Ruthless…

A 1948 film by Edgar G. Ulmer – more on that later – about Horace Vendig, a devilishly handsome fellow who just can’t get enough, of everything, especially if it belongs to someone else.  That includes women too.

His childhood friend Vic is  idealistic and middle-class.  Horace is poor, and harbors a secret urge to accumulate, at all costs.  He uses people, he lies, he is ruthless.  He ends up a tycoon, and his last flourish is to become a philanthropist:  When you have more money than you know what to do with and you’ve ruined your rivals, might as well rub it in by giving it all away.  Vic shows up with Mallory, who bears a striking resemblance to Martha, whom they both loved as boys, and that sets the memories rolling.  The story is dull and predictable, a melodrama of class, ambition, and Wall Street fantasizing.  But…there’s Sidney Greenstreet!

In the middle of the big party, another man-women encounter sets off a different flashback, one that recounts a crucial episode in Vendig’s rise.  Greenstreet, as the emotional mogul, Buck Mansfield, is wonderful, and saves this film from the trash bin.

Vendig ruined Mansfield and stole his wife.  (She’s played by Martha Vickers, the most interesting element in the confusing mess of a film, The Big Sleep).  Vendig likes to keep people around, so both Mansfield and his and Vendig’s ex-wife, Christa, are both at the party.  When Buck sees his old wife, whom he adored, he makes a scene, and we get the whole story.

Yep, Vendig thought he was sharp with his scheme to do in Mansfield, but Buck was ready for him and showed him the door.

Buck and Christa were just having fun with the whippersnapper from the north.

Sometimes, the fat guy gets the girl.  He really knows what a woman likes!

Man, this scene was great, because it was so totally unexpected!

But Vendig works on Christa, who, despite Buck’s considerable charms, is not as young as he used to be.  With her useful information, he gets the upper hand over Mansfield’s empire.  Christa, who fell in love with Vendig, had to be totally loyal and tell all, of course.  She drags Buck to the mirror to give him the bad news.  He can give her everything, “except youth.”  Ah, such a timeless theme…

Exit the king…

Mansfield is ruined, and shows his character as he signs over his power of attorney by knocking everything off his desk, hurling the fancy pen away and grabbing an old quill, then breaking it in two after he’s done.

Later, Vendig tires of Christa as he sets his sights on more useful women.  She returns from Paris to get her divorce papers.

One of those people Vendig ruined but likes to keep around shoots himself while waiting to beg him for a loan he has no intention of granting.  Christa and Buck just end up as hangers on at a boring party.

Vendig tries to steal Vic’s girl again, and gets his comeuppance from a financial titan he trampled along his path to glory.  As the police drag the harbor for the bodies, Mallory comforts Vic, conflicted by his love-hate relationship with Vendig, by telling him, “He wasn’t a man.  He was a way of life.”

One of the weirdest closing lines I have ever heard.

As for Ulmer, he existed at the fringes of Hollywood, after emigrating from Expressionist Europe.  He made Detour and The Black Cat, for which he is celebrated today.  He died at the Motion Pictures old age home in Woodland Hills, where I grew up.

Data Compression

The image above is of a late 15th century Spanish translation of Augustine’s The City of God that is exhibited in The Cloisters Museum in NY.  I was looking at it yesterday, my own copy of the book in hand.  The old edition is three massive volumes; the new one, a Penguin Classic, is a nice little brick of a volume, but still quite handy.  Data compression is not a new phenomenon.

He loved Balzac

In summaries of the plot of The 400 Blows, Antoine, the young boy whose sorry life is chronicled over a period of a few months, is often referred to as “misunderstood.”  Ignored and treated like a piece of wood is more like it.  The adults around him, beginning with his sexy young mother who finds him irritating, his teachers, and adult officialdom generally, have no interest in him at all, his growth, his mind, his feelings, or his future.  They just want to have him “taken care of” in some institutionally acceptable way.

In the only scene in which Antoine reflects on his life, speaking to an (unseen) psychologist at a delinquent ‘observation’ center to which he is sent after being picked up for stealing, Antoine reveals that he knows more about his situation than any adult.  He knows he is an unwanted child, that his mother has affairs, that his parents regard him as a burden, and that the world, generally, sees him as a worthless scapegrace bound for jail or the military.  The film presents his story with great economy, verve, and profound sympathy.  Today, we know it was highly autobiographical of the young Francois Truffaut’s life, who burst onto the scene as a director with this film at the age of 27 in 1959.

I am not a fan of Truffaut, finding him sentimental and too sweet, but this film is stark:  only the soundtrack mars the tone, adding a treacly and naïvely innocent contrast  to the bleak tale of the ‘real world’ grinding young boys to dust between its wheels.  As if we had to have that idea pounded into us that these are, after all, just very young boys.  And speaking of pounding, the title, a literal but misleading translation of the French, refers to the idiomatic expression, faire les quatre-cent coups, which means “to raise hell.”

The only things that rouse Antoine’s genuine enthusiasm are films, and a book of Balzac that his grandmother gave him.  (His mother regards it as rubbish, and sells it.)  Pressed to find a topic for a homework assignment, he plagiarizes Balzac’s story, In Search of the Absolute, which he had been reading with rapt attention that evening.  He even lights a candle to a miniature shrine to Balzac that he creates in his house.  The candle sets the room on fire; his teacher gives him an ‘F’.  The fact that this delinquent, under-achiever had actually read a Balzac story doesn’t interest him at all.

Nietzsche Reconsidered

Readers of this blog know that I have been hard on Nietzsche.  Maybe I’ve been too hard on him because of the nutty followers he attracts – but that’s not his fault.  Through the prompting of a young philosophy grad, I have been reading through The Gay Science in a ‘modernized’ edition of an old public domain translation (T. Common & B. Chapko) available on the Kindle, and I’ve found much to like.

Well, I am preoccupied with problems of knowledge and the mind-body relationship, and Nietzsche is not, but he does address many over-arching concerns of philosophy; philosophy in the general sense of a discipline that asks, “How shall we live?” or “How do we reconcile ourselves to the world as it is?” quite well.  In many ways, he is similar to what Huxley called The Perennial Philosophy, the ideas found in Zen Buddhism as well as the Twelve Steps of AA.

Step One:  I am powerless over…  Grant me the serenity to accept what I cannot change…

I want more and more to perceive the necessary characters in things as the beautiful… I do not want to accuse the accusers.  Looking aside, let that be my sole negation.  …I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yes-sayer!

Poor guy, Fred!  He lived at a time when the most stupid, racist, self-serving, and morally smug notions were trumpeted as eternal truths from the press (You vomit your bile, and call it a newspaper! – Zarathustra) and in which bald-faced lies were presented by pillars of culture as true.  Not so different from today.  In addition, a ‘muscular Christianity’ was the excuse for all sorts of international brutality and oppression over less technologically developed cultures.  Perhaps all his talk of war and battle is his metaphor for moral struggle, similar to the Islamic take on jihad, or perhaps he is ironically tweaking his contemporaries for their preoccupation with tin-horn glory, the military ‘virtues,’ and their genocidal violence – the Philosopher vs. Teddy Roosevelt.  Worth considering.

His writing shows a keen understanding of science, and of Darwinism in particular.  In his desire to embrace the whole person, intellect and instinct – he recognizes that instinct lives on, and is not eclipsed by culture – he denounces those who condemn the ‘natural’ in man.  It’s easy to take this as a romantic and irrational rebellion against the materialism and moral dogmatism of the 19th century, but he is more subtle than that.  He sees man as a unique element in nature, part of nature, but ‘existentially’ different, because aware of nature.  A difficult concept to navigate:

Let us beware against thinking that the world is a living being.  How could it extend itself?  What could it nourish itself with?  How could it grow and increase?  … Let us now beware against believing that the universe is a machine:  it is assuredly not constructed with a view to one end.

Beware New Age Gaians!  Beware vulgar mechanists!  Beware creationist teologists!

Nor is he too bad when he considers technical issues dear to my heart, such as the usefulness of assessing the nature of knowledge from a historical and Darwinian point of view, rather than a contemplative, Cartesian one:

Throughout immense stretches of time, the intellect produced nothing bu errors:  some them proved to be useful and preservative of the species:  he who fell in with them, or inherited them, waged the battle for himself and his offspring with better success.  … Those erroneous articles of faith which were successful were transmitted by inheritance and  which have all become almost the property of and stock of the human species, are, for example the following:  that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances and bodies; and that at thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; and that what is good for me is also good absolutely.

Necessary notions for the fledgling hominids.  Philosophers are not known for their rough and ready survival skills.  Logic, too, evolved from this basis, so what is its status as an ultimate truth?  And why seek for the analytic justification of it?  (Ernest Mach addressed similar questions about the fundamentals of scientific investigation.)  And this, on the ultimate epistemological notion:

Cause and effect:  there is probably never any such duality; in fact there is a continuum before us from which we isolate a few portions:  just as we always observe a motion in isolated points, and therefore do not properly see it but infer it.  … An intellect which could see cause and effect as a continuum , which could see the flux of events not according to our mode of perception, as things arbitrarily separated and broken – would throw aside the conception of cause and effect, and would deny all conditionality.

There is energy, and minds, such as they are, divide it into quanta which ‘we’ take for reality.  And the success of this strategy is the evolution of organisms with minds like ours.  But our minds are limited:

Sometimes I wonder if all these questions aren’t just a problem of scale.  As the scale of things changes, some things disappear.  As we walk around, we are not aware of quantum effects at the sub-atomic level; we aren’t even aware of molecules…  What if the same sort of effects relate to time – what would that do to our notion of causality and determinism?  As we ‘zoom’ our time-scale out to the enormous, everything would appear to be happening at more or less the same time … [from Free Will and All That]

Nietzsche, my brother?

Altered States

Paddy Chayefsky had no business being angry about the treatment given to his screenplay for the movie Altered States directed by Ken Russell in 1980.  Reportedly, he was angry about the way his beautifully crafted dialog was treated.  Here’s a rant by whiz kid scientist Jessup (William Hurt) delivered while he’s raging drunk:

“What dignifies the Yogic practices is that the belief system itself is not truly religious. There is no Buddhist God per se. It is the Self, the individual Mind, that contains immortality and ultimate truth.”

Not far from the truth, but an absurd piece of dialog, in context.  All the characters speak in this stilted, intellectual way, which, along with the deadpan treatment of the action, gives the film a comic-ironic dimension.  Apparently, Paddy took the ideas dead seriously, but this story is ridiculous, and what redeems the film is Russell’s usual over-the-top imagery, in this case perfectly in sync with the psychedelic freakout ethos of this post 60s romp that seems trapped in Strawberry Fields.  Religious, mythic, erotic, pop-cultural, oh that Ken, he’s something else!

In this series of images from Jessup’s mushroom induced hallucinations with rural Mexican Indians, Russell recreates the craziness of pharmaceutical mirages and seems to be paying homage to that milestone of surrealism, An Andalusian Dog.

That Andalusian Dog

 

 

 

Man meets his inner lizard.

 

Pagan Goddess

Adoration

…………………  …………..

 

In stone, for eternity.

As I said, the plot and the ideas driving it are laughable:  it includes an extended interlude in which Jessup regresses, physically, to a primitive hominoid state, nearly kills some security guards, and finds peace only after breaking into a zoo and devouring a sheep raw.  I wanted nothing but to survive that night, to eat, to sleep.  Italo Calvino treats the same ideas, the bliss of pre-cultural consciousness, in his wry and funny piece, Interview with a Neanderthal Man, but, as I said, the screenplay of this film plays it straight.

During Jessup’s final trip, there are some nice images, and more homages to films, I think:

Could be Kiss Me Deadly.  What’s in the damn box?

Bill Gates freaking out on Windows?  Where did this primordial goo come from?  And who’s going to mop it up?

This definitely recalls 2001:  A Space Odyssey.

The Love Goddess saves the day!

Oh,let it be the end!

I stopped reading Thomas  Friedman several years ago, but I couldn’t resist his latest column commemorating the departure of the last U.S. soldiers from Iraq.  He called it, The End, For Now.  Oh, would that it was the end of his scribbling!!

A few morsels to choke on:

With the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from Iraq, we’re finally going to get the answer to the core question about that country: Was Iraq the way Iraq was because Saddam was the way Saddam was, or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq is the way Iraq is — a collection of sects and tribes unable to live together except under an iron fist.

I suppose this was the reason for the war:  just a big intellectual experiment.

Iraq was always a war of choice. As I never bought the argument that Saddam had nukes that had to be taken out, the decision to go to war stemmed, for me, from a different choice: Could we collaborate with the people of Iraq to change the political trajectory of this pivotal state in the heart of the Arab world and help tilt it and the region onto a democratizing track?

Is this the same guy who was jumping up and down shouting about WMDs in Iraq?  Perhaps he is drawing a fine distinction here:  “Oh, I said WMDs, but I never said “nukes““

But was it a wise choice?  My answer is twofold: “No” and “Maybe, sort of, we’ll see.”

I say “no” because whatever happens in Iraq, even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it. And, for that, I have nothing but regrets. We overpaid in lives, in the wounded, in tarnished values, in dollars and in the lost focus on America’s development. Iraqis, of course, paid dearly as well.

Here, Tom follows the great American tradition of celebrating and mourning our losses, while those losses we caused to our ‘friends’ were so much larger:  2 million Vietnamese, half a million Iraqi civilians… of course, of course.

 So no matter the original reasons for the war, in the end, it came down to this: Were America and its Iraqi allies going to defeat Al Qaeda and its allies in the heart of the Arab world or were Al Qaeda and its allies going to defeat them?

Al Qaeda wasn’t in Iraq until we offered them an invitation there by reducing the country to primitive chaos.  With people like Friedman, no need for real enemies:  we’ll create them as we go along.

…the most important product of the Iraq war: the first ever voluntary social contract between Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites for how to share power and resources in an Arab country and to govern themselves in a democratic fashion. America helped to midwife that contract in Iraq, and now every other Arab democracy movement is trying to replicate it — without an American midwife. You see how hard it is.

So, the ‘Arab Spring’ arose in imitation of our war in Iraq?  That jerry-rigged “democracy”, which may be falling to bits as I write, is what they were striving for?  We are truly a beacon to the future!

The best-case scenario for Iraq is that it will be another Russia — an imperfect, corrupt, oil democracy that still holds together long enough so that the real agent of change — a new generation, which takes nine months and 21 years to develop — comes of age in a much more open, pluralistic society. . . I don’t know if Iraq will make it. The odds are really long, but creating this opportunity was an important endeavor, and I have nothing but respect for the Americans, Brits and Iraqis who paid the price to make it possible.

Wow!  So that’s what it all comes down to?  An “important endeavor,” a few hundred thousand dead civilians, lots of dead and maimed soldiers of our own, untold havoc to our federal budget, a gaping hole in the credibility of our government, and, oh yes, a lot of respect from Mr. Tom.  Not to mention the very real possibility that it will all unravel completely in the very near future into the fulfillment of the fiasco that began it.

Vieques – Bioluminescence

Took a little time to get away to Vieques, a small island off the east coast of Puerto Rico, about 20 minutes by plane from San Juan.  For decades, much of the island was used by the US military as a proving ground for artillery, with the result that it was never developed as a tourist destination.  It remains a very quiet and undeveloped spot now that the bombing has been halted (decades of agitation achieved the goal in 2003) although some, not all! are hoping for a big uptick in development.

Those who are hoping against casinos and resorts are the ones who treasure the island as a little bit of relatively unspoiled nature.  The place reminds me of my days in Goa, many years ago, but without the people.  At least, when we were there, it was not hopping at all, although the high season starts after Christmas.  How high it gets, I don’t know.

Besides the beautiful beaches with calm water and fine sand, Vieques is known for the ‘bio-bay’, or Mosquito Bay (not for bugs, but for pirate ship that used to hide there) which has the highest concentration of bio-luminescent creatures of anyplace in the world.  These microscopic organisms produce bright light when they are disturbed – nobody knows why for sure.  If you have ever taken a cruise in warm waters at night and peered over the bow, you may have seen flashes of light from the bow wave that are caused by these critters – they are not rare, but this bay is remarkable.

At night, paddling through the water on kayaks, the bright stars above, and the water totally dark, any movement disturbs the Pyrodinium bahamense dinoflagellates, which causes quite a show.  The paddles pierce the dark surface of the bay and are surrounded by a bright glow.  If you shake your hand in the water, everywhere there is white light.  Fish darting below the surface of the water leave streaks like meteorites crashing through the atmosphere.  Pounding on the side of the kayak sends out a pressure wave causing every creature within twenty feet to glow brightly.  If you scoop up the water and let it run down your arms, it looks as if you are covered in glowing molten metal.

Swimming in the bay is prohibited!  We took an excellent tour of the area led by Abey, son of Abe, who is one of those folks happy to see development held at bay.  He even is happy the military was there for so long – it kept the bay and other areas undisturbed.  He rants about the evils of urban life a lot, but seemed to accept my comment that romantic nature lovers are all born in the city.  If you go, give them a call:  they really know the territory!

Ghost Crabs will keep you company…

And speaking of nature, here’s an old video:

Touching, so touching…

When I visited Paris in the late 1970s, I made a point of seeing the grave of Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise.  The huge stone monument by the then-young Lipschitz shows an Assyrian ‘angel’ on a base that simply says “Oscar Wilde.”  At that time, the large genitals of the figure, so disquieting to the city fathers of the early 20th century, were still missing, hacked off by a vandal in the 1960s.  I was happy to read in the newspapers recently that they have been restored, at the cost of nearly 50,000 euros – that’s a set of balls!

These days, the tomb is in the news because the authorities are going to erect a glass barrier around it to prevent pilgrims from planting big greasy kisses on it.  Apparently, this became a popular custom in the 1980s, and the lower portions of the stone are covered with red lipstick marks.  Some say it’s ugly, others claim it’s causing damage to the stone as well, and thus the protective sheath around the plot.

I find it hard to believe that lipstick could do much damage to the stone, other than discoloring it, and isn’t that the sort of thing that happens to monuments over time?  St. Peter’s toe in the Vatican is almost worn away from the millions of kisses it gets.  It’s not as though it’s a delicate and fragile work such as Michelangelo’s pieta…but Wilde’s grandson is for protecting it, so I cannot protest too much.  The family wants to preserve the look of the original…

Still…from The Picture of Dorian Gray:

And now tell me,–reach me the matches, like a good boy: thanks,–tell me, what are your relations with Sibyl Vane?”

Dorian Gray leaped to his feet, with flushed cheeks and burning eyes. “Harry, Sibyl Vane is sacred!”

“It is only the sacred things that are worth touching, Dorian,” said Lord Henry, with a strange touch of pathos in his voice.