And then you came and then you made me lean that bit harder on my heart

[sovay]

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 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.

Comments

[gwynnega]

Teorema! Young Terence Stamp! Enjoy.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

1 and 2: sold.

4: The Coast Guard is lovely.

[rose-lemberg.livejournal.com]

a concertina, a shofar, a braided whip, an archery target

Stamp of approval!

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I think "Skokiaan" is post-WWII, but they're dancing off the movie set by that point in the picture anyway.


Steve Buscemi can sing!

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

1.

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!

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Kipling claimed that people who said he'd gotten the geography in On the Road to Mandalay wrong couldn't read straight. (I am not saying he was right!) I forget how one was supposed to interpret the words.

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.

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

So thrilled to read your work this morning!

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...

[ewein2412]

Cottage to Let sounds absolutely right up my alley. (Loch Tay is about a 40 minute drive from here, too!)

[schreibergasse.livejournal.com]

re: 1 & 4 especially: w00t!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

You posted this a couple of nights ago, and the night following, I found myself thinking, there is a movie I want to see; I think it must be one Sovay talked about--and it was this one, Cottage to Let. But I didn't recognize/remember that fact before it was too late and I'd fallen asleep on the couch. But now I've remembered, and good things shall come of it.

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.