Brigham's Blog: November 2010

25 Nov 2010

I watched the most remarkable documentary last night, Derby (1971), about the roller derby and Mike Snell's desire to skate in it. Snell is a 23 year-old man who looks like a working class James Dean, always wearing dark glasses. He's a husband with two kids who makes ends meet by working at Dayton Tire and Rubber in Ohio - it appears he makes his living manufacturing tires or retreaded tires. In the course of his applying for a $300 loan for a motorcycle you learn that he makes about $7,000 a year - this is described by all his friends to whom he reveals his roller derby plans as being a "good job."

In a conversation with his slack-jawed, gun-toting friend it is revealed that he is not at all faithful to his wife. I have never seen such an unlikable individual as Snell in a documentary. (Well, okay, I did in a documentary I once saw about neo-Nazis...)

In 1972 Ebert gave this film four stars!

What is extraordinary about it is the thoroughly working class nature of the protagonists; there was frequent dialogue that you just couldn't script. For instance, there's one remarkable scene with Mrs. Snell and her friend; they are dressed alike in polyester uniforms, perhaps from some coffee shop (this isn't explained, and it adds to the surreal nature of the scene). They accost a slatternly young woman whom they accuse of having affairs with their husbands, which was probably the case. The woman's appearance just screams trailer park. Needless to say she smokes - everyone smokes in this - and her eyes are thickly described in eyeliner. As my mother-in-law used to say, "Black as the hole of Calcutta!" She looks and sounds like a nasty piece of work; the kind of waitress you'd find in the Waffle House from Hell.

It reminded me of a scene from one of the documentaries about the White family of Boone County, West Virginia. (With the Whites, however, a gunfire fatality would be an outcome of the scene.)

The film ends on an inconclusive note - you never find out if Snell realizes his dream of skating in a roller derby league. Internet research confirms that he did, but not for long. No surprise there. And he and his wife got divorced shortly after the film was released - no surprise there, either.

I also finished watching the Terry Jones' Medieval Lives series... what fun! I learned a few interesting things:

1.) Jones briefly mentions a story about the "wise men" of Gotham, in village in Nottinghamshire that became proverbial for being where fools and madmen lived. (A Mother Goose rhyme refers to this: "Three wise men of Gotham went to sea in a bowl/And if the bowl had been stronger my story would be longer.") A good web site for this is here; read the tale of the "Feigned Madness." I knew that Gothamites were considered foolish, but I didn't know why. Now I know.

2.) The Medieval Church did NOT insist that the earth was flat. In fact, medieval man knew that it was round, and frequently portrayed in art Christ holding in his hand an orb which represented the world. The story of the flat earth-insisting church authorities got around via Washington Irving's 1828 account of the voyages of Christopher Columbus, in a scene where he debates with churchmen about falling off the edge of the world. In fact, the medieval church had no problem with science until the time of Galileo, when it became considerably more dogmatic.

3.) There is a famous painting of Richard III in the royal collection at Windsor Castle; I show it above. In it, Richard is portrayed with one shoulder somewhat higher than the other, in accordance with the Shakespeare play where he is a deformed hunchback (unsupported, by the way, in contemporary written accounts). Problem is, however, an x-ray examination of the painting reveals that the shoulder was heightened later on - it was not originally painted that way. Awesome... I didn't know this...

Happy Thanksgiving!

24 Nov 2010

The day before Thanksgiving; traditionally, the slowest day at work in the year. Oh, I suppose there are slower days between Christmas and New Years, but I always take those days off so I wouldn't know.

I'll be going on leave for a while, so there might or might not be updates here for the next week and a half. As always, it depends on how starved for the Internet I become.

We're having an unusual Thanksgiving. No family is around, so we had invited the missionaries over. They had to cancel, however. Cari doesn't want to cook so we'll eat at a restaurant. Problem is, most of them are closed or fully booked. So it looks like we'll be dining at a Chinese food place! It could be worse - it could be at a Waffle House. Later in the evening we're doing a dessert thing with the Five Families, so that redeems it.

Note the image I have chosen for today: two mice, two dogs and two ducks gather for a turkey dinner. While I cannot think of any anthropomorphic Disney turkeys, I still think this is somewhat ghoulish, don't you?

In my book about physics I'm currently at the section on the Higgs field - the theoretical field that imparts mass to sub-atomic particles - and this part is very dry. This, of course, leads to the celebrated Higgs boson, the "God" particle, so called because... well... I am unable to find out why. It seems a silly name, and I know physicists don't like it. (In fact, one called it "that goddamn particle").

The uber-expensive Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is expected to find the Higgs boson if it exists. So far, no dice. I'm guessing that it doesn't exist, and the whole Higgs field theory is bunk. But what do I know about this? Nothing. Just a guess. Only time will tell.

Walking into work this morning I noted the usual four story tree in the atrium, reflected that Christmas is coming... and immediately began to feel depressed. I don't know why. I think it has something to do with expectations and the absence of kids this year (we're only having one fly out, unlike last year). I haven't analyzed it. I don't want to.

We got our first Christmas card a couple of days ago - talk about an early mailer. This signals the start of our annual seasonal effort to identify the worst (that is, most self-serving and pediatric detail-laden) Christmas letter we get. Last year we agreed that we didn't get one; it was a rare year and they were all unobjectionable. The 2008 winning entry included the phrase "horse semen."

My philosophy is that if you have friends and you are sincerely interested in hearing from them and bringing them up to speed with yourself (and you should be), that this should take place in the year in the normal course of letter-writing or phoning. It shouldn't be a matter of a generic "personal" letter mailed out to everyone. But I'm not alone in disliking the Christmas letter. The funny thing is, looking at some articles on the net about bad Christmas letters, I frequently see a phrase: "I want to hurl." Is this what Christmas has come to, provoking vomiting?

Of course, 'tis the season to once again link to our all time favorite example: Page one, page two. (Note: This was never sent to us. It was a friend of a friend kind of thing. I would never post one we got to the Internet. We'd savor it ourselves.)

A professional photographer was at the Gettysburg Remembrance Day parade on Saturday - here are his photos. I'm in one of them in the 4th U.S. shot: the copyright label is a rather sad attempt to keep people from doing this with Photoshop and a few minutes of work. (Generally speaking, a blue and black logo on subjects wearing mainly dark blue is easy to remove.)

Even funnier: My friend Don right clicked and saved the full 2 MB file, and the copyright notice disappeared!

I'm in the back - the only guy wearing a forage cap instead of a Hardee hat, third from left. Note how most are looking at the horse crap in the street in an attempt to keep from marching in it. Not an especially good place for the photographer to position himself, I think you'll agree. He'll get repeated shots of guys looking at horse crap. (Sure, I could remove it with Photoshop, but as I treasure unintentional hilarity in reenacting, why would I do that?)

That's it. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend and I'll write again when I get back!

23 Nov 2010

I really like this photograph. Authentic panhandling. I'd laugh if I saw this on Duke of Gloucester St. in Williamsburg...

My wife and I ate in a McDonald's for lunch yesterday. A friend of mine describes the McRib as looking like "a fingerless hand." Here's my visual interpretation of that.

I'm in an odd part of that book about quantum mechanics I'm reading (Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos) that describes a sort of quantum mechanical, non-causal approach to history - that is, where the present influences the past. It's bizarre, and I don't even understand well enough to describe it for you adequately. It involves lasers, beam-splitters and detectors. Profoundly curious. This is a mind-blowing book. I look forward to the string theory sections, where the author connects the cosmology and quantum mechanics sections together.

Some capsule reviews of films I've seen recently:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 - My wife and I went to see this last night. We were in a theater with only thirteen other people.... the Monday 4:35 showing is the one to see if you want to miss the crowds!

I'd like to say that I enjoyed this installment as much as the others, but I didn't. In a word, it's dull. Yes, yes, I know, the Harry Potter story and plot gets darker; I read all the books. (For the record, I didn't like the last one.) I suppose HP fans would loudly insist that the movies are faithful to the books and should be - but what works in a book doesn't always make for a compelling film. This one had none of the humor, sparkle or visual interest that made the previous installments so interesting to watch. It seemed like the journal of a bad camping trip where the weather sucked.

And call me cynical, but I am now tired of hearing Harry lament the passing of his parents. It's a trope used in every film. Enough, already. It reminds me of when I used to read Superman comics and encountered the 3,473rd retelling of how the planet Krypton broke up and Superman's parents put him into a space ship and launched him to earth, etc.

Another problem was pacing, which was badly off. It's a 2 1/2 hour film that could have and should have been tightened up to two hours. There were parts where I mentally began to wander. (If you watch enough films noir you get spoiled for an economical 90 minute running time with no padding.) Salon's reviewer wrote, "In this part of the movie, and indeed for much of "Deathly Hallows," it feels as if Harry and his mates have wandered into some other film in some other genre." Exactly. It's like that whole Hong Kong sequence in the last Batman film... more of an exercise in "Look what I can do with my unlimited blockbuster budget" than a case of artistic appropriateness. I'm expecting and hoping that the final HP installment will be better.

Anchoress (1993) - A dreamy and surreal black and white work about a 14th C. peasant girl who falls under the spell of the Virgin Mary and allows herself to be shut up into a small room, where she becomes the local hermit. I first saw most of this on an International Cinema type show broadcast on TV years ago and have always wanted to see it from start to end. An interesting work; a bit of an art house production - but I enjoy those from time to time.

Umberto D. (1952) - Vittorio De Sica's masterpiece about aging, and arguably the first entry in what was later termed Italian neorealism. As usual, Roger Ebert nails why it is so good: we care about the title character. A common flaw in modern works is that, for various reasons, we do not become sympathetic to the protagonists. This being the case, scenes where the protagonist's life are threatened become less engaging. De Sica doesn't allow that to happen. In fact, for the last fifteen minutes of this film my eyes were wet as I understood and followed this dignified old man's descent into a suicide attempt. This is a film with a rare degree of compassion and humanity. As with Sansho the Bailiff (1954), the emotional impact of this film is not easily forgotten.

Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (2004) - Netflix's user preference software found this one for me, and I'm very glad it did. It's excellent! In eight half-hour installments, Jones (shown above) looks at the various characters in medieval life: king, peasant, damsel, monk, knight, etc. It's funny and informative, and the Monty Pythonesque animations are great. I had enjoyed Jones' wonderful study on the Crusades (yard sale VHS tapes!); I'll have to find his series on Barbarians, too. He's a skilled historical presenter. Better yet - he himself wrote these episodes. Jones is that rare thing: An actor who is not only skilled at comedy, but can write intelligently.

A good Jones quote: "The main reason I wanted to make Medieval Lives was to get my own back on the Renaissance. It's not that the Renaissance has ever done me any harm personally, you understand. It's just that I'm sick of the way people's eyes light up when they start talking about the Renaissance. I'm sick of the way art critics tend to say: 'Aaaah! The Renaissance!' with that deeply self-satisfied air of someone who is at last getting down to the Real Thing. And I'm sick to death of that ridiculous assumption that that before the Renaissance human beings had no sense of individuality."

22 Nov 2010

Gettysburg Saturday was great! Photos here. It would have been a perfect ten on the Event-O-meter, except our pard Chris was missing, so we declared it to be a nine.

A reader named Slats wrote, "Tell us about your rugby career." I already have. It's all here, in excruciating detail, starting with my "Rugby Rookie's Journal," near the top. Every practice session, every match, every party, in my usual compulsively documentational style.

The executive summary is as follows: I played 83 matches from 1998 to 2006, some of them a full match (two 40 minute halves), most of them b-sides (30 or 35 minutes per half), some of them cut short due to injury. I was active with my club - Western Suburbs RFC - for fourteen seasons. I was given three awards at the end of the year club banquets (of which I am enormously proud - they hang on my office wall): "Most Improved" in my rookie season, "Best Forward B" and the "Greg Gregory Award," a special thing due to the enormous amount of club administrative work I did. I never scored a try, not one. Not one solitary point ever put on the board by yours truly. Why not?

Part of the problem was that I normally played in the second row position. If you're playing in position, that is, playing to ensure good, playable ball gets out to the backs, you're not going be set up to score very often. Another obvious reason is that I was old (42 when I began) and generally slow and out of breath!

But there were many heartbreaking near trys. Twice I had the ball within striking distance of the try line, against a club with famously poor tacklers. You might know, the guys facing me on both occasions were lent to the opposition by our club - and they well knew how to tackle. Another time I was oh-so-close, but a opposition player managed to grab and hold on to my ankle, which brought me down. In my last season, I was well-positioned for a try; nobody was in front of me - and it was a clear run. Our fly-half, Elvis, knew I had faded back and was ready to toss me the ball once it came out of the scrum. It finally did, sloppily, rolling crazily on the ground, and Elvis never got it. Consequently, neither did I.

In one match an Old Boy had simply flipped me the ball in what didn't look like a formal line out. I did nothing with it; it was then I learned that in rugby a quick, informal toss-in was perfectly legal and could be played upon. In another match, the same fellow - an Old Boy friend of mine - had set up a special line out play specifically designed for me to score from (my lack of my first try was now well-known in the club) that, for some reason, an officious referee disallowed. By my last season I had ruefully pretty much given up, figuring that it just wasn't in the cards.

I did, however, mightily participate in a few pack tries - these are exhausting affairs when someone gets the ball near the try line and the forward pack gets together in a maul and shoves and heaves a struggling mass of humanity over the line. I was an excellent shover, and in one of these I saw stars after we were done. Whew.

Lamentably, perhaps my all-time greatest rugby moment was one dealing with revenge. In one match, my opposition player #4 (left lock) was a guy about my height, that is, 6' 4". I was about 280 pounds at the time, he was perhaps 250. He appeared to be a few years younger than I, but he was a fellow Old Boy (over age 35). Old Boys tend to play mean and dirty, and this guy was no exception. In one play, when I was on the ground in a ruck, he made a point of deliberately stepping on my arm with his boots. (Rugby boots have 1" aluminum studs - they hurt.) I looked at him and he looked at me. I gave him a raised eyebrow, "Is this how we're going to play this match, old fella?" look and he smirked. A smirk. Okay. We'll see about educating him some.

About fifteen minutes later, during play, sure enough, he got the ball within striking distance of me. I got up a bit of speed and hit him with everything I had, aiming for the stomach. I also had a little technique where I was able to ride players down, that is, use my weight advantage to fall upon them once he got to ground. Perfectly legal, but he must have felt like he was hit by a freight train. BAM. An "oooohh" issued from the guys watching the match on the sidelines, and the other fellow didn't get up after I had.

The ref blew the whistle, calling for a short break to see if an injury had occurred, and stood over the player, who, after about thirty seconds, very slowly got to his feet, rubbing his shoulder. I looked at him with the same raised eyebrow look, "Do we understand each other now?" and he looked back at me with sort of a rueful expression that, frankly, was worth the try I never made. I exchanged smiles with my friend Kelly who saw the whole thing from the sidelines, and continued with the match. Afterwards Kelly said, "Brigham, that hurt to watch!"

One another occasion an unstoppable force met an unmovable object when me and a guy my size slammed into each other in a tackle; we both somehow wound up on our backs, dazed. We sat up and stared groggily at each other. It was actually rather funny. At the party he and I discussed it. He said, grinning, "Geez, that was unpleasant!" Geez, it was.

Anyone who has ever played rugby for any length of time has some injury stories; we like to say, "You only have so many rugby matches in you." I had a rib or two bruised on a couple of occasions, and once, a rib was popped out of the cartilage near my sternum in a scrum; that's a distinctly unpleasant feeling - it's like being de-boned. I once tore the longus and brevis tendons in my ankle. For weeks afterwards a tendon would loosen and slip across the ankle bone unexpectedly, shooting a pain. That was special. And once, in a scrum, I painfully hurt a back muscle. I figured it was healed the week after to enable me to play, and discovered it wasn't in a scrum when I couldn't hold and collapsed the entire formation - an awful experience. (It's like being pushed to the ground by your head.) Finally, whenever I look into a mirror I see a scar over my left eye from a practice session, where a guy had stepped on my forehead with a boot stud. Blood everywhere. And there were various other arm, back and leg bruises. I still have shoulder pains from my most recent season, four years ago.

I sometimes miss rugby. As was the case in my time spent in the Marine Corps, I never achieved much, but I was proud of having taken part.

19 Nov 2010

Tonight, for a lark, we attend "Albopalooza," which is a political fund-raiser for our state representative Dave Albo. It'll be held at Jaxx, Springfield's kind-of-divey rock venue. A band composed of local and state Republicans will be playing rock (Albo plays bass). Hmmmm. My Creative Memories consultant (scrapbooking) will be there. It ought to be... interesting.

A friend sent me this link about Iwo Jima "reenactments." Interesting photos! Turn your sound volume down - or off. It plays a ridiculous and inappropriate Elvis Presley song when the page is pulled up.

Here's a mind-blower: scientists have managed to create and control some anti-matter. Whoa. Can movies about anti-matter bombs be far off? (Note my unconcern about anti-matter bombs.)

We dined at the always-crowded Mike's American Grill in Springfield the other night, my favorite restaurant. We've been going there since 1987, when it first opened and when we first moved into town. I talked to a manager, and she told me something fairly amazing: Mike's is the highest-grossing restaurant in the state of Virginia. It's also the 63rd highest grossing restaurant in the nation. Wow... when you consider all the restaurants in New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas... The reason they make money hand over first is clear to me: it's very well managed and the food is wonderful, and always has been.

I've been using the heck out of Netflix since I got it:

Le Cercle Rouge (1970): A highly-regarded Jean-Pierre Melville heist film. It's not a bad film, but the main problem with it is that it's 140 minutes long, and does no more than a classic period RKO film noir did in just over an hour. Watching this made me appreciate how terse and efficient the old school film makers were! A remake is in the works; it'll star Orlando Bloom, who is learning martial arts in Hong Kong for his part in the film. And that's all I need to know to avoid it entirely.

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005): Penn and Teller call this anti-Wal-Mart documentary socialist, but I don't care. I think Wal-Mart is a net blight upon the American economy, and I try not to shop there. (My wife refuses to shop there at all.) Besides, they generally sell cheap Chinese-made crap. This is one issue where I'm on the side of the political liberals.

Dr. Who: Planet of the Dead (2009): Compleatist as I am, I was only able to get about thirteen minutes into this one before director Russell T. Davies' usual feminist agenda reared its tiresome head and I tuned out. Reading the viewer reviews convinces me that I'm not missing a thing.

Shakespeare's Women and Claire Bloom (1999): Claire Bloom, of course, is a noted Shakespearean actress; I watched this documentary because I was aware that she portrayed Lady Ann in Laurence Olivier's 1955 production of Richard III (which includes incidental music by William Walton that I have loved since I was a teen). Oliver re-wrote Shakespeare so the famous wooing scene takes place over a casket containing Lady Ann's husband, not her father-in-law. I will grant Olivier this indulgence because that scene is one of the glories of British cinema: the acting is spot on and Shakespeare's dialogue just crackles. Even after more than 400 years it is still astonishing... Was ever woman in this humor wooed? Was ever woman in this humor won? Indeed. I hasten to point out that stunning image above is not from some men's magazine - it's a Universal Studios still from 1966. The beautiful and elegant Bloom was once married to Rod Steiger - the most boorish, veins-popping-out-of-the-neck scenery-chewer in Hollywood. Go figure.

You are undoubtedly wondering if she ever starred in any notable films noir. No. But she was cast opposite Richard Burton in the wonderful The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), which is properly called a spy thriller but has a definite film noir mood and fatality. You could say it's the most noirish of the secret agent films - which is why I admire it so. In fact, it's my favorite spy film, hands down.

Dark City (1950): An indifferent noir with a great cast: Charlton Heston, Liz Scott, Jack Webb, Henry Morgan, Ed Begley... too bad all that 1950's talent didn't result in a better film. I've been waiting for a decade to see this one, but I'm not disappointed because I'm aware that reviews were mixed. It was merely okay. I liked it, but it needed a touch of DAME HUNGRY KILLER COP RUNS BERSERK!, you know what I mean?

Classic Albums: Pink Floyd - The Making of "The Dark Side of the Moon" (2003): There are some rather puzzling comments from Roger Waters which lead me to believe that he may have smoked too much grass in his youth; guitarist David Gilmour is by far the most articulate of the bunch. I'm always interested to learn about the origins of songs and was pleased to learn that the surpassingly serene "Us and Them" (a favorite of mine with special memories) was originally used as incidental music for scenes of violence from Zabriskie Point, a 1970 film by the much over-rated Michangelo Antonioni. You also get to learn about the intriguing spoken snippets mixed into the spaces between the songs on the album.

My first exposure to Dark Side of the Moon was a 1973 or 1974 trip to Tower Records on Sunset Strip with my pal Mike; he bought the album there. When we got home we put it on the turntable and listened to it while shooting some pool in the converted garage. I was immediately wowed by what I can only call its sonic qualities - it sounded amazing. Excellent songwriting combined with superb production and intriguing sounds; no wonder it was on the charts from 1973 to 1988, longer than any other album in history.

Tomorrow I suit up in the navy blue wools to march in Gettysburg with Mister Lincoln's Army. They're calling for partly cloudy weather in the high fifties - it ought to be another gala occasion, like last year. I hope that awesome brass band makes a reappearance!

Have a great weekend!

18 Nov 2010

My friend Chris tells me that last year Mercedes-Benz reintroduced the famous "gull wing" design in their SLS AMG. While it is a nice-looking car, in my eyes it just cannot compete with the original gull wing, the 300 SL. Compare. They got the lines of the original precisely right - it cannot be improved upon. It is for me the prettiest car ever built. Good try, but, no. The prettiest new car to my eyes is the Alfa-Romeo 8C.

...which has always caused me to wonder. Styling is essentially a cost neutral activity. In other words, styling an Alfa 8C on a piece of paper is no more expensive than styling a 2010 Ford Mustang. So how come the Alfa looks so much better? Why is it that expensive luxury items like cars and watches always look finer than the lesser cost items?

Take a Seiko watch, for example. There are lots of nice-looking ones, but none of them look like, say, an IWC. Why is this? Oh, sure, an IWC might have a sapphire crystal instead of a mineral glass crystal - that's a cost difference. Or an IWC might have a gold case rather than a stainless steel case, another cost difference. But when you pick up a fine Swiss watch there is a quality difference in look that practically screams at you that the Seiko just doesn't have. How come? Is it a matter of the Japanese wanting to retain an Asian, non-Swiss look and feel? Or is there something about the way the Swiss design, say, dials that results in a higher quality look than the way Seiko designs dials?

I began to ponder this back in the mid-Nineties, when I became interested in fine Swiss watches. I wanted to know if it was possible to attain the look of a fine Swiss watch without the expense. I discovered that, no, it isn't. (Especially with Hong Kong replicas which fail miserably.) But I don't know why not. I suppose, in the end, materials and craftsmanship really count and are noticeable. In order to have a quality product the three essentials must be present: styling, craftsmanship and materials.

This was a major selling point with the original Volkswagen Beetle. Despite the fact that it was most definitely an economy car and was priced like one, it was clearly built with German quality standards. All the parts fit together well and the car exuded a look of craftsmanship that was often not present in domestic cars. Later on, Honda and Toyota learned this lesson to great advantage.

I watched another fun Aki Kaurismaki film last night, Lights in the Dusk (2006), my ninth. Some of you will know I'm an Aki fan from other postings. Roger Ebert is spot on in his review of this film. It's classic Kaurismaki: Moody shots of industrial Helsinki, saturated colors, working class characters taking long, thoughtful puffs on cigarettes and staring intently (there might be one character in this who isn't shown smoking), deadpan dialogue, blond mullets, homely women, dark humor... as one reviewer claims, "A perfect tonic to current Hollywood fare." This film is slightly different from Kaurismaki's usual work in that the protagonist, Janne Hyytiäinen (shown above), is better-looking than the protagonists in Aki films, who normally look, well, like hoboes. He's a bit greasy and scruffy, but that look is in. This fellow could be a model. The homeliest woman in Finland, Kati Outinen, the Match Factory Girl herself, has a bit part as a cashier.

Okay, yes, you can take me to task for being "lookist." I will quickly assure you that a smile makes practically anyone look more attractive, but smiling actors and actresses aren't in Kaurismaki's bag of tricks. (As Ebert writes, you get the impression that their cigarette is the highlight of their day.) Even Kati Outinen cleans up and looks better smiling; I'm sure in real life she's a delightful person.

Netflix calls this film a film noir. While it does have a classic film noir plot - a guy becomes a patsy in a jewel heist and serves time in prison for a woman - it doesn't qualify because, at heart, it's a humorous work. Darkly humorous, but humorous. The noirish fatal mood simply isn't present. The viewer who understands Kaurismaki is smiling too much throughout the film for this to be film noir.

To me what's far more depressing than the plots, acting or Scandinavian mullets in an Aki film are the relentless modern architecture and interiors. It looks Euro-socialist to me - that overall tyrannical Helvetica look, you know what I mean? If I lived in Helsinki I think I'd starve for Greek Revival and Georgian.

Funny story by local film reviewer Michael Jeck: He once met Aki Kaurismaki and asked him if Finland was such a seriously depressing and unhappy place as he depicted in his films. Kaurismaki took a long drag on his cigarette, exhaled, and replied laconically, "It's a wonderland."

There's a catchy rock song played therein by a Finnish band named "Melrose": "In the Meanwhile." Listen to it. Part of the chord progression is standard rock, part of it isn't. As I drifted off to sleep last night I had this tune in my head.

I'm getting over my cold or sinus infection, whatever it is. I'm now in the usual recovery stage where I get weird bursts of energy and my mind starts racing. In fact I sort of awakened in a burst 40 minutes early this morning, my mind like a slide presentation with a hyperactive guy manning the page up/page down keys. Geez. The residual of whatever it is I have is a need to cough. Since I'm told I cough very loudly, this startles people riding the Metro with me. I figure since I probably got the bug on the Metro in the first place, it serves 'em right.

That book I'm reading about physics, quantum mechanics and cosmology is wonderful; the writer is able to convey complex ideas in common English quite well, often using the Simpsons as examples. For instance, he describes Einstein's EPR paradox using Ned Flinders' twins. It's odd but it works. I could go on about the stuff I'm reading in this book, but this blog entry is long enough. Time to close.

17 Nov 2010

Organ recital follows: I saw a nurse practitioner yesterday and got a prescription for amoxicillin. She thinks I may have a sinus infection, not a cold, which explains why the symptoms keep coming back. Yesterday I was bolting down large glasses of orange juice and napping. Makes for a slow day.

I forgot to report back on the Webelos scouts project we did last Saturday morning. We went to a nearby nature center and heard from a knowledgeable and enthusiastic young fellow who is attending college for a Parks and Recreation degree. I'm glad there are people interested in attending college for this kind of thing; I'm certainly not. He trotted out a big box of rocks. The boys got to handle petrified dinosaur poop and hardened lava, sniff sulfur rocks and pound on soapstone rocks... for a ten year-old male, that's guaranteed fun. Afterwards we cooked hot dogs on a grill and made s'mores - more fun. It was a raging success.

I started the Lp Digitization Project yesterday - the follow on effort to the Cassette Digitization Project - that is, I'm taking vinyl albums and turning them into .mp3 files. I began with my Alice Cooper Lps: Killer, Love it to Death and School's Out (more to come). Heh heh... Alice. The Coop. I love the dead. What a contrived act! The music is essentially three chord rock - the stage show theatricality was pure show biz. But Alice Cooper was one of my guilty pleasures.

I discovered him in February 1974, when I saw a friend bring the Billion Dollar Babies Lp to electronics class one morning. You couldn't miss it - this being the era of promotion utilizing the 12" vinyl cover format, the record sleeve was a lurid green snakeskin wallet. It even had an over sized billion dollar bill within, embellished with the band's likeness. "What's that?" I asked. "Alice," he intoned. I asked to look at it and was intrigued - one of those little intellectual triggers that occur from time to time that has gotten me into the Marine Corps, Civil War reenacting and rugby to name but three. Later that evening I checked the record out from the Burbank public library. Yes, a copy of a record featuring a song about necrophilia was available in the public library in 1974. (While friends and lovers mourn your silly grave/I have other uses for you, darling.) In my usual style, familiar to anyone who knows me, I quickly checked out other Alice records, devoured them, and read everything about him in periodicals using the index; he was quite the phenom in the early Seventies.

But I was first alerted to Alice Cooper in an odd way, three years prior: the big Warners Brothers studio building walls fronted West Olive Avenue in Burbank; Dad and I used to drive by these on our Sunday joy rides. Sometime in the late Sixties or early Seventies, the studio had started erecting enormous publicity billboards - these were perhaps thirty feet square and had great visual impact. With the release of the Love it to Death Lp in 1971, a garish image of a staring Alice Cooper, sloppy eyeliner and all, had appeared. "Who is that?" I wondered.

My parents found all this disconcerting. Up to that point I had mainly listened to classical music; now there was raucous rock and roll with some really vile lyrics coming out of my stereo speakers. Mom asked me one day, "So you're listening to swing music now?" Ha ha... Alice Cooper - swing. Good old Mom...

Alice Cooper lead to David Bowie. David Bowie led to Mott the Hoople, the Blue Oyster Cult and other acts, and before long I was listening to rock nearly all the time. I still loved classical, but the thrill of discovery wasn't there, it was with rock. Earlier this year I found an Alice CD at a yard sale, his 1986 Constrictor. It was unlistenable arena rock. It's on my iPod - but not for long. And a few years back I rented the Alice Cooper Welcome to my Nightmare concert VHS. Hearing it from the kitchen, when I was done my wife asked, "Did you enjoy that little jaunt into the past?" "Not really," I replied. I have clearly moved on.

I have started reading The Fabric of the Cosmos - Space, Time and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene, one of my occasional forays into cosmology and physics. It's difficult for a writer to express the mind-numbing implications of quantum mechanics to a lay readership in words, avoiding equations. We shall see how well Greene does.

Oh, yeah... I attended that Air Force Band saxophone quartet concert Friday night I mentioned. It was a lot of fun! I learned about Rudy Wiedoeft, a sax composer/player from the 1920's. (The band played his Saxophobia and Valse Erica.) He's credited with sparking off a nationwide saxophone fad that became so pervasive that some municipalities passed ordinances outlawing saxophone playing between the hours of 10:30 PM and 6 AM! I also inspected the smaller Steinway horizontal the Masonic Memorial theatre has for use - a young lady played it in a couple of sax pieces. It looks like an older instrument, perhaps fifty or sixty years old. But it being a Steinway it still could be worth tens of thousands of dollars. I wish I had it...

16 Nov 2010

Warning! Organ recital follows... I have yet another head/chest cold, my third in two months. I'm tired of this. I'm going to try to make an appointment with my doctor today (if he can see me) and get him to write me up a prescription for an anti-biotic.

I have been making my way through the fourth season of Dr. Who - that is to say, the third full season starring Scottish actor David Tennant as the Doctor. I had started watching the rebooted series a few years back, but gave up on them because they seemed dumbed-down and too full of explosions and pop cultural references. Too American, in other words. So I'm using the Netflix streaming video feature to catch up, so I can say "I've seen them all."

In fact, I have seen every syndicated episode of Dr. Who, 1963-2008. That's a lot, if you've ever suffered through those early stilted black and white episodes where the companion repeatedly gets lost or in trouble, and the Doctor repeatedly has to save him or her.

The fourth season was almost unwatchable for a number of reasons. Under the direction of executive producer Russell T. Davies (who is gay), the series has become stridently feminist with frequent dollops of what seems like a homosexual agenda. It's almost like reading a Berenstain Bears book: If there's an authority figure - head of U.N.I.T., captain of a space vessel, U.K. Prime Minister, lead archealogist, Head of the Shadow Coalition - it'll always be an aggressive, take no nonsense female. Men, especially Americans, are generally depicted as helpless dolts. The first series introduced an absolutely insufferable character named Captain Jack who is a bi-sexual; he continually makes passes at men and women. (Usually men.) This, I suppose, is meant to make the show "hip." Sadly, the writers give this character eternal life - he apparently cannot be killed. Unfortunate in the extreme. But there's some hope: over billions of years he evolves into a giant face in a jar, presumably without genitals.

There is also anti-gun hypocrisy. The doctor is very vocal about hating guns - but they seem to be okay when some female (Rose Tyler) is holding a ridiculously large rifle, looking dangerous and bad. And military types are usually depicted as being cruel, ignorant and... male. Except, of course, when it's a female wearing the uniform, then she is professional, smart, capable and well-intentioned.

The fourth series companion, Catherine Tate (shown above), is especially loud, annoying and working class. I watched the last episode featuring her last night - hooray. You might know, she's the one who saves the universe. In quick, slangy exchanges of shouted Estuary English dialogue with the Doctor they both become impossible to understand - the BBC might at least provide subtitles for Americans. By the way, there's a lot of shouting nowadays, so much so that one reviewer calls Tennant "Dr. Shout."

The music is more of the same... whenever the excitement ramps up the Mormon Tabernacle Choir files in for some semi-wordless, Carmina Burana-style chants - which I find to be an especially tiresome cliche. You can never quite make out what they're chanting. Something in Latin, maybe, for added ponderousness. I have a suggestion:

The-doc-tor-is-in-trou-ble
Get-some-gal-to-help-on-the-doub-ell
The-earth-is-threat-ened-now
The-crap-hit-the-fan-and-how

etc.

Come to think of it, those chants almost sound like Daleks came up with the phrasing.

The previous Dr. Who series may have been low budget and, at times, precious, but at least it was good, honest science-fiction, understated, written well, thoroughly British, without resorting to constant explosions, hugging, weepiness, kisses and romantic themes. Tom Baker - the tall, toothy fellow with the long scarf - remains the definitive Dr. Who for me. I also like Sylvester McCoy's portrayal. I very much miss the understated pre-1989 Dr. Who. The fifth season of the rebooted series has a new executive producer, who is a heterosexual, and a new Doctor. Maybe they improve things.

It remains to be said that the David Tennant Dr. Who is enormously popular in the U.K. and America and I have, once again, the minority view. (In the arts it seems to come with being me.) But it doesn't mean I'm wrong!

15 Nov 2010

I hereby declare the yard sale season closed! There were only a couple to be had last Saturday morn, and a church bazaar. It's over, folks.

I really don't know why the matter of yard sale signs has to be such a difficult thing. People stick a ton of needless, unreadable text on a sign and plop it on a busy street. Who can stop to read it? Hear me, ye home-owners: All that's needed for a yard sign is two elements, the phrase "yard sale" and an arrow. That's it. Nobody cares how "huge" it is, we don't care about the time you open and close (we expect you'll simply remove your signs when you're done - in fact, you need to) and we don't have time to read all your text about what kinds of things you're selling. You've probably written it too small for us to read while driving by. (I saw one sign this past weekend that was black on dark blue. Good luck reading that!)

My last purchase of 2010 was a book about the production of the Simpsons series which I mailed to my son.

I watched some interesting things on Netflix over the weekend:

Iphigenia (1977): One of those Michael Cacoyannis adaptations of a play by Euripides, it fits nicely alongside his Elektra (1962) and The Trojan Women (1971). Now I've seen all three. Irene Papas is, as always, majestic. She is one of the most powerful actresses of her era. In this she plays Clytemnestra, who unknowingly delivers her daughter Iphigenia to her husband Agamemnon to sacrifice, so that the Gods will produce winds for the Greek navy to sail upon to attack Troy. In the earlier Elektra, a younger Papas played the title role; she has Clytemnestra murdered because Clytemnestra had Agamemnon murdered in revenge for Iphigenia's death. Got that? It's great stuff, this classic Greek drama - I love it.

Hidden Fear (1957): A dull late period noir. Stars John Payne, who was possibly the most sullen and driven noir protagonist in the genre. The scene stealers in this movie are, in order, 1.) A Mercedes 300 SL Gullwing, 2.) A pretty blonde and, 3.) the Copenhagen setting.

The Virgin Spring (1960): One of the relatively few Ingmar Bergman films I haven't seen. I can't do better than the plot synopsis on IMDb: "Set in beautiful 14th century Sweden, it is the sombre, powerful fable of wealthy land-owning parents whose daughter, a young virgin, is brutally raped and murdered by goat herders after her half sister has invoked a pagan curse. By a bizarre twist of fate, the murderers ask for food and shelter from the dead girl's parents." "Sombre" is right. This was one of the most sombre films I've ever seen. It's quite good; I like early Bergman.

The Mark of Cain (2000): A documentary about Russian prisoner tattoos and the meanings thereof. What it's really about, however, is the crowded and brutal Russian prison system. I was surprised at how polite the prisoners seemed to be - they rarely swore. In Russia, you could get four years for stealing window glass... or murder.

Blue Beard (2009): A French retelling of the grim fairy tale by director Catherine Brelliat; I quite liked it. I have now seen this story three times, in three widely varied treatments: the superb one act opera by Bela Bartok, the 1944 Edgar Ulmer movie, and this.

I'm also making my way through recent Doctor Who episodes; the rebooted 2005 series. Geez, those have become incredibly complicated. The teleplays have become like modern comic books - you have to have read a bunch of other material to understand what's going on. I'm not sure that's a good thing. It used to be a guy in a box with a companion who traveled through time and space. Now he travels with a ton of storyline baggage.

12 Nov 2010

Regarding my ten favorite films noir posting from the other day, my friend Bob Fawcett asked in an e-mail, "You said you preferred 1950's noirs to 1940's ones but you didn't say why. How do they differ?" More precisely, I prefer noirs made after about 1948 to the ones made 1940-1947. Here's how 1940's and 1950's noirs differ:

Acting style: I call it the "Gee, you're swell!" school of acting, a carry-over from 1930's films where the prevailing acting style was stagey, energetic and dated. What suits a Busby Berkeley musical doesn't suit film noir. What's worse, there were still traces of that theatrical Mid-Atlantic prestige dialect heard in 1940's films (Joan Bennett is perhaps the worst offender in this regard). By the late Forties the acting style had become far more naturalistic, more like the style you see in films today. Not as energetic, not as broad. This suits film noir better - which, after all, purports to show the world as it really is. This, perhaps more than any other reason, is why I prefer 1950's noirs to 1940's examples.

Psychopaths: There were a few over-the-top sickos in 1940's films, but this was the exception rather than the rule. For instance, films like The Sniper and a remake of M (which featured a child murderer) had to wait for the 1950's; producers weren't exploring hardcore social deviants as much in the 1940's. I like the formula of hard-boiled, emotionally cool protagonists and psychopathic bad guys. When Richard Widmark as Tommy Udo pushed a wheelchair-bound woman down a flight of stairs and giggled maniacally in Kiss of Death in 1947, he threw open the door for the 1950's social deviants in noir.

Freudianism: A characteristic of 1940's films was an interest in cheesy Freudian theory where characters offered to psychoanalyze one another ; this doesn't hold up well today. By the 1950's this embarassment had virtually disappeared.

Incidental music: 1940's noirs generally suffer from lush, cliched romantic scores which play more or less non-stop throughout the film. In romantic scenes, there is often a solo "gypsy" violin heard in the arrangement. Most noirheads are of the opinion that this doesn't suit film noir at all, and I agree with them. By the 1950's the background music, when any was heard at all, was more generic suspense music. Many 1950's noirs feature little music (there is a great extended heist sequence at the beginning of 1957's Plunder Road which has little sound, let alone music), and, best of all, towards the end of the Fifties some started using cool jazz scores as incidental music - The Man with the Golden Arm, Odds Against Tomorrow and The St. Louis Bank Robbery are three good examples. Jazz scores suited the material much better.

Industrial settings: 1940's film noir was often an indoors thing - a private eye spouting hard-boiled dialogue in drawing rooms. There may have been some scenes along, say, railroad tracks (This Gun for Hire, 1942) or an automobile chase scene here and there, but, generally, due to technical constraints, noirs were frequently set indoors. After The Naked City in 1948 directors more often took the cameras outdoors to depict the streets and gritty, industrial settings. This greatly expanded the visual basis of film noir and made it look more familiar to the average theatergoer.

Socioeconomics: I might find it hard to prove this one, but it seemed that in the 1940's film noir was most often perpetrated among upper middle class and upper class protagonists (with the exception of the private eyes, who seemed to barely scrape by). At any rate, most 1940's noir characters seemed well-spoken and educated. By the 1950's film noir was also a matter of the lower classes: dock workers, rail yard workers, guys who took a lunch pail to work, the poor, etc. This inclusion made the noir style seem less affected and less like a stylistic exercise among the genteel.

Bad guys: In a 1940's film noir an espionage element was invariably supplied by Nazi spies. In a 1950's noir it was communists. I prefer the communists; the paranoia that the American public experienced due to the Red Menace fits in better with the noir style. Fighting Nazi spies was a clean-cut, heave-ho Captain America kind of operation. Cold War times seemed more psychologically bleak. Who can forget Martin Ritt's wonderful The Spy Who Came in from the Cold? (Which I'm not advancing as a film noir - it's a spy thriller. But it is very noirish.)

Dames and broads: The femme fatale in a 1940's noir was well turned out, wearing a tailored wool suit or an Edith Head gown and an elaborate hat. "B-girls" were also depicted, but the visual clues that a gal wasn't totally respectable are rather difficult for us to spot these days. Such subtleties were mostly gone by the 1950's. A 1950's femme fatale was a Jayne Mansfieldesque blonde with a va-va-va-voom figure and breasts thrust out like the cones on a Cadillac front bumper ("dagmars"). Film noir queen Gloria Grahame models the look for us above.

There you have it, Bob.

Since I had Veteran's Day off, Cari and I spend a good deal of the day at Tyson's Corner mall yesterday, helping to boost the local economy. That's patriotic, isn't it?

I'm now reading 1776 by David McCullough, a crisp, new $32 hardcover book I got at a yard sale for a buck. McCullough is a multiple Pulitzer Prize winner, but you wouldn't know it from this book, which, so far, is merely okay. It's not bad - it's not especially good.

I was at a church party last Sunday where a friend took a photo of me. I was talking to a seventeen year-old at the time about his involvement in a rugby club. I think the photo is hilarious. Look at that disapproving glower! It looks there should be a thundercloud hovering over me. No wonder people don't want to talk to me! Ha ha! All of my life, the usual set ot my face makes me look like I am desperately unhappy when I'm not. I'm the merriest guy I know - rarely unhappy or angry - but you'd never know it from the expression on my face.

I recall sitting on an office trash can after work once when I was in the Marines - we used to gather there to report before leaving for the day - and one civilian came up, looked at me and said, "Geez, it's not that bad, is it?" Another time I was sitting on a bench outside of work when a work associate came up to me and said, "You look like you just lost your best friend!" I was just sitting there thinking of random things, nothing depressing or sad. Short of walking around wearing a leer on my face like Gwynplaine, or forever casting insincere smiles, I don't know what to do.

Tonight there's a U.S. Army Band saxophone quartet performing at the Masonic Memorial in Alexandria - I'd like to see this. I like the tooty, honking sound four saxes make. It reminds me of an old cartoon, or a visit to Disneyland's Main Street.

Tomorrow morning there's yet another Webelos Scout activity: a short hike and a visit to a local nature center, followed by a hot dog lunch.

Have a great weekend!

11 Nov 2010

Happy Veteran's Day to all vets! I run this every year because it's true:

It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press.
It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate.
It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.

Father Dennis Edward O'Brien, USMC

10 Nov 2010

First and foremost of all, a big Semper Fi to all Marines everywhere on the 235th anniversary of the founding of the Corps. Happy Birthday! Wes Clark, USMC, 1974 - 1978.

On Facebook, my friend Bob Avery demands a list of the ten best films noir from me. I gave him my full summary, but he wants only ten. Okay, here they are in no particular order:

1. Chinatown (1974) - The odd thing about this selection is that it's not a film noir from the classic period and is in color. But, as the Czar of Noir Eddie Muller says, it's so good and so representative of the style it takes its place alongside the best noirs. In fact, for me it's sort of the ultimate film noir. It may even be my favorite film. It is wonderfully well-written (I understand the UCLA film school uses Robert Towne's script as an example of good screen writing) and directed, and perfectly captures the essence of this dark and unsettling genre.

2. Kiss Me, Deadly (1955) - The funny thing is, I didn't like this film at all on the first viewing. After the second, however, I realized the critics were right - it perfectly captures so many 1950's tropes and paranoia. And I love the whole idea of the "great whatsit" and the atomic conclusion, and the unlikable protagonist. It has been commented that this film is about speed and violence, and so it is. I've seen it many times, and get drawn into its own little world on every viewing.

3. Night and the City (1950) - Richard Widmark portrays the definitive noir loser in this postwar work - perhaps his best role, ever. And London has never seemed so bleak or fate so relentless. And the British character actors are an added plus: Googie Withers, Francis L. Sullivan, Ada Reeve... You're a dead man, Harry Fabian...

4. The Asphalt Jungle (1950) - There are those who claim John Huston invented film noir with The Maltese Falcon in 1941, and perfected it with this film a decade later. Perhaps. It is possibly the greatest heist film, ever. The cast is perfect, the script is perfect, the directing is perfect. Throw in a sensational bit part for Marilyn Monroe and you have a truly top drawer noir.

5. Detour (1945) - The ultimate B cheapo film - so many good noirs are b-films - that does so much with so little. This one has an overwhelming sense of fatalism, an absolutely ferocious femme fatale and a weird, otherworldly dream logic. It's the kind of film you see one night and find yourself thinking about the next day.

6. The Set-Up (1949) - The fight film is an important noir sub-genre, and this one is possibly the best fight film, ever. And it looks good - based on those still images how could you not want to see this film? Unique in that it plays out in real time, that is, the passage of time in the film is the passage of time in the story. It does more in 72 minutes than many modern films can do in over two hours.

7. The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) - Arguably Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis' greatest roles and a bitter film with an incredibly good script and memorable quotes - "You're a real arsenic cookie - I wouldn't want to take a bite out of you..." Curtis' portrayal as the hungry publicity agent Sidney Falco defines noir desperation.

8. The Big Combo (1955) - I have to include a John Alton-lit film (his work is so perfectly representative of the noir "look"), and this is a good example of the cinematographer's art. People move in and out of pools of light so interestingly. It also features Richard Conte, the smoothest of all noir gangsters. There are some some great "bits": A torture scene involving a hearing aid and loud radio music, a pair of homosexual hit men, the burlesque dancer, an obsessive cop, a superb musical score by David Raksin... they don't make 'em like this anymore because they can't.

9. Odd Man Out (1947) - A Brit-noir about a wounded IRA gunman on the run. James Mason considered this his best film; I can't disagree. As with Night and the City, this one has a wonderful cast of British character actors, including one of my favorites, Robert Newton. Excellent photography, too.

For my last I will allow myself an unconventional choice - a film some may not even consider to be film noir:

10. A Face in the Crowd (1957). It's difficult for us to appreciate this since he spent so many years as Don Knotts' straight man, but Andy Griffith was a superb actor, and this is his stand-out role as "Lonesome" Rhodes, the hillbilly turned power-mad political figure. Griffiths is loud, virile, leering, calculating, at times menacing and half crazy - just wonderful. What makes this rise and fall story even more interesting is that the Lonesome Rhodes character is a comment on a real life celeb: Arthur Godfrey.

Noir purists will find this list unsatisfactory: where is The Maltese Falcon, Out of the Past, The Killers, D.O.A., Murder, My Sweet, The Postman Always Rings Twice or Double Indemnity (the usual suspects)? No Bogart films? Remember, Bob, this isn't Film Noir 101 - this is my list of my ten favorite noirs, a somewhat different thing. For one thing, I tend to prefer 50's noir to 40's noir. But nearly everyone will agree that these are good films, and if you watch them you may be hooked (like me you'll be mentally comparing the qualities of wet streets at night in black and white film stock), and I can then give you tips as to where to look next.

Don't like old films? Do you get annoyed when some character in a movie says something is "swell?" That's fine, there are many good neo-noirs (films made after about 1960), too: Mulholland Drive, Hollywoodland, Following, Night Moves, Blood Simple, Hickey and Boggs, Madigan, Memento... I can give recommendations about those as well.

And be warned, should you acquire a taste for these films you might find yourself buried in my e-mailed text about them.

9 Nov 2010

In the Virginia 11th District House race where I live, it looks like Keith Fimian (R) will concede today; we get another two years of Gerry "No Tax Too High" Connolly - a man who should have been put out to pasture years ago. What a depressing prospect. Maybe even he will see that his .4% plurality is not a mandate for the left wing politics that form his stock in trade, but that's probably wishing for too much.

Last night I watched a neo-noir that I've been avoiding for years: The Black Dahlia (2006). It's on Netflix instant streaming, which was an easy way to watch it.

Fellow noir heads have been telling me that it isn't very good - and they're right. It's not so much of a neo-noir or a film noir as an imitation film noir. It tries hard to get a post war setting right - and that was entertaining - but much of the time the storyline seemed diffuse and only tangentially about the famous Black Dahlia murder. In fact, the Dahlia, or, to be more accurate, her corpse, doesn't make an appearance until about a quarter of the way into the movie. And there's an awkward and sensationalist attempt to link the murder in with Gwynplaine's leer in The Man Who Laughs (1928). While the film had some creepy and suspenseful moments, it just caused me to marvel at how well the classic period noirs turned out despite the usual lack of budget and resources. Those 1940's/1950's filmmakers really knew what they were doing!

I've watched a bunch of Netflix streaming documentaries since I've gotten my account. One was Helvetica (2007), about, yes, the font. The oppressively universal font - in fact, the font that you're looking at now. (It's either that or Arial, which is pretty much the same thing.) There were a number of interviews with ditzy designers, one of whom called Helvetica the font of the Vietnam War and Ronald Reagan. She must have really become upset when she saw it used in that famous Obama "HOPE" poster.

Another was a Discovery Channel three-parter about Jesus Christ; it was primarily interesting in that it showed ancient holy places in Jerusalem and the environs with computer-generated depictions of what the surroundings looked like in the 1st C. A.D. But ultimately the production left me cold. It's off-putting to see my personal Savior treated with historical astringency.

Earlier this month I mentioned a Spelhaus Clock where I work. We have at least one other interesting clock here, a grandfather's clock that is very impressive. (In 2003 a clock buff took photos of it and inquired about it in a clock forum.) The face is marked "C. Letmate, Washington D.C." I spoke to a lady in the office where the clock sits; there seem to be some fanciful stories about this clock, not to mention a bogus brass plate somebody affixed inside that says "Built 1711." My initial impression was that it was built at least a hundred years after that. In fact, I did some quick online research and located the C. Letmate clockmaking business in D.C. The references for it date to 1851-1853, which is more more suggestive of the clock's style, finish and condition.

Am I a clock expert? No. But I often play a little game whenever I watch Antiques Roadshow, which is to determine the rough age of an object before it's revealed. I'm usually fairly accurate in my guesses. I credit this to spending a lot of time in antiques stores in L.A. with my Mom when I was a kid. She used to drag me to these and I found myself becoming interested in old things despite myself. That and cracking open a book now and then...

8 Nov 2010

I had a great time on Saturday! First up was Scouting for Food at 9 AM. That went well and was quick; it only took us about 40 minutes to distribute bags through the neighborhood we were assigned. We've had that same area of streets since I don't know when - I remember doing the same houses with Boy Scouts back in 1991.

After that I looked for yard sales but found very few. There was a church bazaar, however. As usual on Saturday mornings I bumped into Jane, my friend from church. We generally sneak up and greet each other with, "Save some stuff for the rest of us!" I didn't find anything I liked at the bazaar, but she found a coffee table book, "Above Europe" that I would have grabbed (I have a set of books of helicopter shots of cities - this would go with them). Dang, too late. I also saw these salt and pepper shakers. I took a cell phone photo of them while a couple of women were talking and they looked at me and then the shakers. I smiled and they smiled back. I was going to buy them for a white elephant exchange, but didn't. What do they suggest to you?

Then Cari and I drove up to the Smithsonian American Art Museum to view the Norman Rockwell exhibition (from the collection of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg), which was wonderful. And crowded. This exhibition had a characteristic I have seen in no other: the people gazing at the illustrations generally had smiles on their faces. It was a merry collection of paintings and we were both very glad we attended.

But the best of all was a surprise. Ever since we first moved to the D.C. area in 1984, I have enjoyed the political cartoons drawn by Mark Alan Stamaty; they appeared in the Washington Post and were called "Washingtoons." I used to photocopy them from the op-ed page each Monday; I now have a thick three ring binder of them from approximately 1988 to 1992. I also have a Washingtoons book he published back then.

Stamaty's art is nothing if not whimsical - his panels are often cluttered and chaotic, his lettering mixes cursive with printing, and he likes to portray abstract ideas in funny ways. For instance, one time he expressed "the gut feeling of the electorate" as an obelisk. It makes me think of late 1950's subversive collegiate art - that's the best way I can describe it. My favorite visual device of his was depicting the United States of America as a walking continent with an Uncle Sam head about where Maine belongs. This figure would interact with politicians, often Ronald Reagan, whom he drew wearing what looked like a kind of hair hat. Stamaty's art is very fanciful and fun. There is also a strong element of childishness about it that is in contrast to the important ideas and commentary depicted.

Cari and I went to the bookstore and lo and behold, Stamaty has a clever new book out, about how Elvis Presley influenced him as a child: Shake, Rattle and Turn That Noise Down - How Elvis Shook Up Music, Me and Mom. Even better, the fellow in front of me in line was holding a copy which appeared to have been drawn upon by the artist (there's no mistaking his style). What? "He's autographing books just around the corner," I was told. So I quickly bought myself a copy of the book and brought it to Mr. Stamaty to draw upon.

That was so cool! We chatted for a while and he drew - at my request - a anthropomorphic U.S.A. and a Ronald Reagan, along with an Elvis. Here it is. And here's a photo of Stamaty and I, in the courtyard of the museum. An Elvis impersonator and band were there - it was somewhat loud. Stamaty struck me as being a very pleasant and down to earth fellow; I greatly enjoyed talking with him.

Perhaps you can find a copy of the 1973 Stamaty book Who Needs Doughnuts? at your local library; it's a good introduction to the work of this clever and talented artist/cartoonist. He has also drawn the more recent Alia's Mission - Saving the Books of Iraq, but I wasn't aware of this one until now. I'll do a library search and reserve it...

After I put my new prized possession in the trunk of the car we strolled across the street to the Spy Museum, where there was an East German Trabant show going on by the sidewalk. A German oompah band provided music. It was a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Here's a photo: Cari and Trabi, across the street from the American Art Gallery. As you can see, one Trabant was used as a canvas for an art statement (a popular pastime in Germany in those days). We were exposed to these stinky and pathetic, yet somehow endearing, little cars when we visited Berlin in 1991. The owners fired a couple of them up - those things emit a cloud of oil smoke that would give Al Gore an embolism.

We then returned home. Later that evening we watched the latest installment of the saga of the White Family of Boone County, West Virginia, The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia - a documentary that has to be seen to be believed. Shoot outs, drug abuse, robbery, prison interviews, convoluted genealogical lines, odd first names... it's all there in its West Virginia mountain cinema verite. The Video Vault guy introduced me to the Dancing Outlaw Jesco White a couple of years ago and I've sort of been hooked ever since. It's kind of like Gray Gardens with gun play rather than any sense of gentility.

All in all, a fun weekend. But now it's Monday.

5 Nov 2010

Following wikipedia links is always fun and informative. I was composing a snide Facebook comment about Jimmy Carter and his 1979 adventure with the savage bunny that I wanted to research, which led to a link about the Rabbit of Caerbannog. (You remember him... he's the bunny who decapitated King Arthur's knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.)

This, in turn, led to an unfamiliar phrase, Kensington Gore. What's that? A British term for theatrical blood. (Interestingly, it's also a street in London.) What I found especially interesting in that article was this: "Kensington Gore was used in the film The Shining. Director Stanley Kubrick had two or three thousand gallons of it and it can be seen in use during the elevator door scene."

Ah, yes... the elevator door scene from the Shining. When I was dating my wife, we attended a 1979 showing of the Star Trek movie - the crappy first one, with the bald woman. As usual, they showed theatrical trailers for upcoming movies, one of which was for the Shining. I remember seeing that elevator door sequence (they played it with no audio at all) and instantly thought, "That was the most impressive fifteen seconds for a horror show I have even seen." It's like Stanley Kubrick had plugged directly into my eight year-old mind, back in 1964 when my friend Jimmy and I watched horror films - the more blood used the more creatively, the better.

There was a certain amount of blood - real blood - seen in a short documentary I watched last night on Netflix, Go! Dragons, about a gay men's rugby club in Chicago, the Dragons RFC. Yes, there are gay men's rugby clubs, and yes, my own club, Western Suburbs, has played the local one (the Washington Renegades) many times. Good guys, good club. This documentary wasn't so much about gay men as much as it was about guys playing rugby, which is always a hoot. The usual practice mistakes, the usual fears, injuries and drunkenness... the whole culture. Not being a drinker, I always felt like I was taking part without ever really being a part, but I miss it.

When I was active in rugby during their early years, the Renegades fought hard for their first infrequent wins; looking at their schedule, I see they're beating decent local clubs like Warrenton and West Potomac. I knew they'd get better with time. They always had a well-organized and enthusiastic organization, in fact, in many ways (fund-raising, for instance), they put us to shame.

Funny story: We were playing a match with the Renegades once, and we had a speedy winger on our team nicknamed "Princess" who had the ball and was making a run. (Nearly everyone in rugby gets a nickname. Princess got his when his girlfriend admitted that he liked to have creases ironed in his jeans, "...he's such a princess." She made the mistake of saying that in front of my friend, who immediately perked up. That's how nicknames start.) Anyway, Princess had the ball and we were all yelling, "Go, Princess, go!" One of the Renegades turned to us and said, "You have a 'Princess' in your club? We have one of those, too - and a couple of queens." It was one of the rugby quotes of the year.

I also watched a National Geographic documentary last night, The Moment of Death. It was concerned with a question of universal interest, when do we really die? (Answer: When brain waves stop.) I suppose I could have selected a better program to watch just before I went to bed, but as I had no disquieting dreams as a result there was no harm done.

It explored the near universal death/near death phenomena of people rising up away from their bodies and viewing themselves, seeing a beckoning white light in a tunnel, seeing one's life re-run before one's eyes, etc. There was an account of one fellow who had a heart attack and who died on the operating table for a short amount of time - he described floating above the operating table and watching the doctors operate on his body. Per usual procedures, his eyes were taped shut and his face was behind a cloth screen. It really began to get weird when he described seeing one surgeon put his hands against his sides and gesturing with his elbows, which the man described as "moving like a chicken." The doctor actually did that during the surgery - it was his way of keeping his fingers and hands sterile - but this would have been impossible for his patient to see. So how did he know the surgeon did that? (Cue Twilight Zone music.)

As for me, when I die I'm hoping there is a big welcoming committee of ancestors, all thanking me for doing genealogy. I will be a very disappointed traveler if this isn't a part of the life-to-death passage. Christian writer C.S. Lewis thought that the passage would be marked with an awakening and a host of realizations: "I remember now, you were supporting me all along, this is the way life really is - that other existence was just a temporary thing I had agreed to," etc. I suspect he may be on to something.

The weekend! Tomorrow morning at 9 AM I drive the Webelos scouts down assigned neighborhoods to leave plastic bags on doorknobs as part of the local "Scouting for Food" effort. After that there's a bazaar at a local church which is really just a collection of yard sales held indoors. I always like those. The last time I went to one I found a couple of cool old vintage A&W Root Beer mugs.

Have a great weekend!

4 Nov 2010

Hey, over here. You want to read the text over here. Ignore the image at left for a minute - I'll explain it.

As I type this, the situation with my House representative in VA-11 is still unsettled. As I reported yesterday, the Republican, Keith Fimian, lost to the Tax Party candidate Gerry Connolly, but there is only a .4% difference in votes between them. Apparently Fimian is waiting for the election to be certified so the option then presents itself for him to request a recount. But he hasn't indicated that he plans to do that - nor has he conceded. Somehow, however, I suspect my life will go on.

Last night we had a young couple (I went to school with the wife's father) stay overnight with us; we provided a few hours of babysitting with their 4 year old daughter and 7 month old son - sort of a dry run for grandparenting. I did something I hadn't done in many years: watched Disney cartoons with a kid (and fell asleep). Playing with the baby was kind of fun, too. But I can see why parenting is a young person's calling, and we are far removed from that. After a few hours I was ready to hand them back to their parents with a cheery "Here ya go!"

In between demands for entertainment and sheets of drawing paper I managed to finish watching a 1956 semi-demi-noir on Netflix, Hot Cars. Joi Lansing (seen above) is in it - I believe the 1950's term for actresses of her type was "sex bomb." There was one surprising sequence in this film: a man, accused of murder, has to use his evening spent cheating on his wife with Lansing as an alibi. So, to prove his innocence, he describes the contents of Lansing's bedroom to a detective - which must have been an ooh-la-la moment in 1950's film.

The interesting thing about Lansing (aside from the obvious) is that, for all her cheesecake modeling and vampy roles in TV and film, she never posed nude. Nor did she drink or smoke. She was born and raised in Salt Lake City and was a member of my tribe - a Mormon! That's one righteous sister in that polka dotted bikini top...

Hot Cars is about the car sales trade, and has some great, evocative scenes shot in a Culver City car lot at night. As a kid, I loved being in car lots at night - it was exciting. The oversized promotional signs, the little flags fluttering overhead, the artificial lights, the shiny cars and the prospect of my parents buying one... the film also had a great fight sequence at the end - it was filmed aboard a seaside roller coaster (the Giant Dipper in San Diego, perhaps). The film also started well, with shots of Lansing driving around in a red Mercedes 300 SL convertible, for my money one of the prettiest cars ever built. Anyway, it was a nice way to spend an hour. (Yes, only an hour. Those old movies were often marvellously economical with time.)

I posted some interesting stuff to Burbankia yesterday, not the least of which are some fulsome descriptions of the townsite which appeared in 1887 editions of the Los Angeles Times. I also found a description of the area around the house in which I grew up, near Vickroy Park. I spent many hours at that small park, climbing trees, making gimp (aka boondoggle) or playing on the swings and on the Shoe. It was especially fun returning there 25 years ago, letting my little son romp around in the park I had grown up in. I am sorry to say that the Shoe is long gone... but memories persist.

While on a visit I found this funny little poem in an outdoor case in the park, written by a retiree who lived near the park, Grandpa Dutch Cronkite - he's related to the Cronkite boys with whom I played as a child. Funny thing was I posted it to Burbankia and, years later, got a heartfelt thanks from a granddaughter of his who found it - she had been thinking about that lost poem all her life.

By the way, in the LA Times link a 1938 mention is made of homes being built around the park. The house I grew up in was built in 1940 - at least I always thought it was. Perhaps it was really built in 1938!

Okay, I'm done. You can go back to staring at that photo of Joi Lansing.

3 Nov 2010

It is hard for me to contain my glee as I type this: Goodbye Pelosi.

I like a divided government. I like contentious debate - I think it leads to better laws - and I admit that a lot of the time I even like gridlock. If you're a political conservative and think that, as I do, much of what government does is wasteful and/or wrong-headed and you fear an activist government, then gridlock is your friend.

Elsewhere in the country, my native state continues its march to failure as Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown is once again made the governor. This is a man who admitted that he lied to get into office the first time and didn't have a plan; it would be difficult to generate more cynicism about elective government if one scripted it. Also in the state, uber-liberal Barbara "Call me Senator - I've worked so hard for it" Boxer wins reelection, and, sad to relate, the Nevada electorate reelected the contemptible Harry "We lost the war in Iraq" Reid - a man who reminds me of nothing so much as Droopy Dog (seen at left). It is worth nothing that businesses are sprinting out of California and that Nevada has the highest unemployment rate in the country, but apparently the status quo is just fine with the electorate.

Barney Frank, one of the architects of economic collapse, won reelection as well.

I'm in the Virginia 11th House district, so I don't know who won our election yet, Keith Fimian (R) or Gerry Connolly (Tax and Spend). Both are at 49% and are separated by a mere 487 votes (Connolly ahead) out of more than 220,000 cast with two precincts yet to report. In the prior Fimian-Connolly match up, Connally won by 12%. That was then, this is now.

(Scrubbing hands with Boraxo) And that's all I plan to write about politics.

Yesterday I watched a deeply disturbing National Geographic special about The Aryan Brotherhood, a prison gang who apparently controls crime outside of prison. A fearsome bunch.

I also watched a NOVA special about dreams and dreaming; some researchers say that dreams are nothing more than the brain attempting to make sense of random flashes of electrical current, others say that dreams can help one to cope or make sense of waking life. I am in the the latter camp. I have read somewhere and come to believe that you are your own best dream analyst, and there have been many dreams where I've examined what inspired them and drawn some observation about my mood or anxieties from my dreams. But I really learned nothing new about dreaming from the special - so I gave it only three stars.

Netflix: I have rated no less than 1255 movies (have I really seen that many?), and the software is therefore now making sensible suggestions. We got our first DVD in the mail - a disk of season six One Foot in the Grave episodes - and we watched two of them last night. As usual, there was one instance where I laughed so hard I brought on a coughing fit. I have never seen a sitcom that made me laugh as hard as this one. Blackadder is still probably my favorite sitcom, but it is droll rather than ha ha funny. One Foot in the Grave is comedic perfection.

I am now reading The Battle of the Wilderness - May 5-6, 1864 by Gordon C. Rhea, a book about what I find to be the Civil War's most compulsively interesting battle. (Grant just launched his army across the Rapidan and is about to be attacked by Lee.) There is something about the phrase the Wilderness of Virginia that caught my imagination when I was a teenager; it quickly became a place I determined to visit. Even today I still get a bit of a thrill in the knowledge that it is only a short drive south - less than an hour - from me.

I suppose I like to read about it and visit the place in part because the II Corps Army of the Potomac fought there so notably. Bruce Catton wrote a fascinating trilogy of the Army of the Potomac which I read as a teen; the II Corps was sort of "his" unit just as it became "mine." Today I reenact with the 4th U.S. Regulars reenactment unit, which was in Sykes' "Regular" Division of the V Corps - but I never ever think of myself as being in anything other than the II Corps. It's sort of like pretending that I'm in the U.S. Army when I know I was really in the Marine Corps. Weird, huh?

(By the way, a "regular" unit differs from other regiments in that it was a part of the standing U.S. Army, not a regiment mustered into federal service from a state, like, say, the 110th Pennsylvania or the 1st Minnesota. In the V Corps, Army of the Potomac, the regular regiments were grouped together in a Regular Division.)

My piano lesson went well last night; I have another page of Debussy's Clair de Lune to learn. I keep looking for a pattern of chords to memorize, but there is no sensible repeating pattern in that piece. (Finding a set of repeating patterns makes learning pieces far easier.) I pointed out to my teacher that being able to recognize patterns was a very important skill in getting through engineering classes and being able to play bass lines on an electric bass. But piano is somewhat different - the patterns may emerge from a piece and they may not. She gave me what I think might be a useful suggestion: practice playing the left hand descending chords again and again without worrying about the right hand notes. I think this will help a lot.

I must confess that my aging brain finds it difficult to learn sight reading; I realize now that piano is something I should have stuck with when I was a kid. In other words, it's hard for this old dog to learn a new trick. When I'm attempting to play a piece through for the first few times I want to give up - it's hard to make my fingers hit the right notes at a tempo that does justice to the melody. But I realize that this is precisely the kind of thing one should be doing at age 54; I suspect that this will keep me alert and sharp, and prevent me from falling into a mental torpor.

I enjoy my Hanon scales. There is a simple joy in playing a repeated pattern and moving it up and down the scales in something that sounds like a distant cousin to actual music. It's mindless fun. Of course, my teacher wants me to ruin my fun and actually look at the individual notes as I play them, rather than playing a pattern that gets transposed up and down a half-tone. Kill joy.

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