Uncouth Reflections

“Night Flight”

Posted on September 1, 2012 by Fabrizio del Wrongo

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

This MGM star vehicle has been out of circulation since its original run in 1933, probably owing to legal issues related to the rights of the source story by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. (Yeah, THAT Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – the guy responsible for “The Little Prince.”) It deals with a group of flyers in South America who are tasked with undertaking dangerous night missions in order to keep the mail on schedule – they’re a sort of aerial version of the Pony Express. When the pilots land, they go back to their wives and girlfriends, but a part of them remains in the air. They’re spiritually tied to its danger, its space, and its freedom.

It’s a hackneyed idea, and it’s presented with the taxidermied superficiality one expects of MGM. Worse, parts of the movie were cut after a poor preview, dulling some of the plot points considerably. But director Clarence Brown keeps the picture so visually and tonally unified that you glide right over the rough spots. Part of his strategy is to keep the camera moving through space, often craning emphatically to highlight actors and other points of interest. This provides a stylistic corollary to the aerial footage (a dramatic mix of live action and studio fakery), and it effectively underscores the theme of lives dislodged into great open spaces. Brown’s best flourishes come during the flight sequences, some of which take the form of elaborate montages. (The editing is by Hal C. Kern.) Filled with horizontal wipes and high-angle vignettes showing people waving at the planes overhead, these sequences convey the Olympian sense of freedom early flyers must have experienced as they soared above the earth. And in their fractured, space-defeating lyricism they force mental comparisons between aviation and the movies — two technologies which emerged around the same time, each of which went a long way towards splicing together the world.

The scenario lends itself to an ensemble approach, and MGM populated “Night Flight” with some of its best-known players. Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery, and William Gargan play pilots; Helen Hayes and Myrna Loy are their earthbound women; and John and Lionel Barrymore turn up as control station bosses overseeing the flight routes. (John is in full self-caricature mode; his eyebrows seem synced to the flutter of his bizarro tracking instruments.) Loy gives perhaps the best performance, effectively using her entire frame to communicate the complex of feelings that her husband’s flying inspires in her — it’s a mishmash of worry, jealousy, and arousal. I especially enjoyed one of her bedroom scenes with Gargan. Its rumpled, post-coital mood is of a sort one associates with European films.

“Night Flight” is sometimes claimed as an influence on “Only Angels Have Wings,” a not unreasonable charge considering Howard Hawks was serving as chief aid to Irving Thalberg while the movie was being made. But aside from the flying milieu and the South American setting the two films aren’t very similar. With its ensemble cast, its fractured plot, and its race-against-time theatrics, “Night Flight” plays more like a precursor to the disaster epics of the 1970s. It’s like “Airport” or “The Towering Inferno” in miniature.

“Night Flight” is available on DVD through Warner’s burn-on-demand line, The Warner Archive Collection. It also sometimes runs on TCM.

Posted in Movies, Performers | Tagged Airport, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Aviation, Clarence Brown, Clark Gable, Howard Hawks, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, MGM, movies, Myrna Loy, Night Flight, Only Angels Have Wings, The Towering Inferno, Warner Archive Collection | 3 Comments

House Style at The New Yorker

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Paleo Retiree

Paleo Retiree writes:

Take a look at the following first-lines-of-articles-from-The-New-Yorker and tell me if you’re as struck by certain patterns and similarities as I’ve been.

“In 2004, Carolina Izquierdo, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, spent several months with the Matsigenka, a tribe of about twelve thousand people who live in the Peruvian Amazon.”
“Spoiled Rotten” by Elizabeth Kolbert

“In 1926, Forrest Ackerman, a nine-year-old misfit in Los Angeles, visited a newsstand and bought a copy of Amazing Stories — a new magazine about aliens, monsters, and other oddities.”
“Show the Monster” by Daniel Zalewski

“On a recent morning in the rain forest of northern Brazil, a wiry man in a faded T-shirt and shorts leaped from a marshy riverbank onto the trunk of a palm tree.”
“Strange Fruit” by John Colapinto

“On Thanksgiving Day, 2008, shoppers began lining up outside the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, Long Island, at 5:30 p.m., near a small, handwritten sign that read ‘Blitz Line Starts Here’.”
“Crush Point” by John Seabrook

“One midwinter night in 2008, Senator John Ensign, of Nevada, the chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, was roused from bed when six men entered his room and ordered him to get up.”
“Frat House for Jesus” by Peter J. Boyer

“On the evening of May 7, 2008, a twenty-three-year-old woman named Rachel Hoffman got into her silver Volvo sedan, put on calming jam-band music, and headed north to a public park in Tallahassee, Florida.”
“The Throwaways” by Sarah Stillman

House style much?

Here’s my attempt at distilling the art of kicking off a New Yorker article:

“On a date that’s peculiarly specific, and in a sentence that uses more commas than you’re accustomed to, someone you’ve never heard of did something, or had something done to him/her, of puzzlingly little apparent significance.”

Easy-peasy!

If The New Yorker contacts you about offering me a job, you know how to put them in touch with me.

Posted in Books Publishing and Writing | Tagged The New Yorker, writing | 10 Comments

More on Symbolism

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

Last night I opened my copy of Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness and was greeted with this passage:

At the cost of appearing biased, I have to say that the literary mind can be intentionally prone to the confusion between noise and meaning, that is, between randomly constructed arrangement and a precisely intended message. However, this causes little harm; few claim that art is a tool of investigation of the Truth — rather than an attempt to escape it or make it more palatable. Symbolism is the child of our inability and unwillingness to accept randomness; we give meaning to all manner of shapes; we detect human figures in inkblots. ‘I saw mosques in the clouds’ announced Arthur Rimbaud, the nineteenth-century French symbolic poet. This interpretation took him to ‘poetic’ Abyssinia (in East Africa), where he was brutalized by a Christian Lebanese slave dealer, contracted syphilis, and lost a leg to gangrene. He gave up poetry in disgust at the age of nineteen, and died anonymously in a Marseilles hospital ward while still in his thirties. But it was too late. European intellectual life developed what seems to be an irreversible taste for symbolism — we are still paying its price, with psychoanalysis and other fads.

Regrettably, some people play the game too seriously; they are paid to read too much into things. All my life I have suffered the conflict between my love of literature and poetry and my profound allergy to most teachers of literature and ‘critics.’ The French thinker and poet Paul Valery was surprised to listen to a commentary of his poems that found meanings that had until then escaped him (of course, it was pointed out to him that these were intended by his subconscious).

Previously, here’s Ira Glass on symbolism.

UPDATE:

Posted in Books Publishing and Writing | Tagged literary criticism, narrative fallacy, Nassim Taleb, randomness, symbolism | 1 Comment

Question Lady Question

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Question Lady

The Question Lady writes:

What is the best Labor Day meal you ever had?

Posted in Food and health | Tagged food | 9 Comments

“Killer Joe”

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Paleo Retiree

Paleo Retiree writes:

McConaughey and Gershon have a little something they need to work out

A white-trash/noir, doublecrossin’, absurdist melodrama, directed by William Friedkin from a Tracy Letts play that The Question Lady and I also loved. Friedkin may be in his 70s but he has made an energized and outrageous film — juicy, horrifying, shocking, and funny in a downtown-theater/youthful-cult-movie kind of way.

Small tonal note: “Killer Joe” is darker, more intense and less campy than many of the cult-type movies we’ve grown accustomed to in recent years. Friedkin’s a true man of his era. He doesn’t have the modern guy’s instinct to resort to distance, cool and amusement. His instinct is to go for the jugular: When in doubt, don’t back off; instead, push things even further. The goal here is to upset people, and in a way that’s both good and evil. Tracy Letts is one of the best writers-for-actors around, in a class (IMHO, of course) with Mamet and Shepard. He knows what performers need and he gives them a lot of it to go wild on. (His instinct for what the audience needs is pretty darned good too.) Chicago theater, baby. Caleb Deschanel’s tender/harsh cinematography is attentive to atmosphere and psychology in a way that shows the values of the project off beautifully.

In the way it combines absurdism, humor and intensity, and in the way the original stage play has been opened up, “Killer Joe” demands comparison not just to “Bug,” another Friedkin/Letts collaboration that I adored, but also to the less-successful Robert Altman film of Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love.” (Hey, the DVD of “Bug” is currently only $6.95!) Some of it’s like an effective film adaptation of a stage play but much of it is an interesting hybrid, defining and inhabiting its own satisfying limbo between the theatrical and the cinematic. Friedkin and Letts seem to have decided to move the play’s action around while at the same time cutting the film’s microuniverse off from the larger world around it. It’s a shrewd and successful choice, delivering the visual stimulation and scene-changes of a movie without losing the supercharged, screwed-down focus of stage space.

You watch projects like these (whether on film or on stage) mainly for the crazy moments, the intensity of the scenes and the situations, and for the actors and their performances. In all this, the film really comes through. Great cast, great casting. In the central, youthful-patsy role, Emile Hirsch gives the film’s least interesting character — he thinks he’s savvy, hot stuff, and he isn’t — a lot of convincing desperation, ego, and sweat. As the cool and scary Killer Joe, Matthew McConaughey dispenses with the heartthrob baloney of his recent rom-com career and shows off a charismatic, balls-to the-wall, freakazoid side. Gina Gershon goes to town with the scheming, slatternly and bitchy notes (although, needless to say, she’s seductive and sexy too) — it’s a seriously wildass performance that, like her perf in “Showgirls,” deserves instant canonization. Thomas Hayden Church shows that he isn’t just a masterly deadpan comedian, he’s also capable of delivering pathos and brooding depths. And as the film’s center-of-real-human-values, young Juno Temple (the daughter of film director Julien Temple) makes her character’s mixture of fragile angel, “Baby Doll”-style sexpot, and terrifying banshee seem to cohere and make sense.

Juno Temple: Turn-on — or terror?

‘70s-movie-style bliss — and to be avoided at all costs if you dislike shocks, four-letter words delivered with zing and gusto, gratuitous nudity, cranked-up-to-11 emotionality, and/or convincing bloodshed. There’s plenty of all the above. Since this movie goes out of its way to violate personal boundaries in all kinds of thrilling ways, politically-correct lovers of mutually-respectful relationships are especially discouraged from attending.

Bonus links:

An interview with William Friedkin. Great bit: “The important thing is not ‘Does it go too far?’ but ‘Is it effective?'”
An interview with Juno Temple and Gina Gershon.

Posted in Movies | Tagged Gina Gershon, Juno Temple, Matthew McConaughey, movies, Tracy Letts, William Friedkin | 9 Comments

Can you secede while still being in charge?

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Brundle Guy

Brundle Guy writes:

Mike Lofgren wrote this article for The American Conservative asking if the wealthy elites in America have, for all intents and purposes, seceded from the union and created their own world while still governing and controlling the rest of us.

What think you, fellow Uncouthers? I’m particularly interested in Paleo Retiree’s thoughts, as I know he’s got an interest in the theories and culture of American Secessionism, and Glynn Marsh, as this made me think of her post on conspiracy theorists and “creating realities.”

There’s also some pretty feisty comments in the article’s talkback section that are worth taking a look at, if you’ve got the disposition for that kind of thing. It’s a fun little shitkicker of an article, so I figured I’d throw it to you fine folks and see what turns up! Let your voices be heard, Uncoutherites!

Posted in Philosophy and Religion, Politics and Economics | Tagged conspiracy theories, elites, politics, secession, The American Conservative, the wealthy | 5 Comments

Question Lady Question

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Question Lady

The Question Lady writes:

When it comes to people on the internet posting photos of those near and dear to them — are you more susceptible to photos of their animals or their children?

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

What’s Wrong with White Boys Playing the Blues?

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

The L.A. Weekly recently ran a feature on the “20 Worst Hipster Bands.” Here’s the entry for No. 20:

Fifty years after the Rolling Stones and we’re still upset about this? They “lack authenticity,” you see, b/c they aren’t black. Thus, they’re forever barred from using a I-IV-V chord progression and playing a minor pentatonic scale.

By the way, a question: how many young blacks are even drawn to playing guitar? Very few in my admittedly limited, anecdotal experience. It seems like most blacks who pursue music get into DJing, hip-hop, or R&B, all of which put more emphasis on voice or keyboards/programming than guitar. Given the relative dearth of young black blues musicians, shouldn’t we be happy someone is carrying the torch for this essential American art form?

OK, OK, OK — if it sounds like I’m taking this a little personally, it’s b/c I am. First, I think the Black Keys‘ latest album, El Camino, is a great rock ‘n roll record. Freewheeling, raucous, and energetic, it’s packed with dirty hooks and low-down riffs. Eleven tracks and not a single one of ’em is filler. And I used the phrase “rock ‘n roll” intentionally. In his autobiography, Keith Richards laments that fact that a lot of modern rock music puts all the emphasis on rocking and none on rolling. “What happened the groove?” he wonders. (My short answer: blame Johnny Ramone.) The Black Keys didn’t forget the groove. Unlike a lot of the music you find on alternative rock radio, you can dance to it. Here’s the second single off El Camino, “Gold on the Ceiling.”

The second reason this nonsense pisses me off is that I’m kinda, sorta an amateur blues player myself. After messing around on the guitar for years, I recently decided to take formal lessons. My teacher, who is white, was born and raised in Whittier, got his music degree at UC Irvine, and now lives in Aliso Viejo. In other words, cracker as can be. He’s an incredible guitar player whose favorite music is jazz and reggae. At my first lesson, within 15 minutes of meeting him, he taught me the basic blues scale and had me improvising over a rhythm track. It was a blast. Scary and exhilarating at the same time.

But I guess I shouldn’t enjoy myself too much, seeing as I wasn’t born to the right type of people in the Mississippi Delta during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thus my playing will never be more than ersatz. Nah, fuck that and fuck these pinhead humanities-major music critics who probably couldn’t strum a C-chord if their tickets to Coachella depended on it.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go practice my scales.

UPDATE: Stuff White People Like weighs in.

Posted in Music, Personal reflections | Tagged blues, Keef, music critics, Rolling Stones, stuff white people like, The Black Keys | 22 Comments

The Art of Pinball: Roy Parker

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Sax von Stroheim

Sax von Stroheim writes:

Over the last year or so Mrs. von Stroheim and I have been dipping our toes into the world of vintage pinball, and we finally took the plunge and bought the first (and perhaps only) machine for our collection. It’s a game from 1960 called “World Beauties”, produced by the Gottlieb company, which made the best pinball games up until the 1970s when the older electro- mechanical style that they had mastered was phased out in favor of machines run on circuit boards. We chose the game not only because we prefer the old-fashioned gameplay, but also because it’s a gorgeous machine, featuring the art of Roy Parker, a genuine American Master.

Here’s the backglass for “World Beauties”:

Parker’s specialty

Parker was a commercial artist who worked for Advertising Posters, a printing company in Chicago, which was the center of the pinball manufacturing world. Advertising Posters handled the art for Gottlieb as well as Gottlieb’s major competitor, Williams.

Parker was the artist for 290 Gottlieb machines. From the 1930s until his death in 1966, Parker was the exclusive Gottlieb artist, which gives their machines from this era a very cohesive look. Like all pinball art of the era, Parker’s work put beautiful women front and center, but he also had a great sense of humor. The backglass for “Old Faithful”, from 1949 (his style was a little rougher then) reminds me of Frank Tashlin’s cartoons:

At the time, these games definitely were not for kids…

And I love the “school of fish” in the playfield of “Mermaid” (1951):

The joke at the top of the field is pretty good, too…

He also had a great eye for 50s “atomic age” architecture. Dig the hotel in “Hi-Diver” (1959):

Reminds me of Dan Clowes…

One of the great accomplishments of fandom – whether we’re talking about pinball fans or comic book fans – is to have shined a light on the work of commercial artists which would have otherwise ended up in the dustbin of history along with all the other bits and pieces of culture that don’t have official, institutional support. But thinking about Parker’s work makes it clear just how much luck plays a role in what art gets remembered, preserved, and celebrated. Who knows how many other illustrators could have done what Parker did? And who would have guessed that 70 years later people would be collecting these machines for the artwork? In terms of his legacy, Parker seems to have “lucked out”: working for Gottlieb all those years not only gave him steady work (which is probably all he cared about at the time), but gave his career the kind of shape it wouldn’t have if he was in the position of doing piece work, for a bunch of different employers.

If you ever get a chance to check out some of his machines in person, don’t pass it up!