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As Their Own Words: The "Colorless Green Ideas" of Sleep Furiously

How strange, I thought, sitting in the darkened auditorium of our local art house movie theater. Here I am, watching a film capturing the world around me—my immediate environs, the people who are now, in terms of proximity, though not, generally, of propinquity, my neighbors. Looking on once again brought home just how removed I am from the lives and experiences of the people shown on the screen, insisting instead on reliving my recent trip to New York, city and state.

That one of them is a friend, and that the film’s director is her son, only added to the sensation of not being truly part of the networks of people among whom I now happen to reside, that I seem to be less part of the land than our terrier, Montague, leaping in the fields.

The film was Gideon Koppel’s Sleep Furiously (2007), one of the official selections screening at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival. You might call it a documentary; but it really is more precisely a document, meaning that no documentarian vision is imposed on what we are being shown. While the images of rural life in Wales are reminiscent of Humphrey Jennings’s aforementioned Silent Village, Sleep Furiously does not extract a message from what it examines, other than articulating an apparent respect for the life depicted. It captures what some argue to be endangered; it preserves what some fear to be fading. Beyond that, however, the film does not so much as construct a syntactic unit from the words it permits us to overhear.

The seeming randomness of Sleep Furiously (whose title is derived from Noam Chomsky’s famous grammatical yet nonsensical sentence) invites us to study each moment, each figure in the landscape as so many nouns and verbs. It is an encyclopedia of a place, not a social commentary.

The camera is mostly static. It is the people, the landscape and the living things in it that are in motion; and it is this movement within the frame that compels us to keep watching: a library van creeping up and down narrow countryside lanes, people busy at their day’s work, farm animals giving birth, raindrops gliding along a washing line. We are encouraged to look at snapshots, rather than judge or ponder the judgment of a curator who, by comparing and setting aside, is out to assign a definite space to each artifact with the intention of fixing a meaning beyond that each shot may either have intrinsically or hold for us, the individual spectators. Instead, the people we meet speak for themselves without posing or being imposed upon.

Freed from the burden of being representative types, mere manifestations of a director’s position of manifesto, the individuals we meet come alive; and however insignificant they might be to the world at large, their words and image become memorable. It is the lens and the microphone that communicate and let communicate, that extend the hidden community in which they dwell.

For once, I got to see the life in the cottages and farms all around me, disconnected as I remain from most of them and they from me. And, next time I see our friend, Pippi Koppel, I can tell her: hey, I never knew that about you—that you put a dead owl into your freezer and mailed it off to a taxidermist; that you renewed your library copy of Glorious Cakes; that you introduce children to the art of pottery; or that you place stones upon your husband’s grave . . .

I sensed that, beneath the syntax those who look on or judge without bothering to look construct out of our lives, we are all word made flesh. Most of us aspire to being nouns, to being somebodies, while others are adjectives, enriching or changing the lives of those on whom they depend for their own meaning.

The lucky ones are verbs: those who make, who mean, who matter without being mere complements of someone else’s sentence. Unless we are prepared to remain a question answerable to others—Happy? Misfit? Either … or?—we had better work at being and creating. Try! Continue! Change! That, not simply syntactically speaking, is imperative!

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“Jumping Niagara Falls”; or, She’s Pushy, for a Corpse

Among the fifty-eight movies I added to our video library while shopping in New York City is the 1948 film adaptation of Lucille Fletcher’s radio play Sorry, Wrong Number. Fletcher penned the adaptation as well, despite her previous remarks about the merits of her original script. “I wrote ‘Sorry, Wrong Number,’” she was quoted in a 1948 anthology of Plays from Radio, “because I wanted to write a show that was ‘pure medium,’ something that could be performed only on the air.” And yet, “Sorry” has been reworked for stage and television and turned into both film and novel. If the original play is “pure medium,” Anatole Litvak’s melodrama is a Sorry adulteration. Just how much of a narrative muddle it is becomes clear when the screenplay was returned to the airwaves as a presentation by the Lux Radio Theater on 9 January 1950.

The thrill of the original lies in what Matthew Solomon refers to as its “narrative isochrony,” that is, the congruence of elapsed airtime and the clock ticking away the last minutes in the life of the central character. Instead, Sorry is marred by too many flashbacks and too much background story for what is essentially our witnessing of the inevitable death of someone we cannot wait to shut up.

Fletcher invites us to rethink Mrs. Stevenson’s role of a victim and permits us to enjoy tuning in to the well-scheduled execution of a perfect monster. In her screenplay, however, the playwright attempted to elicit feelings for a woman we’d much rather strangle, to make us waver between sympathy and condemnation. Mrs. Stevenson now has a first name and presumably a heart, however weak.

Alfred Hitchcock might have agreed with this revision, considering that the audience experiences suspense more keenly if the character is sympathetic. Fletcher also adds a moment of doubt as to Mrs. Stevenson’s fate by suggesting that her executioner might also become her rescuer.

At the same time, though, the film, unlike the radio play, compromises its point of view, letting the camera glide through Mrs. Stevenson’s room and giving us eyes to see the world beyond instead of keeping us close to the invalid who is being given a pair of wobbly legs just strong enough to make us wonder about her condition and chances of survival. Film insists on showing, even if the most compelling sight is the emotional state as written in the face of a person reduced to being all ears.

At any rate, Mrs. Stevenson died, eventually and unsurprisingly. Or did she? While on our trip upstate, recalled in the current entries into this journal, I was reminded of “Jumping Niagara Falls,” the unlikely sequel to Fletcher’s rather conclusive thriller. In it, Mrs. Stevenson is out for revenge—from the grave as her husband Elbert goes off to the Falls with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. What’s left of Mrs. Stevenson is nothing more than what we get when we first encounter her—a voice, which insists on making itself heard on the telephone, the radio, and (or perhaps solely in) the mind of the man who masterminded her murder.

That voice, in the 1999 sequel (by Brian Smith and George Zarr) is Claire Bloom’s. To me, though, as to anyone loving radio, the voice of Mrs. Stevenson belongs to none other than the aforementioned “First Lady of Suspense.” Equipped with Moorehead’s larynx, Fletcher’s celebrated harridan might have us all over in a barrel.

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Beyond Trickery: Houdini at Niagara Falls

While in New York City, I took in a few films I would have otherwise missed (the intoxicating My Winnipeg, featuring 1940s B-movie actress Ann Savage) or given a miss (the eerie Happening, which went nowhere, but worked well as a prolonged exercise in foreshadowing). Of these offerings, The Incredible Hulk was certainly the least, despite the compelling opening sequences shot on location in Brazil. Thereafter, Fantastic Four and X-Men: The Last Stand screenwriter’s Zack Penn’s adaptation of the Marvel strip exhausted itself, like so many of today’s nominal blockbusters, in CGI trickery that, after all these years, still fails to convince me.

Lou Ferrigno’s cameo sure made me long for the days in which monsters were made of materials that a more or less effectively resembled flesh and bone and stuntmen were at hand to bruise and break theirs for our amusement—the kind of hands-on work recalled for us in the unlikely medium of radio as a series of dramatic reenactments titled Daredevils of Hollywood.

I appreciate a solid stunt or expertly executed legerdemain, which is why I admire the work of the digits-deficient Harold Lloyd and the spectacles of the silent era in general.

During a visit to Niagara Falls, I wondered whether Harry Houdini, who also starred in a series of silent films, had ever gone over them in a barrel. He did not; but that is just the kind of stunt his public would have expected of the great escape artist, whose specter looms large in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which I had devoured not long before my trip to Niagara.

Rich in pop cultural references to comic books and superheroes, the novel makes mention of Houdini, a “hero to little men, city boys, and Jews,” in the opening paragraph:

In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. “To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing,” he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angoulême or to the editor of The Comics Journal.  “You weren’t the same person when you came out as when you went in.  Houdini’s first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started.  It was called ‘Metamorphosis.’ It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation.” The truth was that, as a kid, Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikola Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London.  Yet his account of his role—of the role of his own imagination—in the Escapist’s birth, like all of his best fabulations, rang true.  His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.

There was no escaping the illusionist and stunt performer. So, while browsing at one of New York City’s few remaining video stores, I was not surprised to come across Harry Houdini box set, which I promptly snatched up.

Earlier this week, I screened The Man from Beyond (1922). A convoluted and somewhat ramshackle thriller involving cryonics, the supernatural, and plenty of melodramatic villainy, Beyond features a Niagara Falls-set climax not unlike the one in Henry Hathaway’s previously mentioned technicolor spectacle Niagara (1953). The only trickery is achieved through editing, which, to be sure, makes film a dubious vehicle for the display of an illusionist’s real-time feats. That aside, however, and despite all its cardboard hooey, Beyond achieves a physicality—a corpo-reality—missing from today’s CGIdeated action-adventures. When it comes to movie magic, I take bodies over pixels any day.

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After the Falls

Having just returned from a trip to Niagara Falls, I was eager to revisit Henry Hathaway’s 1953 technicolor thriller starring Marilyn Monroe. Shrewd, sexy, and sensational, the expertly lensed Niagara is the most brilliantly devised star-making spectacle of Hollywood’s studio era. It has so much going for it that it can afford to be utterly predictable. The Falls are predictable, which does not make them any less exciting. And as much as I enjoy spotting old-time radio performers like the aforementioned Lurene Tuttle or Jack Benny’s jovial announcer Don Wilson, Niagara hardly requires any added attractions to make repeat viewings worth my while. More than the mere setting for a tale of adultery and revenge, the magnificent Falls are a dramatic extension of Monroe’s form and the character she portrays, as well as an obvious metaphor for the rush of desire and the flimsiness of the social fabric with which we attempt to stay it.

No one seems safe from the inexorable and devastating force of Niagara. Not even Jean Peters, the far better half of a couple of second honeymooners so clean as to be emotionally washed up and well past passion. Spending a honeymoon by the falls is something of an endurance test. Either your love proves as strong and permanent as the scenery or the flame is doused and consumed by it. Passion, to be sure, is no requisite for marriage, which is why the falls can be seen as a substitute for it, an ersatz externalization for the unsettling influences those settling in dare not permit themselves to experience.

No matter how many showers she takes, how many times she gets sprayed by the mist, no matter how many times she slips into a new dress, Monroe’s Rose is far from spotless. She is no Lorelei Lee, either, an infantilized siren whose predatory sexuality is rendered innocuous by her apparent simplicity and her chief interest in the monetary value of her prey. According to the Code under which Hollywood operated, a lapsarian anti-heroine like Rose must go down in her own scheme to rid herself of her brooding, volatile husband (Joseph Cotten, whose character is too unsure of himself or his position to control his wife, let alone the film’s point of view).

For the gender-confused and fatalistic teenager I once was, Niagara outlined adult life as an improbable proposition, a threatening, unconquerable front: the terror of “taking the plunge” in conformity and the peril of attempting to go against the stream while stuck in a barrel destined for the Horseshoe Falls. Wet behind the ears, I seemed unlikely to get altogether soaked. My downfall would be suffocation, not rapture. The only recourse that appeared open to me back then was to assume the likeness of a devastating and lamented corpse when the bells were rung on my behalf by the re-producers in charge of casting me aside. I never got entirely over this feeling, but have long since learned to keep afloat.

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On the Effects of Beholding the Kaaterskill Falls

“Whoever has made a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Catskill Mountains. They are a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family, and are seen away to the west of the river, swelling up to a noble height, and lording it over the surrounding country. Every change of season, every change of weather, indeed, every hour of the day, produces some change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains, and they are regarded by all the good wives, far and near, as perfect barometers. When the weather is fair and settled, they are clothed in blue and purple, and print their bold outlines on the clear evening sky; but sometimes, when the rest of the landscape is cloudless, they will gather a hood of gray vapors about their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory.”

Thus opens a most curious tale related by the late Diedrich Knickerbocker, a New York historian whose papers have been passed on to us by one Washington Irving. As Mr. Irving comments in his preface to “Rip Van Winkle,” the story in question, the Knickerbocker records of Catskills lore have long since been “admitted into all historical collections as a book of unquestionable authority.”

The astonishing incident in the life of Rip Van Winkle need hardly be recounted here, famous as it has remained to this day. Besides, it has already been retold and dramatized on numerous occasions (such as this 30 November 1949 broadcast of the Family Theater), albeit not always with the respect and fidelity due to a chronicle of such historical significance. The producers of the 26 December 1948 presentation of “Rip Van Winkle,” starring an uncommonly tired Fred Allen, had the decency, at least, to prefix their bowdlerization with the disclaimer that “Any similarity to Washington Irving’s original is purely accidental.”

They ought to have called it Knickerbocker’s original, of course—but we should not expect such scholarly attention to detail from the purveyors of popular entertainments, especially when their tongues are so firmly lodged in their cheeks as to render them barely intelligible. Arch Oboler even went so far as to appropriate the legend for one of his propaganda performances, none too subtly titled “Rip Von Dinkel of Nuremberg.”

Earlier this week, while travelling through the ancient Catskill Mountains—which, truth be told, are not nearly as shadowy and mysterious as the Welsh countryside—we happened upon the Kaaterskill Falls, the very sight of the extraordinary episode in the life of the legendary idler. We retraced his steps, stumbling over the rocks and trees that nature has so liberally and carelessly strewn upon this secluded spot. The hike was tiring enough; but that could hardly account for the fatigue I have been experiencing ever since our return to Wales. A long forgotten lecture by a venerable physician appears to provide the answer.

One of Knickerbocker’s contemporaries, the now entirely forgotten Augustus Ohrenauf, had much to say about the effects of the Kaaterskill waters in a lecture entitled “Ansichten über das Betrachten von Wasserfällen,” which, soon after its publication in 1817, was haphazardly translated into English as “Falls Deductions.” Having perused the original treatise, I am now convinced that my fatigue, commonly known as “jet lag,” is due to that jet of water emanating from the Kaaterskill Falls.

According to Dr. Ohrenauf, it was the fall (and not the flagon of gin from a party of ghosts) that brought on Van Winkle’s decades-spanning slumber and all that befell him thereafter. Without any concern for etymological niceties, the good doctor insists that metaphorical expressions like “to fall asleep” (or the German “Augen fallen zu”) are directly related to the sensation of beholding cataracts and cascades. He argues further that the German expression of “einen Kater haben” (literally, having a tomcat, but meaning, “having a hangover”) is derived from that more than catnap-inducing Catskills ravine.

Entering the trail to the falls, we were instructed to sign a register (shown above), a precautionary measure, no doubt, to prevent visitors from getting lost in the woods due to the somnolent effects of the natural water feature they have set eyes on they are not likely to keep open for long. Dr. Ohrenauf thus advises sightseers to keep their ears peeled for the sounds of falling waters, lest they are prepared for a hazardous exposure to Lethean influences.

Meanwhile, I hope to stay awake for my subsequent entries in the broadcastellan journal, in which I shall continue to expound on the matter.

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"Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound": From the Cave of the Winds

I shall resume this journal shortly. Just let me get the water out of my ears . . .

I am heading back to Wales after a month in New York, City and State. Upon my return, I shall try to catch up with myself, reviewing a few of the shows I have seen (Gypsy, again, A Catered Affair, and Attorney for the Damned, starring an old friend of mine), opening some of the books I have bought, and reporting from places I’ve visited (Woodlawn Cemetery, the Bronx and Elmira; Ithaca, on a Silent Movie night on which we were treated to a film made in Ithaca in 1915, featuring a young Oliver Hardy; FDR’s home near Hyde Park; Fleischmanns in the Catskills, where a young Gertrude Berg spent her summers in her father’s hotel; and, obviously, Niagara Falls, where I thought of Robert Southey’s “Cataract of Lodore,” from which I borrowed the line in the title).

The rush of experience is not necessarily enhanced by reflections in tranquility; but retrospection tends to improve on the performance of expressing it—especially after extensive editing.

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Audiophile, My Eye!

Has my ear been giving me the evil eye? For weeks now, I have been sightseeing and snapping pictures. I have seen a few shows (to be reviewed here in whatever the fullness of time might be), caught up with old friends I hadn’t laid eyes on in years, or simply watched the world coming to New York go by—all the while ignoring what I set out to do in this journal; that is, to insist on equal opportunity for the ear as channel through which to take in dramatic performances so often thought of requiring visuals. When. in passing, I came across this message on the facade of the Whitney Museum, my mind’s eye kept rereading what seems to be such a common phrase” “As far as the eye can see.”

It is the article that began to overshadow the empty nest below the dead eye of the cyclopean window in the austere façade, features that might well be to some what Roland Barthes referred to as the punctum—the point(s) to which the eye is drawn, the dot(s) that end up in the question marks we make of art that engages us.

What might that be, “the eye”? Are we to assume that one eye looks out into the world as any other, that the act of seeing is objective, divorced from outlook, range and perspective? Does “the eye”—untrained or jaundiced or unfocused—invariably begin to see things as it seeks what lies beyond perceiving, such as an imaginary bird returning to the nest of our senses?

A few days ago, I suffered an eye infection (come to think of it, the second one since my arrival here in late May), which brought the above picture back to mind. I am not sure just how it happened, but my right eye became alarmingly inflamed, my lid swelled up and my cornea buckled. It is still pounding now, even though there no longer exists any ocular proof of my discomfort. Perhaps, my eyes are aching for a break upon which they now begin to insist.

A day after the incident I ran into a former neighbor of mine. I had seen him only a few days earlier. This time around, he was wearing an eye patch. As I later learned, he had just lost his sight in one eye, yet too distressed to explain or share his grief. What would I do without my vision, imperfect as it has become over the years? I could not help pondering. Suddenly, my insistence on rooting for the ear as a sensory underdog began to sound rather hollow. I want to keep going out in public and see the world before I allow myself to be dragged away by the ear into the privacy of my inner visions . . .

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Shoes Across the Table

Call it the Case of the Wayward Blogger. I am having a swell time here in sweltering Manhattan; and for once the eyes have it. Today, I vowed to make amends by returning to the aforementioned Partners & Crime bookstore in the West Village, where on the first Saturday of every month (July and August excepting) a capable group of players, musicians and sound effects artists recreate American radio thrillers of the 1940s and 1950s.

On tap this evening were Sam Spade’s muddled “SQP Caper” (originally broadcast on 7 November 1948) and the lively “Taps,” a comedy thriller involving a tap-dancing sister act catching crooks in a rather more sinister act. Outstanding in the cast were David Kester (below, far right and channelling Ned Sparks) and Karla Hendrick (center) who played both Spade’s secretary Effie and Edith “Candy” Kane in “Taps.”

If you count the balloons next to the sound effects table at which DeLisa White (pictured above) worked her earful magic by slamming doors, ringing bells, and keeping shoes a-tapping, you can figure out just how violent (and piercing) the offering for the evening was going to be, each popped rubber sac representing a gun just fired. Yet, to the delight of the audience—and without recourse to the willful misreading known as “camp”—the plays for the evening were light on heavy melodramatics.

Now, this is too hot a night for research and I’m off to enjoy a few ice-cold gin and tonics in a moment; but I am not sure just when “Taps” originally aired. Supposedly, its broadcast date coincided with the date of the reenactment (7 June), even though the program states 2008 as the obviously erroneous year of production. The notes also state that “Taps” was performed as part of the anthology series Suspense; but there is no such play in the program’s twenty-year spanning history.

The Beech-Nut gum commercial so zestfully delivered might be a clue as to the date of the broadcast. I shall have to investigate . . .

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You Are There: Crane Collapse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side

I am not cut out to be a reporter; but since this just happened around the corner, in my old Manhattan neighborhood, where Yorkville meets Harlem, I thought I’d go out to snap this shot. Not that some of the more professional photographers were treated with respect. Two were chased away by an apparently high ranking police officer (one beyond donning a uniform). Ever since I got a ticket and was summoned to court for allegedly sleeping on a New York City park bench (I was struggling to stay awake reading Henry James) and dared to complain about the treatment I received, I am still more wary of the police in the at times insensitively carried out acts of policing our lives. They rarely make me feel protected. Not that the evacuation currently under way is particularly comforting to those living on the block.

Buildings go up at a remarkable speed here in the city; and some constructions sites are as dangerous as they look. You Are There, of course, refers to a radio program that promised to take listeners on location by dramatizing rather more momentous events of the past, from the Last Day of Pompeii to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. I am far more at ease looking backward, at my own pace. Still, as I walk through Manhattan on this latest visit visit of my former home, I shall take my camera along and share my impressions here. As long as there’s a radio connection somewhere . . .

Speaking of Henry James: look what they have done to Washington Square. You’d think the place had inspired Death on the Nile.

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“Elephant” Business; or, Monkeying with a Marx Brothers Script

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I’m sure many of us are exclaiming these days whenever we approach a filling station. As of today, a gallon of unleaded goes for well over $8 here in the UK. Now, I have not driven a car since the Reagan era, but that does not stop me from taking note and commiserating with the one in charge of chauffeuring me about. Back in 1932-33, the Standard Oil Companies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Louisiana, together with the Colonial Beacon Oil Company were spending some of their revenue to send in the clowns to entertain a Depression-stricken public that, for the most part, was going nowhere fast. The clowns were none other than Groucho and Chico Marx, who were heard each week in a radio comedy titled Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel.

On this day, 22 May, in 1933, their vehicle ground to a halt after having sputtered along for six months on the air. Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel did not return for a second season, a cancellation that, as Michael Barson reminds us in his foreword to the published scripts for the series, Groucho Marx attributed to the soaring profits the sponsor enjoyed as a result of the broadcasts, which presumably made Esso feel “guilty” for “taking the money.” It might have been that the puns had all the sophistication of a program geared toward those too young to drive. Contemplating their activities during what was then thought of as a summer break, Chico dreams of going “away on a ranch,” … if only he had the money:

Since the final broadcast is the only one preserved both in print and as a recording, it offers some insights into the changes that were made to a script before it aired. Not that each revision constitutes an improvement.

“Three of your elephants are loose on the boat,” someone alerts Groucho (as attorney at law Waldorf T. Flywheel, at that instant a stowaway mistaken for a famous explorer). “The elephants are loose?” Flywheel replies. “Well, am I responsible for their morals?”

In the sketch that aired on 22 May, Groucho is told instead that “three of [his] monkeys are loose on the boat.” “Monkeys are loose?” Groucho retorts. “Well, get a monkey wrench and tighten them up.”

Sponsors are like elephants. Those straitlaced folks never forget to tighten a “loose” line, no matter how many Esso references you may be able to spin out of a lasso. So, was it the double entendres that proved too much for the oil companies, who subsequently refused to pump in the money for a second season of monkeyshines? To NBC, at least, the show appeared to be far less sustainable than the resources the deserting sponsor was touting as superior.

Given the raw material, penned by Nat Perrin and Arthur Sheekman, the cancellation was not such a loss to those tuning in at home. If you ask me, the Marx Brothers, who depended on visuals for much of their clowning, might as well have monkeywrenched the entire project.