Rereading THE MARK OF ZORRO by Johnston McCulley, it’s easy to see why it spawned multiple sequels and a shit-ton of film and TV adaptations
That made it all the more surprising that when I cracked a joke about “Spoiler: Don Diego Vega is Zorro!” at the book club I read this for (each month we all read different books in the same genre/category) and nobody realized I was joking, that I thought everyone knew about Zorro’s secret identity. They’re all younger than me so perhaps Zorro’s fading from public consciousness?
In any case, the story is set in Callifornia back when it was a Spanish province. The governor is a tyrant and the only one willing to stand up to him is Zorro, a masked vigilante who punishes soldiers for beating peasants, steals illegal tax money to give back to the people and other Robin Hood stuff. The B plot has Don Diego Vega, a man of impeccable bloodline and absolutely pathetic personal style. He’s been pushed by his father to marry a beautiful young woman and while he’s willing, he’s also reluctant to make the effort to court her (“I suppose if you insist on being serenaded, I could send my servant to play under your window.”); small wonder when Zorro puts moves on her (“Your beauty would hinge a man’s tongue in the middle, that he could praise you with both ends.”), she’s more responsive.
This is a fun swashbuckler and McCulley does a great job making Diego ineffectual. Though some of the occasional references (how can you mistreat this nobleman as if he were — a native!) make me wince.
THE WOMAN IN THE CAMPHOR TRUNK: Anna Blanc Mysteries #2 by Jennifer Kincheloe is a historical mystery series about a former socialite now working as a cop in early 20th century San Francisco. It opens well with Anna running off carrying a head from a murder scene but after a few chapters it felt very awkward, like the author wanted the zaniness of the Stephanie Plum series but in a serious vein — plus the Chinatown portrayal (opium dens! Tong wars! Assassins!) felt way too stereotypical. I DNFed it.
I picked up THE COOKING OF THE BRITISH ISLES: A Sainsbury Cookbook by Glynn Christian under the assumption it was a history of English cooking but no, it’s a 1980s cookbook looking nostalgically at the recipes nobody makes any more, such as potted hare, potted trout, skirlie and welsh salt duck. Interesting, but not as cool as that 1930s cookbook I acquired from Mum.
Back when my family moved to America, Universal’s classic horror films were still running in syndication. IIRC, DRACULA’S DAUGHTER (1936) was the first one I ever saw.
Where Universal’s Frankenstein movies had internal continuity, this was the only Dracula film that did so. Following on the events of Dracula, we have Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) busted by the London police for being found near a corpse that’s been stabbed through the heart with a wooden stake. Not only that, Van Helsing (identified as “Von Helsing” for some reason) admits he did it and wait until you hear his reason … The scientist turns to psychiatrist Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger) to be his legal counsel
Fortunately Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden), Dracula’s daughter, has stolen her father’s body, thereby closing the case. Now resuming her own vampiric habits, she meets Garth and asks if psychology can cure someone whose acquired addictive habits from their father. He replies sure — though I’m confident “lock an alcoholic up with a bottle of booze so he develops willpower” is going to work (I am curious if it was considered a legit treatment in that era).
I wish they’d gone on in the vein of psychology vs. supernatural but instead this develops into a more conventional plot with Zaleska doing her best to convert Garth into her eternal mate, much to the disapproval of his Girl Friday, Janet (Marguerite Churchill). It’s still enjoyable, with the distinctive Universal horror aesthetic of the era, though it’s also a mess, plotwise (stealing Dracula’s body wouldn’t close the case) and the relationship between Zaleska and her father needs more exposition. “The strength of the vampire lies in the fact that he is unbelievable.”
As I mentioned yesterday, before interviewing local filmmaker Christine Parker, I watched her BLOOD OF THE MUMMY (2019) streaming on Amazon. Mental patient Louise (Laura Bridges) tells her psychiatrist how her Egyptologist parents opened a mummy’s tomb, bringing down the usual wrath (I don’t believe it’s that easy for Americans to excavate a tomb these days but it’s a classic trope of the genre so I don’t mind). Except the same mummy kept showing up whenever Louise was in trouble, dealing death to her enemies, whether she wanted it to or not, and whether they were a sexual assailant or simply mean girls making fun of her. Gosh, it’s a shame the shrink didn’t take the story seriously instead of subjecting Louise to agonizing electroshock … This is low budget but it’s competently made, decently acted and solidly enjoyable. “Maybe I do know about Egyptian curses but we don’t have the time to talk about it now.”
FROM UP ON POPPY HILL (2011) is an amiable Studio Ghibli period piece set in 1963 as a pair of Korean War orphans become friends as they work to preserve a historic building from being torn down, but also worrying their mutual attraction is Forbidden Love (“I think this photo is my father too.”). This was too low key and gentle to hold my attention; I imagine the original Japanese audience might have been moved more by the setting. “The crux of the matter is how we can make archeology cool again.”
This was a productive week but it left me feeling off-kilter. When writing goes very well, it’s easy for me to get caught up in it, not take breaks, and then feel wiped at the end of the day. While stopping the work feels counter-intuitive, it’s better in the long run.
Also there are one or two paperwork tasks I needed to do this week and I didn’t get to them. That’s not good either. I did get to several but one of them is big and complicated and it’s hard to carve out time when, like I said, the writing is going smoothly.
Two more things going smoothly. First Sage, a Persian vegetarian restaurant that’s a favorite of ours, reopened after a couple of years closed. Bigger place, co-owned — if I’m understanding it right — by a successful Indian restaurateur so I’m guessing more money. The start-up menu has a smaller selection than of old, but the food is still great.
Second, we’ve been concerned about Trixie’s weight gain. Slight, but she’s a small dog so even a little matters a lot. The big problem is that the added meds both dogs are on get wrapped up in food or pill pockets. I’m now setting her total soft food for the day in a small container in the fridge to give me some idea how to ration it. It’s obvious I was giving her way more than that so this is a win.
As to work, I spent more time on The Local Reporter than I’d planned, as often happens. Though in fairness, it was fun time: I was interviewing a local filmmaker about the Sick Chicks Film Festival (specfic films made by women) so I watched one of her films streaming on Amazon (review tomorrow). That added to the time. I also wrote about Carrboro’s plans to renovate its town hall.
My own writing is going to be Jekyll and Hyde for the rest of the year, I think. This week I rewrote the Nutty Professor chapter, which includes other films where Hyde is a womanizing party animal. I also wrote the first draft of the Monster Mash-Up chapter. I watched a couple of movies and several episodes of Monster High in various incarnations.
I also got some feedback from TYG and a couple of other people I trust on the tentative cover design for Southern Discomfort. More about that soon.
That was a good week’s work. I’ll end the post with a shot of the blue tower opposite the Carolina Theater. Not that we were there this week, but just because.
That’s the point made in this discussion on BlueSky (which I can’t find a link to — I thought I had one).
It exists not because men are naturally dominant and superior but because they aren’t. And the misogynists are desperately pushing back to create a society that supports their unjustified belief in their own superiority. Patriarchy makes you stupid and vicious too. Much as they pretend the old 1950s sitcom-style family was a wonderful system for women, the women disagreed.
We see this in “Whisky Pete” Hegseth’s determination to push women out of military leadership. It clashes with his own uninspired record to admit women are more qualified and capable than he is. And some men’s terrified obsession they’re not manly enough. And that respecting equality and diversity is incompatible with the toxic masculinity they claim the military needs. I think the military’s record proves that’s bullshit, but that’s the problem with this kind of masculinity — you can never be butch enough to feel secure.
More broadly it ties in to what Paul Krugman calls MAGA brain: “the belief that effective governance comes from being harsh and unfeeling, putting aside namby-pamby, dare I say woke, concerns about stuff like protecting the environment or respecting civil liberties.” I’d say being harsh and unfeeling is also what they think of as being a Real Man — being soft, compassionate, thoughtful, those are women’s feelings, women’s work. Being a man means smashing stuff and killing people without worrying about right and wrong or consequences or really anything.
This is bad for many of the men trapped in patriarchy too but many of them won’t believe it. At least if they support patriarchy and live up to their friends’ standards for manhood, they can tell themselves they’re not girls, the worst and cootiest thing in the universe. Choking on their own misery isn’t as bad as being too soft in the eyes of other men.
This is a problem that needs fixing, both for society at large and for the victims of this mental state. The one thing we can’t do is back off on the fight for equality or put that on hold until men get over it. As Elizabeth Spiers says at the link, “It is not the responsibility of women to convince men of our humanity, abilities and potential.”
Death to patriarchy. Life for everyone trapped in it.
Yes, we can fix the problems of bad storm and disaster-response.”We have a model of how to do this: the aviation industry. There are about 45,000 flights every day in the United States. More than 10 million passenger flights in a year. Despite that frequency, the 2024 fatality risk in aviation was 0.06 per million flights. We didn’t just happen upon a safe aviation environment. The United States developed a system of innovation and policy to keep people safe, in part by making it a priority to learn from air disasters so mistakes aren’t made over and over.” Mistakes like, say, unplugging critical satellites?
The same people who insist man can’t control the climate are proposing legislation against weather control — because apparently man can control the climate.
AI is a power hog that may raise electricity prices for everyone. The Felon, of course, has his own nonsense theory: renewable energy makes power more expensive.
As Paul Krugman notes at that last link, that’s nonsense but the Felon’s obsessed with the idea. Part of that, as Krugman says, is the non-renewable energy industry paying to get his ear (and spreading lies to everyone else). Part of it is, I suspect, that a lot of religious conservatives think environmentalism is pagan nature-worship, and they have his ear too. And part of it, the Felon just hates renewable energy.
I wonder if he’s one of the techbros who think replacing us with AI would be wonderful (“They are ethical statements about what ought to be the case: that AI should dethrone humanity and take over the world; that this state of affairs would be better.”)
Since I’ve done two media-related posts in a row, let’s talk writing. Starting with former reporter Fred Clark’s comment that “bias often isn’t a left-right spectrum thing. It’s usually a Good News/Bad News thing. It’s about what news is celebrated as good and what news is lamented as bad.” (“cuo b
IIRC the example he once gave was when the painkiller Vioxx turned out to be dangerous. Newspapers focused on how this was bad for the company that made it — no more profits from Vioxx, stock prices falling — and not on the people who relied on Vioxx to ease their manage their pain. I thought that was a good point.
Stretching the topic, I can think of examples of that in fiction writing. The countless films and pulp adventures that assumed stopping an independence movement in the British Empire was good news — the rebels were either evil or misguided and the British Empire was a kind, caring overlord. Or stories were something awful happens to someone, wrecking their life, and it’s treated as, not necessarily good, but just. One of British writer Enid Blyton’s old school stories had the school snob all set to go to finishing school in Paris when her father gets seriously ill. It’s presented as good news for those of us who hated the character (I think I took it as such) even though it’s obviously a tragedy.
Likewise there’s no end of stories in which male-on-male rape is presented as a good thing. Sure, it’s horrible, but he’s learned now not to be so contemptuous of women who get raped. Or it’s the old “well we couldn’t get him locked up for more than six months but at least he’ll get sodomized a lot before he gets out!” I hate these tropes.
“Viewers everywhere, all around the world, pay attention. They say, ‘Here’s this badass, I want to be that cool.’ When that happens, fictional bad guys stop being the precautionary tales they were intended to be. God help us, they’ve become aspirational.” — Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan on the problem of making bad guys look like the cool ones.
A number of pundits and Democratic activists have suggested we need to put money behind a “Joe Rogan of the left,” somebody who can attract male listeners who’ve been swinging to the right (yes, it’s that issue again). This is not a new thought; 30 years ago I remember discussions about finding the Rush Limbaugh of the left. I agree with the Intercept it’s not a great idea.
First off, right-wing talking heads have the advantage that they’re feeding an audience that wants a constant diet of rageahol. If that requires bullshit and lies, cool. Liberals, mad though we may be right now, aren’t looking for lies (not that we need to, given reality is outrageous enough). As someone told the Intercept it’s hard to get something big going that doesn’t feel like it’s exploitative, exaggerated or preachy (whereas right-wing talking heads are somehow not seen as preachy).
There’s also the simple fact that becoming successful is hard. There are lots of talking heads out there but even on the right, most of them do not become Joe Rogan or Limbaugh; loathsome as Limbaugh was, he was very skilled in his propagandist role.
Rather than thinking of a silver bullet for the right-wing media dominance, possibly the solution (this is not an idea that originated with me) is to shoot lots of little bullets. Lots of communities suffer from being news deserts with no local news; why not start underwriting nonprofits like The Local Reporter, the hyperlocal website I freelance for?
Papers like ours may seem small — we are — but letting people know what’s going on with their government and community is important. And even in an age when city councils routinely stream their meetings to YouTube, having someone condense them down and share the key takeaways is a good thing. Even if all it does is build engagement at the local level, I think it’s healthy. Here’s some discussion on Bluesky (I agree including high-school sports is going to grab attention). A genuine newspaper would help counteract the fake newspapers right-wingers have set up to spread propaganda.
Also, as the Intercept suggests, look for podcasters, YouTubers and others who are already doing the sort of things the “Joe Rogan of the Left” would do. Lots of them. Eventually one of them may grow into a Joe Rogan naturally. Even if not, more voices on the left for people to listen to might make a difference. I doubt there’s anything that can smash the right wing media ecosystem but we can chip away at it, bit by bit. That may not get us out of our current battles with fascism but the fascists won’t be going away, even if we turn things around. Long-term tactics are important too.
Meanwhile our nominally neutral/centrist big media are doing a shitty job. As I blogged about yesterday, their crusading zeal has been more the exception than the rule. Part of that is the will of their owners; as Lawyers Guns and Money says of the WaPo “Bezos doesn’t care about the money so reducing the Post to a zombie shell is pretty clearly the end, not the means.“
For instance we have President Snowflake demanding red states gerrymander to give him more seats in the house, Texas complying, Ron deStalinist saying hold my beer, and Democrat-run states saying “Okay, if you do this, we do it too.” But according to the WaPo, the message is both sides do it. A recent headline described the Felon’s military occupation of DC as “well, he’s always had a fantasy of being a big-city mayor.”
The NYT is particularly odious, painting the Felon’s deportation policies as a way to provide more housing for Americans. Asking if it isn’t sensible for colleges to concede to some of the Felon’s demands, an idea parodied here. And rather than say RFK Junior is risking a catastrophe with public health, it’s described as “alienating allies who fear a public health crisis.” Then there’s headlines —
“Maximalist” sounds so much better than “fascist” or “dictatorial.” Or consider this bit on the Felon extorting money from colleges:
Meanwhile CNN announces the Epstein scandal is over, done, nobody cares, because Google searches on Epstein are down. And besides, the Felon is a political genius! As one Bluesky thread says, if the media don’t talk about Epstein or the Felon’s dementia, for lots of Americans it hasn’t happened.
Under Republican rule, multiple feed-the-poor programs have been gutted. Nevertheless The Atlantic is still willing to gush about RFK Jr. having a vague sort of possible plan for mailing veggies to the poor.
I’m not sure what the solution is, other than accepting they’re not going to stand up to fascism. And they’ll keep lowering standards to get clicks and attention, like Jim Acosta interviewing an AI avatar of a Parkland shooting victim.
David Halberstam’s THE POWERS THAT BE is a doorstop of a book but it’s a fascinating doorstop. Published in 1979, it looks at four players in the news media: Time magazine, CBS news, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times (Halberstam touches on the New York Times but in less depth, reportedly because he used to work for them), chronicles their growth and change over the 20th century (sometimes going back further) and the ways in which their tremendous influence has become a tremendous trap.
(This was the most convenient newspaper-related photo I have in my images library)
The book starts in the 1930s when William Paley moved into CBS, a tiny fringe company (NBC was far stronger) in the dubious new business of radio. He saw potential and radio coverage of WW II confirmed radio was going to be a big deal. Time and its sibling publication Life were the product of visionary Henry Luce and reflected his anti-communist politics (I remember flipping through old 1960s issues of Time and marveling that we were always, constantly on the brink of defeating North Vietnam); the Washington Post was for years just the local paper covering small-town Washington DC; and the Los Angeles Times existed to give its owners, the Chandlers a voice for Republican politics and their personal economic interests (which they assumed coincided with Republicans winning elections).
Politics changed. Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from London in the early days of WW II made millions of Americans more sympathetic to the Allies. Halberstam credits Luce as a major influence on America’s insistence Taiwan was the rightful government of all China (we didn’t recognize “Red” China as a legit government until the Nixon administration). When Eisenhower ran against Adlai Stevenson for president, Eisenhower, while disliking TV appearances, learned to make them; Stevenson never did. The Chandlers helped Republicans by covering them and simply not covering Democrats.
As James Fallows notes in the post that got me to read this, none of these companies are the forces they once were, but this book is still more relevant than, say, Season Finale (chronicling the battles between the UPN and WB networks). It shows that in many ways, the weaknesses we’re seeing now from the media in the face of the Felon Administration are nothing new. Yes, CBS took on Joe McCarthy but they were so nervous about it Murrow had to pay to advertise the special out of their own pocket. The Chandlers show biased coverage to suit a publisher’s personal agenda is nothing new. Many editors trusted White House assurances we were winning in Vietnam more than accounts from reporters who were over there.
The bigger and more profitable they got the worse it got. In the 1960s, one CBS executive apologized to a stockholders meeting for how occasionally pre-empting nightly TV shows for news had lowered their revenue, otherwise stockholders would have seen an extra 6 cents dividend per share. Kowtowing to Wall Street became essential — don’t do anything that would lower the stock price! The need for access led news organizations to mute their criticism of the government, otherwise they’d offend their sources. By the time of Halberstam’s books, the vulnerabilities are apparent.
That’s not to say we should just shrug and assume this is just the way things are. As the book shows, all these newspapers (and TV) changed a lot over the decades — they can change again and be better. We should hold them responsible when they’re not.
I’m close to finishing up my long (re)watch of Howard Hawks, though it’ll be a couple more months at least.
Donald C. Willis of Films of Howard Hawks unaccountably loathes GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (1953) — well not unaccountable, he loathes Marilyn Monroe for what he considers her “aggressive, brainless, painless sexuality” (he expressed similar disdain over her in Monkey Business). I think she and Jane Russell are both terrific.
The film adapts a Broadway musical based on Anita Loos’ same-name book, with Monroe as the book’s central character, Lorelei Lee (I’ve read the character is sharper in the novel). Lorelei’s a mercenary beauty out to marry amiable, slightly dim and very wealthy Gus (Tommy Noonan); she’s deeply troubled that her BFF Dorothy (Russell) is perfectly happy with guys who are good-looking and fun, regardless of wealth. Doesn’t Dorothy realize it’s just as easy to fall for a rich man as a poor one? It’s Lorelei’s duty to protect her friend from her own worst instincts.
The plot concerns the duo going to France as showgirls — Gus’s father doesn’t want Lorelei marrying him and she hopes blowing Gus off for a while will stiffen his spine. Complications include a gumshoe (Elliott Reed) sent to catch Lorelei cheating but finding Dorothy so gosh-darn sexy, and conniving lecher “Piggy” (Charles Coburn). The end results rely almost entirely on the charm of the two female leads but that more than enough, especially when Monroe cuts loose in “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” (the song Madonna pays homage to in “Material Girl”), showing why Hollywood could never clone her successfully. However Dorothy buying time for her friend by impersonating her at the climax isn’t quite charming enough. Not a classic, but enjoyable “I think you’re the only girl in the world who can stand on stage with a spotlight in her eyes and see a diamond inside a man’s pocket.”
I’ve read one of the reasons Hawks was dismissed for years as a talented lightweight was that he never confined himself to one genre the way Alfred Hitchcock was “the Master of Suspense” or John Ford was associated with Westerns. As witness he followed the above picture with LAND OF THE PHARAOHS (1955), a historical epic that, as Willis puts it, halfway works “until it runs headlong into Joan Collins.”
The pharaoh Khufu (Jack Hawkins) is rapacious in his lust for gold and jewels even by Egyptian imperial standards. Looking ahead, he’s worried he won’t be able to take it with him — haven’t countless cleverly designed burial chambers been looted by tomb robbers? The solution: offer the brilliant architect Vashtar (James Robertson Justice) the chance to liberate his captive people in return for designing the unrobbable pyramid. Vashtar himself will have to die, knowing the secret, but his people will be free, so he agrees.
This is good looking in the way many epics were, but not terribly interesting otherwise (and it’s entirely performed by white actors in brownface). It falls apart completely when Collins as the scheming queen Nellifer enters the picture. Khufu’s second wife, she wants power and she really wants those pretty things that are going to be wasted being stuck in a pyramid. Hawkins isn’t right for the role but still, he is the lord of Egypt and that gives his actions a certain grandeur. Nellifer’s an uninspired and not particularly memorable palace intriguer. Collins could have played the role well maybe 10 or 15 years later but at this point she’s in her early 20s and not yet good enough. “In the presence of Pharaoh, you kneel.”
