The cat'll sleep in the mailbox and we'll never go to town

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Today is my niece's birthday observed. Her real birthday was Thursday, the same as Ada Lovelace. She loves buses and trucks and earth-moving machinery, so her present from me and derspatchel is a sturdy oversized board book of Virginia Lee Burton's Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939). She is two years old.

Last night was my family's annual Hanukkah party, complete with experimental frying. This year's discovery: deep-fried pickled fiddleheads are delicious. skygiants and genarti brought a jar of the ferns, my brother provided the batter and the oil, the results were pronounced something like fried clams from a photosynthetic planet and vanished rapidly. A friend of my mother's brought a half dozen donuts from Union Square Donuts and we meta-fried one of the plain kind at schreibergasse's suggestion. I think just over twenty people showed up. It was hectic, but I got my one traditional latke and caught some nice conversations in between making sure everyone had silverware and something to drink. Matthew gave me a box of Magic cards from a recent expansion based on Greek myths. I am absolutely delighted that I now own cards with names like "Sea God's Revenge," "Curse of the Swine," and "Ill-Tempered Cyclops." If there is an Odysseus analogue, I will have to find a copy. Ditto Sirens. [edit] "Shipwreck Singer." Excellent.

I feel like I've done nothing but run around for the last two or three days doing holiday-preparation things, but I saw Spotlight (2015) with Rob on Wednesday and made dinner with sairaali and ratatosk on Thursday night and that was pretty cool. Cornel Wilde's Storm Fear (1955) is a fascinatingly rough not-noir that I would like the sleep reserves to talk about sometime.

Courtesy of yhlee: a Roman nereid riding a sea-bull. If I had thousands of dollars to spend on jewelry, that is the sort of thing I would own.

Comments

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How was Spotlight?

Worth seeing. It is a solid, genuine ensemble picture, meaning that all four of the Spotlight reporters get their own threads, no single character is a protagonist, and all sorts of recurring, significant supporting characters come and go and reappear as the story moves on. As a retelling of historical events, it gains a lot of power from its restraint, by which I do not mean that Spotlight is not an angry film—it's a very angry film—but the material is inflammatory enough that it would feel cheap if sensationalized and so I really appreciate that, as far as I can tell, there are no melodramatic twists and turns to confront the reporters with the awful truth; it is taking enough of a toll on them to live for months with the knowledge of systematic sexual abuse and conspiracy, day in, day out, and worse every time a new piece of information comes to light. (In a quirk of statistical distribution, all members of the Spotlight team at the time were Catholic. Even for the angriest of them, there's an element of personal betrayal—and the subjectivity of being embedded in a system. The new editor of the Globe was a Florida Jew who had no compunction about investigating the Church. He is played very well by Liev Schreiber as an undemonstrative figure with acute social instincts; he never gets a scene where he opens up, but by the end we trust him. He is the outsider; he can see some things more clearly than people who have lived in this culture all their lives. He has no affinity whatsoever for baseball.) It's a very good movie about silence and the ways that the factors in institutional complicity are not all malevolent, like the reporter who doesn't know how to tell her devoted Catholic grandmother who goes to Mass three times a week and whose heart will break as soon as she finds out about the child abuse; it's a very good movie about the hard work of speaking out, how the real trick is not the willingness to speak, but the willingness of other people to listen and then to amplify. Some of the survivors have been trying to get this story out for years. Even the Globe has brushed them off: it's awful, but is it news? I've seen it compared to All the President's Men (1976), but even that movie is more of a thriller. Spotlight's deliberate, almost documentary, procedural pace reminded me more of The Naked City (1948). It starts when Marty Baron suggests investigating a story; it ends when the story goes to press. Anything that doesn't resolve within that six-month window is not the movie's problem. One of the reporters is separated from his wife, living in a basement apartment while his colleagues drop by with pizza because otherwise he will patently starve to death on a diet of boiled hot dogs and beer; we never find out what happens to their marriage, because it didn't get solved before "Church allowed abuse by priest for years: Aware of Geoghan record, archdiocese still shuttled him from parish to parish" came out in January 2002. I like that sort of thing. I like that all of its characters are people, even the ones we see incompletely or antagonistically; I applaud the casting of Len Cariou as Cardinal Law, because as soon as he opens his mouth, all you can hear is Sweeney Todd. I don't have much to say about the cinematography or the score, but Boston is played by itself rather than Vancouver or mostly Toronto. I don't know if it's the best possible film that could have been made from these events, but I don't know what that would look like, either. I was not sorry to have seen it and I rather hope it wins some awards when the season comes around.