Yesterday's Con

I was cleaning out the trunk of my car yesterday which has mostly remained undisturbed for ten years. I've used it just as storage all this time--among all the pre-prequel Star Wars books, various sketchbooks, and presumably destroyed Nintendo games I found this;

It has some water damage on the upper right but otherwise it's in decent condition. 1995 might have been my first Comic-Con, I'm not sure. I've gone annually for at least ten years but it was sporadic before that. In 95 I was a sophomore in high school. I have no memory of what I did at the 95 Con. It might've been one I went to with some friends from school, in which case I'd have spent most of my time in the anime theatres. I remember relatively clearly seeing Tenchi Muyo for the first time at the Comic-Con.

Inside the book is the usual rundown of special guests among whom we find a youthful Neil Gaiman;

Youthful--wait a minute, I'm 34 now. Damn.

The only other names among the guests I recognise are Harvey Pekar, Stan Lee, and Sam Keith.

Every year, the Comic-Con book has a lot of full page artwork from various comic book artists celebrating whatever anniversary it happens to be that year. In 1995 it was the 100th anniversary of the Comic Strip, the 40th anniversary of Mad magazine, the 50th anniversary of Katy Keene, and for some reason the year was a celebration of villains;

Here's why superheroes should never take sculptors into their confidence;

This was by an artist calling himself "Dire Wolf". I do wonder what became of most of the artists who contributed work.

Here's one by Vampirella co-creator Trina Robbins;

Twitter Sonnet #516

Questions arise when arrow magnets burn.
Box shaped hearts confound love's comedian.
Melted plastic hammers drip on the fern.
Broken glasses grant blurry Albion.
The butterfly broccoli crawled out of sight.
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Soggy takeout trickled a soy sauce blight.
Stone and steel don't love you as much as pugs.
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The Flower of Colombia

I would argue 2011's Colombiana is not as bad as people say it is. It's true, for every five minutes of the film something stupid happens, the first twenty minutes of the film are devoid of decent actors, most of the film is shot through urine-scope yellow (I think it was 2000's Traffic that taught filmmakers everything south of the Mexican border is yellow), the direction is at best mechanically academic, and the star of this action film is completely unconvincing in a fist fight. On the other hand, that star is Zoe Saldana, she gives a great performance and she's gorgeous.

The petite actress spends a lot of time crawling through ventilation ducts at which she's exceptionally more believably effective than she is in fist fights, not to mention sexy.

Most of the time, too, she's barefoot and in her underwear, a notable exception being a scene where she wears nothing but a black body-stocking.

This is part of a Trojan Horse plan she has for assassinating a guy the FBI are holding in jail over night. She poses as a drunk party girl, gets herself arrested by ramming into a police car, gets up in the middle of the night in her cell, strips and changes to the body stocking she had concealed, and uses an improbable technique with a glass of water and a spoon to disable the fans in the ventilation system for her to crawl through.

The moment she started taking off her stockings I thought of a friend of mine who several years ago was arrested for driving under the influence. She was a lot less intoxicated than Saldana's character appeared to be but they forced her to remove her stockings. Of course, this is less of a glaring problem than the fact that Saldana's able to do this undetected because none of the security cameras are aimed at the cells. When she uses a bobby pin to pick her lock--something else you can be sure would have been confiscated in a real situation--she turns the camera, which was I guess monitoring just the corridor outside the cells, to face the wall.

I think there could be an Uncanny Valley in stylised action flicks. I can accept that airliners have holsters for swords in Kill Bill but I don't buy the police procedure in Colombiana. Perhaps it's because for the most part the production is more mundane than something like Kill Bill, or maybe it's because too much of the fudging is to make things easier for the assassin we're supposed to be very impressed by.

But this stuff wasn't so bad that I didn't enjoy the film at all. There's a good scene where Saldana infiltrates the mansion of a crime boss by swimming through his shark tank, and there's some enticing exploration of Saldana's assassin with the buried heart, something Saldana does more to effectively create than the writers and director.

Veins on a Train

I was thinking about trains in media a few days ago so I thought I'd come up with a list which turns out to have numbered six. It's not a top six list; I wouldn't even necessarily say these are the best things ever involving trains though they could be. I certainly love each of them but there's no hard and fast hierarchy here. I just felt like listing these for whatever reason. Sorry if that's not enough drama for you.

Through the Looking Glass

This is Alice's first move across the chess board. She's a pawn and, as the Red Queen explains, "A pawn goes two squares in its first move, you know. So you'll go very quickly through the Third Square—by railway, I should think—and you'll find yourself in the Fourth Square in no time."

Alice finds herself in a carriage surrounded by strange people obsessed with confusing ideas of efficiency and time. One man across from her is wearing a suit made entirely of paper. As part of Lewis Carroll's larger parody of the adult world through the eyes of a child, this scene is a delightful impression of a child's perspective of being stuck temporarily in close quarters with a disorienting array of adults and their inevitably alien and silly motives and habits.

Galaxy Express 999 (銀河鉄道999)

Leiji Matsumoto's manga from the 1970s spawned an enormous franchise including television series and movies. The show is also based on a child's perspective of journeying by train, in this case Matsumoto translates the strange experience of travelling with his mother as child into a journey through space where the 999 is a locomotive capable of interstellar travel. The feeling of being attached to this mode of conveyance, which travels on a fixed track and stops and goes at fixed times and places, is used to aid the tension of visiting alien worlds.

Travel by train is and has long been an extremely prominent aspect of living in Japan so it's not hard to see why so many people were able to identify with this series. It's nostalgic and at the same time it provides a framing device for encountering the bizarre.

Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (千と千尋の神隠し, "Sen and Chihiro Hidden by the Gods", marketed in the West under the inferior title of Spirited Away)

Obviously influenced by Galaxy Express 999, the train sequence in Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi even features a shadowy conductor almost identical to the one in Matsumoto's series. Like Through the Looking Glass and Galaxy Express 999, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi translates strangers from the child's point of view into mysterious beings. In this case, they seem to be shadow people with enough substance and form to imply personality and purpose but vague enough to frustrate the mind in attempts to know more. Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi presents a gentler take, though, as Chihiro and her companions watch shadow passengers drift in and out of existence as they cross the seemingly endless, strange sea. The way the scene is shot is reminiscent of Shinji travelling by train through Tokyo-3 in Neon Genesis Evangelion where his depression isolates him while other passengers, embarking and disembarking, constitute a barely perceived phenomena.

Dracula (1992)

"The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East."

Francis Ford Coppola uses the line directly from the book in his 1992 adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel. The movie's expressionist use of imagery and sound is an inexhaustible wonder. In this first scene involving a train, Coppola transitions from Jonathan and Mina in a garden in London by pulling in on a peacock feather which dissolves into a dark train tunnel giving way to hills bathed in bloody light. Sounds of birds subtly transform into the more insistent howl of the train whistle.

As the quote suggests, Jonathan perceives the physical travel from one place to another as travel from one cultural context to another, from the familiar inexorably to the alien about which his mind has been taught to have apprehensions.

The 39 Steps

Trains figure prominently in many Alfred Hitchcock movies--The Lady Vanishes, Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest, Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt. But I chose The 39 Steps because the scene where Richard Hannay crosses by rail from England into Scotland puts him on the map of Scotland carried by the dead spy Annabella and into a lot of trouble. There's a great chase scene in the tight confines of the train cars and even outside for a terrifying moment. And of course there are strange people, including a woman Hannay hastily kisses in the hopes of throwing off his pursuers--it doesn't work, of course, the woman doesn't know him.

I Know Where I'm Going!

This 1945 romantic comedy by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger also features a significant journey by train from England to Scotland. In this case, Joan Webster, a pragmatic young woman who dreams with immense pleasure of marrying not so much her fiancé as the wealthy industrial company he owns. Her dream translates the rhythmic noise of the train engines as she sleeps into a mantra about how wonderfully sorted her life is. But this dissolves into the stranger image of the train crossing a line into tartan covered hills, a signal that Webster's not as unimaginative as she would perhaps like to be. The train carries her not to certainty but to a far more exciting and satisfying alien world of romance.

Ghosts are Sprung Traps

Perhaps all the morality a ghost possesses lies in those who witness it. There are two kinds of stories in 1945's Dead of Night, an English anthology horror film: stories of benign encounters with the supernatural and stories where the supernatural assists the witness in self-destruction. It's a delightful film with an easy going wit and it's also feverishly obsessed with the enigma of personal character, the question of justice constantly agonised over.

The framing story is of a group of people meeting in a large country house. One of them, an architect named Walter, tells the others of a recurring dream he's had that gave him foreknowledge of every detail of the gathering. The dream had also revealed that the gathering would end in a terrible disaster.

The movie proceeds with five vignettes, each told by one of the other guests to illustrate their own encounters with the supernatural. When one remarks how it's funny they each should have had such an experience, someone else observes that maybe it's not so strange. Maybe everyone has these experiences and normally never mentions it.

In one story, a man is warned in a dream to avoid a situation that ends in death for others. In another story, a teenage girl encounters the ghost of a child who finds peace because, assuming he's a real child, she sings to him and comforts him when he's crying. He says he wishes she was his sister since his real sister was very cruel to him.

In both cases, the way the supernatural force treats the protagonist causes the protagonist to reflect on his or her character in an attempt to find meaning in the experience. These are also the first two stories.

They plant a seed of thought that turns on the third story. Told by a character played by Googie Withers, it's really more about her husband to whom she had given an antique mirror. Inside the mirror he sees the room in which the mirror used to belong and the strange reflection begins to distort the man's self-image. It's a nice metaphor about how violent and abusive behaviour can be built on prolonged contact with a complex delusion or illusion.

The fourth story is a rather amusing bit of dark comedy, following two affable hardcore golfers who fall in love with the same woman. That doesn't stop the three of them from talking it over like civilised people over drinks. Finally, the two men decide with affable satisfaction that the question can be settled with a game of golf at the end of which the loser shall commit suicide.

It appears one of the fellows cheats but the other commits suicide anyway. The resulting haunting takes a few delightfully weird twists of comeuppance but, again, it's a reflection of a protagonist's character.

In the final story, and the most famous, Michael Redgrave plays a ventriloquist whose puppet, Hugo, seems to harbour a murderous ambition independent of his human partner.

I really like how Hugo's voice doesn't appear to be dubbed in--you can see Redgrave's mouth working just subtly when Hugo speaks. Hugo can be sober when Redgrave's drunk and in one case appears to move from one room to another on his own but again it's a reflection of the man. Redgrave simultaneously loathes Hugo and is fiercely possessive of him, not suffering him to be handled by anyone else. Perhaps it's about addiction to the avatar of self-destruction.

Twitter Sonnet #515

Cromwell's secret fish was a small reverend.
Nuns with four arms excused the octopus.
Cafeterias cried what chefs forefend.
Telephone cords don't pull when they can push.
Jigsaw cadavers disturb the bather.
Metal frames can collide with and break clay.
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Ray's a little bit jumbled and jivy.
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Annulled language gashed the manila shot.
Blackened petals peel from a paper clot.

A Crate of Unruly Details

Last night I dreamt I was visiting Caitlin and Spooky. They lived in a vast underground compound in my dream. It was dimly lit with various crates and cabinets filled with papers and scientific equipment. Caitlin went to take a bath in a room adjoining one where she kept two cadavers, an old man and a woman. While she was away, I for some reason felt I ought to move a large set of black metal shelves on wheels to another part of the compound. As I was doing so, I released it for a moment when I was distracted by something and it rolled back into a rack of little plants in small clay pots, most of which instantly shattered. Caitlin had been conducting some kind of long term experiment with the plants and she was very upset when she came back from her bath.

I haven't had a busy day to-day so much as a cluttered one. Every time I start to do one thing I need to do another. Too many things have been cropping up for days I'd talk about here if they weren't all very boring.

With lunch to-day I watched the first episode of the fifth season of Clone Wars having finished season four last night. The last four episodes of that season were written by Katie Lucas, daughter of George, and picked up from where a third season arc had ended, the story about Asajj Ventress' homeworld of witches and Zabrak men, which also turns out to be Darth Maul's home world. Katie must have a slightly rebellious streak because most of this arc features Ventress as the heroine. They're not bad episodes, either, the fourth season segment featuring Dooku and Grievous slaughtering Ventress' sisters and Ventress afterwards fleeing to Tatooine and becoming a bounty hunter.

The visual design of Ventress' planet and people, "Night Sisters", was pretty great and the story of bitter Ventress, betrayed by Dooku and then permanently separated from her people, is pretty good, too.

The Indiscriminate Web

Spending the night in jail can be a horrible experience. Known for making movies about murder and bizarre forms of extortion, Alfred Hitchcock made his 1956 film The Wrong Man about something very simple, something most films might pass over quickly as one of many plot points: a man being arrested for robberies he didn't commit. Based on a true story, Hitchcock creates an extraordinary portrait of human experience. He achieves this most significantly with two devices: point of view and photographic realism.

Hitchcock hated location shots, preferring the studio environment in which he could control everything. Perhaps it was out of respect for the real events that formed the subject of this film that The Wrong Man features so many real places and settings. In any case, however much he hated them, Hitchcock was clearly very good at location shots.

Henry Fonda plays Christopher Balestrero, portrayed as a man whose modes of living are exceptionally clean nosed--he doesn't even drink. He's a musician, playing bass at the Stork Club, a real club in New York and scenes in the club were filmed in the real club.

Fonda was a great actor and he delivers a fine, common fellow performance, but one could say Hitchcock's camera creates Balestrero's character more than Fonda does. Hitchcock had long believed in the importance of connecting footage to character point of view--it's abundantly clear in Notorious. Here, it combines with the grittiness of real prison locations to help convey the panic and humiliation suffocating Christopher. As he's loaded into a paddy wagon with other prisoners, the movie cuts from Fonda's eyes looking down to a shot of the legs of a man in front of him. Inside the paddy wagon, we see Fonda looking down again before we see the shoes of the prisoners around him. We see Fonda look up and then see a shot of the small window across from him between two fellow prisoners.

For the most part, the camera stays inside with Fonda. When the camera goes outside to establish the paddy wagon pulling up to its destination it's an extreme high angle shot, rather distinctive of Hitchcock, as usual implying to the viewer how small the protagonist is in the scheme of things, how at the mercy he is to more powerful forces.

Vera Miles is in the film as Rose, Christopher's wife. Hitchcock is said to have stuck very close to the facts of the real life wrongful arrest and trial of Christopher Balestrero but one can perhaps see a commentary from Hitchcock in how he chose to portray Rose's story.

Christopher's salvation comes when the real robber is apprehended, an event shown juxtaposed with Christopher praying to an image of Christ for help. However, the film follows this with a scene of Rose in a sanatorium, unmoved by the clearing of her husband's name.

As the two of them had been seeking witnesses to testify as to Christopher's location when the crimes were committed, and twice found a potential witness had died, we saw Rose seem to become more fragile.

At one point she blames herself because it was when Christopher went into the bank to get a loan to pay for her dental surgery that he was first misidentified as the robber. Then, when they're talking to their lawyer played by Anthony Quayle, we see her disconnecting entirely.

Hitchcock has a psychiatrist show up to explain the typical of Hitchcock questionable psychiatric diagnosis of Rose--it's a lot of dialogue that simply boils down to, "She's unhappy." But it's clear and very effective anyway to see what's happened to Rose--she's lost faith. Neither God nor the virtuous government are in evidence for her. The horror of the experience goes beyond anything that can be made better by Christopher's name being cleared. When she fails to recover in that scene, Christopher admits he guessed he'd been expecting "a miracle." Even though a title card informs us that Rose eventually recovered years later, the scene stands in significant contrast to the one where we see Christopher's prayer apparently being answered. One can perhaps see a trajectory in Hitchcock's view of religion when considering the disaster brought on by a nun in his subsequent film, Vertigo.

In light of that, it's interesting to contemplate the fact that Vera Miles was Hitchcock's first choice to play the character of Judy Barton in Vertigo. I've watched Vertigo so many times and am so in love with it I may not have the perspective to really evaluate whether or not Miles would have been better in the role that ultimately was given to Kim Novak. But as it is, I think Novak had more of a necessary ethereal quality. Miles may have been better suited to the Barbara Bel Geddes role, though I certainly wouldn't want to swap out Bel Geddes. Miles was too down to earth for Judy, which I guess is why she worked perfectly fine as pragmatic prairie lasses in John Ford movies.

"She Makes Love for the Papers"

Five years before he played the father of her lover in Camille, Lionel Barrymore played one of Greta Garbo's lovers in 1931's version of Mata Hari. In a film industry that's usually content to pair men with women half a century younger than them, this is a testament to Garbo's power as a performer. Certainly she's far and away the best part of this movie which is otherwise a mildly charming melodrama, one that bears very little resemblance to the story of the real life Mata Hari.

Despite being a pre-code film we never see Mata Hari performing nude. Well, actually, we do see her naked on stage but it's so brief and shown so out of context I missed it until I was taking screenshots just now. The movie cuts immediately from a shot of her fully clothed, from the front, to this;

That might not even be Garbo, though Garbo was known to relax naked in her studio garden.

Mata Hari's working as a spy for the Germans in the movie, though she seems shocked when she visits a hospital and sees wounded French soldiers. The movie's very sympathetic to her and doesn't really connect her actions as a spy with any consequences. Mostly the movie concentrates on how a pilot played by Ramon Novarro finally captures her heart, taking her from a lifestyle in which she makes love to many men including the general played by Barrymore. Her affection for Novarro's character not only invites Barrymore's jealousy but inhibits her espionage.

When Novarro's only injury from a plane crash is somehow being struck blind, the last portion of the movie is a bizarre plot about how Mata Hari, imprisoned before being killed by firing squad (as the real Mata Hari was), tricks the blind Novarro into believing she's really in a hospital.

The good natured nuns and prison guards help her with her plan out of complete adoration and sympathy. In fact, the inspector who caught Mata Hari is the only person who seems really pleased about it. He comes off as something of a two dimensional villain, a somewhat charming symptom of how innocent this movie is.

Twitter Sonnet #514

Apple climaxes charge extra for ferns.
Original jaundice goes beige to blue.
Only in a barrel the monkey learns.
Contestants in briefs aren't allowed to sue.
Girdles are anathema to candy.
Clean wins permeate the moustache's dream.
Centennial claws can come in handy.
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Infinite sunglasses poke your eyes out.
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Mister Potato Head has severe gout.
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Inaccurate underwear rooked the crowd.
Modest rifles cannot make love aloud.

The Repeated Mirage of Home

Most anime nowadays objectifies women, though honestly the male characters don't fair much better. Everyone's a vegetable, really, it's just some vegetables have boobs.

I'm starting work on a new comic and I remembered how much I liked an anime series to watch in the mornings to get me motivated. Even the ironically peppy series seemed to confer on me enough inflated self-confidence to last at least until lunch. But anime has, for the most part, been gruellingly homogenous for the past three years. But I keep trying.

For this morning's motivating dose, I downloaded a new series more or less at random from Tokyo Toshokan, the first episode of Photo Kano (フォトカノ), which I later learned is, like many shows, based on a dating simulator video game.

This may be why the male protagonist is utterly devoid of personality and encounters several female and a few male characters with superficial personality types reminiscent of old anime character types in the way a red Skittle resembles a strawberry. But that wouldn't explain why so many other series fit this bill.

The show is about a teenage boy who receives a camera from his father and suddenly finds every cute girl in school wants him to take her picture in a series of one on one chance encounters throughout the day.

To those who interpret the heterocentric term "male gaze" to mean media that depicts women in a way that caters to people attracted to women's bodies this setup may be nicely meta. To the repressed, passive aggressive type who usually uses the term "male gaze" and uses it to mean that men enjoying the sight of women in media is a poisonous thing inextricably linked to patriarchy, you'd probably feel this show proves your point, despite the utterly useless protagonist who floats from one scene to the next like an anxious paper bag.

There's no doubt this is a shonen series, aimed at boys and young men, but the only social order it really affirms is the one that keeps everyone alone in their bedrooms.

The protagonist encounters the lecherous head of a school photography club who seeks to enlist the young man into his group dedicated to taking voyeuristic photos of girls. The guy's portrayed as repulsive for actively pursuing what the protagonist and viewer passively enjoy. He's a familiar comedy type, usually a supporting character, though memorably a lead in Urusei Yatsura. But all the humour, like everything else, is delivered at an awkward, methodical pace that absolutely obliterates it.

So I didn't get any fix from Photo Kano. I had been rewatching the "Mayoi Snail" arc from the first Bakemonogatari (化物語) series so I put in the second episode and almost got a nosebleed from the drastic change of quality after Photo Kano.

There's less fan service, true, less upskirt shots and the like, but the important thing is it has substance and character. I love the story of the snail demon that eternally can never reach home. Even the ultra peppy theme song is intriguing. One can sense something slightly off about it maybe even before one realises that all the characters depicted are Hachikuji. I especially like the part where she's singing about the one being there to guide her home and we see that it's another copy of herself--we see one greeting two others from across the street like they're old friends, groups of Hachikujis laughing and supporting Hachikuji when she falls in gym class. The song is ironically peppy, speaking to the despair inherent in such dedicated optimism, but it's more specific than that. The scenes depicted are celebrations of community and friendship by someone who is always really alone. The choice of a snail as an animal to represent someone cursed never to reach home is an interesting idea, too. Since the snail's home is on her back, one can see it as both a burden and as something all her efforts would cause her to walk away from.

Processing the Uptake

Modern computer technology is the poorer for its lack of walls of grey squares lighting up in meaningless patterns. We're all poorer for the lack of Katharine Hepburn whose performance in 1957's Desk Set makes this conceptually antiquated database seem like a real threat to her livelihood as a reference clerk for a large company. The movie also stars Spencer Tracy and like all the movies in which these two actors star, talented each on their own, their extraordinary chemistry is a great pleasure to watch. This screenplay supplies them with entertaining dialogue, too.

The movie opens with a special thanks to IBM and Hepburn's character mentioning off-hand viewing and admiring IBM's new electronic brain. But Tracy's character works for a different computer company. Perhaps IBM was concerned with the bad feelings it might generate if the jobs of Hepburn and the other appealing women working in the reference library were threatened by an IBM product.

The same year she appeared in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Joan Blondell appears in a supporting role as one of the clerks and it seems she had settled into supporting roles at this point. She had leading roles in the 1930s, around the same time Hepburn's career began, so I wonder if she felt some resentment that Hepburn was still able to get leads. Then again, it's obvious Hepburn is eighty times the actress Blondell ever was.

The movie's based on a play and feels stagebound. Aside from some moments in lobbies and foyers, the whole movie either takes place in the reference offices, the roof of the building, or in Hepburn's apartment.

This was a pretty delightfully misfit scene. When they're both caught in the rain a distance from Tracy's home, Hepburn invites him in and lends him a robe so he can get out of his wet clothes. They're about to eat dinner when Hepburn's boyfriend turns up unexpectedly. When Tracy asks if he ought to hide in the kitchen, Hepburn scoffs, "We're adults!" A million other movies from the time would have filled fifteen minutes with actors bumbling through doors, scrambling under beds, evading the detection of the jealous boyfriend.

The scene's resolution is nicely low key but of course Hepburn's boyfriend is jealous. And he ought to be. Tracy and Hepburn had already hit it off on the roof of the building when Hepburn perfectly created the charm of a sharp bookworm as Tracy quizzed her to test her cognitive abilities. But my favourite scene is just the two of them slightly drunk among the books at the office Christmas party.

Tracy tells her about his ex-girlfriend and how she always sent him letters about women's fashion. Hepburn's laughter before he says, "I don't look like a fellow who's interested in women's fashion, do I?" is so completely natural and when she says, "Not even in men's!" there's a real delight in both their eyes as they look at each other. He's so sweetly understated as she stands to go and he says, "I bet you write wonderful letters."

The Scales of Justice versus the Squid

It's misogynist but it has two actresses I like, it's racist but it has a pretty good giant squid. It's 1940's Reap the Wild Wind, a Cecil B. DeMille movie I'm conflicted about. It's obvious DeMille looks back to slavery in the U.S. with fondness and a lot of the plot is about how women cause trouble when they get involved with men's work. But there's also a fun tale of seagoing adventure in 1840 told with DeMille's keen instincts and characteristically lavish production design.

Wikipedia says, "While he based his film on Strabel's story, DeMille took liberties with details such as sibling relationships and sub-plots, while staying true to the spirit of the story, which centres on a headstrong, independent woman portrayed by Paulette Goddard," which gives you the wrong idea. Goddard as Loxi Claiborne, a young woman who runs her deceased father's shipwreck salvage business, gets some decent agency in the beginning when she rescues handsome Captain Jack Stuart (John Wayne) after his ship's wrecked by a treacherous first mate for a competing salvage company. After that, she's shown to make one wrong decision after another, all because her emotions make her irrational.

She falls in love with Stuart and goes to Charleston to seduce one of the men running the ship line employing him. This is so she can arrange for Stuart to become captain of the line's new steamship, the Southern Cross. She ends up falling for the man she's trying to seduce, Steve Tolliver (Ray Milland). It's hard to take the movie as a ringing endorsement of independent women when Tolliver, finding out about her scheme, forces her over his knee and gives her a spanking in the middle of a dinner party.

John Wayne has a more complex role than he normally gets, actually making some bad decisions himself when he decides to work for the same pirate salvage men who sunk his ship at the beginning of the film. When Loxi learns Tolliver suspects Stuart, she stows away on the ship Tolliver commandeers to intercept him and disables it--leading to a lot of disaster. We're meant to feel bad for Tolliver stoically bearing the storm of female tampering.

The only adults Loxi's permitted to be wiser than are her slaves who are shown contented with their lot as slaves, exhibiting the usual childlike and broadly superstitious behaviour given to black stereotypes in the first half of the twentieth century, the sort of thing mostly only seen in Jar Jar Binks to-day.

Also like Phantom Menace, Reap the Wild Wind ends with a pretty great action sequence as Milland and Wayne dive to the wrecked Southern Cross to determine whether Susan Hayward, in a small role as Goddard's sister, had stowed away and went down with the ship. The sequence was actually shot on an underwater set and the giant squid that suddenly shows up, while slow moving, is actually rather pretty.

Twitter Sonnet #513

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AI larvae exhibit a pallor.
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Sleep strains out choleric rhymes of coal.
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Siamese twin poets tend to a fake foal.
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Drinks, Books, and Russia

Going to bed at 3am last night I had some vague idea of going back to something like my old nocturnal schedule but I couldn't force myself to sleep in later than 10am. It's easier to stay up late than to get up late, it seems. If only I could eliminate sleep entirely.

Last night I went to my uncle's 90th birthday party which was held in a reserved party room at a restaurant called The Butcher Shop. The place has a mild retro theme, with dim lighting, carved wooden doors, and photos of old movie stars everywhere, which I dig. As usual at family get-togethers like this, I spent most of my time in the corner reading and drinking.

I noticed an accent on one of the waitresses who took plates from my table and gave me water. She looked maybe seventeen or eighteen years old, very young. When I asked what her accent was she drew up possibly with pride and said, "Russian," which caused her to bang her head against a lamp on the wall which sputtered and went out. She hurried away. My sister, sitting next to me, teased, "You made her nervous!"

One of the times I got up to the bar for a drink, one of my cousins had taken my seat so I stood at the edge of the dance floor lamely, watching one of my inexhaustible four year old cousins jumping up and down in the middle of the room while I sipped my scotch. The Russian waitress was hurrying past me so I asked her what part of Russia she was from. She told me she was actually from the Ukraine.

"Ah," I said. "I just saw a really good Russian movie--Dersu Uzala from the early 70s."

She nodded blankly. She'd never heard of it.

"I don't know too much about movies from the Ukraine," I said.

"I like world cinema," she said, "Not from my own country."

"Oh? What movies?"

"Oh, all kinds, I don't know about Ukraine movies."

I told her about how I loved Russian literature, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. She told me reading Tolstoy in her country was "an obligation."

"Did you like him?"

She shrugged, "Some people like it, some people don't, you know?"

"Ah, yes."

"I need to get back to work."

My sister found out later she'd travelled to the U.S. originally five years ago with her eighteen year old daughter. Again, the waitress herself had looked eighteen to me. Maybe it was the lighting.

My plan had been to start off the evening with a gin martini and then to have a scotch. But for some reason people seemed to want to buy me drinks last night and who am I to say no?

The bar didn't have much of a selection. The only bourbon was Maker's Mark, there was no Irish Whiskey, and the only scotch was J&B and Johnnie Walker Black Label. When I asked for a gin martini the guy asked me if I wanted it "up".

"Up?" I asked.

"With ice in it," he said.

Since it was my understanding--and my own practice in making a martini--that martinis were made with crushed ice by default I was a little confused by the question so I said, "Uh, sure." The drink he made for me was in a whiskey glass with ice cubes. My sister, who has worked as a bartender, told me "up", in her experience, actually meant without ice.

Well, it tasted like a martini so it wasn't so bad. A family friend sitting to my right asked what I was drinking. When I told her it was a gin martini and she said, "You don't like vodka?"

"I like vodka too," I said. "I was just in the mood for gin."

She left her seat and unexpectedly came back with another gin martini for me. After this, I went up and finally got my scotch. I'd never tried J&B before but I'd always been curious since it seemed to be the only scotch the characters in Goodfellas drank. I had it neat, of course--I found it to have a pretty mild flavour, almost watery. I suppose there's a chance the bartender didn't know what "neat" meant but I didn't see him put water in it.

Then I ran into one of my cousins who'd just turned 21 and was downright zealous about wanting to buy me a drink. So I got straight gin--Bombay dry gin, I think--and talked to him and another of my cousins. They talked about how tequila drives girls crazy especially with sea food. One of them said he couldn't eat lobster, he skeeved it. I told them about the article I'd read recently about how lobsters were apparently immortal, that unless they died from external causes they just got bigger and bigger forever. They listened to me with wide eyes.

I finished the evening with the Johnnie Walker Black Label. I'm happy to say I've finally developed a taste for the Red Label, which I wanted to do because it's what I see people drinking in old British films like the blind woman in Peeping Tom and Alec Guinness in The Bridge On the River Kwai. I didn't quite enjoy the Black Label so much. It has kind of a pungent quality in contrast.