Nancy Sinatra – "Bossman" (2004)

Winter, summer, fall

Passes us by

Both you and I

My Sirius/XM subscription allows me to listen to broadcasts of New York Yankees games – and the games of every other major-league baseball team – while driving.

My car has a feature called “Personal Assistant,” which works the same way Siri works on an iPhone and Alexa  works on Amazon devices.  You can ask it what the weather forecast is, or get directions to your destination, or tell it what radio station you’d like to listen to, and it repeats your request back to you before executing it.  (You can set the Personal Assistant to speak in a male or female voice.  In my old car, I was able to get the female voice to speak with a British accent – I wish I could get my current car to do that as well.)

I’ve noticed that when I say “Play Sirius/XM New York Yankees baseball,” the Personal Assistant says “Sirius/XM New York Yankees baseball” – indicating that it understood my voice command – but it always takes me to the New York Mets broadcast instead.  When that happens, I have to hit the button on my car’s “infotainment” touch screen that takes me to the next channel – which is the Yankees channel.

Recently, I decided to try a different tactic.  I asked my car to “Play Sirius/XM Yankees baseball.”  The Personal Assistant responded by saying “Sirius/XM Oakland Athletics baseball,” but took me to the Yankees channel.

What do you think?  Should I take my car into the dealer, tell them about this, and ask them to fix it?  The car is still under warranty, so it wouldn’t cost me anything – although it might make my service advisor think I’m a total douchebag.  (Which is not a big deal to me – a lot of people already think I’m a total douchebag . . . probably because I am a total douchebag a lot of the time.)

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“Bossman” was released on Nancy Sinatra’s eponymous 2004 album:

That album includes songs written by Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Jarvis Cocker (Pulp), and Morrissey (the Smiths) – all of whom appear on the album.  If you had asked me which musicians were the least likely to collaborate with Nancy Sinatra, those three would have been very high on my list – yet there they are, big as life and twice as ugly.

Click here to listen to “Bossman.”

Click here to buy “Bossman” from Amazon.

Van Halen – "Finish What Ya Started" (1988)

Come on, baby

Finish what you started

I’m incomplete!

A couple of Christmases ago, one of my children gave me a year’s subscription to the Criterion Channel, a streaming service that allows you to watch thousands of classic and contemporary films from around the world.

Those movie offerings are supplemented with trailers, introductions, behind-the-scenes documentaries, interviews, and commentary tracks.

My only problem with the Criterion Channel is that it’s hard for me to choose which of its many films to watch on any given night.  It’s like having access to a great wine cellar – how do you decide which bottle to open when there are so many great ones to choose from?

Like many streaming services, the Criterion Channel allows you to save titles you’re interested in to a list that you can browse through whenever you’re trying to decide what to watch.

That function is a disaster for people like me because I spend more time browsing through the channel’s film library and clicking the “add to my list” button as I do watching movies.

Currently, my Criterion watch list contains no fewer than 407 titles.  The chances of me viewing all those films are infinitesimal.  Nevertheless, I keep adding movies to it.

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If you’re a regular reader of 2 or 3 lines, you know that I’m the poster child for people who don’t actually have obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (“OCPD”) but act like they do.

Given my OCPD-ish personality traits – e.g., striving to do things perfectly, devotion to being productive, and preoccupation with details, rules, schedules, organization, and lists – it should have come as no surprise to anyone that when I got interested in Alice Munro’s fiction, I first obtained copies of all 14 of her short story collections from my public library and then read each of 140-plus stories in those books in chronological order.  I also meticulously recorded the titles of each of those stories along with the date that I read it in a notebook – which is how I’ve been keeping track of the books I’ve read for almost 50 years.

Likewise, it should come as no surprise to anyone that I took an equally systematic approach to choosing films to watch on the Criterion Channel.

After viewing a few random classics that I had heard about but had never seen – like Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, and Bergman’s The Seventh Seal – I decided to focus on French films.

My original plan was to start with The 400 Blows – Francois Truffaut’s legendary 1959 movie, which I had seen when I was in college – and work my way through the films of Melville, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, and the other French New Wave (or Nouvelle Vague) directors.  

I went to the library and checked out a comprehensive history of French cinema, which I planned to use to identify the movies I should watch.  But after reading the first few chapters of that book, I decided I needed to start by viewing the French “poetic realism” films of the thirties.

I began by watching Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct, and then worked my way through the movies of Julien Duvivier (Pépé le Moko) Jacques Feyder (Carnival in Flanders), Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game – a truly remarkable film), and especially Marcel Carné, whose three-hour-plus Children of Paradise – which I had never heard of – is considered by many critics to be the greatest of all French movies.  (I wouldn’t argue with that judgment – it’s epic, dude!)

It took me a little over a year to work my way from Zero for Conduct to Henri Clouzot’s The Murderer Lives at 21, the 1942 movie that was the subject of a recent 2 or 3 lines post.  Altogether, I viewed about 30 French classics from the thirties and forties.

I didn’t watch old French films exclusively during the last year – I also saw movies by Kurosawa, Scorsese, Peckinpah, DePalma, John Woo, Tarantino, and Richard Linklater (my personal favorite) as well.  

I know all that because I’ve started keeping track of the movies I watch in the same notebook where I record the books I read.

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Who am I making that list for?  Who do I think is going to read it?  I suppose one or more of my children or grandchildren might flip through my notebook someday.  If they do, they might find it somewhat interesting that I bothered to keep such a comprehensive list of the movies I watched and the books I read – but I seriously doubt that they will spend much time mulling over my viewing and reading choices, much less let the movies and books I listed influence their own choices.

(If my father or grandfather had left behind a notebook listing the movies he had seen and the books he had read, I’d be fascinated by it.  That’s no surprise – someone who would keep such a list would be interested in someone else’s list.)

The fact that I keep such a list is very interesting to me.  But what’s even more interesting is the particular way I’m now choosing the movies I watch and the books I read.

Why?

Why did I read 140-odd Alice Munro stories?  And why am I going to watch roughly a hundred classic French movies over a two- or three-year period? 

No one assigned those tasks to me – I’m not a college student whose professor assigned those stories or movies to his or her students.  

And no one would give a rat’s ass if I stopped reading Munro halfway through her oeuvre, or suddenly switched from old French films to the Fast & Furious franchise.  

Except me, of course.  I would not be happy with myself if I didn’t finish what I started.  

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All this nonsense almost certainly has something to do with the fact that I’m almost 74 years old.  I rarely think about dying, but I’m not stupid – I know what it means to be that age.

And what it means is that I have limited time left.  And what that means is that I feel the need to accomplish more than I’ve accomplished to date.

I’m not sure why I felt the need to read all of Alice Munro’s stories and watch all the great French films the Criterion Channel has to offer before my time runs out.  

What I am sure of is that if it hadn’t been Alice Munro, it would have been someone else – Marcel Proust, perhaps.  (I’ve been planning to read all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time for years.  Better late than never!)

And if it hadn’t been classic French films, it would have been Japanese films or finally getting around to watching all five seasons  of The Wire (which I’ve been saving like a squirrel saves nuts).

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The problem is that it doesn’t matter how many of these self-assigned labors I complete – there are infinitely more books to read and movies to watch than I have time for.  

Nonetheless, something is driving me to accomplish as many of these tasks as I can.  

At the same time, something is making me waste a lot of time every day – by lying in bed scrolling on my phone . . . or worse.

I keep hoping that writing about this stuff on 2 or 3 lines will help me figure things out.  But I think that what ends up happening is that I just dig the hole deeper and deeper.

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“Finish What Ya Started” was released on Van Halen’s 1988 album, OU812.  That was the band’s second album to feature singer Sammy Hagar instead of David Lee Roth.  

(Having trouble figuring out what the album’s title means?  Think about it, people.)

Click here to listen to “Finish What Ya Started,” which has nothing to do with Alice Munro stories or French films.

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

Traffic – "Feelin' Alright" (1968)

Don’t get too lost in all I say

Though at the time I really felt that way

But that was then, now it’s today

In the last 2 or 3 lines, I promised to tell you why I recently watched an obscure French movie titled The Murderer Lives at Number 21 – in French, it’s called L’assassin habite au 21 – which was directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and released in 1942.

Let’s begin at the beginning.  Better yet, let’s begin before the beginning.

*     *     *     *     *

In 2024, Andrea Skinner – the youngest daughter of the late Nobel Prize-winning short-story writer Alice Munro – told the Toronto Star that her stepfather had begun to sexually abuse her in 1976, when she was nine years old.   

Skinner had told Munro about the abuse – which lasted for several years – in 1992.  Munro separated from  her husband for a few months but then went back to him, telling her daughter that she had been told about the abuse too late and that she loved her husband too much to leave him.  Skinner cut off contact with Munro after her mother objected to Skinner not wanting her stepfather to have any contact with her children.  

I read about the abuse and Munro’s response to it – or, more accurately, her nonresponse to it – in a lengthy article in the New Yorker, which had published over 60 of Munro’s short stories.  (I subscribed to the New Yorker for many years, and read most of those stories.  But they hadn’t made much of an impression on me – perhaps they appeared one at a time over a four-decade time period.)

The New Yorker piece about Munro and her daughter cited several of her stories that seemed in retrospect to have been colored by Munro’s relationship with her second husband and her knowledge of her daughter’s abuse at his hands.  Some of them featured mothers who felt guilty about something bad that had happened  to their children.  Others were about timid wives who seemed to be in thrall to overbearing husbands.

I made a note of the titles of those stories and decided to read them so I could judge for myself what their contents had to say about Munro’s state of mind when she wrote them.

But after I had read the stories cited in the New Yorker article, I was moved to read all of Munro’s 150-odd short stories – in order of their publication, of course.  So I went on my public library website and reserved copies of all fourteen of her short story collections.  Once I had amassed copies of all fourteen volumes, I began to read them.  

I read the first collection – Dance of the Happy Shades, which came out in 1968 – in April of last year.  I finished the final one – Dear Life, which was published in 2012 – almost exactly one year later.  

My first thought upon closing Dear Life was to go back to Dance of the Happy Shades and start the process over again.  That’s because Munro may be the greatest writer to have ever lived – or at least the greatest writer I’ve ever read.  

On their surface, her characters – most of whom are women – aren’t particularly interesting.  Like her, many of them grew up in rural Ontario almost a century ago and lived unremarkable lives.  After they graduated from high school, they either got married, or got the kind of jobs that single women usually took in those days – or they continued living at home to take care of a sick parent.  (Many of the ones who married and had children eventually got divorced and moved away from Ontario – as did Munro.)  

I can’t really explain why I cares much for Munro’s character.  All I know is that I find them utterly real.

I am very glad that I discovered Munro and read every one of her stories.  But it’s depressing to me to think about how many other great books out there that I don’t know about and will never read.  

*     *     *     *     *

While my therapist finally convinced me that I don’t have obsessive-compulsive personality disorder – or “OCPD” – I often exhibit several of the symptoms of OCPD.

Those symptoms include:

1.  A preoccupation with details, rules, schedules, organization, and lists;  

2.  A striving to do things perfectly;

3.  Excessive devotion to being productive;

4.  Rigidity and stubbornness.

I’ll let you decide for yourself whether my decision to read each and every one of Munro’s stories – in chronological order – makes me sound like someone with any or all of the above characteristics.

I think the answer is pretty obvious.

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What does all of that have to do with The Murderer Lives at Number 21, the obscure French movie I wrote about in the previous 2 or 3 lines?

When I said in the previous 2 or 3 lines that I would tell you the story behind my decision to watch that movie in this 2 or 3 lines, I fully intended to do just that.  But to quote the lyrics to today’s featured song – which were written by the late Dave Mason – “That was then, now it’s today.”

The next 2 or 3 lines will absotively, posilutely contain the rest of the story.  I promise!

In the meantime, click here to enjoy the original recording of “Feelin’ Alright,” which was released in 1968 on Traffic’s eponymous debut album.  (Joe Cocker’s cover of that song sold more records, but I prefer Traffic’s version.)

Click here to buy “Feelin’ Alright” from Amazon.  

Noga Erez – "Nails" (2022)

Bump a b*tch

Flesh pieces in my nails

The Murderer Lives at Number 21 – the original title is L’assassin habite au 21 – is a 1942 French movie directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.  (Clouzot’s best movie was The Wages of Fear, a 1953 thriller that I saw in college.  It was one of the first foreign films I ever watched, and I’ve never forgotten it – I challenge you to name a more tense and harrowing movie.)

The Murderer Lives at Number 21 has been described as a “crime comedy.”  The breezy tone of the movie is somewhat reminiscent of that of The Thin Man, the famous 1934 Hollywood movie that featured a nonchalant husband-wife team who spent most of their waking hours mixing martinis and flirting with one another, but still found time to help the police solve the odd murder.

The plot of The Murderer Lives at Number 21, which involves a serial killer who seems to have the ability to kill in two – or even three – places at once, is quite clever.  It culminates in a very satisfying surprise ending that I didn’t see coming at all.  

But while the movie is ostensibly about an investigation into multiple murders, it’s first and foremost a comedy.  There’s lots of banter between the police detective who’s charged with solving the crimes and his ditzy girlfriend.  (Suzy Delair, who was director Clouzot’s petite amie at the time the movie was made, was terrific as the girlfriend.)

The following scene between the detective and girlfriend really threw me:

Can you think of another movie – much less a sophisticated French classic – that features an extended blackhead-squeezing sequence?

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From the Cleveland Clinic’s website:

It can be very tempting — and satisfying — to squeeze out or pop blackheads. However, squeezing out blackheads can create several problems:

– You may not remove the entire blackhead.  You may even push the blackhead further into your skin, which can cause painful irritation.

– You may introduce bacteria or more oil into the blackhead opening.  Your blackheads could get bigger or even spread.

– Your skin is sensitive, and your nails are much stronger than your skin. When you use your nails to apply a lot of pressure to your skin to remove a blackhead, you can irritate or seriously damage your skin.

But if you absolutely must have a go at a blackhead – either yours, or a friend’s – click here before you start squeezing. 

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You might be wondering what inspired me to watch an obscure old foreign movie like The Murderer Lives at Number 21 in the first place.

That’s a very good question, and I’ll endeavor to answer it in the very next 2 or 3 lines.

In the meantime, enjoy “Nails,” which was released in 2022 by the Israeli recording artist Noga Erez.  An excerpt from that record was featured on the soundtrack the Netflix series, Big Mistakes, which is one of the more interesting TV series I’ve seen recently.  Had it not been for the fact that I watched Big Mistakes, I almost certainly would have never heard “Nails,” and my life would have been much poorer as a result.

Click here to listen to “Nails.” 

  

Click here to buy “Nails” from Amazon.