BAD MOVIES THE WIFE WATCHES
I am so wiped out I wouldn't be blogging if I had my druthers. But Mrs. Lewis is watching something that she assures me is a "chick film". May I summarize the plot in verse?
He was a hottie in high school
My friend and I were "chum"*
Now we're all hottie 20 somethings
We're gonna make that big stud look dumb
Alas! I came in just to dupe him
But am falling for him anyway
So now I'm in a bit of a quandary
Just what is my friend gonna say?
(* "chum" - i.e. shark bait.)
I like some "chick" films, though they're really old ones - like "About Mrs. Leslie" and the high drama, high class soap operas of Douglas Sirk (such as "All That Heaven Allows".) But this film I just cannot watch - not because of the story or the orientation towards females. It's the production quality, costume, acting and even pacing - it's just like porn. They must've gotten production people from porn to make this film for cable, in order to (a) keep it mildly erotic and (b) keep the production costs virtually non-existent, which I'm afraid is something that porn people do well. I guess I just expect the characters at some point to hop in the sack and do the nasty, at least based on the way the actors behave, the background music chosen, and the overall style of the movie. Instead, the couple are in a greenhouse and the male character raises a phallic cactus up through the foilage with a downturned, knowing glance. Makes me wanna puke, so I'm here at the computer and not in bed where I should be.
I'm not saying that hardcore porn is good and that softcore, soap opera styled "porn" is bad (or rather, dishonest). But porn technique applied to a straight dramatic movie does not make for a good movie. I thought they learned that with high-priced flops like "Rollover" and "Bolero" - expensive "porn" without the pornography.
I WAS WRONG - AGAIN
I'd like to state that I owe my employer an apology. The "dead white men" comment that so offended me at work in my last post was never taken seriously as an editorial contribution. I misread an email and was mistaken. Sorry. I'll do better next time. But sometimes I get like a cop and bring something home from work that's like a bee in my bonnet - stays with me all evening long. One way to get it out is to bang it out here. But perhaps I should take up basketweaving instead.
GREENFIELD VILLAGE AND DEATH
My parents were in town over the weekend. We went to Frankenmuth on Friday and then on to Greenfield Village on Saturday. These are pretty ambitious "day trips", and as a result we didn't see very much of either, but enough of both to convince my parents (and my daughter) what a wonderful place Michigan can be when it's not as cold as a witch's tit. Weather was perfect both days, a pleasant relief for my parents who live in Cincinnati and have had nothing but rain for weeks.
At 5pm at Greenfield Village something strange and surreal happened - I guess it happens there every day at this time, but I'd never seen it before. You get into the mindset as you're at Greenfield Village in the afternoon that you're in the early 1900s, like in a time machine. But at 5pm the park closes, and everyone - ordinary folks in current-day clothing, "actors" in vintage clothing, the fellows driving the ancient cars, the carriages, the kids - everyone, turns and starts walking towards the gate in the same direction. It is so quiet you could hear a pin drop - no one seems to be making much noise. It is like we collectively escaped our era, and our sense of time, this afternoon. But now time's up and it's time to head back- head back slowly, silently and without saying a word.
I felt like this is what death must be like, to pick up your drink cup and lawn chair and move with the others toward the gate, not speaking and not hurrying.
MY POE ADVENTURE
When I was in Philadelphia I made a point of visiting the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in that fair city. This is a house where Poe lived in 1843-1845, perhaps his best and most productive years. Poe's house is located on a corner lot of what is now a Section 8 housing authority. Likely this was a poor neighborhood even in the 1840s. The house, other than the foyer which serves as an office of sorts (that part was Poe's neighbor's house) is completely empty to the bare walls. There is no information on how it was furnished in Poe's time, so the National Park Service stripped it out and left it that way. All that's left is traces and fragments of color and glue left behind on the plaster by several layers of wallpaper.
The stairs are narrow and steep, and the rooms are small. Virginia Poe's room is particularly tiny - it wouldn't need to be big, as during her time there she fell ill and took to bed (she died in New York in 1847 at age 24). Poe's own room struck me with some sense of amazement, in that it is not unlike the room imagined for him by D.W. Griffith in his Biograph 1909 film "Edgar Allan Poe"- I could imagine the same furnishings in this room and the position of the window seemed in about the same place. Though I could not imagine the giant raven that Griffith placed on Poe's desktop!
I went down into the tiny, low-ceilinged cellar of the house; the same one described in "The Black Cat". In 1990 I composed a setting of The Black Cat (Uncle Dave Composition No. 241 in the Temporary Catalogue). I recited an edited version of the work onto tape and then conducted an ad hoc "orchestra" of six or seven rock musicians to create a semi-improvised musical setting while listening to the words in headphones - no written score was used. I had my picture taken down there by my daughter, and if it comes out I will use it for the sleeve of a CD of "The Black Cat".
My wife and daughter were terrified of this house - it was not just because of her heart trouble that Allisyn did not wish to traverse the narrow, steep stairs. It really felt like that there were ghosts in the place, even during the daytime - perhaps not the ghosts of the Poes and Mrs. Clemm, but somebody's ghost. I used to live in a place that had been an old Civil War Hospital, and at night sometimes you could hear paper bandages being unrolled and torn. So I have a sensitivity to ectoplasmic activity; hopefully it would increase the sensitivity of my endoplasmic reticulae. (Bad joke).
I much enjoyed talking to the staff at the Poe Site - as I had gotten there too late in the day I didn't have much time to talk to them. They have a display set aside for other American writers of Poe's day, and they were quite surprised to discover that I was the only person in the room to have read William Wells Brown's book "Clotel, or The President's Daughter" (1844). I asked if Brown had ever met Poe, and the reply was no - that had been researched, and Poe didn't review this book (as he did hundreds of others). It made me wonder if the topic had been researched the other way around, through William Wells Brown's writings (should any survive outside of "Clotel.")
One thing that
HASN'T been researched, according to the staff, is Poe's forward influence on other writers, particularly those in Europe (though Baudelaire's fixation on Poe, rest assured, is well known). Though superficially we know of his work in having created the detective genre, refined the horror genre, writing some of the greatest poems in English and his incisive critical commentary, the actual path of Poe's shadow through the future has yet to be determined. I suggested that they compare the opening of Poe's unfinished (and final) story "The Lighthouse" to openings of stories written within the Lovecraft circle, or to compare Lovecraft's story "At the Mountains of Madness" with Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym." While Ambrose Bierce comes somewhere in between, I do believe there is a direct link between the Weird Menace authors and Poe's brand of horrific narrative; much as though Conan Doyle intecedes between Arsene Lupin and the works of S.S. Van Dine, there is a still a similar connection in "tales of ratiocination" (to use Poe's own fanciful term).
Although the staffers at the museum understood what I was talking about, I got the impression they hadn't made this connection before. I hope it helps.
Poe stories you should read if you haven't already: "The Angel of the Odd", "Lionizing", "Xing a Paragrab", "Maazel's Chess Player" (an eerily advanced story about a robot that plays chess - Bierce revisted this idea in "Moxon's Master"), and "The Sytem of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether".
My favorite film adaptation of Poe: "Toby Dammit" (1967) directed by Federico Fellini, based on Poe's essay "Never Bet the Devil Your Head." It appears as part of the collaborative film "Spirits of the Dead", which also contains the worst Poe adaptation I've ever seen - Roger Vadim's "Metzengerstien". It stars Jane and Peter Fonda, trying to play lovers, but obviously they detest one another - from the quality of Peter's performance I suspect he spent most of the time drinking trying to forget he was making this thing. It is priceless, however, to hear Jane Fonda's character angrily calling out for her servant, whose name is Oeg. "OEGGG!!" "OEGGGG!! (somewhere between "oog" and "ewgg" - try shouting this sometime and see how stupid you sound.)
Uncle Dave Lewis
uncledavelewis@hotmail.com