Happy second week of 2022 from my bedroom to yours! Here are my current enrichment materials. Perhaps I shall be let out soon.
Mrs Dalloway
My favourite book from the past week - a strangely incisive stream-of-consciousness description of a whole host of people on the same London day, made more interesting in that some of these people are full of resentment and others are insane.
I was interested in Woolf’s writing mainly as a statement about psychotherapy and social status - the rich Mrs Dalloway and her anti-foil character, shellshocked mental patient Septimus Smith, are engaged in similar modes of thinking and feeling, and only one is actually pathologised. Eccentricities are taken for granted in London’s social set (taking Septimus’s psychotherapist as a member) but rejected in outsiders. This point is only illustrated in multiple subplots: embrace of communism as harmless eccentricity in the rich, a foreign wife as a further barrier to total normalcy, warzones to build character for the insiders and disable the outsiders. There’s probably another point about love and war which I haven’t thought about enough.
One, Two, Three (1961)
I watched this Cold War comedy as part of one of my more inane 2022 resolutions - finish off Billy Wilder’s whole filmography. I would absolutely place it in the highest tier of Wilder and Wilder-adjacent comedies, along with Some Like it Hot and its 1939 sister film Ninotchka (technically a Lubitsch-touched Ernst Lubitsch production, but influenced a great deal by Wilder’s writing credit).
One, Two, Three is similar to Ninotchka in that it deals with the conflict between capitalism and communism in a European setting and with the added complication of inter-ideology romance. It differs, however, in that it takes an explicitly American - and Deep South - viewpoint. This is not to say that American capitalism is not satirised - James Cagney’s fast-talking Coca Cola exec is almost as ridiculous as his putative East German business partners - but in viewing East Germany through the lens of corporate America (not genteel Paris), One, Two, Three reaches a level of topical relatability which Ninotchka barely could. It would make a great double bill in tow with Dr Strangelove, another 60s Cold War satire.
This is a successful film chiefly because it is really funny, starting at laugh-a-minute and gradually increasing its laugh frequency throughout. Comedy is about the subversion of expectations and nobody expects rich American teenage girls to flirt with communist theory (or do they? Remember Teen Vogue’s introduction to Marxism…literally Wilderian)
Ouyang Feifei
A (literally) hot track I’ve been enjoying by another star of early Mandopop. I say literally because the lyrics are all about fire, the desert, and being thirsty.
Lana Del Ray a.k.a Lizzy Grant
Lana Del Rey’s first ‘proper’ album carries a ghostly potency she has only recently started to write from again. This song is my favourite because of the folk-horror flute - one of the hints at 60s mind-control cultism interspersed through the whole thing. The absence of large-scale production throughout serves as a nice reminder of her prototypically late-00s-early-10s web roots - blogging, reused vintage imagery, trapped imagination, the potential of memory to scare and shock. As a result - one of her best attempts at creating a believable midcentury Californian soundscape.
If Honeymoon is the album you listen to while going on Google Street View and pretending to walk from Judy Garland’s house in Mapleton Drive all the way to Sunset Boulevard, Lana Del Ray is perfect to put on while exploring the Manson murder street, Mulholland Dr., Laurel Canyon, &c.
Girls Aloud - Out of Control
Yeah!
60s Italian movie soundtrack madness
It’s the New Year (still) and some people may well have resolved to do more of certain things that involve concentration - writing, studying, etc. In this spirit, here are two Italian film soundtracks I’ve been studying and writing to recently. Both are by evil genius Gianni Marchetti:
Il Magnifico Tony Carrera (soundtrack)
Carnivalesque psychedelic spy jazz soundscaping - for a European racing film with a 5 rating on IMDB. Thus spake the rateyourmusic ‘Soundtrack’ chart.
Vita Segreta di una Diciottene (soundtrack)
The same, but even more fun, and this time made for an unorthodox sex comedy.