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We might sing like angels with each arm in a sling
I washed my hair with my regular shampoo last night and today my head smells like an ersatz strawberry. Without changing a word of their packaging, Pantene has switched the scent of its products—including the kind I've been using for years—from relatively neutral and mildly floral to fake fruit air freshener. Sickly sweet, intensely artificial, chokingly strong. It filled the shower. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel coughed, "It smells like Strawberry Shortcake," and then had to explain that he meant the doll character, not the dessert, which tends to smell a lot better, generally like actual fruit. I stood in the shower for ten minutes after my hair was done, just trying to wash the smell out. It wouldn't leave. It was on my hands. It was still clouding in my hair when I woke up, clinging to my skin. I didn't even have any other shampoo to fall back on: I'd run out earlier in the day and bought a new bottle from CVS as usual, not suspecting it had undergone a noxious alchemy. I didn't have any reason to. On the shelf, it looked like the same stuff. So this afternoon I went back to CVS and purchased some alternate shampoo options, at least one of which should not smell horrific when applied to my hair and not trigger any allergic reactions either, but I am frustrated and disappointed and sad. I have used Pantene for more than ten years now. I am used to its scent, which I think of as part of my own. And if they were going to make their shampoo and conditioner smell like a chemical accident in a jam factory, they could at least have said so somewhere on the bottle.
Some things from the internet. Via the internet, at least:
1. The AV Club, in praise of David McCallum's Illya Kuryakin: "There was no template for a character or a man like him, and the element of the unknown was enthralling." My mother loved The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–68) and especially McCallum's intellectual, enigmatic character; decades later, she wanted to name my brother Ilya. My father vetoed it on the grounds that, as family legend has it, "'Sonya and Ilya' sounded like a Russian vaudeville routine." So my brother ended up named after her favorite character from Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911) instead, and it's worked out fine as far as I can tell, but I still don't think her first choice would have been such a terrible idea. My father, of course, was the one who counter-proposed "Igor."
2. While we're on the topic of spy shows, please enjoy one of the weirder pieces of pop culture I've run into recently: The Londonairs, "Dearest Emma." I can find no information about the band except for the songwriters' last names and the fact that the record was recalled for copyright infringment after about a week of airplay, because it's a fan song to Diana Rigg's Emma Peel and its opening fanfare is right out of the theme music to The Avengers (1961–69). I am fascinated by its existence and the fact that it's kind of unapologetically kinky. We faint at the things you do, though red-blooded men / Now that just ain't good for us, but do it again . . . We'd take all that you can give and come back for more / You'd find we look great piled up in heaps on the floor. Nowadays, you just record this sort of thing and put it on the internet.
3. This has been around for a year, but I just saw it now and it's wonderful: "Deaths in the Iliad: A Classics Infographic." Paris is correctly rated "Most Useless."
4. Etruscan shark's tooth pendant? Yes, please.
5. I wish I owned a DVD of Leslie Howard's Pimpernel Smith (1941). I've mentioned the movie before: it's his WWII retelling of The Scarlet Pimpernel, the definitive movie version of which had starred Howard in 1934; it downplays some aspects of the original story and sharpens others, it's weirder and more numinous than any film in its genre except Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1944), and it stars an unabashedly intellectual hero. I love that while Percy Blakeney only plays at being a brainless fop, Horatio Smith really is an idealistic academic; his disguise is a broadly drawn version of himself, the archaeologist so unworldly, he'll tramp cheerfully through the Anschluss to excavate the rumor of an ancient Aryan civilization predating the Semitic Near East. (Historically speaking, this is as much garbage as Reichminister von Graum's ponderous insistence that Shakespeare was really German, but it's such an irresistible coup for the Nazis, they let him right in.) He's introduced lecturing on classical sculpture; he pronounces the word chiton correctly. Where most men carry a pin-up or a picture of their best girl, his wallet contains a photograph of Aphrodite Kallipygos. His intelligence and his erudition and even his eccentricity are real; it's his pretense of scholarly shortsightedness—a man so concerned with the past that the present is of no consequence to him, even when it contains concentration camps—that's the front. He's a tricky hero, not a two-fisted one. He falls for the girl who sees through his stories, like Odysseus with Athene. Because it features a heroic archaeologist battling the Nazis, I would love to be able to consider the movie a predecessor of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), but I've never heard that anyone involved in that production actually knew about Pimpernel Smith. It did inspire Raoul Wallenberg. Anyway, I'm thinking of it because of this gifset of Smith showing off his photo of the woman he loves, marble draperies and all. The pose looks more like Aphrodite of Knidos, but I'm willing to believe she has a very beautiful ass.
[edit] Trying to find a better shot of Smith's Aphrodite, I've found this article from a 1941 issue of Picturegoer in which a critical fan attempts, on the set of Pimpernel Smith, to persuade Leslie Howard to play more romantic parts and leave the intellectual ones alone. I am afraid my first reaction to this argument was, "What an idiot." No, Mr. Cole, I should not have liked Howard to throw over his "bespectacled Professor Higgins" or "his archaeological-minded Mr. Smith." We can agree that it would have been a shame to lose him as an actor entirely, but your ideas of a romantic hero evidently differ from mine. Rest assured that there is a thriving population to this day who find Leslie Howard disheveled and snappish in nerd glasses to be one of the hotter things filmed in 1938. Show me a leading man who tinkers with oscilloscopes or knows his classical Greek and I'll show you someone I pay attention to. The smarts are part of the sentimental appeal. Fortunately, Howard appears to have been unmoved: "This, considering I had just finished delivering an impassioned plea for Howard to give up the intellectual stuff, was a bit of a blow. Rather like lecturing somebody on the danger of playing with matches and, at the end of it, being idly informed that he was planning to set fire to a cathedral." Well, here's to pyromania.
derspatchel coughed, "It smells like Strawberry Shortcake," and then had to explain that he meant the doll character, not the dessert, which tends to smell a lot better, generally like actual fruit. I stood in the shower for ten minutes after my hair was done, just trying to wash the smell out. It wouldn't leave. It was on my hands. It was still clouding in my hair when I woke up, clinging to my skin. I didn't even have any other shampoo to fall back on: I'd run out earlier in the day and bought a new bottle from CVS as usual, not suspecting it had undergone a noxious alchemy. I didn't have any reason to. On the shelf, it looked like the same stuff. So this afternoon I went back to CVS and purchased some alternate shampoo options, at least one of which should not smell horrific when applied to my hair and not trigger any allergic reactions either, but I am frustrated and disappointed and sad. I have used Pantene for more than ten years now. I am used to its scent, which I think of as part of my own. And if they were going to make their shampoo and conditioner smell like a chemical accident in a jam factory, they could at least have said so somewhere on the bottle.Some things from the internet. Via the internet, at least:
1. The AV Club, in praise of David McCallum's Illya Kuryakin: "There was no template for a character or a man like him, and the element of the unknown was enthralling." My mother loved The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–68) and especially McCallum's intellectual, enigmatic character; decades later, she wanted to name my brother Ilya. My father vetoed it on the grounds that, as family legend has it, "'Sonya and Ilya' sounded like a Russian vaudeville routine." So my brother ended up named after her favorite character from Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911) instead, and it's worked out fine as far as I can tell, but I still don't think her first choice would have been such a terrible idea. My father, of course, was the one who counter-proposed "Igor."
2. While we're on the topic of spy shows, please enjoy one of the weirder pieces of pop culture I've run into recently: The Londonairs, "Dearest Emma." I can find no information about the band except for the songwriters' last names and the fact that the record was recalled for copyright infringment after about a week of airplay, because it's a fan song to Diana Rigg's Emma Peel and its opening fanfare is right out of the theme music to The Avengers (1961–69). I am fascinated by its existence and the fact that it's kind of unapologetically kinky. We faint at the things you do, though red-blooded men / Now that just ain't good for us, but do it again . . . We'd take all that you can give and come back for more / You'd find we look great piled up in heaps on the floor. Nowadays, you just record this sort of thing and put it on the internet.
3. This has been around for a year, but I just saw it now and it's wonderful: "Deaths in the Iliad: A Classics Infographic." Paris is correctly rated "Most Useless."
4. Etruscan shark's tooth pendant? Yes, please.
5. I wish I owned a DVD of Leslie Howard's Pimpernel Smith (1941). I've mentioned the movie before: it's his WWII retelling of The Scarlet Pimpernel, the definitive movie version of which had starred Howard in 1934; it downplays some aspects of the original story and sharpens others, it's weirder and more numinous than any film in its genre except Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1944), and it stars an unabashedly intellectual hero. I love that while Percy Blakeney only plays at being a brainless fop, Horatio Smith really is an idealistic academic; his disguise is a broadly drawn version of himself, the archaeologist so unworldly, he'll tramp cheerfully through the Anschluss to excavate the rumor of an ancient Aryan civilization predating the Semitic Near East. (Historically speaking, this is as much garbage as Reichminister von Graum's ponderous insistence that Shakespeare was really German, but it's such an irresistible coup for the Nazis, they let him right in.) He's introduced lecturing on classical sculpture; he pronounces the word chiton correctly. Where most men carry a pin-up or a picture of their best girl, his wallet contains a photograph of Aphrodite Kallipygos. His intelligence and his erudition and even his eccentricity are real; it's his pretense of scholarly shortsightedness—a man so concerned with the past that the present is of no consequence to him, even when it contains concentration camps—that's the front. He's a tricky hero, not a two-fisted one. He falls for the girl who sees through his stories, like Odysseus with Athene. Because it features a heroic archaeologist battling the Nazis, I would love to be able to consider the movie a predecessor of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), but I've never heard that anyone involved in that production actually knew about Pimpernel Smith. It did inspire Raoul Wallenberg. Anyway, I'm thinking of it because of this gifset of Smith showing off his photo of the woman he loves, marble draperies and all. The pose looks more like Aphrodite of Knidos, but I'm willing to believe she has a very beautiful ass.
[edit] Trying to find a better shot of Smith's Aphrodite, I've found this article from a 1941 issue of Picturegoer in which a critical fan attempts, on the set of Pimpernel Smith, to persuade Leslie Howard to play more romantic parts and leave the intellectual ones alone. I am afraid my first reaction to this argument was, "What an idiot." No, Mr. Cole, I should not have liked Howard to throw over his "bespectacled Professor Higgins" or "his archaeological-minded Mr. Smith." We can agree that it would have been a shame to lose him as an actor entirely, but your ideas of a romantic hero evidently differ from mine. Rest assured that there is a thriving population to this day who find Leslie Howard disheveled and snappish in nerd glasses to be one of the hotter things filmed in 1938. Show me a leading man who tinkers with oscilloscopes or knows his classical Greek and I'll show you someone I pay attention to. The smarts are part of the sentimental appeal. Fortunately, Howard appears to have been unmoved: "This, considering I had just finished delivering an impassioned plea for Howard to give up the intellectual stuff, was a bit of a blow. Rather like lecturing somebody on the danger of playing with matches and, at the end of it, being idly informed that he was planning to set fire to a cathedral." Well, here's to pyromania.
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It's incredibly obscure! It might be available on DVD in the UK, but I've never heard of a legal transfer here; I saw it once in 2008 on a staticky videocassette via interlibrary loan from St. Louis. Occasionally TCM shows it, reliably at times of day when it's of no use to me, but I've never run across anyone else who's seen it and wasn't already a Leslie Howard fan. It really should be better known. It's a good version of the Pimpernel story; it's a great role for Howard, who wrote to his strengths while not shutting out the rest of the cast; in terms of being committedly, specifically, openly anti-Nazi while the outcome of the war was still uncertain, it's right up there with Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942). I want a DVD so that I can show it to everyone I know. At this point I'd settle for a print coming to one of the local theaters, even if I've only heard of it playing at the BFI. There's slightly more detail about the plot here, in a comment I would have folded into this post if I'd been thinking at all about it. OH DUDE THERE'S A YOUTUBE LINK WATCH IT NOW BEFORE IT DISAPPEARS.
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We'll have to watch it on somebody's computer unless I can figure out a way to burn a copy to DVD, but I'd love to! I haven't seen it in years myself. I just remember it with very great fondness. Next up after Caught (1949)?
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There's a possibility that
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Works for me. It's a plan!
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That is the perfect icon to do it in.
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Exactly! It shouldn't make a such a difference, but it really does. At least my hair only smells like experimental shampoo, not horrible faux strawberry, right now.
(It doesn't smell anything like Pantene but the smell is relatively mild--ShiKai, the normal-hair one.)
I don't think I've encountered it. Worth looking into for people who don't want to smell like the cosmetics counter in a department store?
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That infographic is delightul, and so is the Etruscan shark's tooth pendant. Wow.
And Pimpernel Smith sounds fascinating. Idealistic academic archaeologist whose actor knows what he's talking about, and whose persona is only himself turned up to 11 with a lie of myopic focus; yes, all right, I'm sold on that one.
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All of this. I don't understand why they changed the fragrance in the first place, but I really don't understand why they changed it to that.
That infographic is delightul, and so is the Etruscan shark's tooth pendant. Wow.
Archaic Wonder consistently lives up to its name. If I haven't checked the site in a couple of weeks, it becomes a timesink.
Idealistic academic archaeologist whose actor knows what he's talking about, and whose persona is only himself turned up to 11 with a lie of myopic focus; yes, all right, I'm sold on that one.
Week after next?
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Tuesday or Thursday of week after next would work great for me! Any time after 5:30ish pm. Wednesday isn't as good, but is workable if that's what works better for you and Becca.
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I got in the habit over a decade ago of changing up my shampoo and soap every couple of months. I'd been in a long term relationship with someone who turned out to be a terrible human being, but I'd also gotten addicted to his brand of shampoo. One very sucky part of the breakup was choosing every morning whether I wanted to be reminded by scent of Darth Vader all day, or whether I wanted my hair to feel and smell wrong. Never again. If I ever end up in a situation like the movie Green Card, Mike is just doomed.
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It was an impressively fake natural thing, too. I've smelled less realistic strawberries, but they really have been in cans of Febreeze.
If I ever end up in a situation like the movie Green Card, Mike is just doomed.
Aww.
I am glad your shampoo no longer reminds you of Darth Vader.
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Hopefully it is at least a moderately consoling statement that those knowledgeable in such things recommend that one switch shampoos every year or so anyhow, as apparently shampoos do not remove their own buildup. So your hair may actually like having something new. But still, that's very annoying when it happens and I'm sorry it happened to you.
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That is a useful thing to know; I didn't. I can't tell how different my hair feels today because it's raining, but I'll try to evaluate it tomorrow.
But still, that's very annoying when it happens and I'm sorry it happened to you.
Thank you. I would feel much less bitter about it if there had been any kind of warning!
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Aww.
There are many people whose hair looks good in catgirl pink. I have met several of them. I do not believe I would be among their number.
(As a child, what I wanted was sea-green hair, anyway.)
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That makes a lot of sense to me, actually. Though I think of Innokenty Smoktunovsky's Hamlet, not Olivier's.
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Turned out that it was an allergic reaction to the ingredients that were in the unscented body wash, but it was regional. If I bought it in the States it was fine. However, if I bought it in Canada I wound up looking like a Trill from a Star Trek.
Boo to Pantene for messing with your hair smell. I hope the substitutes work out well and don't make you feel alienated.
Phooey, posting from my phone means I can't use the hair icon.
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What a fascinating inconsistency. I am familiar with the experience of allergic reactions to purportedly scent-free or sensitive products, but I've never had it split by country. What were you reacting to?
Boo to Pantene for messing with your hair smell. I hope the substitutes work out well and don't make you feel alienated.
Thank you. At the moment I am noticing how my hair smells, which is weird, but at least not actively offensive. I was genuinely worried the ersatz strawberry was going to set off my allergies.
Phooey, posting from my phone means I can't use the hair icon.
You have another chance when you reply!
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I believe it was a derivative of urea, which gets used in a variety of surprising products. I compared the two bottles after the dermatologist correctly diagnosed the issue, and I believe that was the differing ingredient, but it was more than 10 years ago, so I could be remembering incorrectly.
I was genuinely worried the ersatz strawberry was going to set off my allergies.
I get that. I sometimes react in the shower to strongly scented products, particularly for some reason, mango, even though I don't have a problem with the actual fruit.
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I had no idea.
I get that. I sometimes react in the shower to strongly scented products, particularly for some reason, mango, even though I don't have a problem with the actual fruit.
A lot of commercial scents cause respiratory reactions in me; I assume it's some common chemical ingredient, but I don't know which one. I remember being amazed to discover BPAL, because I could actually wear their perfumes without giving myself a headache. I don't, really, but it's nice to know I have the option. It's certainly better than walking through clouds of strangers' perfume on the street and coming out wheezing.
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I watched Pimpernel Smith on your recco, and everything you say is right. Loved it.
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You had good reason!
I watched Pimpernel Smith on your recco, and everything you say is right. Loved it.
I'm so glad! I wish it were a better-known film. Pygmalion seems to have made the jump to classic status in this country, I suspect partly because it's the missing link between Shaw and Lerner and Loewe, but nothing else he directed. This is practically a crime.
[edit] Did you write about Pimpernel Smith? If not, you should. People would take your recommendations, too.
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I've been linking people to the copy on YouTube. I would love for the film to get a proper DVD release; I'd pay for it.
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Other scattered reactions:
I’d alway heard “borogroves”was a typo for “borogoves”in the US edition of Through the Looking-Glass, but Howard says “borogroves”in this movie. May need to recheck.
You described this movie as numinous, and I was wondering about that, but Howard's speech in the final scene was indeed exactly that -- also the way he was lit (and shadowed) throughout, but especially in that scene, makes me want a timeline in which he played Agatha Christie’s Mr. Harley Quinn.
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Thank you, that sounds great. She has such an amazing face. I've seen her in a handful of movies, but Pimpernel Smith was the one that really got my attention.
(I did feel clever for guessing, when I saw the 1940 Thief of Bagdad in her filmography, that she played the mechanical, murderous Silver Maid.)
You described this movie as numinous, and I was wondering about that, but Howard's speech in the final scene was indeed exactly that -- also the way he was lit (and shadowed) throughout, but especially in that scene, makes me want a timeline in which he played Agatha Christie’s Mr. Harley Quinn.
Who I don't know, either, so thank you for the additional recommendation! I'm mostly familiar with the Harlequin in Sayers' Murder Must Advertise. I'm not quite sure why it worked out this way, since my mother is a comprehensive collector of mystery novels, but I've read a lot less Christie than Sayers or Allingham. The same is probably true of Ngaio Marsh, but I don't remember her as well. My one attempt to re-read her as an adult hit a patch of particularly nasty racism in Vintage Murder, so I haven't tried again.
I find the final scene of Pimpernel Smith extraordinary. I'm so glad you liked it!
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Mr. Satterthwaite realizes after the first story or so that when he encounters Quinn, it's because events are coming to a crossroads at which they must solve or prevent a murder -- they aren't always supposed to prevent a death, though, just the wrong kind of death; because Mr. Quinn's duties include psychopomp.
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That sounds lovely. I suspect I will enjoy these stories very much.
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I took it as the latter, because nothing in his later behavior toward Ludmila indicates that he's actually surprised when a woman shows intelligence and daring. (He is surprised to fall in love with her, mostly because he'd assumed Aphrodite Kallipygos was the only woman for him. You're a classicist, Smith, you should know these things.) I agree that it made me wary the first time I heard it, though.
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Does this help at all?
https://archive.org/details/PimpernelSmith
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Well, it's also on YouTube. The issue isn't that I can't find it without recourse to interlibrary loan; it's that the public domain is not known for the cleanness of its copies and I want something better than the scratchy library VHS of 2008. There's also the way in which physical copies have an importance to me that mp3s or e-books or media streams don't: if I love a movie this much, I want it on my shelf, not nebulously available from the internet. What is it doing in the public domain, anyway? There's all sorts of moies from 1941 that aren't.
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I can't speak to the details of this particular case, but prior to (IIRC) 1976, copyrights had to be actively maintained, requiring paperwork and possibly filing fees. Whoever owned the rights (possibly Howard, himself?) didn't renew them. *Most* movies from 1941 were either produced by big studios with legal staff to routinely handle that sort of thing, or were sold to such big studios at some point before the rights lapsed. The exceptions are now in the public domain (at least in the US).
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I imagine it would have been his family or the studio: he died in 1943. The production company was British National Films; Howard produced as well as directed and starred. The First of the Few (1942) and The Gentle Sex (1943) are also in the public domain, or at least they're on archive.org.
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...Scientist in the first scene has a picture of Marx on the wall.
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Oh, that is just wretched about the shampoo. I can't usually use any of the big name brands because even the mildest smelling ones tend to be too much for me, so I can only imagine how awful this new scent is. Hopefully, people will complain, and they will revert to the old scent. I don't know what the problem is with people that they need everything to be so heavily scented. It's not like we all run around unwashed, or even do the sort of heavy work to produce the sorts of odors that would need to be masked by such heavy smells. Migraine triggering aside, a lot of them seem to produce respiratory allergy symptoms in me.
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Same, actually: I don't get migraines from it, but I don't wear perfume and I can't spend much time around people who do, at least not the kinds that aren't just essential oils and sometimes even those don't work out. My nose stuffs up and my headache levels spike. I buy unscented soap and detergent and the closest thing I use to deodorant is baby powder. The variety of Pantene I've just stopped using was about the only scented product in my life, and it didn't have much of a smell. I'm still trying to determine how I feel about last night's experiment in non-Pantene shampoo. It didn't give me an allergic reaction, at least?
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Currently I use Shikai Color Reflect shampoo -- the one I have at the moment (for darker shades) smells like grape-flavored stuff, but not (to me) heavily so. Their basic conditioner doesn't have a strong smell to me.
I don't get allergic reactions to scents, but I dislike most heavy ones. I should start carrying some kind of neutral soap, because I can almost never use the stuff in a public restroom. I use lots of hot water and scrub, but I doubt it's as sanitary. If I ever run a business with a restroom, I shall put up a big sign saying that the soap has no perfumes and no triclosan (and make sure that is so).
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I remember loving Pimpernel Smith; I really need to see it again.
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Thanks. It was just one hundred percent unnecessary.
I remember loving Pimpernel Smith; I really need to see it again.
See above to
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Is true that Francis Sullivan is no Raymond Massey. His character plays like a sort of unholy mash-up between Göring and Goebbels to me. I remember liking that although von Graum is given a satirical introduction—attempting to fathom the English national sense of humor by immersing himself in their literature, since he's heard it referred to as their secret weapon; disgusted, he concludes that only a nation of imbeciles could have produced P.G. Wodehouse, Lewis Carroll, and Edward Lear—he's not a comic figure because of his incomprehension, but a dangerous one, a blunt instrument who fancies himself a student of human nature. He's utterly, humorlessly convinced of the rightness of the Nazi ethos, and unlike Chauvelin, there's nothing for the audience to find admirable in his dedication. I'm actually fine with that.
However, I had completely forgotten about the whole archaeological subplot! That's cool as balls.
Leslie Howard gives good intellectual heroes.
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It can be awkward.
(I am now thinking of The One That Got Away (1957), a film that derives a nice charge of cognitive dissonance from presenting its tremendously attractive protagonist as crush-worthy, except for the part where's a hotshot of the Third Reich. I can't think of anything else like it in its decade, and it's rare—for good reason—even since.)
If Francis L. Sullivan is your type, I'm not sure I've ever seen him as a hero, but he's a definitive Jaggers in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946) and he's good in Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950), along with everyone else who stars in that incredible piece of nihilism. And he does not play a Nazi.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alhTUo6Xhbw
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I think that was only sensible of you!
so I heartily approve. I'm guessing you've seen this?
Yes—I found it while trying to track down who the hell the band members were. It didn't help!
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They'll be fooled by my pheromonal signature!