Girl Detective

Night Nurse, which is not nearly so tawdry as it sounds, was part of TCM’s feature, “Forbidden Hollywood,” about films that skirted the decency code of the time.

Barbara Stanwyck is a woman hoping to become a nurse. She inveigles her way into the nursing program and rooms with a saucy Joan Blondell. In the hospital, she must dodge leering interns and a stern head nurse. After graduation, she is assigned to the night shift for two children in their home. The children’s health is failing, and the nurse suspects foul play. There is a wild collection of characters: a gangster who wants to date her, a strict housekeeper, a drunk mother and her soused boyfriend, a doctor with suspicious motives, and, best of all, a very young Clark Gable as the shady chauffeur.

It’s a quick, entertaining film, especially for the glimpse into the early performances of Stanwyck and Gable. What I found most interesting, though, is that the movie was rated G for general audience on TCM, in spite of its history as a transgressive pre-Code film. Its naughty reputation was based on scenes of Stanwyck and Blondell undressing together (though they revealed little) and sharing a bed. There was sexual innuendo, a brief scene of violence, and several instances of drunkenness. It makes for an ironic look at the contrast between what was banned then, and now.

I took a brief detour from my reading on the Vietnam war to WWI with Hemingway in order to give some attention to my own bookshelves, instead of the library’s. Hemingway’s In Our Time was his American debut, a set of stories interspersed with thematically related vignettes. Based on his spare, evocative writing, Hemingway was called the voice of his “lost” generation.

At first Krebs…did not want to talk about the war at all. Later he felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it. His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities. Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it. From “Soldier’s Home”

Note the similarity to the passage I quoted from Tim O’Brien’s Things They Carried. Hemingway’s collection, though, covers episodes before, during and after the war. Most of the “during” pieces are the vignettes, not the stories. The vignettes also deal with the blood and gore of bullfighting. Terse and well written, it’s a loosely connected collection that hints at larger, more painful truths of war.

Further evidence that a truly great book will wait for me; it won’t become dated or tired. Minnesotan author O’Brien’s linked story collection about Vietnam, The Things They Carried, was as good as readers had assured me. It was sometimes so funny that I laughed aloud, at one point so terribly sad I had to set it down. The stories and characters are so engaging that it took a while for me to realize and admire the skill with which the stories are crafted. The combination of O’Brien’s writing, structure, and story makes for a powerful soldier’s-eye view of the Vietnam war.

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

Throughout, O’Brien subverts the desire of a reader to know what is “really” true. The stories are identified as fictions, but they don’t read as them, unless viewed through the lens of O’Brien’s above caution.

In the US, PBS’s Masterpiece recently ended its season with the 3-part Cranford, based on three novels by Elizabeth Gaskell; she’s best known as a friend and biographer of Charlotte Bronte. Mo Ryan recommended Cranford, but I found it disappointing. It featured some great performances, especially from Dame Judi Dench and Imelda Staunton, but this tale of a matriarchal town too often used its female denizens as butts of jokes, many of them cruel. The treatment of men was quite negative. Many were thoughtless or bad: a man who discouraged his daughter from marrying, a drunken poacher, a prank-playing friend, a prodigal son who broke his mother’s heart, a brother who deserted his sisters without explanation, and was welcomed back without it. Two especially kind, honorable men were killed off abruptly. One man took a self-imposed exile to India. In all, the tone shifts were extreme, and there seemed to be an underlying misanthropy about it that put me off. Only the removed observer, Mary, seemed immune to trouble.

Was anyone else aloof to the charm of Cranford, or am I a curmudgeon? I’ve recorded two other Masterpiece movies from earlier in the season, My Boy Jack and A Room with a View. Did anyone watch these, and what did you think? I’m hesitant to spend time on them after investing five hours in Cranford.

Our Silvia espresso maker is in the shop to see if she can be repaired. My husband, G. Grod, and I miss her terribly.

Our little family is still in the throes of last week’s nasty virus. Right now, I’m thankful for Jello, PBS kids shows, and magazines.

Invincible is a sports movie, with all the attendant cliches. It’s from Disney, so there’s even an extra layer of schmaltz, like the title. Maybe it’s because I married an Eagles fan, but I couldn’t help but enjoy the movie. Mark Wahlberg plays Vince Papale, a 30yo bartender from south Philly who walked onto the Eagles 1976 team from an open tryout held by then new-coach Dick Vermeil. There’s not an unpredictable moment in this film, yet Wahlberg is so likable, and his buddies and father so sympathetic, that the movie charms away most grumbles. The love interest, played ably enough by Elizabeth Banks, felt particularly shoehorned in.

It’s “based on a true story” and the extra feature on Papale is worth watching to get the commentary from Philly sports guys about some of the true stuff (see also the IMDB trivia of the movie), and the similarity of Papale to a fictional character from South Philly whose movie came out in 1976, the same year that Papale made the team. A little of the real Papale goes a long way, though, and something seemed very off about Merrill Reese’s face–his cheeks didn’t move.

A question for other Eagles fans: did Papale really call that audible at the end?

NPR talks to independent booksellers and gets their picks for summer reading (link from Morning News). I haven’t even _heard_ of many of the books, though I’ve read one of them, Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, which I recommend.

Here are last year’s picks.

Graham Green’s Quiet American was mentioned several times in Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, which I recently finished and admired. Green’s book is set earlier in time, during the French occupation of Vietnam. Fowler is a weary, middle-aged reporter covering the conflict. He’s built a comfortable life for himself in Saigon, with a beautiful mistress and an opium habit. All this is jeopardized with the arrival of Pyle, the well-intentioned quiet American of the title.

Captain Trouin insisted that night on being my host in the opium house….he watched me as I stretched out for my second pipe. ‘I envy you your means of escape.’

‘It’s not from the war. That’s no concern of mine. I’m not involved.’

‘You will all be. One day….you will take a side….We all get involved in a moment of emotion, and then we cannot get out.’

I saw the film a few years ago. I thought it was quite good, and now think it is a faithful adaptation of this spare, well-written novel.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize, now the “Man Booker”, six books were shortlisted earlier this month for a Best of the Booker special prize. A similar prize, The Booker of Bookers, was given for the 25th anniversary in 1993, and awarded to Salman Rushdie for his first novel, Midnight’s Children. That book is the odds on favorite for Best of the Booker as well.

You can vote here. The six shortlisted books, chosen from the list of 41 Booker Prize and Man Booker Prize winners, are:

Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995)

Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988)

JM Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999)

JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)

Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974)

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981)

My sister Ruthie sent me a card with this message for Mothers Day, and it’s so true. Today I’ve cleaned up vomit, diarrhea, and snot, none of which was mine. This is not a glamour gig.

But there are compensations, however brief, like the snuggling of a small, warm head against my shoulder while we read three new finds from the used bookstore:

The Guest by James Marshall
Fox, Outfoxed by James Marshall
Minnie and Moo: Night of the Living Bed by Denys Cazet

For myself, I was delighted to find a slipcased set of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights by the Misses Charlotte and Emily Bronte, with engravings by Fritz Eichenberg. From 1945, they’re fragile, but lovely to look at. They’ll display nicely on my recently created Bronte/Austen shelf, and bring me much bookish geekjoy.

I first saw Blast of Silence, a neonoir film recently released by the Criterion Collection, praised in the back pages of the excellent comic book Criminal. I next saw a good review in Entertainment Weekly:

Director-star Allen Baron’s hitman takes on one last job – can you guess how it ends? But this wintry noir is a trove of unexpected delights, from the sumptuously shot NYC locations and proto-Scorsese touches (several street scenes look like Taxi Driver outtakes; the opening voice-over could be a dry run for Mean Streets) to a mesmerizing performance (as a gun-dealing slob) by Larry Tucker, who would go on to co-create…the Monkees?!?

Alas, though it came with impressive credentials, Blast of Silence left me mostly cold. Its glacial pace meant that its mere 77 minutes felt much longer, and I struggled to stay awake through it. Still, there were good things, like the scene where Baron discovers a girl he’s interested in with another man, when he walks away from a wad of money clearly lying in front of him, and when he finally connects with the man who’s his target. The packaging of the dvd, with Sean Phillips’ art, is also very nice. I think this one is more for noir completists, though, than the general viewing public.

the war hadn’t been only and exclusively terrible. It had delivered a sense, at first dreadful, eventually intoxicating, that something wild, magical, stunning might come from the next moment, death itself might erupt from the fabric of this very breath, unmasked as a friend

Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke wasn’t high on my to-read list. I’d read mixed reviews and didn’t feel much like a novel about the Vietnam war. Yet when it was selected as one of the favorites at The Morning New Tournament of Books, and a friend lent me her copy, I decided to give it a go. I was surprised when I quickly made it past the 50-page mark, and continued on. Johnson is a strong writer, and he crafts memorable characters, following them over twenty years, from 1963 to 1983.

My experience reading it was probably similar to that of the people Johnson writes about: I’m going to Vietnam; I’m worried this is going to get gruesome; hey it’s going ok; still ok; OH NO SOMEONE JUST GOT HORRIBLY TORTURED; whew it’s over; going ok; going ok; AUGH SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAPPENED TO A WOMAN; going ok; going ok; OH NO ONE OF MY FAVORITE CHARACTERS JUST DIED!

At 600+ pages, it’s a wrist-strainer that shifts between stories of spies, military men, soldiers, Vietnamese, and a missionary. The plot is murky and convoluted, but representing the mood of the times. The book ended about as happily and satisfactorily as the war itself, but the people, and how the war changed them, are what stands out.

While I didn’t love the book, it provoked me to want to read more: Graham Green’s Quiet American, Tim O’Brien’s Things They Carried, Johnson’s Jesus’s Son, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and the Apocalypse Now dvd. Though this is a qualified recommendation of the book, I am interested in how strongly I’ve reacted to it.

I Could Never Be Your Woman, a direct-to-dvd directed by Amy Heckerling (Clueless, Fast Times at Ridgmont High) is that rare movie that I know isn’t great, yet I liked anyway, sometimes a great deal. Behold the power of Paul Rudd, at least on me.

Michelle Pfeiffer is a 40yo tv producer of a show for teens who are played mostly by adult actors. Jon Lovitz is her ex-husband and Saoirse Ronan her middle-school-aged daughter. Rudd is a 29yo actor who asks her out. Tracey Ullman narrates as Mother Nature. It attempts to skewer Hollywood specifically, and biology in general, for the veneration of young women.

What was not-so-good: The soundtrack of 80’s music for no apparent reason; Ullman’s shrill and unfunny turn; Pfeiffer and Rudd playing a decade younger than they are/were; Ronan playing dumb with a boy so he’ll like her. Also, Pfeiffer could use a sandwich or twelve, and she’s shot with a fog filter plus has likely had some of the type of “enhancement” that the movie purports to ridicule.

What worked, in spite of all that: Pfeiffer had some genuinely touching and funny moments; Lovitz was endearing as the ex; Ronan charmed as the insecure daughter; and Paul Rudd stole the movie. He’s good looking, has a good sense for physical comedy, and was believable as the younger guy who was seriously interested in Pfeiffer. And she’s gorgeous, if skinny, so it’s not much of a stretch.

I read about the recent reissue of Payday on dvd from Entertainment Weekly, which called it corrosive and uproarious.

The review in the Time Out film guide praises it for its portrayal of the music industry:

it remains one of those welcome movies made by people with genuine knowledge of their subject, on the assumption that their audience is going to be reasonably knowledgeable and interested in the first place.

70’s movies have an element of cool that defines them as surely as the wardrobe and the slang do. Rip Torn is a medium successful country star, and the film follows him and his shifting entourage through 36 hours. The pace was leisurely, but certain moments, and the seedy atmosphere, lingered after the film was done.

How is it that it took most of my life to learn that window washing is difficult? Perhaps because I was doing a crappy job of it and never noticed. But now that I’m a homeowner with two small boys, dirty windows are a fact of life.

It’s cloudy today, so I tried to clean the interior windows. I used a squeegee. I used vinegar and water. And I wound up with windows both still dirty in areas, and streaky in others. And that’s not even taking into account that the outsides of the windows are so dirty that it’s hard to tell whether I’ve cleaned the insides or not.

There are lots of websites with lots of recipes for nontoxic, home cleaning recipes that include vinegar, cornstarch, dishwashing liquid and more. I am not without resources.

Now I understand that commercial from my childhood, “I don’t do windows.” I understand why cleaning services don’t do windows. THEY’RE IMPOSSIBLE.

From the Foo Fighter’s tour rider at the Smoking Gun, via ALoTT5MA. It is, not surprisingly, very funny and worth a look:

Bacon. I call it “god’s currency.” Hell, if it could be breathed, I would.
Bacon in any form is great. Not as an entree, but just in general.

Have other Top Chef viewers noted that bacon is like a secret power? Include it (well) in a dish, and you will win. And be thanked, more than once, for using bacon.

Minnesota Governor Pawlenty vetoed the Safe Baby Products & Deca Flame retardant bills yesterday.

I try not to think what they coat those flame-retardent kid pajamas with. I mostly buy the snug fitting ones for Drake and Guppy. My mom and sister call them “sausage suits”; they are, indeed, snug.

Seriously, how can he veto something called Safe Baby Products and sleep at night?

1. 2yo Guppy demands something impossible, like mac and cheese that isn’t cooked, or complains when he’s given something he asked for, like milk, since what he really wanted was orange juice.

2. I say no; Guppy begins to scream and tears spurt from his eyes.

3. 4yo Drake covers his ears and yells, “Ow, ow, he’s hurting my ears!”

4. I calmly tell Drake to leave the room. He refuses and begins screaming to drown out Guppy.

5. I lose my mind. Then _I_ leave the room till I can think again.

6. Lather, rinse, repeat.

People tell me that ages 5/7 are when it gets easier. I can but hope.

Last week, another mom and I were congratulating each other on making/taking time for a shower.

“I have to remind myself,” she said, “a shower is not a privilege. It’s a SOCIAL CONTRACT.”

Amen, sister.