Blithe Spirit (1945)

You know, I never really liked Blithe Spirit on the page, maybe because I thought the ending really wasn't that funny, even if the first act of the play is hilarious. Well, I quite honestly laughed my ass off watching Rex Harrison, Margaret Rutherford, and the rest of the cast of the 1945 David Lean–Ronald Neame–Noel Coward film of this play. It's delightful!

I've been watching films from the 1947 awards season, and I'd been postponing this one, but the Queer Cinema Archive posted about this recently as a bit of queer coding – the implication is that Margaret Rutherford's Madame Arcati character is coded as a lesbian – so I figured I'd catch Blithe Spirit tonight. Well, I've watched the film now, and I can't say I saw any such coding. However, a the end of the film there is some explicit queerness:

Elvira, the main character’s late wife, has been pestering him about her flirtations with a Captain Bracegirdle while she was alive. She had, apparently, been unfaithful to her husband with old Captain Bracegirdle, whom she tells us was very attractive. Well, at the very end of the movie, Rex Harrison has a monologue about how he’s always been picked on by women who have bossed him around. Harridans, he calls them. Then he says, “You were very silly, Elvira, if you think I didn’t know all about you and Captain Bracegirdle. I did. And what you didn’t realize is that I was extremely attached to Paul Westlake at the time!”

Incidentally, the poster, which is very sexy, doesn't have a thing to do with the movie, which isn't remotely sexy. Kay Hammond, the eponymous blithe spirit, doesn't wear anything approximating the sexy outfit of the woman on the poster, and her haircut looks nothing like this either. Honestly, I don't know who this is even supposed to be. In any case, although it is not at all sexy, Blithe Spirit is a very funny film, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Ok... So I Was Listening to NPR This Morning

...And the following thought occured to me:

Why is there a civil war in Iraq? Really. I'm totally serious with this question. I have no idea why they are fighting.
*

I mean, sure, I understand that some of them are Sunnis and some of them are Shiites, but why are they fighting? That's no reason to kill one another, is it? I don't get it. To me, what is important in my country is politics: where does the money go; what freedoms am I allowed; what medical research do we do; how secure are we, etc. But the Iraqis don't seem to be fighting about politics; they seem to be fighting about... What? Seriously. Does anyone have an answer to this question?
It seems to me that Iraq and Democracy don't really go very well together. There is a scene from David Lean's gorgeously-painted Lawrence of Arabia that attempted to illustrate this in 1962 that I think about a lot when I hear reports from the Arab world nowadays. In it, a group of Arab warlords tries to come to a compromise and eject Westerners from their land. It doesn't work. They can't expel the British from their lands because they can't agree with one another. The meeting ends only in frustration. A gun goes off (as I recall) and everyone leaves pissed. The (Western) hero Lawrence is left, head-in-hands, alone in the meeting room.

If they're fighting about religion, then that's just stupid. In this country we fight about religion, too, but here we do it by yelling at one another, not by killing children. If someone knows of another reason that they're fighting, please tell me, because I just get more and more confused.

Gin & Tonic for Breakfast

I had a dream I was in a play, and it was a good play written by (of all people) David Ives, but it was about baseball or some other sporting event.  I remember none of the specifics of the show, but I was good in it, and I was the audience favorite (hey, it's my dream).  Mike OT was in it too and a whole bunch of other guys.  I forget where it was, but at the end of it, Christine and Kathy and Kristen came.  Kathy & Kristen had watched it but of course Christine didn't.  At some point, too, I was hanging onto the car they were riding in trying to talk to them and they just kept driving and talking to me as if nothing were different.  (But I didn't feel like an outsider).  Who knows.  My alarm went off.

Yesterday, after watching Summertime with Katharine Hepburn in the afternoon, I headed to the Derby for my dad's birthday.  Mike paid.  It was very nice.  That place really is the nicest restaurant.  Matt Kingston was our waiter.  Mike Nicolarsen works there, too, and so does Cassandra Haddon.  My god, it was like a First Lutheran reunion.  I guess Dustin, who is now the manager, got them all jobs.  Matt was cool.  He is gorgeous, now, of course.  Seriously beautiful in the way I like white guys to be beautiful.  He told me he loves me.  Typical stuff.

Went to El Pescador last night in honor of Julie's birthday/Easter.  Many were there: Bobby, Julie, Anna, Lisa, Betsy (Anna's sister), Scott (he comes to everything, now), Jaime, Zack, Sarah, and someone else from Starbucks named Jamie who everyone called "The Other."  Plus me, though I showed up around nine.  I smoked about 5 cigarettes.  I didn't drink too much, though, because my mom had called me from Hawaii and told me not to.  And it's not like I needed to drink.  I was already talkative from the 2 gin and tonics I had at the Derby.  So I just had one really big margarita.

I wasn't gonna tell Anna about the Matt thing tonight, but then she asked where we went and I said "The Derby" so she asked if I saw him... etc.  She got just like I did last week when she was telling me about when she saw him.  Not that I want to compete, because what I really want to do is support her in everything she does, including pursuing Matt if that's what she wants.  But, I felt a little better about the whole ownership of Matt thing because in actuality, she doesn't feel like she owns him either. (Here ends the petty paragraph).

We had SO MUCH FUN at El Pescador last night.  Derek was drunk off his ass and so was Julie and she was opening gifts and the girls were all singing Karaoke: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, and some Madonna song, too.  It was really a blast.  I left around 11:30p, because I have a rehearsal to run this morning.

I am excited for today.  I have plans.  We shall see.

Mike and Debs and Dad were extremely supportive of my decision not to take the CSUP job and they lots of good advice.  I was grateful.

Jeremy called me twice to invite me to Kill Bill, Vol. 2, and Kim Porter called me too.  I felt loved.

Fucking Julie and Bobby went to see the movie in the afternoon because they knew they'd be busy last night.  I don't think I'm gonna see it until Tuesday!  I am so jealous of all who did.