Saturday commute clxxxii: Nice start

After an interval of unexpected length, it is a pleasure for me to look now upon a fresh, unmarked page in this journal. I would be the first to join whatever chorus there may be, for leaving it that way, if the project were completed. 

However, we have just noticed that the United States has discharged the obligation of disposing of its sitting President, and good behavior is always to be encouraged within sight of the young. Compliments, then, to the people of the United States disdained by that figure, over the last four years of exercising his preference for the fragment he seduced and betrayed. By every count, from epidemiology to pluralist reconciliation to international comity to planetary stewardship to fiscal sanity, he had rendered the nation the first justifiably outcast pariah of the New World. How delightful, then, that on the very date when first permitted by their constraining founding document to right his institutionally unchecked hostilities, the country showed him the door.

I know, there are those morose who wail, that this remedy is not enough. They are wonderfully paid, glitteringly honored, and as obvious as yesterday's excesses. I see too many minor movies, not to have heard Rossano Brazzi declare to Katharine Hepburn for David Lean, "Eat the ravioli." Please, do not instruct us in the array of anomalies still disfiguring the feast. Rather, organize for the State of Georgia's double Senatorial runoff in early January, of which more, soon enough. For this weekend, come outside. 

Refresh acquaintance.

Photo courtesy, ubayuri©

Saturday commute clxxxi: This very day, no less

In James Brooks’ hit film comedy, “As 

good as it gets” (1997), Helen Hunt, 

playing a single mother of an asthmat-

ic boy being neglected by the American 

medical establishment, receives an en-

dowment covering all of the medical ex-

penses necessary to transform her son 

into a soccer star within a week. But, 

suspecting that this gift comes with 

carnal expectations attached, she turns 

to Shirley Knight, her mother, to fret 

that maybe she should reject it. “No,” 

she flatly declares. “This isn’t a pair 

of stockings, this isn’t a string of 

pearls. This you do not give back.”

I find myself unable to imagine that 

Joseph Biden could have foreseen that a 

prospective running mate, often seen but 

"somehow" blocked in her quest for the 

Presidential nomination that he won by 

attrition, would be revealed as a soccer 

star within hours of being presented with 

his favor. How oblivious the presumptions 

so often are, at the foundation of our ex-

pertise, we need hardly note in this moment 

of Donald Trump. Yet suddenly the campaign 

that might already be seen as straight, but 

which no one pretended might see very far, 

finds itself carried aloft on a wave of ju-

bilation not seen since the conquest of 

Vicksburg.

Look here. People are affected. That very 

night one could feel the country, stand up. 

Stephen Colbert found Jon Batiste, composing 

a song, "for Kamala." Those who were able to 

squeeze into the donation sites of the Democ-

ratic National Committee, managed to deposit

$48 million there in those hours. Personal

ties, political commitments, alumni networks, 

lately moribund in the moment of Donald Trump, 

sprang to giddiest life — and all without the 

least forewarning. There was pandemonium at

the corner of Castro and Market, without a

word from Dionysus. This selection is not 

a pair of stockings; it’s not even a pair of 

Bernie’s fishnets. Alas, it isn’t pearls of 

Elizabeth Warren. It's the ore of our ground,

not of our statues. This is our birth.

No tentative “connection with the future,” the 

cliché of the day — or light at the end of a

tunnel, Kamala Harris declares the truth of

this very day, that only an unyielding maze 

of sordid, illegitimate structures could con-

ceal. Nor could it be lost in the confetti,

this revelation was ultimately forced upon

powerfully reluctant beneficiaries. But it's
done, and what one feels is the pace at which
such power can shift.

ii  Joshua Lott

    Getty Images©

Hey now, Super Tuesday, who will hang his name on you?

If this "Super Tuesday" casino of political preferences is not the end of the Democratic Party in the United States, it is likely to be cited as the last required mile marker of that destiny. A doctrinaire hysteric from one of the very least representative jurisdictions in the country is said to be poised to dispatch the candidacy of a gen-uinely mawkish bore, endlessly boasting of great personal sorrow and flattering servitude in a previous Presidency as its ceremonial gofer. In the contest still is the single credible candidate remaining, without the stature she originally brought to the field, yet with still more vitality than it would welcome.

It isn't that the program disappoints, it's that what could utterly have been foreseen by the unapproachable, anonymous, and incorrigible powers who structured it as a compulsory cataclysm waiting to happen -- appears so plainly to have been foreseen. Particularly after the last Democratic "Super Tuesday," when the least popular politician in America highjacked the political rights of an electorate starkly deprived of viable choice, who could not have predicted this re-run of the same generation of the same credentials, given how sparklingly well that worked to block the fascist seizure of power in America? 

Let it be remembered while it can be, then, what lies beneath this morally impeccable structure of policy distribution in America. Some 327 million human lives, all arrayed to function as required, if not to be marginalized by the only choice which is theirs. Rosebud. 

Lise Sarfati
Russia
1990

Origins of Wednesday cvii: Motivated to meet

A new acquaintance is seldom undertaken

entirely on one's own terms. Those that

are, can still remain interesting, when

a liberality of collaboration is a term

of one's point of view. I have been en-

joying screwball comedies from the '30s

and '40s again, which acknowledge anar-

chy less as a structuring principle and

more as a consequence of its resistance.

I could have been reading Euripides in-

stead, whose Bacchae is really not fun-

ny, but which acknowledges this paradox

pretty vividly. But now I have lost the

certainty of reach which depends upon a

life with one's books in an established

if quaintly disorderly location, having

moved house in the last quarter of 2019.

This inflicts a loss of fluency in con-

nectedness among influences on the mind

which I wouldn't wish on anyone. I deny

that it is refreshing, because connect-

edness comes first, propinquity second,

except if anarchy encounters resistance.

This glimpse of things was brought home

to me early in the life of the blog, in

a learnèd mentor's stupefaction, that I

proposed to consider water for its link

between the cinema of Jean Vigo and the

movie, If.., by Lindsay Anderson, where

there isn't any. No, there is gymnastic

exercise, though, whose incidence marks

connectedness with mesmerising fluidity.

The screwball comedy exhibits instabil-

ity as the price of a compulsory order-

liness about as well as if dull reform,

itself, had kept my translations of the

Bacchae all in one place, instead of in

the general terrain of each translator.

A more desolate outlook for the mind is

no pleasure for me to imagine. Give one

the connectedness of dark with light, a

sense of procession without fences, but

of genial collaboration, such as we ex-

perience in Henry Miller's intuition to

travel to Greece by way of the Dordogne

to Marseille - a passage ordered freely

by expectancy, astonishment, and nature.

So I packed my valise and took the train for Rocamadour where I arrived early one morning about sun up, the moon still gleaming brightly. It was a stroke of genius on my part to make the tour of the Dordogne region before plunging into the bright and hoary world of Greece. Just to glimpse the black, mysterious river at Dômme from the beautiful bluff at the edge of the town is something to be grateful for all one's life. To me this river, this country, belong to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It is not French, not Austrian, not European even: it is the country of enchantment which the poets have staked out . .

Henry Miller
The Colossus of Maroussi
New Directions, 1941©

Rued, the boat

You think Britain has it bad, to

be led by a PM of iridescent dis-

regard for the realities of Brex-

it? America has a similarly dyed

monstrosity, who can't stay afloat

without fibbing. But think of poor

Bogey, sparring with Claude Rains

on the patio at Rick's, having to

claim he migrated to Casablanca

for the waters, against Rains' re-

joinder that there aren't any. On-

ly in the movies, is it endearing

to confess, I was misinformed. Or

does that line survive so well, be-

cause it's lifted from childhood?

Suppose it were Friday clxxviii: And one forgot to go to the bank

    That's not so bad.
    There's always the
    movie.

      



    
















Anthony Perkins
  and Janet Leigh
Shamley Productions
  at Universal Studios
Alfred Hitchcock
  producer-director
Psycho
1960

The menswear candidate

A friend of mine remarked the other

day, not a little incontestably, it 

was a dark day for menswear when the 

Presidency lost this man. Those who

lived through that scintillating ep-

och have forgotten the lateral lisp,

an aplomb in the figure at all times,

even the stern rebuke of Big Steel's

impertinent price increase, through

a veil of awesomely apposite deport-

ment, calling into question how much

his clothes really do make the man,

now that we see what little Brioni

have done to humanize the incumbent.

But I stray. Laying not very far o-

ver the horizon of the next Presid-

ency, we spy a candidate who offers,

not to say threatens, to refute the

proposition that one can be made to

seem to wear what others may place

upon one's back. Tar and feathers,

for instance; or merely, a drumbeat-

en wash of hoary phobic effigies.

Have we so soon forgotten Mr Biden's

praise of an African American run-

ning, for being surprisingly clean? 

The mayor of South Bend, a place

not so far west in The Philadelphia

Story as Duluth, offers cheerily to

be elected to this office by charm-

ing the pants off the capitalist in-

telligentsia, and lightening them

of merry wads of patronage. Every-

one is tacitly avoiding the thought 

of how he shall be dressed by the

other side, if he should gain the

nomination to run for that office.

An air of make-believe, not hugely

different from the spell which ab-

sorbed the literati in Camelot, is

suspended by satisfaction with how

he dresses himself. In Center Right

and in Center Left, the sound of

ice cubes clinking in a giddy flux

is wonderfully reminiscent of the

blitheness of the last candidacy,

oblivious to the coral in the way.

Ah, but how splendid now to don

the noble togs of chivalry, what-

ever the rules of the game.

Suppose it were Friday clxxv: "What shall we do, play cards?"

One of the charmingest lines in

the oeuvre of Alfred Hitchcock,

in the sound era at any rate, 

finds the would-be assassin of

his well-to-do wife peevishly

mocking her refusal to go along

with his well-oiled conspiracy.

Her task is to stay at home, so

to bore herself to sleep that

she may be awakened in a daze 

and overpowered by a strangler.

But she wants to go to a movie.

Thus, he must shame her for re-

quiring him to stay as well, by

ridiculing what they might do.

As any decent murderer from a

hit play - the original book

for this film - would only too

freely confess, the show must

go on, the crisis must precip-

itate, the unities be observed.

Now the assassin plays the pro-

gressive part, and the victim

the transgressive in the long-

running thriller, grinding

away on Pennsylvania Avenue.

But these terms of art only

miss the point of Dial M for

Murder. Crime is not ideology,

it's meteorology; it's what

the times will permit. Imagin-

ing rolling back the tide, to

those halcyon days of Biden's

highest ever-held office, in-

vites one to neglect the plot.

Alfred Hitchcock

  director

Frederick Knott

  and Alfred Hitchcock

  screenplay

Dial M for Murder

Warner Brothers, 1954©

Some summer night

    As far back as I can remember,

    I always wanted to be a gang-

    ster. To me, being a gangster

    was better than being Presid-

    ent of the United States.

Nicholas Pileggi
Martin Scorsese
  screenplay
Goodfellas
Warner Brothers©
1990

La nuit américaine

Georges Delerue
La nuit américaine
  Grand Choral
1973





 

Further remark on Dean on screen

James Dean participated in three movies

in his career and died in that same year,

1955, at the age of 24. He was directed

by Nicholas Ray, Elia Kazan, and George 

Stevens. Probably nobody in the history

of American film has been showered with

more diverse support in so short a time;

and certainly nobody else so instantly

or enduringly outstripped so much fame,

becoming more universally recognized

than all three films put together. What

shirt today is not born, knowing, it

will never dress James Dean?

Now we have another historical study

of American cinema, to approach this

Alexandrian career with as much well-

sourced research as the years and the

author's visible diligence can allow,

and I'm happy to recommend it for com-

ing to grips with Dean's enigmatic as-

pects with obvious care, legitimate ar-

gument, and enlightening appreciation.

One never minds being informed about a

body of work from the craftsman's point

of view, the merit of which is better

to recognize its singularity. The crit-

ic is David Thomson, familiar for his

interviews with Criterion in their re-

masterings of films for dvd. The style

is conversational, the temper is calm,

the manner is dignified, the thinking

is continuously impressive, and the

curtain of fame is congenially lifted.

We read of many artists engaged in the

suggestion of desire, and of how their

personalities may have been tested in

a variety of ways. What one learns of

Dean is that if all the fame which had

fed his fame were suddenly to be extin-

gushed, the screen would reignite it.

One never minds discovering what one's

always seen.

David Thomson

Sleeping with Strangers

  How the Movies

  Shaped Desire

Knopf, 2019©