1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 102: Loved up

Her drunk, laughing mother climbs into the tiny bed with her after a night out. For 18-year-old Sarah (Lena Headey), it’s the last straw. She resolves to leave home. A younger sister is left to contend for herself.

What could have been a depressing first scene is oddly bouyant. It’s lightened by notes from Leftfield’s song “Melt.” Rave music sounds throughout the whirlwind opening third of this 70-minute BBC drama for teens, as Sarah meets, takes ecstasy from, and moves in with Tom (Ian Hart). There are tracks by Orbital, the Prodigy, and similar musicians.

Trainspotting, the more famous drugs-and-techno movie, was released around the same time. Loved Up is much gentler. It’s basically an earlier version of The Spectacular Now, treating of an unsettled but ultimately tethered girl and her rootless boyfriend.

Tom lives in the Now. He pretends not to – he takes pride in his regular employment and considers his after-hours partying to be well-earned – but the truth is, he parties all day long. He plays with the merchandise in the toy shop where he works. He can’t relax at home: his pals are always dropping in, and he hankers for the club.

The movie’s final two thirds are a gradual come-down from the initial high. But what a high!

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

As soon as Tom has given Sarah the ecstasy, he takes her to his pals. They all go clubbing and joyriding, and when a postal truck loses a sack of mail, the revelers open the letters and drive around the neighborhood, delivering the happy-sounding ones. Bills and such, they throw away because, what use is unhappy news?

Then, at the flat, Tom and Sarah consummate their new love. The movie may have been broadcast to teens, but its U.S. rating would have been a solid “R.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Hart and Headey would go on to become famous for, respectively, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones. Headey also would hold her own as Stellan Skarsgård’s co-star in Aberdeen, playing a more grown-up version of Sarah. (Hart re-appears there, too.)

I guess Loved Up is a cautionary tale, but Hart’s and Headey’s heedless glee is what makes it worthwhile. Hart and, especially, Headey are infectious early on – Headey for Sarah’s wide-eyed innocence as she enters Tom’s funhouse scene, Hart for Tom’s pose of worldly assurance. The eventual undermining of these stances is a poignant, if minor, tragedy.

That’s not to put down the rest of the movie. There are some fine later sequences. Sarah invites Tom to meet her alcoholic mother, and Tom obtusely brings along a pal – and a bottle of sherry. Later, when, in an emergency, Sarah summons Tom, he loses the address and tells the cab driver to just follow after other cars.

Meanwhile, Sarah makes her own blunders, losing her job, trying to compensate for forgetting her sister’s birthday, and allowing herself to grow too close to Tom’s dealer (a charming, snaky Jason Isaacs).

None of this is irreparable. There’s little of Trainspotting’s fatalism. One realizes, of course, that Tom will have to wake up, or else. The movie isn’t quite an argument for shortsighted revelry, but it doesn’t come down hard against it, either. What it does argue against is the permanency of this state.

I don’t think any viewer – teen-aged or otherwise – would wish to end up like Sarah’s mother.

“Lake America”

What I want to know is, how will this trade war affect my streaming of Da Vinci’s Inquest?

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Reading:

The Castle (Franz Kafka)

The Castle (Jon Ronson)

The Sandcastle (Iris Murdoch)

Haunted Castles (Ray Russell)

Castle Rackrent (Maria Edgeworth)

The Castle of Otranto (Horace Walpole)

I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)

The Man in the High Castle (Philip K. Dick)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson)

I really am reading some of them!

R.I.P. Dolly Parton

… whose music I don’t know well – I confidently recall only her songs “Jolene,” “9 to 5,” and “Islands in the Stream” – but whose generosity I appreciate. My children have received dozens of free books from Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.

Speaking of libraries: Abel has become almost impossible to supervise in actual ones. He climbs on tables, ravages displays, chews tips off markers, and dumps toy bins upside-down. I follow in his wake, cleaning his messes. Today, while I was picking up toys, he moved through the Spanish-language book section like a tornado, pulling several shelves’ worth of volumes onto the floor.

The library’s rules, unfortunately (or fortunately), do not permit me to reshelve books.

My two least favorite librarians were on duty – the ones who sternly call me “Sir.” They were kind this time.

Yes, it’s good that we receive plenty of books at home, thanks to Dolly Parton.

A culinary dream

Sometimes, my CPAP machine pumps my stomach so full of air that just before I wake up, I have dreams like this one:

I’d just had a large breakfast when Martin showed up at my house and said, Come with me, I’m taking you out for pancakes. There was no refusing him. (Cut to the diner.) The pancakes were impressive – one was actually a huge, flattened cinnamon roll – but afterward, goodness gracious, did my belly hurt. (Usually, in dreams with food, I don’t get to eat the food.)

The dream also may have been prompted by my having gotten back on the dieting horse. In three weeks, I’ve lost eight pounds.

If there’s anything more tedious than having to listen to other people talk about their dreams, it’s having to listen to dieters tell about their new regimes and food hacks.

Our new food hack is the George Foreman grill that Karin found at Goodwill.

I also just learned a great way to fry an egg. Pre-heat the pan; put in a little fat; put in a tablespoon of water, and then the egg. Cover the pan.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Why do Karin & I keep going on dates to Niles, Michigan? What is the town’s allure? Is it the riverwalk? Is it the pleasant drive from Granger, Indiana, where we deposit our children? Is it Casperson Books? Is it Pizza Transit, with its series of outlandish “pizzas of the month” (e.g., Mexican street corn pizza)?

Is it the Wonderland Cinema?

Is it the knowledge that Ring Lardner walked those streets?

IT’S ALL OF THE ABOVE.

Today’s excursion was to eat hot dogs and popcorn and watch The End of Oak Street, David Robert Mitchell’s movie about time-warped dinosaurs preying on suburban Michiganders. Another of Mitchell’s wry commentaries on the inevitability of death.

Body-text fonts, pt. 54: Poliphilus

Way back when, I’d often mistake Poliphilus for Bembo. “Old Bembo” is how I thought of it. Of course both are derived from the work of Francesco Griffo.

Poliphilus lacks its own italic but usually is paired with Blado.

This specimen is from Aesop, whose fables I like to read to Samuel at bedtime when he’s too tired to stay awake for anything longer.

“A lion and an ass made a partnership and went out to hunt.” It’s surprising how many fables begin that way. (Sometimes a fox joins them.)

It’s surprising, too, how often the lion is not just strongest but also wisest. Aesop has something of a “might makes right” streak in him.

I literally wrote this blog entry in my sleep.

A backward/forward look

We have been immersing ourselves in intermittently glorious, surprisingly mostly dreary Oxford drama: begun in Inspector Morse (1987–2000); continued in Inspector Lewis (2006–2015), which features Morse’s former Detective Sergeant; and prequeled in Endeavour (2012–2023), which is titled after Morse’s Christian name. It’s the last of these we’ve started with. Long ago we saw some of “Morse Proper,” and knowledge of it gives Endeavour a foreboding air: this young 1960s constable will turn into a first-rank curmudgeon, an object of near-horror. There are some explicit portents – Endeavour Morse is solitary, has a savior complex, relishes crosswords and classical music perhaps too much – yet the dread is largely inchoate. There is unease even as this hero, with each new success, rises in his profession. There is gravitas although the genre trundles out its tropes. The classic “Morse” theme music, equally suited to a mountaineering documentary, has been retained for the prequel. As Young Endeavour, Shaun Evans is brusque, skinny, and sallow, with a deer-in-headlights expression. The show’s real human treasure, however, is Endeavour’s mentor, Detective Inspector Fred Thursday (Roger Allam) – surely one of the genre’s wisest men. Had he been higher-born, he could have been a don; as it is, he holds his own against the silly college men he questions, who consider him beneath them. Rank is all in Thursday’s world (and at Oxford). And yet, unlike his own superior, Thursday doesn’t lord it over Morse. The show’s other great virtue is its artifact selection. I’ve not seen another in which beer mugs and wallpaper were so lovingly displayed. The story could be nonsense, the historic University could be ignored, and I’d still watch just for those props.

Our chemical romance

Ziva (cat no. 2) and Dory (no. 3) used to fight several times each day, really brutally; but since we’ve begun using air fresheners to pump feline pheromones into our house, they’ve gotten along much better. This gives me hope for the harmony of our household, and for that of humankind.

Seriously, things are more peaceful now.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

We attended a quite lovely wedding after-party this evening, in someone’s back yard. There were many children. There were dogs of very different breeds and sizes, to warm the heart. The music was from the nineties and early aughts; the catering was local Mexican. There also was much uninhibited vaping. I was amused to see the bride and groom puffing away together at their special table. But they weren’t the only ones. Everyone was at it. Perhaps all the vaping was what made everything harmonious. Halfway through the party, it started raining, and no one really minded.

The children played in a sandbox and got filthy. They had a precious time; afterward, we had to drag Daniel, kicking and screaming, to the car.

Apparel

Warm congrats to my cousin, Matthew, and his wife, Megan, on the birth of their second daughter.

Most of my paternal grandparents’ grandchildren began having children rather late in life. So, although perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me, it always does – pleasantly – when another little niece, nephew, or once-removed first cousin comes along.

What a world to come into, though.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Then again, things arguably were worse in Genesis-time. I have a couple of colorful t-shirts with the caption, “Need an Ark? I Noah Guy.” There’s a picture of the ark on the shirts. (Alas, I can’t find the picture online – just other shirts with the same caption but different artwork.) I obtained these shirts after a children’s program at my church. They were spares.

I wear them around because I’m edgy like that. And because they fit.

No one ever has commented on them – the occasional raised eyebrow is as far as things have gone – until today, when I wore an ark shirt to the to the Salvation Army Kroc Center. (The boys have been taking swim lessons there.)

My goodness, how many laudatory remarks I got.

Did you go to the Ark Encounter?, one man asked.

My people.

Now what I need is a Coach Cignetti shirt to wear to the Kroc.

August’s poem

… is “If – ” – by Kipling, of course.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;

If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

One of the best poems. Kipling thought it too popular for its own good. No doubt the parodies irked him. Some are clever indeed: see Elizabeth Lincoln Otis’s “An ‘If’ for Girls” (but her last couplet is nothing as fine as Kipling’s; it’s his “my son” that makes the difference).

“The jellyfish that has cracked the secret to immortality”

From the Guardian:

[Turritopsis dohrnii] “is unique,” [says marine biologist Maria Pia Miglietta,] “because when faced with unfavourable conditions – and I mean high temperature, physical cutting, starvation, chemicals in the water, you name it – when you try to kill the jellyfish, it doesn’t die.”

Most normal jellyfish start off life as larvae. They metamorphose into polyps (tiny, stationary soft bodies) that bud off swimming medusas, which grow up to become adult jellies. Eventually, after reproducing, most will stop swimming, crumble a little and then die.

But the immortal jellyfish escapes that fate. It reverts to a juvenile form, and starts its life cycle again.

The process is called “cellular transdifferentiation,” Miglietta says. The jellyfish looks like it’s dying and sinks to the bottom. Then – like a butterfly returning to a caterpillar – it shrinks into a ball, and within 24 to 48 hours, buds off a new polyp with the same identical genome, she says. …

In the lab, where Miglietta studies them, these jellies can theoretically live for ever. However, for some in the wild, getting eaten may eventually end that dream run.

(My italics.)

Some more quotes:

James Lenman (“On Becoming Extinct,” p. 254):

The Second Law of Thermodynamics will get us in the end in the fantastically unlikely event that nothing else does first.

Peter van Inwagen (“The Possibility of Resurrection,” p. 121):

Perhaps at the moment of each man’s death, God removes his corpse and replaces it with a simulacrum which is what is burned or rots. Or perhaps God is not quite so wholesale as this: perhaps He removes for “safekeeping” only the “core” person – the brain and central nervous system – or even some special part of it.

John 3:3:

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

And see Lewis’s Mere Christianity – especially its last chapter, “The New Men,” to which everything in the book conduces.