Posted on 07/20/2017 9:33:27 AM PDT by mairdie
I’ll take your advice about Rockford Files. I bought the first season and didn’t finish it. I’ll go back and watch the whole season. I tend to like hard characters in softer shows. Scorpius and Crais are my guys for Farscape, and my only favorite in Deep Space Nine is Garak - maybe Odo. I’m not sure my favorite movies would be considered harder edged - Both Red movies with Bruce Willis, Ironman, Men in Black, Lethal Weapon, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Murder at 1600, Mr & Mrs Smith, Beverly Hills Cop, Indiana Jones, Air Force One. Which reminds me what DOESN’T hold up for me, amazingly - the old James Bond movies. I stood in line for those things and now I can hardly watch them.
Unlike hard-boiled dramas, NCIS and other police procedural shows depict a sometimes dangerous world in which order is reliably restored through law enforcement. In contrast, in hard boiled novels and TV shows and movies, there is frequently a sense of menace, unexpected violence is common, and there is no cure for the general rottenness of people, not even a safe place from it like a police squad room.
I enjoyed the same movies as you did, excepting RED, which baffled and then bored me as I realized that it was what is called "a cozy" in detective fiction. Not only were the characters and gunplay cartoonish, but they conveyed as little a sense of menace as the Haunted House ride at Disney World.
You have absolutely MADE my day. A completely new concept. Looked up “cozy mystery” and it was fascinating. Only one listed that I like is Cadfael, and that isn’t up to the books in the slightest. I’m not sure now what attracts me to Red. I’ll have to watch them for the fifth time with that in mind, but they really do appeal to me. A friend of mine explained that it took her a good half hour to understand me when she hadn’t seen me in a while because I “think at a slant.” Somehow, that movie slants in my direction. I used that description in the query letter that got me so much script interest, so I always thank her for it. I did read Chandler, and Emma Lathem and Robert van Gulik and Elizabeth Peters. The hallway is 42’ long with solid bookshelves floor to ceiling both sides. The library has a 10’ ceiling and 9 bays of bookshelves. 7 more bookcases in the other rooms and the rest of the books packed in boxes. Mysteries, science fiction, civil war, revolutionary war, history. And I read them over and over again. W.E.B. Griffin is my current re-read. I guess my trouble with hard boiled is that I don’t believe in the general rottenness of people. Maybe that’s why I’m a conservative.
I like some ‘Cozy’ - but some of them are too simple. I like mystery/detective writers who are somewhat literary; and ones who are deeply thoughtful about human nature. I’m not into a lot of sadistic violence, and stay away from that - space in my brain is too valuable for it, and ‘True Crime; rarely involves those things as often as it involves more common, less dramatic human emotions and tendencies. I agree with you that people are not in general, or ever wholly, rotten and nasty.
I’ve always liked Jane Langton (literary); and Martha Grimes, for the thoughtful delving into the inner natures/complexes of her characters. Grimes’ books sometimes end up somewhat unresolved for me; but life is that way, too ;-)
Book covers alone give away most cozy mysteries. A female author, a quaint or romantic setting, and cover art that has pictures of an older woman, flowers, or a cat are common tells.
I think that you (or my telling) have Chandler and the hard boiled genre wrong. The fallen world that it depicts is the arena of a struggle for redemption. In an essay, The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler famously defended realistic detective murder mysteries:
It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization. All this still is not quite enough.
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.
If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.
Always loved Tom Lehrer’s parodies, as well as Isaac Asimov’s writing, science fiction and fact.
A real pity that both of them are about 3 steps to the left of Barky Oblamer.
When Mary mentioned Tom Lehrer, I remembered ‘Pollution’ and ‘Who’s Next’; and I thought he had done ‘Little Boxes’; but that was an entirely different person:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUoXtddNPAM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvina_Reynolds
Pollution, done for one of my favorite shows - Get Smart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKFwMhy7lpw
I’d LOVE to do Little Boxes. No idea what I’d do it to.
Graphics; I’m sure it’s been done many times over the years, but not sure if lately.
I can’t think of a movie you could put it to, offhand...
I’m just grateful for the few conservatives we can applaud. The others just make me grit my teeth a lot. I love anybody who makes fun of stuff. Arrogant Worms also comes to mind. I just put up another Farscape video, Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.”
In a lot of ways, the stuff that was ‘anti-Conservative-Establishment’ in our younger days, is OURS now, and anti-Liberal-Establishment’.
I remember, when going to University in 1971, everything was about Free Speech. Now, it’s all about *shutting up* free speech.
I entered U of Chicago in 1962 and it was my generation that screwed it all up. There wasn’t a lot going on at U of C. We were mostly a panty-waist revolutionary bunch more interested in Roberts Rules of Order for revolution than in actually revolting. I was conservative even then, and when I started working in the comp center, my office mates thought I was a narc.
LOL! When I went to Uni, everyone was smoking pot on the lawn, with the Campus Cops looking the other way.
I was looking for some middle-class equivalent of a ‘classical education’, and saw all of those pillars and pediments rotting away.
Our pediments actually WERE rotting away. They’d fall off the buildings and get put in the Gargoyle Graveyard near Botony Pond. Don’t remember anyone smoking pot in public at that time. Probably still too early. Only once went to a party where I could smell it and left right away. Tried not to move in those circles. Luckily, the people I hung around with were work obsessives, which kept most of them out of trouble. Chicago was great for a classical education. But terrifying, too. One exam gave one grade that they smeared over the entire year. You didn’t have to attend a single class, though it wasn’t smart not to. No textbooks unless absolutely no alternative. We read Darwin and Mendel in bio; original Greek and Roman writers, translated of course, for Western Civ. Still have all the Western Civ collected papers. Major pack rat problems.
Oh, and tuition was $525 per quarter, 3 quarters in the year.
Hey! I actually sat in the circle and ‘didn’t inhale’ at one party! And that’s the honest truth, for me, if not for BJ :-)
I left; never finished. I was spending all my time in that glorious library anyway - which I could do on my own.
I think it was the hippie sociology lecturer, who swore in class and dissed everything traditional, that did me in; though there were personal family issues
(I learned a lot from him; but it didn’t help that I dated him, and became even more disillusioned: after I got to know him, I wondered how he’d ever become an instructor!)
Still working on my degree in the School of Life; and still learning ;-)
My first husband was my physics lab assistant. Still love the guy. Better as a friend than a spouse. Best education is reading, if you’re self-disciplined. I needed to be in college because I didn’t have enough character to do it on my own. I’ve always been impressed by people who do. When I first tried to get into research as a retired person, it was absolutely hellish. Library special collections require signatures that you’re in some way official, which I find incredibly annoying. I hated having to use my Vassar prof as a guarantor. I’m working now with statistical analysis of poetry phonemes, so I don’t run into the problem anymore.
I had a scholarship; throwing it away may have been one of the best things I ever did.
Another thing I remember that really turned me off: I was a 17-year-old virgin, and at our orientation, the ‘Health Director’ passed around condoms and bananas - I’m sure you get the point.
It was as if they were saying, ‘we expect you to be having sex’, with the subtext of ‘we don’t want to be responsible for what may happen’. (I think they also told us about the suicide and abortion hotlines, at the same time...)
I don’t know if there are any 17-year-old virgins anymore...
I went from a Catholic girls high school to a University where every class seemed to be about sex. It was absolutely shocking. And I certainly hope there still are.
I thought that a Fran Allen talk I saw yesterday was interesting regarding the ‘professionalism’ that encroached upon computing during her vocational lifetime: I’ve known many people who have spoken about the same thing happening in Library Science (specialists v generalists):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsbovYxNybQ
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