would be the one I didn't watch because it didn't have Anton Lessser as Ezra Jennings, but I can keep it in mind!
Oh, and he was Helena Bonham-Carter's father in A Dark Adapted Eye (one of those 90s Barbara Vine Mysteries we were talking about a little while ago)
Nice.
Like most people I take an interest in, he once played opposite Suzanne Neve, but not in a thing I can have.
Availability or content? Condolences either way.
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Having watched both (although that one not since it aired back in the day), I don't think they are mutually exclusive! I enjoyed them both anyway.
Availability or content? Condolences either way.
Late 60s/early 70s BBC status as to burninated or just unreleased unknown as usual. (Bel Ami, anyway; so as not to be needlessly mysterious.)
<3