Post-Independence Saturday Random Ten

We were hit with the dregs of Hurricane Arthur.  We were quite lucky, on the whole.  It still wasn't fun to get caught out in it.  I know this, and was feeling a little off for a time after I got drenched.  The nighttime was better, though.

The weather was expected to cancel or delay most of the Fourth of July celebrations, except for the fireworks up in Boston, which were pushed up to Thursday night.  The rain put a damper on things, yes.  There were still a few fireworks here last night, though, as well as more tonight.

Watched another movie last night.  This time it was Bad Day at Black Rock, a modern day Western in which Spencer Tracy plays a one-armed war veteran who goes to a small town to give a medal to the Japanese father of a fallen fellow soldier, and winds up having to defend himself against the galoots who basically lynched the old man.  It may be the patron saint of self-critical American popcorn movies.

1. Diana Krall - Este Seu Olhar
2. Mose Allison - Don't Forget to Smile
3. Lower Dens - In the End is the Beginning
4. The Beastie Boys - Rhyme the Rhyme Well
5. Fats Domino - Whole Lotta Loving
6. Paul Simon - Sure Don't Feel Like Love
7. The Dirty Projectors - Stillness Is the Move
8. Neko Case - That Teenage Feeling
9. Pink Martini - Sway
10. Elvis Costello & the Attractions - Watch Your Step*

* Wasn't intending to begin and end things with artists who are now married.  Just one of those fun coincidences.

4 real, man

So, I took this movie out from the library.  The fact that it turned out to be its 50th anniversary this week - and a widely touted one at that - is pretty much pure coincidence.

What to say about it?  First of all, the character of John McCartney is just so very rock n' roll, if  not punk rock.  He's one of the better candidates for "fifth Beatle", even if he is fictional.

A lot of A Hard Day's Night is a kitchen sink comedy about Paul and the others eldersitting his grandfather.  About whom see above.

Some of the song numbers, like the one below, explode with the logic of old time Hollywood musicals.  That is a song that feels right will be on everyone's lips, even if it's implausible in any real world terms.  The train the Fab Four are traveling on is so claustrophobic that the cars become cramped if a couple of extra people pop in, and yet here they all are playing, Ringo's trap set and everything. 

Except that it's different because what's around it is different.  Because the Beatles appear to be a bunch of Northern ruffians who just happen to be famous, their bursting into song feels much different from when a tuxedoed Fred Astaire does it.  It's a bright, low-key kind of surrealism.

The yips

Problems and solutions.  Or if not solutions, if there's no way to resolve the issue in the here and now, then at least constructive responses.

One problem I've had recently is that one of my friends has apparently decided that he hates one of my other friends.  This is a fairly recent development.  And it's only a problem for me, really, because I have to hear about it.  The hater doesn't have any  true complaints against the hatee.  It's mainly a matter of insecurity, I think.  So I'm just going to stand my ground on this one.  There was a time when I couldn't stand the thought of anyone being angry at me, but I think I've gone beyond that.

Another problem, of late, is that I've been stymied on a story and it's consumed inordinate amounts of writing time.  Well, staring at the screen time.  It's proven such a dead end that I've found myself forgetting how to do things I know how to do.

For context I've sent off a couple of pieces this year that I feel I can take some pride in.  Will they be published?  Don't know.  But I think I've made the stories concise and driven enough to avoid the form letter response or the rejection that tells me I haven't gone anywhere with the story or that there's too much padding.

Problem here was that I had too many disparate parts that I couldn't make work together.  And that's largely because I took the already crumbling bones of another project I had been working on and tried to adapt it to an anthology request for submissions.  The anthology requirements just added another level of vomplexity to what was already kind of convoluted.

So what to do?  Pivot into the next thing.  Provided that thing isn't having an embarrassing tattoo etched across my face.

Monastic Saturday Random Ten

The Beautiful Mystery is the second Inspector Gamache novel I've read. Based on the evidence I've seen, Louise Penny is quite a good crime writer. She has another virtue, though, especially evident in this. The entire book is set in a Gilbertine monastery in Quebec province. The Gilbertine Order was dissolved with Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536. In addition, they were an English order, so placing them in the traditionally French part of Canada is a leap.

I like that.  Popular fiction is always throwing in little cheats that the author hopes no one will notice.  But creating a murder mystery - an unusual one in itself - in the confines of a religious order almost 500 years gone?  To invoke Martin Luther, that's sinning boldly
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1. Elvis Costello & the Attractions - White Knuckles
2. Paul Simon - Outrageous
3. Broadcast - Michael A Grammar
4. The Velvet Underground - Here She Comes Now
5. Neko Case - Lion's Jaws
6. Fairport Convention - Crazy Man Michael
7. Nancy Wilson & Cannonball Adderley - Happy Talk
8. Reading Rainbow - Must Be Dreaming
9. New Order - Leave Me Alone
10. Lambert, Hendricks & Ross - Farmer's Market

The illuminating meeting of Drs Seuss and Freud

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is a Dr. Seuss movie.  You can tell.  You really can tell.  That's one of the things that makes it unique.  Seuss worked in two dimensions, masterfully.  This was the one venture he made into rendering his visual world in live action.  The effect is somewhat dizzying.

The plot is simple, when you get down to basics.  Bart Collins is a boy prone to fantasizing.  In order to teach him discipline, his mother has signed him up for piano lessons with Dr. Terwiliger, a perfectionist who demands extensive hours of practice.  (All children raised by tiger mothers are playing the world's smallest violin, and playing it more beautifully than you ever could.)  He's more drawn to the kindly, commonsensical plumber, Mr. Zabladowski. 

So he falls into another dream, one where he's kept prisoner in Dr. T's sprawling surreal academy.  His mother is under hypnosis, forced to do Dr. T's bidding.  Seuss and director Roy Rowland don't get too gross with it, but Dr. T does intend to marry pretty mommy, and she doesn't object to him locking her in a gilded cage.  Zabladowski is in the dream too, installing sinks so the school can open on time.  Bart wins the wary plumber to his side, becoming blood brothers with him and in nearly the same breath exacting a promise to become his new father.  Together they set out to bring down Dr. T and his evil musical schemes.

Wow.

What this movie gets right about dreams is that they're not a reflection of reality.  They're a reflection of us, and elements of reality make a cameo here and there.  In what we see of Dr. Terwiliger (played by Hans Conried, probably best known as the voice of Captain Hook in Peter Pan) in real life, he shows no sign of being anything more sinister than a humor-challenged martinet teacher.  Since that's bad enough for boy like Bart, in dreams he becomes a Flash Gordon villain.  Similarly his mother Heloise shows no attraction to this somewhat asexual piano geek in the real life scenes.  The battle of good father vs. bad father is going on only in the boy's head.

But that's the thing.  Children learn quickly that life isn't fair.  They're slower to find out that they themselves aren't fair.  But that unfairness is buried deep in the subconscious, of grownups too.  In certain doses it can be therapeutic.

Songs of summer

I've bitched before about how lots of songs have disappeared even from oldies radio, meaning that they gradually fade from cultural memory altogether. And honestly I'm not sure if this makes me sound like Proust or like Abe Simpson. (There's probably some hubris in even asking.) Still, enough barbarities from the past survive that you want to see the good, gentle things survive, if they can.

It's a little hard to believe that this group was produced by Kim Fowley, who later put together the Runaways, the jailbait hard rock group that introduced Joan Jett. Or maybe not unbelievable, just weird. The choruses are almost supernaturally sweet. The lead vocal is also sweet, but in a very human way. While the song may be kitschy, it's not impersonal.

Give it up

After being waylaid by some kind of stomach ailment yesterday - either it was dehydration or something I ate really didn't agree with me - I came to the conclusion that throwing up isn't the worst thing in the world.  Waiting to throw up is.  You could call it Vomlet.  The Danish Prince of your stomach can't make up its mind, and until it does you can't go anywhere or do anything because you're trying not to upset it.

So why not take the opposite tack and force things to a head?  I decided that the next time I'd at least want to have the knowledge on how to do so, and I don't like forcing things down my own throat.  So there was this page on the World Wide Web, and one particular item.

7. Watch Someone Else Throw Up
Seeing someone else throw up can often trigger the same response in your body. Though watching someone else throw up can be disgusting, that’s the point – you need to trigger that feeling in order to do it yourself. You can find videos of people throwing up online and use this if necessary. It might not work, but if it does, it will work very quickly.

Can see the practical applications, but making it work seems awkward.  I live alone.  If I had a roommate, even a friendly one, I can't see being comfortable enough to ask him to yak in front of me.  If I had a live-in girlfriend... well, same thing, really.  There are almost certainly websites you can go to, but I'm not sure I want them in my browser history.  So it's probably ipecac or one of the other options for me.