Welcome to the Beehiiv

Hello and welcome to the new home of my newsletter, Who What When Where Why Why Not.

I’ve moved over to Beehiiv because my old home, Substack, happily hosts and takes money from Neo-Nazis, Climate Change deniers, conspiracy theorists et al, and that’s very much not my bag. Hopefully the transition here was seamless - let me know if not.

Warmest of welcomes to any newcomers, or those of you who have been waiting for so long for another newsletter from me that it feels like you’re a newcomer - which would be everybody.

So, news in brief: still living in South East London, still staggering around with Long Covid, still not sure about all the new Doctors since David Tennant left Doctor Who (though on the strength of last week’s episode, I’d put in a vote for Lenny Rush for the next Doctor, or at the very least that his Morris Gibbons remains a major character for decades to come.)

Speaking of last week, here are some things that I have been enjoying over the last seven days or so.

I’ve had a Preston Sturges micro-season, with Sullivan’s Travels at the BFI followed by The Palm Beach Story at home. (Those links will take you to my reviews.) Preston Sturges always manages to cram a dozen ideas into a space made for ten, with four of the dozen being lousy and the rest being brilliant. So while you are watching it’s a 8/12 experience which mysteriously turns into 8/10 in the memory. The highlight of both films are the performances of the women, Veronica Lake in Sullivan and Claudette Colbert and Mary Astor in Palm Beach, the super-wattage of all three of them leaving poor Joel McCrea (ostensibly the lead in both films) very much in the shade. (I find him a somewhat bland actor in general, neither quite funny nor quite sexy enough to really shine.) Sullivan’s Travels is the better film, a fascinating attempt to question whether the money machine of Hollywood can ever capture the true horror of poverty in a format made for entertainment - and whether it should even try. Sturges manages to have his cake and eat it by making a comedy about a film director going undercover as a bum. The Palm Beach Story, in comparison, is a more straightforward romantic comedy about estranged spouses finding their way back to one another, but throws in not only a twist ending but a twist beginning too.

As an aside for Londoners, the Big Screen Classics strand at the BFI is always worth checking out, some of the best films ever made for only £9 a ticket, year round - have a look at their programme here. (I am not paid to endorse the BFI, or anything else!) In a future newsletter I hope to share with you why I love watching old movies so much, but the short version of that is: they are good.

More of a future classic, or a future cult classic, or not really a classic at all, was Under Paris (also my review), more popularly known as Shark de Triomphe, on Netflix. Look, the world divides pretty neatly into people who want to watch a killer shark devour a triathlon in the Seine, and those who don’t. If you do, Under Paris will cater to all of your needs, with some very good surprises too. Does the shark triomphe at the end? Only one way to find out.

Book-wise I have finished the unfortunately-titled Ride The Pink Horse (not my review because I haven’t written one) by Dorothy B Hughes, the not-quite-sung-enough Queen of Noir. My partner and I actually read this one to each other, something we do every night. It’s a lovely way to discover a book and a perfect way to fall asleep, though you do often have to skim backwards to find out what you missed, not necessarily ideal in a thriller. In this one, a shady criminal type called Sailor is staking out a Fiesta in Santa Fe, hoping to corner a corrupt senator known as The Sen to settle a score. His old friend, a police officer called Mac, is also on the scene, hoping to persuade Sailor back to the straight and narrow. The Fiesta atmospherics make the novel, as crowds and music and parades and dancing swirl around Sailor like the carousel pony to which the title refers, taking the action round in increasingly claustrophobic circles as Sailor dreams of escape - but not before he gets his money… It’s a fascinating read, not as good as Hughes’s The Expendable Man, but little is. In A Lonely Place (made into an exceptional film of the same name starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame) is next on my Hughes list.

Life-wise, it stopped raining for five minutes so I have been gardening! By which I mean the Marie Phillips version of gardening, which is as follows:

1. Buy some plants. Perhaps you discover a garden centre behind the record shop where your boyfriend is digging out second hand records. Perhaps you go to a festival called The Lambeth Country Fair which turns out to be much more stressful than you expect, involving loud music and fairground rides that literally collapse and crush some people, when you were thinking that it was going to be much more in the ornamental chickens and unnaturally large vegetables school of things, but it does have a sheepdog display and a stall selling herbs and fruit trees. You buy the plants that look nice and you don’t know what they are.

2. Leave them on top of the tumble dryer for several days, looking out at the dismal weather and refusing to go outside. You water the pots, because you are in your forties now, and have killed so many plants in the past. Yes. You have learned.

3. Dig some holes in your garden and put the plants in. Will they get too big and choke each other to death? Will they die because of lack of sun or too much sun? How could you possibly know? You can’t tell the future. You just put them where the gaps are and where it is sunny some of the time, water them and hope for the best.

4. While you are passing you pull out some weeds, not all the weeds, not even most of the weeds. But some of them. You feel a sense of achievement.

5. Slugs eat everything* *projected

Lastly, in case you missed it, I had a story on a recent episode of This American Life. This one is about moving in with my partner, a widower, and how I got to know his late wife by the possessions she left behind. You can listen to it here.

See you next time! If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it, and consider subscribing if you haven’t already. Also feel free to drop me a reply. Apologies to everyone who wrote to me after my Long Covid post, I didn’t reply to you all for Long Covid reasons but I very much appreciated your messages. I haven’t figured out how to enable comments here yet (at time of writing, anyway) but I do love hearing from you.