Queen Watch: "The Adventure of the Black Falcon"

So. 1947. As you MAY know, America was just a couple of years past a big war, a war in which one of the main adversaries was Germany. This was the second war with Germany. The first had occurred from 1914-18, with the US only really getting involved in the last year. It was an intense war, though, and Germans in America/German-Americans being stigmatized stateside. This didn't really happen in the second war, though, due to a number of factors: German-Americans had assimilated more, our military leaders had names like "Eisenhower" and "Nimitz", the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor and their descendants not being white made them more of a target, etc.

All of this might sound like a digression, but Germany, the German people, and the war(s) lie at the heart of this episode.

Here in my car where the image breaks down

During lunch today I saw a little car on the road that - I'm not positive, but I have a feeling - looked to be electric. After work I saw another one. Well after that, I saw a car whose fuel system I couldn't tell you, but was shaped like a Formula 1 car. So is there some kind of convention in town? One wonders.

I don't walk around with a camera all day. That means I don't have pictures of anything described above. Which, I guess, means it didn't happen.

It figures

Queen Watch? Absent this past weekend, should be back Saturday. I'm about at the halfway point, I guess, give or take. So far it's been lots of fun.

In the meantime, there's this. I've long been a fan of Chirico's paintings from his surrealist/metaphysical phase, so I'm delighted an animator has worked his imagery into this (slightly florid?) scenario.

Dinner and a show

* Most of us aren't going to go swimming anywhere near where sharks do the same. Part of that is our fear of being killed and eaten, which is understandable but not really reasonable: they're not really going to attack a human in ordinary circumstances. A better reason is that we simply don't go out to those depths, that far from land. If you see a shark, the chief danger to you is drowning. So it's ncie to be able to feast your eyes via photography and the intertubes, in case you never get to in person. They're some stunning creatures.

* I did watch Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye last night, as I've been meaning to lately. And one thing I hadn't known before was that Leigh Brackett had written the script. Making this her second Raymond Chandler/Philip Marlowe adaptation, since she'd scripted the Bogey Bacall Big Sleep back in '45. Not a bad record.

Just coming into his own as a director, Altman takes on a different kind of material with pretty rewarding results. Elliott Gould must have seemed like an unlikely gumshoe, best known as he was - and remains - as a kvetching comic actor. But Marlowe is a human scale character, and Gould nails him. Also cast against type is Laugh-In's Henry Gibson as a creepy rehab doctor.

Maybe the most interesting aspect is the way noir claustrophobia is turned inside out, imbuing a sense of agoraphobia. Marlowe isn't confined to dark alleys, he's out in the open air of sunny Southern California. For that very reason he seems vulnerable to attack from any direction. The restless camera sometimes seems about to flee in terror.

Some fun

Just earlier tonight i heard this song for the first time in a long time. I'd always liked it, though.

The person responsible is  Amanda Nazario, who singles it out for the rougher sound of John Sebastian's voice. Nazario is up there with Charlie Lewis as my favorite FMU personalities. She does recaps of years-old Simpsons episodes that I just have to kind of stand up and figure out the applause.

Kassel

I just recently finished The Illogic of Kassel, the most recent book by Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas, or at least the most recent to be translated into English. The narrator of the book is an author who was invited to Documenta 13 to perform as an installation in a Chinese restaurant. Speaking neither Chinese nor German he makes up interpretations of the discussions he hears.

Vila-Matas is actually an author, obviously, and he did attend Documenta 13, so it may be tempting to treat this as a memoir. But I'm pretty sure it truly is a novel, even if it doesn't always look like one. Whether Vila-Matas suffers nighttime panic attacks like his hero does - he wouldn't be the first writer or artist to do so - the special medicine he takes sounds made up. The relationship he has with the curators seems fictional as well. I kind of doubt they'd invite a fairly famous writer into their art project and subject him to the sometimes sadistic head games that transpire here, although I could be wrong.

Whatever the balance of real and fictional, it's an interesting read. I think Bartleby & Co. is still my favorite of his, though.

Starr quality

This morning I had breakfast at this place downtown called NicoBella's. It's a nice joint with jazz on the stereo and fauvist-looking paintings on the wall. Another thing I noticed on the wall was a signed poster of Ringo from one of the All-Starr band tours.

As the owner refilled my coffee I told him I liked the poster. There turned out to be a story behind it. He was in the middle of getting the restaurant ready to open, a massive amount of work including construction, licenses, etc. His friend called him up and said he was with Ringo. He goes, "Ringo who?" His buddy says, "Ringo, one of the few surviving Beatles." He figures this for ballbusting and says, "Eddie I don't have time for this." His friend's got Ringo talking in the background but it still doesn't sink in. The friend goes, "Well, do you want anything?" "If it's Ringo, get an autograph for me."

He got it, obviously. Later his friend told him that Ringo said he was one of the few people who ever hung up on him. I said, "You and John Lennon." On reflection, he had some friction with Paul, too, around the time of the breakup.

Really, for someone who comes from humble beginnings, it must be oddly gratifying to become such a big deal people won't believe you are who you are.