The end of civilization

How much did the transition from black and white to color in television doom anthology shows? I have this theory that up until 1966 or so you could pass off the same room as, say, a ballroom in a very old Italian palazzo and a modern dining room without changing it much. After that shows were broadcast in color, so if people had a color set they could see the walls were the same.

That's only tangentially related to Panic in the Year Zero, a 1962 disaster thriller directed by and starring Ray Milland. The tangent is this: It's an AIP movie, which pretty much by definition means it had a very low budget. Milland uses stock footage for things like nuclear explosions and large scale traffic. But because it's all monochrome the seams don't show too much.

It's tight and efficient. Milland and Jean Hagen (Lina Lamont from Singin' in the Rain) lead a family of four going on a road trip. While they're driving a news alert on the radio tells them that their hometown of Los Angeles has been hit by a nuclear attack. And sure enough, there's a mushroom cloud on the horizon. What they have to survive, though, isn't radiation or mutants. It's just people, and the desperation of the moment.

Son Rick Baldwin, played by Frankie of Frankie and Annette fame, sometimes seems a little too eager to start killing in the "every man for himself" phase. Daughter Karen (Mary Mitchel) doesn't have that much to do here except...Well, there's an emphasis on rape in the movie that's somewhat realistic, somewhat exploitative, and brings some relief that this movie was made when the production codes were still in place.

Ann, the mother, is the conscience. As for Harry Baldwin, the father, Milland is to be congratulated here. Directing himself in the lead, he shows no vanity. Harry might have good motives, but he doesn't seem to be better than the average man. His ethics are compromised early on, even if he doesn't descend to all out savagery.

I liked this movie. It knows what it wants to be.

Off with their heads

Frances Larson's Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found is a cultural study of decapitation in all its forms: beheading as capital punishment, heads taken as trophies from enemy soldiers, the heads that are taken and frozen in cryogenic suspension. Fun stuff. Well, for me, anyway. There's an anecdote about the British artist Damien Hirst. When Hirst was a teen he broke into a morgue and, along the way, had his picture taken with a severed head. The print would be released in the early 1990's under the title With Dead Head.

Hirst was acclimatizing to the dead. He did it with a teenage bravado that continues to colour his work: "The people aren't there. There's just these objects, which look fuck all like real people. And everybody's putting their hands in each other's pockets and messing about, going wheeeeeeyy! with the head...it just isn't there. It just removes it further." Had Hirst objectified the dead so successfully that he no longer thought of them as people at all? Or were the disrespectful jokes an attempt to hide his own emotional fragility? He said that he was terrified the severed head would come back to life, as though confirming that it was not just an object or a plaything after all. 

As a work of art, With Dead Head can be interpreted as an image of conquest, but as a photograph it also documents a moment of childish swagger in what was, ostensibly, an honourable pursuit for a sixteen-year-old boy. Hirst was at the morgue to learn how to draw. If he went back there again and again to draw the dead, there must have been quieter moments of contemplation during his work too. Drawing dead bodies necessitates a complicated emotional journey.

The picture is weird, and it's no surprise that it might be a little off-putting. Hirst looks like what he was, a suburban British teenage boy. His normalcy, with a touch of what could be giddiness and/or snottiness, makes you think the head must be a prop made of wax or clay. But evidently it was not.

As is covered in the book, surgeons desensitize themselves to working with dead bodies, and they do it in a much more systematic way. This is our species, one of the ways we try to make sense of things.

Conversational English

jack and betty forever from Janine Sun on Vimeo.

This is too weird, and weird in such a specific way, for me not to love. Apparently these two were in a kind of Dick and Jane style of book for Japanese kids learning English? I guess there would be such a thing. Anyway, there's a dark turn, but that's part of the whole...you just have to see it.

Sunshine

The Florida Project is as close to just walking around a place as a movie―as distinguished from a VR program―can get. Is it someplace you'd want to go? Complex question. Florida is a place of natural beauty, awesome skies, verdant trees. There is also, to put it mildly, a lot of poverty and dysfunction in this film. I had to step back a few times, but ultimately the characters are as vivid as the land. Director Sean Baker has said that the ending (the only part with non-diegetic music) is an admission that you can only find a happy ending through the eyes of a child.

It's also the only movie I've seen with Willem Dafoe clearing egrets off of a lot and telling them dad jokes.

Again, thinking

I've talked about this before, sometime. I don't think you can generalize and say that most people are good or bad. People are complex, in a way that some of us never get used to.

You can, perhaps, appeal to the better part of others through accessing the better part of yourself. That's the idea, anyway, a good one. I'm sure there's more to it.

Side mind

Lateral thinking, by definition, uses creative reasoning to solve a problem or mystery. So really, while some answers may be righter than others, there might not be a single right answer. It's best to approach these problems in a spirit of curiosity.

The introduction to these exercises says that they tend to be morbid. Which is true. Some of them sounded so much like depressing and quotidian police blotter items I had trouble figuring out what the mystery was supposed to be. A handful I managed to figure out the suggested answer. Some I liked my solution better, although in a few cases I fell short of finding anything that worked. And on the second page I swear there's one where the solution is a Tom Waits song.

God never closes a door

I have new windows now. Well, I don't, my eyes are the same as they've always been. My apartment does. Assistant super put them in today. One nice thing is that it meant replacing the screen windows, so when it gets really warm I can keep windows open that I didn't before, without flying insects getting free reign of the joint.

Of course while we've already had some hot days this season, today wasn't among them and tonight certainly isn't. If I actually had all these windows open I'd be uncomfortably chilly. So far they seem quieter in the wind. Wonder how far that goes.