Snowy New York Valentine

 As I write this, I am getting used to being back in Arizona after a five-day trip to New York last week. We flew up there last Tuesday, to JFK, and stayed through Sunday at the Hilton Midtown on 6th Avenue. The occasion was a conference for Jessica's work at a natural supplements manufacturer.  So the hotel was paid for by the company.

It was the first time I'd been back in the city in five years, and the first time I've stayed in Midtown maybe since...forever. Wow, I can sure understand why people like that part of town.. We had some good food, although we slummed it on Valentine's Day since every restaurant was booked. Instead we grabbed hot dogs and onion rings from the cart outside the hotel. Seventy five bucks!

I worked during the week from the hotel room, taking short breaks to walk around the vicinity, including an obligatory visit ot Trump Tower, which I hadn't visited since 1989. 

On Saturday we enjoyed the freshly fallen snow with a walk through Central Park up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art---Jessica's first time. It was a wonderful way to spend our final full day there, after our work obligations were done for the week.

All in all, a great experience. I saw nothing of the degradation and troubles that have befallen the city lately. We both anticipated a return visit for next year's conference.

I was impressed by how much Times Square had changed.Way more pedestrian f riendly than the old days. It really feels welcoming.It felt much cleaner and more alive from the old days, thanks to modern video screen technology. It was like looking up at a 100 giant smartphones playing videos on the sides of buildings. The ads featured musicians I had never heard of. Who is Zara Larsson? No idea. It felt good to be ignorant with such trends. I couldn't get used to seeing "2024" as the year up by the famous New Year's ball (see very top right corner of the screen).  I feel like this is not real, that real time stopped sometime in the last century, and we are living in some kind of parody of time.

We arrived at JFK on the day before Valentine's Day (Shrove Tuesday, as it happens) into a snowstorm. IIn Phoenix the night beore, I half-joked with Jessica that our flight was going to be diverted and we were going to be stuck overnight at the Cleveland Airport. Or Louisville. We both busted out laughing when the pilot came on and announced we would be landing temporarily in Indianapolis until the snow cleared. "Here we go!" we thought. But the plane took off again after an hour and by the time we got to FJK, everything was clearing out fine. We got a cab up to Midtown and hundered into the next few days of cold chilly weather, which was nice to experience. A chance to wear warm clothes. On Saturday, delightfully, we got a second round of snow, just to stop everything off, and this made our walk up the Met Museum through Central Park a wonderland. Children were sledding like in old paintings that we later saw at the Met. It was Jesssica's first time in the Park. Of course we stumbled upon "Alice in Snow" as seen in this photograph I took. 

Pygmalion (1938) vs My Fair Lady (1964)

 

Caught a showing of Pygmalion (1938) on TCM last week. First time seeing it. I very interesting experience. I expected My Fair Lady (1964) but stripped of the delightful gaiety of the musical numbers in technicolor, and the spunky ferocity of Audrey Hepburn's Eliza Doolittle.

 I did not expect to be blown away by it. Both Ginger and I were in awe of it, and wondering what had possessed me to overlook this, based on false assumptions regarding its stature relative to the later musical remake.

First off, the screenplay is not just adapted from Shaw's play. Shaw wrote the screenplay. Like Hemingway and others, he fancied himself able to compete in Hollywood as a writer. At this he was successful, and in 1938 he won the Academy Award for adapting his own 1913 play by the same name.

It is not a straight by-the-numbers adaptation. He greatly improved it, and it is clear, wrote it with a cinematographic eye. Among the whole additions for the movie was what would become known as the "Ballroom Scene," where Eliza is presented to a duchess, all the while menaced by the intrigue of Karpathy, the former student of Henry Higgins.

In Shaw's original play, Karpathy is a minor character mentioned only in the final scene For the screenplay, Shaw promoted him to a major supporting role completely contained within the Ballroom Scene, where he is given the assignment--to his great delight--to investigate the origin of the mysterious Miss Doolittle.

The biggest thing in favor of the 1938 non-musical black-and-white version, versus the 1964 Broadway musical technicolor version, is that the contest between the two Elizas is lopsided.  Wendy Hiller is so far superior to Audrey Hepburn, it will be difficult to go back and watch My Fair Lady (1964) anytime soon, because I would find myself cringing at Hepburn's over-the-top caricature of the role.

We agreed a fair thing to say would be that whereas in My Fair Lady (1964), Eliza (played by Hepburn), transforms from a flower girl to a lady, in Pygmalion (1938), Eliza (Hiller) is revealed to have been a lady all along. It's much more subtle and powerful.

Hepburn is a great actress but she has better roles.  She is completely believable as a flower girl (she grew up malnourished during the Dutch Famine during the war, and her constitution never recovered). By contrast, Pygmalion (1938) is Hiller's signature role as a film lead (she had an expansive theater career on stage in London).  

Hiller saved a great supporting role for her later years, in the 1970s, not surprisingly as a princess, as if cashing in on the 1938 role like an artistic savings bond. 

Check out the intro the Ballroom Scene. The rack focus when Higgins (Leslie Howard) and Colonel Pickering turn to see Eliza (Hiller) emerge. Then watch Hiller ascend the staircase and speak with the duchess.   We are so rooting for her at this point. By extension we are rooting for Higgins. Pickering is rooting for her in fatherly fashion, even though his wager with Higgins is against her. We are rooting for everyone---except Karpathy. Except at the end of the scene Higgins (Howard) is clearly egging Karpathy towards experiencing a triumph of ego. Methinks this scene shows how Higgins actually does understand rules of social behavior very well. He just chooses to flout them whenever it pleases him. A great pretzel of motives brought to life by great actors. Howard co-directed this. Hewas year from Gone With theWind

What did I miss from My Fair Lady? No knock on Harrison's acting, but Howard was so delightful it was hard to miss Harrison's character. But I did miss his singing greatly. "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" is one of the great masculine musical performances in the history of Hollywood film.  Likewise I missed "I'm Getting Married in the Morning" and other upbeat numbers. Hiller wipes the floor with Hepburn, though.

My Blissful Journey to Ordinariness

 When I was young, in my childhood and young adult years, I fancied myself quite an extraordinary person with special talents not possessed by other people. Buttressing this confidence were the statements made to me by other people, who told me I had extraordinary talents.

I realized lately that lately I felt as if I have made a journey to considering myself hardly extraordinary at all, but rather typical, especially as a specimen of my cohort within the flow of the passing generations.  Of course this has been a hit to my ego, on the hand, but on the other hand it has given me great peace to know how ordinary I am--almost a stereotype in some ways---and it has strangely given me a feeling of meaning to my life.

I had thought the meaning of my life was to use my alleged extraordinary talents to provide some great contribution to humanity through creative uses of my intellect. Somehow this never happened. The years went by. Judged on the standards of my childhood, and what people expected of me, I am nearly a complete washout.

But as an ordinary man, I have found new purpose is being, well, ordinary. Even this blog I write, and have written for over fifteen years now fits into this. I imagine this blog will disappear into the aether at some point when Blogger shuts down and the database is destroyed. Or I will leave this earth and my dormant account will be removed. This does not even include the inevitable end of all material things in the universe, however that happens, but certainly which no computer server can survive.

Even many years ago, when I was a scientist I have said to myself, "suppose there is some end to all of our civilization, and years from now there is an archaeologist or archivist who stumbles upon old writings preserved in some means, and suppose, by some pure random act, they include everything I have written. Suppose however that one's one name and identity is not preserved---only ones writings---so that they are effectively anonymous to people in the future who find them. What I would I then bother to write?"

In thinking about Classical Antiquity, it's clear that many of the most valuable writings are anything that preserves a sense of the life of ordinary citizens.  Do you see where I'm going with this thought?

Here then is a typical man. I have the advantage of being a white man, which according to current thinking means there is nothing special about my "identity" that needs expressing or explaining. Too much ink, phyical and digital, has been spilled by and about people like me, So that's another way I'm free to be ordinary. No respectable publisher would be the least bit interested in my story, or any of my stories, because of my sex and skin color disqualifies me. What a burden has been lifted from me, to attempt to publish anything by that route! I say that without irony. 

Instead I can just write to you, my dear readers, especially the ones who keep coming back here, and also to anyone reading this in the distant future.