6 Movie Reports

Midnight in Paris (2011)

F Scott Fitzgerald partying

This is the recent Woody Allen movie in which a blond Woody Allen stand-in is able at the stroke of midnight to go to the 1920s (and even beyond) where he hangs out with Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Picasso and other famous people from that time. I am in the camp that liked this. I thought it was fun. A lot of people, who obviously did not think it was fun, despised it. (This guy, for example, appeared to have been seething with contempt the entire time). It is pointed out by most of the more intensely intelligent viewers of the movie that the jokes, the music, the personas and conversation of the famous historical people, Woody Allen's idea of Paris itself, rely on the most hackneyed, shallow and cliched tropes in which all of these things have become packaged for mass consumption. It is not that I did not notice all of this, or imagined that Hemingway and all these other people were friendly, good people--though they may well have been fun people--the Paris in the 20s era is attractive to people in large part after all because it seems like it was a good time, even at the dumbed down intellectual level necessary for the general public to conceive some idea of it; but it did not upset me. I am at an age, and perhaps even Woody Allen is too, where I have probably given up on the idea that I will ever experience Paris, or anything else, on the terms that constitute its real interest and greatness. The blogger linked to above talks contemptuously about the philistines who want to seem sophisticated without sacrificing their familiar comforts or facing their limitations. I don't know, it is true I have not been properly pushed to do these things to the extent which seems to be required now for many years, and I have generally avoided intellectual conflict both on the internet and in person because I don't have the ready-made foundation to draw on that I would need to endure and struggle through them, or the time to meticulously respond to all of the tough invective and cross-examining that serious assertion requires to be backed up. Yet I have devoted a lot of time to reading and study, certainly to an extent that seems to lead places and produces palpable results and abilities in other people. I have made some sacrifices in doing this as far as not following other pursuits which might have been more suitable for me goes, though whether any such pursuits exist has never been demonstrated. As to facing limitations, the levels at which I run up against these would preclude even residual participation in any of the attractive or serious areas of life at all if I were to submit to the most exacting standards, and I have decided that in the absence of anything more desirable to me being available, that I don't want to do that.

I even watched this a second time, and thought it, even acknowledging the clunky and even bad writing and characterization in the modern segments of the movie, just about as fun--though I've been known to watch reruns of Rick Steves' cosmopolitan-aspirant travel shows multiple times if they are about a place I like, or imagine I would like.

I thought fleetingly while watching this that it was an old-man work, analogous to the late Graham Greene novel Monsignor Quixote. This may be because the references and shape of the story seemed purposely to have been not been overly daunting or obscure, and reflected some of the artists' standard tastes, interests, what have you. But I did not dig into it any more than that.

Off the cuff top 10 Paris movies. I know I haven't seen that many of them, and I'm sure I'm forgetting something I have seen.

1. Les Enfants du Paradis
2. Stolen Kisses
3. The 400 Blows
4. A Bout de Souffle
5. Boudu Saved From Drowning
6. Celine and Julie Go Boating
7. L'Argent
8. Midnight in Paris
9. An American in Paris
10. Window to Paris 

All we ever asked for was that romantic walk along the Seine (maybe not all, but that was included in the desired overall package)

A Fatal Inversion (1991--incomplete)

This was a British TV production, about three hours long. It is about a couple of college friends who had spent the lazy, glorious summer of 1979 hosting parties and eccentric visitors at the Georgian mansion in Suffolk that one of them had inherited. Ten years later the friends have moved on to careers and wives and children and live in the suburbs. The summer in Suffolk seems to be forgotten until a dead body is found in the woods near the mansion house that seems to have been buried for about a decade. When the police come around to ask the former owner of the house--he sold it shortly after the summer ended--some general questions about his time there, he appears to be nervous...very nervous...I watched the first 1:46:02 on Youtube, which was the only place I could find it. It was very good, a thorough English police mystery type of thing, though I dragged my feet on watching the end because I thought I could see where it was going and I was not very enthralled about arriving there. I waited so long in fact to finish the program that when I did go back it had been taken down and I couldn't find it anywhere else. So I don't know what happens. 

Seeing movies from the early nineties are so very odd to me, because it is a familiar world that one lived in one's self, where young people read newspapers and don't have tattoos and of course the old telephones and cars and all of that, but also the people's bodies. All of the people in this movie have distinctly 1990-95 era bodies that have a quality you recognize instantly if you were alive at the time, that is different from what people look like now. It must have to do with the composition of musculature, fat, presence or non-presence of drugs and other stimulants (and the same holds true for 1970s bodies also, prime examples of which are to be seen in Village People and Jesus Christ Superstar videos).

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974)

TV movie about the life of a (fictional) woman who was born a slave and lived to be 110, which brought her into the civil rights era. It won a lot of Emmy awards, including best actress for Cicely Tyson, which I thought mildly interesting in light of the recent brouhaha over the traditional lack of Oscar recognition for black performers, as this movie and the accolades it got seems to have been largely forgotten. It was based on a book of the same name by a writer named Ernest J Gaines which somehow I had never heard of either though at one time at least it seems to have been quite celebrated and frequently taught in schools. This movie is of that school whose virtues, such as they are, are more in the educational than entertaining line. A litany of the expected atrocities and injustices runs through the course of the narrative, nothing either new in the way of incident or that adds to the understanding. Depictions of life in the old south I often find interesting, though that is, I hate to say, because the presence, in a fairly nearby part of our own country, of a feudal and near-feudal culture up to a time not very far in the past, and probably all of the associated violence in the background, though I am not directly attracted to that as a matter of study, is largely what makes it interesting.

Black Sunday, or The Mask of Satan (1960)

Somewhat pioneering horror movie, made in Italy and based on a story by Gogol (!), the DVD version is dubbed into English. Stars cult legend Barbara Steele (described by the Film Snob's Dictionary as a "wild-eyed, witchie-poo B-movie actress equally at home playing seminude seductresses and scarifying goth girls in horror movies of the 1960s and 70s"). I found it mildly diverting. Such gore as is in it, while envelope-pushing for its time, is not overwhelming, and the atmosphere is gothic in a cheery Addams Family-esque way, as long as people aren't being trapped in dank cellars and in the grasp of determined and thirsty vampires. I have mostly forgotten it though.

I kind of like the idea of vampires being a running theme through the culture, since I mostly associate them as occupying milieus at high levels of taste, cultivation and what have you, but I can never really remember what the meaning of them is supposed to be. I know that you can ward them off with a cross and kill them by driving a stake through their heart, but whatever is signified by this does not strike me as anything that has a deep meaning for most of the people who make these kinds of films.

The Yearling (1946)

The Yearling seems like something I would have responded to more strongly than I did. It was made in the middle of my usual favorite period, is based on a classic, if now somewhat fading, American story, shot in lavish technicolor, and features stars towards whom I have been favorably inclined in the past. These things remain positives in the movie too. There is some kind of spark or underlying energy missing in the execution. It is a handsome and technically fine production, but it felt dull and rather joyless much of the time. Nothing happens in it that particularly charmed or interested me or drew me into the world, imagined or otherwise, of the movie. But I still think it is worth seeing for the student of this time period, or older technicolor movies, or older adaptations of literary classics, if for no other reason to get a better sense of why the better movies of this type work.

Alice Adams (1935)

I thought this was a very good adaptation right up until the end, which unfortunately was completely changed from what it was in the book (which I am an admirer of) in the cause of happiness. I would not have minded it being longer and including more episodes from the story, which is something I rarely say about movies. The young Katharine Hepburn not only does her expected fine performing, but is actually pretty believable as the hopelessly striving, borderline middle class Alice. George Stevens, who would go on to make many notable films, Gunga Din, A Place in the Sun, Shane, etc, etc. was the director. The book came out around 1921 and there was an earlier silent version of it, but this version is close enough to it that it seems contemporary and comprehends the general spirit with which it is animated. The Adams family's economic problems are experienced by them as more of a social/individual nature than the result of a general depression, which latter would have been so immediate to audiences in 1935 of course, but 30s movies excelled in depictions of social rejection and cruelty, much more so than I find to be the case in our own time--at some point I hope to be able to expand on why I think this was the case--so the onset of the Great Depression---I don't know what I am getting at here. I saw the movie a while ago. I enjoyed it, except that for the different ending, both with regard to Alice's love life and her father's career, which obviously play out completely differently in the book.

Pretty sad for a post 3 weeks in the making.

What About Motorcycles? and Other Matters

I read a cover article in Time magazine recently about the imminent ascendance of self-driving cars, swiftly leading to the point where humans will be banned from driving altogether, because they are too dangerous and inefficient, and therefore expensive. Time has always been ridiculed by the cleverer people, but glancing over some issues at a house I visited during Easter it seems to have become even more of a mouthpiece for the technocratic establishment than it has been traditionally ridiculed for being (Joe Klein has a regular column assuring/insisting to the reader that our professional political and financial classes are brilliant, serious people with a thorough understanding of how the world works and how best to get things done). Getting back to the self-driving cars article, the writer seems to have been a little overawed by the geniuses he interviewed at Google and at Elon Musk's company and let them set the parameters of his vision with regard to this upcoming disruption. This is a collective problem in society. We need to learn how to talk sensibly and with some self-assertion to geniuses and millionaires. Our lives will be richer for it. The combination of the tech revolution and the bifurcation of the economy, divided largely, it is held in some quarters, along lines of cognitive prowess, seems to have had the effect of cowing many of those who did not prosper under these conditions into withdrawing from engagement with those who have in any kind of lively or spirited way at all. This vision for the self-driving cars seemed to me very presumptuous and limited, as if all motoring were strictly utilitarian trips from point A to point B. What about motorcycles? Obviously they will be banned under this regime, but how well is that going to go over among motorcycle enthusiasts? Perhaps this hobby is not common in Silicon Valley or in greater Washington, but it is very popular where I live (indeed, people who come to visit me in the summer from the mid-Atlantic region expecting a quaint New England getaway inevitably want to know what the deal is with all of the motorcycles, the road passing by my house being a major thoroughfare for this mode of transport). While certainly the motorcyclists have destinations in view most of the time, in truth the main purpose of most of these outings seems to be as an excuse to meet up with other bikers and ride around. Even with cars, loosely-planned drives as the primary activity of the day, stopping at places that catch the fancy along the way, remains a common pastime; certainly I do this a lot myself. None of this is accounted for or acknowledged in the article at all. I assume the self-driving car will be accommodating if I want to spontaneously stop, or go on a different road than the one the computer has determined is best to take, or have to go to bathroom, or pretend to have to go to the bathroom as an excuse to stop. But it isn't really made clear in the article.

Things I Wasted Time and Energy Worrying/Arguing About When I Was Younger

1. Even before I had any children, I undertook a several years campaign to get my wife to promise that we ever did have any sons, she would not make a stink about them playing football if they wanted to do so. At that time, when I was around 30, I thought that the absence in my own upbringing of the masculine social conditioning, violence, exposure to competition that people cared about and the possibility of enhanced social status in high school, might be contributing to my failure to flourish as an adult, and I did not want to automatically close off that (or any) avenue of possible success for any sons I might have. However, despite having four boys, it is pretty clear that of the elder three, two will have no interest in playing football whatsoever, and the third seems unlikely to based on his temperament as well. This leaves my youngest son, who is only in 1st grade, though he does seem to be the most inherently jockish of the group, and as well to have something of the bearing and makeup of a quarterback, or maybe one of those old style golden boy running backs. Even in New Hampshire though now, the high school that they are likely to go to seems to recruit its quarterbacks and other skill position players rather than hope people show up at their door who can be developed into players. And of course I have not shown any evidence to date of being the kind of modern super-father who is going to fanatically push my children to be good at sports, or anything else, so it looks like the odds of any of my children playing football are pretty low at this point.

2. When I was in my 20s, having children and, especially, taking them to Disney World was seen by the people I was most influenced by and wanted to be like as the ultimate symbol of spiritual death. I was certainly convinced that one could never be a good writer if his experience was tainted by ever crossing the threshold of the Magic Kingdom or one of its sister amusement parks. Naturally I felt everyone with any potential for attaining an intellectually acceptable and satisfying life had zeroed in on me as the most obvious candidate for repeated mindless and sexually neutered vacations to properties of this dreadful corporation. I saw it as an adversary actively trying to destroy whatever positive effects all of my efforts to rise above my station might somebody have for me...Anyway I have never had to go to Disney World, because as it turns out in the 2010s it would cost almost $1,000 for my family just to enter the place for one day, which is so extravagant for us that up until recently, perhaps because I have to go around wearing rags and shoes with holes in them most of the time, no one has ever even asked me about going there. It seems to have become expensive enough that rabble-rousing intellectuals cannot effectively trash it anymore without calling attention to the fact that they aren't worth enough in any milieu to be able to afford to go there...   

I was going to do a religious activities update too but I have to let this post go.

Should I Try to Do the 25 Surprising Facts About Me Meme?

How about 9 to start? I don't think I can come with twenty-five things that will qualify as new, let alone interesting or insightful, at least not in so short a space as a week.

1. I was really born to live a more urban lifestyle. Even at my age, I still like to go places, and I would like to be able to interact more regularly and familiarly with educated people, though I rarely do either of these things, and haven't really in almost twenty years. On the other hand, things like home improvements and maintenance do not seem to interest me at all. There are shelves and lamps and doorknobs and electrical outlets in my house that have been broken for years, and it doesn't even occur to me to ever do anything about them.

2. I never imagined I would have the number of child I have. I should worry about them more. I don't really worry about them that much. I'm sure I don't make enough demands on them. They do read some, and they have taken part in a number of activities and followed various seasonal rituals over a period of years. Their lives have a rhythm to them. Sometimes I think I need to start to talk to the older ones about more complex and advanced things, try to give them some clearer picture of how life develops than I had, and which accomplished smart people seem to have from a young age. 

3. I very rarely drink coffee. Sometimes if I am in a certain kind of restaurant where I order dessert (which I almost never am) I like to linger at the table and sip on a cup with two creams and two sugars. But that is about it.

4. From age 7 to 15 I lived in a townhouse/rowhouse in a lower middle class multiracial neighborhood (before that I lived in an apartment complex), which may or may not be obvious from reading my posts. I am clearly fixated on (comparatively) wealthy, attractive, and well-educated white people, and have never felt really comfortable around this demographic, and certainly was never part of it, other than at the farthest fringe.

5. I finally got a mobile phone (a cheap smart phone) about 4 months ago. I find it frustrating most of the time. The screen and the keypad are way too small for me to comfortably ramp up my various social media participation. I can't remember how to get on the internet if I am not at home. My success rate at actually answering telephone calls stands at around 30%, because in the act of extracting the thing from my pocket I invariably touch something that cuts off the ringing. The one positive is that when I come home from a vacation, I don't have to deal with the possibility of some ominous message, or several of them, awaiting on the answering machine, which I used to dread, more than I realized, since I was still visited by these forebodings as I neared home after my recent trip to, even though there was no possibility of any unforeseen disaster from this quarter.

6. My 10 favorite cities (I haven't been to many): 1 (tie) Prague and Paris. I can't bring myself to slight either one, today anyway. Paris seems like it might be becoming unaffordable for people like me to do much there anymore compared to how it was before, but we will see on that. 3. London. 4. New York. 5. Montreal. 6. Florence. 7. Rome. 8. Dublin. 9. Quebec City. 10. Venice. Philadelphia/Boston/Washington would be next. I wanted to fit them in the top ten somewhere, but in all of these other places I did something that felt very exciting to me in some way, and the three non-New York cities are more like places where I have lived something like my normal life, and they do not feel as special as these other places.

7. I am so out to lunch with regard to everything related to the culture of the workplace, and I have no instinct for things like professional etiquette. I recently found out (via someone else's experience) that exploring other job options without informing your current employer that you are doing so is considered to be a serious transgression, even if you are a comparatively low-level employee. I had no idea about this. It was also news to me that when meeting people in a professional setting, that it is expected you will have done a certain amount of in-depth research on them, or their organization, provided any is available. This had not occurred to me either. For many years of my working life, until the last few really, I had largely been left alone, without a lot of interaction with higher-ups, which I appreciated at the time since as a younger person especially I was quite averse to dealing with older people in superior positions, however I see now that it has really left me on an island as far as relating to most professional-class people now.

8. My 7 favorite highway rest areas. 1. I-95/Maine Turnpike near Lewiston. It's a lonely rest area. Especially in the winter you might have the place all to yourself. Despite that it is surprisingly cheerful. 2. PA Turnpike Northeast Extension, near Allentown/Poconos. The air outside of it always seems especially clean. I like how the chairs in the food court have the little keystone symbol cut out of their backs. This section of highway connecting the western suburbs of Philadelphia with Allentown and Scranton is not a major corridor for east coast intra-city traffic, and most of the people in the rest area seem to be not in a great hurry and probably out doing Pennsylvania-ish things, which I should probably devote a separate post to explaining, because they are the same things people do everywhere, but there is a specific flavor to the way they are done in Pennsylvania that will elude the data crunchers and their ilk. 3. Vermont Welcome Center, I-91 near Brattleboro. Sometimes I come back this way from one of my forays into the rest of America. By the time I get here it is usually after 10pm or so at the end of a long drive, the last hour of which has been on an empty road in pitch dark. any staff they have working there has left, and I'm usually the only person there if I stop, but the displays are very cheerful (the outer design of the building is intended to look like an old barn) and make Vermont seem like an appealing and even exciting place. Plus I feel now that, back in one of the three northern states, with all of which I have some connection, I have arrived at home, which I am inclined to think of fondly despite all of the objections which might be made about it. 4. Florida Welcome Center. I-95. We always stop in here for the free orange and grapefruit juice. This place is always a mob scene, but I like the atmosphere. People are excited to be there. 5. Molly Pitcher Rest Area, New Jersey Turnpike. If I leave home with a full gas tank, this seems to be where I run out. All of the Northern New Jersey rest areas, while containing a great human panorama, are not really restful. This is the last one before the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which is usually near the end of my trip since I generally am going to or staying in Philadelphia, and you can breathe in it a little bit. 6. Canadian highway 10 near Montreal. Only because the Dunkin' Donuts there serves the coffee and donuts in real porcelain cups and plates with the company logo on it, which I thought was amazing. We can't have this in the U.S.? 7. I used to like the Maryland House on I-95 back in the 70s and 80s when they had an actual sit-down restaurant in the neo-colonial house they have there (I went there several times with my grandparents, who were extremely leisurely travelers. Going from Philadelphia to Williamsburg, which is about a six-hour drive, was a two day trip for them). However the last time I went there the single restaurant had been replaced by a bunch of chains and a food court in a new building. So much of the thrill is gone from this one. Honorable mention. The low-key gas stations with their little attached stores, often made of stone, along the old parkways in New York and Connecticut are very cute and inspiring of nostalgia for somewhat old times, but I not attached to any in particular. Likewise for several places on the New York State Thruway, but I haven't gone on that road enough to remember any particular favorites. Of course New Hampshire is notorious for our liquor store rest areas, but as these are only about ten miles from my house I never really stop at them.

9. I was somewhat good at running in high school. I have, or used to have, since I don't know what happened to them, a gold medal and a silver medal from Maine state championship track meets. The gold medal was for the mile relay, which obviously I ran with 3 other people, and the silver was in the indoor 600 yard run, which race I was supposed to win, and indeed the guy who did win had never beaten me before that day. I guess I have to say that I choked. I've choked at a lot of important moments of my life, especially when I was younger and being successful might have made a big difference in some way. So I lost this championship race by about 4/10s of a second and I wasn't even winded in the end. I had forgotten to exert myself, probably being overcautious about going out too fast, I let the other guy get too far ahead, and I couldn't catch him at the end. Of course I had not trained seriously, nor was I coached especially seriously, certainly compared to the way people go about things now. The coach would send us out on what was supposed to be a 5 mile run and we would run to McDonald's. But that's how I always went about things, I wanted to coast by on my natural abilities and achieve victories and other successes easily, with a modicum of work, and thus be enabled to pursue my real desires of devoting the bulk of my time to partying and getting women. And perhaps if I weren't so prone to choking, I could have bluffed my way to some more modest level of success before I ran into the ferociously driven and talented people who are not to be contended with. But I am not going to confess all of my major choking stories at one time. 

Stolen Kisses (1968)

I've started two other posts this week month (and then I went on vacation) but was not getting anywhere with them. So I am moving on to this one in the hope that I can convey something of what I would like to say about it.

While I try to be something of a universal student of the cinema, most of the movies that I really get excited about come from two main strains of the form's history, the first being the Life Magazine-evoking, code-era Hollywood films from the 1930s to the 60s, and the other being European movies from the 30 or so years following World War II, a period I have seen referred to in France at least as Les Trentes Glorieuses. As this appellation suggests, in both the United States and Europe these cinematic eras coincide with periods in the national history which certain people, mainly of the petit bourgeois, or now perhaps formerly petit bourgeois classes, would like to recover, as it was a comparatively heady time for their kind, and it is true that the lifestyle depicted in films of this type are appealing to people are not adapting well socially and culturally, and perhaps professionally, to the twenty-first century, not that I would know anything about that. Surprisingly these kinds of movies, the European ones in particular, do not come up in my program as often as might be expected. So it had been a while since anything like Stolen Kisses/Baisers Voles had come my way, and it was exactly what I needed during this dark winter of being forty-six, which I remember having been revealed in some study as the least happy age of all life, for men anyway. Though I have seen quite a few Truffaut movies, even having once attended a series on him that they showed at my college, and have studied the history of film, especially in this era, pretty widely, I was somehow not familiar with the existence of this one and had thus spent no long years in anticipation of its someday coming up in my system. This doubtless worked in its favor, as I seem to find an especial delight in these kinds of artistic surprises in my advancing age. I watched it through twice and on both occasions was reluctant to have it come to an end, so painful is it to be thrust out of the world of Paris in 1968, civic unrest and all, which world is never coming back, at least in our lifetimes. So I was very strongly affected by this movie for several days. I don't think I have been so thoroughly affected by any movie since maybe The Third Man, and that was six or seven years ago. Artistically of course the movie is highly satisfying, romantic, wistful (Woody Allen appears to have mined this extensively with regard to certain effects which he regularly incorporates into his own films), expertly constructed, interest never lags. Almost all of the reviews I have found, both professional and amateur/online, give it respect and a high rating, but I haven't recognized in any of them an emotional kinship in their perception/response to it. I don't think I have it in me at this time to convey what that is in my case either, but it has to do with the sense I have of certain things that have been lost, either by me personally or in the course of day to day life, that this movie happens to have recalled to me.

Stolen Kisses, while not an overtly masculine movie by contemporary standards, is a decidedly, or I guess a French male version of, a romantic comedy. The protaganist is constantly going to prostitutes, has a rendevous with his boss's wife and so on, but the last 15-20 minutes or so are as beautiful and romantic as any movie I have seen a long time. The old French, even the bourgeois, had such wonderful and dynamic sex lives, at least in the movies. Antoine has a rather random date in the middle of the film that he relates "didn't start out too well", but the night ended with the walls shaking anyway, which to me would nullify any idea that there could have been a weak start. The guy he relates this story to then follows with a rejoinder about the time he screwed his cousin "right on the attic floor" during the reception after a family funeral. The bourgeois dreamboat Christine character and her family are perfect. Everybody knows someone who kind of looks and acts like her, yet the type is rare compared to the demand that exists for it, and difficult to get to know as well as one would like, usually.

A nice montage to the two stars of the movie featuring the sentimental but affecting Charles Trenet tune that is the theme of Baisers Voles. The footage includes scenes from, I presume, the sequel of this movie (Bed and Board--1970, and the 4th of the Doinel movies going back of course to The Four Hundred Blows), in which Antoine and Christine are married. There was a 5th film in the series that came out in 1979 in which the pair are divorced (which if anything emphasizes the fleetingness of the happy ending of Stolen Kisses and makes it even more poignant) but I don't think any images from that later episode made it in here. (7/26/16--putting in labels, making corrections on this post. I was evidently drunk or 9/10ths asleep when I originally wrote this last paragraph).



On a completely different note, I followed this by seeing a movie from 1989 called Santa Sangre, by the iconoclastic cult Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky. I did not really enjoy this movie, which is packed with graphic violence and other in your face grotesqueness, and I was relieved when it was over, but I have to admit I found it fascinating artistically. Even now I am holding on to the 3 and 1/2 hour long bonus features disc a month after seeing the movie because I am not sure that I don't want to go through all of the material before giving it up. Jodorowsky is one of these colorful interviews who does not make any concessions to middle class niceties ("I love violence!" "I hate women!" "Life is violence!"). The movie exists in a sort of world of pure art and artistic personality and expression that draws on Fellini and French pantomime as well as Latin American fantastical influences that I find hard to turn away from, since it is an attitude that is so antithetical to the kind of life and mindset, with its obsession with politics and money, that I have gradually allowed myself to become subsumed into with little hope of shedding the chains of. But for all that the movie has interesting aspects to it and is successful as a kind of art-experiment in various (points?) (But) I don't know, I didn't like it. It doesn't come together in any way that I found meaningful.

Primary Day is Here

I don't have much taste for writing about politics anymore and maybe I will never write about them in the future, but tomorrow is Primary day and it is still a big event where I live, so I suppose I ought to try to explain what I think about what it is going on as much as I can.

I've thought a lot in recent years about giving up voting, since I don't seem to be able to grasp the most important issues and most salient facts about the candidates, adequately explain my votes or positions to rational people, and so forth. I haven't committed to doing this yet because I believe it is still to my benefit, as well as that of the nation as a whole, to take some part in the process than to leave it entirely to the more serious and impassioned people, whom I do not entirely trust to always act with more perfect wisdom in my behalf in spite of their apparent superior grasp of the constitution, economics, justice, the voting and legislative history of the candidates, and all of the other components of political debate.

I will confess that I am almost certainly going to vote for Sanders, barring a last minute semi- miraculous revelation with regard to the heretofore hidden greatness and necessity of one of the other characters. I have spent more time examining the revulsion I experience at the thought of voting for Hillary Clinton than I should have. Ultimately, it is her job as a candidate to make the public desire to support her, not the public's to have to justify themselves for not wanting to support her. Would she be a terrible president? Probably not I guess, assuming events remained on a normal track, though I have not seen anything that leads me to believe she would be a great leader in any kind of major crisis. That is not to say that Bernie Sanders shows any signs of being Churchillian either, but he at least comes off as having more affection for the people and the country overall, disdain for the financial 0.1 percent aside--hey, in the books written in the 40s, 50s, and 60s that I grew up reading, it never said that we had to love J.P. Morgan and Jay Gould to be patriotic Americans, anyway--and the Clintons and their various allies ran off everyone else from running.  The entitlement with which her entire campaign has been run to this point is unbelievable. When her canvassers call or come to your door, they are insistent in trying to get you to commit yourself to vote for Hillary, and then if you give them that of course they harass for all kinds of other personal data about you, all very technocratic, and all executed, in the character of many of the candidate's, and her camp's, own observations about her possible defeat in our state, with an ominous air suggesting that disloyalty, or rejection, as the case may be, will be punished in good time. Jeanne Shaheen, our hapless Democratic senator and apparent lapdog of the Clintons, has been put to work shilling for Hillary in various commercials and at events with the kind of exaggerated enthusiasm that suggests that the details of these endorsements were hammered out in a windowless room under heavy florescent lighting in a warehouse somewhere in Northern Virginia. I am also aware that Bernie Sanders (probably) can't get elected, that his proposals will never be implemented, that if they were implemented the country would immediately be bankrupted, all societal organization would collapse entirely, and we would be essentially laying ourselves open to foreign invasion, of both the military and emigrant varieties, and we would be defenseless before them. I guess I don't care anymore. What are my objections to Hillary Clinton's positions? Well, I can't recall her saying anything that made me say, 'yes, that would be good, I would really like to see that issue pushed or promoted'. It's always how her way is better or smarter than other people's. Bernie Sanders at least talks somewhat about specific things that people are actually concerned about. I don't think his free college plan is particularly brilliant, but, I understand that 'college' in the sense he is using it here is going to be more of a no-frills, high school like experience intended either to qualify people for the decent-paying jobs that they cannot get currently or to press the national media and political and business establishments to concede that the real state of things with regard to paid employment for most people going forward (is bleak?) and to begin to re-organize society accordingly. The college system on the macro-scale (i.e., not my alma mater; we are outside the system of course) does not seem sustainable, and its current role in society probably needs to be re-evaluated. Seriously, I thought in 2008 that the student debt crisis would have forced major changes by now. (My oldest kid was 6 then, now he's almost 14, and nothing seems to have changed as that looms on the horizon)...

I received a robocall the other day with a recording of Jared Taylor speaking in support of Donald Trump. Jared Taylor is, I believe, fairly well known as something of a white supremacist, and I do not tar people with that label as easily as some others might. But Jared Taylor comes off as actively not liking other kinds of people and promoting a kind of unpleasant militancy among white people, which is different from standing up for yourself and having some pride and a sense of dignity with regard to who you are and where you have come from when this is merited, which I don't think is objectionable.

We've been hearing a lot in recent weeks around Ted Cruz's incredible intelligence, which might even be more rawly powerful than Hillary Clinton's, given how reporters and other pundits seem to be cowering in awe before it. Other than mastering how to navigate power structures to most benefit them, these brilliant people don't seem to have a lot of very interesting thoughts about anything, that they care to share with the public anyway, though if they understandably don't want to share their deepest insights, it seems like there must be some level at which they would be free to give a glimpse of the light...But I am out of time now.

Music Death Spiral and Not Finding the Cure For What Ails Me

It's time for another music video post but I seem to have either run out of things I like or, in keeping with my general weariness of life, have ceased to like anything at all. The old familiar veins appear to have been mined clean, I have not hit on any new lodes in recent months that perk me up, and I am not hearing anything randomly or on the radio that is nudging me in new directions. The AM station I have been listening to in the car changed its format from Golden Oldies to political talk, which has left me with a plain old Oldies station which, besides having worse music, does not even have hourly syndicated news broadcasts or affable program hosts. This has been more of an ongoing cause for sourness with me than I might have realized. The differences between Oldies and Golden Oldies may appear minor, but "Golden Oldies" covers a much broader range of songs, from the crooners of the 50s to the Rat Pack and Nat King Cole to movie themes and showtunes as far back as Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman and Judy Garland and even mixing in some modern elevator music and versions of standards and other new releases by museum acts, while "Oldies" is restricted pretty much to top ten pop hits from the 60s. It would seem that the time would be ripe for me to begin a serious immersion in the real classic genres of music, Bach and untamed-period Louis Armstrong and all of those kind of people, but if I am going to write about them I need to connect with them in some way that is both meaningful with regard to what they really are and I don't think I am in the right mind frame to do this right now, I am too distracted, jittery, disorganized--I need a program for this serious music like I have for other serious things--to reach my aim.

I had not known that Pat Boone and Laurence Welk came together one night in 1961. I always kind of liked this song ("Moody River"--it evokes things about the texture of life at the time that I associate with my grandparents' houses, their neighborhoods, the books and furniture they had, that holds some pleasantness for me) though like "Love Letters in the Sand", I never realized the singer of the most familiar version was Pat Boone until I was well into adulthood. If I had caught this at a more intense and impressionable age when if I knew anything I knew that it was of vital importance to despise the music of Pat Boone, I think I would have taught myself to despise them, as I learned around the age of fourteen/fifteen that it was meet to despise Billy Joel's music, and found it easy enough, if not quite to hold the man and his fans in absolute contempt, to be indifferent to and unmanipulated by his efforts. It is very odd, but I am much more fascinated by Pat Boone than I ever was with the late David Bowie, who was clearly a man made to speak to other people. But with Boone there is just as much to marvel at in the perfect execution of supposed Caucasian inoffensiveness (though his existence has certainly always been plenty offensive to many), the clothes, the extreme state of clean cut-ness--his haircut and shave are so pointedly neat and unthreatening as to be almost belligerent. In these old clips too the sexual attraction that the girls and women feel for him seems to be genuine as well, the lesson of which is that if women are sheltered enough from real, pulsating sexuality, they will go for any surprisingly weak version of it that may offer itself...

Depeche Mode, "People are People". They've been playing this a lot lately both on the "80s on 8" and alternative/mew wave channel on satellite radio, I find the sound bearable, though the message of brotherhood and love, delivered with a perfect sneer, doesn't sound as if it is intended to include me. But I keep telling myself, it is I who am strong, who (undeservedly) has everything everybody else wants. who has all the power and backing of society, if I ever want to tap into it. They are hostile to me because they fear me, and my latent superpowers.

This was on in the supermarket the other day. I always liked this song, though it doesn't fit with any particular memories or times or experiences, and doesn't seem like it could fit with any such things, it is a song that evokes an eternal waiting for something to happen, in which nothing ever does or could happen.

Failure to produce art is a failure at living and understanding life and being human, one kind of failure among myriad others, but a significant one insomuch that it is a failure that collectively weakens and diminishes the surrounding culture.

I had run out of Lennon Sisters videos, and hadn't found anybody else who could cheer me up in quite the same way, but then I came across this. It is not a secret than many of the cuter girls you will meet are at bottom rather corny. I don't mind it obviously though the corny types don't usually go much for me, as they prefer someone more demonstrably masculine in all ways. It is not like there is a type that consistently goes for me as it is, but most of the women who seem inclined to at least put up with me (and are not insane) seem to be pretty matter of fact, self-directed, witty, do not need to be constantly entertained and excited, etc.

I was tagged on Facebook a few weeks back to write 25 things about myself. Being a narcissist and luster after attention of course I was interested in doing it, rationalizing the undertaking by saying it was a good exercise, but I don't really have time to do it there (the thing would take several hours to write and you don't seem to be able to save posts in progress), and the nature of that space makes me wary--the majority of the people who seem to read and comment on everything I write there tend to be the people I am least interested in letting in on my secrets, and they are never the people I am thinking of when I am considered whether to put something up. But this is such a private space--I think my last comment was in 2012--that I am considering maybe doing it here, for as far as I know, the people who read this blog are not the people I am trying to avoid on Facebook, though you never know I guess. I'm not sure if there are 25 things about me that anybody who reads this would not know or have guessed already however.

Eleven Movie Reviews

Getting to the point where I am forgetting all the movies I have to write about...

Woodstock (1970)

I had never seen whole thing before, though of course I have been seeing loads of the footage my entire life. It is probably the best rock concert movie I have seen, or been able to endure, though I haven't seen that many of them. The difference in the levels of physical exertion between various of the performers was marked, Richie Havens being the most vigorous, with the Grateful Dead, whose soporific thirty minute guitar indulgence was thankfully relegated to the bonus features, being at the opposite end of the spectrum. The Who was probably my favorite of the groups here, but it seemed like they were out of place in this scene. I was never much into the hippie music which predominates in this movie, though my wife used to listen to some of it when I first met her. I was in the womb in August of '69 when this was going on, and this is very recognizably the world I was born into, so that is interesting to me. Some of my earliest recollections, or impressions, of life involve being on a wool blanket placed on stamped down and dried out grass in the middle of what seemed to my three or four year old self a large crowd of people at some kind of festival, though I don't remember there ever being loud rock music. My father went in more for the kind of fairs where there were blacksmiths and people making saddles and dressing up like it was 1790, which must have been somewhat popular at the time. Back to Woodstock, this was when the middle class was so large and constrained within narrower extremes of education and income so as to almost constitute a world onto itself, as well as being at the end of the four decade period of very low immigration, so that pretty much everyone in the enormous crowd comes from a similar socio-economic and cultural background. This will be especially striking to anyone watching the movie today. Even if it were possible I don't know that I would want to go back to that kind of society entirely, at least in the form it had taken by the late 60s and 70s, which had induced a kind of broad despair throughout the populace, but it is remarkable how much everyone at the time, including the young me, took it for granted as the normal and hopelessly permanent state of society. I am still pretty sure I would not have wanted to be at Woodstock, unless I was part of the crowd bathing with the beautiful naked girls in the lake. But I wouldn't have been.

Party on

Stella Maris (1918)

Silent, obviously. Not tremendous, but enjoyable enough for what it is, which is an over the top melodrama featuring alcoholic first wives who beat their servants, beautiful invalids, fortunes that need to be maneuvered into the legal possession of the most likable characters, and so on. It stars Mary Pickford, the original "America's Sweetheart", and after this one movie I am a believer in the Mary Pickford legend. The bonus features included great home movies from Mary Pickford featuring a glimpse of the glories of pre-smog, pre-sprawl (and pre-income tax) Los Angeles during the teens and twenties.

42 Up (1998)

Installment of the much acclaimed British documentary series which has followed the lives of fifteen or so people every seven years since 1964 when they were seven years old. I had seen a couple of the earlier ones, I assume 21 and 28, back in the 90s, and remember liking them. 42 I found to be somewhat depressing. These people are for the most part distressingly ordinary, though there was one guy who ended up as a science professor (I don't recall which branch, physics, I think) at the University of Wisconsin who was obviously more intelligent than most of the subjects, and the one upper class bred man, at age 42 a successful and rather hard-headed barrister, who still consented to take part in the program, had a few matter of fact observations about the professional life that were interesting to me at least, though he was mostly pretty guarded with the interviewer/director (Michael Apted, who has been with the project from the beginning all the way to the most recent episode, which was 56. He himself is 73 or 74 now). The main problem for this episode from the narrative standpoint that I see is that as people get into their 40s and beyond, they don't change or develop that much anymore. Things may still happen in their lives, but they themselves pretty much are what they are, and as noted earlier, most people once they age out of the time in their lives when their personalities, education, sexual desirability can be understood in terms of potential to that when these have been effectively established, generally have nothing left that is very compelling about them. By that token I would expect the series to get worse as it goes on. However the critics seem to have thought that the two installments that have come after this have kept up the interest of the project. Doubtless they will come up on my list at some point.

The Trial (1962) 

Orson Welles take, made in Europe during his long exile-from-Hollywood period, on the seminal Kafka novel, starring Anthony Perkins (!) as the hapless K. While it has great visuals, it suffers for me from some of the same problems I observed in seeing The Magnificent Ambersons, too much long, intellectually dense and hard to follow dialogue combined with a lack of music, or at least noticeable music, that between the combination of my age and declining verbal intelligence, at least for interpreting the spoken word in large portions, made it difficult for me to concentrate/stay awake. Welles's celebrated genius clearly contains a claustrophobic/oppressive element, in this apart and beyond that suggested by the source material, that I do not find congenial. However many people think this is a masterpiece of sorts.

Office Space (1999)

Something of a cult movie, apparently. I found it diverting in a return to the late 90s way, nothing very profound. It is noticeable to me that such ennui and cultural pessimism as made its way into this--most of which is played as comedy--seem as nothing compared to the almost apocalyptic vision of society that has become predominant in the last ten years or so. It may just be me, and that I work in an unusually female-heavy environment, but I had forgotten about the atmosphere of offices full of placeholding, quietly desperate middle aged men who have no enthusiasm for the actual work they do but are terrified of losing the paycheck. The kinds of guys who lose it if they don't get their coffee breaks at the set times and all of that. I am one of those guys now, but there are not as many like me as there used to be. Most of the men I know seem to be either somewhat major professionals with purpose, authority and so on, or freelancers of one kind or another, with purpose and authority of a sort.

The Plainsman (1937)

Entertaining golden age western starring Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok and Jean Arthur as Calamity Jane (the two had been paired a year earlier in Mr Deeds Goes to Town as well). Buffalo Bill and George Custer feature as characters also, as does Abraham Lincoln, who opens the movie by reiterating four or five times in a cabinet meeting as the Civil War is winding down that the plains need to be made "safe" for settlement for all the restless Americans coming home from the war or otherwise released from past claims or duties or ways of life from its result. Very smooth production, with the characters presented mythologically but not in a 'serious', overly reverent manner. Enjoyable, but not distinctly memorable.

Melancholia (2011) 

This kept turning up in various of the games I play with word combinations on Google, so I decided to get it. Relentlessly dour and pessimistic movie, even before it becomes certain that the world is going to end before the summer is out. Like a lot of modern movies it is well done in a slick kind of way. The characters have everything, seemingly--great looks, brilliant intellects, vast wealth, estates, leisure, privacy--yet they are uniformly miserable and disdainful of others and nothing is good enough for them. I have no sympathy towards them whatsoever, though of course I would still like to sleep with all of the women. They would prefer anybody else, but unfortunately our civilization has produced me, or variations on me, a few million times over. And women have, seemingly, never been less satisfied with the quality of men available to them.

All That Heaven Allows (1955) 

Archetypical 50s technicolor melodrama by Douglas Sirk of the type that was dismissed at the time as pap, but has gained respect in recent years for its lush production and cinematography as well as its sly undercurrent of commentary on the moral and intellectual rot at the heart of bourgeois American society in the 1950s. I was kind of fascinated by it. Nothing in it--town, characters, houses--resembles anything real in the naturalistic sense, yet it feels like a familiar, real world--a horrible one, mostly, but nonetheless psychologically it is only too attainable.

The Emperor's Club (2002)

Probably an all right movie, but more stinking rich and privileged kids who transition mostly smoothly from prep school to the Ivy League to the heights of finance, law, politics, culture, and so on. I'm at a place in my life where the stories of people of this sort, unless they go off on some sort of completely bizarre and unpredictable tangent, are not interesting to me. The crisis in this movie concerns the charismatic but academically indifferent son of a senator who mocks/undermines his classics teacher and cheats during the Mr Julius Caesar pageant/history quiz, which is one of the social highlights of the school calendar. Because his father his so important/gives so much money to the school, no one can bring the hammer down or even effectively express anger towards the kid, who goes on to Yale and eventually becomes a CEO of some kind. Later, at a 25 year reunion of the class in which the Mr Julius Caesar contest is reprised, the CEO cheats again and announces he is running for his father's old senate seat. The classics teacher tries to call the CEO on his cheating but the guy laughs in his face and asks his old teacher where all his learning and study of virtue, etc, has gotten him, and the teacher lacks the wherewithal/confidence in his own learning and development to effectively give any kind of an answer. So it does not really give us the alternative universe vis-a-vis real life that we are looking for. There is a reason why Mr Smith Goes to Washington is a classic and this is not, after all.

Gone Girl (2014)

Silky smooth Hollywood product that investigates more of the rotting heart of the American dream. The most fascinating thing for me about modern movies like this is to see how my contemporaries live, or are supposed to live, since I have little social contact outside my immediate family, and our lives and home follow an apparently outdated rhythm, and we are as well located very far from most of the drama propelling national politics, culture, etc. The main characters is this are around my age, or slightly younger. The Gone Girl, who literally has the adjective 'Amazing' as a huge part of her identity (her parents were the authors of a once popular book series based on her life titled "Amazing Amy"), is a lifelong New Yorker who is forced by the recession, and the losses of her and her husband's media jobs, to move out of the city to her husband's hometown, which unfortunately is a cultural black hole town on the Mississippi River in Missouri (though not so dead that there aren't plenty of large-breasted twenty year old bimbos who are interested in having sex with her husband). All of this drives Amazing Amy over the brink and she disappears in an elaborate hoax to make it appear that she has been bodily as well as spiritually murdered by her fundamentally inferior husband. Perhaps she is a symbol of our whole generation, though she is not really an attractive representation of the supposed brilliance, hotness and overall awesomeness of the contemporary woman. At the end she morphs into what Hollywood seems to consider to be a current feminine ideal, a sculpted. hardened, pitiless shrew whose combination of hyperintelligence and unapproachable sexual magnetism is not to be engaged or resisted, similar to the Robin Wright character in House of Cards, which program I abandoned after about two and a half episodes because I determined my life was too short to feel that miserable, both about myself and the greater society...

Gillian Flynn, best-selling author of Gone Girl and Generation X superwoman

White Bird in a Blizzard (2014)

This movie came up in one of my games rather out of the blue. I have to say I thought it was kind of good, and stylistically attractive. The director is a American of Japanese descent named Gregg Araki, with whose work I was previously unfamiliar. He seems to be a big name in gay cinema. While there is certainly gayness hovering around the edges of this movie, it is mostly of a subdued kind. The main character is another girl/woman of exactly my age, but it is set from 1988-1991, so she is 17/18 to 21 in the film. Other than a kind of uniform blandness and by comparison to now somewhat less all-encompassing relation to media, there is not much specific in the film that is that evocative of 1988. There is a pretty good soundtrack (The Cocteau Twins!) of some of the affecting melancholy sensitive white kid music of the time, but it is doesn't seem to me to quite fit with the movie.

The girl who is my age in generational time has a sexual coming of age at what appears to be the right age for it--when you get your 1st kiss in your junior year of college (as a man at least) it appears that you missed the time for 'coming of age' and all of the specific later-in-life maturity related to that experience--including a lover who is a much older man, which despite having gone out of style in our time appears to be a dynamic that is usually incredibly healthy for all concerned. I am reminded, depressingly for myself, that almost all interesting and attractive women have these deep secret lives and wealth of erotic experiences that people like me have no inkling of, and therefore have can have no real relation to them and their lives and art and basically everything good and desirable in the world. So a good movie, but it did depress me because of the particularly gut-punching reminder of my ------- irrelevance.

I am caught up now, though I wish I had expanded more on some of these.

Year in Review

I only managed to get done 35 posts in 2015 on this blog (though I did put up 27 on the spinoff Vacation blog) and readership was not so hot either. Quality, though never near as high as I anticipated when I took up this pursuit, I suspect is down even from what it was formerly. So I am in a bit of a down cycle. However, maybe this past year marked the bottom in some ways and I will be able to come back somewhat.  Become calmer, more comfortable, less distracted and rushed, or at least approaching somewhat the level I formerly had. I feel like I must be close to peak distractedness or jumpiness; well, what I really feel is that it must be impossible that I will never regain my ability to think and write somewhat coherently. In any case, here were my top-viewed posts from the last year:

1. Mid-Winter Music and Videos on this blog got 174 page views, making it by far my most popular post of 2015.

2. Author List Volume VIII from the Vacation blog, a dry catalog of writers' birthplaces, burial sites, museums and other monuments, was the runner-up of all my postings this year with 73 views.

3. The Battle of the Broadcasting Erins, a consideration of the merits of Generation-X TV newscaster babes Erin Burnett and Erin Fehlau, took the bronze medal for this year with 58 page views.

4. A movie review post with the eclectic-sounding title of Luis Bunuel/John Huston/James Joyce/Andy Williams was checked out by 44 people.

5. My recount of my experiences reading An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser on the other blog attracted 39 visits.

6. Addendum to Edward Bok post (Vacation)--28

7-8. Tie between the original post on The Americanization of Edward Bok on the Vacation Blog and my account of taking my children to see the movie Tomorrowland, both with 25 views.

9. Author List Volume VII (Vacation)--24

10. Report on All's Well that Ends Well (Vacation)--23.

The least viewed post I had this year was my June reading update on the Vacation blog, which drew only 7 visitors. In general those monthly reading updates are not popular, but I started doing them to give that blog a somewhat more frequent consistent source of content, so I think I will keep it up for now. The least viewed posts for this blog were the last two I put up in December, which have both drawn 8 views. 8 seems to be about the baseline number of regular readers I have. Most of my posts get to eight views within a week and then other visitors will trickle in periodically after that.

The rather groovy early 70s video for 'Uncle Albert" on my #1 post for this year seems to have been taken down. We'll try and see if this one is any good.

Videos featuring the beautiful Mirielle from the 1980s "French in Action" TV series (one was on that prize-earning post) never stay up for long, but it is usually worthwhile to find more.

I have had a good Christmas season, of course one always has to work too much in my line of employment this time of year, but I think my children will have pleasant memories of it in their later life. Hoping my brain recovers some of its elasticity and stamina, however modest these were even at their peaks, in the New Year, and I can produce some worthy as well as more frequent posts in 2016.

In Which I Once Again Try to Rationalize Various Crimethoughts

So I have not had the most productive year of blogging. I suppose the main reason for this is that I seem to have ever less to say. This is disturbing of course, since I might have to live another two or three decades at least, and the possibility of being unable going forward to have any kind of intelligent thought processes that could be translated to writing is a state of existence that, due to the absence of other skills or interests at a recognizably adult level of development, I find unpleasant to contemplate. So I feel somewhat obligated to try to carry on. I am also going to cling to the hope that this bad year has been to some extent due to 1) the presence of the new baby, which, even though she is the sixth baby I have had, and is a remarkably easy baby as far as babies go, has still, given my age and the presence of five older children and their various needs--I have to spend almost one hour out of the twenty-four every school day washing out and then making up lunchboxes, for example--impeded more and more on my writing time since I am really too tired at night to do much of anything now, which formerly I could still usually put in a hour or so worth of effort; and 2) the current absence of a functioning computer for writing at home--I do have a smart phone now that has internet access but as yet I have not committed to trying to blog on it, though I suppose if I were truly alive and driven to write, I could. The obvious solution is just to buy a new one, but the timing has not been good for it. Between my wife being out earlier in the year on maternity leave, and the necessity of taking out maximum insurance in anticipation of the baby, and having to buy a new dishwasher, and keeping the children up with all of their camps and lessons and private schools, I have been holding off on the new computer, which would be pointless anyway unless my posting began to show a marked improvement.

It is true though that I don't seem to know my own thoughts, or trust them, on any number of matters, which tends to make writing about anything impossible. Lately, for example, most of the people of my general socio-economic group (or at least that to which I aspire to belong because there aren't any very appealing alternatives) who deeply believe themselves to be good and morally correct, and obviously care about being so, have been greatly excited in favor of the continued mass migration of refugees and other aspiring people from all corners of the world into the United States and other wealthy Western countries, with apparently no limits on such migrations as to number or any strict measure of social desirability other than those determined by the global marketplace and the would-be migrants themselves; to do otherwise would be a moral wrong. I tend to be conflicted about this, at least at the level, numbers-wise, that have already immigrated into these countries since about 1990, and that are being anticipated for the foreseeable future. There are any number of places in the heart of the great western cities and homelands that have had their populations transformed by foreign-born people without much of a visceral attachment or seeming cultural respect, beyond economic and certain educational opportunities, for the host country. There are a lot of old natives of these countries and cities who are deeply unhappy about the changes that have come over the societies that they grew up in, to the point in some cases of demoralization and despair, though as these tend not to be important or respected people, we are not supposed to worry about them. I am not quite in this latter condition--while I struggle some with constant change and 'disruption', I more or less accept its necessity and even its desirability, to a point. I believe I could even live contentedly enough in many places that are more diverse and heavily populated with immigrants than where I live now, provided that, first, the levels of overtly racially-motivated conflict and violence were low (low meaning, 'it is not something I have to account for in my daily life outside of the occasional extraordinary circumstance') and second, if in the United States, the local area were to maintain some strong institutional and cultural ties to the old American republic. A lot of people who occupy somewhat extreme positions, both on the left and the right, including many on the left who would be designated as belonging to the white tribe, seem to relish the prospect of some kind of racial conflict, for the leftists seemingly under the assumption that certain classes of especially distasteful white people are going to be receiving their deserved comeuppance, but I do not share this enthusiasm. For similar reasons I am not really that enthusiastic about the prospect of the western countries being continuously inundated by people from countries with whom they have had very few, and in some instances no cultural or historical ties until recently, though given the global demographic situation, I realize it would require a particular severity and arrogance of will on the part of the western societies to effectively do anything about the flow of migrants, which the powerful classes in these countries seem not to have, or be interested in having, presently.

The professed love that many leftists seem to have for almost any immigrant or person of color in the abstract, and their near ecstasy when a success or demonstration of superiority over the run of ordinary bland Americans by someone from one of these communities is recounted, while I actually think it is understandable given the bitter enmity which has prevailed in domestic politics during most of my lifetime, I also think is not truly real, and therefore not sustainable, especially when the current extreme left wing-right wing hatred dies down a little, which it will,  

I admit I am strongly affected by the stories all of the girls in Sweden and Norway who are supposedly getting raped at staggering rates by immigrant men, while their fathers and brothers and the civil authorities of their nations stand aside and do nothing, as if acknowledging their powerlessness in the face of forceful virility. Of course one hopes these stories are not broadly true, that the problem has been somewhat exaggerated as to scale or embellished as to its brutality, the impression given being that beautiful and unassuming young Scandinavian girls are being routinely attacked, captured and defiled in their own countries in broad daylight and with complete impunity by violent bands of young men of foreign origin, mainly Muslim. Of course I am affected because I imagine the women involved to be the typical beauties of their highly advanced countries, and the imagery of their being violated in their homelands by people hostile to their way of life and their very persons who could have been prevented from ever settling there in the first place is risible. People will argue that women are raped and treated terribly in various hellholes all over the world and I don't care about them. This is not entirely true, though in places where the racial composition, language and culture are completely different it is natural I would not have quite the same visceral affinity where the victims are concerned, and also the chaos and lack of social order and protection for women in these societies are not things to which I feel as direct a connection or responsibility, as I would say, do most Americans, because once you really try to confront all of the atrocities with which the world in all its glorious parts is filled, and keep them always in the forefront of one's consciousness, one must become rather humorless, and be possessed by the tireless zeal of either the saint or the crusader to live at all effectively forthwith, and those are callings that few people are equipped for. In any case one could say the same for me with regard to Sweden, but that country is not dissimilar in many ways to Vermont or New Hampshire, certainly when compared with the Zimbabwes of the world, and the breakdown of order and the safety of women there is more disturbing than it is in a place which had never quite achieved Western levels of those things in the first place.

Well, enough of this.

Lightning Movie Posts

I am so far behind on my movie documenting now, that I am going to go through as many as I can as succinctly as I can, sticking as much as possible to my most pertinent impressions:

Die Nibelungen: Siegfried & Kriemhild's Revenge (1924)

On Youtube, which is never my preference, but I have to take what I can get. Earlier Fritz Lang. Very good, I was into the Teutonic mythology. Supposedly Hitler was an enthusiast of these movies, which do feature a lot of Aryan types engaging in bloodshed. When Kriemhild marries Attila and goes off to live with the Huns we get a more convincing idea of the extreme filth and squalor in which barbarian peoples habitually lived of old. Margarete Schon, the actress who played Kriemhild, was striking to me for personal reasons (i.e., she bore a strong resemblance to someone I know and find attractive).

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919)

Dark, menacing German Expressionist classic, in a great print. Admirable for its style, daring, grasp of the civilizational mood in its moment, but with my current diminished concentration due to lack of rest and downtime this is one of those movies that I had a hard time staying awake through and actually following what was going on. Definitely appropriate for genuine smarties though. I will have to take it up again at some less hectic time.

L'Argent (1983)

Among the directors who seem to be universally considered as serious contenders for all time top-20 status, Robert Bresson has always been to me the most obscure. None of the video stores I used to frequent during that era ever had any of his movies, the college film society never showed any of them, his movies were never obviously referenced in any writing or other cinema that achieved any kind of mainstream penetration. Yet in time, influenced by the odd drop of the name in various corners accompanied with a forceful conviction of the greatness of the man's oeuvre, the idea formed in me that he was one of the small number--twenty? fifty? certainly one hundred--of the all time greats in the field. L'Argent was his last movie, and still the only one of his that I have seen. I bought a used VHS copy of it some years ago now, and had been unable to keep up with it at that time, but this revisiting was much better in that regard, and I was able to appreciate much more the amount of skill and control that is packed into every shot and scene, and their interconnectedness and flow, the quality of which is Bunuel-like. The movie is only around eighty minutes in length, yet a great many significant actions and psychological transformations happen. All of this is impressive, and therefore pleasing in spite of the rather doleful story and seeming message. Also on a less substantial note, we have some nice scenes from (a deliberately gritty and workaday) early 80s Paris, which resembles pretty well the city as it looked and felt like when I was there in 1990, but which I sense it does not in general tone resemble very much any more.

  
So I did not get too far tonight, but I will revisit this exercise again until I have caught up somewhat...

2016 Primary

I'm having a tough time getting this one going. I have really become indifferent...

I thought I should write something about this primary season before I miss it altogether. As with everything else, my level of interest in the process seems to be diminishing with every cycle. I still care enough about the overall well-being of myself the country that I think it matters a great deal that a Republican is not ultimately elected president, but beyond that I do not have a lot of enthusiasm or positive feeling for anything political that seems likely to happen. My waning interest, especially with regard to the primary, may be a symptom of things always appearing more interesting when we are younger and encountering them as a novelty and growing stale upon repetition; that said, I have the impression that the New Hampshire primary is getting a lot less intimate and spontaneous and all of the things that it prides itself on being, every time around. Perhaps as we get closer to the vote--we are still three months out--more of the traditional stump campaigning and the atmosphere that accompanies it will take place; still, the major, big money candidates increasingly eschew this approach when they can, preferring to stick to staged events with carefully selected and prepped audiences, with all public appearances calculated to maximize national media coverage.

My wife, who in contrast to me is known to and liked by the progressive crowd, was invited to a Bernie Sanders house party, but she declined to go because she supports another candidate whom she believes to be the inevitable nominee anyway and she does not think that the presence of Bernie in the campaign serves any useful purpose to the goal of electing this other candidate. I have not as yet been invited to anything other than a generic robo-message inviting me to a Chris Christie pancake breakfast in a town about twenty minutes away. This event took place at 8am on a Tuesday however, which is not a convenient time for me. I guess I am pretty close to being a stereotypical representative of the Bernie Sanders constituency, persuaded as I am that the economic arrangements of the New Deal era were not that terrible, appreciating his efforts to conduct his campaign at at least a high school graduate level of discourse,generally wanting no part of the Darwinian aspects of the capitalistic arena while hoping to maintain some respectability. The conventional wisdoms that he is so far outside the mainstream and that his positions are in some sense absurd strike me as odd. The most fervent supporters of his in New Hampshire whom I know tend to be quite affluent and seemingly successful in the various meritocratic and capitalistic competitions which define our society, and do not give off the least indication that they are concerned about the confiscatory taxes on their substantial and hard-gained incomes that would inevitably follow upon their man's election. The gentleman who hosted the house party referenced above, while something of a new age type, is a lawyer with an international background who travels all over the world and one of whose children at least attended the famous St Paul's Prep School. The other big supporter I know of has a stylish modern house on a good plot of land in the country, and her children also attend boarding school. I do not know what the source of either her or her husband's income is, but they both project the easy, comfortable force of the capable professional class.

That part of Bernie Sanders's platform where he says he wants college to be free has been much mocked by the practical men and ideologues who have a vision of their coffers being raided yet again to throw away on worthless people, but I have heard him (Sanders) explain the rationale behind this on several occasions, and it is not without a certain logic. The argument, as I understand it, is that in the past, when society, for lack of a better word, or some substantial or influential portion of the collective polity, determined that it wanted as many citizens as possible to enter upon adulthood with a high school education, and to in many cases require that either as a condition for employment, or for advancement to a more secure and lucrative position within employment, it was grasped, eventually anyway, that the providing of this education, or the opportunity for it, on the mass scale required would be the responsibility of organized governing bodies at various levels, which public version at least should be free. Bernie Sanders argues that we have come now to the same state with regard to college, or post-secondary training resulting in certification or a degree at any rate, and that if society is going to insist on people having these credentials in most instances to have any hope of earning a sustainable income, that it must, as formerly with high school, offer the opportunity to obtain this education to everyone at no personal cost. I do not know that I agree with this position, and I am not optimistic that it would work in the way that it would be supposed to work anyway, but there is a practical issue of too many people not being productive or self-sufficient or otherwise engaged or positively contributing well into adulthood, if ever, and there being very little structure or guidance or apparent interest on the part of the greater society to assist them to become so. This is a gesture at addressing a part of that problem anyway.      

Hillary Clinton. Yes, I think she is probably, if not precisely evil, more corrupted of soul even than is standard for a professional politician, at this point. But for all that I still don't think she actively wishes the American public, or the completely docile and harmless portion of it anyway, ill will if it can be conveniently avoided. We are constantly assured by the media of how brilliant she is, and doubtless she is possessed of a high general intelligence, but her public speeches, campaign literature, and so on are aimed, clearly intentionally, since her husband did the same thing, at voters in the vast middle of the intelligence distribution, which is politically savvy in the current system I suppose, but is frustrating because the country really needs a more sophisticated political discourse, especially from its leadership Though no one seems to be saying this, I assume that her entire campaign and the lack of any serious opposition to within the ranks of the party establishment is premised on the idea that somehow she, and the people around her, presumably veterans of her husband's administration, will be able to restore some semblance of the fondly remembered prosperity of the late 90s, that perhaps all of the difficulties in the intervening years really could have been avoided with competent leadership. What else is she running on? She has a commercial out about the pay gap between men and women, which takes a tone that seems to me likely to be unnecessarily divisive, especially in the general election, given that most men do not, and cannot regard themselves as riding especially high these days, and probably are not in much of a mood to be taken down any further pegs by feminist political candidates. The pay gap anyway is one of these issues that is always presented as an absolute truth, and an evil one at that, without regard to context, fruitful examples, explanations of whether these wage differentials where they exist reflect some kind of official policy, whether there is any legal recourse if this be the case and if not why not, and so on. I don't doubt that there is something to the pay gap, but the reasons for it are a little more complicated that some of the rhetoric would have you believe, and I doubt in most instances it is of a kind that Hillary Clinton or anyone else will be able to legislate across the board pay raises for every woman in the country (or pay cuts for the men, if you prefer that).

I actually saw a couple of twenty-something girls wearing Carly Fiorina t-shirts walking around my decidedly off-the-beaten-track neighborhood one day passing out flyers. I happened to be driving and in my usual hurry at the time, so I didn't have the opportunity to speak to them. I really would have been curious to know why they were working for her, why they thought it would be a good idea for her to be president, etc. They looked very normal, almost as if they lived in the neighborhood. No make-up, no jewelry, no expensive hairstyle or clothes, none of the air of impatience or educational or financial hauteur that often marks the young political operative or even volunteer from out of state. I know we are supposed to get over the fact that everything Carly Fiorina says or does basically screams out that she is a flat out bitch, because that is sexist, and we love it when Donald Trump behaves in an equivalent manner (though I don't), but I don't understand what her redeeming qualities might be supposed to be. I can't see any.

Among the Republicans, Christie, though I guess the evidence points to him as being more than ordinarily evil too, strikes me as the most interesting candidate, and certainly the most convincing as a person who might actually believe, in a self-generated manner, the things he says. Perhaps it is because he is from the northeast and his persona is familiar to me. Ted Cruz might as well be from another planet, the same with Rubio, Carson needless to say, nothing in their entire worldview has relation to mine. I guess Christie does not come off to me as a rigid ideologue, though I do not like his displayed tendency to personally attack and even savage ordinary people who are opposed to his positions...

I'll have to end this now and maybe do an update in January before the big day. I couldn't even get to stating my positions on the college racial insurrections, the Paris terrorist attacks, Syrian (and other) refugees, the obsessive and unquenchable fury of good modern people about the Japanese detention camps set up in America during World War II (Yes, they were wrong, but people seem to have gotten over the Japanese, you know, bombing Pearl Harbor and waging aggressive war against the United States, while the detention camps and atomic bombs dropped by the Americans on Japan are crimes eternally unforgivable). But as I say, I'll have to get to all this some other time...