Lauren Bacall@100

#LaurenBacall100

Lauren Bacall Billboard, 1948 King Syndicate

 illustration by Dal Holcomb

Rajnigandha, 1974@50...Early Sprouts of Different Love?

Katherine J. Chen, ‘In Praise of “Plain” Heroines: Why Mary is my Favorite Bennet Sister ‘, Literary Hub, July 23 2018:

“...Could Mary Bennet, in actuality, be considered the bravest, most self-assured, and most independent of her sisters? Pride and Prejudice tends to throw women in two black-and-white categories: wives and spinsters. But with her outspokenness and her desire for “knowledge and accomplishments,”  Mary seems the most well placed to break the suffocating confines of the traditional marriage plot. Ironically, with everything going against her, she is also the most likely of anyone to defy expectations and, ultimately, to surprise....”

I watched Rajnigandha, 1974,  after a few decades, on Hotstar in November 2019.

My feeling:  How it could have turned out to be a wonderful story of lesbian love (not exactly 'Blue Is the Warmest Color', 2013) without any nudity. It's to the credit to the director Basu Chatterjee (1930-) that he has allowed the film (at least for people like me) to take some hue of that love.

It's possible that the love is largely one sided....married Ira (played well by Rajita Thakur) developing those feelings towards single Deepa (played by the late Vidya Sinha), primarily because of the long absence of her husband. But it could be a little more than just the absence of male intimacy and heterogeneous sex. 

I really enjoyed the scenes between Ira and Deepa.

Especially the ones where while sleeping in the same bed of Deepa, Ira puts her leg around Deepa's body and they keep gossiping well into the night. No sex is shown or hinted at. At the beginning at the scene it's Deepa who says that Ira is giving Deepa her husband's place!

Or when Ira bids goodbye to Deepa at the station, whispering how their nights together would be missed.

I found it all very beautiful and moving. 

all pictures above, courtesy of the copyright owner of the film

Jane Greer@100...Still In the Present

When I had not read any of the below stuff, I was swept off my feet by Greer's performance when I first saw Out of the Past, 1947...

 

"...Los Angeles Times film critic Edwin Schallert smartly observed, “It took a woman’s discerning eye to discover Jane Greer as a real actress in the movies.”

 

That talent would soon be recognized by the studio’s new production head. “Jane Greer is the new white hope at RKO,” declared columnist Sheilah Graham. “Her boss, Dore Schary, predicts big things for her—based on her two latest movie performances.” Of course, she would exceed all expectations. Out of the Past established her as a leading lady for the next decade...."

 

 With Robert Mitchum in Out of The Past

 

An Ordinary Day and A Special Day

 Philip Larkin's Days

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

 

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

 

"Shadows", 1887 by Charles Courtney Curran

director Ettore Scola's "A Special Day", 1977 featuring Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren

Carol Reed& Graham Greene's 'The Third Man' @75...Orson Welles and James McNeill Whistler

I must have seen The Third Man a few times. What I like most about it is portrayal of Europe after WWII. And its darkness. 

John Gray, August 10 2012:

""In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

When Orson Welles spoke these lines as Harry Lime, the charismatic villain at the heart of the film The Third Man, released in 1949, Welles can't have realised how they would resonate ever after. Graham Greene, who wrote the screenplay, credited the lines to Welles, and it seems clear the actor added them when some extra dialogue was needed while the film was being shot.

The lines became lodged in the mind because they encapsulated an uncomfortable and at the same time compelling idea. His history may not have been factually accurate - the Swiss were a major military power in Renaissance times and the cuckoo clock originated some time later in Bavaria - but the idea that culture thrives in conditions of war and tyranny has an undeniable basis in fact..." 

What could be the ultimate source of the cuckoo clock line?

Wikipedia:

"...The likeliest source is the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In a lecture on art from 1885 (published in Mr Whistler's "Ten O'Clock" [1888]), he said "The Swiss in their mountains ... What more worthy people! ... yet, the perverse and scornful [goddess, Art] will have none of it, and the sons of patriots are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo, with difficulty restrained in its box! For this was Tell a hero! For this did Gessler die!" In a 1916 reminiscence,[29] American painter Theodore Wores said that he "tried to get an acknowledgment from Whistler that San Francisco would some day become a great art center on account of our climatic, scenic and other advantages. 'But environment does not lead to a production of art,' Whistler retorted. 'Consider Switzerland. There the people have everything in the form of natural advantages—mountains, valleys and blue sky. And what have they produced? The cuckoo clock!"..."

 

How was The Son of Man Conceived?

 I laughed my head off when I saw this on Feb 22 2024...

 artist: Dan Misdea

 

 The Son of Man, 1964 by René Magritte

Make a Racket, Perpetuate the Species, and Die...

 

artist: Caitlin Cass

The Vast Majority of Humans Today have Never Seen an Unpolluted, Natural Night Sky

 तारारूपाणि यानीह दृश्यन्ते द्युतिमन्ति वै । दीपवद् विप्रकृष्टत्वादणूनि सुमहान्त्यपि ॥३.४३.३०॥  (महाभारत, आरण्यकपर्व) " The luminous stars, thought really very large, appear small and twinkle like lamps on account of their great distance. "

लहानपणी मिरजेला अनेक वेळा घरासमोरील त्यावेळी कमी रहदारी असलेल्या रस्त्यात रात्र पडल्यावर बसत असू (आम्हाला अंगण आणि गच्ची नव्हते) आणि साहजिकच नजर वरती जाऊन चंद्राची अनेक रूपे , चांदण्या पहिल्या आहेत... चंद्र अगदी घरचा वाटे... त्याच्या पृष्ठभागावर कल्पना करू ती गोष्ट दिसत असे... हरीण, ससा वगैरे... आता आकाशाकडे केंव्हातरी पाहतो... 

Rebecca Boyle reviewing "Starborn: How the Stars Made Us (and Who We Would Be Without Them)" By Roberto Trotta, 2024 for WSJ:

"...The vast majority of humans today have never seen an unpolluted, natural night sky. They have never seen the gauzy stripe of the Milky Way arcing overhead on a summer evening, the fuzz of the Andromeda Galaxy, the faint stars that fill in the empty space between the brightest constellations. It is a great paradox of our age that even as the night sky is screened by a haze of artificial lighting, the glowing rectangles we hold in our palms can bring us to the edges of the universe. As Mr. Trotta artfully puts it: “The pixelized ghosts of photons that chanced to fall onto the mirrors of our giant telescopes after a few billion years’ journey through space are served up from the cloud in an instant.”..."

Stars over Biwa Lake, by Shoda Koho, 1930

 

Philip Ball's Enjoyable Drubbing of Richard Dawkins

John Gray:

"...In a well-known passage at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud declared: “I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation…” What is most in demand at the start of the 21st century, in contrast, is consolation and nothing else. Enlightenment fundamentalism—the insistence by writers such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins that our salvation lies in affirming a highly selective set of “Enlightenment values”—serves this emotional need for meaning rather than any imperative of understanding. Like the religions they disparage, but with less profundity and little evident effect, the varieties of Enlightenment thinking on offer today are balm for the uneasy soul. The scientific-sounding formulae with which they appease their anxiety—the end of history, the flat world, the inexorable but forever delayed process of secularisation—are more fantastical than anything in Freud’s “gloomy mythology.”..."

 In Maharashtra, for a group of people, Richard Dawkins has been a 'deity'  oops "a great social reformer" for some time!...his takedown was necessary, of course the people I referred mayn't learn a thing from this...

 James McConnachie, The Times UK, Jan 7 2004:

 

"...You could read this book as a 500-page drubbing of Richard Dawkins. It is not a personal attack — although some barbed words are aimed — but it is a robust and sustained takedown of the “simplistic”, “distorted”, “barren” and “intellectually thin” notion that biology is all about the gene. There is very much more to life than that, according to Philip Ball. It might even have some meaning.

 

...He wonders why genes were ever worshipped so ardently. Maybe it is because DNA conveniently offers a new home for the age-old idea of an “essence”, or soul. Maybe it has something to do with the male scientists who have so often pushed gene-centric thinking while their female colleagues have pushed back. Ball coyly declines to offer any interpretation of that last, curious fact, but I’m happy to try to fill in. Does glorifying DNA cry up the relatively limited role of the man in the creation of a child?

 

As for Dawkins’s notorious claim that we are machines made by genes, this “alarming gambit” represents “a sterilisation of the life sciences”. It gives the gene “an almost sentient agency it does not possess”. Biologists have developed an allergy to words such as “purpose” and “meaning” — which all too easily open the door to those waiting to usher a god back in. Ball does not want to do that, but he does want to revalorise life — rich, complex multicellular life — while shoving the gene back in its proper place.

 

For Ball, the possession of agency — and purpose, and even meaning — is precisely how you might characterise life. Life, then, is not the servant of the selfish gene. Life happens at other levels. In the cell. In the organism. In us."