Film
The Crimson Pirate (1952)
“Nobody has ever looked like Burt Lancaster in The Crimson Pirate,” John Frankenheimer once noted in an interview. The most flat-out fun film of Lancaster’s muscles-and-teeth peak, it is, as Pauline Kael put it, “A wonderful travesty of the buccaneer film.” That may be giving it more credit for breaking ground than it deserves. This is a genre film, its only innovation a willingness to push the light-hearted into the cartoonishly silly. But who looks for innovation in a pirate movie?
Lancaster’s pirate captain starts as an unprincipled rogue with a plan to sell guns to a rebel leader, then sell the rebel leader to the government, then . . . why am I still typing? You know how this kind of movie goes, and you know that the plot doesn’t matter. (Lancaster developed some elements of it while canoodling with Marlene Dietrich on the Queen Mary, not the most propitious conditions for careful plotting.) What matters is this bronzed god and his pal—Lancaster’s former circus partner Nick Cravat, playing a man who can’t speak because Cravat’s New York accent was so strong as to be dislocating in a period piece—wearing Howard Pyle-style costumes and making feats of acrobatic derring-do seem simultaneously breathtaking and no big deal. (A side note I can’t resist including: Lancaster once described his and Cravat’s agent in their circus days as being located in “a particularly realistic part of Chicago.”) There’s swordfighting and sailing and chases and heaps of nonsense, all in gorgeous Technicolor shot in sunny Italy. Lancaster does Fairbanks, delightfully, with a touch more tumbling and a touch less marveling at himself.
This is a silly film, fit for a moment when diversion is welcome. If you’ve got kids who will tolerate old movies, it’s perfect for a family movie night. And for this Lancaster fan, it carries the additional glow of having been the beginning of an engagement with Italy that would lead to two of his best films, both directed by Luchino Visconti, the epic monument The Leopard and the small-compass drama Conversation Piece, roles that biographer Kate Buford views as “a forced confrontation with the ending of life, the beginning of the end of his own personal dream of himself.” To watch an early Lancaster film and a late one in quick succession is to be confronted with the problem of age and what it simultaneously takes from and gives to us. Lancaster shrinks even as he thickens around the middle, becomes far less physically imposing yet somehow far more substantial.
Book
Women’s Hotel, by Daniel M. Lavery (2024)
I’ve mentioned before my appreciation for artworks that are significantly better than their product class requires. This novel fits that bill. A reader has every reason to expect a book about a mid-century women’s hotel to lean heavily on glamour, throw in some melodrama, and deliver characters and situations designed to simultaneously evoke nostalgia and flatter contemporary conceptions and political positions. Gawping at history while admiring its long skirts and cute hats.
After all, the top-tier twentieth-century women’s hotels were glamorous, at least on the surface. They were built in the 1920s to house, as Paulina Bren explains in her history of the most famous, the Barbizon, “the flocks of women suddenly coming to New York to work in the dazzling new skyscrapers. . . . [The women] wanted what men already had—exclusive ‘club residences,’ residential hotels with weekly rates, daily maid service, and a dining room instead of the burden of a kitchen.” The combination of support and freedom that residential hotels offered single women inevitably tempts us into nostalgia. The decor, the style, the sense of adventure: You can sell those.
So it was a true joy to discover that Women’s Hotel does something different. The first important decision Daniel M. Lavery makes is to set the story not at the 1940s–1950s peak of his Barbizon stand-in, the Biedermeier, but rather during its 1960s decline. The women who inhabited the hotel in its heyday could imagine that by trading their small towns and suburbs for single rooms in Manhattan they were setting out on new adventures, for themselves and for women in general. By the 1960s the glamour was gone, the women more likely to be misfits or oddities, young jetsam or mossy wrack. The women’s hotel in the 1940s was a place young women wanted to be. By the 1960s, it was closer to a last resort.
Lavery introduces us to a number of women, ranging in age from their twenties to the indistinguishable and unacknowledged higher reaches, resident for decades. Nearly all are un- or under-employed; nearly all have to scrimp to a degree that risks becoming pathological. Nearly all are disappointed. Some are crazy.
There’s a recovering alcoholic who serves as den mother. A young reporter trying to escape relegation to the society pages. A young woman whose sole goal is marrying her mother’s ex-boyfriend. The gay male elevator operator who knows everyone’s business. It’s the stuff of cliché, but it floats higher than that. Part of that is because Lavery chooses to ignore the old advice to show, not tell. Much, maybe most, of the novel consists of backstory, accounts of the lives of these women before they arrived at the Biedermeier and in their time there before the present. Those biographical accounts, which Lavery delivers with both a narrator’s omniscience and a sense of how the women themselves view their pasts, help cement our sense that for most of these women, life has already happened. They’re here because of their pasts, not to venture into a bold future. As one of the women reflects:
She had enjoyed herself, but not to such a degree that she was interested in changing the trajectory of her own life; one had to draw a line against pleasure somewhere.
Life has mostly disappointed. We must nonetheless get on with it.
Without being showy, Lavery’s prose is eminently quotable. Sometimes he edges up to aphorism:
Nothing lost its charm so quickly as a not-so-young man who was full of potential.
As a general rule, she fought harder to be given chances than she fought against rejection after the chance had been given.
At other times, insight into character is what stands out:
Lucianne, who was easily fluent in the language of clothes, found the idea that a person would move to New York City and keep dressing like a person who never expected to be looked at completely baffling.
This one will stay with me in how succinctly it pins down both a certain type of challenging person and a natural, dangerous response to trauma:
When something happened to Kitty that she did not like (and she usually counted the things she did herself as things that happened to her), she would shudder briefly, think, That didn’t really happen, and then forget it. Quite often this worked, too. Today she thought to herself, This will only have to be true for a little while longer, just a little while longer, and then it won’t be true again anymore, and in this way she was able to bear it, an hour at a time.
To some degree, Women’s Hotel is simply strung-together bits like that, extended character sketches whose subjects are then turned loose in proximity to others. Not much happens. There’s a satisfying sense that we’ve looked in on this group for a fairly typical set of days, that they’ll go on after we close the book, a belief that Lavery, it seems, also holds, as a Christmas-themed sequel was published in October. Women’s Hotel itself isn’t holiday themed, but it does have one of the qualities of the best holiday books: It would be perfect for picking up on the first day of your vacation and settling into as the wine mulls and the time, for once not spoken for, stretches out ahead. You could do worse than stuff your stocking with it.
Music
The Disintegration Loops, by William Basinski (2002–2003)
Music rewards repetition like no other art form. The first time I heard Billie Holiday, I was sixteen and working overnights at my small-town radio station. Having discovered a Holiday LP, I proceeded to listen to “Solitude” over and over and over in the production studio, racing from there to deal with the on-air studio when necessary, then returning to drop the needle at the start again. It couldn’t be possible to get enough of that voice. Why not just keep listening forever?
My wife recalls how in college she and her roommate left the soundtrack to the film Until the End of the World on repeat for days, to the point where she swears she got so locked into its cadence that she could walk back into the room and know exactly what point in the album she’d be returning to.
I once put “Pony” into the Infinite Jukebox and listened to the resulting unending remix for two hours. It blurred the line between repeating a song and the next step, repeating the elements of a song.
The music teachers in my grade school and middle school were a wife and husband, respectively, whose anger at finding themselves stuck in an uncultured backwater was palpable. Railing against contemporary pop music, both at different points shared the dictum that in a composition you could only repeat something without variation three times. After that, it had to change. The stricture stayed with me. It was only years later that I heard disco, EDM, ambient, and some contemporary classical music pose the question: But what if it doesn’t? What happens then?
“Repetition,” Alex Ross points out in The Rest Is Noise, “is inherent in the science of sound. Tones move through space in successive waves.” Inherent also is decay, as those sound waves die out.
Repetition and decay. That’s what The Disintegration Loops is built from.
A thumbnail account: In the early 1980s, William Basinski recorded bits of music that he picked up from radio stations whose transmitters were atop the Empire State Building. In the late summer of 2001, he dug them up and played them, adding a few synthesized horn notes. As he played the aged tapes, he realized that their magnetic elements were flaking off as they played. The act of digitizing them, of attempting to preserve them, was itself destroying them.
Inspired, he played them over and over and over. He destroyed them and recorded the process.
The result is haunting. Music—vague, muffled, but melodic, maybe horns, maybe strings, maybe both—rises and falls, over and over. It’s beautiful and strange. It’s distant. We’ve picked it up from somewhere we aren’t. Maybe somewhere we can’t possibly be. There is a melody of sorts, but not an insistent one, far more Eno than Mozart, beautiful but also hard to hang onto. In no universe could you put words to it. It doesn’t develop. It just is, and continues to be.
Until it isn’t, and doesn’t. Like life itself, it pulls the rug. It has, we realize, wrong-footed us, and we discover (suddenly) what has happened (ever so slowly): It’s gone. Notes and tones and whole passages have dropped out as the loops looped. What was isn’t. Losses have mounted. Our faces have wrinkled and drooped. Friends have fallen away. Time, that frenemy, has again fooled us into thinking we could keep an eye on it. “You don't waste twenty years all at once," Adam Juskewitch noted on an episode of The Relentless Picnic. "You do it a day at a time, an hour at a time.”
Basinski finished the project on September 11, 2001. A recent New York Times article revealed that he was suicidal the night before, talked down by his partner. He released the album in 2002, and for many people it’s inextricable from the losses of 9/11. For them, it’s a specific elegy.
I came to it later, first hearing parts of it on a long nighttime drive, via a Radiolab episode about repetition. In the quiet darkness of the interstate the music had the power of a stumbled-on Art Bell episode. I believed. It quickly became, and has remained, my winter theme. When the weather starts to turn—when, as Mary Poppins puts it, the wind changes—I start playing it on repeat, and it guides me through the parts of the year that balance beauty and decay, darkness and determination, looking back and hoping ahead. If you’re fighting the darkness—and who isn’t, as 2025 winds down—you could do worse than press play. Maybe also repeat. There may be comfort there. And there may be comfort there. And there may be comfort there.