Film review: The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

See, now this HAS a "the" - why did Hammer lose it between 1957 and 8?  Anyway, this is the very first of the Hammer re-creations of classic Universal films, and as with Horror of Dracula, it changes the original in very interesting ways.  Also like Horror, the star is unquestionably Cushing, who in this one is really stretching his acting chops to play somebody who veers easily from civility to crazed venality.  (Did he ever do Jekyll/Hyde?  For him it would have been Van Helsing/Frankenstein.)  In fact, what really sets these early Hammers apart is how good the acting is in general, and in particular Cushing and Lee.  Again, Lee has very little screen time, and in this case absolutely zero lines (it follows the first film and departs from the book in having the Creature be non-verbal), but once again you are struck by how important non-verbal acting can be.  Just as Lee creates an entirely distinctive version of Dracula, miles from Lugosi's somewhat campy original, but also genuinely terrifying when in full bloodlust, his Creature is a sui generis and fully-realized creation.  Yes, he staggers and lurches (no groaning, though, and somehow his utter silence (except for a death scream) is more chilling) but he is never cartoonish.  In many ways he's a lot more like a modern Romero-esque shuffling zombie, only towering and with a baleful stare (with one milky eye, 

which, knowing the limitations of 50s contact-lenses, must have made him glad only to be on screen for short bursts). 

The film is bookended with Victor Frankenstein in prison, awaiting execution for... something.  He seems deranged, but welcomes a priest just as an audience to whom to tell his story.  

"It all started when I was a precocious schoolboy..." Cue Melvyn "It Ain't Half Hot Mum" Hayes (although he is unrecognizable, and sounds, as Jami pointed out, just like Davy Jones of the Monkees) as young Victor, at the funeral of his mother, which leaves him orphaned.  His aunt Sophie is very worried about something, but Victor reassures her that he knew about his mother supporting her and will continue to do so.  Sophie is effusive and makes suggestive comments about future entanglements with her now very young daughter Elizabeth.  Victor, however, impatiently hustles everybody out of the house because he only wants to get going with his studies.  To that end, and because his teacher is stupid, he hires a live-in personal tutor, Paul Krempe (the very familiar-looking (perhaps from Restless Natives) Robert Urquhart).  They get on famously through the montage that jars rather when Melvyn Hayes, clearly younger than Urquhart, is suddenly replaced with Cushing, who, despite the best efforts of the makeup department, looks significantly older than him.  All is well, as they progress to reviving a dead puppy, and Krempe is keen to take their findings to a scientific society and become famous.  Victor is having none of it, as he has his sights already set on, you guessed it, human subjects.  Krempe is immediately less than enthusiastic, but still goes along as they collect corpses (the first of which they retrieve from the gibbet, and it has a "partially eaten-away" head that Krempe is disgusted to watch Frankenstein casually hack off and dissolve in a vat of acid (a Chekhov's vat of acid).  In fact, Urquhart gets to do every iteration of his appalled-and-alarmed face throughout the film, the facility in the making of which was presumably his reason for being cast.

Krempe is fretting about this while Victor is off somewhere getting body parts (they turn out to be the hands of a sculptor) when somebody arrives to live with them, to the shock of Paul and the maid, Justine - it is the now-grown Elizabeth (who is something of a weak link in the film: Hazel Court is neither a good actress or the later-typical Hammer babe, cast for other assets).  She has been communicating with Victor (especially since Aunt Sophie recently died) but knows him so little she confuses Paul with him at first.  However, Victor does not bat an eye when he returns, more excited to show Paul the hands.  Paul refuses to help him sew them on, however, and in the first of many sulks, Victor tells Paul that he'll have to dine with Elizabeth without him.  Paul clearly becomes besotted with Elizabeth, who only has eyes (albeit out of a sense of gratitude for the role he played in supporting her financially) for Victor, who has asked her to marry him.  This is news to Justine, whom Victor, in the first sign of his more base nature, is seen snogging with in a passage.  (They've done more than snogging, as emerges later when Justine accuses Victor of being responsible for her pregnancy.  How did this film get released in 50s America?) 

Anyway, things progress to the point that the almost-complete human needs a brain, and Victor asserts that he needs a genius one.  Immediate cut to Victor entertaining an elderly professor, whom he toasts as being "one of the great brains of Europe."  As you might imagine, the old man makes it up the stairs after the meal, but then very rapidly descends (on to his head, which seems suboptimal) because of "faulty" banisters.  Paul is out of the house but when he returns is immediately on to Victor, and when, after the funeral, he catches Victor carrying the old man's brain, they wrestle, and the jar the brain is in is broken, which elicits a howl of rage and indignation from Victor that is enough to drive Paul away. 

After Victor has carefully picked pieces of broken glass out of the grey matter, we cut forward to the fully-assembled creature in a vat of liquid (meant to stand in for amniotic fluid? seems a risky combination with all the electricity, but certainly differentiates it from the original film) all wrapped in bandages, as Victor attempts to animate him.  However, he can't manage the equipment by himself and goes to Paul (still living in his house!) to ask for his help.  Meanwhile we see that his attempt has in fact succeeded - the fluid drains away and the creature begins to breathe.  As Victor is arguing with Paul we hear a crash and Victor runs to find the creature standing upright and removing the bandages from its eyes.  And what a sight its face is - Jami didn't even recognize it as Christopher Lee, what with the pasty makeup, scars and milky eye.  Turns out his brain is abby-normal and his first act is to strangle his creator.  

Or at least, choke him until Paul comes up and clocks him with a chair.

After that, things start to move fast.  The creature gets out and roams around the woods 

where the scenes in the original where he meets a child and an old blind man are combined, in that an old blind man and his grandson are out gathering some kind of edible when the monster happens upon the old man.  The monster doesn't immediately attack, and things might have been okay but the old man gets spooked and whaps him with his walking stick.  Bad mistake.  Thereafter things go poorly for the man and (shockingly - apparently the 50s was harsher on children than thereafter) the child, when he comes to investigate (although we never see him killed, we just see his satchel in the dirt later).  Victor and Paul find the monster in the woods and while Victor wants to try to reason with him, Paul just shoots him in the head.  They bury him and Paul can now move away, as he was only staying to protect Elizabeth, who knows nothing of the experiments (and is never allowed in the upstairs lab).

But of course, Victor digs him up and (somehow!) gets him back to the lab, where he does brain surgery.  Meanwhile we get a confrontation between Victor and Justine 

where she claims to know what's going on, announces she's pregnant and threatens to reveal all to Elizabeth.  Victor calls her bluff and tells her to be gone in the morning.  However, at night she waits outside his lab until he leaves and sneaks in.  She finds the inner room where the monster is kept and goes inside... 

and is locked there by Victor, as the monster closes in...  Problem solved!

Victor and Elizabeth finally wed, and Paul is invited to the wedding.  When he arrives, late, Victor proudly shows him that the monster obeys commands.  

(Here Lee's physical movements are fantastic - it's like a badly strung puppet.)  Nonetheless Paul is disgusted and runs out to get the police.  Victor chases after him, and Elizabeth, long fed up with being kept in the dark, goes to investigate.  

Meanwhile the monster has pulled out his chains and made for the roof, where Paul spots him as he and Victor tussle on the street.  Elizabeth goes on the roof to investigate, and, when Victor runs up with a gun, everything ends with the monster crashing through the skylight that happens to be right above that acid bath...

And then we're back to the prison cell we began with.  It turns out that Victor has been charged with the killings of the three victims (spoiler, although Victor seemingly shoots her in the shoulder by accident, Elizabeth has recovered, and Paul has swooped in) and nobody believes him that it was a monster that he created that has been entirely dissolved.  Will Paul reveal the truth to one and all and save Victor from the gallows?  Will he buggery.

Is this as good as the classic Colin Clive/Boris Karloff James Whale film?  Of course not.  But is it the best of the rest?  Almost certainly, and the changes are enough to make it its own thing, which is genuinely exciting and a well-made thrilling (although cozy) film, with great performances from its leads, and excellent sets and atmosphere.  The monster is definitely no pale shadow of the Karloff version, and Lee imbues it with real menace (and a little of the Karloff pathos, but mostly menace).  No tortured "why was I created?" musing here, or even groans, just silent and deadly.  So in a way, it's been stripped of all its philosophical trappings and is just about a crazy person driven to make life because he can, not because he should.  Hey it's Jurassic Park!  No it's Sam Altman! 

Film review: Invaders from Mars (1953)

This apparently made a great impact on the directors who came to fame in the 70s and 80s, and indeed one of them (Tobe "Texas Chainsaw" Hooper) did a remake in the 80s that sank like a stone, although I have an abiding memory of seeing it on the sign outside the Exeter cinema), so in the spirit of Cozy Horror I thought we'd check it out.  Overview: parts of it dragged, and it seems to have been made very much on the cheap (there's a lot of military stuff going on that appears to be complete stock footage, and none of the rooms people are in are furnished beyond a chair and a table), it genuinely holds you in its grip for most of its run time, and you care about the main characters, despite one of them being a child actor of not the highest echelon (who apparently appears in the remake having not acted in decades).  If you step back and think about it for even a second, it's a pretty blatant piece of Cold War propaganda, but they say that about Invasion of the Body Snatchers (with which this has close parallels) and that has never affected my enjoyment of that movie.

The film is unusual for a science fiction film because of its limited use of locations.  The poster for the remake is very telling, because it's a picture of a hill with a glow coming over it, 

and indeed, all of the action of this film takes place in a sort of sand pit just over the hill from the main character (the boy, David MacLean - I would guess he's around 10)'s house.  The film begins with his alarm clock going off in the middle of the night so he can look through his telescope at some particular astronomical phenomenon, but unfortunately it also wakes his father, who comes in to tell him off, but being a scientist himself, gets caught up in looking through the telescope until the mother of the family comes to tell them both off.  All of this is very good-humored, which is important for later.  Anyway, David actually does get in bed and go to sleep, only to be woken an hour or so later by a storm and a green glowing flying saucer landing just over the hill.  We see what David doesn't, which is that the saucer somehow burrows under the ground, leaving no visible trace.  He tells his dad, who goes to investigate... and doesn't come back.  He is not back by breakfast time the next day, so his wife calls two police men to come and investigate.  They trot along and find his flashlight and one slipper, before they are SUCKED UNDER GROUND.  The mother is just starting to get really worried when pop shows up back, only he's completely sullen-faced and very peevish, and even slaps David (very realistically), which gives him a clue something's wrong, something that is confirmed when he sees a little x-shaped scar on the back of his neck.  (See the similarities with Body Snatchers?)  The cops come back and are similarly zombie-like, so David runs off to try to tell somebody.  While he's doing that we see the father taking the mother off over the hill...

Other creepy events: the neighbors have mislaid their young daughter, but then she shows up... changed.  Meanwhile, somebody has lit a fire with gasoline in the basement.  And when David goes to the police, the chief is similarly changed.  He instructs the desk sergeant to lock David up (!) until his parents show up to pick him up.  The desk sergeant is a nice, caring fellow, and can see David is freaked out, so he calls "Dr. Pat Blake" on the phone to come and see David.  This turns out to be a very attractive young woman (Helena "not Bonham" Carter) who will be David's partner in trying to sort this whole affair out.  And in fact, when both parents show up (and it's clear that the mother has been "turned") 

she claims that David shows signs of polio and can't leave with them.  They then telephone David's father's colleague at the observatory and go to meet him.  Here he reveals something that has been hinted at earlier, which is that David's dad's work has recently gotten very hush-hush, which is because they suspect Mars of having hidden cities on it, and they've been building a rocket to go to investigate.  And it turns out that all the families targeted for zombification (or arson) are of scientists on this project, and all the people currently zombified are out sabotaging various labs and factories as we speak.  (Rather gruesomely it is revealed that the little girl dropped dead of a brain aneurysm shortly after completing her mission, and Dr. Blake discovers it's because of the device installed in her brain that exploded.  So instantly David panics about his parents (currently off trying to shoot the girl's father, working late in his lab).  We see the two cops cornered (this is not one of those films where nobody ever believes the protagonists - surprisingly quickly everyone, especially the military, is mobilized) and they drop like ripe figs from a tree, so the danger is real.  

It all builds to a finale where we finally get to see the aliens.  There are some rather laughable hench-monsters, 

who look like extras from a live-action Dr Seuss, dressed in obviously zipped-up green fuzzy onesies, and a quite novel looking brains behind the operation, who has a human (albeit gold) face (with expressive eyes but no other expressions) and tentacles, and sits in a glass globe and is carted around by two of the henchmonsters.  

(The place (which looks very Dr. Who-like - glass bubbly walls, 

and you never see the ship) is said to be "crawling" with them, but you never see more than four at a time.)  The main anxiety at the end is whether or not Dr. Pat will get chipped.  

She's on her front with a descending needle-like inserter for what seems like hours.  Then the army have to get out before the charges blow everything sky high.

And then there's a rather confusing ending: David wakes up in bed, apparently having dreamt all this.  His parents are themselves again and in bed when he goes to check, so, relieved, he goes back to bed.  And then he's woken by the flying saucer landing.  WTF?  Make up your mind, people.

As I said, this made quite an impression on the Spielberg-era directors, probably because they were David's age when they saw it.  And aliens-invading-in-the-neighborhood might have been the inspiration for ET, come to think of it.  Perhaps if I'd seen it as a boy in the 50s I would've been more impressed.  It's interesting... but it's no Body Snatchers or The Thing.

 

Film review: Horror of Dracula (1958)

For some reason there's no "the" in the title, which bothers me.  Anyway, this is the granddaddy of all Hammer Horrors, and we watched it as a kind of cozy horror to ease into the run-up to Halloween.  It's interesting largely because of the changes to the original.  It begins as usual with Jonathan Harker arriving at Castle Dracula (to be a librarian, though, rather than to sell real estate (isn't that what he does in the first one?  Anyway, he can't be doing that for reasons that shall become clear)) and he finds a meal waiting for him and a note that the count is away.  In the middle of the meal he drops a plate and while he's picking it up from out of nowhere a woman appears 

who begs him for his help but stops mid-sentence because she sees something behind him that terrifies her.  It is of course, the count (Christopher Lee) and she scuttles off.  Right off the bat (ooh, look what I did there) Lee both references Lugosi and draws a line between his performance and Bela's, because he says the line "I am Dracula, I bid you welcome," but delivers it in a completely clipped and off-hand fashion.  He then takes Harker to his room and shows a little too much interest in a picture he has of his fiancee, Lucy.  

He then tells Harker he'll be away for a while and then leaves, locking the door behind him.  Harker seems somewhat amused, and sits down to write a letter, that reveals the first really major difference from the original: Harker knows what Dracula is, and has come to kill him!  Alas, however, he is visited in the night by the woman who again begs him to help her escape (and now, of course, it makes sense that he would help her) but has she embraces him in her relief, the sight of his pulsating jugular is just too much for her and she takes a good ol' bite.  Just then Dracula reappears, and here you get the first taste of the Hammer gore, because his eyes are bloodshot and there is ample technicolor blood dripping out of his mouth.  

He intervenes, throwing the blood-crazed woman away from Harker (she has become feral and hisses at him) and in the tussle Harker is knocked out.  When he wakes up it is light (but is late in the day) and he escapes out of the window, first hiding his diary at a crossroads in front of the castle, then returning to find both vampires in their coffins in the crypt.  Foolishly, he stakes her first, and her scream awakes the count whose eyes swivel around to catch the failing light, at which a smile plays across his lips.  

Harker then stumbles over to the count's coffin, to find it empty.  Suddenly he realizes it's dark, and looks up to see the count closing the door to the crypt and advancing towards him...

Sidenote: this film zips along, largely because it is content to cut out scenes that later horrors would see as the main point of the film.  So we never see Dracula feasting on poor old Harker, we just cut to a figure arriving at a nearby inn, who is revealed to be the great Peter Cushing as (a rather young) Van Helsing, who has come to see what's happened to his pal Harker.  The innkeeper is very cagey and basically tells him the usual thing of we don't want your kind stirring up trouble, but his kindly barmaid (who is, of course, called Inge) slips him Harker's journal, so he finds out everything that's been happening and rushes to Castle Dracula.  As he arrives, a carriage that matches the description in the book, all black and gothic, rushes past him, obviously carrying Dracula away.  (Another big difference: there is no sea voyage because Harker, Van Helsing etc., live in the unnamed country just over the border.  This allows everyone to come back to the Castle at the end of the movie for the big finale.  And the reason they believe the Count is leaving is to claim Lucy as a replacement for his staked mate.  So there's no hint, as in the book, that he'd planned on going anywhere to do anything nefarious - it was all prompted by Harker.)

Van Helsing finds the now pointy-toothed Harker in a coffin in the crypt (as well as the mummified corpse of the woman) and you see him very sadly about to stake Harker, when again it cuts away.

Peter Cushing is listed first in the credits, and indeed, Lee gets very little screen time.  In fact, the second star if there is one is reliable British actor (see Doctor Who, and these films we've watched) Michael Gough, who plays Arthur, brother of Lucy, husband to Mina.  Lucy has already been bitten when we find Van Helsing telling Arthur (who is very suspicious of Van Helsing) and Mina about Harker's fate.  We see Dracula arrive to a clearly welcoming Lucy (very sexual undertones - racy for the 1950s, but not as racy as Hammer would soon get) to feast again on her neck.  Van Helsing is called in by Mina and he insists on garlic everywhere and locked windows, but the maid (Gerda?) is called in by Lucy and agrees to get rid of the garlic and open the windows, and so much for Lucy.  However Lucy comes back and almost makes a victim of Gerda's young daughter before Van Helsing intervenes.  Arthur is then convinced and he and Van Helsing visit the customs to find out where that black coach was heading.  They find out the address just as we see a messenger boy deliver a message to Mina (played by the comely, if rather dowdily coiffed and uncomelily named Melissa Stribling) back at home that Arthur wants to meet her at that address.  And she does, and is later seen with a very suggestively satisfied look on her face. 

Anyway, by the time our two men show up at the address (a funeral parlor) the coffin is gone.  They find out Mina has been bitten when Van Helsing presses a crucifix into her hand and she faints (and is burned - as Lucy was earlier).  They set her up as bait and wait outside the window, but little do they know Dracula has got in the house 

and gets to her a second time (to her credit, she looks a little less welcoming than Lucy this time

 - earlier we've seen Van Helsing recording notes to himself on a wax cylinder (very Professor Higgins) say that those affected are like drug addicts who hate themselves for it).  She is treated with a blood transfusion from Arthur, who is told to drink wine to replenish himself, but when he asks Gerda to get more from the basement, she says "ooh, after all the bad things that have happened when I've disobeyed orders, I'm not going to disobey the mistresses' order not to go in the basement" and Van Helsing instantly realizes (a) where Dracula's coffin is, and (b) how he got in without them seeing.  However, he finds the coffin empty, only to see Dracula just arriving, then locking him in the basement, grabbing Mina, and it's a race to the castle for the big standoff (which features the now iconic fashioning of a crucifix out of two handy candlesticks).  

Short and sweet!

This is a very solid film, surprisingly un-campy (apart from two comic-relief characters - the easily corruptible customs officer, who has to keep repairing his gate, and the drunken funeral parlor owner), which is in large part to the excellent leads, all of whom were already very respectable stage actors, and the dialogue, which is well-written and grounded.  A British film industry is (temporarily) saved! 

Flint Water Strikes Again

 So, the day before yesterday our, I would have said almost brand new (three years old, apparently) water heater started leaking all over the basement floor.  We called our favorite plumbers and they came and gave us a new one, which, thanks to rocketing prices, set us back almost two thousand dollars. (My first car cost me $500.) Once again, it was incredibly heavy because of silt building up inside it.  As a pure coincidence, they were working on the pipes in our neighborhood not so long ago.  Well, this one's insured for six years at least...

 

Another camera dump

Summer segues into Fall, and we visit Shiawassee bird sanctuary for the first time in ages.  It was misting and cool but the mosquitoes were rampant.

 

 Holly rec, and an interesting addition to a little park next to a community center:

The view from the top of the Northbank Center shows interesting work on the old concrete riverside park: 

The Lone Dahlia

You do not want to know how much I spent on dahlia bulbs in the depths of February because I thought they looked cheerful and perky.  When it was FINALLY warm enough to put these out in late spring (which was the end of May--very late for this part of the world), everyone else on the internet was bragging about seeing their dahlia tubers producing healthy green shoots.  I had to wait at least a month for runty sprouts--and even then it was only about half of the tubers that did anything. About 1/4 got soggy and rotted and another 1/4 stayed dormant. How many springs do they need to spring to life?  I am saving them and am going to try again next year if I can remember where I store them during the winter...

By mid-July all the tubers that sprouted had formed bushy plants--nice, dark green leaves and very strong stems.  A lot of dahlia enthusiasts online bemoaned that their dahlias were too weak to hold up their COLOSSAL flowers--humble brag much?  In August, when everyone else talked of dead heading spent flowers and preparing them for their end of summer cool down, I was still waiting for ANY sign of a flower bud.  Finally, in the first week of September, when everyone else is digging up their tubers in preparation for winter, I saw four TINY buds form. And now, with October just 12 days away, we have one single flower, and three smallish buds hovering in the background.  Of all the kinds I bought, this was not high on the list that I was hoping to see bloom: I collected every dark velvety red flower that I could find and this orange pom pom thing was tossed into the reds mix.  (Those red flowers in the background are geraniums which grow like dandelions here--not much to get excited about there.  Apparently their stench repels pests. And they seemed to, so they are in my good books.) Obviously this dahlia is producing to spite the prettier ones.  

Flint has its first frost date in mid-October, just under four weeks from now.  Given the forecast and recent weather patterns, I think that is unlikely. In fact, it really seems unlikely we will have any sort of winter as we are stuck in monsoon doldrums--endless warm rainy days and muggy, sweaty evenings. Regardless, I don't think I am going to see any more dahlias this year.  I am going to to dig them all up, dry the tubers out, find a way to store them where they stay dry and cool (but not cold--never cold) and try this whole rigamarole all over again next May. (And, no, you cannot start them early and plant them out as, apparently, they are EXTREMELY tender and do NOT LIKE having their roots "disturbed".)

The Body of a Girl by Michael Gilbert

Here is another stand-alone police procedural that Gilbert published in 1972.  It's very satisfying and has that modern twist of the story being told from a not completely transparent character's point of view. The story begins in a small village located in the "upper reaches" of the Thames River when a couple of boys swimming and playing around in a wooded area of an island in the river see a leg of a person sticking out of the mud near the water's edge.  They run to get the police much to the chagrin of the police chief who is ONE MONTH away from a not-so-well deserved retirement.  (Let's just say this guy likes to ignore crimes that make his life difficult.)  To everyone's amazement (and the police chief's great relief) the next day a Detective Chief Inspector Mercer of the Scotland Yard arrives to take over the case. Not that the locals had actually done anything.  Indeed, they are sort of amazed that Scotland Yard had even heard of the case...Regardless, Mercer is assigned a small team of detectives who are eager to do something--and eager to blame Scotland Yard if it all blows up in their faces.  Because it turns out that the body has been dead over two years, there is no missing person report that remotely resembles the (it is inferred) young adult female, and any clues (like clothes, shoes, wallet) are LONG gone.  

Mercer is in exhaustible and not only sets up a police cordon around the area where the body was found and then orders police officers to start digging up the whole island in case there are more bodies. Not only does Mercer explain to no one what he is up to, he spends a lot of his efforts asking people about local characters who clearly have NOTHING to do with this murder: a guy who owns the only successful garage in town, the half-hobo/half-conman who lives in a hut on the island and sells "girly pics" to teen boys--a seedy but beloved piece of local color, and anyone who worked with or knew a police officer who killed himself over a year ago...Well, it doesn't take long before Mercer has no friends on the force and few friends in town. And it doesn't take long before the Police Chief, Bob Clark to complain to everyone who will hear about how Mercer is messing things up.  And soon the talk is that Mercer is not only messing things up but perhaps criminal himself.

So what is Mercer's story? Well, even though he is the main character and we (the reader) move through the world with him, he does not share his innermost thoughts with us.  His past is a completely blank book--we know nothing of him other than the fact that he states he is a detective with Scotland Yard.  We have no idea why he tells the police officers to keep a 24 hour watch on a local garage owner.  We have no idea why he hangs out at a bar after closing time and pretends to get drunk with the people who hang out there. 

I won't give away the big reveal, but after spending almost 200 pages looking over Mercer's shoulder (but having no access to his thoughts), his workmates' suspicions of him start to make sense.  Is he intentionally sabatoging the whole investigation?  You'll have to read it yourself to find out.

Camera dump: Escher, chimneys, etc.

 

From the right angle, and at the right time of year, Flint River can almost look nice.  They recently got rid of a weir that they'd only installed a few years previously to replace an old crumbling pipe/bridge thingy.  Now the river babbles over giant rocks.

 Hogbacks.  Looking forward to more crisp sunny days.  Still mostly muggy, but this was an exception.

 

There's been an M.C. Escher exhibit at the FIA since May, and it ends tomorrow, so I finally visited it this week.  My conclusion is that Escher had the aesthetic of me aged around 12, when my art teacher said I had a future painting posters for horror films, but the skills of a mathematician.  Truly the nerds' favorite artist.

The demolition of the old Flint Central High continues slowly.  Here's the chimney for the old welding lab that was already abandoned when we arrived in Flint in '99... 

...and now it's gone.  Sigh.

Still, the weather was nice again yesterday.  This is Holly Rec., which we haven't visited much recently, because we normally swim here but they've drained the lakes slightly for some reason (apparently they'll be back to normal next year).