Murder

Opening line of a story Malcolm Lowry submitted to a Cambridge literary magazine: "The first murder I ever committed was in a windmill."

I've never been murdered myself.  I haven't even committed a murder!  And I'm not a huge faun of murder mysteries--I feel stupid if I don't guess who the culprit is. (If I do, on the other hand, the mystery wasn't very good.)

But I do like some Agatha Christie murder mysteries.  She was Catholic, I think, and Catholic writers often have a flair for the mystery genre.  She must have had "a mind like a steel trap." Once she created a real-life mystery by disappearing for several days and checking into a hotel under the name of her husband's mistress!  Her second marriage, to an archaeologist, worked better. (She said, "An archaeologist makes the perfect husband, because as his wife gets older he gets more interested in her!")

Her mysteries have a lot of wit.  I remember the movie of Evil Under the Sun where Diana Rigg told her surly teenage stepdaughter, "If you want to have fun, go play with the jellyfish." That's the sort of line only Diana Rigg could deliver!  She also wrote Tommy and Tuppence:  Partners in Crime, a cute series of mysteries about a married couple going into the private eye business. (I saw a cute TV version with gorgeous Francesca Annis.) I liked Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple in a British movie series.

But my favourite Agatha Christie mystery is And Then There Were None. (The original title was "Ten Little N*****s"!) There's a crackerjack movie version directed by Rene Clair, with actors like Walter Huston and Barry Fitzgerald.  Ten people arrive on a desert island and hear a recording saying that they've all committed crimes and they're all going to die...

Playboy

In one episode of Doonesbury from back when Mike was a college boy, he receives a package in the mail that he calls "my monthly guide to wisdom and beauty." He opens it and checks out the centrefold!

I've never read Playboy magazine myself.  But I recently saw a docudrama series about the magazine and its founder Hugh Hefner.  It's perversely fascinating.  This was a guy with a square background--middle-class Chicago Methodist--but he had a vision that he pursued relentlessly, and not only made a fortune but changed American culture.  And yet his actual vision was a rather pitiful one:  it's for young men who aspire to sophistication and the trappings of "manhood," while at the same time behaving like little boys on Never-Neverland.  The very title "Playboy:  Entertainment for men" is an oxymoron!

The incredible thing is that Hef didn't just sell this lifestyle:  he came to embody it!  Back in the '50s college boys smoked pipes to show how sophisticated they were, and that became part of his look, along with wearing his bathrobe in the middle of the day.  He became Mr. Shameless. (I recall that he was involved with three women called Brandy, Mandy and Sandy!)

All this has been ripe material for satire, especially as Hef grew older. (There were widespread rumours that he'd become impotent.) Like when Playboy did its 50th anniversary issue--a fifty-year-old magazine for nineteen-year-old readers!  Or when Jessica Hahn, after the Jim Bakker scandal, posed for the magazine and moved into the Playboy Mansion, and told one interviewer, "I am not a bimbo!" Eventually there was a reality TV show about Playboy Mansion women, The Girls Next Door.  And the magazine actually was culturally important, especially at its peak in the 1960s.

The satirical Spy magazine was comparing black playwright Anna Deveare Smith to white Playboy Playmate-actress-reality TV star Anna Nicole Smith.  Under ADS: "Attended Beaver College." Under ANS: "A lot of college boys have seen her beaver."

The Olympics

I've seen Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl's documentary about the 1936 Berlin Olympics.  She also made Triumph of the Will, about the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremberg, which is the most sentimental thing you've ever seen!  (I always say that sentimentality and cruelty go together.)

Leni Riefenstahl's a very controversial figure. (She lived to be 100, unlike some...) Many Germans did as much as she did to enable the Nazi order, but they did it on the quiet and escaped the sort of postwar criticism for which she became a lightning rod.  When she later published a photo album showing African tribesmen, Susan Sontag read a Nazi-style white supremacist aesthetic into it, which sounds like an unfair prejudgement to me.

Some years back, the Academy decided to award a lifetime-achievement Oscar to director Elia Kazan.  This caused controversy because in the time of McCarthyism Kazan had "named names" before the House Un-American Activities Committee and destroyed other people's careers to protect his own.  The Academy people said the award was about art, not politics. "If that's the case," I would have asked them, "when will Leni Riefenstahl get her Oscar?" The answer is, there's politics and then there's Politics!

Leni Riefenstahl certainly had great cinematic talent.  There's this one shot in Olympia of these statuesque women throwing the discus together, which they later showed in the World War II documentary series The World at War as an example of the nationalist imagery the Nazis were promoting.  She was surely a big influence on TV commercial directors and photographers like Helmut Newton.

I also remember this scene of an equestrian event where a long succesion of horsemen (no women were admitted yet) had to get through this water trap. Editing is everything:  you can show a rider going down at such a place and then getting up again, and he'll look competent enough.  But Leni Riefenstahl edited it so that one rider after another was only shown at his most awkward moment!  The effect was like a statement about the futility of life...

Watching Olympia is a pretty sad experience, really.  I couldn't help reflecting that just a few years later many of these athletes would be contending over something a lot more important than Olympic medals! (Athletes tend to make good soldiers...) The thing about war is that one side being in the right requires the other side to be in the wrong, raising ethical questions for the soldiers on that side.  If only both sides could be right!

The boss

I was reading a music critic in The Village Voice who said about Prince and Bruce Springsteen, "I have the same mistrust for a revolutionary named for royalty as I do for a working-class hero nicknamed 'The Boss'"!

They've just released Bombshell, a movie about Fox News and how its boss Roger Ailes sexually abused the women under him.  Have you ever noticed that most of the women you see on Fox News have blond hair?  Very old-fashioned attitudes...

Deadwood was a TV show about a frontier town.  There were some Chinese people there living under the thumb of the local Chinese gang boss.  How tough was this guy?  About the only English word he knew, which he'd use when speaking to the white community's gang boss, was "Cocksucker!"

Ebert and Siskel did a show once about movie cliches.  One they mentioned was in buddy-cop movies like Lethal Weapon, where the two partners will get along badly at first, then go to their boss and ask to be reassigned, but the boss will say no. (If he said yes, of course, there'd be no more movie!)

The absurdist workplace comic strip Dilbert makes fun of bosses a lot.  In one episode, the first panel shows the big boss saying to Dilbert's boss, "You screwed up!  How could you be so stupid?" The second panel shows Dilbert's boss saying to Dilbert, "You screwed up!  How could you be so stupid?"  The third panel shows Dilbert saying to his coffee mug, "You stupid coffee mug!" (No doubt the army is like that...)

Mushrooms

There's a joke about mushrooms...

My first wife died after eating mushrooms.  My second wife died after eating mushrooms.  My third wife died after eating mushrooms.  My fourth wife died of a fractured skull.... She wouldn't eat the mushrooms. (BA-DUMP!) Can't beat those wife-killer jokes.

I saw a goofy Japanese movie once titled Attack of the Mushroom People.  It's about these people who land on a desert island and eat these strange mushrooms, and the result is that they all turn into big mushrooms themselves!  All except this one guy who's telling the story from a hospital bed.  But at the end of the movie he says "I ate them too!" and starts turning into one as well...

I've heard you can get LSD from mushrooms.  The thing about LSD is that a bad trip can be worse than you imagine--worse than you can imagine! You have to be really bored to try it. There was an episode of Mad Men where a character tried it and had this vision, and after he came to he ended up leaving his wife...

The Disney movie Fantasia has a funny scene, though not PC, with animated Chinese mushrooms.  That was from a time when all East Asians seemed funny. (I can remember when all East Indians seemed funny...) Because of scenes like that, Fantasia has a big following among practitioners of drug-using "head" culture.  But that culture isn't really in good taste.  Roger Ebert was reviewing a Cheech and Chong movie (one advertised with the line "Just what we need... a really good hit!") and cited a drug-using acquaintance of his, who'd told him, "Laughing at stoners isn't nice if you aren't one, and it isn't funny if you are."

Cheese

I've seen a lot of cheesy TV shows. How cheesy was Happy Days?  When a season was almost finished and the writers' already shallow well of ideas was running dry, they'd have the characters do musical numbers!

One cliche on TV shows is The Forgotten Breakup.  In dramatic terms, it's convenient for an episode to end with a breakup between two people, such as a boyfriend and girlfriend.  But the show's structure may require the two of them to stay together, and reconciliation is harder to do.  So they may just wait a couple of episodes, then show them back together with no explanation!  In other words, they just forget about the breakup and expect the audience to forget it too. (I've seen this happens even on shows as good as Upstairs, Downstairs and The Sopranos.)

Another cliche is to accompany a change in a character with a change in his appearance. (That makes it easier for the less attentive viewers to notice it.) There was this British show Tenko, about Englishwomen in a Japanese prison camp in World War II.  There was this older woman who was stiff-necked at first, but then became more sympathetic.  At the time of this change, she also started wearing a cone-shaped Chinese hat!

Such a change in appearance can also underline a change in how we're supposed to see the character.  In the first scene of Pretty Woman, we see Julia Roberts working the street in a miniskirt, thigh boots... and a blond wig.  In a later scene, when we learn that this hooker is a nice girl underneath, the wig comes off and we see her real brown hair.  Yeah, I know that Pretty Woman is a movie, but it's filled with TV cliches. (It was directed by Garry Marshall, who also created Happy Days...)

I could go on and on about TV cliches, of course.  There's the episode where one of the lead characters considers leaving town, but ends up staying. There's the one where a character makes a bad business deal, but before the show starts--we only see the consequences of it. (That cliche also turned up in a movie:  Spike Lee's The Mo' Better Blues.) There's the one where several characters are stuck in a malfunctioning elevator or locked in a bank vault...

Cookbooks & recipes

When I was fourteen, we bought the Betty Crocker Cookbook.  For a while, we were obsessed with baking bread using its many recipes.  We baked white, whole wheat, pumpernickel, muffins, even corn bread.  We had to knead the dough ourselves, not like with today's bread machines.

In more recent years, we got Craig Claiborne's New York Times Cookbook.  The main recipe I've used in that one is the gingerbread recipe on page 462.  I make really good gingerbread!  We also got a milk calendar with recipes for fettucine alfredo and stir-fry.

In one of the Little House books the Ingalls family got to a new town just at the start of a land rush, and made money cooking food for new arrivals.  Some customers like the mother's food so much that they asked for her recipes, but she didn't have any--she just measured things out by instinct! (My sister had a father-in-law who baked cakes that way.)

Dolls

Dolls are mostly a girl thing, of course.  Boys call them "action figures," like GI Joe and He-Man.

I saw a really funny German silent movie once, The Doll, directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch.  It's about this irresponsible playboy whose father is threatening to disinherit him unless he mans up and gets married.  So he buys a life-size doll to marry, so he can fool his father!  But before he arrives the doll's arm gets broken off, so the dollmaker's daughter takes her place, unbeknownst to the playboy...

One of the White House's most famous first ladies was Dolly Madison.  Someone said about her that after you met her you'd not only like her, but like yourself more than you did before! (She must have had great emotional intelligence.) She'd carry around a copy of Don Quixote and ask people if they'd read it.  If they hadn't, she'd say, "Neither have I--we have something in common!" If they had, she'd say, "Then you can explain it to me." She got the big hostesses around the country to send her their best recipes, and it was she who introduced ice cream to America.

Gratitude

I read that in a traditional Chinese classroom, when a teacher beat a pupil the pupil was supposed to thank him!

I don't expect gratitude as a rule.  I'm happy if people just don't respond to my favours by turning judgemental.

I'm grateful for parents.  In the Disney animated movie Mulan, a Chinese girl goes for an interview with the matchmaker and makes a big botch of it.  When she comes home, her father says, "Our tree has many beautiful blossoms this year.  But look, there's one that's blooming late.  I'm sure it'll be the most beautiful of all!" That's one thing we depend on parents for--to judge us less harshly than we judge ourselves.

And I'm grateful for the Internet. Because of it I'm never bored, and I've even used it to improve my social life through groups like meetup.com . Lately I've been taking another stab at online dating, and I've learned to write a pretty good profile.

I'm also grateful for this memoir group.  Sharing your memories is a great way to make friends!  And I'm grateful for Jagmeet Singh and Jeremy Corbyn.  There, I said it! (A year from now I'll be grateful to Bernie Sanders...)