dual personalities

January 28, 2016

“It’ll get a terrific laugh.”*

by chuckofish

Today is the birthday of Ernst Lubitsch (January 29, 1892 – November 30, 1947) who, you will recall, was a German-American film director, producer, writer, and actor back in the day. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood’s most elegant and sophisticated director. His movies were famous for “the Lubitsch touch.”

The story goes that, leaving Lubitsch’s funeral, Billy Wilder ruefully said, “No more Lubitsch.” William Wyler then responded, “Worse than that. No more Lubitsch pictures.”

Anyway, he made a lot of really good movies with the likes of Greta Garbo, Jeanette MacDonald, Maurice Chevalier, Gary Cooper, Frederic March, Miriam Hopkins etc. He also knew how to use character actors like Edward Everett Horton and Zasu Pitts to their best and most hilarious advantage. Think of Iranoff, Buljanoff and Kopalski in Ninotchka (1939). Think of the acting troupe in To Be or Not to Be (1942).

And actresses like Carole Lombard and Greta Garbo were at their sexiest and funniest–Garbo laughs!–with Lubitsch.

Indeed, Ernst Lubitsch personified what is missing in Hollywood today–humor without vulgarity. His films had class. Sure, there was plenty of innuendo, but it was all done with a light touch.

Maria Tura: It’s becoming ridiculous the way you grab attention. Whenever I start to tell a story, you finish it. If I go on a diet, you lose the weight. If I have a cold, you cough. And if we should ever have a baby, I’m not so sure I’d be the mother.

Josef Tura: I’m satisfied to be the father.

Of course he never won an Oscar for directing–only a special Academy Award for his “25-year contribution to motion pictures.”

They say The Shop Around the Corner (1940) was his own favorite. FYI it is the movie You’ve Got Mail (1998) is based on.

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is showing several of Lubitsch’s best comedies today, so check the schedule here and set your DVR.

I know who I’ll be toasting and what I’ll be watching tonight!

*Greenberg in To Be or Not to Be (1942)

4 Comments

January 27, 2016

Can I get an amen?

by chuckofish

President Theodore Roosevelt on a horse in Colorado; Photographer unknown; Around 1905

President Theodore Roosevelt on a horse in Colorado, c. 1905

“There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, ranging from grizzly bears to “mean” horses and gunfighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid. Most men can have the same experience if they choose.”
―Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography

Agreed, but I will always be afraid of grizzly bears no matter what and always.

5 Comments

January 26, 2016

Cute cat pics

by chuckofish

I took this picture of Ollie (one of the boy’s cats) a couple of weeks ago. He and daughter #3 have three (yes, three) cats. They are cat people.

We had a cat once. His name was Marcellus, but we called him Cat.

He doesn’t look so tough in this photo, but he was a badass.

We got him because we were having an issue with mice at our old house. He took care of things swiftly and efficiently. He was a born killer. That is what cats do.

He also protected our home and children. He would sit up in the branches of a tree that overlooked our driveway and survey his territory.

Once a wayward black lab came trotting up the driveway while the kids (and our dog) played merrily inside the fenced yard. The cat waited until the dog was directly underneath him and then pounced on him from the tree limb. The poor dog never knew what hit him. Cat chased him away.

Once Cat brought home our corgi, who had gotten out. The dog, although cute, was no Lassie. I’m not sure he would have found his way home on his own. But before he had a chance to get really lost, the cat led him home. The cat and the dog got along fine, but there never was any question who was in charge.

As it turned out, I am quite allergic to cats and so we have never gotten another to replace our original Cat.

But then, he was kind of irreplaceable.

And this made me smile.

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January 25, 2016

“Woman, I am the calvary”*

by chuckofish

So I spent most of the weekend inside, in solidarity with daughters # 1 and 2, who really were stuck inside their east coast apartments because of all the snow.

Although I guess daughter #2 wasn’t stuck inside all weekend.

We had no snow besides the old stuff from our mid-week event.

The boy came over to show us his new hockey skates.

And we watched Furious 7 again and thoroughly enjoyed all its lovely ridiculousness.

The OM made shepherd’s pie.

Not a bad weekend, all things considered.

Have a good week!

*Hobbs in Furious 7.

6 Comments

January 23, 2016

You’ve come far, Pilgrim*

by chuckofish

Last Sunday I went to see The Revenant. As I sat in the theater and endured Leonardo DiCaprio’s seemingly endless ordeal (one &*$%-ing thing after another), I kept thinking of Jeremiah Johnson and how I’d rather be watching that movie, which after all had a point and actual characters. The one thing that made The Revenant worth my time was the fabulous scenery and cinematography.

The color palette was as unrelenting as the message: mother nature is unforgiving and life used to be awful.

The cinematographer deserves an Oscar.

The director does not. He was incredibly self-indulgent. Frequent hallucinatory dream sequences and references to other movies like Dursu Uzala and Star Wars (?) did not add anything. Nor did he seem to know anything much about the time period and people he depicted. The film gave no context: we don’t know when the movie takes place (the 1820s by my reckoning), where (Canadian Rockies?) or what the relationships are between the various groups (French trappers, British trappers, Americans? and Native Americans), who is in charge (military? private company?), or what their objectives are (other than to get fur). Doubtless that was supposed to add to the authenticity of our viewing experience. I just found it annoying.

Leo doesn’t know what’s gong on either

Although purportedly based on the true story of Hugh Glass, the scriptwriter embellished it by giving Glass a half-breed son, so that he could include lots of a-historical racial prejudice and show how bad people used to be. He also apparently thought he needed to give Glass better motivation for revenge than just having been left for dead in the middle of nowhere.

I’d grimace, too.

Leonardo DiCaprio deserves an award for surviving, but not for acting (at least not in this movie). While it’s true that he proved amazingly versatile at grunting and grimacing in pain, and he can crawl and tear at raw meat with the best of ’em, one cannot call it acting. I bet he felt all of that pain, cold, and general ickyness. I kept expecting him to whisper “the horror, the horror.” And much as I like Tom Hardy, in this movie he was…Tom Hardy, the bad guy we’ve seen before. Moreover, it was often difficult to understand what he was saying. And the film score was entirely forgettable.

Now that I’ve torn it to shreds, I will say that I did not entirely hate the movie or regret the time spent watching it (seriously, that scenery is amazing). I guess the most damning indication of its weakness was that I never once forgot that I was in a theater watching a movie. I never connected to the characters enough to forget myself in their story.

Let’s all go watch Jeremiah Johnson, which has great scenery, lots of color, wonderful characters (super script), is superbly acted and directed, and has a really great score. In short, it has everything that The Revenant does not.

*Bear Claw (Will Geer) in Jeremiah Johnson

all pictures found on Google image.

3 Comments

January 22, 2016

So God imparts to human hearts

by chuckofish

Phillips Brooks (December 13, 1835 – January 23, 1893) was an American clergyman and author, who briefly served as Bishop of Massachusetts in the Episcopal Church during the early 1890s. In the Episcopal liturgical calendar he is remembered on January 23.

Phillips Brooks memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Trinity Church, Boston

Under his inspiration, architect Henry Hobson Richardson, muralist John La Farge, and stained glass artists William Morris and Edward Burne Jones created an architectural masterpiece in Trinity Church, Boston.

A favorite building of mine, this picture of the beloved church in Copley Square hangs in my flyover university office.

Brooks died in 1893, after an episcopate of only 15 months. His death was a major event in the history of Boston. One observer reported: “They buried him like a king. Harvard students carried his body on their shoulders. All barriers of denomination were down. Roman Catholics and Unitarians felt that a great man had fallen in Israel.”

Remembered today mostly as the man who wrote “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” he must have been quite the guy.

Collect of the Day: Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts, 1893

O everlasting God, you revealed truth to your servant Phillips Brooks, and so formed and molded his mind and heart that he was able to mediate that truth with grace and power: Grant, we pray, that all those whom you call to preach the Gospel may steep themselves in your Word, and conform their lives to your will; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Have a good weekend!

6 Comments

January 21, 2016

What are you reading?

by chuckofish

I read Elizabeth Strout’s new book My Name is Lucy Barton as soon as it came out last week. When I finished, I turned to the beginning and started it again. It is a slim novel, but packed with the good stuff.

I have sometimes been sad that Tennessee Williams wrote that line for Blanche DuBois, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Many of us have been saved many times by the kindness of strangers, but after a while it sounds trite, like a bumper sticker. And that’s what makes me sad, that a beautiful and true line comes to be used so often that it takes on the superficial sound of a bumper sticker.

Mother-daughter issues, a lonely childhood, being a writer. She is terrific.

I am finishing up A New Song by Jan Karon, which I have been re-reading between other books. Karon always keeps me centered and calms me down.

“When the trees and the power lines crashed around you, when the very roof gave way above you, when the light turned to darkness and water turned to dust, did you call on Him?

“When you called on Him, was He somewhere up there, or was He as near as your very breath?”

I took my dual personality’s advice and ordered the mystery by Jussi Adler-Olsen. The Power of Her Sympathy is the autobiography and journal of the mid-19th century author Catharine Maria Sedgwick about whom daughter #2 is writing in her dissertation. I have to try and keep up.

And after watching Double Indemnity I thought it might be time to re-read some Raymond Chandler.

What are you reading?

(The painting is by Winslow Homer.)

2 Comments

January 20, 2016

Mid-week pep talk

by chuckofish

William Morris Hunt (1824-1879)

“We tend to use prayer as a last resort, but God wants it to be our first line of defense. We pray when there’s nothing else we can do, but God wants us to pray before we do anything at all.

Most of us would prefer, however, to spend our time doing something that will get immediate results. We don’t want to wait for God to resolve matters in His good time because His idea of ‘good time’ is seldom in sync with ours.”

–Oswald Chambers

3 Comments

January 19, 2016

Happy Birthday, Mary, Dolly and Buffy

by chuckofish

Our mother and her older sister Susanne, circa 1930

Ah, it is January 19th once again. My mother would be turning 90! Dolly Parton is turning 70! And Buffy Summers remains a youthful fictional character.

In the above picture our Aunt Susanne is two years older (and so much taller!) than our mother. She has a hankie and bracelets. Mary looks as if she has just been told to “Quit it!” by Susanne who probably squeezed her hand in a mean way. Susanne looks tense and my mother looks a little sad.

Growing up, we heard a lot of stories about our mother’s perfect older sister. Although poised and beautiful, she was also very shy. Once when she left her umbrella on the bus, she made Mary go and stand at the bus stop and ask every bus driver on every bus that stopped if they had found Susanne’s umbrella. She was too shy to do it herself and too afraid to tell her mother she had lost it. We always were amazed that she could make our mother do something like that. But she could. She probably threatened to tell on her or something. Or maybe Mary was just used to doing things for her older sister.

Not to give you the wrong idea. My mother was devoted to Susanne and loved her very much. When she visited her in the summer of 1984, they would stay up until four in the morning talking. I think she was a little shocked by her older sister’s lifestyle. She had been divorced for ten years by then and had a boyfriend. She drank Scotch and stayed up late talking. She did what she damn well pleased.

When my mother was dying, it was Susanne she liked to talk to best. “She understood,” she said.

Sisters. There is no friend like a sister, right?

And there is no one like Dolly. Of course, I’ll be toasting my dear mother tonight, along with wonderful Dolly and Buffy. And while I’m at it, I’ll toast Susanne and sisters everywhere.

5 Comments

January 18, 2016

Speaking of mothers

by chuckofish

It was snowing and very cold when I woke up on Sunday morning, but I had to get up and go to church because I was reading the second lesson. Luckily it was a good passage: I Corinthians 12:1-11–the one about there being varieties of gifts, but one Spirit.

⁴Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; ⁵and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; ⁶and there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in every one. ⁷To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. ⁸To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, ⁹to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, ¹⁰to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. ¹¹All these are inspired by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.

It is a good reminder to think about what our gifts are and to use them appropriately.

The Gospel was about the wedding in Cana when Jesus uses a tone with his mother, but then does what she asks him.

The Marriage at Cana by Giotto

Sounds familiar, all you mothers of sons, right?

It is interesting to note that Mary at this early point thinks Jesus can do something about the fact that the wedding party has run out of wine… Well, lots of food for thought.

Speaking of mothers, I bought a frame at an estate sale on Saturday which enabled me to put these three pictures together:

Mary Hough (great-great grandmother), Anna Hough Carnahan (great-grandmother) and Catherine Carnahan Cameron (grandmother). Pretty cool, eh?

I have today off for Martin Luther King’s birthday–how ’bout you?

*The top photo is of some Middlebury College skiers in the 1940s. Is that my mother, the third from the right?

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