Mallory's Camera

I am agog at the blistering temperatures impacting so much of the planet.

How could one not be?

Temps have been over 110°F in Phoenix for 20 straight days in a row now. It’s 120°F in Palermo. It’s 122°F in Baghdad. In the Alps, it’s 85°F.

In a remote northwestern corner of China, the thermometer is supposed to hit 126° today.

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Forty-six percent of Americans still disbelieve in climate change. Disbelief in climate change tends to fall out in the U.S. along party lines, so it’s mostly Republicans who are disbelievers.

Disbelieving in climate change makes no kind of sense to me.

Most Republicans believe in God. And there’s a whole lot less evidence that God exists than that climate change exists.

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At what point do Phoenix, Palermo, Baghdad, et al become uninhabitable?

Maybe never, I suppose, if economic growth—driven by the continuing use of fossil fuels—raises standards of living so that everyone gets to live inside climate-controlled environments!

This is the argument I am seeing increasingly put forward by one-time climate change disbelievers who tripped over something on the road to Damascus and have now (reluctantly!) become climate change agnostics.

But this, of course, assumes the existence of an electrical grid that never breaks down.

And that, I think, is impossible.

Dystopian literature is filled with stories about what happens to humans when the Machine finally creaks and groans to a halt.

Boys and girls! LEARN from dystopian literature!!!

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What else?

I did not finish the Remunerative Project yesterday but stayed up very late and came very close. All it needs now is an introduction and then a couple of hours of proofing and copy-editing.

Shortly, I will trot off to meet up with BB, drink strong coffee, get manic, and deconstruct The Third Man—about which BB and I texted merrily all day long yesterday, thereby sustaining me through a last few rounds of hard-core economic analysis.

I am prepared to say The Third Man is the best film ever made.

Though it is not the film that has had the greatest emotional impact on me and therefore cannot rank at Numbah One on my personal Cinematic Pantheon.

No, that film now and forever will be Fellini’s La Strada.

With Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between a close Numbah Two.

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The weather here has actually been pretty spooky, too, though we haven’t had any record-shattering heat waves as such. Sultry conditions and multiple thunderstorms are kinda par for the course for the Hudson Valley in the high summer—but this year…. I dunno. Something feels different. The thunderstorms are coming every day, and they’re very destructive. Also, there are tornados. The ground is so saturated that earlyish in the morning (like now), the rising mists turn familiar landscapes into scenes from a horror movie.

And, of course, there’s all that Canadian wildfire smoke, which creates a claustrophobic snow globe effect. The sky may be blue, but it’s a mutant kind of blue. Which gives the world a I-have-somehow-wandered-into-a-creepy-alternative-universe sense.

Since low temps have put the quash on wholesome outside tromping, I’ve been conscientious about putting in at least 40 minutes on the exercise bike every day.

But that doesn’t seem to do it in the restful sleep department.

I keep waking up in the middle of the night. And staying awake for two, three, even four hours.

Sure, sure. In ancient times, there was first sleep and second sleep, I tell myself. You are merely reverting back to the ancient rhythms.

But the thing is, I don’t want to revert back to the ancient rhythms.

If I wanted the ancient rhythms, I’d have lobbied to be reincarnated in the 14th century.

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One of the things you’re never supposed to do when you wake up in the middle of the night is activate any sort of electronics. Because—cue diablous in musica—blue light.

But last night, I thought, Fuck that, and ended up watching The Third Man until 4 in the morning or so.

The Third Man may be the most perfect piece of cinema of all time.

It’s not my favorite movie. My favorite movie is actually two movies: Fellini’s La Strada and Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between. Because both those films are about Love, Loss and Redemption, which are the Big Three in terms of my own personal cosmology.

But The Third Man is def on my Top Ten Movies list, and I recognize that in terms of sheer cinematic craft, it’s much better made than either of my two favorites because it showcases visual storytelling so masterfully. Its spoken screenplay exists primarily as a kind of annotation of the images.

Cinema done right is primarily a visual medium.

The version of The Third Man I watched last night featured Steven Soderbergh’s commentary in voiceover.

I was particularly struck by one thing.

Backtracking a bit—Graham Greene wrote the script for The Third Man.

Now, Graham Greene was that rare writer who was actually able to write both novels and screenplays.

Novels and screenplays are actually very different from one another in terms of structure and intent. It is the rare author who is able to do both (and setting up Scrivener with the proper indents won’t really help.)

David Selznic and Alexander Korda (an unlikely duo!) wanted to collaborate on a post-WWII movie and had hired Greene as the perfect writer for the task.

Greene didn’t have the slightest idea what to write except he thought Vienna might be a good setting because it had just the right amount of destruction and decay, plus it was divided up into four distinct occupation zones, overseen by the U.S. the USSR, the UK, and France.

For two weeks, Greene knocked around Vienna, completely blocked when it came to writing anything.

But then, on the last day he was there, Greene stumbled across two pieces of information: the existence of counterfeit drug schemes and the very extensive sewer system that underlies Vienna.

And these seeds sprouted into The Third Man’s screenplay.

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This made me remember something about Alfred Hitchcock that’s always intrigued me.

Hitchcock is one of the most visual of all filmmakers. The general public is not very tuned into this because Hitchcock has come to be so closely associated with suspense and gore, but the reason why Hitchcock is so venerated in cinematic circles and ranks so highly on those lists of The Best Directors is because so much of the calculated release of information in his films—otherwise known as storytelling—is done through the strategic use of images.

Hitchcock actually collected images he found compelling, made lists of them. Maybe even did sketches of them. (He studied drawing and design at the University of London before World War I.)

In an interview I once read, he explained that when he had collected 10 or so images, he would sit down and devise a plot, however improbable, that connected his seed images.

This was the genesis of nearly every one of his later films.

It probably accounts for their archetypal punch even when the plots are quite ridiculous.

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Finally, there is Michael Chabon. A novelist whom I think is wayyyyyy overrated, but I do like this story:

Chabon’s first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was his thesis for the MFA he took at the University of California Irvine’s Creative Writing Department.

When it was published in 1988, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was considered groundbreaking because in it, the protagonist has an affair with both a man and a woman.

Rewind the clock back to one late night in 1986 or so, and Chabon doesn’t have the slightest idea of how to wite a sex scene between a man and a man.

I mean— he didn’t want to write porn, so the obvious And then his massive trouser trout found the puckered rosebud of my anus was out!

In a quandary, he went for a walk.

Now, Irvine is in Orange County, and nobody walks in Orange County! But in particular, nobody walks at night in Orange County. So, there was Chabon, marching along those long wide oleanandered boulevards where human footsteps never echo, and the red/green/yellow traffic lights streak the pavements with erie phosphorescence. Of course, he’s alone for miles and miles. But then, he sees another person coming toward him. A man. And as the man passes him, Chabon sees the man has a nosebleed.

And that nosebleed is the perfect symbolic image for his protagonist’s deflowering.

Moral of the story: Sooner or later, if you’re a writer, the Universe will supply you with what you need. But you have to be open to it. You must remain porous.

If you voted for Trump, this is your handiwork:



You did this.

You might as well have been standing there on that subway car with your Sharpie.

You may not have intended it. You may have been voting for what you thought were pro-growth fiscal policies or a stronger defense.

But this is what you wrought.

For the record, I’m a Jew, and all my life, I’ve had violent, reoccurring nightmares about being dragged off to the camps. I had second cousins who died in the camps.

Whether I like you personally or not – and really, I’m one of those people who would have protested to FDR when he was trash-talking Adolph Hitler, But he’s a vegetarian! And he really likes dogs! – this morning I’m inclined to spit in your face.

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Actually, I can respect people who voted for Trump because they wanted pro-growth fiscal policies. I think they’re delusional, of course, because increasingly, raw materials are sourced globally. Instructive case in point: Miracle-Gro.

People who voted for Trump because they wanted a stronger defense are just idiots, though. Your chances of dying because your cat tripped you in your hallway are 100 times higher than your chances of being shot by a foreign-born Islamic terrorist.

Of course, if you factor in white native-born terrorists, your chances of dying shoot up exponentially.

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In other news, Netflix has gotten The Third Man! One of my favorite all time movies!

Harry Lime is a kind of Steve Bannon prototype, no?

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't. Why should we? Lime asks the naïf protagonist Holly Martin. They talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the suckers and the mugs - it's the same thing. They have their five-year plans, so have I.

I’ve seen The Third Man countless times, but I never get tired of it. So I watched it again last night.

I refuse to own a TV though I do watch waaay too much streaming media on an old computer.

And generally, I watch streaming media in bed.

My cat Rutger hops up on the bed, positions himself on the pillows, and watches with me. He looks forward to it, in fact! He starts trying to herd me into bed so he can watch movies as soon as it gets dark.

“That’s impossible, Mom,” RTT scoffed. “I’ve studied animal biology, and I know. Animals do not watch movies.”

“Oh, I’m not saying he’s seeing anything remotely like what I’m seeing when he watches the screen! But he’s definitely watching the screen.”

“You’re just wrong, Mom. You’re –“ He struggled for the word.

“Anthropomorphizing?” I offered helpfully.

“Yeah. Anthro-whatever.”

But it’s Robin and his science professors who are wrong on this one.

And last night, Rutger did something that was very, very weird.

The Third Man has a very famous soundtrack that’s played entirely on a zither.

And very early in the movie, when Holly Martin, searching for Lime, stumbles upon Lime’s faux-funeral, the zither music starts ascending – never studied music theory, so I have no idea what the correct term is. But the notes were going up.

When this happen, Rutger rose from the pillows and froze. He stared at the screen.

As the melody repeated itself, Rutger walked over to the screen and began batting it with its paws.

I wonder what he was hearing?

I suppose the zither notes were the same frequency as some bird cry or the screech of some other primordial feline prey, deeply embedded in Rutger’s brain circuitry.

It was very interesting and rather amusing, though I hastened to separate Rutger from the computer before he could do any damage.

I am now thinking the Motion Picture Association of America needs to add a new rating: Unsafe for Cats.