20 Minutes Shorter

Chief Inspector and his deputy Inspector Fox are interviewing a suspect in her home.  The phone rings in the adjoining room, and she asks with a sarcastic tone in her voice if she may be permitted to answer it.  The call is for the Chief Inspector, and he leaves the room, she closes the door behind him, pulls out a cigarette case, lights up a fag (the scene takes place in merry old England), and on second thought offers one to Inspector Fox, who up to this moment stood gazing at a painting on the wall.  He declines.

The cigarette fills the dead time in the narrative while we wait for the Chief Inspector to return.  A common dramatic device in this television mystery production, and the only cigarette to appear during its 100 minutes.

How different from the film noirs of the 1940s!  There, cigarettes and cigarette smoke ruled, and not just in the productions featuring notorious chain smoker on an off screen  Humphrey Bogart.  There wouldn't be film noirs without night scenes, rain, nightclubs, shadows, doom and gloom and cigarettes.  Many cigarettes, always cigarettes.  As dead time fillers, scene stealers, social ice breakers, character descriptors and betrayers, as interludes, symbols, metaphors,  so many things in all those melodramas one can't possibly count them all without seeing again all  those films.  One gets the impression that an average film noir would be up to 20 minutes shorter without cigarettes. Sure, in some scenes the directors apparently cheated, not quite knowing how to resolve a scene they'd order a character to light up a fag.  So what?

And today?  Film noir is dead, cigarettes are mostly out, since if nothing else  their presence affects the official rating status of the movie - no chain smoker can be a hero in a drama rated for the whole family - what can replace cigarettes then as a prop and a dramatic device?

What has at least partly replaced cigarettes as a dramatic device in today's mystery movies is a cellphone.  Partly, because it cannot play all those roles that a cigarette played.  But it can fill a dead space, as we already noted, close or interrupt a scene, and move the action forward.  I have watched some recent films where the cellphone appears as often as a cigarette appeared in film noirs.

And the added benefit or perhaps drawback of having cellphones in a movie is that with the cellphone technology and fashion changing as fast as they have been,  the viewer can quickly place the action of the movie in time, even faster than judging the period by the look of the automobiles present which don't change as fast as these portable telephones.

Class Struggle

I don't make a habit of confessing, or as they say nowadays, sharing my life story to friends, foes and strangers.  Yet, an odd anecdote has sometimes a way of provoking an apropos confession from an interlocutor, as one did this past week during a lunch four of us were having at a Thai restaurant downtown.  D. spoke:

"I was dismissed as too low class by my ex's family, all of them doctors, scientists, Ph.Ds, she herself had a master's degree, while I was a self-taught Silicon Valley computer geek whose piles  of cash and stock options were just not sufficient to satisfy their yearnings for status and respect.  Divorce him, and she did, sayonara!   She later married a Ph.D in something or other and they are happily starving in Santa Cruz now.

After my divorce I ran into a woman I had known during my university days,  she dropped out before graduating and fell into the bohemian lifestyle among artists, hippies, junkies.  We went out for a while before she too dismissed me as too high class, one of the filthy rich, a one percenter.  

You can't make everyone happy!"

Identity

Identity was an idea I was interested in when I was starting art school, said a friend, while we were sipping our lukewarm cappuccinos on a hot October afternoon.  Identity - what you are, what anyone is.  IS, right?  And cannot not be.  Well, I'll never forget when I was told by professors and by fellow students, and this was a widespread opinion there, a truism, you might say, that identity is something you create.

Perceptual Distance

On social media and on news websites that offer the opportunity to comment, users, often appearing under screen nicks, type posts such as these "Congratulations Ms Celebrity on the birth of your child", "Condolences to the Family of the dead Mr Celebrity",  or "Happy Birthday Louis Armstrong", where Ms or Mr Celebrity appear as names of well  known figures.  This is no joke.   These are serious, sincere wishes.   What is going on?

Traditionally such wishes were delivered in person,  or by the postal service, or more recently by electronic mail.   And they were signed  by the sender,  somebody whom the addressee usually knew. And now?

I spoke about it to a friend.  People are posturing, I said to him, showing off their goodness,  even as they hide under nicknames.  No, no, he replied, or perhaps that's  part of it, but there is something deeper going on.   In addition to the celebrity worship, and the fantasy that many have that the celebrities and their private lives about which they know so much are important to themselves personally,  people get lost in this virtual reality of the Internet, as if there was an intelligent  being out there listening to them.

It reminds me of the early years of the cinema, he continued, when audiences spoke to the screen, advising the characters, warning them of dangers lurking.   There was a woman in the town where I grew up who was such a movie aficionado that the movie theater owner gave a free lifetime pass.  Now, this was of course 70 years after the early years of the cinema, and she was known to interact with the screen, shouting "watch out, he's around the corner!", "don't open the door!", and so on. We called her "No Perceptual Distance".  Yes, to this day people shout at their TVs, advise football players on the screen, let their emotions run watching live events, but these wishes typed on a cool medium of a computer are something new.  A virtual reality.

And since when did we start to wish dead people "Happy Birthday", I asked?

Prodigal Son Redux

A friend, who is a published writer, has told me he is writing a story about a prodigal son who returns home to Nebraska only to be rejected by his family and by people of his native town.  I don't know much about him (my friend) other than that he is from Nebraska and is not currently in Nebraska, and I asked him if the story was autobiographical.  He laughed and said that no, it was inspired by a news story he had read in a newspaper about something that happened in New England, "and on what you told me", and he decided to transplant the locale to the places that he knows well.

Following the rejection the principal character first leaves the town, then after some time, months or years, returns to exact his revenge. Whether that part is also based on facts or imagined I am not sure, and my friend didn't explain.  Nor did he explain what it was that I had told him that made it into his story.

92 Years Later

Her name was Hildegarde Nowak, she was a medical doctor and she married my paternal grandfather two years after his first wife, my grandmother died.  They shared their medical office across the street from a hospital at the street address number eleven. Did they also live there with my father who was then 11?  Seven years later my grandfather died and my father became an orphan at 18, starting his law studies.  What happened to Hildegarde I don't know, as I don't know how my grandmother died,or where she is buried.  I have found the location of my grandfather's grave.

All of this more or less, so to speak, information gathered from Internet searches, with little or no certitude. I found the name of Hildegarde Nowak, for example, in a digitized version of a newspaper published in a city some 75 miles from where they lived, four years after they married, and listing the names and addresses of thousands of doctors eligible to vote in the upcoming election of a medical society.

Is there more information to be found in archives of various institutions?  What happened to the records and certificates of births, marriages, deaths, degrees? And if they exist, are they accessible to us, or are they guarded by bureaucrats sitting in forts made of reams of paper?

I suspect I am the last person alive who knows something about Hildegarde Nowak, and certainly the last person who knows something, very little as it happens, about my grandmother.  It's been 94 years since she died.

People say that with today's technology more will be remembered and passed on to future generations.  I doubt it.  Unless you're a Rockefeller, Kennedy, or a famous serial killer, all knowledge about you (and me)  will be gone 92 years from now.

Downtown Madmen

The cafe is a safe place.  Patrons leave their electronics sitting on tables while they visit the restroom, stand in line at the counter or visit their acquaintances at far off tables.  One older regular without a moment  hesitation steps out the door to run errands downtown and stand in a long line at the post office, leaving behind his laptop computer set on top of a strange metal contraption which raises the screen and lowers the keyboard, all of it on top of a corner table which he must claim, I figure, early in the day.

On Thursday last week, I was sitting at a table against the back wall with my friend Roger, telling him jokes that I had found in a book of World War I memoirs, which were told by Hungarian soldiers marching to the Eastern front to be slaughtered in the battle of Rava Ruska during the early days of the war.  The jokes sounded fresh maybe because they were Jewish jokes, the characters in them invariably named Cohen and Weiss.

Roger, another avid reader, who unlike me reads mostly non-fiction, popular science and history books (we like to recommend books to each other and never reach for those recommendations)  but does not treat fiction with disdain as many science obsessed people do these days, was telling me about the languages of New Guinea, dozens or hundreds of them,  still unclassified and unwritten, and dying.

Noah, another regular at the cafe, then left his 17'' Dell laptop on the table near the entrance and walked over to join us.  He began to tell us about the growth of the Arctic ice in the past year or two, some 40%, he had read, all contradicting the disaster prognoses of the past decade.

A man shouting something outside was heard. I could see him from my seat, far out on the street, my companions could only hear him.  He was threatening to kill everybody unless the war was stopped, is what I could make out.  Then, a fire engine siren from the station around the corner sounded, heads turned again, the fire truck followed by an ambulance passed the cafe on the way to the disaster,  and the gentle hum of the cafe returned. Classical music played on the cafe speakers. The three of us continued talking.

A man walked into the cafe and sat down at a table near the entrance, his back towards the room.  I thought I recognized the shouter, but I said nothing.   After a few minutes he got up, approached the counter,  slipped a bill into the tip jar and walked out of the cafe.  We continued our conversation and then Noah returned to his table and his Dell computer. He raised his arms in a sign of frustration. What happened?

It turns out that the man, this mad street shouter, had eaten Noah's sandwich, picked up the dollar bill which Noah had left sitting on the table, and generously tipped the cafe's sandwich maker before going his way.