This po-mo stuff is nice, but it's irrelevant to the way I feel right now
The close to eleven hours I slept last night may have exceeded the sum total of the week that preceded it which did not even have the decency to be hallucinatory as opposed to just blurringly strung out. I feel as though the sole things of value I accomplished were reading a new novel and writing about a movie. One night we walked for ice cream to CB Scoops.
Razing the ecosystem of our back yard seems to have produced a monoculture of black swallow-wort.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I planted a medley of butterfly-supporting wildflowers while the yard was still a burnt-brown wasteland and I just hope any of them can survive the invasive cuckoo. I am not sure there is anyone we could even call to extirpate it. I still miss the rose and the mulberry trees.
Last night I showed him Portrait of Jennie (1948), which I had not seen since high school when my mother showed it to me. I had not understood then that it was so much stranger about ghosthood and time than any of its Hollywood contemporaries to the point where it would have been much more normal as a venture into the Twilight Zone or an ITV production in the '70's. It doesn't even look like its decade: its cinematographer shot it with lenses of the silent era for that extra shimmer of time-slip and died before it reached the screen. I just don't see that many films out of classical Hollywood I would call Sapphire and Steel in on. I can't remember if the 1940 Robert Nathan novella struck me as so formally as well as tonally weird. On a more mundane note, I love that the production picked up David Wayne because it was shooting in New York in 1947 and Finian's Rainbow was on Broadway. I had remembered an uncharacteristically quiet shot of his face screened through harp strings when I had forgotten the tidal crash of the Graves Light, tinted in luciferin-green as if the very film stock and not just its characters have washed back into 1925.
If Alexander Knox did introduce Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, I can blame him in a partial, positive way for the first film I ever saw in theaters, which was *batteries not included (1987).
Razing the ecosystem of our back yard seems to have produced a monoculture of black swallow-wort.
spatch and I planted a medley of butterfly-supporting wildflowers while the yard was still a burnt-brown wasteland and I just hope any of them can survive the invasive cuckoo. I am not sure there is anyone we could even call to extirpate it. I still miss the rose and the mulberry trees.Last night I showed him Portrait of Jennie (1948), which I had not seen since high school when my mother showed it to me. I had not understood then that it was so much stranger about ghosthood and time than any of its Hollywood contemporaries to the point where it would have been much more normal as a venture into the Twilight Zone or an ITV production in the '70's. It doesn't even look like its decade: its cinematographer shot it with lenses of the silent era for that extra shimmer of time-slip and died before it reached the screen. I just don't see that many films out of classical Hollywood I would call Sapphire and Steel in on. I can't remember if the 1940 Robert Nathan novella struck me as so formally as well as tonally weird. On a more mundane note, I love that the production picked up David Wayne because it was shooting in New York in 1947 and Finian's Rainbow was on Broadway. I had remembered an uncharacteristically quiet shot of his face screened through harp strings when I had forgotten the tidal crash of the Graves Light, tinted in luciferin-green as if the very film stock and not just its characters have washed back into 1925.
If Alexander Knox did introduce Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, I can blame him in a partial, positive way for the first film I ever saw in theaters, which was *batteries not included (1987).
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I do sometimes feel a little bit sweetly envious at the quality of cinema your family shared with you when you were young, even though there is not *nothing* to be said for Doctor Zhivago or the pleasures of a boisterous movie musical like My Fair Lady, though these texts perhaps contributed to a view of romance as both essential and essentially toxic. Oh well. I think I also saw *batteries not included at some point. The first film I remember seeing was Empire Strikes Back, but it was too scary for me.
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Thank you! I hope you are getting the same.
I do sometimes feel a little bit sweetly envious at the quality of cinema your family shared with you when you were young, even though there is not *nothing* to be said for Doctor Zhivago or the pleasures of a boisterous movie musical like My Fair Lady, though these texts perhaps contributed to a view of romance as both essential and essentially toxic. Oh well.
I had to use this icon because its image of Leslie Howard was carefully cropped from a production still for the 1938 Pygmalion, which overwrote most of my childhood feelings about My Fair Lady except for the music.
I got lucky in having a parent who was a serious movie person, even if she would still not describe herself that way. My grandparents were the same. (My father until recently, not much unless it was at least science fiction-adjacent.) I did not watch many movies as a child or even an adolescent compared to my cohort, but the majority were classic movies and generally because my mother had shown them to me. It was a significant contributor to my disconnection from the pop culture from my formative decades and I don't regret it; it was an amazing substrate and seems to have turned out to be useful.
[edit] What is Doctor Zhivago like if seen when younger? I was in grad school when I saw it for the first time and Alec Guinness stole it for me.
I think I also saw *batteries not included at some point. The first film I remember seeing was Empire Strikes Back, but it was too scary for me.
I had that experience with my second film in theaters, which was Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988).
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Very true!
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I wonder if paintings—at least of ghosts—count enough as technologies to require Silver.
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Definitely! Or possibly any other suitable Element technician, if Silver is busy with another assignment!
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*cough*request*cough*
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I'm also laughing a bit, because one of my WIPs features a forged painting that is messing up with time!
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Look, there's no reason for even Elemental inspiration to obey the illusion of linear time!
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Exactly! \o/
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Extra-diegetically, I accept the actor may have had some other commitment, but in-text, they should so have had a technician for that one.
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Always a major recommendation!
I very much hope more sleep happens again now. *hugs*
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Seriously, if this film crosses your available sources, you should give it a try.
I very much hope more sleep happens again now.
Thank you! I overslept far into the afternoon, so however inconveniently, it did.
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My grandparents had a bunch of his novels, of which the only other one I remember anything about is The Devil with Love (1963). They were always shelved regardless of alphabet next to Stephen Vincent Benét and I believe are still, since my mother managed to salvage them after my grandmother died and my grandfather got rid of so much of their house. The Sea-Gull Cry (1942) has a shell on the spine and I remember looking it and imagining and opening it once and being disappointed, which probably means I should give it an adult chance.
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I'm pretty sure my grandparents owned that one, which means I could just borrow it from my mother.
The Iliad Bookstore had a whole shelf of Nathan last time I looked, but I couldn't figure out which one(s) to choose.
I think you should do potluck and report back! I will see what I can make of The Sea-Gull Cry.