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Just because you're forgotten doesn't mean you're forgiven
I seem to be having a very social weekend. Yesterday was spent entirely with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks, gaudior, and B. who is visiting from out of town, while this afternoon I saw Paths to Paradise (1925)—a delightful crime romance starring Betty Compson and Boston-born silent comedian Raymond Griffith and frustratingly, after a police car chase worthy of the Blues Brothers, missing its final reel—with my parents and derspatchel at the Somerville Theatre and then met sairaali in order to cook a recipe which had eluded us twice previously, the tamarind-braised beef short ribs with vanilla-glazed carrots from Ana Sortun's Spice (2006). The problem with making this dish on the fly is that the cooking actions themselves are simple, but the ribs need to braise for at least three hours and then the liquid needs rather longer than the stated twenty minutes to reduce to a glaze after that. This time we budgeted properly and started chopping the carrots and rehydrating the tamarind in the afternoon and Saira showed me the first three episodes of Lost Girl (2010–15) while the short ribs did their thing. I cannot believe I had never heard of this show. It has a lot of the worldbuilding faults of the urban fantasy of the '80's and '90's that it very much resembles, with its fundamentally Celtic Seelie Light and Unseelie Dark Courts Fae in contemporary Toronto into which the writers throw a kitchen sink of other traditions whenever they feel like it, but the combination of "explicitly bisexual female protagonist" and "spot the mythology" had my attention from the start. Like, I really approve of a siren who whistles to cast his glamour because it attracts less attention than singing on the street. This show had a dullahan! The last time I saw one of those was in Darby O'Gill and the Little People (1959)! It probably doesn't hurt that the starting premise reminds me slightly of Tanith Lee's Sabella or the Blood Stone (1980). I am kind of actively confused that the bartender is not the Dagda.
Courtesy ofrosefox: Universal Pictures: Restorations and Rediscoveries, 1928–1937. It would be impractical for many reasons for me to move into the Museum of Modern Art for a month, but I won't say I didn't think of it. I might still see if I can make some of these rarities later in the month or in June. I really want to see most of them. This would be reason number infinity I want a teleporter.
Courtesy ofladymondegreen: Alfred Cheney Johnston and the hula-hoop nudes of the Ziegfeld Follies. I've seen some of these images before, but never an article about their provenance. You want Paulette Goddard and Louise Brooks nude with hula hoops, click on. [edit] Apparently not, but the wider set of photographs is still fascinating.
Courtesy of bothasakiyume and Saira, because my particular interests are apparently visible from space: nudibranchs that look like David Bowie. It's actually quite wonderful. "Swamp thing style."
I found this photoset of Lizabeth Scott on my own, buthandful_ofdust reblogged it in the first place and I appreciate it.
I wish all of my DVDs were not in storage. Because of thinking about Hedda Gabler recently, I really want to rewatch Patrick Garland's A Doll's House (1973). There were actually two film adaptations of the play released that year, which must say something about the zeitgeist; the other was directed by Joseph Losey and stars Jane Fonda, but I can't imagine imprinting on it as intensely as I did on Garland's version in 2008. It opens the play out a little from the Helmers' drawing room, but not so much that it loses the domestic claustrophobia from which Nora's famous finally slamming door is the only liberation. Anna Massey plays Kristine Linde to Denholm Elliott's Nils Krogstad and the two of them almost steal the show from Claire Bloom and Anthony Hopkins. That's no small feat. But I care about their B-plot perhaps even more than I care about the A-plot, partly because the one is so beautifully patterned across the other. Ibsen sets the characters up as clouded mirrors of Nora and Torvald, old lovers separated once by economics and reunited by bad timing. Kristine's offer of employment at Torvald's bank comes at Krogstad's expense, the first honest job he's been able to hold since his "mistake" that he was never legally charged with and no one will let him forget—it pleases Nora's husband to award one of his wife's old friends this small financial security even as he withdraws it from an obviously less deserving soul, who on top of his social disgrace keeps committing the embarrassing presumption of forgetting their respective positions and calling Torvald by his first name like the schoolfellows they once were. Mrs. Linde seems a model employee, reserved, hardworking, self-possessed, no loose ends in her background and certainly no sideswipes with the law, so Torvald can feel just and munificent, rewarding the right kind of people and seeing that the wrong are properly punished. The fact that she's a widow only furthers her respectability as far as he's concerned. To Kristine, though, her marriage was indistinguishable from prostitution—seven years with a man she didn't love just to support her family before her husband died and left her with "nothing . . . not even grief." The man she did love was Krogstad. And when he questions, with all the corrosive, deliberate cynicism of someone trying to beat disappointment at its own game, whether she's reentered his life just to get Nora out of debt with him, she meets him with an unflinching answer: "A woman who's sold herself once for the sake of others doesn't make the same mistake again." That's the one line on which Massey flares up, and it convinces. Kristine could very easily be a plot device: she's the spark in the threads, Torvald's excuse for firing Krogstad, the immediate effect of which is the calling-in of Nora's IOU and presently the disintegration of the Helmers' marriage, though she is also Krogstad's eventual reason not to go through with the blackmail. As Massey plays her, she's a woman who's spent years keeping her eyes down and her mouth closed: not to be read easily, but not a dissembler, either. Her conversations with Krogstad are frank and direct, devoid of tit-for-tat seduction or moral appeal or any of the stratagems of melodrama. She calls herself a drowning woman, but she's more like driftwood to the hand, scarred and buoyant. I knew I cared about Elliott going in (and I cared about him even more going out), but after that I'd have watched Massey in anything. I like them so much I keep forgetting Ralph Richardson is also in the cast.
rushthatspeaks, gaudior, and B. who is visiting from out of town, while this afternoon I saw Paths to Paradise (1925)—a delightful crime romance starring Betty Compson and Boston-born silent comedian Raymond Griffith and frustratingly, after a police car chase worthy of the Blues Brothers, missing its final reel—with my parents and derspatchel at the Somerville Theatre and then met sairaali in order to cook a recipe which had eluded us twice previously, the tamarind-braised beef short ribs with vanilla-glazed carrots from Ana Sortun's Spice (2006). The problem with making this dish on the fly is that the cooking actions themselves are simple, but the ribs need to braise for at least three hours and then the liquid needs rather longer than the stated twenty minutes to reduce to a glaze after that. This time we budgeted properly and started chopping the carrots and rehydrating the tamarind in the afternoon and Saira showed me the first three episodes of Lost Girl (2010–15) while the short ribs did their thing. I cannot believe I had never heard of this show. It has a lot of the worldbuilding faults of the urban fantasy of the '80's and '90's that it very much resembles, with its fundamentally Celtic Courtesy of
rosefox: Universal Pictures: Restorations and Rediscoveries, 1928–1937. It would be impractical for many reasons for me to move into the Museum of Modern Art for a month, but I won't say I didn't think of it. I might still see if I can make some of these rarities later in the month or in June. I really want to see most of them. This would be reason number infinity I want a teleporter.Courtesy of
ladymondegreen: Alfred Cheney Johnston and the hula-hoop nudes of the Ziegfeld Follies. I've seen some of these images before, but never an article about their provenance. You want Paulette Goddard and Louise Brooks nude with hula hoops, click on. [edit] Apparently not, but the wider set of photographs is still fascinating.Courtesy of both
asakiyume and Saira, because my particular interests are apparently visible from space: nudibranchs that look like David Bowie. It's actually quite wonderful. "Swamp thing style."I found this photoset of Lizabeth Scott on my own, but
handful_ofdust reblogged it in the first place and I appreciate it.I wish all of my DVDs were not in storage. Because of thinking about Hedda Gabler recently, I really want to rewatch Patrick Garland's A Doll's House (1973). There were actually two film adaptations of the play released that year, which must say something about the zeitgeist; the other was directed by Joseph Losey and stars Jane Fonda, but I can't imagine imprinting on it as intensely as I did on Garland's version in 2008. It opens the play out a little from the Helmers' drawing room, but not so much that it loses the domestic claustrophobia from which Nora's famous finally slamming door is the only liberation. Anna Massey plays Kristine Linde to Denholm Elliott's Nils Krogstad and the two of them almost steal the show from Claire Bloom and Anthony Hopkins. That's no small feat. But I care about their B-plot perhaps even more than I care about the A-plot, partly because the one is so beautifully patterned across the other. Ibsen sets the characters up as clouded mirrors of Nora and Torvald, old lovers separated once by economics and reunited by bad timing. Kristine's offer of employment at Torvald's bank comes at Krogstad's expense, the first honest job he's been able to hold since his "mistake" that he was never legally charged with and no one will let him forget—it pleases Nora's husband to award one of his wife's old friends this small financial security even as he withdraws it from an obviously less deserving soul, who on top of his social disgrace keeps committing the embarrassing presumption of forgetting their respective positions and calling Torvald by his first name like the schoolfellows they once were. Mrs. Linde seems a model employee, reserved, hardworking, self-possessed, no loose ends in her background and certainly no sideswipes with the law, so Torvald can feel just and munificent, rewarding the right kind of people and seeing that the wrong are properly punished. The fact that she's a widow only furthers her respectability as far as he's concerned. To Kristine, though, her marriage was indistinguishable from prostitution—seven years with a man she didn't love just to support her family before her husband died and left her with "nothing . . . not even grief." The man she did love was Krogstad. And when he questions, with all the corrosive, deliberate cynicism of someone trying to beat disappointment at its own game, whether she's reentered his life just to get Nora out of debt with him, she meets him with an unflinching answer: "A woman who's sold herself once for the sake of others doesn't make the same mistake again." That's the one line on which Massey flares up, and it convinces. Kristine could very easily be a plot device: she's the spark in the threads, Torvald's excuse for firing Krogstad, the immediate effect of which is the calling-in of Nora's IOU and presently the disintegration of the Helmers' marriage, though she is also Krogstad's eventual reason not to go through with the blackmail. As Massey plays her, she's a woman who's spent years keeping her eyes down and her mouth closed: not to be read easily, but not a dissembler, either. Her conversations with Krogstad are frank and direct, devoid of tit-for-tat seduction or moral appeal or any of the stratagems of melodrama. She calls herself a drowning woman, but she's more like driftwood to the hand, scarred and buoyant. I knew I cared about Elliott going in (and I cared about him even more going out), but after that I'd have watched Massey in anything. I like them so much I keep forgetting Ralph Richardson is also in the cast.
no subject
It really is the only Ibsen I've clicked with so far. Hedda Gabler is interesting, but I don't especially like it. For years I couldn't remember if he or Strindberg had written The Wild Duck, I just remembered it was insanely depressing. I keep meaning to read The Lady from the Sea because it sounds in summary like the kind of ambiguous sea-haunting that would interest me—the protagonist is a lighthousekeeper's daughter, now a doctor's wife, who was once betrothed to a sailor who disappeared at sea; now it seems he's come back to claim her, but he might have drowned in between—but I'd like a translation I could trust. I can bash my way through Swedish well enough for song lyrics, Wikipedia articles, and evaluating whether the subtitles for The Seventh Seal (1957) are leaving out half the dialogue, but not for a complicated play.
I hope you didn't watch an hour and a half to discover that fact right at the end.
Oh, thank God, no. I was going to watch it and then I double-checked the runtime and then I didn't. I don't know what's missing, but I doubt it's worth my time to find out.
...This is a genuinely baffling thought. I can't picture a you who isn't interested in Roman retellings or ironic quip-drawling trainwrecks with eleventh hour sacrificial heroics.
I mean, when you put it that way . . .
Even at the time, the worst part was that the teacher in question was a very nice person, just not a very good teacher. We read Julius Caesar and she talked about the psychosexual implications of Portia's voluntary wound in the thigh. She required us to write essays on Sydney Carton as a Christ figure. I can't remember what she did with Kipling's Kim, but I'm sure it didn't make sense, either. She is the same teacher who ruined Sylvia Plath for me for years. And was very concerned about it all.
Thank goodness your mother had antidotes to hand!
It took me years to notice how much of a movie person my mother is. When I was growing up, my father would occasionally show me movies of great personal importance to him, like Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979) or the director's cut of Blade Runner (1982), but I got my earliest grounding in classic movies from my mother. When my seventh grade English class assigned us Jack Schaefer's Shane (1949), she showed me the 1953 film with Alan Ladd. When the restored version of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) played at the Brattle, she made sure we went. Of my parents, she was always the one who would realize I hadn't seen something famous—or just really good—and promptly sit me down and show it to me. I think it was very healthy.