In darkest Florida

There seem to have been a few movies called The Chase. The one from 1946 is quite memorable. 

Bob Cummings, whom I've seen in a couple of things before, is a down-on-his-luck veteran. He finds a wallet full of cash in the street with an address in it. He returns it to its owner, who lives in a gaudy mansion outside Miami. The owner is played by Steve Cochran, who I didn't know at all. Said owner likes Bob Cummings and hires him as a chauffeur. Which is kind of bad news because Steve Cochran is a full-on psychopath who will kill you just for breathing his air. See the limo he's tricked out with a secret accelerator in the back seat. Or his browbeaten wife (Michèle Morgan) yearning for escape.

The Chase is adapted from a novel by Cornell Woolrich, who would also provide the basis of Hitchcock's Rear Window a few years later. Unlike some noir it's got very little patter or overt humor. The only actor who gets to be funny is Peter Lorre, who's also the second most evil character. But it's got an unnerving intensity. There's also a headspinning twist that happens not quite at the end.

🔴

Being a social animal isn't a bad thing, but there's an underside to it. If you can be shamed out of doing something that isn't bad, you can probably be shamed into doing something that is. Disturbing knowledge, but there it is. You may well be able to think of some examples from the recent past.

In any case it's better to be aware of the phenomenon, to be prepared in the future.

Claws out

Whenever I go to a video on YouTube now there are, as always, thumbnails of other videos running down the right side of the screen. And there's a particular class of video that's been cropping up lately. They'll be about musicians, with the format "X finally comes clean about Y." "Keith Richards finally tells the whole truth about Jeff Beck" or the like. The implication being that these rock stars have salacious gossip and harsh personal judgments about each other but have been holding them in for decades out of sheer politeness. Sure, buddy.

I'd ask what it is about me that they think I'd be interested, but it's all obviously just a mixture of AI and desperation.

Cool, man

 

I've only seen a little of Peter Gunn. Seemed like a setup with potential, so I may check it out again. Just haven't gotten around to it.

Definitely can't fault the music. Blake Edwards had already found Henry Mancini, who would go on to do the Pink Panther music, of course. He was doing some really atmospheric stuff.

Not as advertised

Check the headline. It reads "Florida Republican brings ‘America First’ bent to powerful Foreign Affairs Committee". But...the article is about Brian Mast, a Representative famous (or infamous) for wearing the military uniform of a foreign country around the Capitol. Does the word "first" not mean what it used to?

Of course you hear about Washington getting a "shakeup" every few years. They never seem to get rid of the ones who should be gotten rid of.

Tunnel vision

There's a sheltered stop at the lower end of the tunnel leading to the East Side, said tunnel only being used by buses. Twenty odd years ago a decoration project was done on it. Shells were pasted to the posts in front of it. The wall behind was covered with ceramic tiles personalized by Providence residents. You could sort of date it because there were some 9/11-related tiles: sentimental, not jingoistic.

For several months the tunnel was shut down and buses were rerouted around it. A renovation project. The inside of the tunnel itself got reflectors and yellow paint to make it brighter. The shelter was stripped down. No more shells or tiles. The wall is now bare brick.

To be honest, it looks better. Having an element of the city's infrastructure personalized by people living here was a nice idea but it didn't pan out. Dirt, graffiti, things breaking: these are all facts of life, and they make an already busy design look somewhat cruddy. The return to basics was probably the right move.

Something else.

 

In his 1980 book Shock of the New, Australian art critic Robert Hughes writes:

By 1979 the idea of the avant-garde had gone. This sudden metamorphosis of the popular clichés of art criticism into an unword took a great number of people by surprise. For those who still believed that art had some practical revolutionary function, it was as baffling as the evaporation of the American left after 1970. But ideas exist for as long as people use them, and by 1976 "avant-garde" was a useless concept: social reality and actual behaviour had rendered it obsolete.

The artists of The Pictures Generation probably wouldn't object too strongly to Hughes's judgment and might well share it. Still, the loose-knit group did seem to suggest a post-avant-garde avant-garde. Their work was like Pop Art in that it borrowed imagery from mass culture, but tended to be drier, more analytical, in some cases less material. 

John Baldessari, a 6'8 bear of a man from the rural part of Southern California, was an unlikely mentor figure. But his hybrid visual art―straddling photography, printmaking, painting, and collage―made him apt. There's a playful alienation to a lot of it, intentional mislabeling, figures whose faces are covered with absurd shapes. And his reputation would continue to grow, Baldessari eventually attaining the immortality that comes with voicing yourself on The Simpsons. (After it had started to suck, but still.)

"The Table Lamp and Its Shadows", seen above, comes from a 1994 series of monotypes. It serves as a traditional kind of art: the still life. There's something a little off-kilter about it, though. Maybe it's the way the cord glows yellow and disappears into the blank white background. It captures the paranoid feeling of being out of place in a hotel room.