Upsoaring wings: Get very drunk

George Gordon, Lord Byron, was one of the big guns of English Romantic poetry. I personally outgrew Romanticism probably some time in my 20s, when it started to seem turgid and overblown. But still, never hurts to pay a visit now and again. I like Romantic music just fine, but the literature—especially poetry—not so much.

As a human, Byron was someone I would not have suffered gladly—he was the model for every self-indulgent legend-in-his-own-mind male from actors to programmers. Again—this lost its charm for me in my 20s. Interestingly, his one legitimate child was Ada Lovelace, the extraordinary bluestocking, mathematician and first computer programmer. Like a lot of self-indulgent LIHOMs, Byron lived large on other folks’ money; he ran up huge debts swanning around Europe and having multiple affairs with men and women without much consideration for anyone but himself. In 1823 he became involved in the Greek war for independence against the Ottoman Turks. An illness turned to sepsis, and he died in Missolonghi in February of the following year.

Byron wrote a lot of epic, melodramatic poetry, but it turns out he had a puckish side. His “Don Juan” is a very long satire on the whole notion of the womanizing libertine. In most of the versions we know in poetry and opera, Don Juan (AKA Don Giovanni) seduces every woman he can, ruining them unrepentantly (because he’s young, good looking and a long way from death), until fate catches up with him after he kills the father of one of his victims.

In short—like Byron—Don Juan is mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Okay, but Byron’s take on Don Juan turns everything on its head. Across 17 cantos, his hero starts out as a seducer, but he is shipwrecked, captured by pirates, sold as a slave by the pirate daughter, disguised as a woman so one of the Sultan’s concubines can get him into the harem; he escapes, joins the Russian army, is invited by Catherine the Great to join her, ah, court, becomes ill, goes to England (supposedly better weather than Russia), has some adventures with British aristos, and The End.

I mean—it pretty much is every damsel in distress of Romantic literature, only with, you know, tackle.

No, I won’t make you read the whole thing, although if you want to, it’s on Project Gutenberg. No, I’ll just share this bit, from Canto II, because it seems pertinent to our experience in 2019:

Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,

Sermons and soda water the day after.

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;

The best of life is but intoxication:

Glory, the grape, love, gold, in these are sunk

The hopes of all men, and of every nation;

Without their sap, how branchless were the trunk

Of life’s strange tree, so fruitful on occasion:

But to return—Get very drunk; and when

You wake with head-ache, you shall see what then.

Speaking of romance

In case you’ve been hanging out in a cave without any media access and only just now woke up to check the blogosphere, let me point out that today is Saint Valentine’s Day, the “you-vill-be-romantic-und-you-vill-enchoy-it” vortex of chocolate, jewelry and other forms of conspicuous consumption.

For something a little off the beaten rose-path, you could settle in with a bottle of bubbly and an elegant, witty romantic comedy.

To get a film with those two particular modifiers, you’re going to have to go back several decades, either chronologically or stylistically. Films like Friends with Benefits and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before may have some persons who are quite a treat to the eye, but it’s hard to really give a toss about them and their predicaments.

Go back to My Man Godfrey (1936; although the 1957 version with David Niven is acceptable), with William Powell and Carole Lombard. The premise may be far-fetched, but you just can’t get enough of the dialogue. (The underlying premise of the absurdly wealthy living cheek-by-jowl with the "forgotten men" laid low by the (last) Big Depression lends some bite to the fluff.)

Ditto The Thin Man (1934); Powell again and Myrna Loy. Plus—Nick and Nora drink like they just got out of Prohibition. Oh, wait...

Still on a Powell-Loy roll, Libeled Lady (1936) also includes Spencer Tracy and a very young and extremely funny Jean Harlow. Powell trying to bluff his way through fly-fishing is a treat; and the chemistry between him and Loy is electric.

Then there’s His Girl Friday (1940), in which Rosalind Russell shoots out some of the best and fastest dialogue in film history as she tries to fend off Cary Grant and get a scoop on an escaped death-row prisoner.

Ninotchka (1940) sees Greta Garbo, a dour Russian functionary sent to Paris to bring some discipline to the sale of tsarist jewels on behalf of the Soviet government, come under the spell of the City of Light (and that sly Melvyn Douglas). Garbo laughs.

Perhaps slightly off the rom-com beat is Topper (1937). I’m not talking the part about Cary Grant and Constance Bennett being a sexy and witty couple. It’s how they help the middle-aged Mr. and Mrs. Topper (Roland Young and a delicious Billie Burke) recapture romance in their marriage. Or—more likely—capture it for the first time.

And, here’s the thing: anyone can make a romance about 20-somethings who are drop-dead gorgeous and wear $850 designer shirts. (You can make a romance, but it’s not necessarily engaging.) But building a film around a woman d’un âge certain (not just a middle aged guy; because how many movies have we seen where Mel Gibson or Harrison Ford get it on with chicks 30 years their junior, in between cortisone shots or DUI arrests?), who has more history and more riding on the outcome of the romance… Now, there’s a story.

That’s the attraction of any Katharine Hepburn movie—Philadelphia Story, Pat and Mike, and my personal favorite: Desk Set. The scene where Hepburn gets looped at the office Christmas party and riffs on Spencer Tracy’s logic questions and then faces down the mainframe computer he’s installed in her research department is worth the price of admission on its own.

Everyone knows An Affair to Remember (1958)—largely because of the homage in Sleepless in Seattle (cute, but no cigar). Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant are the embodiment of class and style in the story of two people who’ve set themselves up with wealthy partners because they’ve been around the block a few times and opted for security over love. They meet on an ocean liner (courtesy of their partners’ money) and decide to take a chance—wagering everything they have against the possibility of love.

Now that’s romance. Really: the crapshoot of love.

Indiscreet (1958) pairs Grant with Ingrid Bergman, a combination it’s hard to top. The premise—Grant claims to be a married man unable to get a divorce as a defense against any woman’s aspirations to matrimony. When he falls for Bergman, a leading lady in all senses of the term, there’s a series of farcical events. Frankly, the plot’s a bit hard to swallow, but you don’t really care because the packaging is super.

Within the past 30 years, I rate Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990) very high on the truly romantic scale. First of all: Alan Rickman. You don’t really need more, but the story is about a deceased cellist (Rickman) returning from beyond to ease his lover (Juliet Stevenson) through her overpowering grief. The scene where he appears, playing his cello while she’s playing the piano, and she sobs—that’s one of the most affecting lovers’ reunions ever filmed.

Enchanted April (1992) has a fantastical (as in “imbued with fantasy”) air to it. Four Englishwomen (strangers to one another—already an anomaly in English society) pool resources to rent a villa in Italy for the month of April. The setting is the 1920s, not my favorite era, but it turns out to fit together absolutely perfectly. The magic of Italy takes hold, healing the wounds of each of the women. The ending is a bit pat—but not out of order in a romance.

Not a comedy, The Last of the Mohicans (1992) is still one of the best love stories going. Lyrically shot by Michael Mann (of all directors), it’s visually stunning and emotionally compelling. When Daniel Day-Lewis abjures Madeleine Stowe (Hawkeye/Cora Munro), about to be taken by the Huron, to “No matter whatever happens, stay alive. I will find you no matter what”—well, it’s utterly heart-melting. There can’t be a woman alive who wouldn’t want her man to give that sort of adoration.

Playing against the trend of no witty and engaging rom-coms in recent years is 2008’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. It’s charming and blessed with superior characters and dialogue. (Okay, Frances McDormand can do no wrong; simply by a narrowing or widening of an eye she can communicate utter despair or puppy-wriggling pleasure.) Again, it’s that last-chance-at-love hook that I find much more appealing than the usual ho-hum Drew Barrymore-Matthew McConaughey fluff.

I think my all-time favorite romance, however, is I Know Where I’m Going (1945). Yes, it’s a bit contrived, and you know what the “twist” is going to be. But Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey have such chemistry in their clash of wits, it just knocks you out. Hiller is the strong-willed city girl on her way to marry her wealthy, older industrialist fiancé (see the money-security options in An Affair to Remember), who has rented an island off the Scottish coast. The weather intervenes and puts her in the path of Torquil McNeil, who (it turns out) actually owns that island, but is land-rich and cash-poor.

Well, you know what’s going to happen, but getting there is just charming and well worth the time.

Any of these is worlds better than what any of the Lifetime/Hallmark channels are running for Valentine’s Day—which are all the same exact plot, many times with the same exact actors, filmed on the cheap in Vancouver simulating various US locales. Every once in a while I catch part of one of these; they are to the classics as Cold Duck is to Cordon Rouge.

Until thrift do us part

The other day I was at a thrift store, browsing through the housewares aisles (sometimes you can find small Corning casserole dishes, which I seem to use at a rate of knots) and my eye was caught by the stemware. I don’t know how this happened, but—while I have an abundance of wine glasses—I’m down to only two Champagne flutes, so I looked a bit closer.

It was too much to hope for actual crystal in this setting, but what made me stop and wonder was this random glass:

It’s hard to see the actual words, but trust me on this:

Ryan & Lindsey

August 12, 2006

(And a seahorse. What do you suppose the seahorse signified?)

That’s nearly twelve years ago. I wonder if Ryan and Lindsey are still together?

  

Love in the parking lot

Some time ago I was in the parking lot of the Alexandria Wegmans, an East Coast grocery chain, when I noticed this truck all tricked out:

This Wegmans is near Fort Belvoir; I didn’t see a base sticker on it, but it did have an Oklahoma license plate on the rear, and I just kinda thought…

Anyhow, what caught my attention was this declaration plastered to the front bumper:

Look—anyone driving a $32K Silverado pickup with Oklahoma plates and a piece of a Robert Browning sonnet slapped across the bumper deserves a shout-out. I rifled through my car, but didn’t have any decent-sized pads of paper (since rectified). So I scribbled my good wishes on a business card-sized scrap and stuck it under the windscreen wiper.

May you grow old alongside each other, never run out of gas and always be driving under the speed limit as you pass the cop cars.