Travelin'

I just watched Obsession. That's Brian De Palma's Obsession. De Palma had gained attention with a few thrillers in the preceding years, very much descendants of Hitchcock. This one feels like the first time he had something of a big budget. As a couple of examples, the middle of the film is shot on location in Venice, and he got to work with composer Bernard Herrmann.

The story is a bit of a midpoint between Vertigo and Oldboy, and it doesn't always make sense. Genevieve Bujold is quite lovely, though, and gives an engaging performance once she appears as the second of her two characters. John Lithgow is good too. Oddly enough, he was actually younger than Bujold.

Oh Aubrey

 

Aubrey Beardsley, avatar of Art Nouveau and the Decadent movement. He may be the best remembered of Oscar Wilde's collaborators. Certainly he's left his mark on the world of illustration in the years since he worked. 

One thing I didn't realize about him until very recently. Besides his getting a free bowl of soup with his haircut, I mean. With all the drawings he did, prints he made, all the indelible images, he was only 25 when he died. Who knows what he would have gone on to do.

In his death throes he begged his publisher and a friend to destroy all of his obscene drawings, which by some standards would be the majority of them. They didn't obey, of course. He could still tell St. Peter that he'd given it the old college try.

⛄

Sunday we got a titanic amount of snow. Come this morning, it was still snowing, but not nearly as fast or at the same volume. It had basically stopped accumulating, although it got a little fluffier after 8PM. 

Lots of shoveling going on. There were impacts on other things. All the banks were closed as far as I could tell. So were most eateries. Garbage day has been pushed back by a day...at least. Not many of the neighbors have their barrels out, so I don't know. 

Groceries were still open. Buses still running, thank God. And I think I saw a mail truck driving along, so the creed appears to be in effect.

Skimping

I saw a guy at the supermarket today wearing shorts. Short shorts. A friend of mine from a couple of years back was one of those guys who would switch to shorts as soon as it was spring on the calendar, even if the weather was still wintry. A little showoffy but I could see what he was going for. But today might turn out to be the coldest day of the year, and is likely to at least be in the top five. Whatever point you're trying to make, there are better ways to make it.

But that's me. I wore socks to bed last night and intend to do the same tonight.

looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong

It is a little bit funny that a few days after I bitch about something―on the way to bitching about something else―there's an Unherd article about it. Namely, how so many movies today just run on forever.

Muriel Zagha may be right that studios wanting to give audiences added value as a way of coaxing them back to the theaters. Of course the problem is that it could very easily have the opposite effect. In their minds, I think most cinemagoers still think of it as a good way to spend a couple of hours. If the whole thing counting transportation runs into four or even five hours, that's a lot of your day that's now gone, which can be a frustrating experience.

One might blame James Cameron for starting this. His Titanic ran for three hours and a quarter and made zillions. Of course it wasn't the first long movie to become a hit. But there were doubters. In the months before it was released it became notorious for running way over budget and generally being out of control. Then it proved the doubters wrong. Now everyone wants to be James Cameron. It sometimes works out for them in a commercial sense, sometimes not, but it's led a lot of them astray.

Anyway, it's encouraging to hear that shorter screen classics are proving popular at Picturehouse cinemas. Hopefully that trend will spread to the other side of the Atlantic.

7 Wonders of the World? Maybe?

Let no one say that there are no wondrous sights in Canada. Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan has Mac the Moose, which at least approaches the level of twenty-first century Sphinx, north of the 48th parallel. Imagine the first gaggle of Saskatchewan motorists to drive by that one. The awe.

What makes this thing even better is the revelation that Mac had to have his antlers redone and built off a little to fend off a "world's biggest moose" challenge from the Big Elk from Norway. Who knew it was such a competitive field?

Road trip

The mammoth hunters' hide-covered dwellings squat on a low promontory overlooking the broad river valley. Thin plumes of smoke rise from the houses into the cold, still air this late spring day 25,000 years ago. A group of skin-clad men scrape meat off a large leg bone. Children play nearby, while an adolescent watches the valley below. Suddenly, he calls out softly. The men stop work and gaze intently into the distance. They see a small herd of woolly mammoth making their way to the river. The hunters grab their weapons and descend into the valley. The children halt their play and watch as the mammoth lumber on unsuspectingly. The senior cow stops, as if sniffing danger. Reassured, she moves on to the river, and the others follow. one young beast lags behind. The hunters concentrate their efforts on this one animal. 

Excerpt form The Great Journey: The Peopling of Ancient America by Brian M. Fagan. Fagan, a British anthropologist and archaeologist who taught in the US and Kenya, had an enviable grasp on his subject. Of course our understanding of the subject of early human migration has changed since the book's publication date in 1987. Notably, he addresses the subject of whether Neanderthals crossed over into the Americas. Since the starting point for humans crossing into the Western Hemisphere appears to have been Siberia, we'd now ask if Denisovans had done so. (That said, a number of Amerindian people have traces of both in their genome, not too surprising since the two species lived in overlapping turf in Eurasia.) But of course when the book was written, paleoanthropologists hadn't even discovered and identified Denisovan remains yet. 

But the book has more going for it than Fagan's understanding of the science of the day. He's making a real and fruitful attempt to show how both the Old and New Worlds looked to our long-ago ancestors. It's a quest for understanding on a personal level as much as scientific knowledge.