something queer going on

So, I turned 55 on Monday. Like all multiple-of-5 birthdays, this one is inspiring thought. Aging, mortality, all of that extremely fun stuff. And I can no longer set it aside with "someday." Someday is now, or in the next few years, at least. (I do not have a family history of people living long lives in good health. Maybe I'll be different. Maybe not.)

It's interesting how much "What do I want the rest of my life to look like?" is a different question at 55 than even at 45. And how very much I don't feel any closer to an answer.


Anyway, I took a 4-day weekend for my birthday, which has been nice although far from long enough. I haven't done much--that was kind of the goal--but I did see an actual movie in the actual cinema for the first time since before Covid started. (It was Deadpool and Wolverine, which was slightly better than it deserved to be. I'm the wrong kind of nerd to be the ideal audience for it, and I'm pretty over the whole "mass-produced corporate entertainment product ironically poking fun at mass-produced corporate entertainment products" thing, but I still mostly enjoyed it.)

Other activities:

Reading: I'm still having trouble finding anything I really like. I keep shying away from books that are obviously going to be serious or challenging, and then resenting the books I read because they're unserious and unchallenging. ( More under the cut. )

Listening: Modes of Thought In Anterran Literature, by Wolf at the Door studios (with Alex Kemp as writer, showrunner, and main performer, though you have to dig deep to find cast information), which I saw recommended on Twitter. This is an audio drama consisting largely of lectures for a Classics course of the same title at Harbridge University. Anterra is an ancient civilization, dating back to approx 78,000 BCE (and no, there's not an extra zero in there), whose ruins were discovered on the seafloor after a Chinese submarine accident seven years ago.

I've listened to all the aired episodes--about 30--and I still don't know if I like it. The stuff that's actually about Anterra is interesting, and I really like the idea of an audio drama structured as a class, but the focus has increasingly shifted over towards X-Files style conspiracy stuff that doesn't interest me as much. Plus, the academic angle is just plausible enough, with a lot of actual real-world archaeological references, that my skepticism engages, and I want to know things like how the Anterran language (an unknown language, much too old to be closely related to any known ancient language, in an unknown and apparently logographic script) could possibly have been deciphered at all, let alone so quickly. And why this seemingly undergraduate introductory class has so many graduate students in it. And why the lecture topics are so random.

Randomness is the main problem, really. The show seems to be winging it, without a clear direction or a planned endpoint. Plot elements get dropped in and forgotten while new ones take over. At this point, new episodes aren't even being numbered, so I have no idea how close we are to the end, or if there is a planned ending, or what.

At the same time, I don't not recommend it? It's trying something pretty unusual, and I can respect that. It might be worth trying a few episodes to see what you think.


Watching: Nothing at the moment. But a new season of Taskmaster UK is starting in a couple of weeks!

I got lucky with the thirteenth new-to-me thing: Fashions of 1934, a just-barely-pre-Code movie starring William Powell as a charming con artist and Bette Davis as the artist and designer who helps him launch a new scheme: pirating Paris fashions as soon as they hit New York. The collapse of this plan sparks another new plan, and so on, until Powell finds himself the owner of a Paris fashion house and the crimes have expanded from piracy to forgery, blackmail, and several varieties of fraud. It's all very light-hearted, helped along by a brisk run time of 1:17 including a Busby Berkeley musical number. Lots of fun and some stunning 1930s fashions, too.

It's streaming (in the US) on HBO Max if you feel like watching it.

This week's new-to-me thing was the 1931 movie The Front Page, which stars Pat O'Brien as reporter Hildy Johnson (who wants to quit and move to New York with his fiancée to work in advertising) and Adolphe Menjou as his wily editor Walter Burns, who will stop at nothing to make him stay.

I was expecting screwball comedy, and I did get . . . some. Along with a hefty dose of pitch-black cynicism about reporting, policing, and politics, and some genuinely very dark content. This is a movie that opens with a scene of the gallows being tested, to ensure that all's ready for the hanging of Earl Williams (George E. Stone), an unemployed "Bolshevik" (he insists he's an anarchist) convicted of shooting a Black police officer during a protest. The sheriff and mayor of the unnamed-but-definitely-Chicago city, facing re-election in a week, have railroaded Williams to court Black voters as well as to reinforce the sheriff's slogan "Reform the reds with a rope!" Pretty much everybody in the movie, with the exception of Williams and his only friend, streetwalker Molly Molloy (Mae Clarke), is callous and self-serving. Nastiness flies in the dialogue, including enormous amounts of casual racism, sexism, and homophobia. Some of it's from characters we're not supposed to like, but by no means all, so be warned.

It's a fast-talking, aggressive little movie, with endless scenes of people shouting into telephones. Most of it didn't strike me as very funny, and I found both Hildy Johnson and fiancée Peggy Grant (Mary Brian) pretty dull. However, the movie shows traces of a tender heart, particularly in Williams and Molloy, who have a lovely brief scene together where he argues for the goodness of humanity, and she, out of bitter experience, disagrees--but they each see the other as a good person.

Spoilers here, not that the plot is very important

I wish we knew what became of them. Molly's courage in the face of dismissal and belittling from the cops and reporters made her my favorite character, and I found her onscreen suicide attempt genuinely shocking. And while Williams gets his reprieve for shooting the cop, nothing in the film gives me confidence that he won't be charged for shooting the psychiatrist and attempting to escape.

Besides Williams and Molloy, my other favorite character was Roy Bensinger (Edward Everett Horton, funnier than the rest of the cast put together), a health-obsessed reporter who struck a strangely modern note by, when everyone else was getting hamburgers, ordering a lettuce sandwich on gluten bread. He's very insistent about the gluten bread. (Nowadays it would be gluten-free, of course.)

There's a lot about The Front Page that's eerily modern. Crooked "law and order" politicians, unscrupulous lying press, brutal and corrupt cops. The actual mechanics of the film haven't aged well--it's so stagey you can practically hear the creak of the floorboards, and it feels much older than films from just a few years later--but its concerns are looking, sadly, timeless.

I can't exactly say I liked it, but I found it interesting in a number of mostly-uncomfortable ways.

This week's new thing was the film Hunt for the Wilderpeople, written and directed by Taika Waititi. It's about a young New Zealand boy who's been in a series of foster homes, then finally finds one where he's happy--but some things go wrong, and he ends up on the run in the wilderness with his curmudgeonly foster-uncle. It's about one-third comedy, one-third heartwarming found-family drama, and one-third adventure/thriller as the two end up the subjects of a nation-wide manhunt.

Tonally and in certain details it has a lot in common with Our Flag Means Death, which makes me wonder how much influence Waititi had, behind the scenes, on OFMD's writing.

I don't have a ton to say about it, but it was mostly a lot of fun and the scenery was fantastic. I also enjoyed Taika's cameo and ( casting spoiler )

Below the cut are a couple of content notes I wanted to mention: ( some spoilers )

This week's new thing was a movie again, 1952's Singin' in the Rain, with Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds, and Jean Hagen. I've been meaning to watch this for years, but kept not getting around to it. (Even today, I meant to watch The Green Knight, but Amazon Prime wanted to make me pay $7.99 to "buy" it, and if I'm going to buy it, I'm going to buy a physical copy that I'll really own.)

Anyway. Singin' in the Rain is an experience. It feels strikingly modern sometimes, with its nested narratives (at one point, during the "Broadway Melody" number, I lost track for a while of which narrative we were in), its abstraction such as the use of colored screens and dreamlike spaces, its meta, its highlighting of its own artificiality. I think it's subversive of 1950s norms, too, in a way that both looks back to the daring comedies of the 1930s and forward to the future. Cosmo Brown, Donald O'Connor's character, is as queer as he could possibly be in 1952, and while Debbie Reynolds's Kathy makes a chaste and virtuous (and clever and talented and genuinely appealing) love interest, there's an absolutely smoking hot dance between Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse that blows the supposedly central love story out of the water. (Also, the central love story isn't really the het couple, it's the queer trio of Don, Kathy, and Cosmo, which the movie makes no attempt to transform into two het couples.)

Certainly you can feel the 1950s around the edges, like when we see our heroes sitting down to a late supper of white-bread sandwiches and big glasses of milk (Lockwood's house has a bar but there's not a drink in sight). Or, less amusingly, an on-set scene where we see a "jungle cannibals" scene being filmed with white actors in blackface, or in another on-set scene where a singer declares that one of the things that sets his beautiful girl apart from others is that she's only 16. But still, the heart of this movie is somewhere else, somewhere really quite strange, and I love that. I'm not knowledgeable about musicals, so one of my few points of comparison is my beloved White Christmas, which is roughly contemporary. White Christmas feels of its time in a way that Singin' in the Rain mostly doesn't.

The dancing is fantastic, of course, with the standouts being the title number, the Kelly/Charisse dance mentioned above, Donald O'Connor's amazing dancing + pratfalls in "Make 'Em Laugh," and the sheer wackiness of "Moses Supposes." The comedy element isn't, with a few exceptions, all that strong, but Jean Hagen is amazing as Lina Lamont, and I ended up being a lot fonder of Lina than I think I was supposed to be.

I might watch some other Gene Kelly musicals next, to compare.

1) Stuff I've been watching:

Brooklyn 99, which I started marathoning a couple of weeks ago and am now all caught up on. I was a little dubious about the first few episodes because Jake was such an asshole, but he kept getting his comeuppance for being an asshole, which was encouraging. And then he became much less of an asshole, and all the other characters are pretty damn awesome, and Andre Braugher and Marc Evan Jackson are husbands. I like it a lot.


Broadchurch S3. I finally got up the nerve to watch this. It's much better (by which I mostly mean less frustratingly implausible and contrived) than S2 and not as wrenching as S1, though still plenty grim.( Somewhat spoilery things under the cut )

It was interesting to see two performers I strongly associate with comedy--Lenny Henry and Charlie Higson (formerly of The Fast Show)--take on dramatic roles and do very well in them. I adore Charlie Higson in particular and now need to look up what else he's been in. And, in tribute to my facial-recognition ineptitude (I recognized both Henry and Higson by their voices) I will acknowledge that for the first two episodes, until I looked it up, I thought Trish was being played by Fiona Shaw. Julie Hesmondhalgh, who actually plays the role, is excellent.

Paddington 2, which is even funnier and lovelier than the first one, and which focused on the value and power of community in a way I found pleasing and timely. Hugh Grant nearly steals the show as a sharp parody of himself.


2) Stuff I've been reading:

Point of Sighs, by Melissa Scott. I had not known this was coming out, so it was a wonderful surprise. Like the previous Fairs Point, it integrated character development with plot really well, but in this one the plot involves tea and underwater monsters instead of dog racing, so it was much more my jam. My only quibbles were ( Spoilers )

A Closed and Common Orbit, by Becky Chambers. I liked A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet well enough, but this one, not a sequel but set in the same universe and featuring a few characters from the first book, is better. It's still got too much of its plot stuffed into the last 40 pages, but this time there's some build-up, and more importantly, the characters are sympathetic, well-intentioned, decent people who still have conflicts with each other. Small Angry Planet oversold everyone's pure nobility a bit for my taste; Common Orbit feels more real and more complex.

The teaser chapter to KJ Charles's Henchmen of Zenda, which will be released on May 15th. I can't wait!


3) Stuff I've been cooking:

Strawberry-rhubarb pie. I more or less followed this recipe, but with a cream-cheese pastry crust (mostly because I didn't have enough butter) and with a few other small adjustments, namely a little less sugar, omitting the butter in the filling, and using a few drops of orange extract in place of the orange juice. Also, my strawberries had been macerating in a bit of Cointreau and sugar overnight, because I didn't initially intend to turn them into pie. And the strawberries were halved or in thick slices instead of chopped. It turned out delicious, although more watery than I was expecting from a recipe that promises you it absolutely will not be watery.

I was going to post pictures but the DW posting interface is making it waaaaay too much of a hassle.

I have also cooked a pork and kimchi stew (several days ago, before it turned unpleasantly warm here), made a batch of pesto, and made a "kedgeree risotto" loosely based on Nigella Lawson's recipe. I can almost see kedgeree purists cringing, but the one time I made a kedgeree the proper way, I found it dry and dull and not at all enjoyable. The lovely creaminess of a risotto-style preparation is much closer to what I imagined kedgeree to be when I'd only enviously read about it. Anyway I considerably adulterated even Lawson's "inauthentic" version, using smoked salmon instead of smoked white fish, which is hard to find in the US, adding some shrimp (plus simmering their shells with the broth to add flavor), using spiced ghee and a good dollop of Penzey's curry powder, adding some peas, and even finishing with (gasp!) a little cream. Lawson calls for quail eggs, which are both hard to get and, to my mind, ridiculous, so I topped the rice with a plain hard-boiled egg. It was yummy and I regret nothing.

Oh, and because I got some more rhubarb very cheap from work. I have made a rhubarb syrup which, added to plain or sparkling water, will make a delicious cool drink in the style of a Persian sharbat. The recipe is from A Taste of Persia by Naomi Duguid, a fascinating cookbook that I got for just a couple of dollars as an ebook from the Evil Online Commercial Empire. (Take 1.5 lb of rhubarb, cut into half-inch slices. Put in a pan along with a scant 2 c sugar and 1 c water. Bring to a boil, then simmer strongly for 20 minutes. Strain out the rhubarb, add 3 tablespoons of lemon juice to the rhubarb juice and return the juice to the pan. Simmer another 15 minutes until thickened a bit. You should have about 2 cups syrup. I strained my syrup through cheesecloth because it was a little cloudy. At this point you can add a dash of rose water; I didn't, because I didn't have any, but I did add a little orange extract along with the lemon juice. Put the syrup in a jar and refrigerate up to 3 months. Dilute with 1 part syrup to 3 parts water to use. The strained-out rhubarb pulp is tasty and can be eaten by itself, as a topping for yogurt or ice cream, etc.)


I have been writing this post for about a thousand years and it's getting very long, so that's all for now.

I watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory tonight, because I adore Gene Wilder.

What a peculiar movie. I can't imagine anything like it being made today. Was the recent-ish remake awful? I'll bet it was. I'll bet they started by turning Charlie from a sweet gentle boy into a rebel with an attitude.

Anyway, I kept feeling like behind the random moralizations and the tacked-on feel-good ending, there was a dark, strange, perverse story lurking, that we see only glimpses of.

Naturally I went to the AO3 looking for fic. Oh dear. I didn't even read any of it, and I still want brain bleach. These were not the dark, strange, perverse stories I was looking for.

I saw Dunkirk today. I really wanted to like it, but I'm afraid I didn't.

( A few thoughts under the cut )

Things I've been watching:

That Mitchell and Webb Look. I've been binge-watching this for a couple of days now. I'm enjoying it a lot even though I find it (usually) more wry than laugh-out-loud funny. Sometimes it's actively unfunny, as in the sketch where a man goes into a little shop ostensibly to buy food, ends up buying two cans of cheap strong beer instead, and it's clear that this is a routine he goes through every day as he desperately, hopelessly tries to cover up his alcoholism. I was astonished to hear the audience laughing at it (or was it a laugh track?). Apparently the last sketch from the very last episode was the (in)famous old Sherlock Holmes, which makes everyone cry; somehow I'm not surprised that Mitchell and Webb chose to end the show that way.

Parts Unknown, Anthony Bourdain's most recent show, which is less about extreme food adventures than Bourdain's previous work and focuses to a surprising extent on history, culture, and politics. I was loving it, and then we got to the episode about New Mexico, where I live. I found it oversimplified, almost stereotypical, and much too filtered through Bourdain's romantic obsession with cowboys and the west (and guns--there was a long segment of Bourdain with gun enthusiasts that I skipped most of because it made me so furious). So now I wonder if the whole show is like that and I just didn't notice because of my own ignorance; other episodes, especially those set in troubled parts of the world, did seem a lot more serious and balanced to me, though.

Weeks ago I started watching Captain America: Civil War on Netflix and got so bored about half an hour in that I still haven't finished it. I guess I'll watch the rest eventually, but the whole premise is so contrived that it's hard to care. But part of the problem could be me: I often have a hard time settling in to movies, even though I can watch episode after episode of a TV series.


Things I've been reading:

Right now I'm about halfway through Matter, one of Iain M. Banks's Culture novels. I'm enjoying it all right, but I don't understand why so many people say these books are the best thing ever. The ones I've read have all been a bit same-y, and so the worldbuilding that was initially so impressive ceases to impress. I do give Banks some points for naming a ship Eight Rounds Rapid, though.

Before that I read Dan Chaon's new mystery/thriller Ill Will, which, again, I liked well enough, but which also seemed like another example of that phenomenon where a "literary" novelist writes a genre book and is wildly overpraised for things that are, in fact, pretty typical of the genre. Chaon did throw in a few self-consciously literary touches, but I don't think they were necessary or even beneficial to the story. And plotwise, I still can't decide ( potential plot spoilers )

A while back I read Kai Ashante Wilson's Sorcerer of the Wildeeps but forgot to post about it. It's a little bit slight and short, story-wise (it's a novella, really, not a full novel) but it's fantastically well-written; I especially admire how Wilson melds African American Vernacular English and a high fantasy setting in a way that is first surprising and then just absolutely, seamlessly right. The worldbuilding is tantalizing, too, and I hope Wilson writes more in this universe. And did I mention that the main characters are queer men?


Other stuff: I have a 24-day streak on Duolingo in both German, which I'm just beginning, and French, which I studied for years and then neglected for years. Has anyone else noticed that some of the Duolingo example sentences are rather . . . dystopian? I keep getting ones like "Don't believe that soldier!" and "It's better to avoid that zone." Or, today, "A little robot came and saved them," which was nice.


A request: Now that I've joined the 21st century and have Netflix streaming and Spotify, I'd love recs for movies, TV shows, and especially music.

1) I saw the movie Denial the other night. It's about the trial of Deborah Lipstadt, a history professor who was sued for libel by Holocaust denier David Irving after she called him a Holocaust denier. The script created a surprising amount of suspense and tension from a story to which most people know the ending (Lipstadt was acquitted on the grounds that everything she said about Irving was true), and the acting was great. Rachel Weisz may have overacted a little bit in some scenes, but it's hard to be sure because she was playing a brash American among a bunch of restrained middle-class English people. Andrew Scott was great as Lipstadt's solicitor, Tom Wilkinson marvellously nuanced as her barrister, and Mark Gatiss imbued a small role with a quiet, mysterious charisma. Anyone who thinks Scott and/or Gatiss can't act should see this film.

The script, by David Hare, is a delicate balancing act. The plot trajectory is almost that of a feel-good film, in which truth wins out and the bad guy is reproved and shamed. But the truth that wins out is one of the greatest atrocities in human history. The film, especially in the final sequence, sharply restrains our celebratory reactions. In the end, that's what I liked most about it.


2) After seeing the film, I read Lipstadt's book on the Eichmann trial (I haven't been able to get hold of her book on Holocaust denial yet, but I want to read it although it's well out of date by now.) The Eichmann book was disappointing. ( This gets a bit long )

3) In (somewhat) lighter reading, I've been thinking about re-reading Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad books so that I can finally read Secret Place and then the new one. I need to be reminded of the characters' backstories and interactions, but I'm not sure I can take that much concentrated bleakness in one big dose.

I'd like to know why so many contemporary mystery writers think the only story worth telling is one that makes you wish that whole human race would be wiped out in an asteroid strike.


4) Work post-mortem gathering tonight. I'm going, because I want to try to maintain relationships with people, but I can't say I'm eager. Hopefully the people I particularly want to see will be there, and not too many of the ones I don't.