Regarding earworms and cakes left in the rain
Did you hear Jessie's got a girl? No, I mean seriously, have you heard it?
If you’re a returning reader, thank you!
If this is your first time, I hope you enjoy Highly Transmissible, a daily newsletter about what to watch during quarantine.
Ever get a song stuck in your head and you can’t quite figure out why? The only guaranteed way to assuage it is to listen to the song—or a different song—although apparently puzzles and chewing gum can also help. The phenomenon of the repeating tune is called an earworm, from the German ohrwurm. Research on the subject has found that there are certain tunes that are just particularly catchy, and there are various neurological triggers that can will them into existence. Sometimes simply seeing a particular object is enough to set a tune off and running.
Statistically, 90 percent of people experience an earworm every week. We are a musical species, it seems. Songs we heard in childhood—lullabies especially—are particularly likely to become earworms and simply pop into our heads, perhaps a side effect of their simplicity and repetition. Paradoxically, earworms are most commonly experienced by people who are neurotic or OCD or by those who are extraordinarily open to new experiences.
Since the quarantine began, I’ve become particularly aware of earworms, and anecdotally, I feel like I am experiencing them more often than before. Perhaps it’s another odd neurological effect of the social isolation and repetition of quarantine, along with disturbed dreams and trouble keeping time. These songs keep welling up, a chorus here, a tune there, like sea shanties sung by sailors becalmed at sea.
These have been this household’s earworm hits of the past couple of weeks:
“I Think We’re Alone Now” by Tiffany
“Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield
“MacArthur Park” by Donna Summer
“BabyShark” by PinkFong
“Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads
“Hooked on a Feeling” by Blue Swede
“The Ladies Who Lunch” by Stephen Sondheim
Fun fact, I once met Elaine Stritch while attending a Shakespeare play in Brooklyn with my better half and reader Georgia Gray. Elaine was a trip, as they say, and I seem to remember she enjoyed the play.
Today’s Film: Blow the Man Down (2019)
There are many types of films. Much of the oxygen is consumed by big budget tentpoles with explosions and marketing budgets in the tens of millions of dollars. Yet one of the great pleasures for any cinephile is getting to the tightly plotted, sharply acted, “small” movie made for less than the billboard budget for Aquaman. Blow the Man Down is just such a film.
Written and directed by Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy, Blow the Man Down is a darkly humorous, sporadically violent carouse set in a gloomy and cold small fishing town in a remote corner of Maine. Produced by Drew Houpt, a veteran of numerous Coen Bros. productions, the film finds the beauty and brutality just beneath the surface of American life, and the story is told in a mythic register signaled by the opening sequence of a fisherman’s chorus dismembering their catch while singing the old sea shanty, “Blow the Man Down.” The chorus returns at key moments during the plot, signaling key turning points and the dark depths in every human soul.
The protagonists of the film are two sisters, Priscilla and Marybeth Connolly (Sophie Lowe and Morgan Saylor respectively), whose mother has died, leaving them with a lot of debt, a failing fish market, and a failure to connect emotionally to each other or their neighbors. Meanwhile, there’s a murder or two, $50,000 in a paper bag, and a house of ill-repute that falls into worse repute. These various threads are carefully braided together until a sort of justice is delivered by the matriarchs of the town, although the villains and heroes are different than you might expect at the outset.
Aesthetically, Blow the Man Down embraces the cold grays and blues of the Maine winter, and there’s little about it to warm your bones. Yet the journey into darkness is remarkably refreshing in the end. The story leaves just enough questions unanswered and presents mysteries about the characters that simply refuse to be resolved. In a world swimming with movie franchises about bold-face struggles between good and evil, any revelry in the moral gray areas feels like a respite. Enjoy the cold fish.
Blow the Man Down is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Reading List:
Oh man, I cannot recommend the Times’ profile of Val Kilmer enough. This is what a magazine profile should be, and it lends a level of dimension to Kilmer that might surprise you.
One of Brooklyn’s treasures is Roll N Roast, home of the best roast beef and liquid cheese sandwich in America. It’s the rare standalone drive-thru (or bike-thru) in New York, and their business is BOOMING thanks to quarantine-crazed roast beef fiends.
Benjamin Reeves is an award-winning screenwriter, journalist and media consultant based in Brooklyn, New York. Follow him on Twitter @bpreeves or write to him at breeves.writer@gmail.com.