Far across the broad Atlantic where the storms do rage severe
Jul. 20th, 2025 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sovayBefore the thunderstorm broke in such steel-drum sheets of solid rain that we realized only after the fact that we had accidentally driven through a washed-out bridge on Route 127, I lay with my face against half a billion years of granite cooled in the volcanoes of Avalonia and weathered across aeons of which the ice ages were only the finishing touch to a boulder as rough as rust-cracked barnacles: it pushed into my palms like the denticles of sharkskin, my hair clung to it in the wind that smelled of high tide and the slap-glass of waves coiling around the sunken cobbles and combers of weed. The stone itself smelled of salt. I found a fragment of gull's feather tangled afterward in my hair. spatch had driven me out to Gloucester for a bonanza of fried smelts and scallops eaten within sea-breeze earshot of the harbor while the clouds built like a shield-wall against the sunset and the thunder held off just long enough for us to get back to the car, following which we were theoretically treated to the coastal picturesque of Manchester-by-the-Sea and realistically corrected course back to Route 128 when we saw a taller vehicle than ours headlights-deep. The sunset that came out after the rain was preposterously spectacular: a huge cliff of cloud the peach-pearl color of a bailer shell, the gold-edged stickles of smaller reefs and bars, the mauve undershadow of the disappearing rain, all sunk to a true ultramarine dusk by the time we were doing the shopping for my mother back in Lexington. I used to spend a lot more time out in the world and I need to be able to again. It is self-evidently good for me.
spatch had driven me out to Gloucester for a bonanza of fried smelts and scallops eaten within sea-breeze earshot of the harbor while the clouds built like a shield-wall against the sunset and the thunder held off just long enough for us to get back to the car, following which we were theoretically treated to the coastal picturesque of Manchester-by-the-Sea and realistically corrected course back to Route 128 when we saw a taller vehicle than ours headlights-deep. The sunset that came out after the rain was preposterously spectacular: a huge cliff of cloud the peach-pearl color of a bailer shell, the gold-edged stickles of smaller reefs and bars, the mauve undershadow of the disappearing rain, all sunk to a true ultramarine dusk by the time we were doing the shopping for my mother back in Lexington. I used to spend a lot more time out in the world and I need to be able to again. It is self-evidently good for me.
We rented a glass-bottom boat, we got farther from shore
Jul. 19th, 2025 05:38 amsovayObviously I am not at Readercon, but on the other hand I may have fixed our central air: it required a new filter, a section of insulation, and a quantity of aluminum tape, but the temperature in the apartment has in fact followed the thermostat down for the first time all week. Fingers crossed that it stays that way.
Although its state-of-the-art submarine is nuclear-powered and engaged in the humanitarian mission of planting a chain of seismometers around the sunken hotspots of the globe, Around the World Under the Sea (1966) plays so much like a modernized Verne mash-up right down to its trick-photographed battle with a giant moray eel and its climactic ascent amid the eruption of a newly discovered volcano that it should not be faulted for generally shorting its characters in favor of all the techno-oceanography, but Keenan Wynn grouches delightfully as the specialist in deep-sea survival who prefers to spend his time playing shortwave chess in a diving bell at the bottom of the Caribbean and the script actually remembers it isn't Shirley Eaton's fault if the average heterosexual male IQ plummets past the Marianas just because she's inhaled in its vicinity, but the MVP of the cast is David McCallum whose tinted monobrowline glasses and irritable social gracelessness would code him nerd in any era, but he's the grit in the philanthropy with his stake in a sunken treasure of transistor crystals and his surprise to be accused of cheating at chess when he designed and programmed the computer that's been making his moves for him. If the film of The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) had not made its inspired change in the nationality of its aeronautical engineer, McCallum could have knocked the part out of the park. "No, you don't get one," he almost gets the last word, distributing his sole precious handful of salvage among his fellow crew with the pointed exception of the captain played inevitably by Lloyd Bridges: "You blew the bloody submarine in half."
spatch and I have seen four films now by the husband-and-wife, director-and-editor team of Andrew L. and Virginia Stone and on the strength of Ring of Fire (1961), The Steel Trap (1952), The Decks Ran Red (1958), and just lately The Last Voyage (1960), the unifying theme of their pictures looks like pulp logistics. So far the standout has been the nail-biter noir of The Steel Trap, whose sprung ironies depend on an accumulation of individually trivial hitches in getting from L.A. to Rio that under less criminal circumstances would mount to planes-trains-and-automobiles farce, but Ring of Fire incorporates at least two real forest fires into its evacuation of a Cascadian small town, The Decks Ran Red transplants its historical mutiny to the modern engine room of a former Liberty ship, and The Last Voyage went the full Fitzcarraldo by sinking the scrap-bound SS Île de France after first blowing its boiler through its salon and smashing its funnel into its deckhouse without benefit of model work. The prevailing style is pedal-to-the-metal documentary with just enough infill of character to keep the proceedings from turning to clockwork and a deep anoraky delight in timetables and mechanical variables. Eventually I will hit one of their more conventional-sounding crime films, but until then I am really enjoying their clinker-built approach to human interest. Edmond O'Brien as the second engineer of the doomed SS Claridon lost his father on the Titanic, a second-generation trauma another film could have built an entire arc out of, and the Stones care mostly whether he's as handy with an acetylene torch as all that.
We were forty-four minutes into Dr. Kildare's Strange Case (1940) before anything remotely strange occurred beyond an impressive protraction of soap and with sincere regrets to Lew Ayres, I tapped out.
Although its state-of-the-art submarine is nuclear-powered and engaged in the humanitarian mission of planting a chain of seismometers around the sunken hotspots of the globe, Around the World Under the Sea (1966) plays so much like a modernized Verne mash-up right down to its trick-photographed battle with a giant moray eel and its climactic ascent amid the eruption of a newly discovered volcano that it should not be faulted for generally shorting its characters in favor of all the techno-oceanography, but Keenan Wynn grouches delightfully as the specialist in deep-sea survival who prefers to spend his time playing shortwave chess in a diving bell at the bottom of the Caribbean and the script actually remembers it isn't Shirley Eaton's fault if the average heterosexual male IQ plummets past the Marianas just because she's inhaled in its vicinity, but the MVP of the cast is David McCallum whose tinted monobrowline glasses and irritable social gracelessness would code him nerd in any era, but he's the grit in the philanthropy with his stake in a sunken treasure of transistor crystals and his surprise to be accused of cheating at chess when he designed and programmed the computer that's been making his moves for him. If the film of The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) had not made its inspired change in the nationality of its aeronautical engineer, McCallum could have knocked the part out of the park. "No, you don't get one," he almost gets the last word, distributing his sole precious handful of salvage among his fellow crew with the pointed exception of the captain played inevitably by Lloyd Bridges: "You blew the bloody submarine in half."
spatch and I have seen four films now by the husband-and-wife, director-and-editor team of Andrew L. and Virginia Stone and on the strength of Ring of Fire (1961), The Steel Trap (1952), The Decks Ran Red (1958), and just lately The Last Voyage (1960), the unifying theme of their pictures looks like pulp logistics. So far the standout has been the nail-biter noir of The Steel Trap, whose sprung ironies depend on an accumulation of individually trivial hitches in getting from L.A. to Rio that under less criminal circumstances would mount to planes-trains-and-automobiles farce, but Ring of Fire incorporates at least two real forest fires into its evacuation of a Cascadian small town, The Decks Ran Red transplants its historical mutiny to the modern engine room of a former Liberty ship, and The Last Voyage went the full Fitzcarraldo by sinking the scrap-bound SS Île de France after first blowing its boiler through its salon and smashing its funnel into its deckhouse without benefit of model work. The prevailing style is pedal-to-the-metal documentary with just enough infill of character to keep the proceedings from turning to clockwork and a deep anoraky delight in timetables and mechanical variables. Eventually I will hit one of their more conventional-sounding crime films, but until then I am really enjoying their clinker-built approach to human interest. Edmond O'Brien as the second engineer of the doomed SS Claridon lost his father on the Titanic, a second-generation trauma another film could have built an entire arc out of, and the Stones care mostly whether he's as handy with an acetylene torch as all that.We were forty-four minutes into Dr. Kildare's Strange Case (1940) before anything remotely strange occurred beyond an impressive protraction of soap and with sincere regrets to Lew Ayres, I tapped out.
Offer not valid in Lemuria
Jul. 18th, 2025 07:16 pmsovayThe first weekend in May, spatch and I day-tripped to the Coney Island Film Festival in order to catch the short film debut of Steve Havelka and Nat Strange's Pokey the Penguin (1998–), which I described at the time as "a five-minute delight of shyster shenanigans including an accidentally combination cathedral and DMV and an international offer cautioned to be void in Lemuria. It loses nothing and in fact gains an inventive layer of detail in the translation to traditional animation from all-caps MS Paint, e.g. a beet instead of a carrot for the nose of a fast-talking snowman who could outbooze W. C. Fields. Steal a seat if it comes to a film festival near you." Fortunately, it is now necessary only to steal a seat on the internet: The Animated Adventures of Pokey the Penguin Presents: The Lawyers' Lawyers (2025) is freely streaming and still a delight. Guaranteed even on mythical continents.
spatch and I day-tripped to the Coney Island Film Festival in order to catch the short film debut of Steve Havelka and Nat Strange's Pokey the Penguin (1998–), which I described at the time as "a five-minute delight of shyster shenanigans including an accidentally combination cathedral and DMV and an international offer cautioned to be void in Lemuria. It loses nothing and in fact gains an inventive layer of detail in the translation to traditional animation from all-caps MS Paint, e.g. a beet instead of a carrot for the nose of a fast-talking snowman who could outbooze W. C. Fields. Steal a seat if it comes to a film festival near you." Fortunately, it is now necessary only to steal a seat on the internet: The Animated Adventures of Pokey the Penguin Presents: The Lawyers' Lawyers (2025) is freely streaming and still a delight. Guaranteed even on mythical continents.I build a home and wait for someone to tear it down
Jul. 18th, 2025 03:19 pmsovayDuring one of the four discrete hours I may have managed to sleep in my own apartment, I dreamed of a trio of dark-masked, clever-clawed, civet-bodied animals tumbling across the carpet of the front hall that I recognized finally as orries, which I realized I had never known were marsupials of the real world as opposed to inventions of the 1970's children's trilogy where I had encountered them in elementary school, the companion animals of the nuclear-winter breed of human traveling in secret across a post-rain-of-fire Australia, in some places reverted to a sort of colonially reconstructed medievalism, more indigenously enduring in others. I had so wanted an orrie of my own as a child reader, not least because they were a mark of the strange: bonding with one could get an adolescent suddenly exiled from their pseudo-medieval settlement, as had of course happened to one of the protagonists; they too were creatures of the fallen-out world. In this one, they were inquisitive and quick-moving, slithered themselves into the tub as eagerly as yapoks, and Hestia hissed at them. Awake, I am even sadder about their nonexistence than the more predictable fictitiousness of the books and their famous Australian children's author. I dreamed also of Stephen Colbert, I assume because I am worrying about him. It does not feel actually out of character that he had read much of the same random science fiction I had.
So we don't talk for months and then you ask me where the wind is blowing
Jul. 17th, 2025 02:31 amsovayExiled for the second night running on account of the bustedassedness of our air conditioning, I have been self-medicating with college radio, old movies, and pulp novels. WUMB netted me Cordelia's Dad's "Granite Mills" (1998) and WHRB Thanks for Coming's "Friends Forever" (2020). Killer Shark (1950) is pretty much the other way round from its title with its setting of the mid-century shark fishery in the Gulf of California, but its call-it-courage adventure makes a cute B-showcase for Roddy McDowall just aged out of his child stardom, all his scene-stealer's tilts and flickers in place even if he was directed to give his best shot at sounding like an all-American teen. Night Nurse (1931) remains one of my favorite and endlessly watchable pre-Codes: steel-true Stanwyck, Blondell cracking gum and wise, and Ben Lyon as the sweetest bootlegger in the business, the kind of romantic hero who lets the heroine take the lead while he takes her at her word. Nancy Rutledge's Blood on the Cat (1945) does contain a most excellent black cat, tester of gravity, router of dogs, unendangered throughout the novel despite its human body count. The number of monarch caterpillars is now something like sixteen.