Anyone for a game of darts

It annoys me very much that Alexander Knox's The Closing Door (1949) performed so dismally on Broadway that it never had a chance at a film option, since it would have made a neat little semi-noir addition to the catalogue of mid-century cinema that isn't totally pants about mental illness. Psychiatrically it suffers from the inevitably explanatory trauma and narratively from the climactic restatement of the moral that any audience with half an attention will have gathered for themselves, but not more so than some similarly oriented narratives from its era and certainly less than many. Otherwise and the critics who were bored by it can bite me, its representation of mental illness is remarkable for its ordinariness. Until the last-act decompensation which is explicitly stress-tipped over, Vail Trahern has no blackouts, freakouts, or delusions worth the name; he's a tired, nervous, lucid man who's frightened all the time without being able to say of what and whose ability to hold a job, never fabulous, has deteriorated to the point where he's lied for a month about losing the last one so as not to feel any more of a failure in front of his family than he has for years. He has some odd, jerky triggers, decisions easily overwhelm him, he can tell it's bad when stumbling into his son's photo-finish camera-flash leaves him in the childish pain of a nightmare. "I used to have some kind of a card index in my mind, now the cards are blowing about like snow." He's so terrified of being institutionalized that it makes even setting up an outpatient evaluation a minefield, which per the author's note is much of the social message even without the half of the family that views treatment as a more brazen stigma of lunacy than genteelly hushing the whole thing up. It has a more uncertainly open ending, but the frustrated insistence that mental illnesses should be regarded no more sensationally than physical ones reminded me directly and surprisingly of The October Man (1947), still my gold standard for the subject in its decade. At least on the page, it should not have been a two-week flop. It is never so much of a sociological treatise that it doesn't function as a character study; it doesn't need to be tricky to be tense because the stakes of sanity and autonomy are high enough. Knox wrote the central couple of Vail and Norma Trahern for himself and his wife Doris Nolan and while I am unfairly ill-equipped to imagine her performance, having seen her only as the chic deep freeze of Holiday (1938), he should have been very good as the disconnected, not inhuman Vail. I have not been able to find more of a visual record than the production stills accompanying the published text, which after years of just about every playscript or screenplay of interest to me turning out to be inaccessibly stashed in universities or special collections, I was genuinely shocked to find reproduced in full in the May 1950 Theatre Arts. The sparsely furnished loft which post-war signals the Traherns' poverty—accessible by service elevator, its wall of a studio window overlooking the surrounding roofs with their night-flashing signs—would have gentrified into the millions these days.

It isn't just the jack-of-all-trades quality: his career as an actor looks weirder with every fact I learn about it. I had known that he did a season with the Old Vic in the late '30's, but I had not understood it was 1937–38 which made him part of the legendary A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Tyrone Guthrie with Ralph Richardson as Bottom and Vivien Leigh as Titania and Robert Helpmann as Oberon, of which I have seen photos and caricatures and considered burning a time machine ticket on. He played the wittiest partition of Snout the tinker, for which he got irresistible notices—bettered when he co-starred with Olivier in the same season's The King of Nowhere, which the future Sir Larry conceded he had walked off with. He did first-run late Shaw in the West End and at the Malvern Festival, where his own first effort as a playwright premiered. He did television so early for the BBC, his appearances couldn't be burninated because it was not yet technologically possible to record them. For a while as both director and performer, he was involved with a company that did sort of experimental masques. Like any character actor worth their chameleonism, he played older than his own age from the start, at least once diegetically, already like a meta-joke. Except that he happened to be on Broadway in 1940 where it was easy for him to come to the attention of Hollywood, it starts to feel confusing that he got into American films at all, although even less surprising that he fit so badly into the Lego-set style of the studio system. He did post-war, post-blacklist theater in the UK, too, such that I have to hope for the survival of his televised 1970 When We Dead Awaken with Wendy Hiller. It feels existentially incorrect that the two of them were never in the same Shaw at the same time. I refer often to the hell of a good video store next door, but for some people you want the extra-dimensional expansion to the time machine.

In the meantime, it seems I can't read any of the detective novels he published pseudonymously in the early '30's when he was living by writing rather than acting, not because he was after all successful in taking their titles with him, but because even though Mystery*File made the connection back in 2015, short of incredible luck in a used book store the never-reprinted pulp of Ian Alexander's The Disappearance of Archibald Forsyth (1933) looks impossible for me to get near without Canadian interlibrary loan. The possibility that Alex Knox was the creator of the first fictional Indigenous detective is fascinatingly random except that it fits with the interests of his much later, mostly historical adventure novels published under his own name. I am used to the phenomenon where actors not all that infrequently double as directors or screenwriters, but obscure crime authors is a new experience.

It was sunshowering most of the afternoon, so without doing anything as sensible as looking for rainbows, I went for a walk with my ancient digital camera which now turns itself off at regularly inopportune moments and still managed to capture some rain-dusted flowers.

( We all live in the sun and in the rain. )

The latest fruit of college radio has been Mona's "Kiss Like a Woman" (2018) and the all-ages cute queerness of its video. Since I had just been talking to spatch about Charles Mee, I was extremely happy to see that the (re)making project is still online. The shell-shocking student production of The Trojan Woman: A Love Story (1994) which I saw at Brandeis in 2002 had been substantially, correctly rearranged from the original text. It triggered short fiction of mine directly and I still think about it.

Otherwise mostly what goes on around here is capitalism, errands, and interacting with doctors: the usual. Wishing I could vaporize people with the power of my brain.

I had missed this article on the photographs of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, who memorialized on glass negatives, with a view camera in the improvised studio of their farmyard, thousands on thousands of soldiers and laborers from around the literal world passing through Vignacourt on their way to the British lines of the First World War. It started as a business; it became memory-work, ghost-work. They cannibalized their own windows rather than erase an exposure, the last and perhaps only record of the men who had marched on to the Somme. I was not surprised to read that they took no more photographs after the war, that the husband shot himself, that the wife did not destroy the collection but left it in the farmhouse's attic for history to deal with, too close to the epicenter herself. If I had ever seen any of their images, I had not known the story. The article makes much of the immediacy and casualness of their pictures, of which this one makes a shock of a calling card because only their uniforms and the tin hat one of them isn't wearing tell the time: their expressions aren't a century old. Time is plastic stuff. Don't even ask how long a decade ago feels.

I was in the car tonight at the right time to hear a live-in-studio set from local rockers JVK, reprising three-fifths of their debut EP Hello, Again (2022) for WERS. I get to feel slightly ahead of the curve discovering Tristwch y Fenywod at the start of this year, but I had not encountered Cerys Hafana's "Child Owlet" (2024), which without altering the ballad becomes in their telling a witch song.

The mango lassi pie from Petsi does not actually much resemble the experience of a mango lassi, but since it is constructed along the principle of a key lime pie except with mango, I love it.