Witchcraft and Relaxation

A round of Roulette gets creepy. I watch two great pictures. I finish three non-fiction books. Still revisiting the work of Bill Amend. I ride in a self-driving car.

Roulette

The Burial At Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone by Seamus Heaney, read in 2020. I wrote about this one for the January 9, 2023 edition of this newsletter. This year is going by fast but I’m getting my licks in.

Interview with History by Oriana Fallaci, read in 2014. This is creepy. In that January newsletter the first book that the Roulette random number generator turned up was The Burial At Thebes and the second one was Interview with History. If the third one is The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith I’m going to think that the fix is in. Let’s roll the rando and see.

Cartoons for Victory by Warren Bernard with a foreword by Bob Dole; includes art and comics by many various artists. Most peculiar. For a moment I thought my own game might be trying to tell me something. I did meet a very pretty gal four days after that January edition went out and ended up going out with her for like seven weeks so if I drew Highsmith again my plan was to see if there is some correlation between randomly selecting those titles and meeting fetching women. Maybe this omen indicates that four days after I publish this edition I’ll meet a fairly pretty gal. In point of fact an accidental theme for this installment is witchcraft (see next section); perhaps there’s more to this Roulette game than I divined.

Anyway, Cartoons for Victory is an absolutely marvelous coffee table collection of American propaganda comics from during World War II. Most of the best working cartoonists and their creations put their skills and talents into the War effort and the results were some beautiful, enthralling and often deeply odd humor and adventure comics and advertisements, many of them replete at full-page format. Great book that evinces the usual impeccable design and editing standards of the illustrious Fantagraphics Books. No coffee table is sufficiently patriotic for me without a copy of Cartoons for Victory. I’m in no way being facetious, so don’t invite me over for coffee unless you have a copy. I actually really would like to come over for coffee; I would just prefer that you have this book on hand. If you are a fairly pretty witch you can get away with just a few Sophocles and Highsmith books for making conversation over.

Film Selections: That Sly Come Hither Stare

I Married a Witch, directed by René Clair, 1942. All-around great movie in the fine tradition of old Hollywood — a whimsical screwball romantic fantasy with every choice and detail in its proper place and a brisk running time that leaves the viewer perfectly satiated.

Had never heard of this film until I saw this DVD at the public library with the Criterion branding on the case and figured it was worth a look. I also had never seen a movie with Veronica Lake; part of the plot of a favorite movie I’ve seen many times involves Kim Basinger’s character being made up to resemble Lake, so I figured I was remiss in never having watched one of Lake’s pictures. Indeed there was a sequence in I Married a Witch in which Lake’s character Jennifer is garbed in a bewitching hooded cloak-outfit to which Basinger’s first costume in L.A. Confidential was, now that I’ve seen Lake’s film, quite obviously a reference — Russell Crowe’s character is instantly smitten by Basinger’s Lakeness the moment he first lays eyes upon her.

In I Married a Witch Jennifer as played by Lake is the physical embodiment of the spirit of a witch who has been trapped with her father in an incorporeal form since the days of some Salem-style witch-burnings in an unnamed New England state. In response the witches have cursed the clan of the man who led the witch trial: the Wooley men are only to marry unhappily. Generations later in 1942 Wallace Wooley is running for Governor and is engaged to a shrewishly unpleasant post-debutante who is putting him on course to keep the curse unbroken; madcap hijinks ensue when the charming, elegant, sexily vivacious Jennifer accidentally falls in love with Wallace, placing his hopes for his career and marriage in direct opposition to the calling of true love and confounding Jennifer and her father’s desire to maintain the curse and keep fucking with the Wooley lineage. This makes Wallace, played ably by an actor with whom I’m largely unfamiliar named Fredric March, and Jennifer both appear to be in danger of compromising their respective gubernatorial and witch-related ambitions in the pursuit of true love. Everyone involved in this film on both sides of the camera provides the viewer with a tremendous amount of fun in figuring out how Wallace and Jennifer get to have the cake of being themselves and eat the cake of a happy marriage.

This movie is nothing more or less than well-crafted, engaging, lighthearted fun that sweeps the viewer away from the opening frames. As for my first impression of Lake as a screen performer, she is a delight even from the early part of the film where she’s acting only with her voice. Once her face and body, which she carries with a cervine grace, appeared onscreen I was irreversibly beguiled in a way I often am with the finest of the Golden Age film star broads.

Carrie, directed by Brian De Palma, 1976. That makes two great movies in a row. I’ve vaguely known the main points of Carrie for decades through cultural osmosis and have been keeping it on my Kanopy watch list for some time. Turns out it’s a really fine piece of cinema, exhibiting all of De Palma’s signature director’s quirks like luscious slow-motion female nudity, frequent use of a split diopter lens, literal splits in the screen into multiple side-by-side framings, elaborate and suspense-inducing long takes and jagged fissures in tone that jar the viewer from a sense of peaceful complacency into queasy unease or outright horror. Carrie carries all of these off better than any other De Palma film I’ve seen for two reasons: firstly because it was early enough in his career that these De Palmic tropes have a fresher and less well-worn feel, and secondly because it was far enough along in his career that he could fund Carrie as a slick-looking film with a vision and professionalism transcending its B-picture confines.

The particulars are well-known:

• based on a Stephen King novel I have no plans to read

• a naive, painfully awkward high school girl raised cruelly by a Christian fundamentalist whacko of a mother

• finds herself menstruating in front of other high school girls who bully and humiliate her over it in a traumatizing fashion

• has powers of telekinesis, the full force of which remain troublingly unclear until

• she becomes the victim of an exponentially worse episode of calculatedly elaborate pranking

• which makes her snap and unleash the full force of her powers.

In this scenario blood represents (and is clearly stated in the film to be) Carrie’s emergence into womanhood, which here and in the tradition of witchcraft-paranoia is taken to be a girl’s awakening into the chaotic and destructive possibilities of her full-bloom sexuality. Carrie goes from being ignorant, girlish and brutally sheltered to receiving her first dance and first kiss as the prom date of the cutest boy in school to being drenched in pig’s blood in front of almost everyone she knows, overall a harsh metaphor for the physical challenges and societal hangups around emergent female adulthood. The great actor Sissy Spacek, who a few years later performed brilliantly in one of my favorite films Coal Miner’s Daughter, performs the title character with a haunting vulnerability in the first act of Carrie and famously plays the post-prom-prank version of Carrie as a blank-eyed avenging monster who no longer has any humanity left to bruise. It’s a feat for an actor so young, but then Spacek was simply a great professional actor in these early works of hers (Badlands comes to mind too).

Ultimately the more popular, prettier, sluttier girls have bullied Carrie into being more like them but in so doing have unleashed a force of swirling feminine rage that consumes and destroys them and all of their peers. Carrie’s mother, played by Piper Laurie, also abuses Carrie into being what she wants from the opposite direction and gets her own serving of comeuppance in the form of a literal telekinetic crucifixion. De Palma cheekily but exquisitely frames the character’s wide-eyed and smiling death image to look like a baroque painting of an adoring Madonna, which is effectively what the character is here: mother Mary as a nightmare of neurosis.

Carrie’s gym teacher, played by Betty Buckley, is the only person who really cares about and is nice to her and she is not spared Carrie’s wrath. This exemplifies how undiscriminating Carrie’s fury has become by the end of the film. Earlier when the gym teacher character is making Carrie’s tormentors do extracurricular calisthenics as punishment for bullying Carrie there is a stirring sequence where the musical score is composed and timed to match the cadence of her drill-counting and the exercise choreography of her students. The whole film is like that — characterized through and through by this sense that every choice is carefully considered and orchestrated in concert with every other detail. It’s where De Palma’s meticulous craftsmanship and recurrent obsessions are most sophisticatedly interlaced with his licentious feel for the seedy, vulgar and unspeakable. And like I Married a Witch this is also a relatively short film that feels dense without being overstuffed. Two pictures that exemplify many of the key contrasts between classic Hollywood and New Hollywood and that are both interesting and entertaining.

Relax and Ride

Finished My Dark Places by Ellroy. It was the least fun I’ve had reading him since I started re-reading his early stuff and I’m definitely taking an Ell-break for a while. Also finished Aristotle’s Poetics and feel suitably pleased with myself for notching his name up on the complete reading list.

The last extant addition to the list is How to Relax by Thich Nhat Hanh and illustrated by Jason DeAntonis, the second in the series of slim mindfulness-meditation prose poem collections I’ve read by this famous Zen Buddhist monk. I read this one because at this point in my life I need more practice at relaxing. Not just having fun, of which I have a reasonable amount, but also slowing down and not even bothering to chase fun, to just sit and let good feelings come and find me. Not my forte.

Anyway in the spirit of relaxation I took this book to a bar I like and then took a fully-autonomous self-driving car home. I went out specifically just to use the self-driving car because I’ve never been in one before. A company here in San Francisco has permission to operate their self-driving vehicles from 9pm to 5:30am and I haven’t been out late often enough recently to have a good opportunity to try it. A close friend was on the wait list to get into the testing pool for this particular company when he was last visiting me and having missed his window he some months ago gave me his spot. On this particular evening I determined that it was time to finally get around to trying it. Plus it was free, I guess because they are really trying to get people to use it so they can gather more data, and I thrive on the feeling of getting away with things — getting nice or enjoyable things for free and/or serendipitously.

So I took my Thich Nhat Hanh relaxation book and the FoxTrot collection I’m currently reading to this bar around 8:30pm on a Wednesday to have a few drinks and wait until it was late enough to take the car home. The bartender was in a relaxed mood. Four people were talking in Spanish way over in a corner. A girl with a healthy behind that she was showing off in skin-hugging pants was playing pool in front of me with her boyfriend; they had a friendly dog that came over to sniff my hands and be petted. Normally I dislike being approached by unsolicited dogs but this one seemed in a mood form-fitted to the general positivity and relaxation in which the whole room was suffused. I drank two dry martinis while switching back and forth between How to Relax and FoxTrot: Assembled with Care.

I read FoxTrot religiously as a kid in both book-length and daily newspaper comics-page doses. Assembled with Care collects strips from a time when the strip’s author Bill Amend had a pretty firm grip on what he was doing and had let the story- and gag-writing grow a bit stale. The chaotic energy with which the rougher earlier strips brimmed had at this point in the early 2000s cooled to a manageablely consistent stove-top rumble. However Amend’s intelligent sense of design, which instantiates an architecturally two-dimensional straight-on framing with the confident but expressively curvaceous line with which he renders his five principal characters, the bickering and put-upon members of the middle class suburbanite Fox family, was firmly in the pocket at this point. The daily-strip cartooning in this book is fairly repetitive but also executed with noteworthy expertise.

Most commendably it was around this point in the multi-decade run of FoxTrot that Amend seemed to find the most joy in doing elaborate and inventive compositional experiments in the Sunday strips. Once every seven strips you see him basically give himself full permission to not even try to be funny, to come up with some nearly pointless punchline and work his way backwards from there to some out-of-left-field sequence or single-panel visual anomaly. Many of them verge on the abstract to the point where one doesn’t at first understand what is being depicted, and I actually am really enjoying not especially caring. It is to Amend’s credit that, as he began to run out of ideas for his rather constrained and parochial set of personalities and environments, he in response found more graphically strange and novel ways, mostly in the Sunday strips, to just draw weird shit.

Anyway after two martinis it was getting onto 9:30 and I was excited to give this thing a try. There’s actually not to much to say except that it was the most fun I’ve ever had riding in a car. The thing pulled up, I got in the back seat and it took a roundabout route back to my apartment that included climbing up into some heights that afforded me one of the best nighttime views of San Francisco that one can imbibe. Relax? RELAX, YOU SAY!? I’M NOW A MAN WHO TAKES FREE (minus the not-insubstantial cost of two martinis) GLITTERING NIGHTTIME ROBOT-CAR TOURS OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CITY IN AMERICA. I also took off my seat belt at one point just to see what would happen and the car was a real mensch about telling me in no uncertain terms to buckle that shit back up, with which I complied.

I am now an evangelist for this technology. With respect to Matthew B. Crawford whose first two books had a significant influence on my thinking, I’m actually not going to bother anymore reading his most recent one about how it’s more manly and anti-totalitarian or whatever to drive than to be automatically driven. After cruising in this robot car and actually feeling like it was much smoother and safer of a driver than any human I’ve ever been driven by, I suspect posterity will frown upon Crawford’s theses as they relate to manual driving and automobile automation. Ideally I’d prefer that everyone who wants to drive themselves be permitted to do so, but what I experienced that evening was fucking great and I want everyone who wants that option to have it as well. We all know that tired adage of “Free robot cars, free libraries, free speech, free martinis,” but it turns out the wise old sages were right about that all along.

Next: I start reading a newly-published novel by one of my closest friends. Possibly while riding in an autonomous self-driving vehicle.