Pic Picks for a Socially Distanced Eve

It’s not my habit to watch holiday movies except by accident: they tend to be on TV during the holidays. When I was much younger I went through a phase of deliberately ignoring holidays altogether on the theory that all of them are arbitrary and each of us is capable of choosing and observing his or her own. The trouble with this – aside from the general problem of anti-dogma being a dogma of its own – is that other people are not often available for your own arbitrary festivities; were they to schedule their own as well, hardly any would coincide. So, as a practical matter, aided by twinges of nostalgia, I reverted to celebrating Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving and Halloween on Halloween and so forth. I’m still inclined to host equinox and solstice parties, but while not official holidays (in this country anyway) those are not entirely novel ideas either. In fact, they long predate civilization.

2020 is not like other years however. The absence of the usual houseful of guests prompted a bit more nostalgia this season than usual, so my movie picks Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were Christmas movies – sort of. In keeping with the spirit of this year, the holidays are incidental rather than integral to the plots which are all rather dark. I can recommend all three, albeit to different degrees, when settling into an easy chair tonight or tomorrow after Skyping with friends and family. 

****

The Thin Man (1934)

This is a film I revisit from time to time in any event, but it is set at Christmas. The very good private detective Nick Charles (William Powell), despite the unsavory company he usually keeps, recently has married the wealthy and charming Nora (Myrna Loy) in California and regards himself as retired. They are in NYC for the holidays where Nick, against his inclinations but with Nora’s prompting, is pulled into a missing person case that is somehow tied to two murders. The bibulous Nick and Nora make a marvelous investigative couple and actually seem to like each other even when they fight. This is unlike the way couples so commonly are portrayed today when, even when supposedly in love, their fights seem to reveal genuine hostility. (Perhaps screenwriters in any time write from experience.) It is a classic detective story with heart and cleverly funny dialogue. Though originally intended as a standalone movie, it was well enough received in its day to spawn five sequels. If only there were more. 

****

Better Watch Out (2017)

OK, this gets a recommendation only as a guilty pleasure, but sometimes that is enough. For the first 15 minutes this appears to be a standard teen-oriented horror film with the tropes of a tween boy with a crush on his babysitter and both facing off a home intruder. It then takes a different direction. There isn’t much more I can say without spoilers, but if you sometimes like darkly comedic (but not satirical) horror, this may be for you: not highbrow but fun. Yes, it is set at Christmas.

 

****

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Stanley Kubrick’s final movie has more than one theme. The primary one is the nature of betrayal, particularly within the context of marriage. When does cheating begin? Is the thought enough? Dr. William Harford (Tom Cruise) and Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman) verbally spar after some jealous moments at a party. William is disturbed when Alice tells him that once she would have run off with a naval officer had he only asked. Is that betrayal even though he didn’t ask and she didn’t go? William, still brooding, later picks up a hooker and only an emergency medical phone call prevents anything from happening. Is this betrayal? William’s night gets stranger as he manages to crash an erotic party at a private estate. Has betrayal happened yet?

The second theme is the existence of an ultra-elite who don’t live by the rules that apply to the rest of us, and don’t have to. William and Alice, by normal standards, are elite: their real assets in NYC alone make them one-percenters. Yet, they are still part of the hoi polloi by the standards of the ultra-elite. William makes proud a point of identifying himself as a doctor wherever he goes, but to the super-rich, however friendly they might behave toward him, this makes him a tradesman no different than a plumber and most definitely an outsider. The Christmas setting likely was chosen just as a contrast to the fundamentally pagan attitudes and rites at the estate where William doesn’t belong.

By the way, the movie was deliberately filmed in 4:3 ratio (as most movies were until the 1950s) in order to narrow the viewer's view. It is the way it should be watched.

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman broke up immediately after making this movie. Neither has been forthcoming about whether the film had anything to do it.

****

So, those are three options to consider, but if the reader would rather watch It’s a Wonderful Life yet again, I understand.

 

Trailer: Eyes Wide Shut

The Flurry Query

The first notable snowfall of the season always makes me question why I live in New Jersey. Yesterday’s snowfall was a fairly modest one in my location (parts of the state were affected much more) but it still evoked the question. I’m hardly alone in asking the question and many residents answer it with their feet – or rather with U-Haul trailers. Of interstate moves across NJ’s border, 69% are outbound and only 31% inbound according to Bloomberg. NJ leads the nation in interstate emigres in percentage terms; the percentage is higher even than that of New York where people presently are fleeing New York City in droves during the current Covid regimen. There are many reasons for the exodus including NJ’s property taxes (the nation’s highest) and the least friendly business climate of the 50 states according to the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council. These and other (completely self-inflicted) detriments increasingly outweigh a number of very real geographical attractions and advantages to living in NJ. One negative that is natural, however, is the weather. It is wet in the spring, humid in summer, windy in autumn, and bone-chilling in winter – the winter weather being the most off-putting of the four.

A...um...few years ago

Yesterday: still shoveling

Homo sapiens is not by design a cold-weather animal. When our ancestors spread out of Africa some 70,000 years ago they wisely hugged the southern shoreline of Eurasia as they spread east, infiltrating northward only after occupying southern lands. They occupied Australia before they occupied Europe. Of course, Europe and northern central Asia already were occupied at the time by Neanderthals and their cousins the Denisovans who were, in fact, adapted to the cold. Sapiens previously had little trouble brushing them aside in the southern areas however. Interbreeding appears to have occurred primarily at the early stage of expansion, especially in the Middle East, when intruding modern humans were heavily outnumbered rather than later when they were better established; about 2% of the DNA of present-day humans outside of sub-Saharan Africa is Neanderthal and/or Denisovan. (It is surprising the percentage isn’t higher.) It wasn’t enough to change their body types to better handle a chill. Modern humans turned north, it seems, only reluctantly. They delayed not so much because of the existing inhabitants as because it was…well…cold.

Why did they go north at all? People it seems, don’t like each other very much, especially the ones we know best – hence the special ferocity of civil wars (and Twitter). So, as their numbers rose they spread out, split (in groups of 30 to 150), and spread out some more in order to get away from those awful others with their irksome quirks and offensive ideas. Since maintaining sufficient calories as hunter-gathers requires 1000 acres or more per person in non-ideal climes, even a small rate of population growth meant humans quite quickly spread into vast new regions. The north may have been cold, but at least it was away from those other people. Besides, it turned out the north was rich. This is why a large percentage of the world’s remaining hunter-gathers are in subarctic regions such as the Tozhus and Nenets in north Asian Russia. It isn’t a great way of life for a vegan, but reindeer, elk, and fish are plentiful. Calories are not much of a problem and mobile skin-covered yurts are surprisingly cozy.

This still has relevance in NJ – not that I hunt and gather except in a distantly analogous sense. The northern states (and northern countries generally) are rich in resources and opportunities – pre-tax anyway. The benefits initially were worth seasonally numb fingers and icy winds. That explains why people moved here in the first place, but not why we stay. In my case the reason primarily is inertia, which probably plays a bigger role in human life than any other single factor. It plays a large role in my life certainly. What remain of my friends and family are mostly here, my personal history is mostly here (I live 10 miles from where I was born), my house (which had been my parents’) is here, and my other physical belongings are here. It would be troublesome in the extreme to pull up stakes now. It would have been easy in my 20s when I didn’t have anything that couldn’t fit in the trunk of a car, but not now. The day may come when remaining here becomes so unaffordable as to overcome inertia (as it already has for so many others) but the time isn’t yet. However much it might prompt the question, the deciding factor in the end won’t be a snowfall: not even the next full-blown blizzard.

Sirenia – A Blizzard is Storming

Many a man hath more hair than wit

He called it Macaroni

A recent visit to the barber was my last for this year. Haircuts this year, like everything else in 2020, are weird. I don’t mean the styles. Long-and-shaggy is a more common look than last year to be sure, though that is not by preference. I mean the actual process of getting a haircut. The shops are open in NJ at present, but at limited capacity, by appointment, and with a variety of plastic barriers. Fancier salons and haircutters always have required appointments, of course, but I go to a traditional barbershop, striped pole and all. It’s the same one I’ve used for more than four decades, though the most recent cut was by the grandson of the fellow with the scissors the first time I sat in one of the shop’s chairs. 

The traditional red-striped barber pole, by the way, is a holdover from the days of barber-surgeons. The first guild of barber-surgeons was formed by King Edward IV in 1462 who gave the members a monopoly of surgery and barbering in London. I guess the reasoning was that both activities involved cutting so they were more or less the same. The two professions weren’t formally separated until 1745 with the formation of the Company of Surgeons (soon renamed the Royal College of Surgeons) and the Company of Barbers. Anyway, bloodletting was a common surgical technique from medieval times until the early 19^th century in order to get rid of “bad blood.” (I’m not sure why bad rather than good blood was expected to flow out.) The patient commonly stood and gripped a pole while he bled. So, a pole (blood red) with a spiral wrap of a white linen bandage became an early symbol for a practitioner that potential patients (many of them illiterate) could recognize. The original symbolism soon was widely forgotten, and so the sign (oddly) stuck with the barbers rather than the surgeons after the two went separate ways. 

Fortunately, I’ve never experienced bloodletting, intentional or otherwise, at the barbershop I patronize. Yet, as snippets of hair dropped to the floor while I was last there, the peculiarity of human hair came to mind, abetted by reading the night before, which happened to be Hair by Kurt Stenn, a leading follicle expert. Hair isn’t primarily about fashion, despite some nods to the importance of hair styles for social signaling, but mostly about the biology of hair. Under the general term “hair” Stenn refers to all pileous growth whether tresses, beards, or fur. 

Humans have the strangest hair of all primates. At first glance, the absence of it on most of the body is the most striking visual difference between us and the other apes – hence Desmond Morris’ classic 1967 work The Naked Ape. Just as weird, we have a mane, which no other primate does. If uncut a head hair likely will grow anywhere from one to three feet (30cm to 1m) long depending on the person. At that point it falls out and the follicle generates a new one in its place. In a sense it is not quite right to say we are mostly hairless on our bodies. Except for the palms of our hands and the soles of our feet we have hair follicles everywhere. We have, in fact, just as many as do chimpanzees: see Comparative Evidence for the Independent Evolution of Hair and Sweat Gland Traits in Primates in the Journal of Human Evolution. Unlike the thick body hairs on a chimp, however, most of the body hairs growing from humans are so delicate, short, and wispy that they are all but invisible; one needs a microscope to see many of them. On the other hand, we have 10 times more sweat glands than chimpanzees and other apes have. 

There may be a common cause for the evolution of increased numbers of sweat glands and reduced hairiness. Both traits are great for shedding heat, which was a big advantage on a hot savanna where our ancestors were highly active, unlike most mammals, which laze around most of the time in between short bursts of energy. (Humans may not be particularly fast, but when in shape we can run or travel at pace nonstop for extraordinary distances by the standards of most mammals.) For this reason, the leading conjecture of when humans lost their thick body hair is some 1,800,000 years ago when Homo erectus pursued a lifestyle (evident in butchered bones at archeological sites) of long distance tracking and hunting. Since clothes apparently date back only 70,000 years for anatomically modern humans (determined by DNA analysis of lice that inhabit clothes), for nearly 2,000,000 years we really were the naked ape. There are other proposed timelines and reasons for reduced hairiness, however. (Darwin suggested sexual selection as the proximate cause, which not need not favor a useful trait so long as the trait isn’t seriously harmful – it can even be a little harmful as famously in the case of the peacock’s tail.) DNA studies currently underway are intended to date the changes in hairiness, so in the coming decade we may get a firmer answer from these analyses. 

There is another possible cause that I’ve never seen mentioned in the literature (though it might have been) but which I’ll just toss out there. Our hairless bodies and shaggy manes might have made us look scary to other animals. Consider our own first reactions to, say, a mostly hairless mangy bear. It isn’t, “Aw that’s cute.” It’s “What the hell is that and what is wrong with it?” If other predators had a similar (if nonverbal) negative first reaction to us, they might have been more inclined to leave us alone – a definite survival advantage. Few of these conjectures are mutually exclusive, of course. 

Mangy bear

Humans are not keen on their own body hair; modern folk often attack it ferociously. We are, however, obsessively in love with our head hair. Life being what it is, this is the hair that gives us the most trouble. It grays, thins, mats, and falls out while our body hairs get, if anything, thicker, longer, and richer. Shelves of books can be, and have been, written on the social aspects of hair styles, but that is outside the scope of either Stenn’s book or this blog. I’m just happy to still have something left for the barber to cut. The day may yet come when I don’t.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Almost Cut My Hair

Two for the Read

As the year winds down and the covid-inspired lockdowns, if anything, intensify, there at least is time to catch up on reading. This past week’s selections included some factive fiction and fictive fact. 

Harlan Coben is one of my go-to writers of contemporary mystery/suspense novels, second in my preference only to South African author Deon Meyer. In Coben’s 2019 Run Away, Simon Greene and his physician wife Ingrid try to find their missing adult (college-age) junkie daughter Paige. All too many of us (whatever our own histories of substance abuse might or might not be) have faced the problem of how to deal with an addicted family member or loved one who doesn’t want help if it means giving up drugs or alcohol. Not all of us are as persistent as the dedicated family man Simon. When Paige’s known dealer/enabler Aaron is murdered, Simon becomes a suspect. It is difficult to comment much on a mystery novel without spoiling the mystery. Among the questions raised, however, are how Paige fits in with a string of superficially unconnected murders, another missing person case, a professional hit couple, a rural cult, and deep family secrets. As usual with Harlan, the book is hard to put down once started. Suspense is high and the characters are, despite (or because of) their flaws, relatable. Also as usual with Harlan, he with no hesitation distinguishes between ethics and the law. 

The second book was a biography of someone whose voice frequently reached out from my stereo speakers in my youth. 

In August 1968, I was 15 and far, far from cool, but least I had a considerably hipper older sister who introduced into the house trending music that I might not have found on my own until it was passé. Her freshman year at Boston University would begin in less than a month, however, and she would be taking her favorite record albums with her. So I went shopping with a friend at a local record store in Morristown to beef up what would remain on the stereo shelf at home, relying in part on my sister’s advice and in part on that of the store clerk. Once back home, I slipped one of the new vinyl albums out of its jacket, which was covered with the artwork of Robert Crumb. The album was Cheap Thrills by Big Brother and the Holding Company. I still have it 52 (!) years later. The lead singer was Janis Joplin. I sat through the album from start to finish: the first of numerous occasions and a very 1960s thing to do. I bought her previous album on my next trip to the record shop and then picked up the next two (including the posthumous Pearl in ’71) within a few weeks of their release. 

Popular music in the 21^st century typically is polished, highly produced, visual, and choreographed. This so unlike the 1960s when a frowzy Janis simply walked on stage and sang her heart out. There is something about the romantic excess in her songs that appeals especially to adolescents – and for once I don’t mean that as an insult. It appeals to them because they are not cynical yet (much as they might think otherwise) and all of that emotion looms fresh and huge; if we have a little teenager left in us – again not meant as an insult – we still can recapture a bit of that from singers like Janis. 

A dark side to Janis – not unique to the 1960s – was substance abuse: notably Southern Comfort onstage and heroin backstage. Southern Comfort is also something one tends to grow out of after adolescence btw: too sweet and syrupy straight-up, but OK as a mixer with coke or something. Like all liqueurs, it also gives mean hangovers – or so, ahem, I’m told. Hangovers by themselves would have been survivable however. Janis died in October 1970 from an overdose of unexpectedly pure (only 50% adulterated) heroin. 

George-Warren’s book covers the ground one expects a bio to cover.. All biographers going back to Plutarch insert their own perspectives into their narratives, and George-Warren does, too, but not overly distractingly. (Autobiographers on the other hand, while their perspectives can’t help but be their subject’s own, are more apt to outright lie, especially by omission.) The book is well researched and details the wrinkles of Janis’ lifeline. Yet, despite the much briefer account contained in it, I prefer the memoir Laid Bare by actor/author John Gilmore who knew the woman personally. Though he writes of Janis in only one chapter, and intensely from his own perspective, we put the book down feeling we’ve met the person – and have mixed feelings about having done so. A third option is simply to let Janis speak for herself in her music. That works, too.

Janis Joplin – Get It While You Can (1970)