[Henry, February 6, 2017.]
Henry just exited an Exhibition of Modern Sculpture. (Really.)
Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)
Monday, February 6, 2017
Two Henrys
Twelve more movies
[No spoilers.]
Soylent Green (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1973). It is 2022. The “greenhouse effect” leads to oppressive heat. Cities are overpopulated and covered in a yellow-brown haze. Citizens wear facemasks and generate electricity from car batteries and exercise bicycles. The homeless sleep on any available staircase. Scoops dispose of the unruly. And food has been replaced by “soylent” — little red, yellow, and green planks of nutrition. With great performances from Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson (in his last film). “There once was a world, you punk.” Best scene: Robinson watching movies.
And there are Blackwings.
*
Un peu de festival du Jacques Demy
Les horizons morts (1951). Demy’s short first film, in which the director stars as a young man with a broken heart. Here is the kernel of the full-length films that were to follow.
Le sabotier du Val de Loire (1956). A short documentary through a week in the life of a sabot maker: love, death, craftsmanship, modernity. As the camera watches this man splitting or carving wood or eating soup, every action feels like the most important thing in the world.
Ars (1959). The life of Jean-Marie Baptiste Vianney, parish priest, self-flagellant, saint. A strong Bresson influence here. The year 1959 marked the hundredth anniversary of Vianney’s death.
Lola (1961). Watch what happens, as Michel Legrand’s song says, as sailors, dancers, a young woman, a long-lost son, and an alienated young man (Marc Michel) criss-cross Nantes. Obscure objects of desire on the move, with every character another’s double or stand-in. At the center of it all, the dancer Cécile, now known as Lola (Anouk Aimée). Beautifully filmed in soft, milky black and white.
[“C’est moi, c’est Lola.“]
La luxure (1962). Demy’s contribution to The Seven Deadly Sins, a collection of short films by different directors. Wordplay, crassly charming pickup lines, a fantasia on Hieronymus Bosch, and music by Michel Legrand. The solemn world of the earliest Demy films is giving way to playful urbanity, and, of course, la luxure — lechery.
Bay of Angels (1963). A variation of sorts on Stefan Zweig’s story “Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman.” A newbie gambler (Claude Mann) vacations in Nice and meets up with an older (and compulsive) hand at roulette (Jeanne Moreau). Both gamblers smoke Lucky Strikes. Let the chips, or plaques, fall where they may.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). A sweetbitter fairytale of love and loss and love. A jazz opera of sorts (with some brief metadialogue about preferring movies to opera — all that singing!). An influence on Mister Rogers’s operas? I wonder. Offscreen, the sorrows of war. With Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo, and Lola’s Marc Michel.
The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). A fair comes to town, and relationships rearrange themselves. Look, it’s Catherine Deneuve. And her ill-starred sister Françoise Dorléac. And Bernardo from West Side Story (George Chakiris). And Gene Kelly. And sailors. And they’re all singing and dancing. Or someone is singing for them. But they’re the ones dancing. This film made us happy beyond happy for all 126 of its minutes. And yes, it’s an inspiration for La La Land, but this film is the one to watch. Please, watch The Young Girls of Rochefort, before Netflix says “Very long wait.”
[Dorléac and Deneuve as twin sisters Solange and Delphine Garnier.]
We’re watching Demy via Criterion’s The Essential Jacques Demy. Two more to go.
*
Vicki (dir. Harry Horner, 1953). Social media and death. A publicity man (Elliott Reid) and a gossip columnist (Max Showalter) turn a waitress (Jean Peters) into a model and aspiring actress. And then she’s murdered. A remake of I Wake Up Screaming, with strong overtones of Laura, even in the music that plays behind the opening credits. With a strong performance by Richard Boone, who steps into Laird Cregar’s shoes as terrifying, obsessed cop Ed Cornell. Best line: “If men want to look at me, let them pay for it.”
*
Indignation (dir. James Schamus, 2016). A Jewish boy from Newark goes off to a Christian college in Ohio. (Why, exactly?) We stopped after twenty minutes or so, having watched long enough to see that this film is yet another version of mid-century America in which color filters turn everything into The Past. Or everything except the luminous blonde-haired student who will obviously be the protagonist’s undoing. From a Philip Roth novel.
*
City of Gold (dir. Laura Gabbert, 2016). A portrait of Los Angeles food writer Jonathan Gold, and a celebration of the delights to be found in strip malls, storefront restaurants, and food trucks. “In this completely ordinary place,” says, Gold, driving down yet another boulevard, “there happens to be extraordinary food.” He is utterly unpretentious in his appreciation of the world’s cuisines: Chinese, Ethiopian, Iranian, Korean, Mexican — and hot dogs and Squirt soda. Gold may be best known as the man who ate his way down Pico Boulevard. Best watched with food nearby.
Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)
Fourteen more films : Thirteen more : Twelve more : Another thirteen more : Another dozen : Yet another dozen : Another twelve : And another twelve : Still another twelve : Oh wait, twelve more : Twelve or thirteen more : Nine, ten, eleven — and that makes twelve : Another twelve
Sunday, February 5, 2017
Culs-de-sac?
From the Gilmore Girls episode “The Nanny and the Professor” (January 20, 2004). The episode begins with Rory and Lorelai discussing a plural form. Rory: “It’s culs-de-sac.” Lorelai: “No way!” Lorelai adds that culs-de-sac “doesn’t even sound like English.” Rory: “That’s because it’s French.”
The Oxford English Dictionary and Webster’s Second give culs-de-sac as the plural. Webster’s Third adds “also cul-de-sacs.” But Garner’s Modern American Usage (2003) gives cul-de-sacs as the proper plural. Bryan Garner says that with some exceptions (for instance, faits accomplis), “the trend is to anglicize French plurals.” That observation holds in Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016), which adds that culs-de-sac was “a common variant until about 1940,” now outnumbered by cul-de-sacs, 4:1. (The ratio comes from Google’s Ngram Viewer).
I’m amused that the French for “sack-bottom” or “bag-bottom” has become a favored term of American realtors. But as Rory might say, “That’s because it’s French.” I’m not sure it occurred to me until this morning that I am living on a cul-de-sac. I always thought I was living on a dead-end street. But not the one in the Kinks song.
Related reading
“William Safire Orders Two Whoppers Junior” (The Onion)
[In imaginary towns like Stars Hollow and Pleasantville, all streets are either cul-de-sacs or endless loops. My Super Bowl prediction: Gilmore Girls 3, Super Bowl 0.]
Saturday, February 4, 2017
Inept, or radical, or both?
Jonathan Stevenson, former staff member at the National Security Council, asks and answers a question: “Is Trump’s Foreign Policy Inept, or Radical? It’s Both” (The New York Times).
A two-part thought I’ve been thinking for the past two weeks: They have no idea what they’re doing. And they know exactly what they’re doing.
Be prepared
From the Gilmore Girls episode “Those Are Strings, Pinocchio” (May 20, 2003). Richard Gilmore advises his daughter Lorelai: “Never be without a pen.”
Other Gilmore Girls posts
Escape to Stars Hollow : Shopping for supplies : “That bastard Donald Trump”
[How many times will Lorelai ask Luke for a pen, assuming that he’s carrying the one that he uses to take orders at the diner? Two times so far.]
Friday, February 3, 2017
Yet another Henry gum machine
Ownlife
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
This passage made me think immediately of Creon’s rebuke of Antigone: “Aren’t you ashamed to have a mind apart from theirs?”
Related posts
All OCA George Orwell posts : Antigone in Ferguson : Literature and reverence : Modest proposals : Susan Cain on “the New Groupthink”
[The line from Antigone is in Paul Woodruff’s translation, from Sophocles’s Theban Plays, trans. Peter Meineck and Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003). For an excellent discussion of Creon’s question and Antigone’s apartness, see Diana Senechal’s Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012).]
Hamiet Bluiett needs some help
After a series of strokes and seizures, the baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett needs help with his recovery. To that end, his granddaughter Anaya Bluiett has established a GoFundMe project.
In 2014, a New York Times article recounted Bluiett’s earlier health struggles and his determination to continue working. The GoFundMe page says that he’ll no longer be able to work.
I’ve listened to Bluiett for years on recordings. In 2008, I was fortunate to be able to hear him play with Kahil El’Zabar’s Ritual Trio. What’s the chance that someone reading this post is a Hamiet Bluiett fan? Small. But that’s a chance I’ll take.
Thursday, February 2, 2017
Three rocks, no-release
[Zippy, February 2, 2017.]
For physical health, Zerbina rides her bike “hither and yon.” For mental health, it’s “three rocks no-release bowler poses,” daily. “Three rocks,” better known as “some rocks,” is a perennial element of the Ernie Bushmiller universe.
Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts, Nancy and Zippy posts, Zippy posts (Pinboard)
Du Bois and Niedecker
W. E. B. Du Bois, addressing the National Colored League of Boston, March 10, 1891:
Grandfather says, “Get a Practical Education, learn a trade, learn stenography, go into a store, but don’t fool away time in college.”Lorine Niedecker, in a 1962 poem:
It’s almost certainly nothing more than coincidence, but it’s a telling coincidence, with Du Bois and Niedecker both dissenting from ancestral authority.
Condensery is a wonderful name for a poet’s workplace. It owes something to Ezra Pound’s discovery in a German–Italian dictionary of condensare (to condense) as an equivalent of dichten (to write a poem). So making poems means condensing: a maximum of imagery, meaning, and music in the words, with nothing extraneous or redundant. Having always assumed that condensery is a nonce word (formed along the lines of, say, cannery), I was floored when a student discovered that it’s a word outside this poem: “an establishment where condensed milk is prepared” (Century Dictionary). Holy cow! That makes the word even better, with one kind of workplace turning into another.
Another Niedecker post
Keillor and Niedecker
[The source for Du Bois: “Does Education Pay?” in Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others, ed. Herbert Aptheker, vol 1., 1891–1909 (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1982). I came across the passage I’ve quoted in Russell Jacoby, Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert Education and Distract America (New York: Doubleday, 1994). Du Bois goes on: “Learn a trade, by all means, and learn it well, but Get a Liberal Education.”]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
