Monday

Well, here we are. An earlier post on St. Thomas Aquinas went up a couple of hours ago.

Here’s your digest:

Writing: I wrote nothing this past weekend, but I am in Living Faith today, so perhaps that counts. Looking forward to…not a good week of writing this week considering we have snow forecast for tomorrow, which means…work will not happen. Although the forecast is iffy. Birmingham is always right on the border of these fronts. I’m sure we’ll have a delay at the very least.

I will point you to one of my older sons, who does very good writing on film. Here’s a piece he wrote on the concept of awe and here’s one on the movie Judge Dredd. 

Cooking: The always great Chicken Tomatilla Stew (not spicy for those of us who are not fans of hotness) – served with rice to bulk it up a little, as well as mini corn muffins –  and a new cookie – these oatmeal chocolate chip bars are very good.

Watching: We watched Stagecoach Saturday night. They both enjoyed it. It is fully of the Western Movie Tropes, but that’s because it more or less originated them. The character acting is memorable – Thomas Mitchell as the drunken doctor, Claire Trevor as the prostitute, and of course John Wayne, in the role that made him a star.

I was interested in a few aspects of the film, in particular. First, Ford’s direction and the cinematography was particularly striking to me, not so much in the iconic Western panorama scenes, but in more intimate shots like this one:

The stunts in the climactic chase were terrifying. That was no dummy or model sliding under the beating horses’ hooves. It was a real person, the very brave (or foolish) Yakima Canutt. 

Pre-Hays Code films are fun to watch, as they confound our expectations of what was acceptable to audiences almost a century ago, but the impact of the Code, as often noted, was like that of all imposed content restraint: it required a level of creativity and nuance that serves to raise the artistic bar. Take, for example, Claire Trevor’s character – driven out of town, we assume, because she’s a prostitute. Being forthright about that wasn’t permitted, but it’s clear that’s her sin. There’s a striking, subtle moment that makes this clear near the end when she and Ringo are walking in the town – the question is, will she take his offer to marry him and go to his ranch to wait for him while he serves his jail time? She pauses, ever so briefly, and behind her are dance hall women standing in the doorway with a couple of men – their images are softer, and if you’re not paying attention, they’re just…background. But her brief pause right in that spot expresses, in such a subtle way, her own conflict about who she believes herself to be, and whether there’s hope for another kind of life for her.

And there is the theme, and how it might resonate with contemporary viewers. Many of us look at the past mostly in terms of caricature and a sort of construction of strawmen – a straw society and culture. The past we think  was a monolith of social conformity and cultural conservatism. 

A film like Stagecoach might just challenge those assumptions. For who are the “good guys” in Stagecoach? The drunken doctor, the prostitute and the escaped criminal – who gets some last-act revenge and picks a couple more guys off (mostly off screen). Between them, they save a lot of lives – including a birthing woman and her baby – and do good and brave things that the more upstanding citizens are too afraid to do. And at the end – they’re not punished for their flaws. The West, it’s clear, is a land of second chances.

Listening: We went to Mass at a not-usual church for us. The music director played a piece during Communion on the piano, and I asked him afterwards what it was. He said it was Satie – something something – and of course the something something went out of my head as soon as I went home. So I ended up listening to a lot of Satie on Sunday, trying (unsuccessfully) to figure out what it was.

And then listening to all that Satie reminded me of the duet Trois Merceux en forme de poire, the first bit of which M and I worked on several months ago – which sent me into the piano room to finally Organize All the Things – basically all the reams of printed-off music that is the fruit of the era of “Hear it, sort of like it, look for it, print of a pdf of the piano version.” We didn’t play the Satie today, but we did play with a simple duet of La donna è mobile and did that Shostakovitch Waltz #2.

The other listening obsession today was the historic Benny Goodman 1938 Carnegie Hall concert. Sing, Sing, Sing is simply one of the greatest jazz recordings – and to think of the way that the concert was recorded – one jazz enthusiast recorded it using the microphones and wiring in the hall, and then transmitted it over telephone wires to a transcription service, and those recordings didn’t surface until 1950 – whew. There aren’t many events about which I think, “Wow, I’d love to have been there” – but that concert is certainly one of them. Goodman, Krupa’s drums, that driving brass section. Nothing like it. Listened to it several times this weekend.

 

Honeysuckle Rose got a few listens too. 

Reading: I got about halfway through Love is Blind by William Boyd. I’ll finish it tonight. I had wanted to read it since I’d heard the author on a BBC Start the Week – the premise was intriguing to me: a 19th century piano tuner has European adventures. But I’m finding it – flat – so far.