I Like Charade in June/ How About You?
As is inevitable in this day and age, one occasionally gets involved in a “What was your lockdown like?” conversation. I just avoided going to a college reunion, and I’m sure much of the smallest of talk would have centered around trading anecdotes about isolation from family and support structures, about juggling parenting, schooling, and work-from-home, of eldest children trying to figure out how much college was actually worth when another Covid variant could cause another stretch of remote learning from within the college’s dorms. The personal cost of the pandemic has been and will continue to be wildly varied, which makes it both an interesting conversation starter and an easy way to reveal vast gulfs of experience on either side of an anecdote.
My final pre-shutdown experience back in March of 2020 was deciding that it probably was not the better part of valor to venture out to a Welcome to Night Vale performance when I knew the governor was about to declare a state of emergency as soon as the timing was right for a press conference. But a scant two weeks before that, I’d closed out a weekend of entertainment by walking around the Museum of Modern Art with an old roommate talking about the growing fears of infection and how seriously we should take the burgeoning news coverage. Prior to that, the weekend had consisted of my first ever attendance at an actual Broadway show and the achievement of a long-awaited dream of visiting the New York Public Library’s Charade collection.
That’s not what it’s officially called, of course. But, as I’ve previously mentioned, the Library of Performing Arts’ collection of the papers of Charade screenwriter Peter Stone were an enticement that had been hovering over my NYC visits for some time. I’d previously had an opportunity to swing by and plunge into the archives, Scrooge McDuck-stylee, in November of 2017 when I unexpectedly found myself with five hours to kill between planned events. But I was with company and asking them to wait while I poured over ephemera of little interest to anyone else felt like the height of rudeness (he says on a blog where he’s detailing some of that ephemera). So I put it off until I found myself with another window of time to kill between events and was flying solo. Some people find it lonely and a little scary to travel by one’s self, but I find if one is looking to spend a literal half-day taking notes on contract details and script annotations of a minor ’60s romantic thriller comedy, it’s best not to trespass on another person’s patience. My friends were politely bored enough having to listen to me gush about the experience afterward; to deal with with it in real-time would surely have been unreasonable.
What is reasonable, unfortunately, are the fairly stringent copyright protections instituted by NYPL about the fabulous things that I found there. Obviously, they are aware that they have many, many things in their collection that are not in the public domain, and despite the fact that anyone with a digital camera and a library card could cheerfully make the protected contents of their archives significantly less protected, their policy states that “The Library does not grant written permission for any type of use of reproductions taken by readers“, and that photographs are only for “personal use”. I have read and re-read the permissions policy, and while I would say that the narcissistic ouroboros of non-commercial blogging is much more adjacent to personal use than it is to publication, I understand that this perspective probably wouldn’t stand up against a cease-and-desist notice. Since copyright is designed to prevent unlicensed reproductions that will stifle, divert, and lessen sales, excerpts or “transformative works” that aren’t going to reduce access to and sales of the original aren’t considered violations. Which is why this post won’t be a catalogue of all the minutiae I’ve teased above. I have instead clipped a portion of an image from the NYPL’s “Peter Stone” image collection of a man in a smart… waistcoat, but changed it enough to hopefully make it something sufficiently Other. I’m pretty sure that is permissible — and desirable, as something to slightly break up this unremitting block of self-indulgent twaddle with an image — but I’ve been wrong about the legality of Charade-based copyright issues before.
Read the rest of this entry »Auld Reacquaintance
I have discovered that I don’t listen to as much music around the house as I used to. After a decade and a half of living alone, while I still love music, what I have discovered that I need, subconsciously, are other human voices. My father is a fan of classical music, and has always had a strained relationship with public radio, which was the primary source for intelligent classical programming, but which featured talk, talk, talk ninety percent of the rest of the time. For whatever reason, he had little use for listening to other people; it wasn’t what he needed as part of his background. Whereas, while I like the comfort of listening to familiar music — and, perhaps as part of my father’s influence, much of that music was comprised of orchestral film scores — for the last several years my primary source of internal stimulus and conversation has been podcasts.
In talking with my friend Meggie, I discovered that what I thought was normal parasocial behavior — of imagining myself in conversation with the podcast hosts, figuring out how I would answer the questions being posed if I were ever to be a guest — was not entirely typical. It is, perhaps, born more out of a combination of using podcasts as a substitute for human interaction and a wistful male ego that aspires to one day accomplish something that would lead to being sought after as a guest that leads me to practice my answers to questions from people I will never meet.
Much of my podcasting still is primarily sourced from personalities involved with either the Largo/UCB Los Angeles comedy nexus, or prominent figures from BBC4 panel shows, and are usually trivia shows or film podcasts. So there’s a degree of interactivity built in to the format, making the parasocial relationship not so surprising (he justifies somewhat defensively…). Much in the way that Jeopardy is built around the audience trying to see if they would do as well as the contestants, I listen to podcasts with an ear toward how I might have performed. Which, incidentally, almost happened: I was an alternate contestant for the touring Boston episode of Ask Me Another…, I got to dodge the bullet of actually losing live on air, and got preferred seating to safely maintain the listener relationship. The producer told me that, as an alternate, the next time I attended a performance I would be able to jump to the front of the queue and be selected. I laughed and said that I wasn’t likely I’d be in Brooklyn on a random Tuesday or Wednesday night, but that I’d keep that in mind. Seven years later, the producer has moved on from the show and I wonder both: if that offer has expired, and also if that’s why I still live in this zone of thinking that I need to keep on my toes in terms of possible participation.
So I wander around my apartment answering lots of questions being asked of other people. I’m trying to choose what my favorite starter, side, main course, drink, and dessert would be in the Dream Restaurant, I’m trying to figure out what film I first remember seeing, which film I loved as a kid and think is shit now, and which film that people hate but I love and conversely which film people love but I can’t stand, and I’m determining how I would have rated a movie on a scale of 0 to 99 when I first saw it in 1999, and how those ratings would have changed today? But those are all year-’round reflections and inquiries. The timely, seasonal question over on Doug Loves Movies has been: what is the holiday movie that contestants have chosen as their favorite? Read the rest of this entry »
LE CARRÉ DIEM: Pro Patria Mori
A couple weeks ago, it was announced that David Cornwell, who had written under the pseudonym John le Carré for decades, had died. I may have found out, most banally, on Facebook, where I have subscribed to his fan page. I had enjoyed the announcements that spun out of there, most recently about the paperback edition of Agent Running In The Field — a book which I had purchased eagerly in hardback the week of its release, spurred on, no doubt by earlier announcements issuing from that same source.
It stung to hear of his passing, for entirely selfish reasons. There is literally no one on the planet who will live forever, but certain people take on the character of eternity regardless, particularly if they pre-date one and continue to flourish during one’s significant life changes. I mentioned in my Le Carré film adaptation recap series that I came to him on two fronts. The first was during a Michelle Pfeiffer-soaked adolescence ignited by her whisky-husk voice in the vinyl Catwoman outfit, but confirmed by her appearance in The Russia House, where her glamour was downplayed by the costumers and elevated by the text.
But the other source was the BBC television adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, which I did not truly deconstruct on the (still partially unfinished) series. Upon rewatching the film for the blog entry, I found myself incapable of disentangling my feelings about the film from comparisons to the miniseries. Much in the way that I don’t feel myself wholly capable of judging the Knightley/Macfadyen Pride & Prejudice, because I’m not watching it as a movie so much as I’m watching it as a condensed version of the Ehle/Firth miniseries, I can’t get Alec Guinness out of my head while watching Gary Oldman. And more than just the performance, I’m judging Alfredson on his choices in interpreting the script versus the more luxurious prior effort. It’s not really fair.
It’s additionally unfair because my attachment to Guinness’ George Smiley is significantly sentimental. Read the rest of this entry »
Birthday Present
As I left my apartment this morning, I put my weekly lunch materials — diet iced tea, cold cuts, cheddar cheese, jalapeño wraps, peanut-butter crackers, and raspberry fruit bars — into a reusable shopping bag I got a few years ago. I got it at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston during an event with Emily Haines. That had been my second time seeing Haines perform, and my second time ponying up for a VIP experience.
There had been a podcast I’d listened to at some point in 2015 that had detailed an investigator’s attendance at a VIP event with Britney Spears in order to be able to ask her a question. The strangeness of the description of the event — of paying money to be part of an assembly line in order to claim that one had a “personal” experience with a celebrity — was compellingly absurd. So when an offer from Ticketmaster came to upgrade my ordinary Metric tickets to a VIP experience, I felt like I owed it to the spirit of random adventure to do so, even though I had no idea what that entailed. Because while I’d been listening to the band since discovering “Poster of a Girl” via an mp3 blog aggregator (ah, a younger internet…), they hadn’t been a band I could claim I “knew” with any real strength. In fact, an illness had kept me from attending a previous concert I’d hoped would help establish that expertise. However, found myself enamored of the essential stupidity of going to an intimate meet-and-greet session with a band I basically didn’t know.
And, well, it was brilliant. The band were welcoming and heartfelt, and we unexpectedly got to go up on stage and sing along with a song, and I felt alive and thrilled, and the whole show ranks somewhere in the top five concerts I’ve ever attended. And I decided that, as a result of how thrilling the whole experience had been, that I was going to unironically take advantage of any and every VIP opportunity that Metric provided thereafter, to chase that dragon and try to recapture that thrill.
Haines’ appearance at the Boston ICA was the next available opportunity, and since VIP access always comes with attendant merch, I left that show with the memory of breathlessly close seats and the aforementioned canvas bag that warned me that, “All the things I own, they own me.” I’ve had this bag in high rotation since I moved into a new apartment at the beginning of the summer, as I’d recently shouldered the weight of shifting my possessions across town, and of finding volunteers during Covid to huff and puff in proximity to each other while humping those possessions up and down stairs. Packing, moving, and unpacking had put a serious physical strain on me, and while I had returned to a degree of equilibrium, anxiety over maintaining work to maintain rent to not have to endure that physical gauntlet again any time soon remained. As I grew accustomed to my new digs, I wanted to remind myself not to get too comfortable, too entrenched, as my possessions were a future labor that would have their reckoning.
BRIEFLY: Nog
Many of my northeasterly friends posted Facebook or Twitter updates this afternoon that were variations on the following: “What? Snow! Interrobang?! Nooooo! Not yet, it’s too early; I’m not prepared! Argh!” Stuff and nonsense along those lines.
I looked out my window this midmorning to see a slow descent of slush mixed in with a moderate amount of rain. It hardly had the fortitude to be called “snow”. It was wet and barely corporeal whilst falling, and when it hit the ground, it quickly was indistinguishable from the liquidity of its more prevalent falling companions. The ground has absorbed it, and unless there’s a truly tumultuous temperature drop tonight, I expect to see no ice nor snow nor even frost upon the morn.
But as people bundle themselves againt the oncoming onslaught of cold, I choose to warm myself with this: for the next eleven weeks, until right after New Year’s Eve, there will be egg nog once again available for purchase in my local supermarket. That will warm the cockles of my heart for a while, the eventual actual accumulation of snowfall be damned.
Freedom’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Choose
At work this year, I have been making a point of rotating through a number of pins worn on my lapel. Most have been those small three-quarter inch badges that hipsters use to adorn the flaps on their messenger bags, and which are just the right size to cover the boutoniere hole of my suit jackets. Because I have a limited number of these, I was pleased to find that due to my habit of dutifully filling out surveys for National Public Radio about my listening habits and my lack of donor generosity, they are kindly sending me three pins in gratitude for my efforts.
The e-mail that thanks me also invites me to e-mail my friends, and encourage them to send their mailing address to NPR to possibly receive three random buttons as well (supplies, naturally, are limited). I don’t have any friends, so I hope that NPR won’t begrudge me posting this out in the wild, instead.
My suspicion is that this, like Obama’s offer to send a text-message to his supporters in advance of the national announcement, is actually a moderately clever way of gathering more addresses of likely donors, despite the fact that the NPR Listens website says that it will not share your name with the fundraising arm of their organization. So, be advised of my unfounded suspicion that you may be trading a cool Carl Kasell badge for future mailings asking for your financial support. Personally, I think it’s worth it. If you agree, send your name and address to the e-mail link above, and you to can wear your liberal media bias on your sleeve, lapel, or messenger bag.
BRIEFLY: Age of Solitude
I wrote, some while ago, about the mild frisson of joy and surreality that came from being mistaken for a high school student whilst in grad school.
All of which leads me to ask: why is it that I’m carded one out of every five times I buy some gourmet microbrew root beer, but never, ever, not once when I buy pure vanilla extract (35% alcohol)?
Dedicated to Rahul Kolhatkar
I don’t have a particular thing for George Clooney. I like him, but I would like any person who is cast in the role as this generation’s Cary Grant, because I adore Cary Grant. More people should be trying and vying and jockeying for the position of this generation’s Cary Grant, as far as I’m concerned, but if we’re only going to have one, then, by god, I’m going to have some low level adulation for him.
But I respect any man who is successful and who is able to balance glamour and self-depreciation. It’s a winning strategy, as it leads me to infer humanism and frailty upon a person who has clearly had to, at some point, step over the bodies of others in order to reach the vaunted levels of success that make anyone a household name. And it’s hard not to like anyone who had something to do with Out of Sight, a masterful piece of charm.
But yeah, it’s not as as George is the final part of my Five and Switch. But because he prefigures prominently in other people’s estimation, I was interested in his profile in the New Yorker. And I was glad I read all ten pages of it, because I now feel closer to George Clooney than I have any other celebrity in my life:
“He hit his head on a concrete floor; not long afterward, cerebrospinal fluid began to leak out of his nose.”
Anyone who’s heard me tell “the cranial fluid story” will understand.
LIVEBLOG: Primary or Primate?
10:52pm: with 73% of districts reporting, NPR has called it for Hillary. Over an hour ago, they had called the Republican side for McCain, with something between 50% and 60% reporting (my notes are unclear).
Of course, in 2004, the Associated Press called it for Kerry with only 19% of districts reporting, so I’m slightly more pleased with the press this time out.
I’m off to bed. I’ll listen to the speeches and the pontification about what this all means tomorrow on my way to work. I’ll only say, 1) that the New Hampshire primary is lousy at predicting actual victorious presidents. 2) That said, I did hear an article telling me that in the last twenty or so years — perhaps more, I can’t put my fingers on the article — the person eventually elected president has never finished lower than second in the New Hampshire primary. So, statistically, we’re down to four possible people who could be sworn in on January 20, 2009. Woo.
9:21pm: Dave Barry sums everything up:
The voters of New Hampshire have made their decision, and the big winner is: Change. Here’s the final vote tally:
- Change — 43 percent
- Hope — 28 percent
- Hope For Change — 17 percent
- Hair — 9 percent
- Experience — 2 percent
- Dennis Kucinich — 1 percent:
Now it’s time for the politicians and the press to drop New Hampshire like an ant-covered corn dog and sprint for the airport, leaving the residents of The Granite State to spend the rest of the winter plucking 239 billion candidate signs out of their snowbanks, all the while wondering if there ever really was a candidate named “Mike Gravel,” or if that was just teenagers playing a sign-planting prank.
In actuality, though, the final tally is far from in at this point. National Public Radio has the reporting districts at only 44%, and New Hampshire Public Radio doesn’t yet have the all-important Epping and Newmarket results in their town-by-town results.
Mr. Barry’s other columns on the primary are worth reading, if only for his keen observation on New Hampshire’s state-run liquor stores — “One of them is located — I am not making this up — in a turnpike service plaza, apparently for the benefit of motorists who are, for whatever reason, running low on gin.” — and to familiarize yourself with the name “Dick Harpootlian“.
3:26pm: The recorded voice of Ron Paul’s wife greets me from my answering machine. I don’t know how I get calls from a Republican candidate. If I were registered as an independent, I would have expected barrages of calls from candidates of both parties, but it’s only in the past week that I’ve been getting autocalls from the Paul campaign. Maybe it’s because he’s only pretending to be a Republican, and so he’s either bought both the Democratic and Republican registers. Or maybe he’s cold-calling the whole state.
Or perhaps Anthony and Christine Fay, for whom I still get phone messages, yea these eighteen months after I procured this phone number, gave out their number to the Paul campaign. They give out their number to Realtors, car salesmen… the sort of people who plead for a number and who you’d rather not have actually call you. Instead of giving out a fake number, the Fays have been known to give out their old number… their old number which has been reassigned to me. Oy! Tony! Stop giving out my phone number! Oh, and your grandmother wishes you a happy Christmas.
3:11pm: My Nixon/Agnew button gets the approval of the guy manning the ballot box, though he informs me that he saw a button for Adlai Stevenson the previous day at a rally, so I’m not quite wearing the coolest button so far. I could quibble with him that, I’m certainly wearing the coolest button so far on election day, but it doesn’t seem worthwhile. He at least didn’t seem to care that I was far too young to wear a Nixon button, whereas two or three people holding candidate placards outside the City Auditorium were taken back. But even they weren’t as flummoxed as the woman who confirmed my registration. She seemed momentarily at sea due to the fact that I was registered as a Democrat and wearing the badge of a former Republican president.
2:19pm: Rhu, my assistant, brings over the Concord Monitor’s Primary Election Guide for my perusal, specifically because there is a candidate in both the Republican and Democratic columns of whom she’s never heard: on the former side, is the traditional Silly Party candidate Vermin Supreme, but on the other side of the aisle was the putative Democratic candidate O. Savior. In the Monitor’s helpful guide, all the candidates had website addresses to head to in order to find out additional information, except for O. Savior. Perhaps we’ll just have to try the Bible?
10:45am: These are not, I repeat, not the results of the official town polling station located in the gymnasium of Belmont High School. This is an informal poll of voting-age and non-voting-age Belmont and Canterbury students.
Belmont High School Mock Primary:
School Population: 480
Total votes: 305 (63%)
Results compiled by Dane Loomer
Democrat
- Barack Obama: 145
- Hillary Clinton: 33
- John Edwards: 18
- Bill Richardson: 8
- Dennis Kucinich: 4
Total votes: 208 (68%)
Republican
- Mike Huckabee: 34
- Mitt Romney: 22
- John McCain: 21
- Rudy Guliani: 15
- Ron Paul: 5
Total votes: 97 (31%)
This looks like a standard case of votes equating to a certain media popularity, more than any issues-based alliance on the part of the voters. Of course, if Huckabee and Obama carry their respective nominations, that will be the national story anyway: the new breed of populaism.
7:03am: The city polls have officially opened, and the race is on. Carl Kasell has just told me that Dixville Notch and Hart’s Location have had their traditional midnight ballot, and successfully polled each of their fewer-than-100 eligible residents. Both towns ended their vote with John McCain and Barack Obama in the majority position.
Despite the midnight cache that each of these towns enjoys, New Hampshire Public Radio informs me that the two towns considered to be bellwethers for the state are Epping and Newmarket.
I’ll be voting in Ward 5, Concord, later today. Belmont High School is hosting polling in the gymnasium right now (the school is doing some self hype/entertainment for people waiting in the lobby by doing a clipshow of BHS News segments, including my promo spot for 24 Hour Comic Day). We did an informal poll of the students yesterday, and for what is generally considered to be a socially conservative town, the results were fairly interesting. More on that when I can sit down with the hard numbers.
Commercial Identity, part 2
So I’ve paid a considerable amount of attention to Apple’s most recent slate of announcements about their iPod and iPhone upgrades. I do want an iPhone, but I have never been a first-adopter and I want to watch a few more kinks shake down from the highest branches before I make the plunge (just to mix my metaphors). However, the announcement about the effective “limited edition” 4GB iPhone — because it’s being discontinued and therefore being sold at a considerable discount — has made me want to dash into the fray, only to emerge with the most recent piece of mechanical obsolescence. Knowing something is just off the boil, probably won’t be supported past the next upgrade, etc., always makes an object’s faults and inconveniences that much more psychologically comforting.
I was more amused by the changes in the lineups of available iPod Nanos and Shuffles. I love my Shuffle. I like the size and the shape and the belt-clip and the fact that unlike my original 512MB plastic model, the aluminum casing might make it a little more resistant to being shut repeatedly in the car door (although the clip is more helpful in preventing it from slipping there in the first place). And while it is a little annoying to add new music to the library and then not be able to refer to just who is that strange new group anyway, I’m glad to trade a display for the extra miniaturization. But while Apple used to make color choices easy — everything was gloss white, and one had to pay an extra hundred dollars to get a given product in sleek black — the second-gen Nanos and Shuffles came in a small but potent array of varying hues. I dallied with the grey, as I didn’t want my personal music player to be ostentatious, but went with orange because I frequently use orange in my decorating and design and identify with the color somewhat.
But it was also of some small import that nothing else Apple offered came in that color. The Nano had no parallel in its various offerings, and it made the orange Shuffle that much more appealing. It was part of the line, but not part of the overall scheme. So it pleases me unduly that the most recent announcement informs us that the orange Shuffle is no more, replaced with a soft violet. Now I really want my outdated iPhone to go with my other outdated Apple accoutrements.
In other technology upgrade news, one can now search one’s Google Reader feed archives. Thank goodness! This upgrade makes the fact that my preferred Stylish reader scripts are currently incompatible with the various updates. EDIT: Wow, that sentence really doesn’t make sense, does it? Ahem! This upgrade almost makes up for the fact that certain Google Reader mods no longer actually work, due to essential alterations in their code.
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