Here we are, here we are, here we are again

Things of the weekend, in no particular order—

1. After I posted on Friday about the silent war dead handing out their names, lauradi7 linked me to a voice: Corporal Edward Dwyer VC of the 1st Battalion, East Surrey Regiment singing "We're Here Because We're Here." I had no idea there were any recordings of WWI soldiers' songs made during the war itself. Dwyer appears to be the only one. As far as I can tell from the internet, the YouTube clip is an excerpt from the double-sided record With Our Boys at the Front, released January 1916 by Regal Records as part of the nationwide recruiting drive—propaganda, but also documentary. I didn't know that British soldiers sometimes sang minstrel songs while marching. That's an unsettling piece of the past. Elsewhere on the record, Dwyer describes the retreat from Mons—no angels, thank you, Machen. Ghosts, though, if that's what you want to call a voice still hailing you from a hundred years ago. Here we are, here we are, here we are again. Hello! Hello! Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello . . . He died at the Somme in September 1916, two months shy of his twenty-first birthday. I wondered if he was part of the inspiration for the project "we're here because we're here," because he still is, still singing. I would like to think at least some of the volunteers learned the song from him.

2. You don't need to talk to the dead to touch time. This afternoon on the bus from Harvard Square to Arlington Center, the elderly woman sitting in front of me turned around suddenly and said, "I sent a birthday card to the Queen on her eightieth birthday." She found it astonishing that Elizabeth II was now ninety. She had seen her once in person, she said, driving by; she mimicked a little wave to the populace. Her two older sisters were around the Queen's age; her third sister was closer in age to herself. "All three of my sisters went to Radcliffe. I went to UC Berkeley." She said it as though she had gotten away with something. I was fruitlessly trying to calculate what range of years that would have been, a math problem with multiple variables missing. She wore a broad-brimmed woven hat with a string of agates or banded glass beads around the crown; I thought that she looked underneath its shadow like a very old turtle, but couldn't think of any way to make it sound like the compliment I meant—including the reminder of my grandmother—rather than an insult. She was East Asian, her speech slightly accented; her hands and her head were shaky, but not her voice. "You're an old Bostonian, too?" she said, smiling at me. I have no idea where any of this conversation came from, unless she was feeling friendly toward me because I had gestured her to get on the bus ahead of me. I thanked her for it before I rang for my stop.

3. The Brattle continues its massive noir retrospective with a series of femme fatales. Regardless of how I feel about the concept, quite a number of those movies are on my list to see if I can. Criss Cross (1949), that's got Dan Duryea in it, Gun Crazy (1950), Peggy Cummins is supposed to be amazing, Born to Kill (1947), it'll be nice to see Lawrence Tierney in something that isn't Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987), a theatrical showing of Too Late for Tears (1949), hell, yes, Detour (1945), rushthatspeaks made that sound worth our time, Gilda (1946), on my list for years, Leave Her to Heaven (1945), the other very famous film with Gene Tierney, man, that's a lot of movie tickets, maybe I'll win a lottery I didn't know I'd entered. I want to curate a female-focused film noir series deliberately without emphasis on the archetype of the femme fatale. I keep tripping over them and they're great.

4. Yesterday was bracketed by two movies: Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) first thing in the morning and Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo (1970) at midnight. In an ideal world, I would have double-reviewed them last night; in the realistic one, I didn't sleep at all the night before last and spent almost all of today away from the computer, helping my mother clean the house in preparation for the Fourth of July. I was not surprised to find the Chaplin funny, beautiful, poignant, and very difficult to watch right now. I would have been less surprised about the intensity of affection I felt for the Jodorowsky if anyone had ever mentioned to me that in addition to a surrealist Western, El Topo is also a myth-cycle full of gorgeous iconography reminding me of Pasolini, Parajanov, and Ulrike Ottinger. nineweaving, I don't know what you'll make of the rest of the movie, but there are four masters of the gun who live in the desert and the second lives in a canyon of sand with a Tarot-reading mother-goddess in bright Slavic clothes. There is an owl nailed to the table at which she reads her cards and she cries like a bird when her son is shot; she speaks in a man's voice without opening her mouth and keeps a lion on a leash. A man is buried in a grave of rabbits, which catch fire out of a clear sky. The cairn of another becomes a hive, dripping with wax and honey, humming with bees. The plot is very clear. It just helps if you have a passing acquaintance with Buddhism and know that traveling with anyone named Mara—especially if you've named them Mara, what did you think would happen—is a terrible idea.

5. Everyone who recommended me Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January mysteries was quite right to do so; thank you. So far I've read A Free Man of Color (1997), Fever Season (1998), and Sold Down the River (2000), because that's what the library had on Thursday night, and I just picked up copies of Die Upon a Kiss (2001) and Wet Grave (2002) today. I am actively confused that these books were never adapted for any kind of television; they would be a magnificent showcase for a cast of primarily actors of color, most of them women. Benjamin himself is the rare and welcome case of a protagonist I really like: a free man of color in New Orleans of the early 1830's, a classically trained pianist and sometime surgeon, a middle-aged widower still in grief-shock when the series begins, and a semi-stranger in the city of his youth, having spent the last sixteen years in Paris where being assaulted with impunity by white men with nothing better to do was significantly less of an environmental hazard and he did not need to carry papers to prove that he's no longer a slave. He's canonically very dark-skinned, six foot three, built like a brick shithouse. He scares a lot of white people just by walking down the street and has for survival reasons therefore become very good, very fast at looking like Just Another N-Word, Nothing to See Here, Move Along, unless he's appearing in his capacity as a musician or a music teacher, in which case it's Very Polite Black Man, the Nice Kind, Please Patronize. It's no surprise that he's furiously angry about much of the world he lives in, but I think it's wonderful that the narrative so thoroughly supports him. For similar reasons, I enjoy how carefully the series draws its positive white characters (there's, like, two in the regular cast) so as to avoid even an accidental case of white savior. Abishag Shaw is a laconic police lieutenant from Kentucky who gets almost as much deceptive mileage out of looking like a backwoods hick without two brain cells to smack together as Benjamin does from the racial stereotypes mentioned above; he's honest, compassionate, and appears genuinely capable of seeing people of color as people, but he's still embedded within a deeply unjust system and many of the laws he's sworn to uphold are actively dangerous to the people he cares about. An even better example is Hannibal Sefton, who drunkenly coughed his way into the narrative more or less carrying a placard with my name on it—he's an utterly loyal friend to Benjamin and he plays the violin better than any star pupil of the Paris Conservatoire; he's also permanently skint broke, consumptive, and a hopeless drunk with a laudanum habit a mile wide. (I am waiting for his backstory to come off the wall because it is obviously dramatic—his accent is gentlemanly Anglo-Irish and his liberal use of both quoted and improvised Latin attests to a misspent classical education, but nothing he's ever said about his past hangs together and that's when he talks about it at all.) He has no social standing in society of any color. He couch-surfs in whorehouses when he can't make rent. His willingness to help is never in question, but it's even odds at any moment whether he'll be too sick to get out of bed, too drunk to get off the floor, or too stoned to do either, none of these states being mutually exclusive. There is no chance of him running heroically away with the narrative. (He runs antiheroically away with scenes, of course.) I find this both a clever and a novel technique and it works in that while I like both Shaw and Hannibal, I agree that it would throw the series off balance were they to take a more active part in the proceedings than Benjamin. Give me more time with the Greek-translating, bomb-building Rose Vitrac, however, or Benjamin's full sister Olympe, the voodooienne who learned from Marie Laveau, or his half-sister Dominique, a plaçée like their mother, or even the fascinating Livia Levesque herself, who is a stone cold dreadful parent, but whose ruthlessness is the reason she and her children are all free, and we're good to go. I have not fallen into a series for some time and this one is addictive. Also, kind of timely.

Crud. I ran out of day-before-holiday. Everybody go watch 1776 and set off fireworks if your state allows it. I wish mine did.