Picturing the past

I love old photos. This came through one of my downloads—a rather interesting historical document, no?

Leaving aside the rather grim setting—which might have been a state-of-the-art office environment in 1924, & would probably fetch a couple mil for subdividing in the Georgetown loft market today, even tricked out as it is—the whole arrangement speaks volumes about the workplace.

Those “computer stands” look like cruel & unusual punishment to me. & with their electromechanical guts, I’m betting the noise would have been comparable to Khachaturian working in a tractor factory.

But it’s fascinating that these were all “personal” computing devices—one human, one machine. (I’m not even going to venture a guess as to the processor capabilities for these things.) Twenty-five years later we’d “progressed” to room-sized Univacs & Eniacs—thanks in no small part to Admiral Grace Hopper, a woman with a true gift for numbers & logic. Then we gradually whittled the technology down to mini- & then microcomputer size. Now I carry around a smartphone with whiz-bang capabilities in the back pocket of my jeans.

Another point of interest is that I can make out exactly two men amongst this phalanx of women—not counting the standing guy, who’s obviously overseeing the operation to ensure there are no shenanigans got up to. (Corporate intrusion into your computer activity goes way back, doesn’t it?)

I have this vision of a bell ringing & the serried rows of computer specialists rising in unison & heading off to the loo. Although—you’ll notice there’s no room on these computer stations for coffee cups.

Finally, scroll to the right & look at the denizens of the other half of this office. Three of the four people closest to the photographer (two female, one male), in their non-adjustable wooden chairs at their big, heavy wooden desks, are looking into the lens with distinctly amused expressions on their faces. Are they happy they’re not part of the computer collective? Feeling superior because they could put a cup of coffee on their workstation (if they were allowed coffee)? Anticipating their own close-up?

I dunno. But this makes me feel less whiny about my brick of a ThinkPad laptop in my office with my ergonomic chair.

Feeling noirish

Last week TCM ran The Third Man—I missed the first ten minutes or so, but when I remembered it was on and switched channels, I fell right into the spell as thoroughly as I did the first time I saw it. (That was at an art theatre in West LA, many, many years ago.)

Actually, it knocked me out. I had the TV on while unpacking boxes from the latest move and I ended up bagging the life-organizing and watching—really paying attention to—the film.

I’m not sure it was the plot so much as the characters and the actual cinematic techniques. I’m not a fan of Joseph Cotton; he’s okay. But Trevor Howard as Major Calloway, the chief of the British MP contingent, is understated commanding presence. I love watching him at work.

Plus, there’s the youthful Orson Welles as the elusive, multi-dimensional Harry Lime. The aftermath of all that destruction is a Petrie dish environment for the Lime bacillus, and he thrives as though he’d been cultivated at great expense. He’s not on camera for most of the film, but he—Lime/Welles—dominates the film.

However it was odd watching him run in one scene—you think, “That can’t be Welles haring off like that, not with his heft.” Then you remember this was 30+ years before those no-wine-before-its-time Paul Masson commercials.

I had to keep reminding myself that Welles didn’t direct the film—actual director Carol Reed used so many of the techniques Welles pioneered in Citizen Kane. Those weird camera angles that make you look at things in ways you’d never have thought of doing yourself. And Reed really made stellar use of the black-&-white medium.

The film is incredibly atmospheric—which is a quality I’m not sure you can get outside of B&W. (Well, maybe Chinatown…) Most of it is shot at night; what light there is, is harsh and unforgiving. You really get the sense of the swirling hell post-war Vienna was. Not a shred of that Austrian Gemütlichkeit in evidence. All that ruined Baroque splendour—and it’s not just the Habsburg buildings.

The place reeks of corruption, as happens in defeated territories. (I wonder if anyone will make a Third Man in Bagdad? Or, God willing, some day in Belgrade?) The city is divided into zones run by the four allied powers; the Soviets are angling at every opportunity to push their control, as they’ve done with all of Eastern Europe. Calloway is doing his best to police his patch while avoiding international incidents.

And that’s one of the problems of victory—it’s one thing to fight and win a war. It’s another entirely to occupy the conquered territory. As armies dating back to Alexander have learned. Vienna, with its long history of decline and its pretentious shabbiness is the perfect setting for the story of black marketeering, unashamed opportunism, scrabbling for survival and  yes, even love.

Of course, it’s love for the wrong person. Another universal theme not restricted to post-war settings.

Then there’s that iconic scene on the Prater, where the resurrected Lime explains his philosophy of personal success to his naïve friend Holly Martins. He utters a line that condenses the whole ethos of 1946 Vienna: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

I have to say that zither music gets up my nose. It’s the 1949 equivalent of a John Williams score (the composer who thinks movies are produced solely to provide a vehicle for his turgid compositions). Like a Williams score, it screams plot points at you in case you can’t follow the subtlety of the film.

Even so—if you’ve not seen it, hie thee to Netflix and get it. If you have seen it—it’s high time you saw it again.

Let the Games Continue

It's really hard to get excited about the presidential conventions this year--we've been so enmired in the campaigns for the past two years (recall that John Edwards took up with his videographer in 2006, for God's sakes) that I've long since lost any enthusiasm for the process.

A colleague of mine chastised me about 18 months ago--he said that electing the President of the United States is an event of world-class importance, worthy of months & months of debating the issues & candidates' qualifications. I suppose he's right, although of course issues are always thin on the ground while "qualifications" usually mean slagging off your competition. But after non-stop campaigns seemingly since the last century, I just feel like the kid at dinner who muttered, "Okay, I'll eat my carrots--but I won't swallow them!"

I suppose it would be interesting to make book on how many Democratic delegates get altitude sickness on the floor. Other than that, I'm predicting utter predictability for the next four days.

Dog days...(oops!)

This appeared in my queue a while ago & I sent it round via email. However, today I found it on the company Intranet, associated with an employee-produced cats calendar.

If you've already seen it, it’ll still bear another look. If not--go to.

Just don’t be drinking anything while watching, or you’ll snort it out your nose.

Let the games begin

As you might expect during this two-week period, the WSJ’s Eric Felten (“the man with the best job in journalism”) yesterday discussed the history of Olympic drinking.

He doesn’t include the story of Spiridon Louis, winner of the marathon in the first games of the modern Olympiad in 1896. That may be because Louis stopped at a taverna in the course of the race for a glass of wine, not ouzo, so perhaps that’s considered outside Felten’s remit.

On the other hand he does tell how swimmer Eleanor Holm Jarrett was busted for drinking champagne when she was caught drinking champagne (and shooting craps) with members of the press on the way to the 1936 Olympics. Avery Brundage, who had a somewhat sliding scale of ethics throughout his IOC tenure, axed her as a bad example, notwithstanding her being the great hope in the women’s 100 metre backstroke.

These days that latter fact would have outweighed any crime up to and possibly including capital offenses.

Anyhow, Felten, as is his wont, comes up with a couple of quasi-official Olympic cocktails. Both of which strike me as nauseating, but feel free to use them to test your own personal best in endurance.

The thing that left me gobsmacked was the opening anecdote, about another marathon, 1904 in Saint Louis. Seems Thomas Hicks was crapping out at the 19-mile mark, so his coach gave him a cocktail of cognac, egg whites and sulfate of strychnine. He got another dose closer to the finish.

What I want to know is: there were Olympic Games in Saint Louis?

Why?

P.S. Having just moved into a house in a vintage-1950s neighborhood in Bellevue, I find myself without connectivity at home for the first time in this millenium. Verizon doesn't seem to run DSL to this area and  the cable couldn't be installed until next week. However, this being the metro Seattle area, I'm going native: this is being posted from a coffee shop with free wi-fi.

Sex & politics

Well, the news about John Edwards admitting to a months-long affair in 2006 while running for the Democratic nomination for President (but not while his wife was being treated for cancer, he says)—it got me thinking. As you knew it would.

For one thing, Edwards assured the public that he “didn’t love” Rielle Hunter, although of course she’s 1) eleven years younger than he & 2) 15 years younger than his wife, Elizabeth. So she’s got that trophy thing going for her.

Plus, she’s apparently not suffering from incurable breast cancer.

What gets me about that is he’s basically saying it’s somehow less selfish, arrogant & adulterous to carry on with a woman you don’t care about than one for whom you have feelings. How does that work?

(Also that defense in detail of “& I didn’t do it while Elizabeth was actively fighting the cancer”—who thinks that’s a justification?)

But that’s not the only thing that bothers me about this. What I really don’t get is this:

• For at least the last five years he’s been telling the world that he’s a straight arrow, the embodiment of Family Values & therefore worthy of We the People electing him to the office of Vice President, & then President


• He possesses the added saintly association of having his cancer-stricken wife publicly support his ambitions


• He’s been senator from North Carolina—Jesse Helms country—so has had to walk the straight & narrow path for at least the length of his political career


• He does have that wife & four children

He’s really not generally speaking a stupid man

So how is it he engaged in an adulterous affair with someone he didn’t love in an atmosphere where he was bound to be found out & publicly excoriated?

What is it about men & their sliding sense of morality when it comes to this sort of thing?

Let’s leave aside the ordinary schmo who believes he’s entitled by fiat of the Almighty to share his procreative fluids with anyone with the XX chromosome configuration. The one who thinks marriage vows only apply to his wife, but who either thinks he’s not got much to lose by spreading it around or can’t think that far ahead to any consequences.

The stakes may in fact be high for this guy—lose the wife, the kids, the house; but he’s not going to lose his career or his future in the community.

& forget about celebs who feel entitled by virtue of celebrityhood to sleep with anything animal, vegetable or mineral without consequences. They don’t live in the real world & we don’t really expect them to be capable of spelling “morals” much less have them. In fact, behaving like a Restoration earl sells movies & media, so everyone’s happy about it.

But what’s up with guys who have so much more riding on this than the little woman chucking his clothes, baseball card collection & bowling ball in the garbage? Pols know they’re expected to display the family values they purport to believe in. & they know that if they don’t live up their own hype, their careers are toast.

How is it that they risk not only the break up of their family, but public humiliation, alienation of the voters, and—most horrifying of all—the exodus of those big-ticket campaign donors. You really can lose your job & your career future by giving in to your libido (or your ego—or both). & there’ve been so many examples of that—Bill Clinton notwithstanding.

So what is it that makes a smart guy, who presumably loves his family, who is at the height of his career aspirations, who knows what the consequences are—what makes him put all that on the line to make it with a videographer?

I just do not get it.

Culture vulture

A friend sent round this Yankee or Dixie Quiz. So I took it.

My score came out 80% Dixie (Do you have Confederate ancestors?). Which is a complete crock, because how is it that I could have only THREE answers that are pegged as solely south/southeast and all the rest be somewhere else (with some also the south), and STILL be tagged Dixie?

I mean, I started off #1 as being “clearly Massachusetts, Maine or Rhode Island”. I’ve spent maybe four weeks in Mass, one in Maine and I’ve driven through RI. Go figure.

Caramel I’ve always pronounced the way it’s spelled, and never confused it with the biblical Mount Carmel. (Nor do I refer to the place of Christ’s crucifixion when I mean horse soldiers, for that matter.)

My answer to #3 was “common throughout the US”. Four WAS “southeastern US, but five was “no bias” and six “common nearly everywhere”.

I’ll give them y’all on seven. Guilty, guilty, guilty.

Eight was “all US; slightly favors the southeast”. Nine “common throughout the entire US”. Ten “universal generic term used nationwide”. Eleven, “very strong bias toward the Northeast US”. (Although I grew up in California and never left the state until I went to Mexico in high school, and I never called them anything else.)

Twelve—really, I use both terms, but it’s “all of southern US and Midwest except Great Lakes area.” Thirteen “favored in western Great Lakes region”. Fourteen “used nationwide and in southern urban areas”. Fifteen “most common nationwide except for Great lakes area.” (And I lived in Wisconsin for a while, so I recognized the term used there. I just never used it.)

Sixteen FINALLY got me back home: “used heavily in northeast US and California”. But as for 17—again, in Southern California we never called it anything else, so how did that become “used heavily in Great Lakes and Midwest region”?

Eighteen brought me “this is common throughout most of the US”. How 19 got me “largely a Texas term but also used in the urbanized Northeast”, I don’t know. And for 20 in LA we never called it anything BUT pillbug, so I’m not getting the “Great Lakes region and northeast US”.

Even so—notwithstanding the categorization of some of these terms, how is it I could still come out 80% Dixie, when most of my responses came from multiple areas?

Now, as it happens, I do have Confederate ancestors. Yankee ones, too. You gotta problem wid’ dat?

Working theory

New workforce study out, reported by The Onion. This should resonate with all three readers of this blog.

Leaving aside the point that it’s satire, it reminds me how obtuse asshole bosses can be. I once worked for a woman who was a blonde version of Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss in every respect: ignorance, self-puffery, paranoia, micromanaging, etc.

Yet she cooked up one of those “team-building” outings to Annapolis, which included several Dilbert videos featuring her alter ego as the example of how not to manage people. It never occurred to her that she herself was the object of derision in those videos.

This is something I've wondered about for years: how is it that some people 1)get hired & 2)remain employed when they display no discernible skills, talent or even basic intelligence? I once expressed to a friend this wonder regarding a particular person when I was working in the film industry. She looked at me in amazement & exclaimed, "But, [Bas Bleu] don't you know that when you can't figure out why someone's in the position they're in, it usually means they have photos!"

Well, perhaps. But I'm reasonably certain that some of them--most, but not all, in management--are too stupid to operate the camera. So I still don't get it.

My bad...

I realized after posting yesterday that as Raymond Chandler aged, Philip Marlowe’s attitude toward gin mellowed somewhat.

Terry Lennox of Silver Wraith fame was drunk on gimlets, and he introduced Marlowe to them. He even dictated the recipe: “A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow."

Well, even at half and half, the Rose’s will peel the enamel off your teeth. A professor at Santa Monica City College who taught a course on detective literature made it 2:1 gin to Rose’s. But it’s a delicate balance—do you prefer to risk disintegrating teeth or deadened brain cells?

The Long Goodbye was written in 1953. Five years later, when Chandler published Playback, Marlowe was drinking Gibsons (martinis with an onion instead of an olive).

I can’t see it myself—but then I’m more of a vodka girl.

There’s a passage from Goodbye, where Lennox describes the comfort to be found in a bar at a certain time: “I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar.”

Good luck trying to find that sort of respite at any time in any boozery these days, where the techno pop and TVs blare at you from the instant the bartender turns the key in the door to open.

Terry Lennox—and Marlowe—would not be able to sit in a bar for the time it takes to down a single gimlet in this age. They’d take one look at the cosmos and cranberry martinis and beers with limes in the necks being drunk by poseurs who think their quaff is a statement, not a drink; and they’d have just walked out and gone dry.

Down these mean streets

I recently relocated from the Metro DC area to Metro Seattle. This move involved being housed in a corporate apartment for the past two weeks with nothing but what I brought with me on the flight from Dulles.

I had less than three weeks to organize this move. I did my best in the circumstances, but for some reason I only put four books in my luggage. (If you’re interested, they were Strapless, a “history” of John Singer Sargent’s “Portrait of Madame X”, which I do not recommend; Final Salute: A Story of unfinished Lives, based on Jim Sheeler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of notifications of families of service members killed in the current wars—also over-written, but still worth a read; The War Works Hard, by Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail—recommended without reservation; and Trouble Is My Business, a collection of four short stories by Raymond Chandler.)

This aggregation barely lasted three days. Fortunately, it turns out that my corporate apartment is a block away from the largest branch of the King County Public Library. And they’ll let you get a card on your say-so that you live in the area (two-book limit on checking things out until you prove your bona fides). And so I had a card within a day of arriving.

On the back of Trouble, I felt like reconnecting with Chandler—when you are uprooted and plonked down in an alien environment, comfort reading is a bit like comfort food. It gets you over the hard parts. I’m not a fan of meatloaf and I gag at mac and cheese; but favorite books are like Moët Brut Imperial—they go down silky and leave you lighter when you’re done. So I checked out Volume I of the Library of America’s collection of Chandler’s stories and novels, and have been wallowing in blood, bruises and bourbon for a week.

It’s a blast from many pasts.

I discovered Chandler as a junior in college—introduced by a gentleman caller who lived smack in Philip Marlowe’s Hollywood territory. At that time (cusp of the 80s), the streets around Cahuenga, Franklin, Gower and Sunset were still pretty mean. A lot of the buildings there dated from the 20s and 30s, so Marlowe could well have known them.

I read most the oeuvre over a summer and picked up the left-over bits within a couple of years. I revisited one or two of the stories in the intervening years; but this is the first time I’ve delved deeply back into that world for 20 years. (I’ve not been back to Hollywood for about that time span; I wonder what’s changed there?)

I have to say—no one can open a story like Chandler. He uses language like a diner uses the smell of bacon and coffee to lure you into his world. One of my favorites:

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."

That’s from “Red Wind”. Anyone who’s ever experienced a Santa Ana—even in the age of air conditioning and the ubiquitous water bottle—will recognize the condition. You can’t read that story without feeling your skin cracking with dryness.

One that I’ve always loved is the beginning of Farewell, My Lovely—not, technically, the opening graf, but this description of Moose Malloy comes on the first page, and once you read it, he’ll be ingrained in your cortex:

“It was a warm day, almost the end of March, and I stood outside the barber shop looking up at the jutting neon sign of a second floor dine and dice emporium called Florian’s. A man was looking up at the sign too. He was looking up at the dusty windows with a sort of ecstatic fixity of expression, like a hunky immigrant catching his first sight of the Statue of Liberty. He was a big man but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck. He was about ten feed away from me. His arms hung loose at his sides and a forgotten cigar smoked behind his enormous fingers.

“Slim quiet negroes passed up and down the street and stared at him with darting side glances. He was worth looking at. He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes. From his outer breast pocket cascaded a show handkerchief of the same brilliant yellow as his tie. There were a couple of colored feathers tucked into the band of his hat, but he didn’t really need them. Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”

Moose—like so many of us—is looking for love in the wrong place, and within a few pages he’s murdered the manager of Florian’s in his search for little Velma, who used to sing and dance there—eight years ago.

But my all-time favorite is from The Long Goodbye:

“The first time I saw Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other.

“There was a girl beside him. Her hair was a lovely shade of dark red and she had a distant smile on her lips and over her shoulders she had a blue mink that almost made the Rolls-Royce look like just another automobile. It didn't quite. Nothing can.”

I picked up my copy of The Long Goodbye at Gatwick Airport on my way back to LA from following the pilgrim route from Paris to Santiago de Compostela the autumn after I graduated. I’m not sure whether I love it the best of Chandler’s works because it’s superbly plotted and written (as Ross MacDonald described Chandler) as by a slumming angel; or because I associate it with that particular trip and time in my life. But I’m looking forward to rediscovering it again.

Chandler is certainly free with the similes and metaphors, especially in his earlier works. And his plots get pretty convoluted. (I read somewhere that when John Huston was filming The Big Sleep, after one day’s shoot, he realized that no one could understand who killed the chauffeur. So he called Chandler, who had written the screenplay while drinking heavily. And not even he could unravel the threads.) But the man knew how to evoke a sense of place and time like very few other writers.

This time around, freed of the college earnestness and the influence of the gentleman caller (who quite fancied himself built in the mold of Marlowe—in his dreams), I’m struck by a couple of observations about the gender assumptions of the times.

Marlowe is indeed a paladin, a principled man in a world that has lost all honor. Educated well enough to quote [Christopher] Marlowe, Shakespeare and other literary giants, he’s still tough enough to fight literally and figuratively with the forces of corruption that swirl around him.

But he’s also a chick magnet, that quintessential indicator of a protagonist devised by a male. At least 93% of the women in these stories throw themselves at him, the good as well as the bad. He never pursues any one of them; in fact, he has to brush them away like lint off his suit.

He’s somewhere in his forties. Women in that category are “of a certain age”, desperately trying to disguise their years (and Chandler is pointedly cruel about that); but he’s just all the more attractive because of his seasoning. Also, his face is frequently the object of various fists, saps and gun butts. That doesn't seem to discourage the women.

He barely makes a living and spends a considerable portion of his earnings on booze. Mostly bourbon or rye; Scotch when he can get it. (Gin he clearly holds in disdain—you can predict with absolute accuracy that a character has no self-respect or redeeming social value if s/he drinks gin.) He has a shabby office with a reception room always kept unlocked, and an inner office with empty filing cabinets and a desk of uncertain lineage whose primary function seems to be to hold a bottle of rye.

And yet his financial circumstances seem to raise no flag for the women who pursue him with the single-mindedness of a four-year-old determined to stay up past his bedtime.

You can pretty much bet the ranch on the fact that any woman who doesn’t succumb to his charms is going to be a psycho or a drunk; possibly both. Of course, many of the women who do fall for him are bitches or psychos, as well. I guess it was that kind of world.

You can also depend on the “good girls” (and they’re all “girls”) being sent packing, generally sooner rather than later. Marlowe isn’t going to trade in his efficiency with the Murphy bed at the Hobart Arms, his drugstore lunch counter meals and his office desk drawer bottle for domestic happiness.

Finally, you’re going to want to be ready to cherchez la femme: a woman is usually at the root of all evil. Sometimes innocently, but usually decidedly on purpose. Turns out little Velma wasn’t worth Moose’s devotion. Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep is the very Energizer Bunny of psychotic nymphomaniacs. And poor Terry Lennox had good reason indeed to be drunk in that Rolls Royce Silver Wraith. (Then there are The Little Sister and The Lady in the Lake…)

Don't get me wrong--I still love the stories and the writing. And Marlowe does seem to be partial to redheads. I'm just sayin'...

Chandler didn’t write Marlowe a permanent love interest until Playback. Which, BTW, also has a memorable beginning (not the first graf):

"So I went to bed. But not to sleep. At three a.m., I was walking the floor listening to Khachaturian working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it. A white night for me is as rare as a fat postman."

Well, comfort is where you find it, I guess. I’ve now got mail addressed to me at my temp address that will permit the King County Public Library to authorize me to check out the full complement of books (100, they tell me). Plus, now that I think I’ve found a permanent place to live, I can spend my off-time actually, you know, discovering the PNW.

For the moment, however, I may pour just a skosh of the Glenlivet I’ve got in my freezer. I did at least have the presence of mind to tape the daylights out of that bottle, wrap it in bubble pack and put it in my luggage, along with the four books. It's been getting syrupy with cold ever since. I've just been reaching over it to get to the ice cream.

But I think now's a good time to open it. Marlowe deserves the effort.