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Starting to Get My Local Groove On
Last Tuesday’s ballot for the local election in Conway, NH, seemed extraordinarily long to me. The many budget and development questions (“warrants”) would probably have been decided at town meetings in earlier days. Maybe they still are in smaller NH towns, as they were in Tamworth when I was growing up. Anyway, today I noticed that the research I did for the election and the half hour or more it took me to fill out my ballot have had a positive effect on me. Driving around town with my elderly mother today, I realized that I knew some things about the direction of the town’s development and that I actually cared. It seems I’m growing more connected to this place in these times.
This shifting personal orientation is no small thing because I’ve felt relatively isolated here since coming up from DC for eldercare in late 2021. Hanging out in indoor spaces where I might meet people is limited by my awareness of the health risks that such activities entail for my mother. This circumstance also limits word-of-mouth news about local goings on. It doesn’t help that the days of bulletin boards and multiple local and regional newspapers are long gone. I’m told there’s local information on Facebook, but I wasn’t that desperate.
Last week, I finally subscribed to the online version of the only remaining local paper in order to prepare for the election. I took the plunge after talking with a few people at the protest on April 5th, my first in this town. I think this bit of personal agency and local involvement is doing me good, especially in these times. The paper prints letters, so maybe it’s high time I wrote one of those up here too. The last time I did that was for the International Herald Tribune in the early 1990s while living in Germany.
“Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” dir. George Clooney (Miramax, 2002), is absolutely bonkers (in a good way). Sam Rockwell does not disappoint. 📽️
The night shots of the Kennedy Center in the closing sequence of the movie “Ghosted” (Apple, 2023) show it lit up in the national colors of Ukraine. I like that. 🇺🇦
“The Israeli army is facing its biggest refusal crisis in decades” by Meron Rapoport for +972 Magazine, April 11, 2025.
Over 100,000 Israelis have reportedly stopped showing up for reserve duty. While their reasons differ, the scale demonstrates the war’s waning legitimacy.
📺 I’m in the second of two miniseries called “A Young Doctor’s Notebook and Other Stories” (Sky Arts, 2012-13). It is based on work by Mikhail Bulgakov and is set mainly in rural Russia in 1917–18, with flashforwards to 1934–35.
Or is it set in Moscow in 1934–35 with flashbacks? Either way, Jon Hamm plays the lead in the 1930s and Daniel Radcliffe plays the same character in the 1910s. Hamm’s character is also present in the 1910s as a kind of morphine-induced hallucination who talks to his younger self.
I’m enjoying this dark comedy, but be advised that it has drug addiction, gore, and other bodily fluids. The Hobbesian characterization of life as nasty, brutish, and short applies.
Reading Dr. Suess with FaceTime
I’m so excited. I just read Dr. Seuss’s One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish to my granddaughter in another state using the MacOS Books and FaceTime apps. Since we’d already read this on a couch together a few times, she sometimes explained a page to her father before I read it to her. Or she got excited and spoke lines before or with me.
At this young age (preschool), it helped that a parent was sitting next to her. That took care of the cuddle element that one usually gets when being read to. It also helped reduce the distraction of background voices in the house.
I did this on my desktop using split view, devoting a small part of the screen to her face. On the other end, they used an iPad to follow along. They saw the book open to two pages along with my face because I was sharing my whole screen in FaceTime.
I saw the first hour of Fritz Lang’s “Hangmen also Die” (United Artists, 1943) tonight. The story, inspired by Reinhard Heydrich’s shooting in Prague in 1942, was a collaboration between Lang and Bertolt Brecht. The film is good, but 135 minutes of wartime stereotypes is a lot. 📽️
📽️ I enjoyed “The Cape Town Affair” (South Africa, 1967), starring Claire Trevor, James Brolin, and Jacquelin Bisset. I’ve never been to that part of the world, so seeing the city in this period was doubly interesting. The level of segregation, however, stood out, as did the unsettling naturalness of its portrayal.
The film is a spy story involving mainly white people of different social classes and ages. The one exception is the Communist ringleader, who appears only two or three times and presents as East Asian. This world of espionage inadvertently becomes entangled with less reputable characters who live by their own, less unsavory codes.
The film is a remake of the New York City noir “Pickup on South Street” (USA, 1953), which I haven’t seen.
📽️ Watched “Affair in Trinidad” (Columbia Pictures, 1952), a murder–spy story starring Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. Was fun despite the usual noir gender normativity. Also interesting to see the early fictional appearance of a ballistic missile threat in the Caribbean.
The post-[1968] invasion regime in Czechoslovakia spoke of “normalization,” which nicely caught the spirit of the moment. What was, was normal.
– Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (2018), chap. 2.
📽️ The last time I saw “Three Days of the Condor,” dir. Sydney Pollack (Paramount, 1975), was long enough ago that I didn’t get as much out of its mid-seventies paranoia about the CIA as I did this time around. Or maybe it just didn’t gnaw away at me like it’s doing now. I grew up in a small rural town, but the grit in that movie pervaded a lot of popular television culture. I also heard my fair share of conspiracy-theory talk during my teens. Besides, the CIA was in the news.
I’m still not sure what to make of the mentality expressed in this film. It’s interesting, in any case, to speculate about how anti-establishment images and paranoia from the period have mapped onto both ends of our political spectrum.
"Maybe there's another CIA inside the CIA."
"Oil fields."
"We have games. That's all. We play games. What if? How many men? What would it take? Is there a cheaper way to destabilize a regime? That's what we're paid to do."
"How do you know they'll print it?"
📽️ Am watching “So Ends Our Night,” dir. John Cromwell (United Artists, 1941), a “story of people without passports” based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1939 novel Flotsam.
A great line early on spoken by an Austrian police officer sending two stateless Germans across the border to Czechoslovakia in 1937:
You refugees! It’s not like handling a first-class criminal. You’re detracting from the dignity of my profession.
I forgot how many things can be on a NH town and school election ballot. Still more boning up to do, and not a deep enough media scene to lean on endorsements.
📽️ Watched a post–Cold War episode to the Harry Palmer films, “Bullet to Beijing” (1995). Michael Caine, the lead in the 1960s films, plays an agent pushed into early retirement who freelances for a Russian oligarch-mobster. It was interesting to revisit the period’s pop cultural images of Russia.
📽️ This evening I saw “Secret Agent,” dir. Alfred Hitchcock (UK, 1936). It was a box office hit in its time, but for me it’s less compelling than “The Thirty-Nine Steps” (1936) and “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934). The cinematography and moments of suspense were nonetheless entertaining and characteristically Hitchcock.
Unlike the protagonists in the other two movies, who become involved in espionage by chance and are clearly the good guys, the protagonists in this film play morally ambiguous roles. Their mission is to locate an enemy agent in Switzerland and assassinate him before he can carry British military secrets to the Ottomans. Only the playful, but dark character played by Peter Lorre enjoys the necessary close-up work of killing.
Silhouettes of hanged spies out a train window on the way through enemy territory underline the ultimate personal price during war, if caught. A Swiss hotel and casino serves as a glamorous counterpoint, with social banter, dress, and flirting more in line with the 1930s than 1916. That means viewers are treated to Madeleine Carroll’s bare shoulders while she is wrapped in a towel that covers the rest of her body in a scene with two men in full dress.
Distributor advertisement targeting cinema owners in The Film Daily, June 23, 1936, p. 3, via Internet Archive.
Local clergy and faith leaders posted A Call to Justice, Mercy, and Peace (PDF) in our local newspaper yesterday. Its themes have been prominent in the sermons at my mother’s church this year.
This is the kind of messaging that I, an otherwise nonobservant, unbelieving Christian can get behind. I sometimes think that I should get over my own church issues and seek out community there. We certainly share many of the same values and concerns.
📽️ I watched “The King’s Speech” (2010) for the first time. It certainly lives up to all the praise it received 15 years ago.