Posts Tagged ‘Cary Grant’
“Hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity”*…
… but that authenticity can be hard to find…
In 2016, US retailer Target severed ties with textile manufacturer Welspun India after discovering that 750,000 sheets and pillowcases labelled Egyptian cotton were not 100% Egyptian after all.
Egypt has long been known for producing long- and extra-long-staple cotton, a variety of the crop with especially long threads that results in softer and more durable fabric – so products labelled Egyptian typically command a higher price. But the year after the Welspun incident, the Cotton Egypt Association estimated that 90% of global supplies of Egyptian cotton in 2016 were fake.
Egyptian cotton is not the only fabric that has fallen foul of mislabelling in recent years. In 2020, the Global Organic Textile Standard (Gots) said that 20,000 tonnes of Indian cotton had been incorrectly certified as organic – around a sixth of the country’s total production. In 2017, a Vietnamese silk brand admitted that half of its silk actually came from China. And in 2018, several British retailers had to withdraw “faux” fur products that turned out to be the real thing.
From choosing an organic cotton T-shirt to buying trainers made out of recycled plastic bottles, many of us opt to pay more in the hope that our purchase will be better quality, or help people or the planet. However, as the Welspun incident and others have shown, when it comes to textiles, we’re not always getting what we think we’ve paid for…
How can we tell if the clothes in our wardrobes really are what they claim to be? “Why fabric fraud is so easy to hide,” from @BBC_Future.
* Coco Chanel
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As we root around for the real, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that Howard Hawks’ comedy Bringing Up Baby premiered at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco. Featuring Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and a leopard, the film earned good reviews but suffered at the box office. Indeed, Hepburn’s career fell into a slump– she was one of a group of actors labeled as “box office poison” by the Independent Theatre Owners of America– that she broke with The Philadelphia Story (again with Grant) in 1940.
As for Bringing Up Baby, the film did well when re-released in the 1940s, and grew further in popularity when it began to be shown on television in the 1950s. Today it is recognized as the authentic screwball classic that it is; it sits at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, and ranks among “Top 100” on lists from the American Film Institute and the National Society of Film Critics.
“What you’re telling is just a story. It isn’t happening anymore”*…
Detail from Senecio by Paul Klee. 1922
Some find it comforting to think of life as a story. Others find that absurd. Galen Strawson weighs in…
‘Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”,’ wrote the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, ‘this narrative is us’. Likewise the American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner: ‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story.’ And: ‘In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives.’ Or a fellow American psychologist, Dan P McAdams: ‘We are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell.’ And here’s the American moral philosopher J David Velleman: ‘We invent ourselves… but we really are the characters we invent.’ And, for good measure, another American philosopher, Daniel Dennett: ‘we are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behaviour… and we always put the best “faces” on it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character at the centre of that autobiography is one’s self.’
So say the narrativists. We story ourselves and we are our stories. There’s a remarkably robust consensus about this claim, not only in the humanities but also in psychotherapy. It’s standardly linked with the idea that self-narration is a good thing, necessary for a full human life.
I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths – even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here. They’re not universal human truths even if they’re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way. At best: I doubt that what they say is an accurate description even of themselves…
Read on for a challenging perspective: “I am not a story,” from @gstrawson in @aeonmag.
* Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
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As we rethink retrospection, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Samille Diane Friesen– better known by her stage name, Dyan Cannon. She was born on this date in 1937. An actress of accomplishment (she scored a Saturn Award, a Golden Globe Award, three Academy Award nominations, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame), her career began in B movies, but took off after a turn in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, for which she received her first Academy Award nomination.
Before her career took off, Cannon was married to Cary Grant for three years and gave birth to his only child, daughter Jennifer. Reluctant to discuss the marriage since their 1968 divorce, Cannon turned down lucrative publishing deals following Grant’s death in 1986. Finally, in 2011, she published a memoir. Dear Cary, which became a New York Times Best Seller.
“Oh how Shakespeare would have loved cinema!”*…
Indiewire‘s list of “The 50 Best Opening Credit Sequences Of All Time“– each with a video of the sequence, and followed by a bonus “starter list” of other candidates that might have made the cut… because after all, the point of lists like these is the arguments they provoke.
* Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge
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As we settle into our seats, we might spare a thought for Archibald Alexander Leach; he died on this date in 1986. Known by his stage name, Cary Grant, he became one of the greatest stars in Hollywood history, the epitome of the “leading man,” famous for roles both comedic (e.g., Holiday, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story) and dramatic (Grant was Hitchcock’s favorite actor, for reasons obvious in Suspicion, North By Northwest, To Catch a Thief, and Notorious).
Living for much of his career “above the title,” Grant was the first actor of note to “go independent”– to refuse to sign a studio contract– which gave him control over roles and collaborators and a bigger piece of the action; he was one of the first actors to earn a percentage of his pictures’ gross revenues.
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