Memor(ial Da)y Lane

[captainsblog]

Not-all that much-all going on here this weekend. Rels are either working or far away, various yard things have been tackled, and in local news probably the most interesting development of the past two days has been this implosion of a building on the edge of downtown:

I did get round, finally, to re-adding HBO to my cable account for the final episodes of Sopran-dom. For less than the cost of two matinee tickets, I've gotten on-demand access to all the late April and May episodes I missed, plus I'm good to go for the final two, not this weekend but the two to follow. They're definitely setting up for some potent stuff in these final views; even Meadow and A.J. (or, perhaps, the rather annoying performers who voice them) have had some less-than-annoying life breathed into them, and it won't surprise me for a second if the finale winds up centering on one or both of them as the future of the family; whether that's with a capital or small f, I'm not sure yet.

----

Netflix also brought an old Hitchcock classic to the yard this weekend. I was reminded of it by this post from earlier this month, written by a remarkable young lady who I chanced to come across through a threadbare Ithaca connection several months ago and whose thoughts on film in general and Hitch in particular, not having anything to do with the original bare thread, are still damned insightful. As I posted in reply to that, the later and lesser-known of the two she wrote about, 1948's Rope, was one of five of Hitchcock's best alltime efforts which wound up out of circulation for close to two decades before Universal bought the rights to them in 1983 and put them on the art-house circuit in early 1984. Rope was the third of the five to be shown at Buffalo's majestic (and still-used) North Park Theater; I took time out from my last semester of school to see all five of them there (Rear Window and Vertigo before it, the repetoire then ending with The Trouble with Harry and Hitch's 1956 remake of his own earlier version of The Man Who Knew Too Much). In the 20-plus years since then, the first two have gone on to receive more viewing and probably more retrospective acclaim, the last two perhaps to less of either, but Rope stands alone among the five. Perhaps because it was Hitchcock's first (and quite an interesting) experiment with color; possibly it's because of its unique way of working the crime into the timeline of the plot; but maybe the most interesting, as doubtful_salmon's analysis above is quick to note, the gay subtext of the killing and the moralistic ending, in the all-too-straight context of postwar America in general and the Hays production code in particular, makes it unique and perhaps sad as a component of the Hitchcock body of work.

One wonders what a less restricted director would do with the end of the story if it were to be remade today, freed of the need the studio felt to wreak retribution on the bad gays guys at the time.

----

For any of you who would be entertained by a best-of-the-best collection of sports column feeds, I've added an off-LJ favorite of mine as an RSS feed on my (and, thus if you wish, your) Friendspage. the_daily_fix, co-written as part of the dayjob of one of my fellow Met bloggers, brings a One-a-Day vitamin's worth of the previous day (or so)'s sports columns on everything from baseball to soccer and hockey to horse racing. One of the first to reach my page was this one, which reported on a remarkable punishment meted out by an old-school football coach in a happy-valleyish little town known as State College, PA:

This past offseason, six Penn State football players were charged with crimes stemming from a fight at a party. Four of the six were legally cleared, while two still face criminal charges. Those players will be punished along with all of their teammates, after each home game this fall: They'll have to clean out 107,282-seat Beaver Stadium.... The designated mass punishment by 80-year-old coach Joe Paterno is either a masterstroke, a calculated political move or a sign of senility, depending on which columnist you're partial to.

Me? I'm with the minority of columnists (one) cited in the article, who find this a refreshingly down-to-earth and no-exceptions punishment of all for the sins of a few on the rare occasion anyone got caught. Equal time, though, goes to other columnists, who either view it as too much (a military-style response to a civilian offense) or as potentially too little (as an attempt by the coach to pre-empt whatever alternate punishment the school's own Judicial Affairs office might try to mete out).

----

Tomorrow's agenda: no parade. No ballgames. No work. No trips. This, for me at least, is what those memorialized men and women helped to fight for.

Comments

[luckycee.livejournal.com]

The right to sit home and do nothing. Amen.