Stuff and Moonshine

I don't usually get nightmares, but lately, due to politics or other stress, I've been having a lot of dreams involving threats, conspiracies, falling, or post-nuclear wastes. I still don't know if they count as nightmares -- I'm usually too detached in my dreams to feel anything more than unease. Still, last night's dream was a welcome change: I was at a party where I didn't know anyone except the host and his girlfriend (who seemed to be older versions of Wyatt and Caitlin from the animated show 6teen); but I was enjoying myself -- music was playing and we were all drinking cocktails from lab test tubes. Suddenly my mother walked in, asked a bunch of questions about gardening (not-Wyatt's place was a suburban ranch-style house), then left after a few minutes. I started asking everybody if they'd seen her too, or if I'd just hallucinated the interruption.

On an unrelated topic, thanks and good luck to everyone marching for Science! today.

 Rewatching TOS a couple of months ago, I'd noticed that cannon!Kirk is almost completely different than the popular image of the character, but Erin Horakova in Strange Horizons goes into more detail (and semiotics theory, so, y'know, brace yourselves for that).

Especially good points --
1. Everyone knows Nimoy was Jewish, not so many people know Shatner is, and it's something to take into account as part of the subtext in stories like "The Conscience of the King."
2. A lot of Kirk's "conquests" in TOS are more like "Kirk plays along with the situation/distracts the guard."

 1. Almost done the baby sweater I have to knit to prove I can knit so I can potentially get some piecework as a test knitter. I'll have it done well before the ten-day turnaround time they need, though I've come to the conclusion that the hood is the most voluminous part of the hoodie.

2. Watched the 1931 Maltese Falcon a couple of days ago. I prefer Bebe Daniels' Miss Wonderly (they never drop the alias in this version) to Mary Astor's. Dwight Frye as Wilmer gets less screen time than Elijah Cook, Jr., but is equally nervy; he apparently kills Gutman (Dudley Digges) and Dr. Cairo (Otto Matieson) offscreen as they head back to "Constantinople." Digges isn't bad; his Kaspar Gutman makes me think he would have played an excellent Mr. Pickwick or, in the villain line, Charles Augustus Milverton. Matieson's Cairo is basically the same as Lorre's, but he misses putting it over the top like Lorre.

As Spade, Ricardo Cortez (born Jacob Krantz) is a completely different character from Bogart's detective. I feel like Bogart is a 1940s character and Cortez is a 1930s one, if that makes sense. He swings wildly between suave and goofily, snappishly sarcastic. He might even have the tiniest touch of sentiment, but only the tiniest. He was definitely sleeping with his partners wife -- for one thing she's Thelma Todd as opposed to Gladys George, who seemed flaky enough to have just imagined his interest, and who did not, in 1941, leave a kimono at Spade's place. There is a neat twist at the end, as long as you don't understand enough Cantonese to have been spoilered back in the first few scenes.

3. I have deleted my LJ, though I think it takes sixty days to believe me. I've located most of my LJ flist on DW, and feel rather as though we ought to have some kind of site-warming party, though it's not easy across time zones. Feel free to post hellos in the comments, however.

ETA 4. Also rewatched Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle which, if you've never seen it, is a movie that has absolutely zero interest in subtlety or psychological realism. Its cartoonish grotesquerie is more touching than a lot of Oscar-nominated films, probably because of the sincerity of Chow's love for the Shaw Brothers, the Warner Brothers, the Peking Opera (I'm guessing from the soundtrack), unexplained heel-face turns and fairytale logic. I'd like to see it in a double bill with Galaxy Quest, because the former is about storytelling as the greatest human invention and Kung Fu Hustle is the kind of ridiculous cheese that could inspire naive extraterrestrials to acts of nobility and heroism.

 I made it through two job-screening interviews by telephone today, and have a face-to-face interview tomorrow for one of the jobs. I think I need to up my mess, though -- I was shaky and exhausted afterwards. Andrew's been under a lot of stress lately; everyone's been under a lot of stress lately, and I guess it's finally hitting me.

Applied for a side gig making up knitting samples; hope the kit for the test project arrives soon so I can at least work on something. Heard that Glad Day bookstore is starting a Monday-night knitting circle and I might take work to that.

Someone on Facebook last week asked about borrowing clothes for a play and I photographed and offered a few. They seemed interested, but I haven't heard further. Trying to decide whether or not to alter the garments in the meantime to look more 1940s in case they come back to me at the last moment with a yes.

Question -- I've been interested for a few years in 1940s headscarves, but I don't know if I can wear one in public with out looking like I'm ripping off Black style or Muslim headgear. Thoughts?


Going to another demo on Saturday.

We've been watching old bootleg copies of Vengeance Unlimited by way of escapism, and Andrew dug up his copies of Michael Madsen's poems, which are exactly as gonzo as you'd expect them to be; he's really determined to be beater than Beat and noirer than noir.

The Read Thru

When you make a bad film, it's there
Forever.
Like a big 250 ft. Herpe, with two
legs, and two arms and a big ugly
head always showing up when you
least expect it. Walking up
behind you; walking toward you,
with an "I'm gonna f*ck you up"
look on its face.

Everyone sees the damn things.

Over and over. Your friends, your
enemies, strangers. That's never true for the good films
you have, if there are some.

Anyway.

This big, swollen, red, festering
rotting 250 ft. pus vessel has
big feet, too. In a nightmare, they'll
be the last thing you see coming
down to smash your f**k**g head.

Sometimes, it's saying, "Hey, I'm not so bad."
But you know the truth.

 I think it's also supposed to be the Day Without a Woman protest today, but I'm currently between paying jobs*, and I have yet to determine if Andrew can manage on his own today. So my action will most likely to be to point out that like a lot of other women, I'm doing a lot of unpaid nursing and emotional labour.** 

* I did have an interview yesterday. We'll see if they get back to me.

** I also acknowledge that the protest is kind of problematic in itself given how many women really can't afford to lose a day's pay.

Went to the counter-demo at Nathan Philips Square. I think the Anti-Muslim demo we were countering were over on the east side of the square. There were police (some in riot gear) standing guard near them, and our marshals were trying to keep us over at the other side, though I think some of the counter-demonstrators had gone over anyway, as there were some signs on the fringes of the their crowd that didn't seem to fit. I think their actual numbers were relatively small. Meanwhile we did keep edging closer to the centre of the square, following the sunbeams like a cat.

Feeling like a coward, though, because I didn't confront the guy I saw waiting for the bus at Queen/Roncesvalles on the way home, who was yelling racist stuff at a motorist, and then more general stuff at his own dog and at the bus driver. The driver did report him for animal cruelty though.

This one was scripted by Bertram Millhauser, who worked on most of Universal's Sherlock Holmes movies, and I kept expecting Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce to show up and sort matters out. In their absence, Robert Griffin comes to England after escaping from a Capetown asylum for the criminally insane, and accuses his old friends Sir Jasper and Lady Irene Hedrick of deliberately leaving him for dead after he was hit by a falling branch on their South African expedition years before. They plead that his injury was showing the expedition down, so they'd left him in the care of the most trusted bearer. This does sound a bit flimsy, and when Griffin comes over all woozy after accepting a drink from Lady Irene, Andrew and I figured she was the real villain and had arranged the original accident.

Griffin falls into a river, falls in with a local yokel who pulls him out, and they try unsuccessfully to sue/blackmail the Herricks. When that fails, Griffin wanders about muttering angrily until he meets mad scientist Dr. Drury (John Carradine). Drury's not such a bad sort, although his animal testing probably isn't up to modern RSPCA standards; he's got a lot of Invisible animals, including his pet parrot Methusulah and his guard dog Brutus. Griffin volunteers to be the first human test subject, then takes off while Drury plans to write up the results and present them to the Royal Society.

He goes back to the Herricks' and harasses them invisibly for a while. When their daughter returns home to care for her stressed-out parents, Griffin decides he needs to be visible again. He goes back to Drury, who has just made Brutus visible again via a blood transfusion from another dog, but balks at draining a human's blood to treat Griffin, so Griffin takes his blood, somehow performing a blood transfusion with no medical training or awareness of blood typing, and leaves him dead. So now he's visible again, but effectively a vampire, as the effects of the transfusion keep wearing off, although Brutus appears to be fine, and after a few more scenes, is ultimately the one who kills Griffin. "Wait," we said, "so was Lady Irene innocent the whole time?"

 Nice to see Jet Set Sewing has a new post, after a long break. Also nice to see I'm not the only one who thinks the Pussy Hat has the bonus of resembling Schiaparelli's 1929 "Mad Capr:"
https://jetsetsewing.com/2017/02/01/sewing-a-retro-mermaid-skirt-mccalls-7386-a-20s-vibe-sweater-coat-vogue-8930-and-a-50s-mccardell-bolero-but-still-it-was-all-downhill-until-i-made-a-pink-hat/#comments (scroll down)




See? After the protest march, you can tuck in one corner, tilt it at a jaunty angle, and you're ready for cocktails: