boys club

I made the graphic below for this Boys Clubs Tumblr about institutions that are all men because I have been thinking about it/noticing it for months: every single host of a show on the Travel Channel is a white man. Note: Samantha Brown is still listed as a host on the Travel Channel website, but I haven't actually seen her show on Travel Channel or on TV schedules for months. All these other shows are actually broadcast regularly right now.



These casting choices feel full of meaning, taken together. Among a million things, that: white men are the expert conduit through which the unusual/fun/exotic/interesting/unfamiliar/delicious are experienced and their identity therefore defines all of those things (by comparison); that their eyes are the ones that can be trusted for observation; that men are the only ones badass enough to travel around and do what they do. I really don't like how Travel Channel sells itself, which leans heavily on that last idea. And I really love travel shows! I enjoy some of these shows occasionally. But boy, is it a narrow window through which to look at the whole wide world.

Their newest show, premiering later this month? Hosted by Bret Michaels.

deep thoughts from S06E05

Roger Ebert Is Gone

When I read on Twitter that he had died I was actually sitting at my desk trying to decide what to send him to acknowledge his newest trouble with cancer. Nothing that made for sickbed hassle...a card? A note? Yeah, a note, on a piece of engraved stationery from my hoarded, dwindling stash. He'd appreciate that. A nice note with words that I'd hope would convey the right type of clear-eyed compassion - the kind of words he always chose to send: wise, kind, smart, with the beautiful responsibility and directness (and accuracy) of a lifelong newspaper man. I would have been careful to not write "Get Well," but, still, something as cheerful and real as I could make it. Writing to him always made me think very hard about the words I chose.

It doesn't matter now, because it's over. It was always going to feel too soon. He had been articulating his death in his strong voice for a long time, but it still hurt when it came, felt an unfairness.

I knew Roger Ebert a little bit. I have my small bag of stories, and I keep it more carefully than I do many things in my life because of how much my interactions with him meant to me. I don't think they are unusual - many, many people have them - and I know the same thing from my stories that I know from reading other people's: he was generous. It's such a boring word for what it describes. Maybe because "generous" is sort of outwardly-focused  - opens things up. It's a little vague. There was nothing diffuse in dealing with him, though. He was extremely focused, strongly himself, loyal to his thinking and his emotions. But he showed the best kind of confidence by being interested in and open to others.

I first knew him in 1999 because I sent him my zine. It was an impulsive move, born from killing myself for weeks to finish the second issue only to immediately have no clue what to do with it (a common feeling upon finishing a zine). Then I thought: Roger Ebert! He lives in Chicago too. He loves opera and movies and is an Anglophile, like me. He likes Doris Day and MFK Fisher, like me. I will send my work to him - he might like it. I followed my finger down a page of Who's Who until I found his business mailing address, and flung the zines in the mail with a note. Hail Mary.

I was at work three weeks later on a Monday, after a bad weekend spent dealing with the noise and stereo twiddlings of a crackhead neighbor. As I started miserably slashing through my inbox I was stopped by the sight of an email from Roger Ebert - Roger Ebert, just like any other person. His name shone calmly in the stacked queue amidst waves of the usual frantic work horseshit.

When I think back I can immediately access the physical sensations that swamped me as I let in what I was seeing. Adrenaline was shooting through every limb. I kept getting up and sitting back down, leaving my office and coming back, doing laps through cubicles with a huge involuntary smile on my face, occasionally letting out a yelp or a squeal.

He wrote that he did not have time to read 95% of the stuff that was mailed to him ("no human being would") but that his eye had fallen on my zines and started reading. "You are some writer," he told me. It turned out one of my favorite childhood books, Cheaper by the Dozen, had been a favorite of his too, and he offered to submit an essay I had written about it to a literary review on my behalf; "help it through the slush pile."

He offered clear, concrete help right off the bat. I am still dizzy from the effect of that, years later. He read my work, told me it was "of a high professional standard," and he offered to help me, right then. As it turns out the review did not accept the piece, but Roger's email came at the beginning of a period in my life in which I changed jobs and started to publish work, including, eventually, a (better, reworked) version of the Cheaper by the Dozen piece. As obvious as it seems now, it really is only in retrospect that I can see that every communication with him provided real fuel to my life.

In the ten years following, we sent the occasional email. He contacted me about my Cheaper by the Dozen piece when he was reviewing the 2003 remake. In 2004, I messed up a good chance to talk to him in person. I had seen him a few times in passing, but this time I was at the theater on Lake Street where Chicago critics see their films, and when I stumbled into the elevator, sweaty and late for a screening, there he was. Standing with someone else, I forget whom, and wrapped up in his winter coat. I just couldn't bring myself work through our outerwear to do the introducing.

That was because I was at the beginning of a period of bad health and quite bad physical mobility that I would acknowledge to no one, and I just could not - did not have the energy to - navigate sweating with pain as I tried to stay vertical, explaining who I was, then finding the Right Seat among critics who all had their own spots already, all in the 90 seconds before the film was to start.

So I cravenly avoided his eyes. Now I think that no matter what I should have talked to him, or found him after the show, which I hoped would happen, but didn't. But then I was quite embarrassed by my inability to stand or walk well and didn't have the courage to push it. It's sad in so many ways to think about this: a dumb missed chance (forever now), dumb vanity, the poignant fact that he, more than many, might have been able to understand my physical limitations. I did email him later and tell him I had seen him in the elevator. I lied, basically; I said I had been too unawake and uncaffeinated to realize who he was in time to say hi...blah blah. It was stupid. He wrote back a variation on No-way-that-was-you!?-Say-hi-next-time-[you-idiot].

In 2009 I got in touch with him again, pushed to do so by two things (three, if you include a smart friend). Firstly, I was exhilarated by the writing he was doing then, by how good his long-form autobiographical pieces were (such as those on drinking - at O'Rourke's - and on not drinking - at AA). I wanted to tell him how exciting I found his work, how it married intelligence and the humbling specifics of human experience in ways that I couldn't stop thinking about. I also wanted to tell him how much I admired how he handled his illness (and deadlines!), especially as a public figure. By then I knew how hard addressing long-term illness is. For myself, at least. How much it shapes your life, how hard it is to get better, how getting better can be as tricky as getting worse, how you have both no control and too much control over the little things that happen and what an exhausting drain every situation is. I knew that he had spent time at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, which is where I had done my rehab too. At that point I could have stood in the elevator and introduced myself to him - although at that point he couldn't have spoken back.

I got his new email address from a friend at the paper I had worked for and sent him a letter. He wrote back quickly (he always did), said that he was enjoying writing more and "I daresay, better than ever," and told me he liked my blog and that he had tweeted about an entry (props to Rog for using the word "fat" in a neutral, descriptive fashion, by the way). He did this again in subsequent years about a few things I sent him: once tweeting a piece I had written about Jeff Bridges (by then I understood Twitter better and what it meant to have Roger Ebert tweet about something you had written) and last year Facebooking something I had written about Brideshead Revisited. Each time it happened there would be a brief silence after his email arrived before my Twitter and email notifications would start bonging loudly, my face would get red, I'd yell and jump around, my blog hits would (temporarily) spike to 8,000 a day, and I'd chant to friends over and over, "such a mensch...he's such a mensch!" I never got cool about this. I'd try to write thank-you letters that I hoped weren't too fulsome, or demanding in any way. Nor quite as hyper as the jumping around that happened first.

I also hope that it isn't too dreadfully vainglorious that in describing his generosity I also have to relate experiences of good fortune in my life (there doesn't seem to be any way around it). Even if I am judged coy for doing this I want to show how smart and generous he was with me with the power he had. Ours was not a balanced relationship - he could give me more than I could give him - but he did it gorgeously. I always aware of who he was, but mostly I just wanted to show him what I had been thinking about. Share it. He made my heart full.

Around ten months ago I decided I wanted to send him a present. From reading his work and keeping a brutal eye on the facts of his health I was worried I'd be too late if I didn't do it sooner rather than later. I didn't want to miss him again, miss him for good. I wanted to tell him directly how much his encouragement had meant to me over the years. I could see clearly the day coming - it is today, it turns out - when I would be one of thousands of people at their keyboards trying to describe what he meant to us. I didn't want him not to know.

I sent him a two-volume edition from the 1930s of the complete works of Saki in beautiful dust jackets, enjoying the process of packing it up just so, writing the right note, paddling to the post office. I knew he'd like them. He sent back a spectacularly sweet thank-you letter that I feel too weepy to reproduce here. And then not long after wrote me back again to say: I want to give you some books too. What do you like?

That threw me. If he had been a better friend I would have risked a couple emails to wave him off, saying no, no, they are for you, you owe me nothing, ya dope. But because he was Roger Ebert I couldn't. I felt a little slapped in the face, to get his return offer so fast after my long-planned present. Or as if I had perhaps initiated a neverending ping-pong match of escalating gift-giving. But with a little time to think it over (thank God for time, sometimes) I realized: this is a man who will probably not live that much longer. It would be unkind to refuse him the pleasure of giving something. Let him do that. Let him put some books where he wants them.

So I learned another thing from him in the end of his life, as so many have - I listed some favorite authors (he told me he liked my taste and I died another happy little death) and he sent me two books that I now cherish. I don't really want to say what they are for some reason; they weren't enormous gestures - he didn't send me Shakespeare Folios - just books that were perfect for me and provided a few new literary directions to sniff in. I have been reminded in the last few days how early I started learning new things from him; how much watching Siskel & Ebert with my family as a teenager influenced me. Decades of my life he informed. To be a critic, he said, was to be a teacher.

When he wrote me in 1999 to tell me the Cheaper by the Dozen piece had been turned down, he sent some advice in his email that I printed out and have had hanging on my wall for the almost fifteen years since then. I don't know if I've been able to follow it the way he did himself, but it makes me feel special to have been the recipient of it and to have ever had his hilarious, wise eye on me at all:

Well, I guess acceptance the first time out would have been too much to expect. But you DO have a voice--yours--and if you plug away you will be a famous and beloved writer before you know it. (Human nature being what it is, you will have retained the words "famous and beloved" from the previous sentence, when of course "plug away" is the key content.)

very best,
RE 

I love that he had my and every other writer's number in that last sentence. And that he signed his emails "RE" then, which (I told him) always reminded me of "RF" Simpson in Singin' in the Rain.

I loved learning from him in recent years, loved his vulnerable but fiercely steady eye on life and loss. I loved that he wasn't scared to care. I loved that his existence prompted me to want to find always better-chosen words, showed me that it was worth telling him what he meant to me before it was too late, although I don't think I knew how soon he'd go. I hope I can even try to be as dogged, as giving, as curious, as of my time and of my life as he was of his - to contribute, as he said, "joy to the world...no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try."

- § -

Michael Ramsay, Archbishop of Canterbury during my childhood and during my religious phase a hero and profound influence, was once accused by an interviewer of being wise.

"Am I?" he asked. "I don't think so really. I think it is probably just the impression given by the absurd fecundity of my eyebrows."

"Well, your Grace," the interviewer persisted, "how would you define wisdom?"

"Wisdom?" Ramsay chewed the word around in his mouth. "Oh, I should say that wisdom is the ability to cope."

Moab Is My Washpot, Stephen Fry

"I play the piano a good deal," he said "I have a seven-foot Steinway. Mozart and Bach mostly. I'm a bit old-fashioned. Most people find it dull stuff. I don't."

"Perfect casting," I said, and put a card somewhere.

"You'd be surprised how difficult some of that Mozart is," he said. "It sounds so simple when you hear it played well."

"Who can play it well?" I asked.

"Schnabel."

"Rubinstein?"

He shook his head. "Too heavy. Too emotional. Mozart is just music. No comment needed from the performer."

The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler

The return of the voice also enabled me to begin really to taste the verse [of Titus Andronicus]. I discovered that it was like surfing. Unlike modern writing, the words, the metre and the rhythm contain their own energy. Once you've liberated it, it carries you forward effortlessly. It's a question of putting one's brain into the words and one's emotions into the rhythm. The metaphors have such a vigorous life of their own, that they sweep through one unaided; that is to say, if the rhythmic conduit has been firmly established. I have to confess that in these matters, as with Shakespeare in general, I have found the Stanislavsky system of no use. Metaphor is the problem. It cannot be coerced into the activity-towards-an-action straitjacket.

Being an Actor, Simon Callow

This blog is:

Tornar laggiù!

Starts around 2:25:

Happy 2013!!

It's amazing what you can see...

...when you look more closely!

Blue-footed boobies wish you a happy happy new year!

Have you ever been poitrined?

Have you read Little Me (1961), darlings? If you haven't, you have to, and there isn't really anything more to say about that.

It's the biggest joke ever, all the way through--and as such rewards repeated readings extremely well, as there is so much to absorb and catch from slightly different points of view and snortle at and see differently in the text and sometimes very naughty photos that accompany The Intimate Memoirs of That Great Star of Stage, Screen & Television, Belle Poitrine, as told to Patrick Dennis.

Belle Poitrine, née Belle Schlumpfert, of Venezuela, Illinois, is forever mercenary, sluttish, committedly deluded, and vain, whether bleeding dry a series of men ("As Fred had only five thousand dollars, I saw no need to squander it in that squalid hotel"); dumping her two-year-old daughter in boarding school ("I stood silhouetted in the doorway as Baby-dear toddled after Mademoiselle toward the car…'Who's the big blonde?' Baby-dear asked."); or -- my favorite -- offing or otherwise doing nothing to prevent the passing of a series of husbands, such as number whatever, studio owner Morris Buchsbaum, who expires after seeing Belle's bank-breaking version of Cleopatra, Nights on the Nile:

"Better I should plotz than see another picture with a gurnisht like you!" A convulsive shudder passed through his entire body. "Ausgeschpielt," he breathed. He sank back onto the pillows, lapsing almost completely into the vivid tongue of his faraway European childhood. But even at this moment my Morris could praise me!

Later Belle is helped down the aisle by her next husband, Letch Feeley (their estate is Belletch), at "dear Morris' high requiem mass."

If nothing else, page through Little Me to see the genuinely amazing poitrine of Jeri Archer (the model who plays Belle in the photos by Cris Alexander), Dennis' virtuoso abuse of scare quotes ("Momma had engaged the services of several very attractive young ladies and held a perpetual 'open house' for America's jolly 'Jack Tars'" [Belle's mother's latest whorehouse, in San Diego]), or the weaving in of imagined interactions with real-life show-biz celebrities ("I approached Ivor Novello to compose an operetta suited to my vocal range. 'CAN PROSTITUTE ART ONLY SO FAR' was his cabled reply.") It is the best. As Charles Busch says in the intro the 2002 re-issue:

This faux memoir of a deluded but determinedly optimistic Grade-Z movie star is a forerunner of the 'mockumentary' that is more and more becoming a staple of American film comedy. This Is Spinal Tap and the films of Christopher Guest…owe much of their deadpan and meticulously accurate tone to this seminal work.

Belle's version of The Scarlet Letter, set at Allstate U.
"Just try to change one comma in some old book about a girl
having a baby in Massachusetts and they're all up in arms!!"

Recession sludge!

I'm lucky: I really love brown rice. Am I lucky? Is that unusual? All I know is I don't get sick of it. Which is good in a recession. This recipe isn't interesting, but I like it. It sustains me, sitting in the deep, heavy Calaphon pan in the fridge, as I scoop out bowls' full during the week. It reheats incredibly well, and can be added to, and sauced, and made more cheesy as the pantry and wallet dictate.

RECESSION SLUDGE

• 1st stage: You need flavoring and fat now--and protein, if you can afford it. So, for instance: very browned meat with aromatics if you're in the mood to chop them (I'm often not), or just spices: heat up some olive oil or butter and crush some dried herbs into it and let them sizzle. This is the stage where I really like to get the extra protein in if I can.  If you have a little minced ham or ground meat, add that. I tend to buy decent-quality protein only on sale and put it in my freezer if I can't use it right away.

In the image below I used four Italian sausages (crumbled out of their casings), browned very crisp and excess fat drained, to which I then added oregano, dry mustard, thyme, Worcestershire sauce, some tomato paste, paprika... I think I threw in some Cotes du Rhone from the fridge door and let it boil off a bit. Basically you want to make a good flavor base of some kind, in enough fat to toast your rice. High temps and a lot of stirring are good here. Make sure there's enough salt and pepper.

• 2nd stage: Throw the rice in and toast it. Plain brown rice is good, but I also like grain combos, if you can get them working: Lundberg rice blends are good, or rice with barley, or rice with quinoa (added later in the cooking process). Stir, stir, stir.

• 3rd stage: Add liquid. Here is the place for stock or broth if you have it, or can afford it. Water's fine, too.

• When it's done: Fluffing the rice and letting it sit is essential once it seems like the rice is really done.

I like to eat it straight with a little extra salt. Or reheated with cheese, if I have some, or a spoon of yoghurt on top. Sometimes instead of putting in the protein in the beginning, I will make a basic veloute sauce and add the protein to that: organic chicken breast, for instance - much easier to deal with in volume - that I roast and make stock from to use for the sauce and and to cook the rice. Make sure the sauce also has lots of flavor: Worcestershire, dry mustard, pepper, thyme, etc. You can make it a cheese sauce with the roux base. Mix it with the cooked rice.

The point is: it is yummy, and because it's whole grain you feel very satisfied, and there aren't a million pans, and it keeps extremely well in the fridge and there are a lot of variations and you know - yum.

Google Voice translates a butt-dial

Very few of these words were actually said: what was actually being "translated" was the sound of walking and then a bit of radio patter. And certainly "Beth" and "Betty" were never said—but Google Voice knows my first name, I guess.

Hey Beth, bye bye bye okay bye, hey. I just bye. Okay bye. Bye, okay hey, bye. Okay bye. And okay bye okay bye bye and bye applicant bye hold on hullabaloo you didn't want to the pretty don't call and hundreds of move. My the guy. And as I would be possible. But if I could call. Okay bye. So, holler, called the are you call. I think it's in it. And what's up. It would be better. Late. Because, below them. Hey, You, hey hello. Please, hey. You is leaving, hopefully The hey and Okay bye. Okay bye. It's okay This. My cancel it, ohh ohh well, call one on east of fun. No, no, and stuff. Yo Yo, hey, it's just the computer okay. We were talking about me would be. We were talking about club okay with you, hey. Hello. Uh huh, okay. Hey, okay. Bush did okay bye week okay. Hey Betty, okay 15 degree. We're gonna be gone.

This is what finally inspired me to learn how to make animated .gifs. Scene's a little tour de force!

Because everything I know and understand comes from Gaudy Night, it is inevitable that upon seeing the above, parts of the following crucial passage from that book, about managing one's highest priorities (quoted here before, even--pardon me), floated up in my brain:

You can usually tell . . . by seeing what kind of mistakes you make. I’m quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. In my opinion, that is.  

 . . . The big proof is that the thing comes right, without those fundamental errors. One always makes surface errors, of course. But a fundamental error is a sure sign of not caring. I wish one could teach people nowadays that the doctrine of snatching what one thinks one wants is unsound.

I think some people might call them the opposite--call "Amercia" and "Regan" surface errors--but it didn't feel like that to me. In the middle of heavy political rhetoric like that, I couldn't help thinking: What do they really care about?

adventures in the subconscious

fompe [noun]
: a type of novel in which the plot makes sense only when viewed by the somewhat paranoid protagonist

[The E is silent; pronounced like "pomp."]

Do not remember what was going on in my dream, but this was all I was left with from it when I woke up--this made-up word. Apparently it is from the French. Who knew.

Upstairs, Upstairs

Last month it was 30 years ago exactly that the finale of Brideshead Revisited aired in the United States.

I was 15, although in my memory I was older (you may hear that read in Jeremy Irons' languid voice if it helps get you in the mood). I was gripped by the series when it first aired, holding my breath from week to week. So were my friends. I think we loved: 1) the Stuff, big and small: Castle Howard, the period clothes, Oxford; 2) hot dudes--I was especially besotted with Anthony Andrews; 3) the doom and nostalgia and sacrifice and love; 4) the fantastic score; 5) the words. Words, words, words--drowning in them (stingless). Poured into our ears for eleven solid episodes, via Irons' voiceovers and a lot of other English actors with quite notable diction.

I watched it again recently for the first time since then, I think--the whole thing. It was the equally popular Downton Abbey that sent me back to it, for, truly--I say this with all the love in my Anglophilic, Maggie Smith-worshipping heart--Downton Abbey sucks now. The first couple episodes were great, but I have never seen a series pulled so thin, so far past its natural size; it's like a string of gooey mozz stretching halfway across the room.

Nothing really happens in Downton Abbey. Characters are collected in groups, over and over, as letters arrive and even the most dramatic events--like Bates' wife's murder--are patched together off-stage in lamp-smelling ways. It reminds me of Veterinarian's Hospital on The Muppet Show (the intertwined cheeseball plotlines in season two of the perishing Lavinia and the will-Matthew's-wiener-work? war injury pushed me over the edge). It's soap opera, but it's not good soap opera, which is a very good thing.

That's what made me curious to watch Brideshead again. Downton Abbey has devolved into such meager story-telling most of the time that I can only assume it's the art direction and location shooting at an English castle and costuming that makes people so melty about it. That stuff was a huge part of the popularity of Brideshead Revisited as well (influencing fashion and decor at the time), but I wondered if there was as much to it as I remembered, outside of the gorgeousness. There are superficial similarities between the two, too, that made me want to go back: Mary Crawley and her grasping ex-fiance Richard Carlisle are a bit like Julia Flyte and a more unidimensional Rex Mottram; youngest daughter Sybil Crawley's interest in good works is rather like youngest daughter's Cordelia Flyte's, for instance.

Brideshead Revisited has aged well, it turns out. The fact that it so closely follows the novel is in retrospect its greatest strength; because it is allied first to the book's language, plotting, and surfeits, this inhibits, paradoxically, the worst of cinematic excess. It's still about the agonies of beautiful English aristos, but there are so many words to get through in this TV serial--dialogue, voiceovers--that too much stretching isn't possible, despite lingering shots of Oxford walls and Venetian canals. They don't actually linger that long. There are missteps; scenes of a hunt in Episode 5, for instance, are filled with needless aerial shots and scoring that departs from the more understated music in the rest of the series (extremely well done by Geoffrey Burgon)--too smug and Ralph Lauren. Sebastian's decline into sothood certainly happens for a very long time in very gorgeous rooms. But most of the time there is a forward-moving quality to the lush world Brideshead inhabits. It has bones. People who hate the story won't think so (it isn't often funny), but I think it does. Even the way the editing at the end of each episode is designed--with a fast cut to the credits, accompanied by the start of the theme--feels refreshing and brisk and is still one of the oddly affecting things about this adaptation.

The book has been much criticized--by author Evelyn Waugh himself, even, not long after the book's publication--for its snotty and gluttonous mourning for an aristocratic world presumed dying when it was written (during World War II). There is something about our distance from the story now that neutralizes the self-pity of it all a bit. Time has dulled the nostalgia into something a little more straightforward; the framing device of Charles stationed at Brideshead later in the Army--his despair at the "age of Hooper"--is much less compelling than the main story, although it is not effaced. I wonder now at my 15-year-old love of the elegiac qualities of the piece--the way I remember it, my friends and I just gobbled that up, found it a completely natural way to involve ourselves in the story, as if we ourselves were mourning our lost Oxford youths...in Ohio. Perhaps that is a testament to Brideshead's estimation (as Martin Amis called it) as a "good bad book."

Another thing that stands out watching it again is the way that Brideshead Revisited handles the relationship between Sebastian and Charles that drives the first half of the series. The book is not explicit about the nature of the relationship between the two men ("naughtiness high on the catalogue of grave sins"), and neither is the series. Despite showing the men together in all kinds of intimate situations, dressed and undressed, they never kiss or make love. The story is not silent on the topic of gay sexuality--there is casual reference to "sodomites"; Charles and Sebastian are called "fairies" by dance-hall girls; their "pansy" friend, the stuttering, debauched Anthony Blanche, points by his existence (with derision, sometimes) to the end of the spectrum on which we are to see their connection--but it is not overt. It is, however, extremely romantic, especially the first two/three episodes, which depict the connection between the two men, lost in each other at Oxford and their summer idyll at Brideshead. Charles' famous thoughts about going to lunch for the first time at Sebastian's, seeking love, hoping to find that "low door in the wall others, I knew, had found before me," seem so universally poignant and true. More so now.

Maybe it is a failing, to not flesh out the intimacy between the men more, despite the limitations in the book's text. Maybe that makes this series complacent in its desire to see their love (as Lord Marchmain's mistress says) as one of "these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans…very good if they don't go on too long." One thing that strikes me strongly watching it now, however, as it often does when comparing how we handle things Now to things Past, when there more restrictions about what could be said or shown, is (strangely) how much more disapproving--disbelieving--we can seem in our desire to do credit to something shocking for the time. The 2008 movie version of the book (I tried to watch it multiple times, but just couldn't) marketed itself luridly with the idea of Charles! In Love! With a Brother AND a Sister! but it in this adaptation it all unfolds pretty naturally. At age 15 I didn't see this with much subtlety, but I accepted it without question, as I think I did the romance between the two men. I remember buying a magazine with a friend at the time because Anthony Andrews--or maybe Jeremy Irons--was featured in it and realizing only later that it was a magazine for bisexual men, which made us twitter in embarrassment--we were sure the clerk must have thought we were gay. We didn't even notice until afterward, though.

Race, and class, beyond public school variations, aren't handled with any particular sensitivity in Brideshead. There is no Downstairs. The occasional servant, such as the butler Wilcox, who appears throughout most of the series, is shown only in reference to the other characters, given no life of his own. And the occasional racist comment is casually tossed off with no self-awareness: "dago," "Jew-boy," "N-----," "Chinky vases," "half-castes," some comments about black partygoers. What did I think of this then? It bothers me to think that maybe I heard it mostly as general evidence of snobbery/class. I wonder if filmmakers would take out these comments now--I wonder if filmmakers did in the 2008 version? Or maybe (guessing here) rounded them out to make their disapproval of them clear? The blithe way these distancing words are spoken by the main characters makes me think of a passage by Dorothy Sayers; how "the real offensiveness of the educated Englishman [is] that he will not even trouble to be angry…the awful, bleak, blank…facade."

The issue of class begs more comparison to Downton Abbey, which looks above and below stairs for its stories. This is one of the things I like about Downton Abbey--and like much more about Downton writer Julian Fellowes' Gosford Park (2001), an infinitely better country-house creation all the way around--Lady Trentham is a less jolly, but more interesting creature to me than the Dowager Countess of Grantham--but I wonder if in its attempts to live in the past without offense that it cleans up some of its horrors. I like that Downton Abbey shows how interdependent the worlds above and below are, but (I'm sorry, Hugh Bonneville, I love you, but) it reeks of a paternalistic complacency at times, to keep viewers content with its inequities. As one critic of Downton Abbey has pointed out, the servants' clothing is awfully clean for the dirty work they had to do. But they are people. They aren't in Brideshead.

There are amazing characters--and acting--in Brideshead Revisited. That hasn't paled. Nickolas Grace's turn as Anthony Blanche is still exhilarating and bold and makes you long for more real eccentrics in your life (and in Downton Abbey), friends who bawl The Wasteland through a megaphone off the balcony. John Gielgud as Charles' father is just amazing: batty and waspish and reactive; thoroughly outside of the world of the Flyte family, but holding his own against it. Lawrence Olivier is (I'll say it) kind of a mumble-mouth in Lord Marchmain's famous Castle Hill speech, but extremely charismatic. Claire Bloom seems somewhat bland as Lady Marchmain, lacking the charm that makes her so deadly, but Bloom's unearthly perfect diction and composure does add to her character's formidable quality. Irons is a real star in his difficult role as observer/participant, carrying the whole thing through with great change in his character, becoming rather dreadful for at least one whole episode without reproach.

These characters all have a lot of room to do that--to change, to expand, to be. As Troy Patterson wrote in his excellent estimation of Brideshead Revisited, "the pleasure's in the leisure." It seems rather unusual for these days, when filmmakers often forcefully shape our reactions to period pieces with seemingly so little faith in us or the text. It's especially notable in the last episode, which is almost wholly given over to the climax of the tension about religion--Catholicism--that charges the book; there's even less scoring in the denouement than in other scenes. Brideshead Revisited gets quieter at the end. That seems like a great gift to have gotten at age 15: the spaciousness and size of tangled emotions and language. It still clutches at your heart. The words, the music, these people, the doomed, fantastic Anthony Andrews sliding down the hole to ruin--it's all still there.

Ought we to be drunk every night?

Happy Doris Day's Birthday!!

Liz in RectangleLand

Movie & TV Violence Guides!

Here are all eleven of the violence guides I have so far! For your--partial--viewing pleasure. Violence guides (see previous posts here and here) are chronologically arranged summaries of potentially nervous-making violence in movies or TV shows, so that you know what to expect and how to watch/watch around them/watch through your sweater, knowing when it's safe to watch again. When it's all less gross, violent, gloppy, gory, whatever.

These guides were written by my friend Will. (That is--I can take credit for nothing but the phobia and the page-coding.) You will notice his efforts to pacify nervousness in the way things are worded, and in his kindly but addicted use of the smiley face emoticon. I edited some of those out but after a while, figured...ah. What the heck.

Some of the guides, when you click on them, are color-coded (black = not scary; green = kinda; yellow = gah; red = OMG). Some are not. Some in addition/instead contain a 0 - 3 ranking scale (0 = not scary; 1 = kinda; 2 = gah; 3 = OMG). Some do not!

A sample time stamp might look like this (from No Country for Old Men) :

00:18:20 - A man gets shot at a few times and at 00:19:10 he gets shot in the shoulder, but he's only slightly wounded.

So you can see that every guide contains by definition some (usually very vague) SPOILERS. You've been warned. In every case the guides were written to MINIMIZE SPOILERS, but--but. It happens. The whole point of the violence guide is to help you get through the movie you couldn't watch without it--information will be spilled. There will be blood, yo...there will be blood.

Thanks, Will!

• Fight Club! is what those boys do!
• Inside Man! is inside! or is he!
• Jackie Brown! from downtown!
• Lord of the Rings! not one, not two, all three!
• The Matrix! has lots of glop!
• No Country for Old Men! get out, old men!
• The Prestige! is an abstract noun!
• There Will Be Blood! no way! Gross!
• The Ring! is scary ringy!
• The Wire! is fantastic TV but damn dire!
• V Is for Vendetta! and for violence guides!

Note: These violence guides do not constitute a thumb-up of the movie in question.

(with apologies to William Morris)

(p.s. I post this not as a Tumblr-like nod to my mood or a hint at some unspoken breakup, but because I LOVE THIS STILL--the top one. The note. The last time I saw it was in college, when I saw The Tramp, and just found that bit of writing the coolest thing ever. I wrote the words out on a little sheet of mauve linen laid stationary and had it taped to my wall for years. It's kind of amazing to me [still] that I could find it in 5 minutes on the internet when I finally decided to look for it. Anyhow, it's just gorgeous, I think. And has quite an impact in a silent film, which, despite the interstitials, is a very image-driven world. Remember it just leaping off the screen.)

once every couple years I wonder anew

What the hell is up with this?

That is Maxim de Winter to the second Mrs. de Winter, ramping up to the denouement of Rebecca, confessing his killing of his first wife (Rebecca).

It's so bald and discrete, that sentence--referenced by nothing in the book before or after. It's dropped like a tidy little grenade, pin in, in the middle of a confession so shocking that it distracts you from what's being said. "I'd forgotten"…forgotten? Maxim has shot people before?

Because of a perennial mystery novel mindset and a love of discordance, I have generally chosen to see the comment as meaningful and mysterious--once I noticed it. However, chances are really good DuMaurier was telling us, more "prosaically," that Maxim had shot people in World War I.

I've decided that makes it no less shocking, though. There is no context for Maxim's comment at all. I don't think there is any talk anywhere in the book of his military service (rather the opposite--all Maxim does is run Manderley; he has no 'job'). Or anybody's. (Am I wrong? Does Frank Crawley talk about it?)

But if the comment is indeed a casual reference to the horrors of World War I, and not a hint at further lurid personal history from Maxim, it's still rather shocking as an assumption of experience, by a certain kind of person and/or DuMaurier's readers. It's sad.

I admire her for dropping it in those last chapters, which (I'm such a middle class dilettante lady) I admire themselves so much for their plotting. I think they're just beautiful. I love that Rebecca is smarter than every character, that the secret revealed by Dr. Baker at the end isn't the one we expected, but makes things clear nonetheless and in fact opens things up even more. It's all just cool.

I have made an effort at other DuMaurier--Jamaica Inn and Frenchman's Creek. No go. I don't think I like gothic/horror books very much, or perhaps I am too impatient. Who knows. I'll try again.

And whom did Maxim shoot?

I fell in love with this beautiful little train station last month. It's the Beverly Shores stop on the South Shore line, a Spanish-style building constructed in 1929 and renovated about 10 years ago. Note the living space for the ticket agent built into it, seen in this link. You can't quite tell in the photos, but the lettering on the "Beverly Shores" sign--and coloring of the lettering in the various outlines--even when the neon isn't lit, is extremely bold and flamboyant. Personality-filled. There is a font based on it!

now with more air!

It's a bit macabre, but I love that there are some salty snacks out there now whose prices reflect exactly what's (not) in them. In the case of Munchos and Chester's Puffcorn: there is a lot of AIR--for which you are not paying. A big bag of these extruded, puffy thnackth is only $2, which, really, makes sense. Maybe we don't want to know what ingredients really are in things, but still. Something about it pleases me.

calligraffiti

The thing I enjoy most about this man's work, I think, is how it recreates/puts you in touch with the energetic joy of letters coming alive under your hands. Very very happy feeling. Can taste it. I have to say it: kinetic. KIIIINEEETTTTIC.

great quotes out of context

"Always distrust the man who looks you straight in the eyes. He wants to prevent you from seeing something. Look for it."

Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Political blah-blah--especially coverage of possible GOP presidential candidates--makes me think of this line. The real problems are where they don't want you to look.

movies with really big people on the walls

are extra good:

souply, bookly, posterly promotion

The Soup & Bread Cookbook, written by Martha Bayne, designed by Sheila Sachs, and illustrated by Paul Dolan, is having a release party at the Hideout on November 2. The book has gotten amazing reviews and shoutouts already- The Onion - TOC - Examiner.com Grub Street Chicago - Chicagoist.com - leaving me unsurprised but so heartened and excited. I drew a poster for the release party--click the fragment below to see the whole thing.

C O M E   O N   O U T ! ! !

(click image to embiggen)

solid proof of a leak between two movie continuums

Annie Savoy's house - Bull Durham:

"Thorny" Ramathorn's house - Super Troopers: