Up Close and Personal

A Single Man on my “old” HD TV. (Oh, it’s my husband’s really, but I’ve hijacked it.) Am I technically allowed to diffuse this image?

You know, I’ve written a lot about this HD TV of ours (an old technology by now)and how I didn’t want one, but my husband did (cliche-city) and how I now am thrilled we got it because I can watch old movies the way they were meant to be watched.

But a few days ago, I tuned into Witness, a movie I really like, for many reasons, but mostly the sex part, and started watching at the scene where John Book is in town trying to phone his partner and I exclaimed to my husband, “Blair, something’s WRONG with this movie. It doesn’t feel like a movie. It feels as if I am right there, a member of the crew, watching the shoot.”

“I changed the setting to High,”he replied. “Do you want me to change it back?”

“No,” I answered. “I am fascinated. It doesn’t look right. It’s a bit like watching a CBC production. And I am wondering why, exactly.”

A little while later we were watching a re-run of MASH (the episode where Radar is leaving) and same thing, it seemed as if Alan Alda were right there in front of me at the table in the Mess Tent.

I flipped to Coco:after Chanel, a modern movie, the scene where she’s getting into the car (or motor as they called it back then) with Boy and same thing, I felt I was about to get into that antique auto too.

And then the weirdest, Chinatown came on, so I watched it too. And I’d seen it a month ago, so I could compare and analyze. Mrs. Mulray was talking to Jake in the Restaurant. Her perfect (and perfectly made-up face) seemed different from the last time I’d watched.

What was the problem? The lighting. You could SEE it.. And because of that the film now had a soap opera feel. And this is Chinatown, one of the best movies of all time.

And somehow the acting seemed a bit soap-operaish. Impossible. How could that be?

Then when they parted on the street, it no longer seemed soap operish, it seemed TV ish, Miami Vice like. (Soap Opera’s seldom have street scenes.)

So I tried to further deconstruct it all… Somehow, with this lighting (my husband says it is twice as clear or something) a barrier between me as the viewer and the characters is removed. Something like that. I can’t ‘suspend disbelief’ as well.

It doesn’t help that my husband has installed a better sound system and I can hear every tiny background noise and tinkle of knife on plate.

Anyway, I went to the exterior hardrive and loaded A Single Man. Wouldn’t it be nice to feel Colin Firth is in the room? Up close and personal like. But, no. The lighting in this film had a filter or something. Didn’t work.

I guess this is something Directors these days have to think about. Apart from the other thing: that a viewer can take any frame of any film and zoom in on intimate body parts.

(Not that I’ve ever done that…)

Oh, the Wizard of Oz is another movie that (in my opinion) can stand up to this HD scrutiny. I guess that’s because it is so-fake anyway, the costumes and scenery and all.

Now, I’d like to see Gone with the Wind on this HD. That’s one movie that seldom is replayed on TV. If I recall, the cotton picking scene already looked pretty fake.

This has absolutely nothing to do with FLO in the City, except with respect to changing motion picture technology and how it affects us.

Motion Pictures were new in those days, the 1910 era, yet people were quick to adapt.

I recall that famous film story, I heard at school. When “primitive” people were shown their first motion picture, they ran out of the room chasing a chicken that had run out of the frame.

And supposedly, everybody recoiled in horror when they first saw a head in giant close up..

In all my readings about early film, for this blog, I have yet to hear any of these stories. Motion Pictures caught on with everyone, the old, the young, right from the beginning. (Well, theatre-owners and Ministers of the Cloth were not fans of the new medium, because it was stealing away their customers.)

I just read an opinion piece that said that 3 D is IT from now on. No one will want to watch the other, anymore. But what about people like my husband and first born son, who have eye issues and can’t see 3 D? Aboriginal North Americans and many Orientals can’t see 3D either, apparently.

I see that BBC Radio Four is doing a show about 100 years of the film industry. It will be interesting. I wonder if they’ll turn it into a book, as they did with 100 Objects. Like they did with Ways of Seeing.

Ways of Seeing, by John Berger, has greatly influenced how I see the world, as this essay proves.

Sex, Drug Fiends and Veriscopes

My husband’s off work today and we want to see a movie but the only one we can agree to see is Barney’s Version, which is playing in town at AMC and only comes to the burbs tomorrow. So we’ll have to wait. We’ve already seen the King’s Speech – and I wouldn’t mind seeing it again.

I remember watching The Apprenticeship Duddy Kravitz when it came out, and loving Richard Dreyfuss in it. And last night I started to watch A Serious Man on the TV and decided it was too good to watch alone, so I taped it. (A Serious Man’s portrayal of 1962 was as stylized as was A Single Man’s. Funny, both movie protagonists were college professors, yet one lived in a fantasy house in the woods and the other in a small bungalow in a sterile-looking treeless new development. Tract housing, I think they call it.)

My husband and I are not the only ones with this filmic dilemma this holiday season. A family I know, at their Christmas meal, was trying to decide on a movie, one that Gran, 92 and grand kids, in their twenties, would like.

They could not decide, as a group, so went to the Casino, although the 21 year old grandson went on and on about a certain scene in the Black Swan, which contains, in his words, “some serious m##f-diving”.

(He didn’t appear to have registered anything else about the movie.)

Grandma (who still drives) wanted to see King’s Speech, as she has her own stash of “Colin Firth porn” no doubt – or at least a well-worn VHS copy of P and P.

Whatever. On a more serious note: I’m going to talk about opium and morphine addiction. In the 1900′s.

I’ve dug out my copy of The Gentlewoman Magazine, out of New York, to take another look. It is falling apart.

This magazine should be re-named The Hypocondriac Gentlewoman’s Magazine, if the advertisements are any indication.

Cures for all that ails the lady with nothing to do, two of the cures for morphine and opium addiction.

That’s the point: pre-1903 it was these respectable well-heeled ladies who were addicted to the stuff, in their tonics and such. Once the stuff was made illegal, it became controlled by the under-class (peddled by Jews or Chinese to Blacks, so it was claimed in the press) and the menacing, out-of-control ‘ drug fiend’ was invented.

That’s why it is so interesting that the very proper George Falconer in A Single Man admits to taking drugs, including mescaline. Or that the prim and proper Meryl Streep character in It’s Complicated smokes marijuana and has the night of her middle-aged life.

Anyway, the fashion editorial in the Gentlewoman is especially intriguing. This is 1900 remember. A woman is calling for simpler less restrictive clothing, “like the Hindoos wear.”

This is interesting to me, because, as it happens I have a scene in Flo in the City where Flo is getting dressed with all her layers, on a hot summer day, and her mind wanders to something she read about Indian women, and, for a brief moment she envisages herself in a sarong or sari- and the thought disturbs her….

Her m##f-diving moment.

Here’s a snippet: Did any woman in a tea-gown, with plaits and fancy sleeves and much lace and ribbons ever look so well as the Hindoo in her softly folded draperies?…. It is possible to argue that they are an indolent people, that we could not do business or keep house in draperies.(sic) No, we could not conveniently. But the East has workers. I am not arguing only voluminious draperies or even draperies at all, but I am arguing for simpler patterns, and for their superior patterns.”

Yes, I will use this snippet in that chapter in my book.

As it happened, simpler patterns slowly came in over the next two decades… and this helped doom the custom-tailoring industry and promote the exponential growth of garment industry.

In 1900, they didn’t have films, they had VERISCOPES.

HD Time Machine

My Dad and Me, Wabush Lake, 1959

I finally got down to watch A Single Man again, this time on DVD at home. Why I didn’t buy the Blue Ray I don’t know.

Anyway, I watched with my husband fully aware this wasn’t his type of movie. (When I tried to get him to watch Brideshead Revisited once, he ran out of the room saying This is too gay for me.) He made me watch Hot Tub Time Machine last week, a movie that is on the opposite end of the scale to A Single Man.

Anyway, I wanted to see if my ideas about he movie would change at all. But they didn’t. I still found it pretty and meticulously crafted, but a bit over produced, too precious. (The friend I just visited in Halifax loved the movie by the way and she’s not that much of a Colin Firth fan.)I still found Julianne Moore’s performance a bit weird; indeed she reminded me at one point of Edwina on Abfab. The accent, I think and all the cigarettes and ‘darlings’ flying about.

And I still think Colin Firth has had performances equal to this, although I have to concede this role gave him more room to manoever. And he cries very well, for a ‘repressed guy.

And I still think all the women in the film were too stylized, unrealistic, props or anima. Decoration. Not fleshed out, by design, if you will. Literally and figuratively.

And I still found the old man, young man thing icky, although I can see it was handled with dignity – and kid gloves. You see George is a very dignified man, as most of Colin Firth’s characters are or should I say, as are Colin Firth’s most famous characters.

I gained an admiration for the pacing, which is pitch perfect, though.

Anyway, George reminded me more than ever of my father, so the director, Tom Ford, certainly captured the sixties. Indeed, the style of the movie was reminiscent of some 60′s movies, not the gritty realistic ones with Albert Finney, but those ones like The Romantic Englishwoman with Glenda Jackson and all those mirrors. (They never play that one on Turner Classics.) Or The Go-Between, a movie I love.)

Firth’s character, George, mentions he came to the US in 1938. (There’s something cockeyed about the time line in the movie.) My father, likes so many Britishers, came after the war. And unlike George, he lost his British accent immediately.

My final word: the movie would have been nothing without Firth and yet, if they had cast an unknown, they might have been able to make it a groundbreaking movie, gritty and get down dirty, at points, instead of dancing around everything. (The short beach scene reminded me of a sketch from Extras, which means it was a tad cliche.)

Anyway, I asked my husband if all the homoeroticism in the movie freaked him out. (I mean, he couldn’t stand the sight of Charles Ryder and Lord Sebastian Flyte eating a picnic under a tree.)
He replied, “What are you talking about?”
I answered, “All the male nudity and cameras panning over the bodies like they usually do over women’s bodies in the movies.”
“I didn’t notice, ” he replied. “I felt sorry for the guy. I guess it’s a love story.
And so it is, except the dvd of A Single Man has no picture of the love interest Matthew Goode. Just the shots of Moore and Colin.
The marketers know who Colin Firth’s fans are. Women like me.

One other thing that bothered me about A Single Man was the fact the two men lived in the burbs in the 60′s. How did that happen?

I lived in the burbs. I recall one evening my Dad coming home late (I was in bed, at least I remember I was) and he told my mother how the next door neighbour, who had given him a drive into the city that day, had ‘made a pass’ at him. I sort of knew what that meant.

The next door neighbour was married, of course. I also recall his wife used to wash her bedsheets every day. My mother remarked upon it.

My husband, amazingly, did not fall asleep during the film. I kept a close eye on him.

How can I relate this to Flo in the City, my novel about a girl coming of age in the 1910 era? I can’t. No mention of homosexuality in the letters, needless to say. Although it was there, no doubt. There is mention of a boy committing suicide in the town of Richmond. And Edith says, “He was always a strange boy.”

Hmm. And there are the Boston men, Chester, who is not inclined to marry, which bothers his mom, who needs help around the house and Dr. Henry Watters, a cousin who appears to be the best kind of man, thoughtful and responsible, and who has a successful practice, but who never marries and dies in 1937.

I can relate this blog to Looking For Mrs. Peel, my play about my British Grandmother, www.tighsolas.ca/page.745.html

because it partly takes place in 1967. In it, I invoke all those Expo 67 hostesses and Yardley The London Look. And the sizzling political situation. And this play is all about women, so the men literally have no voice. Including, well, especially, my father.

Home Theatre Musings

A nice picture of my favorite actor Colin Firth at the Luncheon of the Academy Awards in February.

My husband and son went to Costco today to buy a new BBQ but came back instead with a much more important thing, a storage device for the satellite. I just asked, he says it is an external hard drive.

We buy and save a lot of movies off satellite.. And then I watch the few movies I like a few times over. I did this with An Education and I liked it more and more with each viewing. I am waiting this week for A Single Man, which I will likely buy on DVD too.

My husband couldn’t wait to tell me about his purchase, as if I care about anything like that: he thinks I’ll be happy because now I can keep the movies I buy or tape for a long long time. And he won’t have to bug me to erase some because he’s running out of room. I have a few favourites I refuse to erase, Mamma Mia, Lost in Austen, basically a whole bunch of Colin Firth movies and sundry period pieces and classics. I guess this has irked him on some level.

No new bbq. The one we have with the one handle that threatens to come off at any time will have to do. It doesn’t matter. I never touch the thing.

Anyway, today I went with a friend to see Knight and Day because I saw the preview and it seemed funny. I was surprised, I liked it a lot. It’s a spoof as far as I can see (without the broad comedy) and Cruise’s deadpan performance is spot on. And Cameron Diaz is fun. Maturity has been kind to her. The problem is, the action genre is so over the top anyway, that few critics saw this movie as a spoof. It’s too subtle a spoof -if that’s possible. But I like subtle, that’s why I like An Education. (Peter Sarsgard (spelling?) was in both movies.

Whenever I watch an action flick with my husband, usually half paying attention, I always say “That’s ridiculous. No human can do that or take that punishment. ” And he gets mad. He says I am ruining it for him. It’s become ‘the convention’ I guess, led by the Bond Films. He’s a news editor: so he likes to stop the movie at any point to show me continuity errors which have gone ZING over my head. I suspend belief when it comes to continuity. The dialogue is more important than whether a character has an open shirt, closed shirt, open shirt, etc etc.

Anyway, I saw a preview for an Oliver Stone Film, Wall Street Something or Other….sequel I guess. Carrie Mulligan is in it – and from what I saw in this preview, her performance in An Education is no fluke.

She’s going to be a huge star…

The Entertainment World Turns a Page

Coats in 1909 Delineator.

Well, The Hurt Locker won most of the important awards last night, with Kathryn Bigelow winning for best director, a first win in the category for a woman.

A few years ago BBC Radio 4 ran a piece on Women in Silent Film and said there were more women directors in the silent era than there are now. And it has taken 100 years for a women to win a best director Oscar.

I wonder if this is only because the ‘real films’, from now on, will be these techno-extravaganzas that bring in billions and the ‘little films’ bringing in pittances will be left to women to make. Sounds cynical…But you know, in the 1900′s, there were some women aeroplane pilots too, but after WWI, when planes became important, men took them over. (Amelia Earhart’s story resonates because she was an exception, not the rule.)

It’s getting more and more the case: movies I want to see only play in the art houses (in my case AMC at Atwater in Montreal) whereas the money making movies (and the movies that draw the over-priced popcorn and soda garburating kids) play in the ‘burbs.

So, yesterday I went to see Up in the Air again, at AMC, because a friend hadn’t seen it – and she complained she couldn’t get her seniors’ discount. (An Education and A Single Man and Crazyheart were playing in the theatre as well, and no where else in Montreal.)I told my friend,who had a bottle of water tucked away in her purse because she would never dole out 7 dollars for a water in a cinema, “That’s because the only people coming to these cinemas are seniors, or film students! They’d lose what little money they make if they gave discounts.”

I personally thought the Hurt Locker was similar to a good episode of Generation Kill without the crude sexist humour.

I liked An Education much better. I liked Up in the Air better. And I even liked A Single Man better – as a work of art. I have mixed feelings about the story-line. (And not only because that movie starred Colin Firth, who did not win last night despite the fact he’s simply the best movie actor out there, period, in any year.)

But that doesn’t matter, because I am an ‘old’ person and cinema, in this new video-game 3-D format, with by the book fairy tale plotlines, belongs to the young, just as it did in the silent era.

Anyway, motion picture shows figure largely in Flo in the City, my work in progress about a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1910 era based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/.

This was the era of D.W. Griffith’s silent short films. In one of the upcoming installments, possibly the next, Marion and her friends the Clevelands go to see Man in the Box at the Nickel starring Mack Sennett, who is from Richmond. They do not recognize him. I have not decided whether I will have them go to the Ouimetoscope, a lavish 1,200 seat theatre or a plain Nickel. (I should go to McGill and look through a newspaper, but I’m too lazy.)

I have a copy of the 1910 Dramatic Mirror -a theatre publication which has a motion picture section. Many many movies are ‘reviewed’ but few mention the name of the Director, so I can’t tell whether any were women.

Here’s a link to that BBC Four piece on Women in Silent Film

Here’s a link to a page on film censorship in 1910 from my Tighsolas website where I snuck in a picture of my favourite actor Colin Firth (just to bug my husband).
Film Censorship then and Now.

Questions of Silk and Chiffon

A fashion spread from the Delineator, 1909. Each dress had a number with a corresponding pattern. Still, it is unlikely the Nicholson women made such fancy dresses. Of course, in those days, a woman would have one or two nice dresses, no more. We are used to seeing these fashions in movies, like Titanic, on gorgeous actresses portraying wealthy women. Let’s face it, the fashions in movies like Easter Parade or Gigi are half the fun.

With the Academy Awards coming up Sunday, or the Oscars, it is interesting to observe that the women in these early fashion magazines were fantasies to aspire to, much as the modern actresses parading the red carpet are, today, 100 years later. For the Academy Awards are all about fashion, right? (Of course, this year they’ve nominated more popular movies as well as the art house movies like An Education which critics like but few go to see in the cinema. (Well, I do.)

(I hope my favourite actor Colin Firth wins best actor for A Single Man, despite the fact I have very mixed feelings about the movie. I don’t even believe, as most critics do, that Firth outdid himself in this movie. He’s always worthy of a nomination, I think, anway. Oh, and I tried to watch the Olivier Pride and Prejudice last night, taped off Turner Classic Movies, but I couldn’t. Those ridiculous hats and dresses! Not Regency at all! I’m just so used to the Colin Firth P and P.)

My next chapter of Flo in the City, a story based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/, will be about fashion, which means I have to ‘study’ this Delineator to absorb the lingo, the fashion jargon, which is Greek to me.

(I’m watching Richard III on my big screen, right now, and Olivier is doing his winter of discontent speech, in a silly wig..very distracting.)

Here’s a bit from this Delineator…Society Page, in honor of the 2010 Oscars, because, since the 1910 era, actors (and singers) have taken the place of society people in the the heart of us dull normals as people to look up to.

Not in one’s wildest flights of fancy could one call New York a deserted city, even during this deadest and dullest season on the year. Fifth Avenue alone feels the defection of its householders and the sightless eyes of its closely boarded windows turn a vacant stare on the quiet and sunny street.

The city has been taken over by an ever changing flow of visitors, who are here to enjoy the amusements which New York affords during the Summer Months. These women, or girls rather, for they are still girls, with their love of youthful pleasures have been planning for these days or weeks in the city and have used all of their ingenuity to be gowned correctly for all occasions.

Our concern is with the women who lead in the matters of fashion. Newport, Narragansett, Manchester, and the other cities by the seas are at the height of the season, and there seems to be no dearth of amusement if one is fond of polo tournaments, tennis matches and yacht races. The older women of the social world are apt to be a bit bored by the never varying program that repeats itself each Summer, but if one is young and not too much troubled by temperament, I believe the point of view is somewhat different (Sic!) Nothing is or should be a bore to someone of one and twenty, although one gloomy young person who is dragging through the first year of society assured me, when she came to order her summer frocks, that another winter she intends to take a flat on the east side and work among the poor so that she can get a little rest. However, I noticed that once she became really interested in the question of summer silks and chiffons , the slums seemed to slip a little into the background.. (PS. for some reason this excerpt of August in the Cities by the Sea by Mrs. Simcox, written in 1909 and therefore in the Public domain disappeared off my blog. Hmmm. Ghosts?)

(Hmm, I love this…It was OK for society matrons to take an interest in social problems, but clearly it was not encouraged in the young. A young woman concerned with more than her appearance was deemed ‘dull’ and too troubled by temperament. The media, in this case, magazines, provides a kind of conditioning, with a few well-chosen words. (Does this happen today? But of course.)

Now, I gotta go to IMDB and see if Richard III won any awards for costumes. I hope not. They are awful!! Gielgud looks like he’s wearing a woman’s wrapper from that 1909 Delineator I have on hand. But the acting, ahh, that’s a different story.

Influenza, La Grippe and Flu Epidemics

Nadruco Products 1910. Na-Dru-Co or the National Drug Company was Canada’s premiere company in the era. I have their 1911 brochure. My favourite bit: “Hysteria is a nervous condition peculiar to females and manifests itself in various ways according to disposition and temperament; paroxysms of laughing and weeping alternately, screaming, gasping for breath, trembling, clenching the hands and teeth and other apparently alarming symptoms are common and often needlessly frighten the friends of the patient. It is not necessarily dangerous, but rather a symptom of some nervous irritation or organic excitement, and is often a frequent attendant of uterine troubles.”

I have re-read my rough draft of the first chapter of Flo in the City, about a young girl coming of age in the exciting 1908-1913 era, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ (covering 1908) and have decided to continue writing installments for 1909 while I edit 1908. (I’ve got the February blues but I can’t just fill in with movie reviews: I reviewed Colin Firth’s A Single Man yesterday in my blog and now I just have to see Crazyheart. ) Still not sure how I feel about A Single Man a movie created by a fashion person…transition My very next installment of Flo in the City is going to be on millinery, showing how hats are made… very technical. Maybe I’ll make a hat, myself, from scratch.

Hats (and status) are going to be a central theme of this chapter for 1909. Marion and Edith go hat shopping at Ogilvy and spend way too much money on fashionable hats, money they can ill-afford to spend. Fashion can be a way for women to express themselves (and get ahead socially) but it is also a way to keep them poor.

I read somewhere that single women today aren’t like the spinsters in the old days, who saved every penny, as they had no kids to take care of them in old age. Single women today,unlike in the 1910 era, can make a lot of money, but they are keen to spend it and many have huge credit card debt and no security for old age. So consumerism undermines the aims and goals of feminism. To protect women.

Edith ended up a spinster and living in genteel poverty, despite working at good jobs all of her life, but that wasn’t because she spent on clothing. It was largely because she had so many medical bills to pay.

So I continue my research on the era and I found this 1910 medical book on archive.org and excerpted the bit on influenza, or ‘la grippe’ as it was called. The Nicholon letters of the era are full of talk of colds and ‘la grippe’ although I sincerely doubt that when Edith says she has “La grippe” that she had influenza. Just a cold.

In 1912, however, there appears to be a kind of outbreak, because many more people than usual are dying in Richmond (healthy people,too) and two otherwise healthy young women die suddenly at Macdonald College, where Flo is studying.

Influenza, consumption and typhoid are talked about in the letters openly. Scarlet fever and diptheria too. Mental illness is hinted at. Depression is called ‘the blues’ but in one letter a young man dies locally and it sounds like a suicide. Edith says, “He was such a queer boy.” A local man goes missing and is found ‘in the river’ and that too sounds either like Alzheimer’s or depression.

Here’s the excerpt from 1910 Medicine book.

INFLUENZA; LA GRIPPE— Influenza is an acute, highly contagious disease due to a special germ, and tending to spread with amazing rapidity over vast areas. It has occurred as a world-wide epidemic at various times in history, and during four periods in the last century, A pandemic of influenza began in the winter of 1889-90, and continued in the form
of local epidemics till 1904, the disease suddenly appearing in a community and, after a prevalence of about six weeks, disappearing again. One attack, it is, perhaps, unnecessary to state, does not protect against another. The mortality is about 1 death to 400 cases. The feeble and aged are those who are apt to succumb. Fatalities usually result from complications or sequels, such as pneumonia or tuberculosis; neurasthenia or insanity may follow.

Symptoms. — There are commonly four important symptoms characteristic of grippe: fever; pain, catarrh ; and depression, mental and physical. Grippe attacks the patient with great suddenness. While in perfect health and engaged in ordinary work, one is often seized with a severe chill followed by general depression, pain in the head, back, and limbs, soreness of the muscles, and fever. The temperature varies from ioo° to 104° F. The catarrh attacks the eyes, nose, throat, and larger tubes in the lungs. The eyes become reddened and sensitive to light, and movements of the eyeballs cause pain. Sneezing comes on early, and, after a day or two, is followed by discharge from the nose. The throat is often sore and reddened. There may be a feeling of weight and tightness in the chest accompanied by a harsh, dry cough, which, after a few days, becomes looser and expectoration occurs.

Bodily weakness and depression of spirits are usually prominent and form often the most persistent and distressing symptoms.

After three or four days the pains decrease, the temperature falls, and the cough and oppression in the chest lessen, and recovery usually takes place within a week, or ten days, in serious cases. The patient should go to bed at once, and should not leave it until the temperature is normal (98^° F.)for some time. Afterwards general weakness, associated with heart weakness, causes the patient to sweat easily, and to get out of breath and have a rapid pulse on slight exertion.

Such is the picture of a typical case, but it often happens that some of the symptoms are absent, while others are exaggerated so that different types of grippe are often described. Thus the pain in the back and head may be so intense as to resemble that of meningitis. Occasionally the stomach and bowels are attacked so that violent vomiting and diarrhea occur, while other members of the same family present the ordinary form of influenza. There is a form that attacks principally the nervous system, the nasal and bronchial tracts escaping altogether. Continual fever is the only symptom in some cases. Grippe may last for weeks. Whenever doubt exists as to the nature of the disorder, a microscopic examination of the expectoration or of the mucus from the throat by a competent physician will definitely determine the existence of influenza, if the special germs of that disease are
found. It is the prevailing and erroneous fashion for a person to call any cold in the head the grippe; and there are, indeed, many cases in which it becomes difficult for a physician to distinguish between grippe and a severe cold with muscular soreness and fever, except by the microscopic test. Influenza becomes dangerous chiefly through its complications, as pneumonia, inflammation of the middle ear, of the eyes, or of the nose or kidneys, and through its depressing effect upon the heart.

These complications can often be prevented by avoiding the slightest imprudence or exposure during convalescence. Elderly and feeble persons should be protected from contact with the disease in every way. Whole prisons have been exempt from grippe during epidemics, owing to the enforced seclusion of the inmates. The one absolutely essential feature in treatment is that the patient stay in bed while the fever lasts and in the house afterwards, except as his strength will permit him to go out of doors for a time each sunny day until recovery is fully established.

Treatment. — The medicinal treatment consists at first in combating the toxin of the disease and assuaging pain, and later in promoting strength. Hot lemonade and whisky may be given during the chilly period and a single six- to ten-grain dose of quinine.

Pain is combated by phenacetin,* three grains repeated every three hours till relieved. At night a most useful medicine to afford comfort when pain and sleeplessness are troublesome, is Dover’s powder, ten grains (or codeine, one grain), with thirty grains of sodium bromide dissolved in water. After the first day it is usually advisable to give a two-grain quinine pill to gether with a tablet containing one-thirtieth of a grain of strychnine three times a day after meals for a week or two as a tonic (adult). A powerful medicine suitable to keep the bowels regular as a Seidlitz powder in the morning before breakfast. The diet should be liquid while the fever lasts — as milk, cocoa, soups, eggnog, one of these each two hours. A tablespoonful of whisky, rum, or brandy may be added to the milk three times daily if there is much weakness.

The germ causing grippe lives only two days, but successive crops of spores are raised in a proper medium. Neglected mucus in nose or throat affords an inviting field for the germ. Therefore it is essential to keep the nostrils free and open by means of spraying with the Seiler’s tablet solution , and then always breathing through the nostrils.

A Single Man – Colin Firth.

Superbowl Sunday I went to see A Single Man, the movie for which Colin Firth, (my favourite) has been nominated for Best Actor and since I reviewed An Education and Up in the Air in this blog (somehow relating it to Tighsolas) I’ll do the same here, although I don’t see, yet, how I can relate it to the Nicholson women experiences.

First, I don’t see why they are calling this Firth’s ‘breakout’ role. This is pretty much the same Colin, the perfect gentleman, grieving for a loss, that we’ve met many times before.

In fact, A Single Man is practically another And When Did you Last See your Father and I think that movie dealt with grieving in a more realistic way, well, a totally realistic way.

OK. A Single Man is a day in a life, so it’s the proverbial ‘slice’ -but still.

The movie is nicely-crafted, but more style than substance, even too stylized.

I wish it had been more political and ‘piggy’ instead of just hinting at the politics and leaving out all explicit sex, with a few good scenes, where Firth ogles a young man playing tennis as someone talks about nuclear war and bomb shelters and where Firth gives a speech about ‘fear’ in the classroom, the best speech in the film. A Single Man reminded me of those 40s musicals, where every time the couple should have sex, they dance. Here they swim.

The grieving main character, George, himself is not political, and that’s fine, but the film should be -or it is just a rather one-dimensional character study – and, like I said, Firth has played this character before, many times, regardless of sexual orientation. (He looks just like my Dad, which is freaky but predictable as my dad was of that era.)

I’ve heard a lot about what it meant to be gay in the 60′s – it was dangerous. To be a gay couple, in a suburb, must have been very very risky. And a college prof and an architect, they risked their careers, I imagine.
I was just reading about Gielgud, and how he almost blew his brilliant career for one public incident in the 50′s.

May-September romances or flirtations are icky whoever is in them, old men, young women, Old women, young men. So, that subplot with the young student gave me the creeps, despite the fact it was not what it appeared. (Actually, it was ambiguous.)

Still, Colin’s performance, in my humble opinion, was better than Clooney’s in Up in the Air, although not the one he gave in Michael Clayton.

Now, how can I relate all this to Tighsolas? Well, Tighsolas is a woman’s story. I like women’s stories. As a woman, I find it hard to relate to this movie, A Single Man, as women play no part in it, they are merely decoration or ‘anima’ of the male psyche, all eye-make-up and party dresses. Just like in the fashion industry, I guess.

(The characters identify with little girls but not little boys.) And ogling the human form in a movie can get uncomfortable, whether it’s female or male.

So I much prefer An Education, which was as well crafted and more true to my experience and was about the sixties, as well. Also far better written.

Oh, yea, and the couple in A Single Man had a sixteen year relationship and yet that relationship is portrayed as perfect (in George, the main character’s memory.)Matthew Goode is very very good, actually.

My favorite couple (or the one I feel is most realistic) is in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Enough said. As for Firth’s gal pal, well, I’ve been there and done that and I couldn’t relate to the way they related, either. The gay couple has been together for 16 years, so the ‘intimate’ gal pal has listened for almost two decades to intricate details of the relationship (that would be her function) and then she comes out with a stupid statement claiming their relationship wasn’t a real one.. Nutsy. So there you go.

So, I enjoyed A Single Man while watching it, quite a lot, (my companion didn’t, she found it boring) and now, upon thinking out it, I find it has many flaws. And I love the 60′s. And I love Colin Firth.

A Single Man is based on a story by a Christopher Isherwood, a gay guy and directed by a gay guy, Tom Ford, but I found Brokeback Mountain more realistic, if love is love is love and lust is lust is lust and couples are couples are couples, which is the main message of A Single Man.

But, then, the movie isn’t exactly for me, even though they cast Mr. Darcy in it. In one scene, where he’s supposed to be 16 years younger, he wears a white shirt and he looks great, as usual. (See, even here they snuck that in.) Give Firth marks for daring, he put himself up close and personal with gorgeous young men, in fact he is the least good looking man in the film by a mile.