July 1946: The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

I love the title!

And… wow! This is absolutely brilliant! I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s condensed, over-the-top melodrama; every scene, every camera angle pitch perfect.

Lizabeth Scott is wonderful here. I’m not familiar with her work, but she’s like every 40s dame distilled. And Kirk Douglas is perfect as the milk-toast weaselly D. A. (which probably didn’t take much acting).

OK, my enthusiasm here is perhaps a bit er enthusiastic (I’ve got a way with words): Some of the scenes don’t really work. But the ones that do are fabulous.

“Let it burn, Sam.”

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Lewis Milestone. 1946.

Popular movies in July 1946 according to IMDB:

Votes	Rating	Movie
5941	7.5	The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
967	7.1	I See a Dark Stranger
1346	7.0	Canyon Passage
576	6.9	A Scandal in Paris
229	6.9	Bowery Bombshell
767	6.8	Till the End of Time
209	6.7	Centennial Summer
368	6.6	My Pal Trigger
282	6.5	Two Guys from Milwaukee
426	6.4	Of Human Bondage

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

Automated Turn-On Logic

CCCB: Last and First Men/Star Maker

Wow, it’s Thursday, so something must be baked. And it’s not me!

Years ago, there was a fabulous cookie in the stores here. They were made by Walkers, and they were “stem ginger” cookies. They were glorious. Chewy, flavourful, in your face.

Apparently nobody else liked them, because they disappeared only to be replaced by Walkers shortbread “stem ginger”… things… and like all things shortbread, they’re not any good.

So now’s my opportunity. I can make them myself! Here’s a recipe! But what is even “stem ginger”? I mean, all ginger is “stem”. Or rhizomes. Or roots. Or whatever those things are.

This explains it, kinda. When you cook ginger (first for a while in water and then in sugar), it becomes something called “stem ginger” in many parts of the world, and it’s not quite the same as candied ginger.

So I went a-boiling and then put them in a container and let them sit for a week, and:

Look how… de… lish… ous?

Yeah, OK, they look like Satan’s wet farts, but they taste nice.

Got all my ingredients…

Uhm… my Muscovado sugar looks a bit… er… solid? Yes, solid.

Hah! I’ve got tools!

After blitzing that block of sugar in the blender for a while it got very powdery.

Perhaps a bit too powdery: See that haze over the blender? Yes, I think I inhaled a lot of aerosol sugar. That’s not unhealthy, is it? IS IT

The rest went without mishap. Dry stuff mixed with butter…

Chop chop chop.

Blend blend blend.

Mix mix mix.

Roll roll roll and then into the fridge for 20 minutes because of reasons that aren’t explained.

Chop chop chop.

I never know how much these things are going to expand in the oven, so to avoid to get a Continuous Cookie Landscape thing happening, I went way wimpy this time and only did six cookies in the first batch.

And…

They didn’t expand to 12x their sizes! Who knew!

OK, that’s half done (and I froze the rest of the dough for later, which, according to the recipe is A-OK).

I didn’t quite understand the “Melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of gently simmering water, making sure that the water isn’t touching the bottom of the bowl” part of the recipe. Vaguely holding a bowl over water doesn’t like something that’s going to make a lot of chocolate melding action happen, does it?

IRC to the rescue: What they’re talking about is this principle:

Trapping the vapour under the bowl. Well, I don’t have a copper Bain Marie, but I’ve got plenty of small pots and pans:

Hah! Take that, oh so Bain Marie.

Melt melt.

Dip dip.

Done!

Well, this is a bakin’ and readin’ blog, so I have to pick a book from my collection of books from the early 90s that I have managed to avoid reading until today.

I pick Last and First Men/Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon.

There’s two reasons I haven’t read this book until now. The first one is silly and the second is deadly:

I hate reading collected editions. It makes reading seem like a chore, somehow. When I’m done with a book, I want to go on reading something else, not more of the same. So I avoid buying collected editions, and will gladly spring for buying five separate smaller paperbacks instead of one giant collected hardback.

But I bought this book, probably in like 1989, because Samuel Delany wrote somewhere that he thought that this was the bee’s knees.

I think.

At least some author I respected thought that this was good.

But when I started reading it, I found it tedious in the extreme. Like, way beyond reading calculus, which I also had to do at the time.

And I haven’t changed my mind there at all.

The book is one of the first science fiction books, and Stapledon is a horrible writer. First and Last Men is the history of humankind from the 1930 on, where we learn of the soon-to-come French/British war, and then the German/Russian one, and then…

It’s all told in the manner above: As written by some omniscient historian from the year 2 billion CE.

I think there’s probably some people who would like this thing. For instance, people who like reading recaps of stories instead of reading stories. And there’s a lot of those, so perhaps this would be a brilliant read for somebody who isn’t me?

Reading this was a soul-deadening experience, and, Reader, I have to admit I couldn’t get through it this time either. I failed! I had to start skimming, and then I started skipping chapters, and then I just skipped to the end.

Here’s the end, on page 246:

Well, that’s not too bad, is it?

BUT THEN THERE”S ANOTHER NOVEL! THIS IS WHY I HATE COLLECTED EDITIONS!

Well, OK, this one doesn’t seem to be written in exactly the same tone, so I’ll give it a go…

Oh, I was going to try the stem ginger cookies while reading.

Mmmm… yum… they’re crispy but also chewy. They could have used more stem ginger, to give them even more chewiness. Next time I’m baking these, I’m doubling the stem ginger.

Dee-lish.

While the first novel was about the history of humanity, the second book is more… lateral. It’s about a person who goes around (in his mind perhaps) around the galaxy, visiting planet after planet, and joining up with minds from each of these planets. So they collectively visit all kinds of strange planets… for page after page after page (did I mention “page after page”?) after page.

This is, after all, a pretty original structure for a novel, so I had expected to last longer, but I just can’t.

It’s deathly dull.

As a catalogue of wonders, it just doesn’t work. Stapledon cycles through all possible extrapolations from the current state of the art (of 1937), and he’s a smart cookie. But he lacks spice.

Mmm. Ginger.

Oh, right…

Well, I started skimming and then skipping and then jumped to the end of this novel, too.

I’ve let everybody down!

4AD 1987

Listen to 4AD 1987 on Spotify.

This isn’t complete, unfortunately. The Fat Skier mini-album by Throwing Muses doesn’t exist on Spotify. Three of the tracks appear on various compilations, and I’ve included them on the playlist, but you’re missing some wonderful songs like And A She-Wolf After The War, Pools in Eyes and Soap and Water.

Hey, 4AD people! Get the rights for this thing and get it on Spotify already!

The songs from the Frazier Chorus EP Sloppy Hearts are included in the playlist, but they are the re-recorded versions from their debut album, and not the versions from the EP. The differences aren’t huge, though.

4AD didn’t release that many releases in 1987, but it was a momentous year, anyway. The three major releases:

Lonely is an Eyesore is a label sampler, but it’s the best one ever. All the bands contribute new songs, not featured anywhere else, and they contribute top shelf items. Almost any of these tracks would have been standouts on their respective bands’ albums, so you have to wonder how label head Ivo Watts-Russell managed to wrangle those tracks out of them. And it’s such a striking, excessive release (it was done in several formats, one of which was in a wooden box in an edition of 100) that it further cemented 4AD as being a “thing” more important than the individual artists (in many people’s eyes).

And while there are ten tracks on the album, two are from Dead Can Dance, and three of the tracks (by Clan of Xymox, Dif Juz and Colourbox) are from groups that would release barely nothing after this release. So in a way it’s an (unplanned?) epitaph of an era of 4AD instead of a celebration of it.

The second thing of particular import is the first album (well, mini-album) by Pixies. Not only was it a shock to the system: It’s such a wild, ferocious thing, but a whole genre was spawned based on somebody in Seattle getting a copy of it and the subsequent album. (I’m talking about grunge.)

And then there’s Pump Up The Volume by M|A|R|R|S, which is basically one of the guys from Colourbox trapped in a studio with the guys from A. R. Kane. Who didn’t do much except bitch, apparently, until Martyn Young made the song (recollections differ greatly), which was Ivo’s basic plan to prod Young into making something. It was a huge, huge worldwide hit and 4AD’s best-selling release. I remember visiting my sister in Portugal during the summer of 1987, and we were walking around the old part of Lisboa and hearing that song streaming out of somebody’s window and everything was perfect.

The commercial success of the song had all kinds of negative repercussions, though. A. R. Kane sued 4AD and or Colourbox because they wanted more money, and some of the people sampled on the song did likewise. Martyn Young basically dropped out and didn’t write a single track afterwards, and the process was a time and energy drain on 4AD and Watts-Russell.

Less distressing was Sleeps With The Fishes by Pieter Nooten and Michael Brook: It’s an album I never grow tired of listening to.

1987

	BAD701 Throwing Muses — Chains Changed Finished, Reel, Snail Head, Cry Baby Cry
	BAD702 The Wolfgang Press — Big Sex The Wedding, The Great Leveller, That Heat, God’s Number
	CAD703 Various — Lonely Is An Eyesore Crushed, The Protagonist, Cut The Tree, Frontier, Hot Doggie, Acid Bitter And Sad, Muscoviet Musquito, Fish, No Motion
	BAD704 A. R. Kane — Lollita Lollita, Sado-Masochism Is A Must, Butterfly Collector
	CAD705 Dead Can Dance — Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun Anywhere Out Of The World, Windfall, In The Wake Of Adversity, Xavier, Dawn Of The Iconoclast, Cantara, Summoning Of The Muse, Persephone (The Gathering Of Flowers)
	MAD706 Throwing Muses — The Fat Skier Garoux Des Larmes, Pools In Eyes, A Feeling, Soap And Water, And A She-Wolf After The War, You Cage, Soul Soldier
	BAD707 M/A/R/R/S — Pump Up The Volume Pump Up The Volume, Anitina
	BADR707 M/A/R/R/S — Pump Up The Volume (Remix) Pump Up The Volume (Remix), Anitina (Remix)
	BAD708 Frazier Chorus — Sloppy Heart Sloppy Heart, Typical, Storm
	MAD709 Pixies — Come On Pilgrim Caribou, Vamos, Isla de Encanta, Ed Is Dead, The Holiday Song, Nimrod’s Son, I’ve Been Tired, Leviate Me
	CAD710 Pieter Nooten / Michael Brook — Sleeps With The Fishes Several Times I, Searching, The Choice, After The Call, Finally II, Instrumental, Suddenly II, Suddenly I, Clouds, Finally I, Several Times II, Equal Ways, These Waves, Several Times III
	BAD711 Xymox — Blind Hearts Blind Hearts, A Million Things, Scum