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And then you came and then you made me lean that bit harder on my heart
1. Yesterday I met someone whose front closet contained a concertina, a shofar, a braided whip, an archery target, and I was informed there was a stuffed turtle in the basement. They also offered me whisky and pineapple, but I'd have liked them anyway.
2. I am surprised that Netflix was streaming Cottage to Let (1941), but![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I did not question their motives; we cued it up and got a charming small spy thriller by Anthony Asquith and a character-actor cast, where nearly everyone who comes to the Barringtons' estate on Loch Tay has double motives, but they're all such a riot of red herrings (glances, phone calls, carrier pigeons, postcards) that the audience can only guess who's the fifth columnist, who's the British agent, who's from Scotland Yard, and who might just be sufficiently eccentric to be taken for any one of these things by turns. Leslie Banks, so often cast as the heavy, here puts his magnificently asymmetrical eyebrows to good use as the inventor whose latest designs are turning up with distressing consistency in tanks and guns of German manufacture; he's the kind of classic disorganized boffin who doesn't think twice about tinkering out a self-sealing fuel tank, but he needs a thirteen-year-old to show him the right way to wind up a model plane. John Mills is a cocky, confident little Spitfire pilot, fished out of the loch with a wounded arm; Michael Wilding is his rival in love, gangling over him with a look of hopeless anxiety behind his Coke-bottle glasses. Jeanne de Casalis plays a character so astonishingly scatterbrained, I began to wonder if she even had lines or if Asquith just gave her a topic each time and told her to free-associate. But the film is really a showcase for George Cole, in his screen debut, as the Cockney evacuee whose Holmes-loving application of the deductive method to everyone he meets actually contributes to the solution of the mystery (even when he's annoying, he's annoying in the way of a bright kid underfoot, not a teeth-grating child actor) and Alastair Sim as the late-arriving tenant of the cottage, the most ambiguous figure of all with his apologetic, slightly too self-aware grins and his way of craning into every conversation that doesn't involve him; he's always whittling at apples with a little pocketknife, absentmindedly skinning off those long perfect spirals of peel, which could be sinister if you think about it or could be as harmless as a downed flight lieutenant's liking for cherries. It's the earliest I've seen him; it's also the most slippery of his roles. The rest of this train of thought will devolve into a complaint about films I can't get hold of in this country, so I'll just be glad some of them are apparently on Netflix now and you should check them out.
3. I don't really want to say anything about The Impostors (1998) except that it is the perfect film to watch if you've had half the soundtrack to Anything Goes stuck in your head for the last week and change; also, Steve Buscemi; also, I have finally seen Stanley Tucci in a major role and he's wonderful. It's a movie that knows exactly what it's doing with every register it plays in and it doesn't put a step wrong when they shift under its characters as unpredictably as everything else in a screwball comedy world. Its music is also correct.
4. Niteblade #19 met its fundraising goal, so my poem "The Coast Guard" is now online with the rest of the magazine's content. It is one of the fisherangel poems, accompanying J.C. Runolfson's "The sky is the floor of an ocean," Erik Amundsen's "Feather, Halo, Hook and Line," and Francesca Forrest's "Invitation Refused," all inspired by James Yorkston's amazing cover of Lal Waterson's "Midnight Feast." It is also the poem I wrote directly from a tripfleurdelis28 and I made to Cape Cod in November 2008, looking for a nineteenth-century shipwreck. I am not sure anything in it is fictional.
(There is nothing to be done about the geographical facepalm of the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the bay, but all the things the narrator moons over in Kipling's "Mandalay" (1892) are present in the author's travel writing about the city (1889), only without the rhyming. He really seems to have been taken with the elephants.)
5.rushthatspeaks and I have a copy of Pasolini's Teorema (1968). Catch you later.
2. I am surprised that Netflix was streaming Cottage to Let (1941), but
derspatchel and I did not question their motives; we cued it up and got a charming small spy thriller by Anthony Asquith and a character-actor cast, where nearly everyone who comes to the Barringtons' estate on Loch Tay has double motives, but they're all such a riot of red herrings (glances, phone calls, carrier pigeons, postcards) that the audience can only guess who's the fifth columnist, who's the British agent, who's from Scotland Yard, and who might just be sufficiently eccentric to be taken for any one of these things by turns. Leslie Banks, so often cast as the heavy, here puts his magnificently asymmetrical eyebrows to good use as the inventor whose latest designs are turning up with distressing consistency in tanks and guns of German manufacture; he's the kind of classic disorganized boffin who doesn't think twice about tinkering out a self-sealing fuel tank, but he needs a thirteen-year-old to show him the right way to wind up a model plane. John Mills is a cocky, confident little Spitfire pilot, fished out of the loch with a wounded arm; Michael Wilding is his rival in love, gangling over him with a look of hopeless anxiety behind his Coke-bottle glasses. Jeanne de Casalis plays a character so astonishingly scatterbrained, I began to wonder if she even had lines or if Asquith just gave her a topic each time and told her to free-associate. But the film is really a showcase for George Cole, in his screen debut, as the Cockney evacuee whose Holmes-loving application of the deductive method to everyone he meets actually contributes to the solution of the mystery (even when he's annoying, he's annoying in the way of a bright kid underfoot, not a teeth-grating child actor) and Alastair Sim as the late-arriving tenant of the cottage, the most ambiguous figure of all with his apologetic, slightly too self-aware grins and his way of craning into every conversation that doesn't involve him; he's always whittling at apples with a little pocketknife, absentmindedly skinning off those long perfect spirals of peel, which could be sinister if you think about it or could be as harmless as a downed flight lieutenant's liking for cherries. It's the earliest I've seen him; it's also the most slippery of his roles. The rest of this train of thought will devolve into a complaint about films I can't get hold of in this country, so I'll just be glad some of them are apparently on Netflix now and you should check them out.3. I don't really want to say anything about The Impostors (1998) except that it is the perfect film to watch if you've had half the soundtrack to Anything Goes stuck in your head for the last week and change; also, Steve Buscemi; also, I have finally seen Stanley Tucci in a major role and he's wonderful. It's a movie that knows exactly what it's doing with every register it plays in and it doesn't put a step wrong when they shift under its characters as unpredictably as everything else in a screwball comedy world. Its music is also correct.
4. Niteblade #19 met its fundraising goal, so my poem "The Coast Guard" is now online with the rest of the magazine's content. It is one of the fisherangel poems, accompanying J.C. Runolfson's "The sky is the floor of an ocean," Erik Amundsen's "Feather, Halo, Hook and Line," and Francesca Forrest's "Invitation Refused," all inspired by James Yorkston's amazing cover of Lal Waterson's "Midnight Feast." It is also the poem I wrote directly from a trip
fleurdelis28 and I made to Cape Cod in November 2008, looking for a nineteenth-century shipwreck. I am not sure anything in it is fictional.(There is nothing to be done about the geographical facepalm of the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the bay, but all the things the narrator moons over in Kipling's "Mandalay" (1892) are present in the author's travel writing about the city (1889), only without the rhyming. He really seems to have been taken with the elephants.)
5.
rushthatspeaks and I have a copy of Pasolini's Teorema (1968). Catch you later.
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4: The Coast Guard is lovely.
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Stamp of approval!
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It was great.
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Steve Buscemi can sing!
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I have, and I do like it! I discovered Timber Timbre in the fall; I am very fond of them.
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The archery really sealed it.
4: The Coast Guard is lovely.
Thank you!
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Seriously!
(And he let me mess around with the concertina. I couldn't get a tune out of it, but that's not the point.)
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Have you seen Zazie dans le Métro (1960)?
Steve Buscemi can sing!
I love Steve Buscemi. I made the mistake of discovering him with Ghost World, meaning I thought he was customarily a lead actor. Then I saw him in other things and he was not onscreen as much as I wanted.
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You saw The Impostors! I am not normally a fan of slapstick, and was so annoyed by Woody Allen's presence in the first ten minutes that I almost would've left, had I not been reviewing the damn thing--but everything after that is pretty much genius. Campbell Scott and Lili Taylor are funnier than I've ever seen them be anywhere else, and that bit with Tony Shaloub talking dirty in his made-up language while Oliver Platt hides under the bed reading his subtitles made me laugh so hard I couldn't catch my breath.
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Anglo concertina?*
I have one. They're perverse.** I can vaguely get a tune out of it, but I've never been able to play it up to a decent session speed.
*English system are supposed to be more straightforward, sort of piano-like. I've never heard Irish tunes (as opposed to O'Carolan airs) very well played on an English--the in-out of the Anglo lends itself to playing with a proper pulse--but I suspect a lot of that is the player.***
**Different notes on the draw and the push, that's one thing--having the alternation change from one side to the other is another.
***After all, although a lot of the people you run into who're trying to play trad on a piano accordion have got lousy rhythm, the ones who do get it (like the lady I was playing for sets with on Saturday night, or, for the examples you're most likely to find on CD or Youtube, Jimmy Keane (the Chicago one, with Bohola) or Karen Tweed) can be very good. It's just there's a lot fewer people trying to play trad on English concertinas than on piano accordions, and, judging by the ones I've met, they're a lot less likely to be exposed to the tradition sufficiently to have a concept of it as a living thing.
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Awesome. I approve. I wish I got to meet new people like that more often.
2.
Sounds excellent. I'm glad you were able to see it.
3.
I feel as if I should have seen this, but I don't remember it. I'll have to keep an eye out for it.
4.
Brilliant! Wonderful poem, and I like the company it's in. I remember that post about the shipwreck.
5.
Enjoy!
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By the way, On the Road to Mandalay is one of the songs my father always used to sing when he was cleaning up the kitchen after a party.
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In a mirror, at that!
"Is that yer best shot, Savage Gyspy Loverrrr?!"
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Then there's Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's explanation of how to get to Mandalay. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9vqPgxO7Mg)
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I'm tasting the salt and metal and wind. It has been in the eighties here in the Midwest, and humid, a bit too much for me, and this felt oh so blue-grey cool.
I love your work. I just love it. :) Off to read once more...
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I don't know if you've seen Buscemi in Passing Glances; but yeah, there's not nearly enough of him in it.
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It had me at the credits sequence, I'm afraid. And there wasn't very much Woody Allen.
and that bit with Tony Shaloub talking dirty in his made-up language while Oliver Platt hides under the bed reading his subtitles made me laugh so hard I couldn't catch my breath.
Yes. That was beautiful. And the follow-up gag: "Was that English?"
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It is! (The link is my writeup, in which he is mentioned.) I was somehow not surprised to find out yesterday that he wrote an 82-line poem in rhyming alexandrines about plastics.
I don't know if you've seen Buscemi in Passing Glances; but yeah, there's not nearly enough of him in it.
I have not seen that film! Tell me about it.
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Highly, highly recommended.
Brilliant! Wonderful poem, and I like the company it's in. I remember that post about the shipwreck.
Thank you!
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If you ever find out what he thought the right way was . . .
By the way, On the Road to Mandalay is one of the songs my father always used to sing when he was cleaning up the kitchen after a party.
That's lovely. The version I know best is Peter Bellamy's—he uses the melody of "Blow, Ye Winds"—but I think most people still know the setting by Oley Speaks.
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"Turn right there at Xanadu . . ."
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Thank you! I am very glad to be thought of as a sea-bringer.
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Then you have no excuse not to watch this film!
(Even if I suspect it of having been filmed on Gainsborough stages . . .)
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Thanks.
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As to Queneau, I've only read "Pierrot Mon Ami" thus far. (I didn't know it wasn't really about the Comedia, but it's a nice, earthy little farce.) I'll check out the poem in a mo.
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Brother Noah! Brother Noah!
Can I come aboard on the ark of the Lord,
'Cause it's raining awful hard and it's getting awful cold?
Brother Noah! Brother Noah!
No, you can't, sir! No, you can't, sir!
You can't come aboard on the ark of the Lord
'Cause you smoke cigarettes and you never pay your board,
No, you can't, sir! No, you can't, sir!
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Can I come aboard on the ark of the Lord,
'Cause it's raining awful hard and it's getting awful cold?
Brother Noah! Brother Noah!
I know a version of that sung by Dave Van Ronk:
Oh, Mr. Noah—oh, Mr. Noah
May I take a ride in the ark of the Lord?
'Cause it's getting mighty dark, going to rain mighty hard
And then a nonsense-syllable chorus, catchy as these things are. I like the line about the cigarettes.
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Sold, thank you.
I shall look it up.
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Did it work?
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"I'll have a whisky and soda."
I'm sure that's not what Nazi spies drink.
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The evacuee was the BEST. I'd write a review, but essentially you've said everything I need to say.
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Hah. Thank you! You could still write a review!
I had no idea you'd flown a seaplane over Loch Tay!
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You do write the most enticing movie wrap-ups.
And I've finished Linnets and Valerians, and I hope to write about it soon. I liked all of it very much, though (and?) it's a mysterious book whose magic--at least for me, reading it as an adult, requires quiet reading time. With that, oh how it rewards. But try reading carelessly and you'll miss it all.
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Hah. Thank you!
I liked all of it very much, though (and?) it's a mysterious book whose magic--at least for me, reading it as an adult, requires quiet reading time. With that, oh how it rewards. But try reading carelessly and you'll miss it all.
It has real magic in it, dark as well as light; which is unusual even for a children's fantasy. Now I hope you'll be able to find a copy of The Valley of Song.
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That's still wonderful.