Families planning for the worst

“Imagine trying to prepare your children for the day you may disappear without warning”: listening to this NPR story made me wonder what country I’m living in.

Roger Angell on Trump tweeting

Roger Angell:

Mr. Trump, for me, has become Tweety, peeping out soprano observations from his high, caged perch. The old Looney Tunes dialogue follows automatically: “Tewwible! Just found out that Pwesident Obama tapped my phones at Twump Tower!”

Twelve more movies

[No spoilers.]

Paterson (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2016). Paterson (Adam Driver) is a bus driver and closet poet in Paterson, New Jersey. He wakes, eats breakfast, thinks out poems while walking to work, writes in a notebook before beginning his route, and attends to the conversation of his passengers and the sights on the streets (the city teems with twins). At night Paterson walks his dog Marvin and stops at a bar for a beer. Paterson’s wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) designs cupcakes in black and white and aspires to Nashville stardom. The film moves through a week in their lives, with everyday realities altered by a moment of triumph, a moment of crisis, and a new start.

One problem: Paterson is, at least for me, a cipher. We learn nothing of what led him to read the writers whose books crowd his desk or to write such poems as “Love Poem,” whose playful charm seems at odds with Paterson’s blank demeanor. (Like Paterson’s other poems, it’s by Ron Padgett.) A second problem: relying on reaction shots from a dog for comic effect, no matter how endearing and photogenic the dog, is a losing proposition. But I like the film’s presentation of the dignity of everyday work, and of poetry as an everyday activity, even if the poet’s work has been simplified. (Does Paterson ever have to rethink a line break?) What I liked most was the chance to move about a city (like the Dr. Paterson of Willam Carlos Williams’s epic Paterson), seeing streets and stores and people. An especially nice touch: the hall of fame in the bar, with pictures of Lou Costello, Sam and Dave, Kathryn Dwyer Sullivan, Uncle Floyd, Williams, and other local heroes.

*

Horace Parlan by Horace Parlan (dir. Don McGlynn, 2000). A portrait of the jazz pianist (1931–2017), playing and talking, with attention to his childhood (polio affected his right side), his determination to play the piano despite a disability, his association with Charles Mingus and Blue Note, his life as an expatriate in Denmark, and his marriage. Parlan’s joy in making music is a powerful solace in these times, or in any times.

*

Un peu de festival du Jacques Demy

The Young Girls Turn 25 (dir. Agnès Varda, 1993). A sweetbitter return to Rochefort by the creators and cast of The Young Girls of Rochefort (dir. Jacques Demy, 1967). Demy, Varda’s husband, is gone (d. 1990), as is Françoise Dorléac, who was killed in a car accident in 1967, just months after the film’s release. Gene Kelly is, for whatever reasons, not present. Catherine Deneuve, Dorléac’s sister, is a model of courage and grace as she revisits the scenes of the film. What’s most delightful: seeing some of the film’s Rocherfort children twenty-five years later. Imagine: having had Gene Kelly choose you as a kid to dance with.

Donkey Skin (1970). A Cinderella story with a strong element of incestuous desire, from a fairy tale by Charles Perrault. A widowed king (Jean Marais) is determined to marry his daughter (Catherine Deneuve). She flees and finds a new life as Donkey Skin, a lowly rustic. And then a charming prince (Jacques Perrin) comes her way. While working on Donkey Skin, Demy remarked that with The Young Girls of Rochefort he had gone “too far” in an “unrealistic direction.” Was Donkey Skin a gesture toward greater realism? Was he joking? The Michel Legrand score is a plus, but this film is my least favorite of the five Demy films we’ve seen.

Un chambre en ville (1982). Demy in operatic territory: love and betrayal and death, all against the background of a workers’ strike in Nantes. Two scenes evoke Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but we’re a long way from earlier Demy films. Music by Michel Colombier.

*

Dishonored Lady (dir. Robert Stevenson, 1947). Hedy Lamarr is Madeleine Damien, art editor for Boulevard magazine. After years devoted to what the film calls “excitement” (sexual relationships with various men), she begins, to remake her life with a psychiatrist’s help (Morris Carnovsky). But the past intrudes. My favorite line, the psychiatrist to one of Madeleine’s suitors: “She told me to tell you if you inquired that she was busy growing a new soul, and would you please keep off the grass.” Bonus: an appearance by Natalie Schafer, best known as “Lovey” Howell from Gilligan’s Island. A YouTube find.

*

Genius (dir. Michael Grandage, 2016). The writer Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law) and his editor Maxwell Perkins (Colin Firth). A period piece in blue and brown and grey. Law’s Wolfe is a manic Southerner; Firth’s Perkins is a buttoned-up urbanite. There’s an element of the Odyssey or, better, Ulysses in the relationship: a son in search of a father, a father in search of a son. (Perkins has five children, all girls.) My favorite exchange: “Am I supposed to grow up like you?” “No, Tom, but you’re supposed to grow up.” The “literary” stuff in the film verges on unintentional comedy: F. Scott drinking, Zelda in a trance, Ernest fishing and getting ready for a trip: “Spain is where the action’s gonna be.”

*

Miles Ahead (dir. Don Cheadle, 2015). In 1979, when I was a grad student teaching freshman comp, I had a student who claimed to have delivered groceries to Miles Davis. It was the time of Davis’s withdrawal from music, and the story my student told — of a cadaverous recluse in a dark Upper West Side apartment — turned out to be accurate. This film draws upon that time in Davis’s life and many others. It’s a portrait of Davis (played by Cheadle) as an aging junkie, wandering through parts of his past — especially those involving Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi), his ex-wife, who fled the marriage fearing for her life, and who now stares at him from album covers everywhere. But exploration of character and relationships is minimal: instead, we’re given an absurd (and fictional) caper for a plot, with a stolen tape, car chases, and Columbia Records execs being held at gunpoint — by none other than Davis and a would-be Rolling Stone writer who wants an interview. The film is at Netflix, so I watched. But listening to Miles Davis records would have been a better way to spend the time.

*

Saboteur (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1942). I always like watching Saboteur, my first Hitchcock film. It borrows from The 39 Steps (1935) and looks ahead to North by Northwest (1959): a good guy, mistaken for a bad guy, on the run, trying to stop the real bad guys before it’s too late. All three films are episodic: collections of great unrelated scenes. Here they include a truck ride, a ranch, a cabin, a circus caravan, a fancy party, and a showdown at the Statue of Liberty. There is also time for a love story to develop. Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane have the right stuff as naïfs in danger, so much so that the original casting choices, Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, seem to me unimaginable. Murray Alper has a great turn as the helpful truckdriver and self-proclaimed “nicotine addict.” The most disturbing thing about watching this movie in 2017: Hitchcock’s depiction of fascist sympathizers in every corner of American life.

*

Magnus (dir. Benjamin Ree, 2016). A portrait of the Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen. Carlsen looks like the hunky member of a boy band: it is only slightly surprising that his chess success has led to opportunities in modeling. He is sometimes affable, sometimes cranky, often abstracted, most at ease with his parents and sisters. His mind, as he acknowledges, is always working on chess. The story of Carlsen’s 2013 match against then-champion Viswanathan Anand is gripping — at least for someone who, like me, hasn’t been following chess. The film casts this match as a battle of Carlsen’s intuituive genius against Anand’s computer-assisted preparation. It’s not quite an accurate picture, and a short clip in the closing credits makes clear that there’s plenty of study behind Carlsen’s play: presented with random positions on a chessboard, Carlsen is able to name their games: Fischer–Taimanov, Vancouver 1971, and so on. The subtitles for this film (which is mostly in English) are poor: they leave out whatever Norwegian seems beyond the translator’s ability, and they’re filled with awkward phrasing and misspellings (like Fisher for Fischer). What’s really missing from this documentary though is chess itself: we see nothing of what transpires on the board. When a crucial move gets made, there is no position, no context, to help the viewer understand it.

*

Lady Gangster (dir. Florian Roberts, 1942). Faye Emerson plays a role in a bank heist (literally) and goes to prison. The men involved go free. A radio personality steps in to help. Most of the film is women-in-prison, with prison resembling a gossip-filled high school. Emerson is the chic new girl. Dorothy Adams plays the ultra-creepy Deaf Annie, who has it in for the new girl. With a gangster in drag and one Jackie C. Gleason in a small part. Another YouTube find.

*

The Prowler (dir. Joseph Losey, 1951). Webb Garwood (Van Heflin) is a police officer and, I daresay, a psychopath. To say that is to give nothing away: from the first minutes of this film it’s clear that something about him is deeply off. After responding to a call about a prowler (a voyeur, really), Webb begins an affair with the caller, Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes), a married woman who spends her nights listening to her husband’s radio show. Soon enough, Webb too is listening, as he seduces Susan and smokes her husband’s cigarettes. The relationship then moves into very dark territory. A YouTube find. Dalton Trumbo was an uncredited screenwriter. And did you know that “police officer” is a favorite career choice of psychopaths?

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)
Fourteen 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 : And twelve more

Heavy reading

From Frances Ha (dir. Noah Baumbach, 2012). Frances (Greta Gerwig) is about to fly to Paris for two days. She thinks that she should read Proust: “Sometimes it’s good to do what you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it.” Caroline (Maya Kazan) is skeptical:

“Proust is pretty heavy.”

”Yeah, but it’s worth it, I hear.”

“No, I meant the book, carrying it on the plane.”

Frances packs the Lydia Davis translation of Swann’s Way.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

“What else is he gonna do with a beard that long? He’s gonna stroke it. It’s like he has a cat on his chest.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

John Shimkus in the news

Our representative in Congress, John Shimkus (R, Illinois-15), is in the news, having questioned whether prenatal care should be part of the cost of men’s health insurance. After all, men don’t have babies. That’s like a totally female thing.

Here, from Consumer Reports, is a helpful explanation of why men should have to pay for prenatal care. An excerpt:

Health insurance, like all insurance, works by pooling risks. The healthy subsidize the sick, who could be somebody else this year and you next year. Those risks include any kind of health care a person might need from birth to death—prenatal care through hospice. No individual is likely to need all of it, but we will all need some of it eventually.

So, as a middle-aged childless man you resent having to pay for maternity care or kids’ dental care. Shouldn’t turnabout be fair play? Shouldn’t pregnant women and kids be able to say, “Fine, but in that case why should we have to pay for your Viagra, or prostate cancer tests, or the heart attack and high blood pressure you are many times more likely to suffer from than we are?” Once you start down that road, it’s hard to know where to stop. If you slice and dice risks, eventually you don't have a risk pool at all, and the whole idea of insurance falls apart. [My emphasis.]

Notice though that Consumer Reports has limited the question to childless men. Shimkus was speaking of all men.

Heidi Stevens of the Chicago Tribune offers offers further reasons why men should have to pay for prenatal care:

Because lots of men have sex with women.

Because a lot of that sex produces babies.

Because men and women have an equal stake in those babies being born healthy.

Because all of us, even when we’re not the parents of those babies, have a stake in those babies being born healthy.

Because healthy babies, ideally, turn into healthy children.

Another Tribune item sums up matters in its headline: “U.S. Rep. John Shimkus’s foot finds warm welcome in mouth.” But Shimkus’s suggestion about prenatal care is not a mere gaffe, an “unfortunate choice of words,” as they say. His words reveal a fundamentally ungenerous regard for those who are not in his own comfortable shoes. It’s the same narrow, selfish thinking that underwrites, say, an older voter’s choice not to approve a bond issue for schools or libraries: “I don’t have children in school.” “I don’t use the library.” “Why should I,” &c.

*

March 11: Shimkus is standing by his remarks.

Three more posts with John Shimkus
Shimkus and the NRA : : Shimkus says that Bruce Rauner can make the trains run on time : Waiting for Godot Shimkus

“E” is for Ellington

 
Two Duke Ellington compositions: “Melancholia” and “Reflections in D.” Ellington, piano; Wendell Marshall, bass. Recorded April 14, 1953. From the album Piano Reflections (Capitol, 1953).

I’m still making my alphabetical way through my dad’s CDs: Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Ivie Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, Mildred Bailey, Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Art Blakey, Ruby Braff and Ellis Larkins, Clifford Brown, Dave Brubeck, Joe Bushkin, Hoagy Carmichael, Betty Carter, Ray Charles, Charlie Christian, Rosemary Clooney, Nat “King” Cole, John Coltrane, Bing Crosby, Miles Davis, Matt Dennis, Doris Day, Blossom Dearie, Paul Desmond, Tommy Dorsey, Billy Eckstine, and Duke Ellington. I’ve known Piano Reflections as an LP for a long time. And now it’s a CD.

Bonus: Norah Jones has recorded “Melancholia” with her own lyrics: “Don’t Miss You at All.” I would sometimes play this recording when teaching Sappho; it’s a perfect illustration of eros the sweetbitter (glukúpikron). Try it in a classroom: music to drop pins by. This Sinatra performance too.

Also from my dad’s CDs
Mildred Bailey : Tony Bennett : Charlie Christian : Blossom Dearie

VapoRub, the earliest camel-case brand name?

[H. S. Richardson, “Difficult Sales Problems Overcome by Truthful Advertising.” Associated Advertising (June 1921). Richardson’s father Lunsford Richardson founded the Vick Chemical Company. H. S. explains in this article that “Vick was an old family name, which my father adopted because he felt that it would be easier to remember than Richardson.”]

I wonder: could VapoRub be the earliest camel-case brand name? Wikipedia’s article about camel case has DryIce as its earliest example, from 1925. But here’s VapoRub in 1921. And here’s a 1920 advertisement with the product identified as both Vaporub and VapoRub. Notice in the advertisement below that camel case applies even when the product name is in all caps. The product’s original name was Vick’s Croup Salve — not quite the same modern ring as “the VapoRub.”


[This advertisement is part of the 1921 article. The caption: “Illustrating the policy of avoiding ‘cure all’ copy.” In other words, the claim that VapoRub is good for neuralgia or headache is presented as truthful advertising. This advertisement also illustrates the problem of subject-verb disagreement.]

Remembrance of Vicks past

From WNYC, “Just Put Some Vicks on It,” about Vicks VapoRub, which turns out to be not just a fragrant reminder of childhood but something like the WD-40 of mentholated ointments.

But not all uses are recommended. My dad revealed late in his life that his mother had him swallow this stuff when he had a cold or cough. I wonder if she ever tried it herself. One should never swallow Vicks VapoRub. Yikes (camphor).

Being wrong about beauty

Elaine Scarry is commenting on the experience of being wrong about beauty. Her example: realizing that palm trees are, after all, beautiful. She writes:

Those who remember making an error about beauty usually . . . recall the exact second when they first realized they had made an error. The revisionary moment comes as a perceptual slap or slam that itself has emphatic sensory properties.

On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

“The exact second”: that rings true for me. It reminds me of something I posted in 2000 to rec.music.artists.beach-boys (remember newsgroups?), describing how I came to appreciate Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. Before 1999, the Beach Boys for me were trivial, nothing more than striped shirts, “Surfer Girl,” “Surfin’ Safari,” and a Sunkist commercial. But:

In January 1999 I happened to rent a videotape of I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times. I’d remembered reading in the New York Times that the film was well done and told the story of Brian Wilson’s life (that rang a vague bell). There was much in the film that I didn’t take in, but I was struck by — mesmerized by — the Van Dyke Parks song “Orange Crate Art.” (His name rang a vague bell too.) I rewound that section of the tape many times and started figuring out the tune on the piano (nice chord changes). Then I went to the library, where I always go to explore music I don’t know much about, and discovered that there was a CD called Orange Crate Art available through interlibrary loan. I figured I should get Pet Sounds too. Why not?

Listening to both was an incredible reeducation in music. I don’t typically listen to music with a lot of “production” — in old jazz and blues recordings, production amounted to moving the musicians toward or away from the microphone (the only microphone!). So it took me a while to get used to production, and to then appreciate it. And the songs on Pet Sounds seemed so short — they seemed to barely get started before fading out. But I can mark the first moments in the album that really hit me — the huge drum sound that stops the intro to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” the slowing down and picking back up at the end, the intro to “You Still Believe in Me,” and the low note on “me.” So I kept listening.

My account jibes with another observation in Scarry’s book: that the experience of beauty “seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication.” ”Beauty,” Scarry says, “brings copies of itself into being.” Which is just what happened when I listened to “Orange Crate Art” again and again and then began playing the song on the piano. The copies need not be perfect.

I would like to read accounts of other people’s errors about beauty, recognitions that something once thought not beautiful is indeed beautiful, or that something once thought beautiful is not. Is Scarry right that there is usually an “exact second” in which one recognizes the error?

Also from this book
“When justice has been taken away”