women's short hair and other features of vintage film

I'm still watching old movies mostly in order to do my knitting, at a rate of about one finished for each five or six started.

It's a lot easier for me to ignore a certain quantity of misogyny, racism, classism, etc in old movies, if it doesn't go much beyond the standard of the time, than it is in contemporary film. (The DNF rate shows that it only goes so far though.) In contemporary stuff, even nasty things that are completely genre standard will drive me away, like copaganda which has made me pretty much intolerant of any portrayals of them in contemporary tv, even from outside America where it's not quite as bad.

I'm finding it very refreshing seeing women with short hair absolutely everywhere in all these early-mid 20th c. films. Finland has the highest rate of short haired women out and about of any place I've ever encountered, but it's still much lower in my experience than the worlds of 1920s-60s film and tv. And I get a bit aggravated seeing the long hair everywhere on TV, where the Central Casting Style Nexus radiates stupidly identical, implausibly labor-intensive styling, right down to the same diameter of curling iron, out from shitty network tv into the rest of the film world, even affecting prestige tv and characters who textually can't be spending any time heat styling at all. (The long hair I see irl is not aggravating, because it's their own hair, but sometimes it is puzzling - Why? How? Do you think it's on purpose? - or mildly tragic - Oh no it needs moisture! Which is probably easier than they realize! Just switch shampoo and conditioner!)

Old films are generally worse than modern non-prestige film for makeup being worn all the time and by all women characters, but this is also easier for me to excuse. I always remember the picture size and quality they were designed for was generally so much lower that who knows what you'd've seen?

ADHD Tax

Last night I put one of our favorite dinners (an aluminum pan of chicken and vegetables tossed in oil and seasonings) into the oven to roast, then went back to Sipuli-sitting duty, knitting and watching a movie in the diningroom.

I didn't hear the oven timer go off, but Wax, in the livingroom, did.

"I wonder if I should check the oven?" thought Wax to herself. "No, she must have heard it." "You have to TRUST her," thought Wax, erroneously (never trust someone with ADHD to not get tripped up by ADHD), probably because she's just watched like twenty-five seasons of the 911 franchise of silly prime time soaps and was suffering from residual sentimental conventional moral messages floating around in her head.

When I went into the kitchen the pan had cooked completely dry of juices in the bottom for the first time since we started making this dish (eight years maybe?). The fillings were distributed in artistic blobs with burnt-to-carbon bits on the edges and flat blobs of blackened aluminum in the spaces between them.

It was still edible! Mostly. There were some dried-out bits to discard. But she definitely should have checked whether I heard the alarm.