Myth Happens

I have spent the majority of my day in the pursuit of bureaucracy, which is obfuscating and elusive and in our supposedly frictionless digital age requires multiple rounds of phone tag, and am seriously tempted to run screaming into the afternoon. I hadn't known there was a documentary about Pete and Toshi Seeger and the Clearwater, but it's playing the Somerville in July. Recent fruits of college radio include Violet Grohl's "Bug in the Cake" (2026), the Japanese House's "Boyhood" (2023) and Noah Kahan's "Doors" (2026), which the DJ at WERS declared would make her cry all summer as she drove around Boston, unless she'd actually just been looking at the price of gas. I took a picture of myself yesterday with the late-blooming dogwood in my mother's yard.

For the seventy-second yahrzeit of Alan Turing, it feels inevitable that I should find AI tools incorporated into the creation of opera and sculpture about his life. The flaw in the imitation game is not the mimicry of the machine, but the mirror test of humanity which has such difficulty recognizing itself to begin with. How much more readily the present of this future ascribes personhood to an app than acknowledges it in a rainbow. No chatbot has ever been as queer as the Manchester University Computer. His ideas on computability are still investigated and his reaction–diffusion systems turned into art and I can't remember knowing that a road had been named after him in 1994. When Alan imagined a child-machine, he included the concern that it would be made fun of at school. It was never necessary to share a taste for strawberries and cream.

For six years I did not see ladymondegreen except through a screen, so it was especially lovely to meet them in the bright hot afternoon by Spy Pond and catch up on the respective ways we had managed not to die since last we compared notes, after which it planlessly evolved that we repaired to my parents' house and ended up cooking a suitable dinner with interludes of watering the irises and the alyssum, touring the art in the house with my father, and lying around on the couch. Late in the evening akawil and pecunium came by to collect their spouse and talk programming and rocks with my parents and my mother had to kick all of us out into the night before her natural nocturnal clock ticked over to the point where she woke up. We are resolved to keep not dying so that it need not be another six years before we share a view of the water.

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.

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.

Tonight being Kittening Day Observed, Hestia was miffed that I would not let her at my olive-and-pepper-tinned sardines, but for the actual twelfth anniversary of Kittening Day, she was fed on lox. A dozen years she has been in our lives, the cat of legend. Her brother grows into irises. I still remember the soft musk under his ears. She lay warm and purring on my feet all afternoon.

In other news of media of predictable interest to me, I had no idea that Cannes just premiered a queer romance set in a theatrical troupe on the Western Front of World War I. To this review, yes, concert parties of the trenches could indeed have flutes and clarinets and all manner of professional entertainment on account of the quantity of professional talent behind the lines if not on the front of them. I'm curious about the historical tunes alone. I know much less about Belgian soldiers' songs and sketches than I do about their British or Canadian counterparts. Local arthouses had better come through on this one.

Hestia is sleeping against my knees. Earlier in the night she hopped onto the bed where I was reading, trampled my ankles, and curled herself into a gravitational field of black fur. At dinner she stretched forth her delicate paw and clobbered as her rightful prey a portion of spatch's haddock. Out of this week's three doctors' appointments, one was objectively encouraging and I am acting toward its future which I cannot yet believe in. I have so many moving parts to keep track of. I feel like eighteen and a half plates in the air. In lieu of room in my life for real convalescence, I am reading a lot in the evenings, accompanied by cat, which is where she came in.