The Further Adventures of Deluzy

A guilty pleasure

Sean Connery to unveil autobiography at festival - Yahoo! News.

I know, I know:  he's said incredibly sexist things about women in his time.  Hell, consider his background, generation, and position.  Of course he has.

But from the time I first saw him in Hitchcock's Marnie (1964) on television one afternoon when I was about 11, he's been a guilty pleasure.

Well, not so guilty.  The man can act.  I can live without the James Bond stuff, but he's pretty fab in other things.  De Palma's  The Untouchables (1987). Combine good acting with his looks, even in his late 70s, and I'll pay the price of admission.

Or, in this case, buy a copy of his book.

Happy birthday, Fred Astaire

What can I say?  He was my first and longest crush -- and my point of entry into classical Hollywood cinema.

I wrote him endless letters as a child and teenager (by today's standards, I'd have been a considered a stalker and the FBI would have a file on me -- or maybe it does!).

I was harmless, though. And many years later when I was a Ph.D. student in Los Angeles, I left a bouquet of flowers on his doorstep on his birthday with a brief thank-you note printed on university stationery.  I rang the bell and then ran --  Ding Dong Ditch -- but I  heard the sounds of a convivial  gathering  floating from around back of the large house, and  I didn't want to intrude or bother anyone, least of all an old man.  I just wanted him to know that his own work had led me to mine. I'm glad I did. He died the next month on June 22.

A piece of personal trivia: he named his dog after me.  Yup, a true story and not the ravings of a delusional fan :)

Weekend musings

I've had a relaxing and mildly productive weekend with my husband away on an overnight hang-gliding trip (yes, I worry -- but he used to go every weekend when we first met, and lately he hasn't been in over a year: I think the fact that a fellow hang-glider pilot he knew fell out of the sky and died a couple of years ago, leaving a wife and two little ones, inspired him to scale back -- that, and the fact that he now has a home life that he enjoys with me and the kitties.)

In my husband's absence, I enjoyed having the house to myself (though I'll enjoy having my husband home safe and sound more).  I did a (very) little light house-keeping, tidied up, worked a little (as I am also doing today), and then last night I settled down with a couple of DVDs to try out our new 50" plasma TV screen.  My husband is the one who pushed for it, but I have to say it was kind of wonderful to watch the ever-fabulous Now, Voyager (1942) on it, and even last year's The Invasion, a riff on the 1956 classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, was more interesting than it would have been on a smaller screen.

Today I've had another reasonably relaxing day, minus the DVD-watching.  Mindful that my PCP told me my protein levels are low, I began the day with a protein shake and a latte, both of which I drank while sitting in the back yard in an Adirondack chair and enjoying the morning sunshine.  Then I threw together a beef stew in the crockpot for dinner tonight and for additional meals later this week.  Protein Central.

Moreover, I've decided it's time to cut out the refined sugar carbs except for an occasional treat once or twice a week -- n minimal amounts -- and to scale back even the  non-sugar carbs.  Popcorn, okay; popcorn and chips, not okay. And so on. I'm serious as a heart attack about not taking my DS and its benefits for granted, and I need to recommit to the basics of DS eating.  I gave myself a B+ the other day on that front -- but I'd like to shoot for an A instead.

Under a rock

That's where I've apparently been living for the past week or more, because it took students in two of my classes this week to alert me to the supposed discovery of a 15-minute film in which an alleged Marilyn Monroe may or may not be giving one of the Kennedy men a blow-job. Is it real or a hoax?

Apparently this was breaking (non) news a couple of weeks ago. I missed it.

Mind you, these are undergraduates who've probably never seen a Marilyn Monroe film and who are too young to remember JFK.  For that matter, I'm too young to remember JFK.

(Actually, that's not true: I was born in 1961, and my earliest documentable/documented memory is of the JFK assassination.  I was just about to turn 3, and what I remember is being surrounded by adult legs [I was about as tall as a grown-up's thigh), seeing a tall counter above my head [my mother and I were apparently at the post office], hearing a loud broadcast [a radio had been turned on for breaking news], and a woman [a post office customer] began to scream.  That's it.  When I checked that memory with my mother many years later, she looked at me disbelievingly and said, "That was the day that JFK was shot.  You couldn't possibly remember that -- you were too young!"  Wrong. I may have brain fog now, but I had a mind like a steel trap then.)

But the point is, my students were all over this story, and yet it had careened right past me.  Let's face it, you combine the topics of sex and celebrity with  the Internet, and my students are on them like a duck on a June bug. 

So I had one student who was in the back row of the lecture hall and who had been surfing online during class do a Google search and asked him to read a brief blurb about the story to the hall full of students.  (Hey, you surf the net during my class?  I'm going to nail you one way or another -- and one of those ways may involve making use of you as a research serf! That's the risk you take, babe.).

The unsettling-though-not-surprising thing?  Because the story was on the Internet, many of the students regarded it as Truth.  Sigh. In some ways they're so media-savvy -- and in some ways they're so not. It was time to have yet another chat about Evaluating Your Sources.

I concluded by saying, "Hey, if one of you can bring me an actual copy of the film in question with its authenticity guaranteed by the end of this semester, I'll give you an A in the course. No need to turn in another thing."

They were excited and several more students decided to go online right then and there -- which meant that I had any number of them evaluating various versions of the story a tad more carefully. I let them buzz and call out remarks for about 3 minutes -- until they came to a conclusion that I knew was inevitable ...

Their best shot for an A in the class lies elsewhere.

Charlton Heston Dies at 83

Link: Charlton Heston, Epic Film Star and Voice of N.R.A., Dies at 83 - New York Times.

Not my favorite -- in terms of his films or his politics -- but Heston's death is another marker of an era that has passed.

Oscar Nominations 2007

Link: Oscar Nominations Are Announced, Strike or Not - New York Times.

Crap. I have some serious catching-up to do.

Another farewell

Link: 'Newhart' Actress Suzanne Pleshette Dies - New York Times.

Ah, too bad.  I knew her best from her earliest films and, of course, The Bob NewHart Show.

Michael Kidd, Choreographer, Dies

Link: Michael Kidd, Choreographer, Dies - New York Times.

He had a long and creative life, that man.  He choreographed the truly odd-but-kind-of-wonderful trash can dance in It's Always Fair Weather (kind of like a less happy version of On the Town).

Out of the darkness

One of the reasons I like It's a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946) is not for the idyllic family moments that this production still seems to suggest (incorrectly) permeate the story.

No, it's actually for the darkness of the tale (which is, among other things, an overt tribute to Dickens' A Christmas Carol) in which family, for the most part, is everything that drives George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) right out of his skull -- to the extent that he wishes both he and they had never been born.

It's also what George Bailey loves most in life. He's a decent guy whose obligations to family dictate his life choices, but despite his fundamental decency (in part because of it) he still gets bitten in the ass.

The strength of the film lies in its refusal to deny the reality of darkness all around us, which is also that darkness that lies in the corner of every human heart. The miracle of the story, if it can be said to have one, and of life itself (ditto) is not that darkness is banished (because it's not: Mr. Potter is still alive and well at the end of the film) but that, with a supreme effort, it can occasionally be relegated to the background.  With a great deal of effort and no little pain, the finer things in human hearts can -- sometimes -- prevail.

(I always imagine that Alfred Hitchcock noted the close-up shot of Stewart's face as he teeters on the verge of madness after making his way through Pottersville, or what Bedford Falls became because George wasn't ever born to help hold back the darkness. I figure that single shot is what prompted Hitchcock to cast him in Vertigo 12 years later.)

Today I'm going to relegate family dynamics to the background and work on the mountains of grading I've got.  And maybe, when the grading is finally done for the semester, I'll watch It's a Wonderful Life once again to remind myself of what I've written here.

I went back on my word

and stepped into a mall, as I said I would not do until after the holidays were over.

But I did it purely in order to see Beowulf in 3D this afternoon -- my husband's pick, I hasten to add, not mine.  All in all, it was somewhat better than I'd anticipated. I confess I neither know nor care much about animation and related issues (Disney's Snow White [1937] is still my preferred standard) and capture-motion is a controversial issue among animators, I know.

Still, it was a pleasant surprise to find the 3D aspect of the film relatively unobtrusive, as such effects go (based on past experience, I half-expected to feel nauseous or to be jumping all the time as blood and/or guts appeared to shoot into my lap, and such was not the case). It was also a plus to find that there is, indeed, a narrative arc to the whole thing, however much not part of the original epic it may be. 

All in all, I didn't hate the time I spent in front of the screen, and I didn't expect to be able to say as much afterward.  If that's damning with faint praise, so be it.

Thanksgiving at my friend's house was a friendly, convivial gathering. Well, okay, for the most part. I did get into a vociferous dispute about whether one's ethical obligation to live a useful life (however defined) is directly proportionate to the gifts one has (again, defined however) -- yes, was my position; no, was the position of the person whom I was debating. (Note to self: sometimes I can be a really self-righteous prig. I probably didn't need to argue as if I were verbally arm-wrestling the guy to the mat, particularly on a social occasion with multiple guests.) Aside from that contretemps, however, all went well.

And yesterday's jaunt on my own to the local Harvest Festival was nice in its own way, in that I got in multiple miles of walking and picked up a few items for others.  Its location inside a convention center rather took away from the hills-and-haystack harvest feel, but oh well.

Food has been ... okay.  I've consumed too many refined carbs (e.g., alcohol on Thanksgiving, a few pieces of fudge yesterday and today), which I need to watch -- but other than that, protein is high, no other unplanned carbs have crept in, and compared to past patterns of consumption, or even to the patterns of regular weight folks around me, I'm doing reasonably well.  Weigh-in on Monday will provide a reality check. During this food intensive week, my goal is to have maintained at 158.8 (with 159 being the uppermost range of  my defined goal weight).