Wubba wubba wubba wubba wubba wubba

I had entertained fantasies of attending Pride, especially since I can really get behind the theme of protesting since 1776, but what I actually had the energy for was imitating a pancake. Eventually I gathered enough verticality to walk around the neighborhood and make hot dogs for dinner. TCM gladdened my heart by running The Sea Wolf (1941). I have not enjoyed the news about either Marjane Satrapi or Anthony Stewart Head. In lieu of a parade, I wore the rainbow cat T-shirt my godson handed up to me.

We might not have spent the sunset at Marblehead Light if we had known that all five yacht clubs within earshot would fire off a salute of cannons in accordance with the naval tradition of evening colors in season, but on either side of the sudden harbor-rolling cracks of smoke it was a postcard of a sunset in the smelted oranges and wave-mirrored blues of a painted present from, partitioned by the nineteenth-century cast-iron skeleton of the light itself. spatch had wanted to take me to water after I had spent the previous day in the kind of pain where as soon as it eased off a little I passed out. We ate roast beef sandwiches parked at the Mystic Lakes and drove north once rush hour had died down.

( I've brought silver to set you free. )

Home again with a bowl of noodles, I heard rushthatspeaks' irresistible report on Tokuzō Tanaka's The Whale God (鯨神, 1962), a radiation of Melville I had known nothing about. Rob and I have not yet caught up on the latest episode of Widow's Bay (2026), but last week when we marathoned the previous three we were delighted to confirm that in its remix of New England horrors, Shirley Jackson had unambiguously entered the chat. Hestia, our own lighthouse, was golden-eyed in the cat tree.

Rabbit, rabbit! I am thrilled at the notion that we may have been splatted into on Saturday by an Eta Aquariid. I will otherwise have missed all of the year's meteor showers to date.

On a forecast of long-range optimism, I am planning this summer on Readercon and NecronomiCon Providence. Noir City Boston is nearer enough future to be uncertain, but this year's selection is generously defined as jazz-themed and I am really eyeing that 35 mm screening of Blues in the Night (1941) backed with Black Angel (1946).

Last week selkie shipped me a paperback of Lee Welch's Mr Collins in Love (2025) and this afternoon a_reasonable_man was responsible for the arrival on my doorstep of Molly Crabapple's Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (2026), which swathe of interests makes me feel very catered for.

I had not heard of Goblin Band before discovering their exuberant version of "Clyde Water" (2026), a ballad I have loved since Kate Rusby via selkie and Nic Jones via nineweaving. I have since gathered with pleasure that they are trans/queer trad folk and Martin Carthy likes them.

For the first time in several days the weather heaved itself out of its autumnally raw overcast and I walked around and took a slightly disheveled seasonal picture.

For unknown and displeasing reasons, I am currently experiencing a problem with DW where I can't get into my own active entries. I have filed a support ticket. It really cuts down on the conversation.

[edit] And we're back. Everyone's efforts to ping me appreciated!

Non-Stop New York (1937) means it. Careening in under the 70-minute wire, it's as madcap a quota quickie as ever shot its heroine through a proto-noir's worth of miscarried justice into the aerodynamic future, stowed pluckily away on the transatlantically palatial Lisbon Clipper in hopes of beating the execution of the innocent tramp in the frame for the gangland slaying she witnessed one underemployed New Year's Eve as the ball dropped in Times Square for 1939. The plot bounces like a business traveler between New York and London. Its character turns suggest a centrifuge. If anyone talked at less than double time, it'd have the whole bill to itself.

No shade to a rogue's gallery of the Cinematograph Films Act 1927, the science fiction right on the curve of civil aviation is the scene-stealer in this flick. In the fall of 1937, there were no direct flights from London to New York. The age of airships over the Atlantic had ended that spring with the Hindenburg and the proven range of flying boats just barely established itself that summer between Foynes and Botwood. By the film's target date of 1939, however, there was nothing fantastical about the transatlantic passenger and mail service provided by Pan American's Boeing 314 Clippers and if the Short S.26 had not been commandeered by the RAF straight out of No. 3 Shop, it would have flown the same northern route for Imperial Airways. Without foreknowledge of the fire curtain of history, Non-Stop New York joined the industry in presuming a comparably luxe experience aboard the Southampton-docked "airmail" of Atlantic Airways: "London to New York, 18 hours, fare £65!" Even for Gaumont-British whose sideline in sci-fi was consistently nuts-and-bolts-ier than the cosmic proclamations of Things to Come (1936), it's an impressive extrapolation. The flight time would have to wait for the Douglas DC-4, but the pricing is about right for a Pan Am Clipper. Executed in a combination of gorgeously streamlined sets and six-engined models, the Lisbon Clipper has staterooms and promenade decks more befitting an ocean liner than even the swankiest of flying boats, but then again the 314s would boast the stewards and silver service of a first-class voyage and their interiors had been Deco-designed by no less a futurist than Norman Bel Geddes. The globally commuting future to which the interwar years looked forward was spacious and sleek and if the technological slingshot of World War II would render designs like the Dornier Do X or the Latécoère 521 as alien to the jet-accustomed eye as dirigibles, they were nonetheless, for a brief, achievable window, not at all dead-end real. The picture was praised at the time for its pinpoint zeitgeist. Even when it cranks up the action to the day-saving wing-walking of a disaster film, it remembers the vertical dimension of skyjacking and anticipates the reality of mid-air murder to the year. Frankly, its biggest stretch of the imagination may be its handling of a parachute, although it does know that no commercial airline ever issued them to its passengers like life jackets. I hope Hugo Gernsback saw it and plotzed. "And we've got seventeen and fourpence between us!"

Since none of this eccentric prescience would get anywhere as a story without a human cast to animate its light thrills, however, it's just as well that they are an ensemble delight beginning with Anna Lee as the pertly dashing chorine with an intransigent sense of justice and no fear of the police even after an unwarranted prison term; her repartee can give the Clipper a run for its cruising speed. "I suppose if a man had asked you back to supper, you'd have taken your little notebook and written everything down." John Loder as the romantically inclined inspector on the case isn't quite in her league even when he loosens up enough to be seen putting out his tongue at his own reflection, but fortunately she has a great, game charlady of a mother in Drusilla Wills and an accidental sleuthing partner in Desmond Tester, the nerdishly bespectacled and opera-caped prodigy who would so much rather be practicing the saxophone than the violin. "You give me your ticket and I'll swap it for two London to Leeds and a second-class to Vienna." Francis L. Sullivan as the architect of all their misfortunes may be unusually hands-on for an intercontinental crime boss, but he's justified by the bored delicacy with which he performs his signature trick of snapping a match to light and his Paraguayan impersonation which throws down the gauntlet to Mr. Paravicini while Frank Cellier capitalizes on bald-faced sleaze as the bookmaker whose taste for blackmail has taken him rashly aloft. "Cash down, you can do as you like. No cash, I'll be a father to the girl." Blink, but do not miss the Wodehousian aunt played by Athene Seyler, the seen-it-all steward by Jerry Verno, the moonlighting informer by Peter Bull, the kindhearted mouthpiece by James Pirrie, and the railroaded down-and-out by Arthur Goullet, all of whom take on their screen time with small-parts gusto. New York plays itself in newsreel shots, even if the representation of its woodnotes wild implies that lots of cities have an East End. The rest of North America is not forgotten when the action passes climactically over Newfoundland.

Whatever the resemblance of the divers-handed screenplay to its credited source of Ken Attiwill's Sky Steward (1936), as directed by Robert Stevenson Non-Stop New York is fast, fun, and photographed by Mutz Greenbaum, so even its earthbound scenes have an expressionist luster—the urban heartbeat of a neon sign, an uncomfortable memory in a half-scrubbed theater floor—and as soon as the suspense tightens aerially, Hitchcock missed several tricks never employing him. The art direction by Walter Murton is supposed to have consulted with Shorts and other aircraft designers on the realism of its lavish seaplane, which if true spectacularly paid off. I love the heyday of flying boats in part because it was a genuine wave of a future that on the other side of an air war had washed another way and this movie lifts off from it giddily. It may have looked one step ahead of the headlines to its first-run audiences, but it had actually wrapped production months before the Pan American Clipper III and Caledonia flew their great circle both ways over the Atlantic, while the Hindenburg was still flying lighter-than-air. I am not sure it should even count as hauntology, since the future it envisioned did essentially come to pass. I had never heard of it before this week. It looked no worse than a little flickery on TCM and therefore it bugs me that every copy I have found so far plentifully available in the public domain looks blown out or beat up or both. It doesn't have to be a lost classic to deserve a little polish and the appreciation due its deployment of Chekhov's saxophone mute. Lee sparkles whether she's keeping a weather eye on the propellers or putting a point-blank bullet point through her love interest: "And in the fifth and last place, you may be darned good in the moonlight, but as a policeman you're just awful." Give her that job at Scotland Yard already! This ticket brought to you by my airy backers at Patreon.

Our sidewalk is sunnier than it was. Our Bradford pear has been cut down. The city never called me back about whether a new tree would be planted in the square of mulch currently hosting a knee-high stump: a cherry picker and a woodchipper hauled up to our curb in the early afternoon and the air turned to sawmill. The noise was jaggedly inescapable even with earplugs. I still don't know what was wrong with the tree. Its lopped, leafy branches were not conspicuously rotted. spatch and I ran through the cloud of splinters and fled.

The Used Book Superstore in Burlington was in fact gigantic. I didn't make it through all the partly alphabetized sections. Every time I felt jaded by half a shelf of the same remaindered best-seller, I was pulled up by a Depression-era Samuel French edition of a romantic comedy I had never heard of. I reluctantly left the uncut pages of Bliss Carman's Ballad of Lost Haven (1897) in favor of a library-jacketed hardcover of J. R. Humphreys' The Lost Towns and Roads of America (1961) for Rob, who unbeknownst to me had located me a near-fine of Alex Hirsch's Gravity Falls: Journal 3 (2016), fortunately without any O. Henry-ish shenanigans when we met and exchanged gifts. He left with two further playscripts and Earl Mac Rauch's The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) and I have Seamus Heaney's aptly posthumous Aeneid Book VI (2016) and an anthology of poems from The Atlantic which I bought predominantly for the one about lichen. We were the next mall strip over from Schoolhouse Ice Cream, so I ate my cherry-dipped soft serve in the rapid self-defense of 92 °F.

Yesterday for Peter Cushing's birthday, I did see the news about the restored re-release of Dracula (1958).

For the second time in a row, Hestia has evinced great interest not in the bruised leaves of catmint I have brought home, but the smell of it on my hands which fires up an instantaneous purr and much excited butting of the head. It took me a season to identify the purple-flowered ground cover in my parents' front yard as Nepeta × faassenii, after which I have started to see it everywhere around my neighborhood, e.g. this afternoon while out walking with a_reasonable_man and the encyclopedia of plants on his phone which also named for me the wind-shaken white frou-frou of a Chinese fringe tree. Last year when it was already on the far side of fall, I picked up May Theilgaard Watts' Tree Finder: Identifying Trees by Their Leaves in Eastern North America (1939/2025) which the season has now leafed out enough for me to experiment with. For Memorial Day the sun has come lazily out and the temperature fogged up to the point where stepping outside in even a washer-worn overshirt was a miscalculation. nineweaving has sent me a pair of folk albums that went majority-missing in the crash of Bertie Owen. I am re-reading Kay Chronister's The Bog Wife (2024) to keep in with the zeitgeist. Two sprigs of the lilac in the back yard remain.