The old army game!

I am having a great deal of trouble adjusting to Daylight Savings. It doesn't help that yesterday felt like Friday and today doesn't feel like Sunday. My entire calendar feels scrambled. I am as blurry and as weary as if I've been awake for days. On the bright side, when I walked over to gaudior and rushthatspeaks' this afternoon, it was finally warm enough that I shed coat, hat, jacket, scarf, and gloves along the way, and arrived in my shirtsleeves with everything else stuffed in a bag. And the weather report tells me the high for the day was 42°F. We have become way too accustomed to Fimbulwinter in this city.

These are notes rather than full reports, but I am tired and I don't want to lose the weekend. Saturday was my mother's birthday observed; we took her to the closing matinée of Theatre@First's The Mousetrap in the afternoon and then The Son of the Sheik (1926) at the Somerville in the evening, with live music by the Alloy Orchestra. The former was great; the mystery holds up to repeat viewing and someday I will even talk (under a cut-tag, in compliance with Christie's request) about why I like it so much.

( Oh, what the hell. )

The latter slightly blew my mind. The plot of The Son of the Sheik is not important for the purposes of discussion. It contains several problematic elements and a lot of sand. What is important is that I had never seen Rudolph Valentino before. I had seen photos; I knew he was a matinée idol, a sex symbol, one of the first celebrities whose untimely death made them a cult figure. He is as beautiful as his portraits, and unusually—heavy-lidded, fine-boned, brooding symmetry opening suddenly into an unguarded smile. He has sexual chemistry with anything he turns his attention to, camera and leading lady not excluded. I'm not going to try to evaluate the authenticity of the costumes, but he looks terrific in them. He's also Douglas Fairbanks levels of athletic, doing most if not all of his own stunts himself,* and he can really act. He is nuanced, expressive, and plausible by contemporary standards as well as the stylization of silent film. The script requires him to reprise the part of the Sheik from the 1921 film as well as originate the role of his handsome, headstrong son—and differentiate them by twenty-five years as well as personality and social standing—and my father who is very good with faces thought it was two different actors. I'm willing to give him credit for the emotional arc of the film working at all, frankly. Valentino's death at age thirty-one wasn't a loss of potential; it was a loss of real talent. I would love to have seen what became of him in later years, if he negotiated the transition to talkies, retired, aged into a character actor, whatever: I was sorry no one got to find out. That was not what I was expecting when I got the tickets.

* I'm willing to grant that I couldn't see the rider's face in all long shots, but I'm certain about the chandelier swing and the leap onto the moving horse. The part of the fight choreography where he just picked up the one guy and threw him into the other guy was also memorable.

(After the movie was over, I followed derspatchel's text to the Mousetrap cast party and learned to play Superfight with an orange and red deck; it is the first party game in decades I can remember unequivocally enjoying. It offers an ideal blend of storytelling and kibitzing and players don't have to commit to anything more than a round if they feel like it, which suits my general tendency at parties to park myself near interesting conversations and open a book; the communal nature means it doesn't penalize players for not getting all the pop-culture references and I found the combinations of characters, attributes, and arguments consistently hilarious without the intermittent squick risk of Cards Against Humanity. Would play again, with many people. I don't say that just because I was undefeated champion for three rounds as a dominatrix wearing nothing but a strap-on with an infinitely extendable penis. I lost to Captain Kirk with some irrelevant attributes because I couldn't argue against the fact that Kirk always gets the girl of the week, and if she's a villain, defeats her into the bargain. Non-heteronormativity was restored a turn later when Kirk lost to a Baby Jesus who was literally flaming gay, incidentally providing me with an opportunity to explain "The Cherry Tree Carol" to the group. (Seriously, the kibitzing is built in.) The game was eventually won by Nikola Tesla armed with a gravity gun and operating at Level 90; he was undefeatable. This may be the only time I review a card game on this journal, but it really made an impression.)

The clocks sprang forward and my already shaky circadian rhythms didn't get the memo. I still managed to spend most of the afternoon and evening with Rush-That-Speaks, Gaudior, and a mutual cousin who probably doesn't have a livejournal; I stopped by the Somerville for an hour and a half first to catch W.C. Fields in Sally of the Sawdust (1925), which surprised me almost as much as The Son of the Sheik by providing an unexpected degree of emotional complexity for its comedy-melodrama and an equal amount of agency for its female protagonist. There is a scene in which Carol Dempster's Sally is trapped in a courtroom, faced with being sentenced to a home for wayward girls, calling piteously for her adoptive father who is miles away mixed up with some bootleggers and cannot save her. She pleads with the judge; she struggles with the bailiff; some constables have to help restrain her, because she is a slippery teenager who fights dirty; and just as the tension snaps to become either unbearable or stupid, Sally breaks free, shins up to the tall courthouse window, swings out of it, shins down the tree outside, and it takes an entire manhunt to bring her back. She doesn't let herself be groomed into someone she's not; she doesn't let herself be nobly renounced, either. Lanky, gawky, an agile clown and an animated dancer, Dempster is not conventionally beautiful and she's luminous. I am displeased that the internet tells me she didn't have much of a career because she wasn't Lillian Gish. Most people aren't Lillian Gish. I don't think it should be held against them.

I am out of critical faculties for the night. Please have a blowfish mermaid; everybody needs one.

It was all done with these 16-millimeter cameras you had to wind

The last thing I read before bed was the last few chapters and endnotes to Mark Morris' excellent Five Came Back (2014), a braided study of five Hollywood directors—John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler, and Frank Capra—and the movies they made for the War Department during World War II. None of them was starting from the same place in life or even the same motives as his colleagues; each follows a very different trajectory, as does their work. I went into it knowing the least about either Stevens or Wyler and came out especially attached to the latter. If anything about the period or film history even faintly attracts you, highly recommended.

The last thing I looked at before leaving the computer was Underwhelming Lovecraft Monsters, which presumably explains why the only dream I can remember from last night reads like a Lovecraft parody: a visit to a reclusive academic in a house where stacks of books and papers are holding up the sagging walls; half of his face is not his face, it's a parasitic entity that speaks for both of them. I remember knocking down books and running; the pages had been rotted out from between the covers and that was more horrifying than alien possession. It just looks like metaphor now: ordinary on the outside, nothing within.

Most of today has been characterized by a gonging headache, but we did make a grocery run and then dinner: coconut pandan rice with chicken curry. Hard-boiled eggs would have happened with a little more organization. I am hoping to work up to nasi lemak.