Up at 7:20, did the emails, with the results below:
Frost Advisory issued May 04 at 3:42AM EDT until May 04 at 9:00AM EDT by NWS Indianapolis
...FROST ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 9 AM EDT THIS MORNING...
* WHAT...Temperatures as low as 34 will result in frost formation.
* WHERE...Portions of central, east central, north central and west central Indiana.
* WHEN...Until 9 AM EDT this morning.
* IMPACTS...Frost could kill sensitive outdoor vegetation if left uncovered.
Job hunting result:
Unfortunately, Finish Line has decided not to move forward with your application at this time.
No evidence exists that proves the extended coverage of Carlson is designed to move the discussion off of Fox and onto its erstwhile anchor. But the steady flow of leaked material — including the Times and Post stories as well as a series of embarrassing off-air recordings uncovered by the activist site Media Matters for America — point to the possibility of an after-the-firing campaign to make Carlson the personification of the network’s rot when the infection goes much deeper.
People connected to the Fox case might be leaking information on Carlson to burn him before he burns them. If that’s true, they should beware. As Ben Smith wrote in his Times column in June 2021, Carlson has been a good source for political reporters in the past. “It’s so unknown in the general public how much he plays both sides,” one unnamed reporter for a prominent publication told Smith.
I should do more about highlighting other literatures. So, I apologize for not noting Brittle Paper before today. Horror seems popular: Let the Queen of African Horror Nuzo Onoh Give You a Good Scare with These 6 Books!
While I was out doing my registry thing with the sheriff and a 90-minute wait for the return bus, I slipped into a jury trial. I provided some unintended comedy when my phone that never rings went off. The headline did not surprise me, the jury looked pretty grim: Jury finds Muncie man guilty of DWI, fleeing from crash that injured woman.Read the synopses of the books below and decide which one appeals to you. The Reluctant Dead (2014) and Unhallowed Graves (2015) are short story collections depicting core Igbo culture, traditions, beliefs and superstitions with tons of ghosts and spirits included. But if you’re more of a horror novel fan, then dive deep into child spirits in The Sleepless (2016), a corpse that refuses to die in Dead Corpse (2017) and a warrior-prince fighting against an Osu curse in A Dance for the Dead (2022).Onoh experienced the Biafran war in Nigeria as a child refugee and was the victim of an attempted “exorcism” by a local pastor at the age of 13, which shaped her approach to the horror genre. Her stories have been featured in many anthologies and she was recently nominated for the British Science Fiction Awards as well. Read about Onoh’s forthcoming novel The Ghosts in the Moon here.
I poked around a little last night in the direction of Theda Bara. An old idea of the vamp being an actual vampire. I still have nothing but the idea.
This morning, I chose to read Cinema in a Little Mirror: The Hays Code and Cultural Dysphoria. Dysphoria being a generalized unhappiness, restlessness, dissatisfaction, or frustration. I like the Pre-Code movies. I have wondered if the Hays Code infantilized Americans. Not one of Indiana's best contributions to American film.
Despite these challenges, pre-Code movies often prove revelatory to audiences that bear with them. The people in these films have the same problems we do, nearly a century later: mixed emotions around family bonds, lovers who want too much or too little, jobs that ask more of us than we want to give. These characters struggle with money, make mistakes and muddle through them, and cope with competing life priorities. The Hays Code—although this was not its stated purpose—flattened out these vibrancies and transformed realistic human characters into paper dolls that pushed plots around the studio backlot like uneaten vegetables on a dinner plate.
This may sound like exaggeration. But because the Code was so grounded in moralism, rather than realism, it discouraged ambiguity of all kinds. Families were usually loving and whole, rather than disappointing or healthier after splitting up. People presented in a positive light, particularly women, rarely had vices or lost their tempers. If a protagonist made mistakes, he earned punishment, not a lesson. The colors of real life cannot be developed on film stock imbued with such black-and-white morals.
Compare two films about people who marry in haste: Platinum Blonde (1931), an early Frank Capra picture with Jean Harlow, Robert Williams, and Loretta Young; and Suspicion (1941), an Alfred Hitchcock film with Joan Fontaine and Cary Grant. In both films, the protagonist marries someone irresistible without realizing their essential incompatibility as a partner. Blonde is a lighter film, a frothy newspaper comedy, while Suspicion is a suspense drama adapted from an even darker novel. Each protagonist makes a different choice about their bad marriage; one reflects reality, the other a moralistic fantasy.
This section lets me think I might have a point:
The Hays Code, and its enforcement, easily explains the differences in these films, but it elucidates a lot more about the shape of the 20th century besides. Deliberately, with racism and sexism aforethought, the Hays Code reflected an exceptionally narrow band of human experience. It was composed and enforced by men who had a specific idea of what movie audiences should be exposed to, and that meant the mirror of cinema shrank unacceptably to the point where only cisgender, white, straight, Christian people could see themselves in it. Since everyone else was excluded—despite pre-Code movies showing clearly that they existed long before the 1970s—their lives and realities were suppressed or ignored. At a time when cinema was a far more homogeneous national media experience than it is now, the movies didn’t frequently show happy divorced women, or professional Black men, or queer people with regular lives. If moviegoers who could see themselves in the little mirror never encountered any other kinds of people in real life, for whatever reason, they might well have believed that such people did not exist.
For 30 years, this cultural dysphoria was the norm.
The Code did not fall like the Berlin Wall, on one fateful day; it disintegrated over a period of years. The reasons for its decline are thoroughly covered elsewhere—Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration (2007) and Mick LaSalle’s Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood (2000) are two definitive books on the Code, although there are many others—but it became quite toothless by the end of the 1960s. During that decade, an influx of European films demonstrated how distorted the mirror really was, and they gave audiences a taste of real, regular life, in all its complexity and pain and joy. Nothing like that had been on screens in the United States since Gold Diggers of 1933 (released the same year) or I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932).
And so does this:
In the universe within Code movies, it seems as if people lived happily, sexlessly, without queerness or disability or mental illness or any other inconformity. If dissatisfaction cropped up, it was easily resolved by digging in to traditional values. This is not a true representation of life. Life has always been chaotic and gorgeous and difficult, and pre-Code movies mirror more of that beautiful chaos. People in pre-Code movies lose their tempers, marry the wrong person, let ambition get the best of them. The mistakes they make are not held out as the wages of sin; they’re just mistakes, and characters either figure out how to fix them or don’t. And life goes on.
It’s often messy, but that’s life: messy, challenging, unboxed. Pre-Code movies can be described with these three adjectives too. Suspicion cannot. But Platinum Blonde can.
Wikipedia has a list of Pre-Code Movies.
sch 9:27
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to comment