1. So it sucks hard vacuum that Johnny D's closed, but I appreciate that at least they left an assortment of random CDs in a free box on the sidewalk, because I now own in some cases brand new copies of Hector Zazou's Chansons de Mers Froides/Songs from the Cold Seas (1994), Noe Venable's The World Is Bound by Secret Knots (2003), Jim Guttmann's Bessarabian Breakdown (2010), and Ken Waldman's Music Party: Alaskan Fiddling Poet Music from All Over (2003). I had never heard of either of the last two musicians, which is part of the reason I bought them. I was on my way over to see my cats. It has been quite hard to work with one of them insisting he should be the center of attention instead of my keyboard, but it is worth the purr.
2. Many of these poems are good (and a couple I don't like at all, because that happens sometimes), but I love Yvonne Reddick's "Ermine Street." John Foggin's "Norman" feels like one of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nineweaving's characters.
3. I couldn't find Pauline Kael's 5001 Nights at the Movies (1982) anywhere around the house, but fortunately her review of Phaedra (1962) was readily available online:
Phaedra (1962)—Jules Dassin's glossy, novelettish version, set in modern Greece, of the classic story that was dramatized by Euripides, Seneca, Racine, and many others. Here, it's undermined by a lunatic piece of miscasting: when Melina Mercouri leaves her rich, powerful bull of a husband, Raf Vallone, to run away with his skinny young son, Anthony Perkins, the audience can't imagine why. She scoops him up in her arms, like a toy. With its snazzy cars and fabulous jewels that can be casually thrown into the sea, this is like a Joan Crawford picture, only more so. Dassin appears as Christo.
This is exactly what I meant when I talked about critics missing the point of the chemistry. Kael is quite right to notice the difference between Thanos and Alexis—and to draw the sexual implications from it that she does—but she's completely mistaken that it's a movie-wrecking oversight rather than a mythologically appropriate contrast. Hippolytos is the son of an Amazon, already a marginal figure from an Athenian point of view: an unnatural woman who hunts and fights. Taking after his mother does not make Hippolytos a normal young man, reversing her masculine characteristics onto a more societally appropriate actor, it just makes him feminine from strange angles. Like his barbarian mother, he is a hunter, a charioteer, and a breaker of horses, a kind of solitary male Amazon when he should be pursuing the expected social activities of his age and gender and Greek surroundings, Aphrodite included. He should be marrying, at least trying out sex. Instead he has dedicated himself to Artemis, the goddess of wild virgin girls. He enters the play offering her a garland of flowers he picked himself in an untouched meadow, and if that image doesn't shout Persephone—Kore, the Maiden—I haven't got a little cat on my lap trying to add his pawprints to my typing. He even says of himself that he has a παρθένον ψυχὴν, a maiden soul. Phaedra would fall apart if Alexis were a conventionally masculine type like his father. That Kael thinks he should have been tells me a lot more about her ideas of romance than about the success or failure of Perkins' performance.
(Phaedra does not ever literally pick up Alexis, but I like the image—it makes me think of the little Adonis-dolls dandled and mourned for at the Athenian Adonia or the statue of Eos with Tithonos that so frightens the narrator of Evangeline Walton's She Walks in Darkness (2013). The goddess with her mortal plaything. I believe it of Mercouri, larger-than-life irresistible force that she was. You try saying no to the Earth Mother, see where that gets you. Oh, man. I have to meet my parents for a movie, but that should be a poem when I get back.)
2. Many of these poems are good (and a couple I don't like at all, because that happens sometimes), but I love Yvonne Reddick's "Ermine Street." John Foggin's "Norman" feels like one of
nineweaving's characters.3. I couldn't find Pauline Kael's 5001 Nights at the Movies (1982) anywhere around the house, but fortunately her review of Phaedra (1962) was readily available online:
Phaedra (1962)—Jules Dassin's glossy, novelettish version, set in modern Greece, of the classic story that was dramatized by Euripides, Seneca, Racine, and many others. Here, it's undermined by a lunatic piece of miscasting: when Melina Mercouri leaves her rich, powerful bull of a husband, Raf Vallone, to run away with his skinny young son, Anthony Perkins, the audience can't imagine why. She scoops him up in her arms, like a toy. With its snazzy cars and fabulous jewels that can be casually thrown into the sea, this is like a Joan Crawford picture, only more so. Dassin appears as Christo.
This is exactly what I meant when I talked about critics missing the point of the chemistry. Kael is quite right to notice the difference between Thanos and Alexis—and to draw the sexual implications from it that she does—but she's completely mistaken that it's a movie-wrecking oversight rather than a mythologically appropriate contrast. Hippolytos is the son of an Amazon, already a marginal figure from an Athenian point of view: an unnatural woman who hunts and fights. Taking after his mother does not make Hippolytos a normal young man, reversing her masculine characteristics onto a more societally appropriate actor, it just makes him feminine from strange angles. Like his barbarian mother, he is a hunter, a charioteer, and a breaker of horses, a kind of solitary male Amazon when he should be pursuing the expected social activities of his age and gender and Greek surroundings, Aphrodite included. He should be marrying, at least trying out sex. Instead he has dedicated himself to Artemis, the goddess of wild virgin girls. He enters the play offering her a garland of flowers he picked himself in an untouched meadow, and if that image doesn't shout Persephone—Kore, the Maiden—I haven't got a little cat on my lap trying to add his pawprints to my typing. He even says of himself that he has a παρθένον ψυχὴν, a maiden soul. Phaedra would fall apart if Alexis were a conventionally masculine type like his father. That Kael thinks he should have been tells me a lot more about her ideas of romance than about the success or failure of Perkins' performance.
(Phaedra does not ever literally pick up Alexis, but I like the image—it makes me think of the little Adonis-dolls dandled and mourned for at the Athenian Adonia or the statue of Eos with Tithonos that so frightens the narrator of Evangeline Walton's She Walks in Darkness (2013). The goddess with her mortal plaything. I believe it of Mercouri, larger-than-life irresistible force that she was. You try saying no to the Earth Mother, see where that gets you. Oh, man. I have to meet my parents for a movie, but that should be a poem when I get back.)
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