[The Old Groaner] Floating disks and a spinning world

Ordinarily, especially in newer films, we are aware of far fewer smokers than was the case back in the ‘40s and ‘50s, when a man was not a man unless he smoked and to woo a pretty girl you blew smoke in her face!

In modern films the occasional floating disk is a minor annoyance, last night, however, we had a gangster film and, as we all know, any gangster would be laughed out of the gangster union were he to declare himself a non-smoker. Smoking is compulsory in that trade, the size of the snout being proportional to ones rank in the gang or “organization,” as we in the know refer to the collective.

So it was that in a bar scene last night the 15 or so gangsters and their molls had their faces obscured by opaque white disks. Now if only one chap is in scene and we see him in close-up, then the disk covers only his mouth and possibly nose, but in a group shot where the heads are so much smaller, the same disk blocks out entire heads at the very least. One shot managed to have the whole scene obliterated, I could make out the dialogue, which was along the lines of “Youse guys stay here and don’t let nobody in,” but I had no idea where the scene was set or even which gang they were. That rather set the plot back for me.

Am I being silly? Listen, in a film the previous night, a group of young ladies shed every stitch of clothing and ran squealing into a lake. Hardly a week goes by when I am not so treated. Nudity, it seems, is quite the norm in modern cinema and after half a century of needless caution, it transpires that boys and men need not be protected from such sights; we do not turn into drooling monsters after all.

This week I have probably witnessed the death of several hundred men on our screen. Most were shot, but several died most horribly; one poor chap was gobbled up by a combine-harvester and may have ended up in a hundred loafs of bread. Now you’ll have to take my word for this, but I swear that as a result of that exposure I do not feel any more inclined to commit murder than I did the previous week. Bear in mind, if you follow my argument, that I have never been exposed to real murder but have been watching real live people smoke all my life. Why protect me from images of that foolishness now, I ask?

And what next? Alcohol must be the next in line and just maybe fried foods thereafter.

When we first settled in this valley, we were unable to receive any television broadcast in Turkey. There was a broadcasting station in the nearest town, but the signal could not leap the mountain in between it and our house. By pure fluke, however, we were able to receive Rhodes TV from some 40 miles away across the Aegean. The station there relayed Greek ET1 and Rhodes own TV. For a full year we watched repeats of “Ann of Green Gables” on ET1 and The News on the local station. Watching the news opening sequence was a daily treat. The station was a one-man affair, employing only Nicos and just for the news, his dear mother. Mum would read the news sitting at the kitchen table with a vase of plastic flowers in front of her, the vase cunningly concealing the microphone; no amateur production this. The news was all cribbed from the international press and was read word for word.

Back to the fun of the titles though. Nicos had dug up a very appropriate piece of music, a sort of “clackety clack” piece which suggested a typewriter or perhaps a news wire-receiver. Another stroke of genius, nearly filling the screen was Nico’s school globe, a tin thing of about 200 millimeters diameter. It was spinning and with half lighting was quite convincing as the earth so long as you ignored the “Pacifi…” and “Atlant…” as those blue patches sped by. Now you’ll wonder how I could confidently estimate the diameter of the globe. Well it was easy really; you see, Nico’s hand was clearly visible at the bottom of the screen as he spun the earth on its (plastic) axis!

The next step in giving the likes of us evening entertainment was the erection of a dish on top of a small hill in the middle of the village. It didn’t have direct line-of-sight with the antenna in town but was nevertheless able to receive the signal and to retransmit it to the whole valley. That lasted a full week before being blown away (I am using non-gangster English) during a storm. It was eventually recovered and Eight Fingers Ali was given the job of beating it back into shape. At the time, one restaurant had a goat hair tent set up as it’s “Lounge Bar” and we much enjoyed the sight of Ali 8 sitting cross-legged outside the tent beating the dish into something resembling a parabola. It never worked again because the dish could only concentrate the radio waves onto a bare aluminum stick somewhere near it’s focal point. Something important was lacking, I think.