Porcelain promises

I hate that it had to be done in memoriam instead of normal celebration, but I love that Nathaniel Parker read Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" (1917) for Derek Jarman, from the first edition he was given when he played the poet in Jarman's War Requiem (1989). He made his feature debut clutching its holograph ink in his cold hand, laid out like an effigy with the mortal candle-flicker pinpointed in his dark eyes until the greatcoat he would no longer need against the slither and freeze of the trenches was flung furiously across him like a shroud: the author who has always been dead. He was perhaps more beautiful than the real-life Owen, but he had the mustache and the patent dark hair exact. I never remember him as the living man at work on his poems by the lantern-light of a dugout or kneeling beside the barbed-wire snarl of the friend he brought to his death, but on the other side of a fire-sheeted abstract of towns shelled to skeletons when the parable of the old man and the young has already killed him, his face a ghost-powder of lime and his notebooks and tin hat springing with the green turf of war cemeteries, the sacrificial Isaac himself led to a tomb of waste ground and slaughtered by a diabolical cardinal in a butcher's apron to the applause of a crowd of pantomime-rouged profiteers. The image haunted me, the poet telling his own death, writing his own ghost poem. It got into "Red Is for Soldiers" (2013), which I wrote for Armistice Day in a year the living links of memory had finally snapped. And Jarman who was already HIV-positive at the time of filming died younger than he should have, no government's hand stayed by a child-poet's angel to spare him, either. Any number of poems could have been read for his memory, from Christopher Marlowe to his own words, but this one had so many echoes. It makes me think well of Parker that he thought of it. He was not one of Jarman's muses, but he didn't forget.

For the eleventh anniversary of Kittening Day, Hestia was made much of with ham and petting and tomorrow when the day is less frenetic, there will be salmon. Her brother is celebrated in memory, my flower-clawed movie cat.



I will not be attending the reenactment because my plans for tomorrow all involve absolutely not getting out of bed until after noon, but it is true that despite it being the first naval battle of the American Revolution, I had never heard of the Battle of Chelsea Creek. Then again, apparently I have to find out from the internet that I transatlantically pronounce "penalize." An envelope full of lino-printed stickers arrived in the mail from asakiyume.

Despite spending rather more of the afternoon at the doctor's than planned, I do not consider the day a total loss because it contained an unexpectedly successful nebulizer treatment, the acquisition of bagels and chopped liver, a cinnamon cake donut, and ashlyme introducing me to Idris the Dragon. I have now seen what a gas station looks like when the fire suppression system has been deployed. Fell over in the evening and went down a rabbit hole of Boston vintage radio. Read some film criticism by Graham Greene. Am still not really watching movies myself. My brain could come back online any time.

How I am doing at the moment is extremely not great. spatch took a picture of me craning into frame like a cat. I took a picture of a blinkie my father made for me.

( I've opened my doors and I've closed all my windows. )

I was unironically charmed to discover The Wonderful World of Tupperware (1965). The hard sell can get a little hard to take, but the technical details are as good as all those short films from the Children's Television Workshop about the manufacture of peanut butter or saxophones.

The rediscovered 1983 Thomas the Tank Engine pilot which I had seen linked around my friendlist turns out to have been more like a screen test for the model work, which honestly makes it even neater to watch. I wrote a letter once to the Island of Sodor. It did occur to me years after the fact that my parents answered it.

If Richard Brody would just edit the collected film criticism of Virginia Tracy and Andre Sennwald, I would buy the books like two shots and consider it a service to art.

I record-scratched out of this article on the signaling of political vibes early on with the assertion:

And in the 2010s, in online forums, fans of the TV show "Steven Universe" gave the word "coded" its modern meaning, talking about how cartoon characters could be "coded" as gay.

What modern meaning? "Queer-coded" as a phrase as well as a concept goes back to the '90's off the top of my head, meaning it's almost certainly older and predates by decades no matter what the internet fandom of Steven Universe (2013–20), which may have popularized the academic usage but cannot have invented it. I'd have to check if it was part of Vito Russo's vocabulary, but Richard Barrios and Alexander Doty certainly used it. So did people I know. I am aware that shallow etymologies are least of the problems of the New York Times, but it is the sort of thing that I complain about on the internet because it is the sort of thing that will cause me to distrust the rest of the sourcing. More pleasant features of my evening included the first two episodes of Murderbot (2025–) which spatch and I watched in a rare moment of synchronization with pop culture. I am also enjoying Elleston Trevor's The Big Pick-Up (1955) even though every time one of its soldier characters swears, I keep thinking the printable profanity of the '50's can't hold a candle to Her Privates We (1929).

I have been so spoiled in recent months by the accessible obscurities of my local library systems that I took it personally when both internet archives and interlibrary loan wiped out on the 1954 source novel for "Dishonoured Bones" (1964), which I watched last night while falling down a rabbit hole of surviving episodes of the BBC's Detective (1964–69) thanks to thisbluespirit. At least in fifty-minute anthology format, the mystery itself is a shoal of red herrings, but I was instantly taken with Alan Dobie as Martin Cotterell, an archaeologist-hero as pipe-smoking and untidy as any weirdo by Leslie Howard, especially with his awful walking hat knocked down over his eyes, characteristically rolling off one of his socks in the middle of a discussion of suspects with his old friend who has turned up as the sergeant on the case. (He's right to have suddenly noticed it was inside out and his friend is right that no one else would have noticed because his socks aren't matched to begin with.) He has an artificial hand. It's treated so matter-of-factly, it's never even addressed as such until the rock-fall of the climax, which would have smashed a hand of flesh and bone and just leaves Martin wryly straightening his flattened tin fingers; otherwise the viewer notices eventually that he does most tasks one-handed, the other always gloved, impossible to tell which was originally his dominant hand. Its relevance to the plot is realistically zero. Trying to find any information on this elusive series, I am delighted to learn from its author's obituary that not only was John Trench more than literarily into archaeology, he was employed long-term, about a generation later, by the same advertising firm as Dorothy L. Sayers. They both worked on the Guinness account. I have a line on the novel and in the meantime am stuck with an interest in Alan Dobie, with his thin dented-in face that looks so much younger with his hat off, except when he's got a bandage around his head. Even if she doesn't have that much to do, you get early Judi Dench with this episode, too.

It upsets me for many reasons that science in this country is about to crash for a generation if we're lucky, but one more is the news which spatch just sent me that it is now possible to synchrotronically transmute lead into gold so long as you don't mind the gold being a transient and unstable radioisotope. Is there a productive application for this discovery? Do I care? I'd rather it take my tax money than anything advanced by RFK Jr. I like libraries and habeas corpus, too.

To every nimrod who still wants to claim that the women of noir are misogynistically divided between the milksop and the fatale, I commend the enchantingly left-field battle royale climax of Riffraff (1947) in which Anne Jeffreys launches herself like a pro wrestler onto Walter Slezak while Pat O'Brien is still fighting off his goons and then squashes him under a bookcase from which he has to disencumber himself like the victim of a Murphy bed. It's even goofier and braver because Slezak in this film has real menace, a summer-suited stone cold sketch artist who finishes up his latest street scene while his hired muscle is slugging the bejeezus out of O'Brien, whose amiable chiseler of a private eye has a nicely careless chemistry with Jeffreys' canary, herself the kind of platinum-tressed pulp ideal who can pick herself up from getting cold-cocked in someone else's tossed office with breezily tart sang-froid. The opening murder at 30,000 feet is breathtaking in its sharp-shot night rain and silence, but I may still consider the film stolen by Percy Kilbride as the sarcastically milk-tippling cabbie whose jalopy fires up like the 1812 Overture and whose gag of mending O'Brien's shirts runs all the way through a proposal into breach of promise. He's the cherry on this modest but satisfying sundae of RKO B-noir which balances its shortfalls in budget with buckets of style, incidentally the first non-short film I have managed to watch this month. "You got the piano player?"

Speaking of women in noir, the Brattle has announced this year's Noir City Boston and despite the presence of Foster Hirsch, I am not missing Caged (1950) on 35 mm, not to mention I have never seen the directorial debut of Mickey Rooney, My True Story (1951). I reserve the right to throw popcorn if he mischaracterizes any of the dark city dames I know anything about.