Tangled Mind

It is the dozenth birthday of Hestia Hermia Linsky-Noyes, lhude sing meaw! We sang to her after midnight. She ate eagerly of her festive ham. She has spent the afternoon in the pursuit of Bird Theater. I remember her brother under that same light. Bast smiled when our cats were born.

Not only is 42 °N a lousy latitude for radio astronomy, it does jack most of the year for the photosynthesis of vitamin D, but I was inspired by the summerlike spike in temperatures to walk out for groceries in a T-shirt and whatever it may or may not have done for my metabolism, it was worth the pitching over onto the couch when I got home.



No introduction to an actor may be as misleading as discovering Peter Lorre with Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), but spending much of last night sacked out in front of my longtime comfort movie of Robert Aldrich's The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) reminded me that I should probably count Richard Attenborough in a similar vein, all those weak links and bad influences his panicking debut in In Which We Serve (1942) and his nihilistic breakout in Brighton Rock (1947) set him up for. Never mind that I saw him first as the briskly competent ringleader of The Great Escape (1963), he looks much more in his ambivalent element as Lew Moran, the middle-aged navigator who may have his moral compass screwed on straightest of the sun-blistered survivors of what will become the Phoenix but little authority between his uneasy position as peacemaker and his diffidence as a drying-out drunk, even if his stammer doesn't after all stop him from going off like a firecracker on some blatantly bullheaded display of stupidity on the part of one or more of his co-leads. It would have been the second way I saw him, after which the time-shock of Jurassic Park (1993), jovial and grandfatherly and scientifically short-sighted. I'd give a lot for a record of his Sergeant Trotter in the original run of The Mousetrap. The time machine bureau is going to cut me off.

I have been made the unexpected recipient of an unbirthday scarf. It is patterned as if with fossil leaves and irresistibly striped.

For various reasons not limited to the overhead activity of children in the mornings, last night was the first real time all week that I slept and have thus spent most of the day in a vague state of hibernation despite the warmth of the air. There was a mauve overcast around sunset that turned out to belong to a volcanic wall of gold and bougainvillea over an agate-blue cloud-band. Have some mostly musical links.

For the more than twenty years since lesser_celery made me a CD of Peter Gabriel's Melt (1980), I have assumed that the eerily voiced French refrain of "Games Without Frontiers" was either the singer's own falsetto or pitch-shifted vocals. It turns out to be Kate Bush. I would never have identified her on my own, but then I thought about "Army Dreamers" (1980).

I grew up on Arlo Guthrie, but my favorite version of "City of New Orleans" (1971) is almost certainly Steve Goodman himself in 1970, where he reminded me unexpectedly of a Chicago-accented Stan Rogers. It's driving me nuts that I would swear the first person I heard lead "The Twentieth Century Is Almost Over" (1977) was Pete Seeger and I can't figure out where.

WERS has been playing nothing but female artists for International Women's Day, which means everything from Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman" (1978), Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine" (1983), and Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl" (1993) to Tegan and Sara's "I'll Be Back Someday" (2019), Orla Gartland's "Little Chaos" (2024), and Arlo Parks' "2SIDED" (2026). I had a moral obligation to let my father know when Rickie Lee Jones came around.

Video quality regardless, sholio's "Waking Up in Vegas" (The Greatest American Hero) remains one of my all-time favorites of their vids.

Of his foreshortened filmography, David Farrar was right to class Cage of Gold (1950) with his three films for Powell and Pressburger. He would never again be as luscious onscreen as he had been as the louche and irresistibly uninterested Mr. Dean of Black Narcissus (1947) or even as bitterly vulnerable as the self-dodging Sammy Rice of The Small Back Room (1949), but neither had he been asked to splash out his saturnine charm like Bill Glennon, the cornucopia of post-war shadow sides who fascinates this Ealing blend of domestic and underworld noir even when it knows, like his string of cross-Channel women, better.
 
Even in his era's extensive catalogue of damaged veterans, Bill is a disturbing shape-shifter, a violet-eyed spiv who can sit for his medal-ribboned portrait only half ironically as "St George, World War Two." Airmen were so heroized during the war itself, it feels like an especially provocative tilt at a generation of odeon myths to leave uncomfortably open whether this decorated wing commander became a crook after the war because it damaged him too badly to settle to civvy street or whether he made such a successful flyer because he was an amoral adrenaline junkie to begin with and whether it even matters when the results either way are this gorgeous, destructive, at once worldly and immature man. "I ask about your plans, you make a joke about the atom bomb." He romances the gamine artist of Jean Simmons' Judith Murray in a whirl of air shows and nights on the town as if incarnating the RAF-struck fantasies of her adolescence and leashes the cosmopolitan chanteuse of Madeleine Lebeau's Marie Jouvet with a bluntly demon lover's alternation of vanishing acts and the most incredible sex. The jeweled wristwatch that circulates among them does more than symbolize his inconstant attentions, it underscores his loose-ended opportunism, the streak of nihilism in his pleasure-seeking that can distract itself mid-scheme with a tastier prospect and cut and run from either at a moment's expedience. "Sweetheart, to live you have to have money. If your only trade is shooting down aeroplanes, you have to make it the best way you can." In the age of the welfare state, he's a creature of the unrepentant war, inseparable from its reckless glamour and threat: James Donald as the romantically second-run Dr. Alan Kearn labors with thankless conscientiousness for the future of the nascent NHS, but the blackout dazzle of Bill never appears except out of one past or another, the repressed on a perma-return ticket. What's the Time? glowed the legend of the world clock at Piccadilly Circus underneath which he was introduced transacting some elliptically clipped business that in hindsight cannot have been remotely legit, considering that bigamy and blackmail comprise merely two of his offhand income streams. His last words which for a twist sound like true ones will reach us through the spectral double exposure of memory. Of course his talent for inconvenient reappearance includes from the dead. Farrar had such bodily presence as an actor, Bill can't be too ghostlike when his dark-tousled, tweed-slouched figure commands the most venal conversations with the look of a raffish don, but he is elusive for such a comprehensive rotter, never once given the socially soothing out of a psychological explanation or even a total write-off. Just as it would have been nicer of the film to smooth the anxieties of his criminal present by revealing a past to match, it's nastier of it to suggest that he may retain some real feeling for the woman he's improvised into a badger game, which doesn't make it untrue. "Judy and I have a thing for each other that takes some breaking. We always had. You should know that."
 
Cage of Gold was produced and directed by the indispensable Michael Relph and Basil Dearden and while its preoccupation with the war's ambivalent legacy could be taken to point toward the social problem cycle for which their post-war collaborations became best known, it's also a fluid and full-tilt showcase for the British noir style. The screenplay by Jack Whittingham hinges its split modes so cleverly together—a criss-cross of perspectives that could each have formed their own, more conventional crime melodrama—that the film can't help but deflate when it converts in its last fifteen minutes into a much more forthright procedural with the introduction of Bernard Lee's Inspector Gray, but until then it seems to delight in laying down one immaculately expressionist set-up after another like the surge of commuters that sluices a pair of not yet lovers into one another's fateful, Tube-crowded arms. The elfin legend of Léo Ferré accompanies the star attraction of La Cage d'Or within a self-referentially gilded set that turns by dressed-down day into a vorticist rattan of shadows. The lid of an overboiled kettle chatters like the tremble of a pistol whose barrel telescopes with the steam-shriek into the circular blare of an impatient car horn. Even locations as familiarly establishing as the Albert Bridge or the Arc de Triomphe can flip in the hard-lit lens of DP Douglas Slocombe into a luminous mews of fog or an implicitly chthonic gate, as fast as the whip-timed cutting of Peter Tanner can slam a telephone's last word on the emptily curling smoke of a suicide. An abortion is discussed as frankly as the sign in a register office wearily requests, "Confetti must not be used in these premises." The joke about the wireless that pits the Third Programme against "comics and crooners" has faded to period detail, but it still feels sharp for Judy's stomach to turn at the gleefully untouchable misdeeds of Mr. Punch. The supporting cast of Herbert Lom, Harcourt Williams, Gladys Henson, and Grégoire Aslan occasionally feel heavyweight for their screen time, but Simmons offers more than a beautiful target as her pixieish innocence slowly cools and Lebeau is stealthily less decorative than her devoted role, though the demands of reliable virtue leave Donald with little to show until he's caught polishing the prints off a crime scene. With one speculatively raked brow, Farrar dominates and he should, magnetically troubling, unresolved to the end. "She had everything I ever really wanted except money." I am in the wrong region for the restored Blu-Ray, but it's not unwatchable on the Internet Archive and certainly clearer than it looked on the former TVTime where I discovered it four years ago and it seemed to have been heavily stepped on. Even so, not unlike its antihero, it haunted me. This thing brought to you by my wanted backers at Patreon.

I have spent the literal entirety of my legally adult life watching the country I was born into try to fait accompli its way into Armageddon and I have to say that it was not an enticing novelty a quarter of a century ago, either.