I feel as though I have fallen into a kind of minimally emotional reportage about my days as opposed to any real record of what I am thinking or feeling, but the good things seem to speak for themselves and otherwise neither vitriol nor despondency feels very useful to add to the current state of the world.
I took part last night in a semi-improvisational recording over Zoom and had a wonderful time. Autolycus made a special guest appearance. I was asked to sing the Dies Irae, which was no sweat as I have been known to get it stuck in my head without even rewatching The Seventh Seal (1957), and "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?" which was actually much trickier since the only person I have ever heard sing it was my grandfather and as important as he was to me, he was not the most tuneful person in the family and therefore I was trying to spot-reconstruct a plausible melody from my childhood memories of him sort of sprechstimming it and I have deliberately not gone looking for a recording of the real thing: I am reminding myself of the polyphony of the folk tradition. I will no doubt be stricken with self-loathing when I get a look at the final edited version, but until then it feels like it went well.
The movie I tried to relax with a couple of nights ago was Gerd Oswald's Crime of Passion (1957), described by Criterion as "a potent noir firecracker with feminist undertones." It starred Barbara Stanwyck and Sterling Hayden and was so chokingly acute about patriarchy and heteronormativity and the economics of marriage and how damn near it kills a cheerfully unsentimental career woman to marry for love in middle age and find herself straitjacketed into a suburban housewife—in other words, this film doesn't have feminist undertones, it has klaxons—that I tapped out after the first act because it had already achieved the classically noir nightmare of the everyday and I just didn't want to see how tragically further the protagonist had to crater from panic attacks in the middle of gender-segregated parties and the powerful sexual current with her sweet, unambitious husband who just wants to make her happy and as soon as he put the ring on her finger pretty much guaranteed he'd never be able to again. I did appreciate the queer vibes of the early scenes, as when one of the protagonist's columns is collectively and appreciatively read aloud by the women of San Francisco, a neglected wife sitting up in bed as her husband snores, one cinema usher to another, one B-girl to another, a pair of butch cabbies leaning shoulder to shoulder against their car: "Let me stand by your side in your fight for justice and compassion in a world made by men and for men." Asked how to reply to a seventeen-year-old letter-writer unhappily stuck on a married man, the protagonist answers, "Forget the man; run away with his wife."
I had much better luck with Peter Ustinov's School for Secrets (1946), which I had wanted to see ever since discovering Ralph Richardson in 2012. It is a sort of popular history of radar in World War II, including Chain Home Low, Gee, and a version of the Bruneval Raid, where as far as I can tell the technical information is reasonably accurate within security constraints of the time and all of the personalities involved are fabricated with the occasional allusion to reality; this approach has met with mixed success with me in the past, by which I mean that the least of the sins for which I do not forgive the pseudo-docudrama about the Manhattan Project The Beginning or the End (1947) is the total waste of Hume Cronyn as Oppenheimer, but either it makes a difference that I know less about radar to object on its behalf or the film's effectiveness as entertainment makes up for its shortcomings as nonfiction. It has a light touch and stacks its deck with character actors from John Laurie and David Tomlinson to Finlay Currie and Hugh Pryse, but it takes the intelligence of its scientists seriously, neither resting its humor on their eccentricities nor oversteering them into infallibility. Most of them are married, even, and most of their marriages work. The whimsical title crawl defines the boffin as if from a scholarly lexicon of the RAF ("Once upon a time the Puffin, a bird with a mournful cry, got crossed with a Baffin, an obsolete Service Aircraft. Their offspring was a Boffin. This bird bursts with weird and sometimes inopportune ideas, but possesses staggering inventiveness. Its ideas, like its eggs, are conical and unbreakable. You push the unwanted ones away and they just roll back"), but the one real weirdo in the bunch is Richardson, which isn't even typecasting so much as truth in advertising. In light of the actor's notorious record as "Pranger" Richardson of the Fleet Air Arm, his character's height-sick nerves feel like a slight joke. His revulsion at the prospect of women in uniform, however, is soundly rebuffed not just by his fellow scientists but by the film itself, which foregrounds WAAFs at work at CH stations and the operations room at Bentley Priory. Ustinov wrote, directed, and co-produced and I kept wondering if he would turn up as some uncredited technician or paper-pusher, but he does not seem to. Now to try my luck with Vice Versa (1948) or Private Angelo (1949). Billy Budd (1962) has been on the list for years for Terence Stamp.
I had the fun this evening of running across an article about the American aversion to mutton and lamb while eating a dinner of lamb chops, which it would never have occurred to me to consider an acquired taste. I disagreed violently with not just the philosophy but the factual claims of this article on the inherently divisive nature of narrative, at the end of which I recognized the title of the author's book from an incredible demolition of a review that has been circling my friendlist, which at least means I am not the only person to find his understanding of story reductive, zero-sum, and apparently absent any awareness of myth, folklore, or the history of literature. ("Classically told stories tend to divide the world into good people (protagonists) and bad people (antagonists), which means they generate a unit of callousness for every unit of empathy." BZZT NO DO NOT PASS GO DO NOT LEARN ANYTHING ABOUT ANCIENT GREEK CULT HEROES.) I am fascinated by this photographer's lighthouse project. I had a lot of the Boston Globe to catch up on.
I took part last night in a semi-improvisational recording over Zoom and had a wonderful time. Autolycus made a special guest appearance. I was asked to sing the Dies Irae, which was no sweat as I have been known to get it stuck in my head without even rewatching The Seventh Seal (1957), and "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?" which was actually much trickier since the only person I have ever heard sing it was my grandfather and as important as he was to me, he was not the most tuneful person in the family and therefore I was trying to spot-reconstruct a plausible melody from my childhood memories of him sort of sprechstimming it and I have deliberately not gone looking for a recording of the real thing: I am reminding myself of the polyphony of the folk tradition. I will no doubt be stricken with self-loathing when I get a look at the final edited version, but until then it feels like it went well.
The movie I tried to relax with a couple of nights ago was Gerd Oswald's Crime of Passion (1957), described by Criterion as "a potent noir firecracker with feminist undertones." It starred Barbara Stanwyck and Sterling Hayden and was so chokingly acute about patriarchy and heteronormativity and the economics of marriage and how damn near it kills a cheerfully unsentimental career woman to marry for love in middle age and find herself straitjacketed into a suburban housewife—in other words, this film doesn't have feminist undertones, it has klaxons—that I tapped out after the first act because it had already achieved the classically noir nightmare of the everyday and I just didn't want to see how tragically further the protagonist had to crater from panic attacks in the middle of gender-segregated parties and the powerful sexual current with her sweet, unambitious husband who just wants to make her happy and as soon as he put the ring on her finger pretty much guaranteed he'd never be able to again. I did appreciate the queer vibes of the early scenes, as when one of the protagonist's columns is collectively and appreciatively read aloud by the women of San Francisco, a neglected wife sitting up in bed as her husband snores, one cinema usher to another, one B-girl to another, a pair of butch cabbies leaning shoulder to shoulder against their car: "Let me stand by your side in your fight for justice and compassion in a world made by men and for men." Asked how to reply to a seventeen-year-old letter-writer unhappily stuck on a married man, the protagonist answers, "Forget the man; run away with his wife."
I had much better luck with Peter Ustinov's School for Secrets (1946), which I had wanted to see ever since discovering Ralph Richardson in 2012. It is a sort of popular history of radar in World War II, including Chain Home Low, Gee, and a version of the Bruneval Raid, where as far as I can tell the technical information is reasonably accurate within security constraints of the time and all of the personalities involved are fabricated with the occasional allusion to reality; this approach has met with mixed success with me in the past, by which I mean that the least of the sins for which I do not forgive the pseudo-docudrama about the Manhattan Project The Beginning or the End (1947) is the total waste of Hume Cronyn as Oppenheimer, but either it makes a difference that I know less about radar to object on its behalf or the film's effectiveness as entertainment makes up for its shortcomings as nonfiction. It has a light touch and stacks its deck with character actors from John Laurie and David Tomlinson to Finlay Currie and Hugh Pryse, but it takes the intelligence of its scientists seriously, neither resting its humor on their eccentricities nor oversteering them into infallibility. Most of them are married, even, and most of their marriages work. The whimsical title crawl defines the boffin as if from a scholarly lexicon of the RAF ("Once upon a time the Puffin, a bird with a mournful cry, got crossed with a Baffin, an obsolete Service Aircraft. Their offspring was a Boffin. This bird bursts with weird and sometimes inopportune ideas, but possesses staggering inventiveness. Its ideas, like its eggs, are conical and unbreakable. You push the unwanted ones away and they just roll back"), but the one real weirdo in the bunch is Richardson, which isn't even typecasting so much as truth in advertising. In light of the actor's notorious record as "Pranger" Richardson of the Fleet Air Arm, his character's height-sick nerves feel like a slight joke. His revulsion at the prospect of women in uniform, however, is soundly rebuffed not just by his fellow scientists but by the film itself, which foregrounds WAAFs at work at CH stations and the operations room at Bentley Priory. Ustinov wrote, directed, and co-produced and I kept wondering if he would turn up as some uncredited technician or paper-pusher, but he does not seem to. Now to try my luck with Vice Versa (1948) or Private Angelo (1949). Billy Budd (1962) has been on the list for years for Terence Stamp.
I had the fun this evening of running across an article about the American aversion to mutton and lamb while eating a dinner of lamb chops, which it would never have occurred to me to consider an acquired taste. I disagreed violently with not just the philosophy but the factual claims of this article on the inherently divisive nature of narrative, at the end of which I recognized the title of the author's book from an incredible demolition of a review that has been circling my friendlist, which at least means I am not the only person to find his understanding of story reductive, zero-sum, and apparently absent any awareness of myth, folklore, or the history of literature. ("Classically told stories tend to divide the world into good people (protagonists) and bad people (antagonists), which means they generate a unit of callousness for every unit of empathy." BZZT NO DO NOT PASS GO DO NOT LEARN ANYTHING ABOUT ANCIENT GREEK CULT HEROES.) I am fascinated by this photographer's lighthouse project. I had a lot of the Boston Globe to catch up on.
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