The Vital Virtue, and Other Tales

The New Year has thus far proved drowsy and unproductive for me. Apart from our New Year's Eve celebration, walks to the Volkspark and to the Kleistpark amid the snow, and a visit to B. and A. in Prenzlauer Berg for a small family gathering before G. and N. flew home, I have done very little.

Anyway, here are some of the past week's amusements:

Television: Live and Let Die, Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Concert, The A-Team, sundry crime shows
YouTube: Roman Holiday, Notorious, To Catch a Thief, Spellbound, The More the Merrier, parts of Charade and Rebecca; Royal Canadian Air Farce
New Yorker, Guardian, Globe and Mail, and New York Times articles

Papa, Mama and I watched the New Year's Concert yesterday. In the second half the usual depressing feeling that all waltzes and polkas sound alike did descend on me; but this was temporary and I even enjoyed the "Blue Danube" and "Radetzky March," which I have heard approximately nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine times. It was not as embarrassing to watch the conductor as it often is; though he didn't glower impressively like Zubin Mehta or Valery Gergiev, neither did Georges Prêtre assume a theatrical air of absorption or indulge in giddy mannerisms as his colleagues all too often do. He lightly waved the tempo here, and wiggled his fingers there, mouthed "stop" at the end of the odd phrase, smiled often and evidently enjoyed the concert greatly. I felt that he brought a welcome lightness, but not superficiality, to the music. Besides, I liked the camera direction; not distractingly fanciful, it permitted satisfying views of the musicians, the audience, the flowers and the ladybug ornaments (which did not, I believe, contain chocolate) among them, and the Musikverein building.

My favourite films among the ones that I watched on YouTube are To Catch a Thief and Spellbound. The first is a well-known Hitchcock film where Cary Grant plays a retired jewel thief who is wrongly suspected of returning to his old work. He wants to clear his name, so he obtains the addresses of people who have valuable jewels that might be stolen, and hopes to trap the real thief at one of these places. One of the rich targets is an American woman (Jessie Royce Landis, who played Cary Grant's mother in North by Northwest) and her daughter (Grace Kelly). I like the Monegasque scenery, the brisk but leisurely pace of the plot, the characters, and the care with which the film was made. Its atmosphere is not as tinged with cynicism and darkness as Charade, for instance, is (in my opinion), nor is it too fluffy. Spellbound is another Hitchcock film, about a psychoanalyst, Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman), who works at a mental hospital. The head of the hospital, Dr. Murchison, is to be replaced by Dr. Edwardes. But it turns out that the man who shows up as Dr. Edwardes (Gregory Peck), is not Dr. Edwardes at all but an amnesiac who has assumed that identity. Dr. Petersen, who loves the impostor, does what she can to cure the amnesia and to find out what happened to the real doctor. The plot is melodramatic, but the quality, taste and seriousness of the acting and direction redeem it, I think. I also like how the parallels between detective work and psychoanalysis are worked out; one collects the data, searches out the clues, and tries to decode and synthesize them to find the solution of a problem. And, realistic or not, I like the film's implied assumption that there is no problem that cannot be rationally explained and solved.

As for my New Yorker reading, I found this week's article on Rudy Giuliani especially good and amusing. I much enjoyed the anecdotes that were skillfully employed as needles to puncture the balloon of political oratory. For example, in one chapter of his book Leadership, "Loyalty: The Vital Virtue," Giuliani records how he appointed Robert Harding to be New York's budget director, even though he was criticized for patronage because Mr. Harding's father, as the chairman of the New York State Liberal Party, had secured political support for the mayor. “I wasn’t going to choose a lesser candidate simply to quiet critics,” he wrote. Elizabeth Kolbert (who wrote the article) responds: "This self-praise is particularly noteworthy, since Giuliani also appointed a second Harding son, Russell, to lead the New York City Housing Development Corporation. Russell, a college dropout with no experience in the housing field, embezzled more than four hundred thousand dollars from the agency, and was eventually sentenced to five years in federal prison."

Besides, I've been re-reading the works of Edward P. Roe on Project Gutenberg. This time their kitsch has been sadly apparent, but I find Miss Lou and An Original Bellevery good in their meticulously researched descriptions of the American Civil War. Mr. Roe had served during the war as a chaplain, and he clearly still read and thought about, and discussed, it long afterwards. The second book portrays not only the war itself, but also the riots that broke out in New York City in July 1863, after President Abraham Lincoln declared a draft. Mobs marched through the streets, murdering black people and police officials in the streets, attacking newspaper offices and other buildings, and looting the houses of the rich. (One of the virtues of Mr. Roe is that he is quite unprejudiced about race and national origin; he only indirectly mentions that most of the rioters were Irish.) The army was called in to help the outnumbered police fight the mob, because the city militia had been sent off to fight in Pennsylvania. The police superintendent, Thomas Acton, had already ordered his men to shoot to kill and take no prisoners. Despite his clerical calling, Mr. Roe approves of this course and calls him "courageous," but I find the superintendent's commands unnecessarily violent. Anyway, I had never heard of the riots before I read this book, but the author's description is interesting and most detailed. It reminds me of the looting in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, because it also shows how thin the veneer of civilization can be, especially in turbulent times.