Suburban Malaise

Riding the Third Avenue El

On this chilly February Sunday, stuck in the suburbs, I can’t think of a better way to spend the time than to ride on New York’s long-gone Third Avenue El, courtesy of the Prelinger Archives. An enterprising filmmaker filmed a day on the El a few months before it was torn down in 1950. In this beautiful film, we follow the filmmaker as he makes the film, a father and his little girl, a pair of young lovers and a drunk on his way to the breweries on Third Avenue. The city has something to offer all of them: adventure, amusement, romance—and a beer. The elevated train passes through a series of Edward Hopper-esque landscapes of clotheslines, pushcarts and lone pedestrians silhouetted in the city’s relentless summer glare. It’s a beautiful look at a bygone New York that is at once far removed and eerily similar to the city today. After you’ve finished your ride on the El, be sure to visit the treasure trove of open source movies at the Internet Archive and learn more about this priceless internet resource.

Hitchcock's Mothers

My friend and I watched Psycho on TCM while everyone else watched the game. What is it with mothers in Hitchcock's films? So many of his characters have mother problems. Norman Bates' dead mom in Psycho, Marnie's wierd mom, Roger Thornhill's nagging mom in North by Northwest, Jessie Steven's domineering mom in To Catch a Thief . . . Hitchock's moms just can't let go. It's the mothers that the characters are really running away from. Either that, or risk ending up like Norman Bates.

A tiring, nice day (Superbowl notwithstanding). I cleared off the entire dining room table for the first time in about six months. But we ended up eating in either the kitchen or the family room. Now I have to figure out where I put all the stuff I took off the table. That should take another six months.

Thinking of the Dream Kitchen

After I mopped the winter slush off the floor of my circa 1980's kitchen, I relaxed by watching some some of the long-forgotten sales films and commercials available online through the invaluable Moving Image Archive. In the 1955 film pictured above, A Word to the Wives (sponsored by America's Homebuilders), housewife Jane Peters commiserates to her friend Mary Edwards about her "nightmare kitchen." Mary, in her gleaming new kitchen with steel cabinets and an automatic flour dispenser, suggests a way to "trick" her husband into buying her a new house: go visit her brother in Cleveland and leave hubby and son to fend for themselves. Disaster ensues when George tries to cook himself and his son dinner! He's so incompetent he can't even open the kitchen cabinets by himself. When the Peters go the Edwards' house for a dinner party, Mary prepares a delicious dinner of baked ham with grape jelly and mustard dressing and a sweet potato casserole with pineapple and marshmallows. George is sold! He buys Jane a new house. Now Jane has time to indulge in the only activities this film could imagine for women outside of housework and child-raising: shopping and playing golf. I feel mildly guilty watching these old films; I feel like I'm snooping in on my parents' generation and seeing their humble desires commoditized in a way that, crass as these films are, is oddly touching.