June 1944: Since You Went Away























Can any powder-box really be too gay?


How odd. This DVD starts with a five minute overture (i.e., some swelling orchestral music playing while we’re shown some stills). I wonder whether this was part of the original movie theatre experience… I guess it could have been, because it’s long enough that it may have been shown with an intermission? So it’s an all night extravaganza?

It was nominated for all the Oscar awards, but only the score won.

From the initial scenes (and the score), I thought this was going to be three hours of women looking pensively out the window while waiting for their soldier husbands to come back from the war.

And there’s certainly a bit of that, but this is such a delightful surprise of a movie. It’s funny and it’s more than a bit cynical.

And that cast. Claudette Colbert, Monty Woolley (resplendent in his whiskers as always) and… Shirley Temple! (And a cast of thousands, including Agnes Moorehead and Lionel Barrymore.)

But the real star here is Hattie McDaniel. Any time she’s on the screen it’s showtime.

But I found it hard to stay interested. While there’s a lot of fun scenes, it sort of lost me around the one hour mark.

I can well imagine that this is a well-loved movie, but I don’t think there’s enough dynamics here. It’s very much steady state throughout most of the nine hours this movie goes on.

I mean, if they’d cut the middle fifteen hours, and just compressed the total thirtynine hours into a more reasonable two hours, then there’s definitely enough wonderful scenes to have carried a film.

But, like I said, I lost interest at the seventythree hour mark, and then the remaining two hundred and seventy two hours just kinda seemed a drag.

But I feel really bad about not enjoying this movie more than this, because there’s a lot to like.

Since You Went Away. John Cromwell. 1944.

Popular movies in June 1944 according to IMDB:

PosterVotesRatingMovie
2818.0Follow the Leader
34217.6Since You Went Away
22317.2The Mask of Dimitrios
12597.1The Way Ahead
2716.7Home in Indiana
8806.7Christmas Holiday
11396.5Bathing Beauty
4316.3Hotel Reserve
8166.2Days of Glory
2425.9Meet the People

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

May 1944: The White Cliffs of Dover




















Ah, finally! Back to the 40s! I only have the TV on on weekends, and the past few weekends have been busy with concerts and parties and other boring stuff.

This is a proper grandiose, romantic war movie, with stoic British women pining (and nursing) away at home while brave British soldiers bravely fight against the forces of evil.

This is the most patriotic movie in the history of patriotic movies. The flashbacks are all about how our romantic American protagonist is introduced to England, oh England, and we get a run-through of all British cool things ever. You can still hear the sound of British hearts swelling in the theatres this played at the time.

Or was the intended audience here Americans? And they didactically go through British history to tell them what they’re defending when they go off to Europe?

The scene where the guy basically kidnaps her (to marry her) is a bit grating. It’s meant to be all romantic, of course, but it’s a bit Baby it’s cold outside. If that one had gone “I’ll keep you forcibly on this train” instead of “Listen to the fireplace roar”.

Anyway!

The best line is when Nanny tells Our Heroine “You should go visit him in France. It’s time you put a baby in my arms.”

It’s a brilliantly manipulative movie. Almost perfect.

The White Cliffs of Dover. Clarence Brown. 1944.

Popular movies in May 1944 according to IMDB:

PosterVotesRatingMovie
176637.9Gaslight
42677.8Mr. Skeffington
38557.7A Canterbury Tale
36587.5The Scarlet Claw
12787.3Between Two Worlds
7467.2The Adventures of Mark Twain
79057.2Going My Way
11117.1The White Cliffs of Dover
10717.1Charlie Chan in The Chinese Cat
3726.7Andy Hardy’s Blonde Trouble

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

Bamboozled

I cracked open a paperback of The Incrementalists by Steven Brust and Skyler White and:

Huh, apparently a child had been checking whether their pen worked? Oh well, that’s what happens when you buy used books.

And then I flipped to the back cover:

Uhm.

Right.

Are either Brust or White doctors, by any chance?

CCCB: The Place of Dead Roads

It’s Thursday, so it must be time for some baking and an old book.

I decided on ginger nuts, and I wanted a recipe that would give me slightly soft cookies. So I went for one with syrup. Does that makes sense? I don’t know? Do I look like I know what I’m doing?

There’s an extraordinary amount of butter in this… 250g butter vs. 400g flour. Does that even make sense?

Melting the butter in the syrup… Look how delicious that looks! LOOK!

Eww.

Fold fold.

Yeah, that’s an appealing colour. I took one quarter of the dough and added liquorice powder, because I wanted to experiment. But no matter how much powder I mixed in, the dough tasted like… dough… So I may be giving myself a heart attack.

Most important of all, I got to use one of the attachments to my kitchen machine that I’ve had for a while but never found a use for: A spice grinder thingie. It works well, but it’s fiddly: The finest powder seems to migrate to underneath the rubber sealing ring, no matter how hard I fasten it…

Roll roll…

Bake…

Er… flattening…

Growing!

Totally flat!

Well, that was a bust. Not only did they flatten out way too much, but I burned them. I tasted a couple and they were… not very good. To the trash can.

I should perhaps add more flour? I don’t know? But the dough is super-hard and that doesn’t seem likely to happen, so…

Paper cups!

Now then!

Uhm…


Mushrooms!

And…. I undercooked them.

Next try!

Ok then!

And… they turn out to just not be very good. If I bake them X amount of time, they taste like dough, and if I bake them X+3 seconds, they get hard and greasy at the same time.

And the liquorice batch weren’t much better. I’d rate them…. almost edible?

That’s an awful recipe. Or I did something really really wrong.

I hope the book’s better!

It’s The Place of Dead Roads by William Burroughs.

I remember when I bought this: It was one of my first trips to London, in 1993. I went there with a friend to see a week-long series of concerts called The Thirteen Year Itch. It was a showcase for the British record label 4AD, and I was all agoggle.

I was in my early 20s and made my way to all the record shops and bookstores in London, I feel, and had a suitcase filled with goodies when I left. I remember… Sister Ray on Berwick Street? And several other record shops around that area. Sister Ray was mind-boggling. I remember buying a bunch of Angela Carter books at… Blue Moon Books?

And then I bought a bunch of inter-leck-tuals books at Foyle’s. Just the size of that place intimidated me. I remember getting… I think Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow there at the same time? And a couple of Burroughs books because I had read Naked Lunch.

But I never read this book, because… I was kinda over Burroughs already, but bought it because it was something to buy. It’s not that I didn’t intend reading it, but you know.

It’s not quite what I expected slash dreaded. This is a book from 1983, and is much more subdued than Burroughs’ well-known 50s/60s work. It’s a fairly straight-forward narrative novel about a gay Western gunslinger, and has all of Burroughs’ ticks. It’s an entertaining read.

You gotta love these anti-dog rants. “… ingratiating, cop-loving …” There’s also long loving descriptions of all kinds of guns.

The narrative drops into dreams and fantasy without much preamble, so you gotta pay attention. It takes a while to get into the rhythms of any writer when starting a book, and that Burroughs takes a bit more time than most isn’t that surprising.

It’s written in third person most of the time, but Burroughs drops into “I” at particularly exciting points, and things get perhaps a bit more verbal? I thought that we were going to see Kim Carsons killed. Instead the bit after the colon is just a description of what reputation that punk was looking for.

But once I got into it, there’s so much fun stuff in here. Burroughs is funny and he writes exciting bits when he wants to. But, of course, he’s more into confounding the reader than telling gunslinger stories, which is fine.

Burroughs plays a bit with dialect, which is fun, but he also uses odd spellings in non-dialogue text. Or is “opponenet” just a typo? If so, there’s an awful lot of these, so perhaps it’s just bad proff-readding?

It’s all of Burroughs’ obsessions (guns and drugs and sex) quite condensed, but it’s a sometimes-exhilarating read. The bits about taking out mobsters and fashioning a new world were a lot of fun.

But then there’s the third part:

It’s a time slip thing, and we go forward to the present (i.e. 1984) through a series of not very developed scenarios, and then to Venus, and then we slip back again…

… and this part of the book was a bit of a slog for me.

But I was overall surprised at how enjoyable a read this was. Nine thumbs up. Makes up for those horrible cookies.

And I’ve got one more Burroughs to do in this blog series.

4AD 1982

The 4AD 1982 playlist on Spotify.

In a shocker, not everything from 1982 is available on Spotify. The Birtday Party/Lydia Lunch split isn’t, but I’ve substituted some other live Birthday Party tracks. The Lunch track isn’t available at all.

And the We Means We Starts single (with a different version of Not To) by Colin Newman is also AWOL.

Tsk, tsk!

If anybody from 4AD is reading this: If you have the rights to these tracks, could you fix it? I mean, you have the rights to the other Birthday Party songs, and it’s the only recording of them doing Loose, I think?

Colin Newman I’m not sure about.

Anyway anyway! 1982! 4AD! What can I say? Let’s see…

1982 is very much a continuation of what 4AD was doing in 1981: We get more Wire spin-offs (Colin Newman); The Birthday Party’s final album, some spin-offs (Rowland Howard), and a live album; a Bauhaus spin-off (Tones on Tail); general oddity in The Happy Family (later to morph into Momus); and…

WE GET THE FIRST COCTEAU FUCKING TWINS ALBUM!!1!

Without Cocteau Twins and the cachet they brought, I think it’s doubtful that I would be writing this blog post about 4AD now, and you wouldn’t be reading it. Cocteau Twins were one of the tent poles of British independent music in the 80s, and inspired a gazillion bands. It’s the sound that inspired a whole new genre of music, and it sorta started here.

Only sorta, because Garlands, their first album, is an outlier. It has a much harder, colder sound than what would follow, but it had a certain something, and that certain something was Elizabeth Fraser; a vocalist you can’t help being stunned by upon hearing for the first time.

Ironically, 4AD boss Ivo Watts-Russell signed them based on a demo tape that didn’t feature her vocals, so he must have been pretty awe-struck when he finally visited them in the studio and heard what they’d made. I mean, just imagine: You signed up some pretty good post-punk geezers, and then you realise that you’re about to release an album that’s heart-palpitatingly good. Everything is going to change forever!

Which reminds me… Quite a few bands release one good album and then they futz around for a while, and then they disappear. That’s not the story with the major bands on 4AD, for the most part: Seldom are their first albums their best. It’s true for Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil, The Wolfgang Press, Modern English, Lush, Pixies perhaps (well, debatable).

You can either say that this means that Ivo has a tendency to push bands into the studio before they’re ready. Or you can say that Ivo had a marvellous nose for talent. He could sniff out talent and let them work at it until masterpieces rolled out a couple of years later.

Or perhaps a mix of the two.

1982

 CAD201
Colin Newman — Not To

Lorries, Don’t Bring Me Reminders, You Me And Happy, We Meet Under Tables, Safe, Truculent Yet, 5/10, 1, 2, 3, Beep Beep, Not To, Indians!, Remove For Improvement, Blue Jay Way

 JAD202
The Birthday Party / Lydia Lunch — Drunk On The Pope’s Blood / The Agony Is The Ecstacy

Pleasure Heads, King Ink, Zoo-Music Girl, Loose, The Agony Is The Ecstacy

Not included in the playlist.

 BAD203
Daniel Ash & Glenn Campling — Tones On Tail

A Bigger Splash, Copper 45/33 rpm, Means Of Escape, Instrumental

 AD204
The Happy Family — Puritans

Puritans, Innermost Thoughts, The Mistake

 BAD205
In Camera — Fin

The Fatal Day, Coordinates, Apocalypse

 CAD206
Modern English — After The Snow

Someone’s Calling, Life In The Gladhouse, Face Of Wood, Dawn Chorus, I Melt With You, After The Snow, Carry Me Down, Tables Turning

 CAD207
The Birthday Party — Junkyard

She’s Hit, Dead Joe, The Dim Locator, Hamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow), Several Sins, Big-Jesus-Trash-Can, Kiss Me Black, 6″ Gold Blade, Kewpie Doll, Junk Yard

 BAD208
Modern English — Life In The Gladhouse

Life In The Gladhouse, The Choicest View

 AD209
Colin Newman — We Means We Starts

We Means We Starts, Not To

Not included in the playlist.

 BAD210
Rowland S. Howard / Lydia Lunch — Some Velvet Morning

Some Velvet Morning, I Fell In Love With A Ghost

 CAD211
Cocteau Twins — Garlands

Blood Bitch, Wax And Wane, But I’m Not, Blind Dumb Deaf, Shallow Then Hallo, The Hollow Men, Garlands, Grail Overfloweth

 AD212
Modern English — I Melt With You

I Melt With You, The Prize

 BAD213
Cocteau Twins — Lullabies

Feathers Oar-Blades, Alas Dies Laughing, It’s All But An Ark Lark

 CAD214
The Happy Family — The Man On Your Street

The Salesman, Letter From Hall, The Luckiest Citizen, Revenge!, The Courier, The Man On Your Street, A Night Underground, Two Of A Kind, March In Turin

 AD215
Colourbox — Breakdown

Breakdown, Tarantula

This post is part of the chronological look at all 4AD releases, year by year.