Scott was wearing those red polka-dot pajamas. What a shock they'll give the Devil!

Tonight I was really looking forward to watching Flight Commander (1930) on TCM, because that's the title under which Howard Hawks' The Dawn Patrol was filed after the pre-Code film was given a high-profile remake in 1938; I figured it would be a nice reward for an evening that prominently featured an MRI. (I wear earplugs, but still find the experience excruciatingly noisy.) I got about twenty-five minutes into the picture and it dropped right out of the buffer. Couldn't even wait until midnight. Thanks ever so, TCM.

A review will have to wait until I can get hold of the complete movie (which exists on DVD, but not in the Minuteman Library Network, thanks ever so to you, too), so about all I can record is that so far the two scripts are so scene-for-scene similar that I'm actively puzzled that a remake exists at all. Entire passages of dialogue are identical or differ by some rearrangement and vocabulary. With the possible exception of some graffiti¹ and the romantic backstory mentioned below, I can't see any elements so Code-uncompliant that they would have prevented the original from being re-released. Everyone drinks like it's a race between the Germans and liver failure, but that's true in the '38 version, too. So the differences come out in the performances—Neil Hamilton as Brand is younger than Basil Rathbone, tougher-mannered but more visibly fraying; he keeps a bottle on his desk and starts drinking the moment he hears four planes come back from a seven-man mission. Aerodrome gossip says that he and Courtney fell out in Paris over a girl, but the real argument is Courtney's belief that his superior's lack of judgment and/or outright incompetence is what keeps the new recruits tumbling out of the sky like burnt leaves, not the major's helpless position in the relay of orders that he can neither amend nor assume himself. As Courtney, Richard Barthelmess doesn't have Errol Flynn's careless panache, but he doesn't need to: he has hard-bitten professionalism on his side and the world-weary edge that I have come to associate with the actor. He has no expectations of his own survival, but he takes as much care of his men as he can while he's still around to do it, protecting the less experienced pilots in combat and, if they survive, trying to ease them through the inevitable shock of losing their friends, just as Courtney is implied to have lost everyone but the inseparable Scotty, here played by an incredibly young Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., clean-shaven and gangling. He's the closest in type to his successor—David Niven—the joker of the squadron, absurdly debonair in the pajamas which he is wearing under his flying gear on the day he's shot down, having rolled out of bed with a hangover ten minutes before scramble. Courtney's line quoted in the subject header was exactly where TCM's streaming service cut out. I've seen this picture with different actors, so I know he's not dead, but I don't know how Barthelmess takes the discovery and I was looking forward to finding out.

I recognize that my ability to watch TCM on my computer at all is a privilege, but I still resent it. I'd feel a lot less bitter if I had access to this movie anywhere else at all.

1. Over the bar in the mess, someone has chalked "NO OBSCENE LANGUAGE." Someone else has come along and chalked out the "NO."

Wandering the streets at this hour with your kid and a bass guitar

In 2004, lesser_celery pointed me toward a band with the appropriate name of My Favorite. I was going through a period of ferocious music acquisition, actively following the Dresden Dolls (discovered at the Ig Nobels in 2002) and about to fall heart over heels into PJ Harvey (my eventual advisor played "To Bring You My Love" at a party and I sat on the floor in front of the stereo for the rest of the evening). The band's website had an mp3 from each album available for download and all of their lyrics in fully punctuated prose and I listened to "Burning Hearts" and "Working Class Jacket" and was hooked. Between the writing of Michael Grace, Jr. and the singing of Andrea Vaughn, My Favorite's songs were catchy and literate, like character sketches or short movies. Their footprint was small but evocative. They had released two albums and an assortment of singles and splits since their genesis on Long Island in the early '90's; they drew inspiration from new wave, post-punk, '80's teen movies, Joan of Arc, Alain Resnais, classical Greek hero cults, and with the unerring timing of irony they broke up in 2005. I never saw them live. I watched the videos for "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" and "Burning Hearts" and bought a T-shirt quoting a line from "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" (your darkness is brighter than all the lights in the disco tonight) which I still wear despite severe cracks in the silkscreen. The closest I ever got in person was the April 2004 interview with Michael Grace, Jr. published by John Benson in Not One of Us #31.

In the years after the breakup, Michael was easy to follow. Minus Andrea, the band shifted shape for an EP and two albums into The Secret History, now with more glam rock and Catholic mythology; later, a further subset reformed as the "Second Empire" of My Favorite, releasing a remastered special edition of Love at Absolute Zero (1999) and a new single. Andrea was harder to track, though I was able to find her contributing vocals to Bell Hollow and Bagatelle. And then there were rumors and then there was a Facebook page and now there is The Chandler Estate:

We are a band rising out of the ruins of other bands (My Favorite, The Secret History, Mad Planets, Boycrazy) named after an abandoned property on Long Island, NY that became a commune for artists and outsiders. Our debut e.p. explores the idea of infrastructure literally and metaphorically: songs of NYC and San Francisco crumbling around their inhabitants, in the midst of both collapse and gentrification; the tenuous bonds of old friends and lovers over the course of several decades; those things or people that become visible only when they fail or fall apart. But there's also love, and hope, and dancing.

Andrea Vaughn, Darren Amadio, Todd "Todbot" Karasik, Bryce Edwards, and Tara Emelye Needham. Their debut EP Infrastructure came out in January. I found out this afternoon and bought it on the spot. It's really good. They sound like the bands whose ruins they rebuilt themselves from (three of them, anyway; I am unfamiliar with Boycrazy, although throwing Edwards' name into Google got me this magnificent interview with The Isotoners) and they also remind me a little of Consonant, Clint Conley's in-between-Mission-of-Burma band with Holly Anderson. They sound like themselves. Their lyrics are snapshot and poetic: I tried to sleep in the common heat, windows propped open with books I never read. He had an 8-track stereo, an overgrown patio, a view of the Golden Gate. Dandelion, sand, and seaglass edge the island where she stood last. On the sidewalk, in fading chalk, we left our mark. I like the way they mesh layers of guitar. I have missed Andrea's voice.

There should be more records after this one. In the meantime, check this one out.