The Best I Can

Answering the question: What am I doing?

[yesterdaysprint]

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri, April 11, 1909

[thebestican]

The song looping through my head when I woke up today…

[suiheisen]

[thebestican]

Many of my dreams take place in weird yet familiar buildings assembled by my unconscious, melding different actual places of my past and present into one indescribable and impossible construction. This amazing video replicates, in real life (?), how my mind wanders through the night.

[thebestican]

I'd been pretty good this year in avoiding binge-watching of television series but, appropriately, I gave in to what Edgar Allan Poe called "The Imp of the Perverse", knowingly acting against my own self-interest, by bingeing this new celebration of Poe's works.

The modernization meshes together many of Poe's stories and poems, linking them mainly through his well-known short work "The Fall of the House of Usher". For the update, Roderick Usher and his twin sister Madeline own a pharmaceutical company ala the Sackler family, getting rich and powerful off the customers addicted to their opiates. Then, Roderick's grown children start dying off, one by one, in mysterious (and to Poe fans, familiar) ways.

Amidst the death and occasional dismemberment there's also a wonderful abundance of dialogue and poetry drawn directly from Poe. Producer Mike Flanagan is not only a fan of the author but, as he's shown in his previous works and adaptations like Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House, he's a proponent of characters with unusually long monologues.

As each chapter and death adapts Poe it's not really a surprise to Poe fans how the Usher heirs are killed but the modern twists to their departures are often quite ingenious. Some of the connections to the originals are admittedly tenuous, tying daughter Tamerlane to the Goldbug and the William Wilson stories for instance, but the weaker links are forgiven given Flanagan's many clever takes.

Auguste Dupin's revamp as the attorney prosecuting the Ushers is great, the Rue Morgue update is especially sweet, and I'm very taken with how he managed to bring us the very deep-cut character of Arthur Gordon Pym. I'm curious how viewers -not- familiar with Poe are taking to the series, though. It's got to be a very different experience.

Give it a watch, whatever your familiarity with the source, but it's recommended you'll schedule your viewing for what Poe would call a dull, dark, and resoundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hang oppressively low in the heavens.

[thebestican]

Spooky Creature Double Feature:

"El Conde" (The Count) is a dark dark satire by Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain recasting, reconsidering, Chilean dictator Pinochet as a literal vampire. Church leaders assign a nun schooled in accounting and exorcism to the case when they discover he didn't really die in 2006, that he just retreated to a country estate. If the metaphor of a monstrous autocrat sucking the blood and hearts of his country seems a bit too precious a conceit, Larrain strengthens its gravitas by making it a warning for these times as well: Fascism never dies.

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I'm not sure what "No One Will Save You" is saying. And it's not because there's only four or five spoken words in the script. Kaitlyn Dever is outstanding as a dream-filled small-town loner, ostracized by her community for a past crime, until mysterious shadows come knocking at her window late at night. It reminds me of that old dialogue-free Twilight Zone, with Agnes Moorhead as the old woman in the cabin visited by a strange creature from a saucer. Part alien invasion, part zombie apocalypse, "No One" keeps you guessing as to what-goes-there along with Dever, while the clues to her past crime and all its implications are equally slowly revealed. Be warned there are definitely more questions by the end, why I'm not absolutely sure what it is saying, but this being a possibly-unsolvable mystery is one of the reasons I love this film.

[yesterdaysprint]

The Daily Times, New Philadelphia, Ohio, April 22, 1924

[busymicrobes-blog]

John Waters and David Lynch meet outside of Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Los Angeles, 1979.

[thebestican]

I'll have what they're having!

[historium]

Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder filming the first Superman movie, 1978

[thebestican]

Can you read my mind?

[thebestican]

Sweet and sour twice fried pork! Used the recipe from Mandy at Souped Up Recipes.

[thebestican]

Some pig!

[thebestican]

Season 2 is here, adapting the Joe Leaphorn mysteries set in the Navajo country of the early 1970s. So far even better than Season 1! Also recommend the original Tony Hillerman books...

[thebestican]

Caught the cannonball. RIP Robbie Robertson.

My favorites of his songs featured enigmas and riddles, most commonly seen as reflections on the inherent contradictions of America, a nation containing not only roads to Hell paved with good intentions but also roads to Glory pot-holed with bad faith and lazy ignorance.

And sometimes the mysteries got deeper, like when Robertson’s weird and wonderful “The Weight” became an even more truly American anthem in the version on “The Last Waltz” by The Band and the Staple Singers. Greil Marcus wrote of it, “the performance quite intentionally took in the whole of the country: blacks and whites, men and women, Northerners and Southerners, immigrants and the native-born, the old and the young.”

The most recent version, by Robertson and an incredibly international group of musicians, expands this meaning beyond our borders and reminds us how the most diverse band of people, differing in race, religion, language, gender, and political beliefs share the most precious component of all: their humanity. Recognizing and respecting that humanity allows them to play together and create something long-lasting and beautiful. And that union of humanity, circling back, was supposed to be the American Way, the ideal of the founding fathers.

Regards for everyone…

[thebestican]

While silent film director Louis Feuillade is on my mind, I'll also recommend Olivier Assayas' 1996 Irma Vep, a reimagining of Feuillade's 1915 crime thriller movie serial, Les Vampires.

Irma Vep starred Hong Kong action star actress Maggie Cheung as a Hong Kong action star actress chosen to star in a 1996 reimagining of Feuillade's Les Vampires. In real life Cheung and Assayas subsequently got married, then divorced, and 25 years later, Assayas reimagined his reimagining into an 8-part series for HBO Max called Irma Vep, where action star Alicia Vikander was chosen to play a part previously-played by a Hong Kong action star actress in 1996 who got married to the 1996 film's director.

Highly recommend both of these, as well as the Feuillade original.

[thebestican]

Quiet, Please! It's a double-feature of French films paying homage in their own unique ways to the lost-art of the silent movie. "Yo Yo" follows the ups and downs of a father -- bored and rich, finding happiness when he's broke and on the road with the circus -- and then, his son -- taking the opposite track, trying to regain and restore his father's riches and manor via his increasingly-profitable career as a clown. Despite the surrealism of the wonderful and non-stop (and mainly silent) sight gags, this comedy surprised me as it revealed itself by the end to be quite an emotional journey, too. Starring and directed-by Pierre Etaix, former assistant to comic film-master Jacques Tati, "Yo Yo" even got on grumpy old Jean-Luc Godard's list of best films for 1965. The crime thriller "Judex" is George Franju's 1963 remake of Louis Feuillade's 1916 silent film serial about a hawk-eyed vigilante taking vengeance on a corrupt banker who caused the death of his father. Judex's penchant for disguises and legerdemain -- one of the stand-out scenes is his appearance as a silent bird of prey at a masked ball -- keeps the proceedings much more lively than anything else about the title character, but the real star who keeps things going is Francine Berge's villainess. Whether dressed as a nun or sneaking through the shadows dressed in black leotards, Berge is an unpredictable and murderous force. And then there's equal kudos for the unearthly dream of Edith Scob as the damsel in distress. Both are playing now on the Criterion Channel, though you can find Judex for free with your library card on the Kanopy app, if the service is offered by your local public library. I'd heard of Etaix for a long time and very glad I finally got to see this, will be looking into watching the rest of his films.

[thebestican]

Artist Steve Bissette attempted an ambitious dream project back in 1994, creating and self-publishing a comic book series about the life of a T Rex. He figured it would take him ten years worth of books, but sadly he didn’t make enough money from initial sales to make it feasible to last more than four incredible issues. At least in the fourth issue we got to see the star of the book, finally, as he hatched from his egg.

A recent video on that Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube channel examined the series, and though the story pages were as impressive as I remembered, about 20 minutes in it was one of the text features that really stood out to me.

Bissette was telling new readers in the feature how to order future issues, and included contact info for three comic book shops — one of them being UCity’s own Starclipper Comics at its old address when they were west of the Loop, where I bought my own issues of the series!

Throughout its lifetime (and even with different owners) Starclipper had a great -national- reputation of being one of the best places to buy independent comics. So nice to see them popping up on my YouTube screen so many years later! So sad they're no longer a thing in my life.

[thebestican]

I thought the final Indiana Jones film was a pretty decent ending to the series with a good combination of exciting stunts and nostalgic mush amid several rousing rounds of punching Nazis.

And while it was mostly a mindless bit of fun, it also brought to mind how much a disturbing number of Americans seem to be in need of reminders on this 4th of July, this celebration of democracy, to the fact that the Nazis were bad guys and against everything the American ideal was supposed to represent.

From the growing prevalence of the thugs marching in goose-step with Christian White Nationalist groups to the fact-free anti-LGBTQ crusaders to the Hitler-quoting Moms for Liberty, these people attacking institutions like school boards and teachers unions as purveyors of ‘Woke’ seem to be in dire need of remedial education and a mirror so they can wake up to what they truly represent. If you know of any, send them this video made when, in their own minds, this country was great. ‘Tis of thee I sing, America. Be better.

[thebestican]

Considering (good) poets are better than most folks at finding connections between seemingly-disparate elements, I'm surprised there aren't more poet detectives in the world of mystery novels. Couldn't think of any other than P.D. James' Dalgliesh, until I ran across Qiu Xiaolong and his Inspector Chen.

The first book in the series, Death of a Red Heroine, calls on Chen to solve the murder of a "national model worker", a young woman exalted by the Peoples' Republic as an ideal example of how best to live a life according to the government's principles. Chen's fact-finding uncovers details of the heroine and her killer that, regardless of their truth, are not warmly-received by his superiors in Shanghai of the early 1990s.

Though billed as a mystery, Chen's real challenge is not so much finding "Who done it," as it is working his way through the bureaucracy of Chinese politics while keeping himself, as well as his friends and family, politically safe from the consequences of his solution. Even the poems he's published in small journals leave him open to censure and demotion.

It's a gentle and sensitively-told story, the many different images and sensations Chen notes along his path reflect the answers to his own personal quandaries as much as they point him to the murderer.

Born and raised in Shanghai, Qiu Xiaolong (who is also well-regarded as a poet and translator) used his Ford Foundation grant to study here at Washington University in St. Louis in the late 1980s. A very big fan of T.S. Eliot, Qiu was excited at the thought of working at a place founded by the poet's grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot. During the completion of his MA and PhD here he also got involved in supporting the democratic uprising by students which led to the Tiananmen Square protests. His protest work was noted unfavorably by the Chinese government so he, his wife, and newborn daughter, have remained living here in St. Louis. His works are -not- available in mainland China.

Because of his living more-specifically in the UCity Loop neighborhood he was given a Tradition of Literary Excellence Award by the University City Arts & Letters Commission last fall. Also last fall he was tapped to write the introduction to the 100th anniversary collection of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Other Poems. Very nice -- or some might say 'poetic' -- completion of his circle. Look forward to reading more of his work in the future!