Myth Happens

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.

Diameter of mental blast crater not diminished. Outside is absurdly springlike following the double-tap of winter that required me to shovel my mother's car out twice, once for the unexpected four inches of snow and then for the glacial swamp the succeeding sleet turned the driveway into. In the process I seem to have inherited the Bat, the stupidest motorcycle jacket I have met in my life. It doesn't have sleeves so much as it has patagia. It is covered with snaps that open into flaps and none of them into pockets. The total design suggests that it may be so heavily constructed because otherwise in a sufficiently stiff gust of wind its owner could achieve accidental unpowered flight. It looks like an opera cape with ambitions of fetish night. My mother insisted on it because I had run out to shovel the first time in my flannel shirtsleeves and the second time my corduroy coat was obviously not adequate to the slush-fall, but it was a present to my father from my grandparents about forty years ago and it looks functionally mint because he has spent most of that time avoiding ever wearing it. In its defense, it is extremely warm and also I look like a tire. There will be no photographs.

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 was supposed to spend the afternoon with my husband and instead I am about to spend it at the doctor's. The one is obviously much preferable to the other. Have a photo I took yesterday when I was out and walking and thought I had a decent chance of doing something human with the end of my week.

Stepping out of the house for a short walk around the neighborhood, I discovered that a friend had sent me a surprise gift in the mail and that between their post office and my doorstep it had been stolen. I received a gutted envelope slit down the side containing brown paper from which the gift had been shaken out. The stiff paper of the accompanying note had wedged hard enough into the envelope that after some stricken searching it was still in there; the handmade buttons and the picture were not. I assume the thief was looking for checks or more conventionally defined valuables, but it seems unspeakably cruel to let the envelope continue on its way and arrive to tell me what kindness I had been robbed of. I still have the note. The kindness itself did travel the distance. But I still want the thief to fall in front of a freight express.

The snow has plastered our windows like blinds. This morning it scudded so thickly down our street that the air itself couldn't have been any clearer: it made walls instead of veils of the late streetlight. The yew trees look like calcified humps of stalagmite. It's still blowing around out there, bending the whippier evergreens of the neighbors' yard like a wind sock. I can hear a commuter train whistling dimly from over Route 16. I am informed we have broken the previous state record for snowfall in a day set by the 1997 April Fool's Day Blizzard which had itself surpassed the Blizzard of '78. Our porch is drifted ankle-deep.

I am operating at about sixteen percent of a person thanks to medical needlessness and it puts me at something of a disadvantage in reacting to the ending of Susan Cooper's J. B. Priestley: Portrait of an Author (1970) with anything more critically incisive than profanity.

To rewind a hot semi-linear second, I had just meant to complain that it feels almost superfluous for Cooper's The Grey King (1975) and Alan Garner's The Owl Service (1967) to be geographically as well as mythologically neighbors. Given their mutual setting in the valleys of North Wales, it finally occurred to me to check when a location in one novel turned up in the production history of the television version of the other. As anyone from the area could have told me, Tal-y-llyn and Llanymawddwy are about half an hour's drive from one another. As I noticed a couple of years ago, The Grey King is the only one of its sequence whose mortal and mythical layers are rigorously double-tracked instead of sewn back and forth through the great doors of Time: thanks to the machinations of the Light and the woman who hinges them as if fixed within a pattern of her own, the royal and terrible truth of Bran's parentage cannot be uncovered without simultaneously drawing out the tragedy of the previous generation in the present day, a sadder, messier, only locally legendary triangle whose fallout has nonetheless marked the valley as indelibly as the Arthurian stamp of Cader Idris. "I wanted to keep you free of it. It was over, it was gone, I wanted to keep you away from the past. Ah, we never should have stayed here. I should have moved away from the valley at the beginning." But the past is an event horizon, there's no escaping it in three days or fifteen centuries or eleven years, and when the power of the Brenin Llwyd has been broken and a human mind with it and the milgwn have all drowned themselves in a headlong rush of ghosts—when the Dark has given up the valley—the haunting of its human grief and loss remains. "Then the mist closed over Llyn Mwyngil, the lake in the pleasant retreat, and there was a cold silence through all the valley save for the distant bleat, sometimes, of a mountain sheep, like the echo of a man's voice calling a girl's name, far away." You see how dangerously a narrative imprints itself on a landscape. I discover that a person can go up the Dysynni Valley and stay in an Airbnb called the Shepherd's Hut and my first thought is that I don't care how nice a view it has of Craig yr Aderyn, I am not interested in tripping over a warestone while glamping.

Cooper's nonfiction came into it when I was thinking about the centrality of time to her work and Garner's, specifically the tradition of ancient and simultaneous ages in the land. It had made dawn-over-Marblehead sense when I finally learned that the "J. B." and "Jacquetta" to whom she dedicated The Grey King were Priestley and Hawkes. I had never gotten around to reading her biography of the former and was immediately distracted by it. As a portrait, it is analytical and awed by turns; she calls its subject a "Time-haunted man" and supports her argument with reference to his novels, plays, and nonfiction as well as the ghost-history that she differentiates from nostalgia for some idealized pre-WWI Eden overlapping the end of his adolescence, identifying it instead as a bitterly vivid awareness of all the possibilities smashed by the war onto the rails of the twentieth century we actually got. He sounds more than slightly Viktor Frankl about it, which I am guessing accounts for the parallel evolution with Emeric Pressburger. I was never able to figure out if it was plausible for the nine-year-old Cooper to have seen A Canterbury Tale (1944), but she wouldn't have needed to if she had the vector of Priestley. "And because there was enchantment in the life it offered, the hideous transformation scene that took place when the enchantment vanished in a cloud of black smoke, and came out grimed and different on the other side, was enough to leave a young man of the time very vulnerable to visions of a lost Atlantis—especially a young man who was to become gradually more and more involved, as he grew older, in theories of a continuum of Time in which nothing is really past, but everything which has ever been is still there . . . If there is, in effect, a fifth dimension from which one can observe not only the present moment but also everything which runs before it and behind—then things which seem lost have never really been lost at all." By the time she got around to writing the Lost Land of Silver on the Tree (1977), she would be able to explain it more poetically: "For Time does not die, Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time." In terms of lineage, I can also get mildly feral when she discusses his wartime broadcasts which relied again, not on the wistfulness for an unmarred past, but the determination to build something stronger on the scars. Describing one in which he imagined himself explicitly choosing the second, harder work when offered the choice by the thought experiment of a great magician, the assertion that "the thing which is pure Priestley is the implication of an almost Arthurian destiny . . . and the vision it offers is one not of a misty Avalon but of a better Camelot" naturally makes me think "For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you." I keep finding reasons to argue with the last decision of The Dark Is Rising Sequence and yet another would be that it is demonstrably difficult to build a workable future on a past that's been erased. In fairness, she would get the balance right in Seaward (1983). I didn't react to the final pages of Cooper's biography of Priestley, however, because of any dot-to-dots I could draw from them to her own prose. They make a book-ending "picture" of the Omnibus programme which aired in 1969 as a tribute to Priestley on his seventy-fifth birthday, wrapping up what Cooper had until then considered a pretty marginal viewing experience with:

a condensed version of the last act of Johnson Over Jordan; and again there was an awkwardness, for this more than any of his plays translates badly to the medium of television, needing the depths of a craftily-lit stage to suggest the immensities of spaceless time in which it takes place.

But then, like the moment Priestley once celebrated 'when suddenly and softly the orchestra creeps in to accompany the piano', the magic that one had been hoping for all along suddenly came filtering through this television programme; for the part of Robert Johnson was being played here by the man for whom it had been written some thirty years before, Ralph Richardson, and Richardson and Priestley between them, actor and dramatist, magicians both, wrought a spell that produced, despite all handicaps, the real thing. Time had made one of those curious spiralling turns, for Richardson had grown older to meet the play, and fitted easily now into the role for which he had once had to draw in an extra couple of decades on his face; he played it without a false move or a marred inflection, and by the time he turned to walk into infinity, Everyman in a bowler hat, leaving one dimension for another unknown, I had forgotten the deficiencies of the small screen and could indeed hardly perceive its outlines at all. I had never seen Johnson Over Jordan in the theatre, but it had always moved me even as a written play, and I had never expected to have the chance of seeing Richardson act the part which had been so subtly tailored to his talent and voice. Now, however inferior his surroundings, I had. I blew my nose rather hard, and glanced across at Priestley.

I don't know what I expected him to offer us: a non-committal snort, perhaps; a rumble of technical criticism; at the most, a bit of knowledgeable praise for Richardson. But Priestley sat silent for a moment, gazing into space, looking unusually small in a very large armchair; and then he rubbed his eyes. 'I shed tears,' he said, rather gruff and low, 'not for what I have seen, but for what I have been remembering.' Then he hoisted himself up, and was his proper height again.

For a moment, he had been caught by a spell himself; caught by Time, by his own magic, and by that of his friend, and transported on to that other dimension where still there is playing the first production and every production of Johnson Over Jordan—and of As You Like It and The Cherry Orchard and Arms and the Man and all the rest—and where a younger Richardson is turning to walk not into the shadow of a cramped television studio but into the glitter of stars and the blue-dark cosmic depths that Basil Dean had created on a great stage, while Benjamin Britten's triumphant finale sounded out over the audience. Priestley wasn't really remembering, not really looking back; he was looking outward, into the level of Time where there is no forward or backward, no youth or age, no beginning or end. Like all the great enchanters, he has always seen it plainer than the rest of us yet can.

Obviously, I assumed at once that Richardson's televised performance survived only in the residually haunted sense that the space-time continuum never forgets a face, even one whose owner once unfavorably compared it to a hot cross bun; it would have been ironically on theme and characteristic of the BBC. To my surprise, the programme does seem to exist in some archivally inaccessible fashion and I could theoretically experience its time travel through the ordinary machinery of a telerecording, which would make a change from just about everything else Richardson was stage-famous for. I wouldn't be sitting next to Susan Cooper or J. B. Priestley, but the thing about art its that its audience is not bound by time any more than its maker. The author's bio for J. B. Priestley: Portrait of an Author identifies Cooper as the writer of Mandrake (1964), Behind the Golden Curtain (1965), and "two novels for children," which by publication dates must be Over Sea, Under Stone (1965) and Dawn of Fear (1970). She has not yet begun work on The Dark Is Rising (1973). She is not yet known herself as a magician of time. By my childhood she was firmly established as one and I checked out this book because I was interested in her stratigraphy as much as its subject and was so struck to find her interpreting him in the same language which I would use to discuss her, which Priestley had died before anyone coined as hauntology, although I am not sure from this portrait that he would concede that a future which had failed to materialize was existentially lost. By that logic, the profanity being all inside my head may or may not prevent it from reaching the genizah of time.

I did not end up accompanying rushthatspeaks and his child to the zoo this morning because I crashed so hard last night that I slept ten to eleven hours and am having difficulty remembering the day of the week, but he just dropped by with a nineweaving in the car and brought me my Christmas present of a sweater in the pattern of the Minoan octopus flask from Palaikastro and the cup with the scale motif from Archanes: it's spectacular. I was able to give him the collected cartoons and comics and poems of Le Guin's Book of Cats (2025). I got to see photographs of Artic and fennec foxes, flamingos and peccaries, sloth and snow leopard, porcupine and poison dart frog. Having spent the prior portion of my afternoon in the excitement of calling doctors and paying bills, my evening's plans involve couch and books.

I spent the first half of Valentine's Day unromantically fulfilling some medical errands and then trying to sleep off a migraine, but in the evening I made keyn-ahora plans with rushthatspeaks and spatch and I ordered an accidentally four-person quantity of dinner from Chivo and watched Tales of the Tinkerdee (1962), an early fractured fairy tale of a Muppet curio whose relentlessly older-than-vaudeville gags we frequently missed from still laughing at a line about three jokes earlier. "A solid ruby gold-panning inlaid electric-fried antique!" After that I fell asleep on the couch.

Today's excitements included a more complicated dentist's appointment than originally envisioned and having to stop very suddenly short on I-93, but I did technically find my way to Scollay Square.