Movie recommendation: The Honeymoon Killers

François Truffaut called The Honeymoon Killers (1970) his favorite American film. It was written and directed by Leonard Kastle and is based on the true-crime story of Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, the "Lonely Hearts Killers," who teamed up to con gullible spinsters and widows of their savings and lives. Kastle, an opera composer, had never made a film before; his friend Warren Steibel (producer of William F. Buckley's television show Firing Line) suggested that the Fernandez-Beck story would make a good film.

Ray (played by Tony Lo Bianco) is a cheap approximation of elegance; Martha (played by Shirley Stoler) is a sour, haughty, contentious woman whose every attempt at conversation seems to turn into an argument. (Stoler's work is almost certainly a major influence on Divine in John Waters' films.) Ray and Martha's mutual passion takes us into operatic territory as they move from murder to murder to their own destruction, accompanied by excerpts from Mahler's Sixth Symphony.

The Honeymoon Killers is no gore-fest, but it is strong stuff: the brief on-screen violence is terrifying in its matter-of-factness. "Hit her again," says Ray. "Finish her," says Martha. What happens off-screen, toward the film's end, is even more terrifying. The film's greatest distinction lies in its hilariously deadpan dialogue, spoken by characters who are wholly without irony. Here are Ray and Martha bickering in the house they've just bought, in Valley Stream, Long Island:

Ray: Don't eat candy at ten o'clock in the morning.

Martha: It's because you're making me nervous!

Ray: You're nervous! How do you think I feel, sitting around here day after day? Now I've even taken to reading these stupid magazines of yours! . . . They call this place Valley Stream. Hmm, hmm. What a joke. One little jail after another with ten feet of grass between them. Valley Stream. I hate it here.

Shooting with a very modest budget ($150,000), Leonard Kastle made a masterpiece. I'd liken The Honeymoon Killers to Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962), another great American film made with maximal imagination and minimal resources. Both films are available from The Criterion Collection, in beautiful digital transfers, with all sorts of wonderful extras.

Link » The Honeymoon Killers (The Criterion Collection)
Link » Carnival of Souls (The Criterion Collection)

Revenant

From Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day:

revenant   \REV-uh-nahng (the final "ng" is not pronounced, but the vowel is nasalized)\ noun: one that returns after death or a long absence

Example sentence: The play is about a family of revenants who come back to their ancestral home after years of political exile.

Did you know? Frightening or friendly, the classic revenant was a ghost — a specter returned from the dead. Even in figurative uses, death played its hand. When Sir Walter Scott, in his 1828 novel The Fair Maid of Perth, used "revenant" in one of the earliest uses of the word in English, he was referring to a criminal who had survived the gallows, who "was cut down and given to his friends before life was extinct, and . . . recovered." Eventually, though, we appended a more earthly meaning: a revenant can be a flesh-and-blood returnee when we use it simply to mean a person who shows up after a long absence. We borrowed "revenant" from the French, who created it from their verb "revenir," which means simply "to return," as does its Latin ancestor, "revenire."

"Revenant" has two associations for me. The word turns up in the lyrics of the first song of Sufjan Stevens' Illinois, "Concerning the UFO Sighting near Highland, Illinois":

When the revenant came down
We couldn't imagine what it was

And it furnishes the name of a great record label, Revenant Records, devoted mainly to reissues of neglected American music. Revenant is the label responsible for Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton, the best boxed set I've ever seen.

What did she mean by that?

The title of a book my wife Elaine bought for me yesterday:

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Vegan Living

Words, mere words

From Mark Edmundson, Why Read? (Bloomsbury, 2004):

Many humanities teachers feel that they are fighting for a lost cause. They believe that the proliferation of electronic media will eventually make them obsolete. They see the time their students spend with TV and movies and on the Internet, and feel that what they have to offer — words, mere words — must look shabby by comparison.

Not so. When human beings try to come to terms with who they are and describe who they hope to be, the most effective medium is words. Through words we represent ourselves to ourselves; we fix our awareness of who and what we are. Then we can step back and gain distance on what we've said. With perspective comes the possibility for change. People write about their lives in their journals; talk things over with friends; talk, at day's end, to themselves about what has come to pass. And then they can brood on what they've said, privately or with another. From that brooding comes the chance for new beginnings. In this process, words allow for precision and nuance that images and music generally don't permit.

Our culture changes at an astounding velocity, so we must change or pay a price for remaining the same. Accordingly, the powers of self-rendering and self-revision are centrally important. These processes occur best in language. Surely there is something to be learned from the analysis of popular culture. But we as teachers can do better. We can strike to the central issues that confront students and the public at large, rather than relegating ourselves to the edges. People who have taught themselves how to live — what to be, what to do — from reading great works will not be overly susceptible to the culture industry's latest wares. They'll be able to sample them, or turn completely away — they'll have better things on their minds.

[Edmundson is quoting Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 5.3:

Pandarus: What says she there?

Troilus: Words, words, mere words.

I'm reminded too of Hamlet, 2.2:

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet: Words, words, words.]

A related post » Mark Edmundson tells it like it is

Child's play

The Child is father of the Man

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), "My Heart Leaps Up"

*

Child — the child, Father of the man

Van Dyke Parks (b. 1943), "Child Is Father of the Man," from SMiLE (words by Van Dyke Parks, music by Brian Wilson)

*

Most of my ideas come from my childhood. I just needed the knowledge and skills to develop them.

Gerhard Trimpin (b. 1951), sound sculptor and installation artist, quoted in an article by Jean Strouse, "Perpetual Motion," in The New Yorker, May 8, 2006

Relativity

My daughter's watching Meet Me in St. Louis this afternoon. It's one of her favorite movies. But it's not, she tells me, her favorite movie of all time. Marty is.

Meet Me in St. Louis, set in 1903, was released in 1944. I've always thought that an audience watching the movie in 1944 was looking back on an antique, bygone world. But now it occurs to me that their experience would be comparable to that of a 2006 audience watching a film set in 1965. And 1965 wasn't all that long ago. Heck, that's when Help! and Rubber Soul came out, along with The Sound of Music, which used to be my daughter's favorite movie of all time.

Ubuntu

An African word, meaning "humanity to others" or "I am what I am because of who we all are." The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.

(from the Ubuntu website)

A suggestion: If you have an older computer around that's not doing much of anything, install Ubuntu. Ubuntu is an operating system, a friendly version of Linux, "Linux for human beings," as the website says, available for free on CDs and as a download. I installed Ubuntu on an old family computer earlier this week, a Gateway laptop with Windows ME (Millennium Edition). Reformatting the hard drive, installing Ubuntu, and installing applications (Firefox, OpenOffice.org, and so on, all packaged with the operating system) took less than an hour and involved nothing more than starting up a CD (yes, just one CD) and responding to a few prompts. Using an online guide, I found an Ubuntu-compatible wireless card and had a wireless connection in roughly another hour (a 45-minute trip to Staples and 10 minutes of trial-and-error entering the network information).

Five years or so ago, I spent several days trying to establish an Ethernet connection with this Windows ME laptop. I had no luck, not even after trying the one network card that Gateway and Microsoft guaranteed to work. I never found anyone else who was able to get a network card to work with Windows ME either. Now, for $34.95 (plus tax) and couple of hours, we have a "new" computer with which we can browse, do e-mail, and create documents that we can open with any of our Windows XP computers. Ubuntu is stylish, fast, and, so far, fool-proof.

[Silent laughter at Microsoft's expense.]

Links

» ubuntu, the word
» Ubuntu, the operating system
» Ubuntu and wireless cards

Expectations, extensions, achievements

Dr. Harold Koplewicz, director of the New York University Child Study Center, in today's New York Times:

"Among the baby boomers, and I am one, expectations for our children are very high," he said. "Baby boomers prepare their children for all kinds of bizarre things, as if their children are extensions of themselves. These are kids who have résumés by the time they apply to college. As a society, unfortunately, we have changed focus so we value our children for their achievements, not because they're our children."

From an article on the prime-time telecast of the Scripps National Spelling Bee finals.

Link » The Bee, the New Celebrity Showcase (registration required)

Gnail

Make a typo in a URL and you never know what you'll find. Here's what I found when I mistyped gmail:

Beijing Gnail Heattreatment Technology Institute is famous for his liquid heattreatment technology in China.

We have introduced from German, Japan etc. and R&D a lot of new technologies in liquid heattreatment. The technologies are proved stable, efficient, pollutant-free , and have been widely used in China. All experts in our institute are skill in application for the technologies. We are professional.

Our products have been exported to many countries and regions over the world with good quality. Gnail liquid salts offer so many solutions for manufacture with low cost and easy operation.

Gnail, good companies of heattreatment !

Yes, there is a Gnail !

Two links

» Beijing Gnail Heattreatment Institute
» Gmail

"Important Safeguards"

An all-in-one radio-phono-cassette-deck, a portable radio, and a portable cassette-player? Who wouldn't be happy?

I found this image in a pamphlet titled "Important Safeguards," which came with my purchase of a "component" system in 1983: a Harman/Kardon receiver, a Dual turntable (maybe the most temperamental turntable ever made), and Infinity speakers (all long-defunct).