'Sons And Lovers'

Every son loves his mother and it should be no surprise that this is a common theme in literature. I say "love" only because it's the best word. In fact, the mother-son relationship is so dynamic that it shapes most males to their detriment or otherwise.

The United States government once claimed that they disallowed women in battle because it would be too traumatic for the male soldiers to see a woman die. That's because when a male soldier is bleeding out all they ask for is their mother. All women are sort of their mothers.

D.H. Lawrence wrote Sons and Lovers while his mother was ill. The first draft of the novel was lost due to him leaving it to tend to his sick mother. The story itself is a mirror of his mother. He felt she married below her social standing. Paul Morel's mother falls in love with a poor, drunk and simpleton miner. She lives a hard and unremarkable life fighting off her dullard husband and preventing him from spending their meager pay on drink.

I can relate. My parents divorced when I was 15 and it was probably another five years until my mother starting "dating" guys. She was in her 40s and 50s so it wasn't anything like it sounds. It was older, grandfatherly like guys from her church. Everyone was lonely.

I probably ran at least one of them off. I was in college so I wasn't around. But one guy was not unlike Paul Morel's father: Unintellectual, unambitious and physically unfit for any basic action like going to a museum or traveling.

Yeah, I understood that she was lonely and it makes me sick sorta thinking about it. However, that's no excuse for compromising even if the scales were even. I would like to think I did all of this because I love her. But I don't if it was altogether altruistic or built out of jealously.

'Les Vampires'

A 10-part series of episodes that runs just under seven hours total. It's a messy confluence and often hard to watch. I often found the action confusing, I mixed up characters jumping from episode to episode and it was a very complex plot for it being 1915.

I kept thinking, however, that all these people are dead. And that depressed me. Even the little boy, Eustache Mazamette. René Poyen played the boy and he was seven when he did Les Vampires. He was out of the film business when he was 24 and he died at 59. 

But he made his name as Poyen appeared in dozens of short films before doing Les Vampires starting at age four. 

The most interesting plot point of Les Vampires is that it's not about the mythical, blood-sucking immortal demons, but instead an Apache gang, which I had no idea about. These were violent roving packs of gangs that terrorized members of the middle and upper class in Paris during the early part of the 20th century. 

They were known for their violence and for using an "Apache revolver," which was a third knife, a third revolver and a third brass knuckles. 

'Way Down East' & 'Intolerance' & 'Orphans Of The Storm'

While riding with a friend recently, he plugged in his iPhone and put his downloaded songs on shuffle.

One of the songs that comes up is Run DMC's "It's Tricky." I don't necessarily react, but my friend states that the group and, thusly, the song were relevent because they were pioneers of the rap or hip-hop genre.

I got to thinking about this. It's a common substantiation of particularly artists, that they were some of the first to do it therefore they are due some sort of respect or props for doing so. For essentially being at the right place at the right time.

Are Run DMC a better group because they were one of the first to perform rap at a high level?

Is D.W. Griffith a good director or just one of the first of the prolific ones?

I tend to believe he's the latter: Someone that was at the right place and the right time. The guy who invented baseball, but he was no Babe Ruth, Willie Mays or Frank Robinson.

Again, I'll be tickled pink when I'm done with these silent films. I've had enough. I've never seen someone say less in three hours than Griffith.

'Rosshalde'

Rosshalde, to me, is just another chapter in the literary transition of the turn of the century, provincial lifestyle, the rise of the middle class and the death of the mores that dominated through the beginning of the 20th century.

Rosshalde is no different from Howard's End or any other E.M. Forster novel or The Remains of the Day.

In this case, it's the dismemberment of the family establishment and the disenfranchisement of marriage. Veraguth's disillusionment of his marriage (and thus his older son, who he actually has entirely more in common with unlike the youngest, Pierre, who seems to despise art) and also with the provincial life in the country speaks volumes about the sea change in the way we see families and archaic ways of living through the middle of the 20th century.

Essentially, everything about the way we thought and felt changed. From the latter stages of the Industrial Revolution (mobility, communication), to civil rights, the Great Depression, the World Wars, the 1960s and the "flattening" of the world makes us currently completely unrecognizable to even someone like Veraguth and possibly Hermann Hesse.

'Howard's End'

I've never heard of or seen a group of people so concerned with class than the Victorians.

How much money you had was who you were as a person or a family.

It determined how you acted, who you were friends with, what you did for fun, your likes, dislikes, wives, husbands and how you raised your kids.

If God didn't bless you with placement with a rich family, there was little to hang your hat on except hard work and maybe a little bit of luck to hammer out a decent living where you could actually enjoy the small things.

At the time, it appears there were the haves and have nots. Even the middle class wasn't the modern middle class that we all know and love. The poor in 1900 would've killed to be a middle class family in 1990.

But as can be expected, money doesn't make you a good person. Being someone who can be snobby or even keep a dying woman's request clearly makes you a bad person. Or a person to ill-repute. Then to marry this woman as she stares spinsterhood square in the face, well, that's another pickle. It's downright sorry.

Say what you will about modern culture, but the idea of a woman having an illegitimate child is looked at totally differently in most cultures.

'Rashomon'

I was prepared to borrow this book from the library when I realized how stinking short it was.

So I sat down and read it. Returned it to the shelf.

No harm. No foul. Play on.

'Broken Blossoms'

I was chit-chatting with The Unit the other night about Pablo Picasso and how he was born in 1881 and died in 1973.

Now, quite a number of people live until their 93 and old age isn't what made Picasso better than most people. But it was the time that he lived. He was old enough to see the machine of the Industrial Revolution trudge forward from its young age. He saw the turn of the century. He saw flight and automobiles become realities. He saw electricity and phones in few houses to every house. He saw a civil war in Spain. She saw two World Wars. The A-bomb. He saw countless movements in his own field. He outlived the Beatles.

I was also thinking about Lillian Gish. She lived from 1912-1987, dying at a ripe ol' age of 99. She saw her fair share of intrigue along the pathway of her life. Most importantly, she worked extensively with famed director D.W. Griffith, the guy responsible for "Broken Blossoms." There was this living museum piece taking TV jobs and movie roles until she was 93 or so and she had worked with the guy that made filmmaking a viable art form, at least for the time.

For the record, old movies are creepy no matter what. The scene with her in the closet and the dad chopping down the door. And then all the scenes with the "Yellow Man." Gives me the heeby jeebies.

'The Birth of a Nation'

Three hours? Really???

This is my first viewing of the "great" "The Birth of a Nation" -- the film we all learn about in history and media classes as being one of the great early films.

I can definitely see how everyone was taken by the film in 1915. And this was probably a good waste of three hours back then.

Today, I fell asleep twice and had to come back three different times to finish it off. I hate taking anything away from an artform or piece of work that helped a certain genre take off into its current form, but there are a number of things that should be put on the shelf and never touched.

All of this criticism, and I haven't even mentioned the depiction of African Americans and the Ku Klux Klan.

'Death in Venice'

My favorite books or movies are those in which the city or setting are heavily featured. Almost as if the city is as big of a character as the actual people or story.

Europe is especially appealing. It's incredibly old yet extremely progressive. It's where the old and the new meet. It's the home of the great empires, democracy, monarchy, the Renaissance, Black Death, the Holocaust and soccer.

It's a continent that clings to so much of its past, but can not contain it's ambition.

It's a place to live; and, better yet, it's a place to die.