1. I've been putting some titles of documentaries about music, musicians, and writers on my FireTV watch list. I had promised myself that today I'd watch the movie Regarding Susan Sontag. The movie chronicles the entire span of Sontag's life, dividing its focus between, on the one hand, looking at Sontag's novels, essays, and books, her film making, and, on the other, reporting on her love relationships over the years with men and women. While aware of Sontag's fame, I came to this movie not knowing much about her ideas and this film helped me understand her writings on, among other things, pop culture, photography, her political viewpoints, her insights into illness and mortality, and her sense of what she understood her role as a writer to be, especially in relation to society and as a cultural critic. Among the many pleasures of this movie was listening to the voice of Patricia Clarkson. Clarkson provided readings of those passages for which no recordings exist of Sontag reading them herself. Clarkson's work was brilliant.
2. It got to be around dinner time. I told Debbie that whatever we were having for dinner, it would involve rice. Debbie recommended I make shrimp with green beans. Talk about great minds. I was thinking the very same thing. As I started thawing the pre-cooked shrimp and preparing the frozen green beans, seasoning them with garlic powder, I suddenly thought that I'd like to top this rice bowl of shrimp and green beans with toasted sesame seeds. Debbie liked the idea, too, so I prepared the sesame seeds, finished warming up the shrimp and green beans, and we each enjoyed a tasty rice bowl. I enhanced mine with Bragg's Liquid Aminos, a very good decision.
3. After watching some news programming, we switched gears and went back to the first season of Vera. Although Debbie had seen it, she agreed to watch the season's second episode again. In it, Vera revives an eleven year old murder case, suspecting that the wrong person was imprisoned for it. It was a good story, but of special note to me was the way, in this early episode, Vera is portrayed as prone to temper outbursts and is, to say the least, prickly with her subordinates, yelling at them sometimes in moments of frustration and impatience. I began watching Vera in a much later season -- 10 or 11 -- and while Vera is, in these later episodes, sarcastic, fiery, demanding, blunt, and always brilliant, it's as if the years had worn off some of the sharper edges of her character. Over the next weeks and months, I'll keep coming back to Vera and I'll be particularly interested in watching the development of her character and see if I'm right that as she ages she mellows a bit.
It was past 10:30, I think, when Vera wrapped up. I thought Debbie was going to go to bed, but she lingered for a while. I started doing one of my favorite things -- clicking around the endless offerings available on FireTV and looking at trailers for different movies and documentaries.
While I was FireTV surfing, Debbie said she'd like to watch a short tv episode of something -- in the spirit of what we did a while back when we watched early episodes of Bewitched. Her eye caught an image and abruptly she said, "How about Peter Gunn?"
My adrenaline surged.
I clicked on Peter Gunn with these few words, "Remember its great theme song?"
I was a too young to watch Peter Gunn when it aired from 1958-61, but over the years I'd read this and that about its atmosphere, the writing, and the way it was filmed. Our viewing tonight confirmed that the atmosphere and the way the show was shot was all film noir: monochromatic, cool jazz, dimly lit rooms, high contrast between light and shadows, tons of cigarette smoke. Peter Gunn is a well-groomed, sharply dressed private detective who drives a DeSoto and has a beautiful girlfriend who sings with a jazz band in a wharfside club called Mother's. The show's script is hard-boiled, echoing the clipped rhythms and wit of writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.
The two stories we watched were thin, but in their devotion to cool jazz, elegance, and ruthless thugs, it looked like Peter Gunn was as much about aesthetics as it was about plots. In the second episode, "Streetcar Jones", much of the story is given over to Streetcar, who plays the vibes, and Lido, a jazz piano player, talking in separate conversations with Peter Gunn about the nature of jazz, the soul of jazz, and what divides authentic jazz players from pretenders. The murder investigation became a minor concern in this episode. Jazz theory and jazz criticism took over the episode and my jaw dropped. I had no idea that these kinds of conversations ever took place in a weekly half hour television program. We are looking forward to watching more.
Stu wrote this limerick for our enjoyment:
I know that the world sure seems crazy.
You're told to go home and be lazy.
Stay six feet apart,
Wipe down the shopping cart.
And on Doctors and Nurses heap praisey!
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