Just to be a normal man, just to go out shaking hands

[sovay]

I don't understand Facebook's algorithms. Independent of any pages shared by my friends, it keeps presenting me with this photo of violinist Gil Shaham, upcoming guest of the BSO, and I cannot tell if it thinks that I am the sort of person who listens to classical music (true) or the sort of person who thinks this particular musician is great-looking (also true) and in either case I have no money for the symphony and extant commitments on one of the days he's playing anyway, but I still want to know which data they were farming to produce this result. Seriously, it's been every time I go to check in on the news. I'm not complaining, but I am impressed.



(I did not make it to the Brattle's screening of A Matter of Life and Death (1946), so the question of whether I find David Niven as beautiful in that movie as Andrew Moor does will have to wait for another time.)

Comments

[sovay]

she said she would have gone up that stairway for Michael Powell, as he would have for her.

I am glad to hear it. I hope when the time comes he's waiting at the other end to greet her, as I hope Pamela Brown was there for him. (Kathleen Byron and Deborah Kerr will be somewhere in the constellation. If it was complicated on earth, in heaven it shouldn't be so.)

The black-and-white of heaven, she said, was actually monochrome: clever Jack Cardiff filmed it in technicolor, then printed it without dye. If you see a good print, she said, it's pearly.

That's one of the reasons I want to see a print!

No one else would have thought of those lovely mischievous bits: the goat boy; Conductor 71; the great theatre of heaven dwindling into a galaxy, tinting as it shrank; and the vicar rehearsing A Midsummer Night's Dream with GIs; and the camera obscura, with our doctor as benevolent spy.

Those are the pieces I remember best—see linked post. What I don't remember so fondly is the Other World itself, except for the galaxy and the stairs.

It turns humans into art, at once vulnerable, comic, and unsettling. An artform for the dead to smile at.

It's stopped film. Like that line I loved and have never been able to find again on the internet: that cinema is twenty-four death masks a second.

"Seventy years old!" she said. I told them to go out and watch them all.

I hope they do.

So what do you think of David Niven?

[nineweaving]

I hope when the time comes he's waiting at the other end to greet her, as I hope Pamela Brown was there for him. (Kathleen Byron and Deborah Kerr will be somewhere in the constellation. If it was complicated on earth, in heaven it shouldn't be so.)

Constellations fit rather well in heaven.

That's one of the reasons I want to see a print!

I hope you will.

What I don't remember so fondly is the Other World itself, except for the galaxy and the stairs.

Except for Marius Goring (as trickster and fop), and the coke machine, it's all a bit chilly and regimented, yes. But then, it's a place you don't want to go. Earth is gloriously messy and contingent.

This is an awfully Ptolemaic cosmos: there are the unmoved movers in heaven, and the whole sublunary world. Niven should have been a meteor, but he fell without burning. Someone else had to flame out.

...cinema is twenty-four death masks a second.

Oh, that's really good.

So what do you think of David Niven?

I'm not usually one for charming rogues, but in this his roguery is tempered by memento mori.

Nine

[sovay]

Oh, that's really good.

Courtesy of the Nitrate Diva. I finally tracked it down via Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933).