12/24/13
12/19/13
IT HAPPENED ON FIFTH AVENUE : FILM CIRCA 1947 : HOMELESSNESS CIRCA 1947 : CHRISTINE TRZYNA FILM REVIEW
A vintage Allied Artists film - staring Don DeFore, Ann Harding, Charlie Ruggles, Victor Moore, Gale Storm.
This is an improbable but touching film in which a man who would otherwise be homeless lives the life of a millionaire by infiltrating the boarded up Fifth Avenue, New York, mansion of the second richest man in the world. We see the man, his bowler hat, heavy coat, and cane, as he walks down the street, lifts up a man hole cover, and lets himself into a shut down but extremely livable mansion. It's a squatter's dream with a stocked pantry and apparently a stocked cigar closet too. This squatter knows well how to live the high life. He is a highly principled person. We never ask while watching "What did he do to deserve this? When spring comes he has somewhere else to squat. (He's nice enough to leave the place as he found it. But in fiction we are always asked to suspend disbelief.)
Soon the rich man's daughter leaves finishing school on a whim to be a singer in New York and comes to live in the mansion as her bolt hole. Then other people who have no homes - a couple with children, a single man down on his luck - come to live there. These well dressed homeless are World War II veterans and mom's who wear their millinery and high heels while living in vehicles.
After the second richest man in the world - an Irishman! - has his detectives locate his wayward daughter, he and his ex wife come to visit and influence their daughter to get back to her education and privilege. Of course, stereotypically mom is sympathetic to her daughter because she has fallen in love with a man down on his luck. Once upon a time she and her husband lived in a lousy apartment when they were first starting out. You have to start somewhere.
But by the end of the film you know it; the rich man's heart softens to approve his daughter's less than greedy and materialistic romance and eventual marriage to that man.
The World War II veterans with no jobs and no homes decide to pool their money and get investors so they can establish a kind of shelter town in an abandoned army base. Eventually the rich man gives in and supports their efforts, even though when he got word of their idea he bought it all up for himself.
Review: While watching I was thinking how heartless people have become in the last 60 years. Old films with heart create a kind of happiness in one's own. I was also thinking about the screenwriters of that era who were pitching their ideas to movie makers. This film, posted as "an original story by Herbert Clyde Lewis and Frederick Stephani," was meant to be watched by hopeful Irish (20 years before we had out first and only Irish Catholic in the White House), by hopeful World War II Veterans (soon women who had worked in Industry would be encouraged by the government through well placed magazine articles and such to get married and be stay at home moms. They were no longer supposed to take a job away from a man!), and by those who hoped that class differences could be melted (but seems to me we are nowhere near that yet.)
To have a heart, to have hope, you must also have believe that people are essentially good.
That notion that people are essentially good, is what made this film one of four in a series called FILM FAVORITES, Classic Holiday Collection Vol 2.
This is an improbable but touching film in which a man who would otherwise be homeless lives the life of a millionaire by infiltrating the boarded up Fifth Avenue, New York, mansion of the second richest man in the world. We see the man, his bowler hat, heavy coat, and cane, as he walks down the street, lifts up a man hole cover, and lets himself into a shut down but extremely livable mansion. It's a squatter's dream with a stocked pantry and apparently a stocked cigar closet too. This squatter knows well how to live the high life. He is a highly principled person. We never ask while watching "What did he do to deserve this? When spring comes he has somewhere else to squat. (He's nice enough to leave the place as he found it. But in fiction we are always asked to suspend disbelief.)
Soon the rich man's daughter leaves finishing school on a whim to be a singer in New York and comes to live in the mansion as her bolt hole. Then other people who have no homes - a couple with children, a single man down on his luck - come to live there. These well dressed homeless are World War II veterans and mom's who wear their millinery and high heels while living in vehicles.
After the second richest man in the world - an Irishman! - has his detectives locate his wayward daughter, he and his ex wife come to visit and influence their daughter to get back to her education and privilege. Of course, stereotypically mom is sympathetic to her daughter because she has fallen in love with a man down on his luck. Once upon a time she and her husband lived in a lousy apartment when they were first starting out. You have to start somewhere.
But by the end of the film you know it; the rich man's heart softens to approve his daughter's less than greedy and materialistic romance and eventual marriage to that man.
The World War II veterans with no jobs and no homes decide to pool their money and get investors so they can establish a kind of shelter town in an abandoned army base. Eventually the rich man gives in and supports their efforts, even though when he got word of their idea he bought it all up for himself.
Review: While watching I was thinking how heartless people have become in the last 60 years. Old films with heart create a kind of happiness in one's own. I was also thinking about the screenwriters of that era who were pitching their ideas to movie makers. This film, posted as "an original story by Herbert Clyde Lewis and Frederick Stephani," was meant to be watched by hopeful Irish (20 years before we had out first and only Irish Catholic in the White House), by hopeful World War II Veterans (soon women who had worked in Industry would be encouraged by the government through well placed magazine articles and such to get married and be stay at home moms. They were no longer supposed to take a job away from a man!), and by those who hoped that class differences could be melted (but seems to me we are nowhere near that yet.)
To have a heart, to have hope, you must also have believe that people are essentially good.
That notion that people are essentially good, is what made this film one of four in a series called FILM FAVORITES, Classic Holiday Collection Vol 2.
C 2013 Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved
12/15/13
THE LINGERING DEATH OF E-MAIL : SOAP BOX : CHRISTINE TRZYNA
THE LINGERING DEATH OF E-MAIL : SOAP BOX : by CHRISTINE TRZYNA
As many of you already know, from the bad experience of it, Yahoo recently decided to "recycle" old e-mail addresses, those that no one had logged into in a year. A year is really not a long time. Now people are gaining access to other people's private information and communication. IT IS A PRIVACY INVADING NIGHTMARE, one that is opening common ordinary people to identity theft and other embarrassments. Yahoo may not be the only e-mail provider, as I hear now that Microsoft is doing the same thing, but I'm personally pissed off at Yahoo.
It's sometimes difficult not to believe that someone wants us all micro-chipped to prevent ID theft. I got a call one morning a couple weeks ago from first one, then another, peach fuzz boy types, and they knew way too much about me.
It's sometimes difficult not to believe that someone wants us all micro-chipped to prevent ID theft. I got a call one morning a couple weeks ago from first one, then another, peach fuzz boy types, and they knew way too much about me.
I've been thinking about my whole e-mail experience and find that my enthusiasm for this form of communication, which I initially thought of as something closer to a telegram than a phone call, has waned considerably.
CLASS REQUIREMENT
CLASS REQUIREMENT
My first e-mail experience was at college, where it became a requirement for a class to not only do all the reading and studying, taking quizzes and writing papers, but to also continue classroom discussion by e-mailing with the TA and classmates. After trying to give some open, honest, and impactful feedback, I soon realized there wasn't much else to say or do. Enough was enough. (All professors do think their class is the only one you're taking!)
SAVING ON LONG DISTANCE PHONE BILLS
I used that e-mail account to be in touch with some friends who had become long distance to save on the phone bill (don't laugh! Few people had cell phones then. Students who lived in the dorms were upset about there being only one phone jack in each room!)
SAVING ON LONG DISTANCE PHONE BILLS
I used that e-mail account to be in touch with some friends who had become long distance to save on the phone bill (don't laugh! Few people had cell phones then. Students who lived in the dorms were upset about there being only one phone jack in each room!)
One of my friends was into playing paint ball. One day he sent me a message about a weekend paintball game that went something like "and I could have killed that guy." The University server picked up the wording and sent a message about using their computers to send (or receive) threats that scared me enough that I called him long distance to warn him. (Don't laugh even harder.)
Soon after that I opened a mainstream, non-university free e-mail account. It would become one of many that I simply didn't use and walked away from rather than cancelling the account. (I should have deleted all of them!) I once even had EarthLink as a service - and their Internet dial up!
KEEPING A FRIENDSHIP GOING - OR NOT
KEEPING A FRIENDSHIP GOING - OR NOT
As I neared graduation, with so very much work to do, finals, a thesis, and not knowing where the hell I was going to live in a few weeks, brewing rapidly, a friend who I'd been e-mailing back and forth taught me my first lesson about the nefarious use of e-mail.
(And for this he is not forgiven.)
Nothing was more important to him at that point than the boycott he was declaring against a venue where he'd been holding free poetry classes over the whiff of cigarette smoke that had made it through the front doors. When I look back on that now, I know this person had an anger disorder, and if it wasn't focused on one person, it would be focused on another. When I refused to join the boycott, our e-mailing ended along with our friendship. But not until he, I heard, e-mailed his entire contact list of poets - hundreds - to say bad things about me.
E-mail was being used to shame me? Shame on him!
Overall, I came to think that e-mail was a substandard way to keep a friendship going. Text was too subject to misinterpretation. But then, this was before the sometimes cute, sometimes irritating smiley and other emoticon faces.
(OK, so now you are holding your belly and rolling on the floor.)
The first and best way to communicate with a person is in person where there is facial expression and the intonations of voice. Next comes the phone. Letter writing - handwriting - is the next best. You can diagnose the handwriting if you want to. (Ah! I see that the slant here has changed. Her hand must be really tired and she's writing on the surface of a book at an angle!) Then typed letters or text oriented messages, like e-mail that are sight based only.
THE LEARNING CURVE CAN BE LIKE A ROLLERCOASTER
Forward a few years later - early 21st century - when I first began to blog. A friend in a coffee house who was very into Social Networking and pretty much spending much of his day on his laptop doing just that suggested that I should experience the Yahoo Blogger. I tried it under an assumed name and fake avatar and actually made a few "friendships," all that went Poof! as soon as Yahoo decided to discontinue that free product. However, I enjoyed exercising my writing skills and learning to import pictures and videos. And what happened with that friend? He managed to attract some very unsavory people into his life. I used his laptop a few times to check e-mail and before you know it he was sending messages to my entire contact list, and with multiple accounts. Clearly even though I logged in and out while he was in the men's room he was able to follow my keystrokes. I started getting mail from the unsavory people he attracted. I spent hours blocking this big mess.
AIN'T NOBODY'S BUSINESS BY MY OWN and THE MYTH OF THE PAPERLESS OFFICE
Next came the clever idea to save documents such as resumes, family pictures, research data, letters, edits, short stories, novel chapters, and other stuff that you would usually have saved in file boxes or cabinets on paper, things that require someone to actually break into your home to steal your property, on line, before the Internet in places like e-mail (or Photobucket, or some other product that has a "privacy settings.") Things maybe you aren't ready to print out yet. I bought into the myth of the paperless office. I did this, and in multiple unrelated accounts. My thinking was half correct and more cautious. While my goal was preservation, such as if things were lost due to fire or flood or actual theft, there would be another place I could retrieve them. In the end neither home or storage unit or Cloud is truly private and safe.
YOU NEVER KNOW SOMEONE UNTIL YOU GIVE THEM YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS
Next came using e-mail to give people you meet here, there, and around, who seem OK but you don't want them to know where you live or have your phone number - yet. (Now people will say "Find me on Facebook!)
In one case I took a local gardening class - a few sessions - and the teacher asked for contact information, she said to follow up on our gardening experiences. Without my permission she gave my e-mail to someone at an agricultural program at a major university and soon after came one solicitation after another to be a slave laborer at a community garden. More than one a week. And an account that never had spam was subject to all the usual ROT of offers of penile implants, Viagra, Canadian Pharmacies, Diet Solutions, Credit checks, Ponzi schemes, Job Offers, and Social Networking with Sluts, Local Sluts, Horny Sluts, and the one that really got me - Christian Sluts! (Adriana, if you're reading this, you really belong in a jail cell.)
OK, this bothers me, a lot, because I have low tolerance for anything that comes close to porn. I do not want my eyes to even accidentally subliminally view the Rot!
(And that means that I wish the lesbian porn site that attaches to this blog would cut the crap.)
In another case I attended, with an open mind but not conversion, a free class that was supposed to be about A Course In Miracles. Turned out it was actually a psychic witch looking for clients.
Ditto.
Never take a free class where you have to give your name, address, telephone number, or e-mail address as terms and conditions of "registration." Time is money.
These people are putting together a mailing list and they will soon be sending you monthly, even weekly solicitations. Do I have that much time to keep clicking and sending to Trash without reading. No I don't !
A friend tells me that he never really knew what a great person his wife was until they needed to be divorced.
HACKERS ARE EVIL PEOPLE and THEY ARE NOT ALL FROM AFRICA
Recently an account I'd used for years with no spam at all was hacked. I contacted someone who said they were a contracted to Yahoo, they got back to me, and said that they knew that this particular hacking event was one in which the goal was to read all my saved correspondence to put together a profile, invade my bank accounts, etc. LUCKILY I NEVER DO ON-LINE BANKING or ANY FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS AT ALL ON LINE! Yahoo said that the source of this was Africa and that the same people would then continue to "invade" my entire contact list and go from there.
Sadly, the old "Africa" excuse is just a teeny part of the problem. Think I'm wrong? Then attend a hacker convention in Vegas!
TOOLS ARE MEANT TO MAKE OUR TASKS EASIER, OUR LIVES SIMPLER
The U.S. post office is limping along with higher postage rates and less service. Why? Because we started using e-mail instead of postage because we thought it would be cheaper. BUT AT WHAT PRICE? Meanwhile, for all your PSYCHOBABBLE LOVERS OUT THERE, there is a NEW DIAGNOSIS and NEW SUBSTANCE ABUSE PROGRAMS! Internet Addiction. With it's sub categories such as SELFIE ADDICTION! People who can't afford cell phones any more are going through withdrawal symptoms!
PS: Did I mention I'm pissed at Yahoo?
TO THE PERSON WHOSE PICTURE ON YAHOO HAS MY VERY WORDS FROM THIS GOOGLE BLOGGER RUNNING BELOW IT!
I'm sorry for you, who ever you are, if you are looking for a job, a boyfriend, or whatever, that YAHOO has you mixed up with me. Yahoo, you are grabbing words that are on GOOGLE BLOGGER, and using them without my permission certainly.
C 2013 Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights.
(And for this he is not forgiven.)
Nothing was more important to him at that point than the boycott he was declaring against a venue where he'd been holding free poetry classes over the whiff of cigarette smoke that had made it through the front doors. When I look back on that now, I know this person had an anger disorder, and if it wasn't focused on one person, it would be focused on another. When I refused to join the boycott, our e-mailing ended along with our friendship. But not until he, I heard, e-mailed his entire contact list of poets - hundreds - to say bad things about me.
E-mail was being used to shame me? Shame on him!
Overall, I came to think that e-mail was a substandard way to keep a friendship going. Text was too subject to misinterpretation. But then, this was before the sometimes cute, sometimes irritating smiley and other emoticon faces.
(OK, so now you are holding your belly and rolling on the floor.)
The first and best way to communicate with a person is in person where there is facial expression and the intonations of voice. Next comes the phone. Letter writing - handwriting - is the next best. You can diagnose the handwriting if you want to. (Ah! I see that the slant here has changed. Her hand must be really tired and she's writing on the surface of a book at an angle!) Then typed letters or text oriented messages, like e-mail that are sight based only.
THE LEARNING CURVE CAN BE LIKE A ROLLERCOASTER
Forward a few years later - early 21st century - when I first began to blog. A friend in a coffee house who was very into Social Networking and pretty much spending much of his day on his laptop doing just that suggested that I should experience the Yahoo Blogger. I tried it under an assumed name and fake avatar and actually made a few "friendships," all that went Poof! as soon as Yahoo decided to discontinue that free product. However, I enjoyed exercising my writing skills and learning to import pictures and videos. And what happened with that friend? He managed to attract some very unsavory people into his life. I used his laptop a few times to check e-mail and before you know it he was sending messages to my entire contact list, and with multiple accounts. Clearly even though I logged in and out while he was in the men's room he was able to follow my keystrokes. I started getting mail from the unsavory people he attracted. I spent hours blocking this big mess.
AIN'T NOBODY'S BUSINESS BY MY OWN and THE MYTH OF THE PAPERLESS OFFICE
Next came the clever idea to save documents such as resumes, family pictures, research data, letters, edits, short stories, novel chapters, and other stuff that you would usually have saved in file boxes or cabinets on paper, things that require someone to actually break into your home to steal your property, on line, before the Internet in places like e-mail (or Photobucket, or some other product that has a "privacy settings.") Things maybe you aren't ready to print out yet. I bought into the myth of the paperless office. I did this, and in multiple unrelated accounts. My thinking was half correct and more cautious. While my goal was preservation, such as if things were lost due to fire or flood or actual theft, there would be another place I could retrieve them. In the end neither home or storage unit or Cloud is truly private and safe.
YOU NEVER KNOW SOMEONE UNTIL YOU GIVE THEM YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS
Next came using e-mail to give people you meet here, there, and around, who seem OK but you don't want them to know where you live or have your phone number - yet. (Now people will say "Find me on Facebook!)
In one case I took a local gardening class - a few sessions - and the teacher asked for contact information, she said to follow up on our gardening experiences. Without my permission she gave my e-mail to someone at an agricultural program at a major university and soon after came one solicitation after another to be a slave laborer at a community garden. More than one a week. And an account that never had spam was subject to all the usual ROT of offers of penile implants, Viagra, Canadian Pharmacies, Diet Solutions, Credit checks, Ponzi schemes, Job Offers, and Social Networking with Sluts, Local Sluts, Horny Sluts, and the one that really got me - Christian Sluts! (Adriana, if you're reading this, you really belong in a jail cell.)
OK, this bothers me, a lot, because I have low tolerance for anything that comes close to porn. I do not want my eyes to even accidentally subliminally view the Rot!
(And that means that I wish the lesbian porn site that attaches to this blog would cut the crap.)
In another case I attended, with an open mind but not conversion, a free class that was supposed to be about A Course In Miracles. Turned out it was actually a psychic witch looking for clients.
Ditto.
Never take a free class where you have to give your name, address, telephone number, or e-mail address as terms and conditions of "registration." Time is money.
These people are putting together a mailing list and they will soon be sending you monthly, even weekly solicitations. Do I have that much time to keep clicking and sending to Trash without reading. No I don't !
A friend tells me that he never really knew what a great person his wife was until they needed to be divorced.
HACKERS ARE EVIL PEOPLE and THEY ARE NOT ALL FROM AFRICA
Recently an account I'd used for years with no spam at all was hacked. I contacted someone who said they were a contracted to Yahoo, they got back to me, and said that they knew that this particular hacking event was one in which the goal was to read all my saved correspondence to put together a profile, invade my bank accounts, etc. LUCKILY I NEVER DO ON-LINE BANKING or ANY FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS AT ALL ON LINE! Yahoo said that the source of this was Africa and that the same people would then continue to "invade" my entire contact list and go from there.
Sadly, the old "Africa" excuse is just a teeny part of the problem. Think I'm wrong? Then attend a hacker convention in Vegas!
TOOLS ARE MEANT TO MAKE OUR TASKS EASIER, OUR LIVES SIMPLER
The U.S. post office is limping along with higher postage rates and less service. Why? Because we started using e-mail instead of postage because we thought it would be cheaper. BUT AT WHAT PRICE? Meanwhile, for all your PSYCHOBABBLE LOVERS OUT THERE, there is a NEW DIAGNOSIS and NEW SUBSTANCE ABUSE PROGRAMS! Internet Addiction. With it's sub categories such as SELFIE ADDICTION! People who can't afford cell phones any more are going through withdrawal symptoms!
PS: Did I mention I'm pissed at Yahoo?
TO THE PERSON WHOSE PICTURE ON YAHOO HAS MY VERY WORDS FROM THIS GOOGLE BLOGGER RUNNING BELOW IT!
I'm sorry for you, who ever you are, if you are looking for a job, a boyfriend, or whatever, that YAHOO has you mixed up with me. Yahoo, you are grabbing words that are on GOOGLE BLOGGER, and using them without my permission certainly.
C 2013 Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights.
12/12/13
LAWRENCE WESCHLER (1995) FROM AN ARTICLE IN THE NEW YORKER
LAWRENCE WESCHLER - Published 1995 in The New Yorker magazine
He grew up in Southern Cal and became as writer for the New Yorker. This was published in that magazine in 1995. In this article, Weschler examines the question of the light and air quality in LA, which is famous for smog. First he gets opinions at Cal Tech.
Page 668) Hal Zirin at Caltech speaking
"Well, it's all thanks to the incredible stability, the uncanny stillness, of the air around L.A. It goes back to that business people are always talking about - a desert thrusting up against the ocean, and, specifically, against the eastern shore of a northern ocean, with its cold, clockwise, southward-moving current. And the other crucial element in the mix is these high mountain ranges girdling the basin - so that what happens here is that ocean-cooled air drifts in over the coastal plain and it's trapped beneath the warmer desert air floating in over the mountains to the east. That's the famous thermal inversion, and the opposite of the usual arrangement, where warm surge air progressively cools as it rises. And the atmosphere below the inversion layer is incredibly stable. You must have noticed, for instance, how, if you're on a transcontinental jet coming in for a landing at LAX, once you pass over the mountains on your final approach, no matter how turbulent the flight may heave been prior to that, suddenly the plane becomes completely silent and steady and still."... "That's the stable air of L.A."
Pages 669-670)
Angelenos tend to take perverse credit for the uncanny light of the place, as if they themselves were the ones who made it all happen; and, in fact, according to at least one way of looking at things, they may have a point. Someone told me that if it was air pollution I wanted to consider I should go talk to Glen Cass, at Caltech, a jovial, rotund, clear-eyed, and short-cropped professor of environmental engineering with very specific interest in smog....
So I asked Cass,what, exactly, was all that white stuff chocking the view of his beloved mountains?
"Well, it turns out that there are all sorts of different sizes of particles floating in the air - from absolutely minuscule to relatively large and coarse, he explained. "Some of those - and especially the larger ones - simply get in the way of the line of vision between you and, say, that mountain over there. They blot out or diffract the beams of reflected sunlight emanating from the mountain that would otherwise be conveying visual detail to your eyes. Contrary to what you might think, though, it's not so much the large, coarse particles that pose the biggest problem, Instead, it's those of a specific intermediate size - about half a micrometer, to be exact - those constitute the jokers in the deck when it comes to visibility."
from
Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002
He grew up in Southern Cal and became as writer for the New Yorker. This was published in that magazine in 1995. In this article, Weschler examines the question of the light and air quality in LA, which is famous for smog. First he gets opinions at Cal Tech.
Page 668) Hal Zirin at Caltech speaking
"Well, it's all thanks to the incredible stability, the uncanny stillness, of the air around L.A. It goes back to that business people are always talking about - a desert thrusting up against the ocean, and, specifically, against the eastern shore of a northern ocean, with its cold, clockwise, southward-moving current. And the other crucial element in the mix is these high mountain ranges girdling the basin - so that what happens here is that ocean-cooled air drifts in over the coastal plain and it's trapped beneath the warmer desert air floating in over the mountains to the east. That's the famous thermal inversion, and the opposite of the usual arrangement, where warm surge air progressively cools as it rises. And the atmosphere below the inversion layer is incredibly stable. You must have noticed, for instance, how, if you're on a transcontinental jet coming in for a landing at LAX, once you pass over the mountains on your final approach, no matter how turbulent the flight may heave been prior to that, suddenly the plane becomes completely silent and steady and still."... "That's the stable air of L.A."
Pages 669-670)
Angelenos tend to take perverse credit for the uncanny light of the place, as if they themselves were the ones who made it all happen; and, in fact, according to at least one way of looking at things, they may have a point. Someone told me that if it was air pollution I wanted to consider I should go talk to Glen Cass, at Caltech, a jovial, rotund, clear-eyed, and short-cropped professor of environmental engineering with very specific interest in smog....
So I asked Cass,what, exactly, was all that white stuff chocking the view of his beloved mountains?
"Well, it turns out that there are all sorts of different sizes of particles floating in the air - from absolutely minuscule to relatively large and coarse, he explained. "Some of those - and especially the larger ones - simply get in the way of the line of vision between you and, say, that mountain over there. They blot out or diffract the beams of reflected sunlight emanating from the mountain that would otherwise be conveying visual detail to your eyes. Contrary to what you might think, though, it's not so much the large, coarse particles that pose the biggest problem, Instead, it's those of a specific intermediate size - about half a micrometer, to be exact - those constitute the jokers in the deck when it comes to visibility."
from
Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002
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