Sleepy Day Flicks

According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, more people say they are sleepy on New Year’s Day than on any other day of the year. The first day back at work in January came in second (57% vs. 45%). I think we know the reason why, and it hasn’t much to do with having stayed up until midnight the previous eve. So, many of us will be on our couches tomorrow with chips on the coffee table, aspirin in our bloodstreams, and TV remotes in our hands. (I personally plan to be hangover-free this year, but only because I’ve experienced being otherwise in past ones.) If the reader has seen too many Twilight Zone marathons to wish to see another one and is furthermore no big fan of college football, he or she might struggle to find something watchable with that remote. This past weekend I happened to watch (in one case rewatch) three movies, all of which I can recommend. By the end of the third, the funk should be lifting – depending on just how much overindulgence was involved.

Ad Astra (2019)

I almost saw this in the theater several months ago but ultimately opted for Joker instead. That was the right choice, but this would not have been a bad one either. (I could, of course, have seen both, but I don’t go to the theater frequently anymore.) The title (“to the stars”), as any first year Latin student knows, is part of several Latin sayings, notably ad astra per aspera (“to the stars through difficulty”: the motto of Kansas of all places) and sic itur ad astra (“thus one goes to the stars”: Aeneid IX 641).

Even scifi films that make an effort to portray spacecraft and space habitats realistically tend to make them overly polished. Not Ad Astra: here they are credibly worn, gritty, and lived-in. The special effects in the film are phenomenal without overwhelming the story. Brad Pitt pulls off a much deeper and contemplative performance as the astronaut Roy than I had expected from him.

Earth is suffering damaging EMP surges that seem to come from the anti-matter power source of a presumed-lost crewed probe beyond Neptune. The probe was designed to image planets in other solar systems. It is commanded by Roy’s father. The highly skilled but deeply flawed character Roy sets out to find the probe and destroy it. There is much in the film about personal identity, generations, morality, and whether meaning is to be found out there or within oneself. Lest that sound like too much philosophy and not enough action, there is enough of the latter, too. The pacing isn’t rushed, but at 2 hours it doesn’t drag.

For those who like hard scifi (e.g. The Martian), this is a solid entry.

**** ****

Ready or Not (2019)

Getting the balance right between humor and horror when mixing the two is no easy matter. A few pull it off including Cabin in the Woods and Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. Ready or Not does, too.

Grace (Samara Weaving) marries a young scion of a super-rich family that made its fortune in playing cards and board games. Family tradition has her pick a game card from a very special game on her wedding night. Most of the cards are innocuous, but unknown to her one of the cards will declare her “it” in a game of hide-and-seek in which the family tries to kill her. Her only chance is to survive until morning. Naturally, she draws this card.

This is a warped but entertaining film with something to say about what people will do for love and money – and love of money.

**** ****

Road House (1948)

This has nothing to do with the better-known Patrick Swayze movie of the same title.

The 1940s were a marvelous decade stylistically and in the popular arts. Film noir defines the decade on the screen more than any other genre, and this noir drama is one worth seeing. Ida Lupino is superb as the world-weary performer Lily in a rustic road house owned by the somewhat unstable Jefty (Richard Widmark) and managed by his best friend Pete (Cornel Wilde). A love triangle develops. Betrayals upon betrayals including attempted murder ensue. There is suspense, fine acting, and a well-written script.

The clip from the film below is Ida singing about the reason so many of us are on our couches with remotes.

**** ****

If, after those three flicks you’re still feeling off, have some Alka-Seltzer and take a nap. Tomorrow all will be better… unless tomorrow is that work day that came in second in that AASM survey.

Ida Lupino - One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)

Paranoids Have Enemies Too

Tis the season for get-togethers with friends and family, and this year I’ve been to a few such including in my own house. In today’s hyper partisan world the old rule to avoid religion and politics is more advisable than ever – especially regarding the latter as ever more people make politics their religion and suffer no heretics. The temptation to be righteously offended is high. By and large, the rule was followed everywhere I was present. I say by and large because absolutely everything has become politicized including the food on the table and the wrappings of gifts, so complete avoidance is impossible... and then there are the conspiracy theories. These I rather enjoy when they come up in conversation, and fortunately a few did. I don’t mean I enjoy ones about contemporary politicians, which are wearyingly predictable in how they are advanced and received. (Fortunately, these were avoided.) I mean the ones less influenced by the emotions of the moment, such as those about JFK, MLK, RFK, Marilyn Monroe, faked moon landings, Pearl Harbor, the Illuminati, and so on. On a somewhat different level, let us not forget alien abductions, Bigfoot, live-Elvis-in-hiding, and Nessie. (In NJ, Nessie supposedly has a cousin named Hoppie in Lake Hopatcong.)

Many of these are not fringe beliefs, if by fringe we mean limited to a small percentage of the population. More than half of Americans believe the JFK assassination was the work of a conspiracy, for example. A 2016 Chapman University survey found more than half disbelieve the official account of 9/11. 33% of respondents said they believe the government is covering up the truth about the “North Dakota crash,” which was an unreal event entirely invented by the researchers for the survey. Underlying most of these is a tinge of paranoia: the notion that there are string-pullers behind the scenes who do not have the best interests of the rest of us at heart.

All of us have some opinions that will strike most others as odd, but what distinguishes someone who entertains a poorly supported hypothesis from someone who is a full-blown conspiracy theorist? It’s the habit of the latter of turning the burden of proof on its head: they demand that naysayers prove their theory wrong. Of course, proving a negative fact is seldom possible. Prove Marilyn wasn’t murdered. I can’t, but that doesn’t make it true. Can you prove you didn’t rob a convenience store in Allentown PA in 2002? Assuming you were old enough to do the deed in 2002, odds are you can’t. I can’t prove I didn’t (though I didn’t). Put another way, it is the difference between bias and prejudice. Someone with the former has an inclination to believe something but is persuadable by contrary evidence; someone with the latter has made up his mind (pre-judged) and will dismiss any contrary evidence as tainted. Everyone – absolutely everyone – has cognitive bias (See Blindspot by Mahzarin R. Banaji & Anthony G. Greenwald) but we still can choose not be governed by it – not to act blindly on the basis of it.

Intelligence is no barrier to odd beliefs and unlikely conspiracy theories. Quite the opposite. Michael Shermer (founding publisher of the magazine Skeptic, contributing columnist to Scientific American, and author of The Believing Brain) explains that intelligent folk are better able than duller folk to convolute, reinterpret, and interconnect data in creative ways. Moreover, they are every bit as motivated to do so: “our most deeply held beliefs are immune to attack by direct educational tools, especially for those who are not ready to hear contradictory evidence.”

Partly for this reason, I’m inclined to allow the odd bee in a person’s bonnet without it diminishing my opinion of him or her in a general way – provided the particular conspiracy theory isn’t actually vicious. Another reason is that there really are conspiracies in the world on large scales and small. On occasion the bee can be right. Edward Snowden, whatever one thinks of him, revealed rumors about the NSA were true. On a personal level, if you feel you are being followed, you might just be right: stalkers do exist out there. Even if a theory is wrong overall, it may yet contain a nugget of truth. I doubt the Illuminati are running anything from under the Denver Airport, for example, but there really are elites who interact with each other in the Bilderberg Group and elsewhere and who surely would like to run things if they could. Said Gore Vidal, “Anyone who isn’t paranoid isn’t in full possession of the facts.”

So, I’m happy (and entertained) to hear what people have to say about Roswell or Area 51 or HAARP or what-have-you. Despite my cognitive biases, I’ll even endeavor to remain open to persuasion. If persuasion fails, perhaps when I awake in an alien spaceship the joke will be on me.

Garbage - I Think I'm Paranoid

Ballard’s Ballad

Back in the ‘60s when I discovered JG Ballard’s off-beat scifi (so much more fun than my school assignments), he instantly became one of my favorite authors. He continued to be up through his final (2006) novel Kingdom Come. He writes so elegantly that had he written user manuals for washing machines they would have been a joy to read. Fortunately he was more creative than that.

There often is a Lord of the Flies vibe to Ballard’s fiction, though with adults and triggered by an excess of civilization rather than the lack of it. Ballard came to believe that modern physical and social environments are so at variance with the natural world in which people evolved that our ids urge us to rebellion. When animals in zoos are enclosed in spaces radically at variance with their natural habitats they develop behavioral disorders. Ballard’s human characters do, too; being intellectual creatures, they couch their rebellions in philosophical terms, but there is really something much more primal at the bottom of them. In High-Rise, the residents cut loose in every imaginable way. In Crash the central characters find psychic release and erotic satisfaction in auto wrecks. In Running Wild, the children in an upper-crust gated community kill their parents. In Super-Cannes, highly educated professionals, egged on by a psychiatrist/philosopher, form gangs of roving violent thugs at night. In Millennium People, middle class folks rebel violently against their own suburban lifestyles, taking up terrorism and burning their own neighborhoods.

By 2019 I’d read the bulk of Ballard’s published work, but there were two full length novels I’d missed. They’re missed no more. 

Rushing to Paradise (1994) is a darkly funny novel written from the perspective of the adolescent Neil. Neil is mesmerized by the anti-nuclear/animal-rights protests in Honolulu organized by Dr. Barbara Rafferty, who has a controversial past involving assisted suicide. Ostensibly to “save the albatross,” she assembles an activist group to sail to the French South Pacific island of Saint-Esprit, which is being prepared for a nuclear test. [For historical context: The French continued nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific until 1995, and in 1985 sank in harbor the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, whose crew had intended a stunt much like that of “Dr. Barbara.”] Neil joins her expedition. The project attracts attention from TV and movie producers. Dr. Barbara and her followers reach the island but are forcibly removed by French soldiers amid a media circus. Neil is wounded in the foot.

Months later, they mount a second expedition, which Neil again joins. Arriving at the island they find the French military has withdrawn and that nuclear tests, at least for the time being, have been suspended. Dr. Barbara and her odd assortment of scientists, activists, and hippies establish the island as an animal sanctuary. Yet, charismatic leaders and their fanatical followers (of any ilk) often become brutal and dangerous when social restraints come off, and Saint-Esprit proves no exception. Despite all the sloganeering, Dr. Barbara seems singularly uninterested in the albatross. When Neil questions her about it, she explains to him that the real sanctuary is for women. The men have a way of dying on the island in the ensuing months; Neil eventually realizes his value to Dr. Barbara lies in not being a full grown man. Yet even the explanation she gives about this is an intellectualization by her of more primitive motivations.

The second novel, The Kindness of Women reveals much about JG Ballard himself. Ballard is most widely known for a very atypical book: the semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, based on his experiences as a boy interned as an enemy alien in WW2 Shanghai during the Japanese occupation. Spielberg directed the movie adaptation in 1987. The novel The Kindness of Women is the lesser known sequel to Empire of the Sun. “Semi-autobiographical” understates it: it is closer to three-quarter. Maybe more. His lifelong obsession with death, repressed sexuality, and the thinness of civilization’s veneer becomes much more explicable in light of this tale.

The protagonist James Graham (which is what JG stands for) leaves the Shanghai internment camp, which is suddenly unguarded, at the end of the war. The teen’s first encounter while walking along railroad tracks away from the camp is with Japanese soldiers (still occupying the area) who are slowly killing a Chinese in civilian clothes. (There might or might not have been a reason other than random cruelty.) James knew by then not to question anything Japanese soldiers did, so he puts on an air of as much nonchalance as he can manage. He assumes his own odds of survival in this moment are 50/50 but the soldiers  just exchange a few mutually unintelligible words with him and don’t bother him; he and they pointedly ignore the bound civilian. He walks on. After James leaves China, he attends medical school, serves in the RAF, marries but suffers an early loss of his wife, and unexpectedly achieves some success with writing. All of those events parallel Ballard’s own life, of course. It is clear that the years in Shanghai always followed him – both the character “James” and his real self. They deeply impressed on him what people could be like when effectively unrestrained – and when imprisoned. As one might expect from the title, his relationships to (and with) the special women in his life (sometimes kind, sometimes ruthless, sometimes both) from the days in the camp up to the time of the Spielberg movie are crucial to his sense of the world.

All of us are haunted by our personal Shanghais. Most of us (though some not) are fortunate enough for them to have been less extreme than Ballard’s, but his writing slips us into his shoes easily.

Both books get a solid Thumbs Up.

Doris Day – Shanghai

The Egg Also Nogs

Eggnog is prominent on supermarket shelves this time of year. Homemade is vastly better, but I’m much too lazy to make it from scratch these days, so it catches my attention. I rarely buy it, however, because a glass contains as many calories as a lumberjack’s breakfast. (I do little calorie-counting, but there are some items that shout out for it.) As a kid I loved the stuff (the nonalcoholic variety, of course) and I still like it. Ready-made nonalcoholic eggnog is a relatively recent product, appearing in markets in the late 1940s. Add your booze of choice for the adult version. Maybe sometime before New Year I’ll skip breakfast and have one or two – with or without the ethanol.

As it happens, the first alcoholic drink I ever had was eggnog. It was on a warm evening in Islamorada Florida during a family vacation between Christmas and New Year’s Day. I was 8. A dozen adults, my parents among them, were gathered under a beachside gazebo and had served themselves nog. A cup was handed to me before my mom sampled it and realized it was spiked. At this late date, I have no idea with what, but given the company and location it probably was rum. “Oh, it won’t hurt him,” my dad said. “There isn’t much in it.” My mom let it go. There wasn’t much in it either, as it had no noticeable effect whatsoever, though of course I wasn’t allowed a refill. That’s all there was to it. A decade later my relationship with alcohol became more complicated.

Sumerian kegger with straws

Humanity itself got a much earlier taste. Great apes today seek out fermented fruits, which can have as much as 5% alcohol content – about the same as beer. There is every reason to suppose hominins did the same. The natural supply always was limited. When human ingenuity removed those limits, humanity’s relationship with ethanol became more complicated. 8000-year-old shards of pottery from sites in the Middle East, China, and Georgia (Transcaucasian Georgia, not the one it’s a rainy night in) contain traces of beer, mead, and wine. Since this timing coincides with the advent of farming, some anthropologists have argued that the reason humans adopted farming (which is harder work than hunting and gathering while providing a less healthy diet) was not for food but for an abundant supply of grains for beer; if so, the credit (or, some might say, the blame) for civilization belongs to brewers. The first written records appear in Sumer 5000 years ago, and among them is a recipe for beer. Beer powered the overachieving masons in ancient Egypt as well. The classical Greco-Roman world favored wine. Asian cultures favored rice wine. In the Middle Ages playful Arab and European alchemists discovered how to distill powerful spirits.

A useful and compendious history of humanity’s love/hate affair with alcohol, by the way, is Drink: a Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately, though he has little to say about eggnog in particular.

Eggs and alcohol don't seem to have been a popular mix in ancient times, though Pliny the Elder does mention it as a cure for alcoholism. He tells us that owl eggs aged for three days in wine "produce distaste for it." Posset, something very much like eggnog, appears in the historical record in England in the 1300s. It was a mixture of eggs, figs, and ale. It didn't cure alcoholism. As the years passed, experimenters swapped out ale for sherry and then hard liquor. Other additives besides figs were tried. The word “eggnog” turns up in 18^th century dictionaries, which means it is probably older. It apparently derives from the words egg and grog, and the recipe by then was essentially the same as today. Then as now the choice of liquor was a matter of personal preference. George Washington preferred a mix. He offered the following recipe:

One quart cream, one quart milk, one dozen tablespoons sugar, one pint brandy, pint rye whiskey, pint Jamaica rum, pint sherry — mix liquor first, then separate yolks and whites of 12 eggs, add sugar to beaten yolks, mix well. Add milk and cream, slowly beating. Beat whites of eggs until stiff and fold slowly into mixture. Let set in cool place for several days. Taste frequently.

George’s eggnog packs a lot more punch than whatever I drank at age 8, which likely contained just a splash of Bacardi’s. If it is the one concocted surreptitiously at West Point, however, it explains the Eggnog Riot of 1826 in which 90 drunk cadets broke dishes, windows, and bannisters. All were disciplined but only 11 were expelled, which is a much milder response than I would expect today. Perhaps the Superintendent figured the morning after was its own punishment. I’ve never experienced one, but I understand eggnog hangovers are brutal.

George wasn’t the only President to share an eggnog recipe. Dwight Eisenhower was a bourbon man: one dozen egg yolks, one pound of granulated sugar, one quart of bourbon, one quart of coffee cream and one quart of whipping cream.

Bourbon is good, but if I ever get ambitious enough to make eggnog from scratch at home and pour a quart [.95 liter] of it in there as per Ike’s instructions, I’ll repeat my age-8 experience of stopping after one cup.

Straight No Chaser - Who Spiked the Eggnog?

The Tree Thing

There was a Christmas tree in the house every December when I was growing up. I very much liked it as a kid and spent an inordinate amount of time sitting by it. I’m not really sure why. My parents owned three homes in my lifetime and none had any shortage of trees on its lot. So, a tree in the house was special only by being in the house. 

1954

 Presents showed up underneath it Christmas morning, of course, but I liked the tree for itself. The lights and decorations didn’t matter much either. The tree alone had some atavistic appeal. My dad must have felt it too, though he never outright said so. He always brought home a Christmas tree before either my sister or I asked for one. During the rest of the year he followed the builders’ tradition of raising an evergreen on the roof peak when topping out a newly constructed house. It always was a sad day when the tree exited our house: usually on January 2, though a few times it dried too quickly and departed before the New Year.

The origin of Christmas trees is open to some debate. When the Council of Nicaea standardized the dates of Christian holidays in 425 CE they quite sensibly chose dates that coincided with pre-Christian holidays. The transition was easier that way. Solstice celebrations in one form or another had existed pretty much everywhere. (The solstice fell on December 25 when the Julian calendar was adopted.) Many pagan holiday traditions such as gift-giving for Saturnalia transferred readily to the new holidays. A millennium later, the Puritans banned the celebration of Christmas (Easter, too) precisely because of these pagan origins. Formalizing the ban into law in 1659, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony dictated: “It is therefore ordered by this court and the authority thereof that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, upon any such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shilling as a fine to the county.” They technically were right about the history… and yet they were wrong. One can't help suspecting (with HL Mencken) that the real worry the Puritans had was that someone somewhere might have fun.

Getting back to the trees, ancient pagans of central Europe and the Baltic celebrated the solstice in woodsy fashion by hanging evergreen wreathes, holding sacred grove ceremonies, and burning the Yule log. Christmas trees seemingly derive from these practices, but before the 16th century in Germany there is no mention in print of whole trees being brought indoors for the holiday, so this particular tradition may be no older than that. The trees became popular in the US in the mid-nineteenth century with the arrival of large numbers of German immigrants.

Though my mom and dad grew up Presbyterian and Catholic respectively, they were not dogmatic in religious matters as adults, and became less so with each passing year. They sent me to an Episcopal high school, but only because they thought it was better than the public school. So, for the most part their seasonal decorations were just festive. When pressed about their spiritual opinions in later years they sounded rather New Agey. My skepticism regarding all things mystical kicked in early, and in my 20s I shunned Christmas decorations with an almost Puritan adamancy – a youthful fault. For years I forewent any seasonal ornamentations on some sort of secularist principle. I didn’t object to others (including my parents) having them, of course, but in my first decade of living alone there were no Christmas trees in my dwelling space. I grew out of this unholier-than-thou attitude in time. Besides, the Neolithic (maybe Paleolithic) pagan origins of the seasonal celebrations that so distressed the Bay Colony court were the very things that gave me an excuse to ease up even before I mellowed with age. Before the 1980s ended, a tree reappeared in my home each December.

2019

Evergreens still have an atavistic appeal. So, in 2019 once again, there is a tree in my living room and egg in my nog. There will be gifts under the tree for friends and family on Christmas, too. Further, if I decide to build a small house for the stray cat who lives outside year round (something I’ve considered) I’ll raise an evergreen on its roof when it is topped out.

Tarja - O Tannenbaum

For Whom the Belles Toll

The usual suspects were on hand for Thanksgiving at my house, which this year also happened to fall on my birthday. 18 altogether of friends and family were there, though a few left early while a few others arrived late so 14 was the maximum at any one moment. The standard advice to avoid politics on such occasions is sound, and was very nearly obeyed. It was “very nearly” rather than “entirely” only because food itself is political nowadays. I suppose it always has been to some degree, but it is more fiercely so today. Enough tolerance was demonstrated all around to keep things mostly congenial however. There were dishes on hand for vegans and carnivores alike. (I’m unabashedly one of the latter.) It was nice to catch up with everybody in person rather than through social media. Remarkably, no one at the table had a nose in a phone. That was nice, too.

When the table was cleared, the fridge filled with leftovers, the sink left for later, and the guests departed, the question arose of how to employ the time before the arrival of the sandman. “Turkey coma” is something of a misnomer, since I always have been exceedingly awake after over-indulging in poultry, sides, and desserts. It is true, though that I’m not ever motivated to do anything useful in that condition. A movie was the obvious answer. Two 20-something friends have been rewatching all the Harry Potter movies the past week because the films remind them of what they charmingly and without sense of irony call their youth. This brought to my mind another flick set in a British school: The Belles of St. Trinian’s (1954).

My first instinct was to recommend the movie to the two Millennials, but first instincts are not always wise. If they were, enough intelligence for second thoughts never would have evolved in hominins. That’s not to say we often make use of it. I’ve made the mistake before of trying to introduce favorite books and films to people for whom they were unsuited, only to bore the recipients to tears. No snobbery is intended by “unsuited”: few of those recommendations were highbrow, and I’ve received my share of recommendations for which I was unsuited, too. When it comes to classic films (“classic” in the sense of older than the 1990s rather than necessarily “great” or even good), young people generally have to find their own way to them. They can’t be pushed, or they will dislike them on principle. So, as quiet returned to the house Thursday evening I spun up the DVD for myself.

Ronald Searle infused his 1940s cartoons with a dark humor much of a kind with that of Charles Addams. The hellion schoolgirls of St. Trinian’s were a recurring subject for him. Searle is not as well-known today on this side of the pond as he was during what I call (with quite proper lack of irony) my youth. Back then The Belles of St. Trinian’s and its sequels aired frequently on television. They haven’t for the past few decades, and the 2007 St. Trinian’s sank like a stone. Searle is worth rediscovering. He occupies a space on my shelf next to Addams. The 1954 movie remains the definitive adaptation, and if you have found your own way to classic films but haven’t yet seen this one, do yourself a favor and do so.

Alistair Sim is marvelous in a dual role as the headmistress Millicent Fritton and as her underworld brother Clarence. Millicent describes her educational philosophy thus: “in other schools girls are sent out quite unprepared into a merciless world, but when our girls leave here, it is the merciless world which has to be prepared.” The plot involves a race horse owned a sultan father of new student: he had chosen St. Trinian’s for her only because it was near his horses. Millicent hatches a scheme to rescue the near-bankrupt school by betting on the horse though Clarence and the Sixth Form girls have contrary plans. In a subplot, police Sgt. Ruby Gates (Joyce Grenfell) goes undercover as a substitute teacher to uncover illegal activities at the school. There is a thoroughly enjoyable celebration of anarchy throughout the film. Keep in mind it is 1954, and the flick is intended to be kid-friendly, so don’t expect Quentin Tarantino, but it is still as much fun to watch as it was when I first saw it decades ago. It wrapped up my Thursday nicely.

Field hockey at St. Trinian’s