If you don't know by now

Well, here we are at the absolute pinnacle of Romance—Saint Valentine’s Day. If you’re thinking about dining out tonight and haven’t booked a table, fuggedaboutit; tomorrow the prices will be lower, anyhow. To get into Trader Joe’s yesterday, you had to pass through a wall o’ bouquets ready for lotharios low on funds.

Love is, as they say, in the air.

But that’s only part of romantic love. Valentine’s Day is like a Hallmark movie: it’s all about the appearance of passion. We all know that the story goes on after Stacy and Todd fade out and the credits roll. Very often the next chapter is full of screaming fights and slamming doors. And the one after involves Todd crying into his beer with his bros while Stacy and her posse slap back cocktails and tick off every single one of Todd’s transgressions.

That session lasts the whole night.

I was interested to discover that one organization has recognized and even celebrated this aspect of love. Through today, Wildcat Ridge Sanctuary in rural Marion County, Ore., will write your ex’s name (in cat-safe icing) on a heart-shaped mass of meat and feed it to one of their residents. Your donation of $50 to $75 also gets you a video of the very satisfying meal.

(The director of Wildcat Ridge Sanctuary reports that people are also sending in donations with the names of work colleagues, friends, spouses and other sundry miscreants to become wildcat chow. This is their fourth year of offering the much-needed service.)

So, in keeping with the full scope of the day, we’re having Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, sung by the Indigo Girls.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Paschal Moon: Fair-lined slippers

I’ve always had a penchant for Christopher Marlowe. In an age teeming with polymaths (Sidney, Jonson, Shakespeare, Spenser...), Marlowe stood out. Poet, playwright, drunkard, spy—he covered the full spectrum. His short life—29 years old when he was fatally stabbed in a barroom brawl—encompassed only six years of literary output, but he made those years count.

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month is Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love”. It’s a pastoral poem, depicting an idealized countryside, and an idealized love. It’s the sort of thing that Dorothy Parker twisted around a rapier of cynicism.

Contrast the whole rural idyll thing with Sherlock Holmes’s view of country villages, stated most succinctly in “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”, which was, “They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

Well—whether you’re thinking dark deeds or just a roll in the hay, Marlowe’s got you covered.

“The Passionate Shepherd to his Love”

Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove

That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,

Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon rocks,

Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,

By shallow rivers to whose falls

Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses

And a thousand fragrant poises,

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle

Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool

Which from our pretty lambs we pull;

Fair lined slippers for the cold,

With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,

With coral clasps and amber studs;

And if these pleasures may thee move,

Come live with me, and be my love.

The shepherds's swains shall dance and sing

For thy delight each May morning:

If these delights thy mind may move,

Then live with me and be my love.

Algo roulette

Y’all know how interesting I find algorithms used for search and for serving ads. (One of the worst instances of the latter actually came from the LA Times; that one is forever printed on my cortex.)

Well, here’s another example that I find deliciously perplexing, served up by YouTube, a Google property:

I mean—are the people who’d listen to Tom Waits and Bette Middler singing a smoldering “I Never Talk to Strangers” likely to be in the market for dating Arabian women? Conversely, are the people interested in dating same likely to be listening to Waits and Middler?

I didn’t click on the link, so I can’t tell if the “dating” site is an iteration of Eastern European women who really, really want to be friends with you. Or what. I just don’t really want to know. I am kind of wondering what, exactly, that algorithm is smoking.

But I’m betting that somehow Facebook is going to be showing me more of similar sites.

Gratitude Monday: Facebook fan mail from some flounder

As a software product manager who takes pride in what I deliver, as well as a software user with no discernable amount of patience when it comes to actually, you know, using an application, I never thought I’d hear these words coming out of my keyboard, but I’m grateful today for Facebook’s egg-suckingly bad user interface (UI).

Because it turns out that it does have its upside.

First—you understand that Facebook obscures how you interact with it; they really want to keep you bamboozled while they suck down all information about you that could possibly be sold to marketers and advertisers. Not only do they periodically change your privacy settings for you (or at least how privacy levels work) without bothering to inform you, so you have to constantly opt out of changes they’ve made; but they also just plain make things kludgy.

Which makes it a bit of a challenge to keep your account locked down.

It’s like they think they’ll just wear you out so you’ll give up and acquiesce to all their data pillaging. (Like health insurers make their processes so obscure and tedious and endless that they hope you’ll stop trying to use the benefits that you’ve, you know, paid for.)

Furthermore, their notification system seems pretty much intermittent, for both posts and messages, but today I’m concerned with the latter. Because either FB doesn’t notify you if you’ve received a message in your “other” box (i.e., from someone not designated as a Friend), or else the notification comes and goes like Tule fog. So if you’re not actively looking for fan mail from some flounder, you’re not going to find it.

Until potentially much, much later. Because apparently messages never go away, either.

Which (finally) brings me to my point:

Back when I didn’t have my account completely bolted down, I received a query from a former Great Love. (And, tellingly, it was a query, not a friend request, since he would never risk that not going his way.) To wit:

This was in 2009; well, I think I picked it up in 2010. I recall looking at it, snorting and hitting what I thought was delete. (Look—that whole condescending “I understand, and it’s okay” is so typical of his approach to relationships. He never understood a fifth of what he thought he did, and that, sunshine, is not okay.)

So imagine my surprise last week when all of a sudden FB kept telling me I had a message, and I could not find it in my inbox no matter how much I scrolled through the list. That was when I found the “other” category, and it turns out that the little “x” next to a message doesn’t mean “nuke it”, it simply archives it.

And, blow me, but former Great Love was back, this time with something he apparently thought would be more charmingly persuasive:

I have to say, I burst out into such a gale of sustained spontaneous laughter I was afraid the neighbors might complain of the noise. What a drama queen.

And I realized his whole drama queen thing is so…last century. Maybe it stems from him fancying himself a writer; but just listen to him: “…who acted from his own madness”. He couldn’t just stop at dickhead, which at least had the virtue of being accurate? No, no—it had to involve madness. Like he’s freakin' Lord Byron.

And at what point was he “acting from his own madness”? Every instance of dickheadedness during the course of our relationship (which lasted for a brief period during the early 80s)? Or when he tracked me down across the country years later while I was in grad school to offer what was meant to be one of those 12-step amends-making apologies, but he managed it so that it never actually involved the word “sorry”? Or the last exchange a decade ago when I decided there was no upside to dealing with him?

Look—you know the romance has gone out of the relationship when your last words to him are “Just grow the hell up.” And you send them by email. And you delete his riposte without reading it and never give it another thought.

I don’t know what DQ hopes to get out of this, or why he’d bother with me—once, let alone twice. Possibly some internal coup-counting. But if he’d been interested in maintaining contact with me, he should have considered that whole dickhead thing a lot sooner.

Besides—don’t ask if I’m “open” to an apology; either apologize or shut the fuck up. Be a man or a mouse, not Uriah Heep.

I may not always be the sharpest blade in the drawer but I’ve come to realize that being treated with respect and appreciation on a steady basis trumps a load of shite punctuated by flamboyant gestures and crocodile-teary humility. That Anna and Vronsky thing is enthralling for a few months (when you're young), but it’s not sustainable. And my days of contemplating the train approaching the station are long, long past.

And that realization brought a wonderful freedom, shortly after my first outburst of hilarity upon stumbling on his idea of a billet-doux. Which only occurred because of Facebook’s totally crap UI.

God bless ‘em!

Once upon a blog

Evidently there are cyber romances that don’t end up on the crime pages of major dailies. And apparently love comes to those who blog.

I'm heartened by this story about the no-longer-young-and-buff, although it did take rather a while to take hold.

But it would seem I’m doing something wrong, because I haven’t had so much as an emoticon wink, much less a proposal, after almost a year of blogging.

I wonder if it’s my subject matter? Or my vocabulary?

Celluloid hearts

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 Saturday 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 Made of Honor and What Women Want 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 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 20 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 the 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.

Beware the power of IKWIG, however. It can fool you into thinking there are Scotsmen who are worth the gelignite it would take to blow them back to hell.

Oh, wait—that’s a different sort of comedy.