As I have ever since Debbie tested positive, I felt fine today.
2. I gave the Vizio a good workout today. I definitely went for variety! I started by flipping on the Joan Jett documentary, Bad Reputation (2018). I love Joan Jett and this movie inspired even more love in me. The last time the Westminster Basementeers Zoomed together, the subject of punk rock music came up for a little while and, as I watched Bad Repuation, I thought about how his movie would have helped our conversation. Bad Reputation not only places Joan Jett in the world of punk rock, it provides an insightful overview of what punk embodied, especially in Los Angeles.
This afternoon, I returned to the Criterion Channel's collection of British New Wave movies and watched Room at the Top (1959), the movie many film historians credit for initiating this British burst of movies focused on the lives of working class characters, often shot in black and white, mostly filmed in industrial towns outside of London. In Room at the Top, Laurence Harvey plays Joe Lampton, a small town working class character who had been a POW in World War II. He takes a city government job in a larger town and sets his mind to breaking free of his working class past and begins his efforts to ascend to what he hopes will be "room at the top" of the local social ladder. He sets out to seduce and marry the daughter of a local wealthy factory owner. He complicates his efforts by falling in love with and having an affair with a solicitor's wife, a woman ten years older than he is. Her name is Alice and she's played brilliantly by Simone Signoret who brings to life the many layers of Alice's frustrations, wisdom, longing, sensuality, intelligence, and suffering. While the movie is Joe's story, it's Simon Signoret's work that will stay with me and bring me back to watching this movie again.
I continued to make the most of being holed up in the Vizio room by watching another Ealing Studio comedy, Whiskey Galore! (1949). These Ealing Studio comedies consistently pit ordinary people of the United Kingdom in some kind of conflict with their country's bureaucracy or with the efforts of some kind of law enforcement body to maintain order. This hilarious movie is no exception and tells the story of a plucky Scottish village whose whiskey supply has run dry. But, a cargo ship has a wreck just off this village's shore. The ship is carrying a generous supply of cases of whiskey. The movie then centers on the efforts of the citizenry to get the whiskey out of the wrecked ship, bring it back to land, and stay out of reach of the authorities who would arrest them for plundering the ship.
I'll leave it at that, only to say that what ensues is a madcap and glorious exploration of a village's love of whiskey and highly entertaining story of their efforts to secure and keep possession of it.
I wrapped up my Vizio room marathon by watching Requiem for the Big East (2014) an ESPN 30 for 30 episode I'd watched before, but I've been missing college basketball and decided to watch it again.
This documentary pumped me up. I loved, once again, hearing the story of how the Big East Conference came into being and how its birth coincided with the birth of ESPN. It was a blast seeing highlights of fiercely contested games from the 1980s and to remember what a superb roster of coaches worked in this new league: John Thompson, Jim Boeheim, Lou Carnesecca, Rollie Massimino, Tom Davis (not mentioned in the documentary), Rick Pitino, Bill Raftery, and, later, Jim Calhoun and P. J. Carlesimo. In the 1980s, the league featured some of the USA's very best collegiate players: Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullen, Duane Washington, among others. Two of my favorites back then weren't mentioned in the film, both from Boston College: Michael Adams and John Bagley.
But, as this movie documents, by the end of the 2012-13 season, the original Big East dissolved.
Conferences realigned. Money won the day and the original Big East Conference lost out.
The Catholic schools in the region, however, bonded together and created a new Big East Conference. It's the basketball conference I pay the closest attention to during the college basketball season. But, this documentary didn't cover the conference's reformation.
It covered and served as a requiem for the demise of the original Big East.
3. One other event occurred in the Vizio room this evening. I tuned in to Facebook Live and watched tonight's installment of Bill Davie's *Poetry Break*. Bill read several poems organized under the umbrella of mindfulness. Bill didn't write as much as usual over the last week, so he didn't have any new poems to read from the "Old Manhood" series he's working on. I especially enjoyed hearing Bill read Wallace Steven's poem, "The Snow Man" and my mind wandered to another of my favorite Wallace Steven's poems, "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock". I remembered back to when I used to assign this poem in Intro to Poetry and discouraged any discussion of its "meaning" and focused entirely on its music, especially its vowel sounds, and tried to work with my students to see if the poem's impact might arise more fully out of the poem's sounds than out of the "meaning" of its words and lines.
Its opening line always seems to be with me:
The houses are haunted.
It's a great start to a poem about disillusionment -- especially the disillusionment of 10:00 p.m.
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