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It's still a bit luminous, but it'll wear off
1. Dear brain. I understand you like to come up with alternate mythologies while I sleep, but it is not true that Medusa's more serpentine qualities are merely the contagious effects of sex with sea-cold, shape-changing Poseidon (whose lovers are often transformed: Kainis becomes a man, Mnestra is given Proteus' gift of shapes) and that Athene's displeasure had nothing to do with it. I liked your theory about the Sphinx and Teiresias better.
2. There are many things I love about The Man in the White Suit (1951), including but not limited to the razor edges on the script, the kneading purr of Joan Greenwood's voice, the leitmotiv oom-pah of a polymerizing amino acid residue, and everything about Alec Guinness, but I particularly loved being able to see it at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Monday, where it was introduced by a man in a suit that smelled like peppermint.
That would be Marc Abrahams, the man behind the Annals of Improbable Research and the Ig Nobels. (The self-perfuming business suit was a winner for Environmental Protection in 1999.) He was kicking off the sixth season of the Coolidge's Science on Screen; hence also the prefatory lecture by Daniel Rosenberg, who discussed the molecular chemistry behind the film's conceit and gave away a trade secret, namely that there are a very limited number of chemical reactions that really look dramatic to an audience, so whenever you see one occurring onscreen, it is almost invariably dry ice and water. Fortunately, The Man in the White Suit doesn't need special effects to be one of the best pieces of science fiction to come out of the 1950's, albeit of the sociological, Asimovian kind. Its age-mates are The Day the Earth Stood Still, When Worlds Collide, The Thing from Another World; while everyone else was watching the skies, Alexander Mackendrick was checking out the meta-level of scientific progress, the cynical interplay between discovery and industry and how fast the fear of change can fuse old enemies into a backslapping torch-and-pitchfork mob. We're talking astonishingly cynical here. As comedies go, it probably doesn't out-bleak Dr. Strangelove (1964), but its take on the human capacity for vested interest is even more caustic than Ealing's earlier Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and I'm not sure that should have been possible. I don't think there's a political or an economic stance that doesn't come in for a potshot somewhere in the script. The ambivalence extends to its protagonist, Guinness' Sidney Stratton, an oft-sacked, never-deterred research chemist whose mild-mannered monofocus is more complicated than the standard choices of mad scientist or misunderstood genius; the camera famously frames him as an ironic white knight, tilting at windmills of dirt and complacency in his indestructible, immaculable suit of radium white, but his Quixote is equal parts Harpo Marx, blithely trailing the kind of bedlam that could really get someone hurt. What about my bit of washing, when there's no washing to do? And yet, for a nice change of pace in post-atomic sci-fi, it is not technological innovation itself that is the film's object of fear, nor whatever thoughtless ends humanity will put it to, but the establishment whose restoration of normality is usually—It had been a hard and bitter experience for all of us. But we face the future with confidence!—the happy ending of the cautionary tale. The ending of The Man in the White Suit is wonderfully more ambiguous than that.
And it is a great deal of fun to watch, which is why it's a brilliant comedy as well as a smart exercise in "the impact of scientific advance upon human beings" and a barely scratched dissertation on the state of postwar Britain, and why I jumped at a showing on the big screen. With an emcee in a peppermint-flavored suit. Sidney Stratton, if he noticed, would probably approve.
3. In other screen-type news, Peter Davison is a beautiful, quirk-perfect Albert Campion; my mother and I streamed Look to the Lady (1989) off Netflix last night and were delighted. Brian Glover as his ex-burglar Magersfontein Lugg is also right on. Seeing as how I feel like a train dropped on me, I will probably curl up tonight with Police at the Funeral. Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jonquil for the recommendation.
4. Starting tomorrow morning, I will be out of town and probably offline for a couple of days. Is there anything I should know before I leave?
2. There are many things I love about The Man in the White Suit (1951), including but not limited to the razor edges on the script, the kneading purr of Joan Greenwood's voice, the leitmotiv oom-pah of a polymerizing amino acid residue, and everything about Alec Guinness, but I particularly loved being able to see it at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Monday, where it was introduced by a man in a suit that smelled like peppermint.
That would be Marc Abrahams, the man behind the Annals of Improbable Research and the Ig Nobels. (The self-perfuming business suit was a winner for Environmental Protection in 1999.) He was kicking off the sixth season of the Coolidge's Science on Screen; hence also the prefatory lecture by Daniel Rosenberg, who discussed the molecular chemistry behind the film's conceit and gave away a trade secret, namely that there are a very limited number of chemical reactions that really look dramatic to an audience, so whenever you see one occurring onscreen, it is almost invariably dry ice and water. Fortunately, The Man in the White Suit doesn't need special effects to be one of the best pieces of science fiction to come out of the 1950's, albeit of the sociological, Asimovian kind. Its age-mates are The Day the Earth Stood Still, When Worlds Collide, The Thing from Another World; while everyone else was watching the skies, Alexander Mackendrick was checking out the meta-level of scientific progress, the cynical interplay between discovery and industry and how fast the fear of change can fuse old enemies into a backslapping torch-and-pitchfork mob. We're talking astonishingly cynical here. As comedies go, it probably doesn't out-bleak Dr. Strangelove (1964), but its take on the human capacity for vested interest is even more caustic than Ealing's earlier Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and I'm not sure that should have been possible. I don't think there's a political or an economic stance that doesn't come in for a potshot somewhere in the script. The ambivalence extends to its protagonist, Guinness' Sidney Stratton, an oft-sacked, never-deterred research chemist whose mild-mannered monofocus is more complicated than the standard choices of mad scientist or misunderstood genius; the camera famously frames him as an ironic white knight, tilting at windmills of dirt and complacency in his indestructible, immaculable suit of radium white, but his Quixote is equal parts Harpo Marx, blithely trailing the kind of bedlam that could really get someone hurt. What about my bit of washing, when there's no washing to do? And yet, for a nice change of pace in post-atomic sci-fi, it is not technological innovation itself that is the film's object of fear, nor whatever thoughtless ends humanity will put it to, but the establishment whose restoration of normality is usually—It had been a hard and bitter experience for all of us. But we face the future with confidence!—the happy ending of the cautionary tale. The ending of The Man in the White Suit is wonderfully more ambiguous than that.
And it is a great deal of fun to watch, which is why it's a brilliant comedy as well as a smart exercise in "the impact of scientific advance upon human beings" and a barely scratched dissertation on the state of postwar Britain, and why I jumped at a showing on the big screen. With an emcee in a peppermint-flavored suit. Sidney Stratton, if he noticed, would probably approve.
3. In other screen-type news, Peter Davison is a beautiful, quirk-perfect Albert Campion; my mother and I streamed Look to the Lady (1989) off Netflix last night and were delighted. Brian Glover as his ex-burglar Magersfontein Lugg is also right on. Seeing as how I feel like a train dropped on me, I will probably curl up tonight with Police at the Funeral. Thanks to
jonquil for the recommendation.4. Starting tomorrow morning, I will be out of town and probably offline for a couple of days. Is there anything I should know before I leave?
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And she's instantly recognizable by it in Little Dorrit (1988), the very last film she did before her death. No one else sounded like her.
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You'd only have had flashbacks if you sat in the first row, I think. I prefer to sit at the back of theaters, so from my viewpoint the peppermint was theoretical.
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He was kicking off the sixth season of the Coolidge's Science on Screen...
When first I read this, I thought you'd said that he was kicked off of the sixth season, and I was thinking this sounded unfair and unfortunate. Glad to realise I was misreading.
I'm sorry to hear that you're feeling as if a train was dropped on you. I hope that Police at the Funeral is comforting.
I hope you have a good time out of town. I'll apparently not be teaching starting next Monday, after all, due to a lack of students, but I'll live.
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It's another dream I had in March; it should be a story or a poem and hasn't turned into one yet.
I hope that Police at the Funeral is comforting.
So far, so good. I'm sorry there were only two seasons.
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Right, now I remember reading that one. I do hope to read that story or poem, someday.
So far, so good. I'm sorry there were only two seasons.
Glad it was good, although I regret the lack of further seasons.
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But it could be.
I liked your theory about the Sphinx and Teiresias better.
Ears perk up.
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I'll add it to the list . . .
Ears perk up.
(You've seen it.)
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The self-perfuming suit sounds a bit nightmarish--very few synthetic fragrances are pleasant...
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I hope they do.
The self-perfuming suit sounds a bit nightmarish--very few synthetic fragrances are pleasant...
Well, there is a reason it won an Ig Nobel . . .