Shittown

In case you’ve missed it: Shittown (or more politely, S-Town) is a new seven-episode podcast from Serial and This American Life, hosted by Brian Reed. All episodes are available now. I’m three episodes in. To paraphrase what someone once wrote about James M. Cain’s fiction: No one will ever stop listening in the middle of Shittown.

“Maybellene,” General Tso’s chicken, and “cultural appropriation”

Jonathan Zimmerman, “On ‘Maybellene’ and General Tso’s Chicken” (The Chronicle of Higher Education):

we continue to imagine that every current-day practice descends from some kind of cultural Garden of Eden, where each ethnic or racial group existed in unalloyed form. . . .

Indeed, the mostly left-wing quest for cultural purity bears an eerie echo to the right-wing fantasy of national purity.

Don’t overlook the link to Ralph Linton’s “One Hundred Percent American.”

[As far as I can tell, Linton’s essay was published in 1937, not 1936.]

Imaginary word of the day

I dreamed the word and its definition:

fequid / ˈfe-kwəd / adjective

: of, or characteristic of, a dictator

Sample sentence: His fequid remarks were at odds with democratic principles.

The etymology is unknown, at least to me. The adjectives fetid and liquid may lurk behind fequid.

Other dream words
Alecry : Misinflame : Skeptiphobia

Bristol’s “grammar vigilante”

From BBC News: the “grammar vigilante” of Bristol. More accurately, a punctuation vigilante. Or perhaps more accurately still, a spelling vigilante.

Is “MOTOR S” really an improvement on “MOTOR’S”?

Related reading
All OCA apostrophe posts (Pinboard)

Separated at birth

 
[Henry Daniell, actor. Anthony Weiner, politician.]

Also separated at birth
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : David Bowie and Karl Held : Victor Buono and Dan Seymour : John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi : Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt : Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov : Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy : Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Gough : Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, and William Hopper : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Barbara Hale and Vivien Leigh : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : William H. Macy and Michael A. Monahan : Fredric March and Tobey Maguire : Molly Ringwald and Victoria Zinny

Twelve movies

[No spoilers.]

How to Dance in Ohio (dir. Alexandra Shiva, 2015). This documentary follows the lives of young adults on the autism spectrum as they prepare for a formal dance. “You see someone and you want to talk to them. What would you do?” “I just don’t know.” Fear, uncertainty, courage, risk, kindness, and joy.

*

Frances Ha (dir. Noah Baumbach, 2013). Frances (Greta Gerwig) is twenty-seven, a dancer and choreographer, trying to make a go of it in New York, trying to preserve a friendship, trying not to crack up. As in the more mocking Fort Tilden (dir. Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers, 2014), there’s the danger of falling back into a previous stage of one’s life. My favorite line: “I’m so embarrassed. I’m not a real person yet.”

*

Ulmerama (four Edgar D. Ulmer films)

Strange Illusion (1945). Jimmy Lydon, best known for the Henry Aldrich series, in a low-budget, surprisingly thoughtful adaptation of Hamlet. A judge dies in an accident. His son thinks it was murder. And now his mother wants to marry this dashing but creepy fellow (Warren William). No ghosts, but a mighty strange dream sequence.

The Strange Woman (1946). Hedy Lamarr plays a lumber-town bad seed whose ability to destroy lives seems unbounded. The line forms to the right: Gene Lockhart, Louis Hayward, George Sanders. My only dissatisfaction with this film: it’s set in the 1820s. I would like to see these relationships play out in a film-noir setting, with cigarettes and electric lights.

Ruthless (1948). In a story told in flashbacks, Horace Vendig (Zachary Scott) grows up to master the art of the dirty deal, exploiting and destroying every relationship that comes his way. With Louis Hayward, Diana Lynn (in a dual role), and Sydney Greenstreet. Watch for Bobby Anderson (who played the young George Bailey) as young Horace and a barely recognizable Raymond Burr as his no-account father.

Detour (1945). Yes, it’s true: “Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all.” Al Roberts’s (Tom Neal) only mistake is in seeing himself as a singular victim. The film’s other principals are victims too, of accident, assault, illness, or estrangement. Ann Savage as Vera is terrifying. Her association with Al feels like a nightmare of a marriage.

These four films are available at YouTube.

*

Hitchcock/Truffaut (dir. Kent Jones, 2015). Audio excerpts, always brief, from François Truffaut’s conversations with Alfred Hitchcock; excerpts, always unidentified, from Hitchcock’s films; and many directors talking at length about Hitchcock’s work, sometimes with tiny subtitles. Some of what’s said sounds like critical gibberish: “The subtext seems to be bubbling up almost to the point where it’s text.” Much of what’s said runs to the obvious or the hagiographic and makes the movie feel interminable. The most thought-provoking remark comes from Peter Bogdanovich, speaking of Psycho: “It was the first time that going to the movies was dangerous.”

*

The Upturned Glass (dir. Lawrence Huffington, 1947). That James Mason — he always looks like he’s up to no good. Here he plays a brain surgeon and part-time lecturer who looks like he’s up to no good. With Pamela Kellino (married to Mason in real life), who also looks like she’s up to no good. A gripping movie, especially when what appear to be flashbacks prove to be projections of future events.

*

A Separation (dir. Asghar Farhadi, 2011). An Iranian husband and wife separate, and they and another couple become entangled in a bitter court case. Tradition and modernity, obligations to family and obligations to self are in conflict here, with a strong element of social and economic difference, and perhaps the most intense domestic arguments I’ve seen on screen. By the director of The Salesman, which I want to see as soon as I can.

*

Something Wild (dir. Jack Garfein, 1961). A rape and its aftermath: isolation, fear, despair, and an encounter with a good Samaritan that takes a deeply disturbing turn and turns the story into a variation on “Beauty and the Beast.” If you know Carroll Baker only as a sex symbol, if you know Ralph Meeker only as Mike Hammer, see this film. Rooted in the work of The Actors Studio, with scenes that play as if they’re being worked out in the moment by real people. Music by Aaron Copland. Recently released by the Criterion Collection.

*

Un peu de festival du Jacques Demy

A Slightly Pregnant Man (1973). A farce with Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni. The joke never really goes much beyond the title. Most enjoyable: the film’s final thirty-or-so minutes, in which the pregnancy gains media attention and a line of men’s paternity clothing hits the market. But to my mind this film lacks the chicness and charm of earlier Demy films.

Model Shop (1969). Architect manqué George (Gary Lockwood) and his actress girlfriend Gloria (Alexandra Hay) struggle in Los Angeles. The possibility of being drafted hangs over George as he tries to raise the cash to keep his car from being repossessed. The film becomes much more interesting when Anouk Aimée enters the story — she plays a woman working in a “model shop” in Los Angeles, photographed by anyone who can pay for a fifteen- or thirty-minute session. For anyone who has seen Lola and Bay of Angels, Model Shop is a sweetbitter extension of the Demy universe. (George, I think, is another Roland Cassard, a Lola character who goes unmentioned here.) Los Angeles plays a supporting role as a large bleak city.

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 : Is there no end? No, there’s another twelve

The Golden Voice

Pencils, giant handsets, John Milton’s L’Allegro, and “At the fourth stroke it will be four forty-three and forty seconds”:


The Golden Voice, British Pathé, 1935.

From 1936 to 1963, E. W. Cain, or more accurately, Ethel Jane Cain, “The Girl with the Golden Voice,” was the recorded voice of the United Kingdom’s speaking clock. BBC News explains:

Ethel Jane Cain, the first voice of the speaking clock, won the role in a Post Office competition called “Golden Voice” in 1935. For the first time in the UK, callers dialling TIM (846) were greeted by a recording of Ms Cain giving the Greenwich Time — correct to one-tenth of a second.

Here is a clip with Cain and the speaking clock:


Time Please!, British Pathé, 1938.

And one more clip of the speaking clock in action:


Time Please!, British Pathé, 1945.

And here is the same speaking clock still going in retirement.

A related post
Time of Day operator, Chicago 1937

The day after National Pencil Day

[As seen on a walk this morning.]

Yesterday was National Pencil Day. You could hear them going at it, partying hard, deep into the night. This poor guy must have gone a little too hard.

“Another slim volume”

And speaking of slim volumes of poetry:


[Glen Baxter, Atlas (New York: Knopf, 1983).]

A related post
“Just poems about spring and that”

[A friend gave me a xeroxed copy of this drawing years ago, clipped from an advertisement with the heading “Coming Sept 30 from Cape” (that is, from the publisher Jonathan Cape). I thought the publisher was advertising poetry in a funny way. I didn’t realize that the ad was for a book by Glen Baxter himself.]

“Just poems about spring and that”

On guard duty in a trench, Schlump hears “the call of nature.” He cannot desert his post. And all he has for paper is a “slim volume of poetry.” By a sign reading Infantry Regiment X—Infantry Regiment Y, he leaves “a different, far less glorious marker”:


Hans Herbert Grimm, Schlump. 1928. Trans. Jamie Bullock (New York: New York Review Books, 2016).

Also from this novel
Food fight : “Headed for the Front” : “A few sacks of peas”