With the sudden influx of quotidian toil at my office, I can relate to Harry Lime, depicted above and played by Orson Welles in the 1949 film, The Third Man (which, Wikipedia notes, was released on the second day of 1950 in the United States). If you've not seen it, you have been deprived of a fine cinematic experience. The film also starred Joseph Cotten, who had appeared with Welles eight years before in Welles' magnus opus, Citizen Kane. Rounding out the cast was the lovely Italian actress, Alida Valli, who had appeared in the early 1940s Italian films, Noi Vivi and Addio, Kira, both based upon "We The Living," the first novel of Ayn Rand.
Directed by Goffredo Alessandrini, "Noi Vivi" (later combined with its sequel into a single film decades later) was a bold anti-totalitarian work considering who was running Italy at the time. The film generally avoids the haughty certainty of its source material and its author, who most thinking people abandon after a literary fling during the first semester of their freshman year of college. Although Rand was fiercely anti-communist, a champion of individualism seems less credible when she runs her school of thought as an absolutist. Rand - like the totaliarians she held in such great disdain - refused to tolerate any dissent in her philosophical movement, Objectivism. Further, Rand's novels are vexing in that her characters are not human beings to whom the reader can relate so much as amalgams of Rand's various philosophical tenets. As such, these Objectivist archetypes do not feel, emote, or change, as they have already reached the Randian ideal and thus they are already perfect in their creator's eyes. The other characters, as polar opposites of Rand's darlings, are weak stereotypes of collectivists or traitors to the capitalist utopia for which Rand longed. But with Valli as the protagonist/Rand surrogate, such faults can be overlooked when translated to celluloid.
What better way to recognize that the parlous perils of one's profession can preempt a blog post than to recognize Elsa Lanchester, the title character in 1935's Bride of Frankenstein? At 33, she was still a relatively young actress when she played the role with which she would forever be associated. Despite the fame and notoriety of her role as the monster's wife, few modern viewers know her name, or any other role which she played over the remaining forty five years of her career. (Her last film role was in 1980's Murder by Death; she died in 1986).
Business travel keeps me from making a substantive post today, but I do have time to pause and ask of you, how could you not have signed up for the Spinal Tap Fan Club in 1992 when the world's loudest band resurfaced to support its then-new album, Break Like The Wind?
Dear Fan,1992 was also the year of The Return of Spinal Tap, a television special and faux sequel to the originally faux movie which gave birth to their careers in the first place. (This would later be released on DVD; thank the maker.). Also that year, Tap's members quibbled with Metallica about black album covers and that band's theft of that concept for their 1991 self-titled album:
We're sorry it took so long to get back to you but we've been quite busy lately.
What with rehearsing for our upcoming tour and trying to straighten out our tangled legal problems. Oh, well!
We love hearing from you so please stay in touch.
Thanks for your support!
Travel today thwarts my attempt at a more substantive post. Have you queried your presidential candidate of choice as to his or her views on the Mutant Registration Act?
The perils of my professional career keep me from authoring a substantive post today, but I expect to return to regularly scheduled programming in time for tomorrow's installment of Chronological Snobbery. However, if it is snobbery you crave today, you might investigate the very, very new and entirely unrelated blog, Adventures in Literary Snobbery, authored by one Calliope of New York City. That blog has but two posts, but its most recent entry concerns Kevin Brockmeier's haunting novel, A Brief History of the Dead (about which I myself previously blogged here). In the novel, the afterlife is a city filled with everyone who is specifically remembered by someone - anyone - who still lives. But Calliope writes that this city of the dead may actually be preferable to those in which we dwell while alive:You die and wake up in a giant city. The city is very much like the ones found on the Earth you knew in life: apartment buildings, divey diners, giant corporations, mom ‘n pop stores, bums on the sidewalks, overflowing trash cans. But somehow, this city – The City of The Dead – is better than anything you experienced while you were alive.There’s a “what if” game that’s fun to play: What if you could go back to high school (or “your twenties” or “elementary school”) with everything you knew now? What pitfalls would you avoid? What mistakes would you correct? What encounters would you risk?
In The Brief History of the Dead, this is exactly the sort of scenario Kevin Brockmeier envisions for his version of Heaven; not eternal perfection, but knowledge and second chances.
...
The trappings of a universal and perfect heaven are disregarded as illogical; because how could “perfection” be universal? These tiny happinesses are only exist for each individual character and are made all the sweeter because they were given the chance to choose their happiness.
Ah, second chances.
Nostalgic popular culture posts will return tomorrow; thanks for your patience.
Fatigue preempts a substantive post today, but you must behold the Wikipedia entry for Skeletor, evil jackanapes and foe of 1980s era cartoon hero He-Man. Startling is the length and depth of this entry (which, as of today, includes sections entitled "The Scare Glow controversy," "Skeletor in popular culture" (where else would he be?), and, of course, "The question of Skeletor's head," in which we learn, at last, that "[i]t has never been clarified as to what extent any version of Skeletor is supposed to have remaining fleshy matter in his head, and thus to what extent Skeletor retains normal biological functions, if any."). One of the criticisms of Wikipedia is its priorities; its collected knowledge of things pop culture is encyclopedic, while its entries on things of more import are less so. (See generally the Wikipedia entry for lightsaber, or compare those of comic strip character Mallard Fillmore and former U.S. President Millard Fillmore.). That said, without this resource, how would we know that Skeletor may have once been Keldor, uncle to Price Adam/He-Man? Where would we turn for information on Panthor, Skeletor's "evil feline companion"? How could his relationship with Stinkor, "The Evil Master of Odors," be fully explored? ("[Skeletor] does seem to have a sense of smell though, as he is shown in the 2002 MYP series attempting to block his nose when Stinkor appears before him to beg a boon, which has some logic as his skull would still have nasal passages permitting him to breathe, if he in fact still needs to."). Thank the maker that these truly scholarly issues have been addressed and forever preserved.
The perils of making my living kept me from authoring a substantive post today, but I expect to return to regularly scheduled programming in time for tomorrow's installment of Chronological Snobbery (which will not, actually, have anything to do with Superman, weeping or otherwise). Thanks for your patience.
Really, nothing says you've earned a day off from pop culture blogging like a 1987 Ringo Starr wine cooler advertisement. That's right, dear readers, twenty years ago, the former drummer for the Beatles was hawking Sun Country Classic Coolers! They're dry, clear, and classy! Guess what? There were not just print advertisements, either. Behold, from the YouTubes:
Weariness has set upon me as I stayed up late into the night last night to attend a concert of two bands with moderately popular hits in the 1990s. At one moment, it truly felt as if it were once again 1994, a time when all was well and true worries were a decade away. However, the brief respite from the present expired, and when confronted with the task of finalizing a post for the morrow, I could only muster the energy to type these few lines, which I now post.
