Meador Manor

Boosting Broadcasts

Posted on February 11, 2026 by Granger Meador

Linear television is dying, but with retirement approaching, I decided it was worthwhile to restore free over-the-air broadcasts to Meador Manor.

I bought our home in southeast Bartlesville in 1994. Built in 1981 near the end of an oil boom, it came with coaxial cable wired to two walls of the living room and to each bedroom, but I noticed that it lacked a television antenna. I had grown up with them in Oklahoma City, which did not have cable TV service until 1980, when I was 14 years old.

Analog Broadcasts

Back in my hometown there are huge broadcast aerials on Britton Road, less than three miles from my parents’ first house. So until I was in first grade, we just had “rabbit ear” antennas atop 1950s black-and-white televisions. We later moved to about 8-10 miles from the transmitters, and larger very-high-frequency (VHF) antennas hidden up in attics captured the analog signals for channels 4 (NBC), 5 (ABC), 9 (CBS), and 13 (PBS) for our color cathode-ray-tube television.

Some of the antennas I’ve used over the decades

Our vacation cabin in Missouri, however, was over sixty miles from the towers for Springfield’s stations, so it needed a huge antenna on a mast to pull in their signals. When I finally purchased my own home in Bartlesville in 1994, I didn’t need an antenna, since I subscribed to cable television.

Funly enough, I had first seen cable TV in the 1970s up in Bartlesville, when my parents and I visited some of their former co-workers here. They could watch a few dozen channels in little Bville while metro OKC at the time was still limited to just the four broadcast channels.

These little loops were used to pick up nearby UHF stations

Televisions once came with tuners for analog Very High Frequency (VHF) channels 2-13 and analog Ultra High Frequency (UHF) channels 14-83. Eventually a few UHF channels began broadcasting in OKC, but since our old attic antennas were not designed to pick up those frequencies, we attached little UHF antennas to the televisions’ UHF terminals. Those were loops instead of rabbit ears and worked fine since the UHF towers were not far away.

Then little microwave antennas started sprouting up on some neighborhood roofs to pick up pay television like Home Box Office, and finally coaxial cable service became available.

Cable TV

When Cox Cable first launched in OKC in May 1980, it carried 31 analog signals. The four VHF and two UHF broadcasters were represented, plus things like the USA Network, WGN-Chicago, WTBS-Atlanta, a weather channel, and the extra-cost channels of HBO and Showtime. The first full-time cable news channel, CNN, debuted that June, and Music Television (MTV) arrived over a year later.

When I was in high school in 1982, I would tune in TMC 43 on KAUT Channel 43 for music videos until I convinced my parents to subscribe to cable, which allowed me to watch MTV. That greatly broadened my awareness of popular music, although MTV later became symbolic of cable’s decline.

As Michael Girdley noted in his video about it, MTV long ago switched away from concentrating on music videos to reality programs and game shows that snagged higher ratings. Like me, he is a member of Generation X, and despite not seeing any of MTV for decades, it caught my attention that at the end of 2025 they finally shut down their remaining music channels, with just one hour of music videos airing each week in the USA on their main channel.

When I left for college, I had my own cable TV subscription and my parents cancelled theirs, reverted back to analog over-the-air broadcasts. A decade later, in January 1995, my recently-purchased home in Bartlesville was one of almost 60 million across America that had cable television. However, none of the available channels had elected to carry the premiere of the syndicated Star Trek: Voyager show on the fledgling United Paramount Network. As a Trekkie since 1972, I was pretty frustrated.

Meador Manor’s First Antenna

Voyager was airing on one of the over-the-air broadcast channels not carried on the local cable system, so I went to the Radio Shack in Eastland Center and bought an antenna, chimney mount, mast, grounding rod and wire, conduit, signal booster, and coaxial cables. My friend Carrie helped me get the antenna mounted to the chimney, and I was able to pull in the analog television signals from various transmitters.

Wouldn’t you know, a few days later, before the second episode of Voyager even aired, one of the cable channels belatedly started carrying the show. That meant I actually made no meaningful use of the antenna while paying for cable, although the hard-won experience prepared me for helping my father replace the larger antenna at the cabin in Missouri and, years later, I was ready to replace the antenna in my parents’ attic in OKC to improve their UHF reception.

Cutting Basic Cable

Cable television had expanded to 9 out of 10 households by 2008, the year I cancelled it. It took 17 years for the majority of the country to catch up, but by 2025 reportedly only about 1 in 3 households still had cable TV.

I cut off my basic cable TV service while retaining the cable system’s internet service. My reasoning was that the last of the Star Trek series, Enterprise, had been cancelled in 2005 and the last cable television channel I regularly watched was the SciFi channel, just to see the reimagined Battlestar Galactica and old reruns of Mystery Science Theater 3000. By 2008 I could get those fixes via the internet, so it no longer made sense for me to pay for oodles of basic cable channels I never watched. It shouldn’t surprise you to be told that I had no interest in satellite TV, either.

Analog to Digital Broadcasts

The switch from analog to digital broadcast television signals in the 2000s allowed broadcasters to send out both high-definition signals as well as multiple DVD-resolution subchannels. I could then pick up dozens of broadcast digital channels with my chimney-mounted antenna, although the only time I bothered with that was from 2006-2009 when the old Star Trek original episodes from the 1960s were remastered and broadcast in high definition, plus an occasional PBS program I would record for use in my high school classes.

Digital television was great for my parents back in OKC, although many broadcasters shifted away from using VHF channels 2-6 to broadcasting digital signals on higher frequencies. For example, old WKY, Oklahoma’s first television station in 1949 and the state’s first color station in 1954, which became KTVY in 1976 and then KFOR in 1990, stopped transmitting on channel 4 and instead that NBC affiliate began transmitting on UHF channel 27, masked as virtual channel 4. Similarly, the CBS affiliate shifted from analog signals on channel 9 to digital ones on channel 39 and then shifted again to channel 25 when the FCC reallocated more bandwidth away from television. Now most stations actually broadcast on channels 7-36, although there are a few in isolated locales which still broadcast on 2-6, with many virtual channels allowing broadcasters to pretend they are still using their old analog frequencies.

I helped my parents negotiate the analog-to-digital transition with converter boxes for their older bedroom televisions and a new high-definition 16:9 LCD television for their living room. Since their 1960s antenna up in the attic was only designed to pick up VHF signals, and many stations were now broadcasting on UHF, I also installed a new VHF/UHF antenna and booster in their attic, with coaxial cables snaking to three different rooms below. Tyler the Antenna Man has a video explaining the three types of television antennas.

The Decline of Linear Television

My father died in 2022 and my mother moved to an independent living facility in Bartlesville. It had local cable TV available at first, but then Sparklight reportedly stopped providing service to it. The elderly are the most engaged demographic for linear TV, so a new provider was promptly identified using alternate technologies.

Another indicator of the contraction of linear television came in December 2023, when the Tulsa ABC network affiliate, KTUL, shuttered its local news production. KTUL is owned by the repugnant Sinclair Broadcast Group, which is now also influencing Tulsa’s Fox 23, with an allied company holding the broadcast license to dodge FCC restrictions. The percentage of US adults reporting they regularly watch local TV news declined from 46% in 2016 to 29% in 2022. By 2025, in the key advertising age demographics of 18-29 and 30-49, television news was only preferred by by 12-23% versus 19-24% for news websites and apps and 16-31% for social media, with print and radio their least preferred news platforms.

The inexorable decline of interest in linear television explains why there wasn’t more outcry about the Republicans’ cutting off federal funding for public broadcasting. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is gone, with the surviving Public Broadcasting Service reliant on individual donations and various underwriters.

CBS will cancel The Late Show in May 2026, and while the urban left-wing politicization of the various late night talk shows’ monologues has presumably alienated at least 40% of their potential audience, the general decline of linear television also explains the monetary argument behind CBS terminating its offering, which was hosted by David Letterman from 1993 to 2015 and then by Stephen Colbert.

Nielsen’s nationwide summary showed that at the end of 2025, cable and broadcast TV were each only attracting about 1/5 of viewers.

Restoring Linear TV to Meador Manor

While Wendy and I rely heavily on YouTube Premium to reduce advertisements in its on-demand offerings, we have no interest in paying for YouTube TV to get linear television via the internet. However, I’ll be retiring in June 2026, and I will have much more time for things like shows on the OETA educational station. Its high-definition broadcasts on channel 11-1 are much clearer than what it streams over the internet.

So I thought it would be nice to have that and other over-the-air broadcast channels available not only on the big TV in the living room but also on our iPads and my desktop computer. I also wanted the same digital video recording capability that I had once enjoyed with Tivo DVRs, allowing me to skip commercials and pause live transmissions.

Back in 2018 I had briefly experimented with an HD Homerun unit for that purpose. So I reinstalled that box, splitting the antenna booster’s output to it and the television’s own tuner and plugging the HD Homerun into the network router. I loaded the HD Homerun app on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and while I had to turn off my Virtual Private Network (VPN) for the Mac application to work, the iPhone app didn’t mind.

An ice storm damaged part of the VHF array on my 1995 antenna

The old antenna had lost its ability to pick up low VHF channels 2-6 many years ago when its longest log-periodic dipoles were snapped off in a storm. However, that didn’t matter after the digital transition when all of the regional channels shifted to broadcast on channels 8-36, as shown at rabbitears.info and antennasdirect.com. The shorter dipoles on my old antenna could still pick up VHF 8-13 and the Yagi-Uda end-fire array could still pick up UHF 14-36.

Well, at least it could a few months back, when in a test the television was pulling in 72 broadcast channels. Now the HD Homerun was only receiving Channel 2 and its seven subchannels, which actually broadcast on VHF channel 8. Did splitting the antenna signal across the TV and the HD Homerun weaken it that much? Or had a recent snowstorm dealt the antenna a near-death blow?

I disconnected the splitter, hooked the TV back up directly to the antenna, checked that the 1995 Radio Shack signal booster in the living room was on, and found that the TV was only receiving Channels 2 and 6 and their various subchannels, so it was only picking up high VHF channel 8 and UHF channel 26.

I wasn’t sure what was wrong. The old booster had a cranky connection in my recent test, so while waiting for decent weather to brave climbing up on the roof, I ordered a Winegard Boost XT pre-amplifier. By the time it arrived, the weather had improved from snow and a high of 46° F (8° C) to a sunny 65° F (18° C). I climbed up on the roof with the booster, tools, and coaxial accessories.

The shadows are of my crescent wrench and my iPhone (and yes, I know the chimney brick is shot)

I discovered that the coaxial cable was screwed into a balun right up at the antenna, too high for me to reach. The mounting hardware was still in decent shape despite over 30 years of weathering, and even the electrical tape holding the coaxial cable to the mount was still okay. Ethel, one of our outdoor cats, and a couple of neighbor dogs thought I was a rooftop menace, while if my human neighbors spotted me, they were kind enough to leave me to my work.

I was able to slowly loosen the bolts on the clamps, remove the upper clamp completely, and then lift and tilt the mast out of the loosened lower clamp to lower the mast and antenna to the rooftop.

The insulation on the twin leads of the balun had degraded

Unfortunately, the insulation on the balun adapting the balanced 300-ohm twin leads on the antenna to the unbalanced 75-ohm RG-6 coaxial cable had degraded, and the leads felt quite flimsy. I had no replacement on hand, so I went ahead and wired the pre-amplifier onto the antenna and remounted everything. Back down in the living room, I hooked in a box to send power back up the coaxial cable to the booster and hooked up the television. However, now it wouldn’t pull in any stations at all. I figured the balun up top was shot, and it was time to reconsider my approach.

Amplification and Reception Limits

Pre-amplifiers can’t make up for an inadequate antenna; they are more about addressing signal attenuation through the downstream coaxial cable and any splitters. Practical and reliable reception can be expected for stations up to 70 miles away with a high-quality long-range antenna; while there are plenty of antennas advertised as having longer range, the curvature of the Earth makes such claims bogus.

There are 20 transmitters within 70 miles of Meador Manor. The closest broadcast antenna, for a religious station, is 16 miles away, and the important antennas for the NBC, CBS, and PBS affiliates are 50 miles away, the ABC affiliate’s one is 55 miles away, and there is an Ion affiliate in Muskogee that broadcasts from 63 miles away. Thankfully they are all situated to the south, so I have no need for a rotating antenna.

The broadcast antenna locations in relation to Meador Manor [Source]

Since I was going to have to endure the cumbersome process of dismounting and remounting the antenna again, I decided to give up on the damaged 31-year-old antenna, which had been designed in the days when television was broadcast on a wider range of VHF and UHF frequencies. While I was still young enough to handle the task, I would erect a new long-range antenna with a built-in pre-amplifier that was designed to pick up channels 7-36 and reject 5G cellular signal interference.

A New Antenna

Tyler the Antenna Man and several other sources recommended a Televes High VHF/UHF antenna for weak long-range signals. It was pricey at $215 but at least I saved money by not ordering the even more expensive model that includes Low VHF reception since I don’t need to pick up signals from VHF channels 2-6.

The new antenna arrived in a few days, and I assembled it in the living room.

I took it up to the roof and lowered the mast and old antenna.

The new antenna is 86 inches long while its rear UHF reflectors and VHF array make it 29 inches tall, and I was concerned if it would clear the chimney with the old chimney straps and mounting pole. Thankfully, it did.

I used the compass on my iPhone to guesstimate the orientation of the directional antenna, trying to point it at 165 degrees to aim for the PBS, NBC, ABC, and CBS affiliate transmitters between Broken Arrow and Coweta.

I tossed the old antenna down and then crumpled it into a trash can. Down in our living room, I wired up the power unit that sends power back up the coaxial cable to the built-in booster within the antenna housing, and I hooked up coaxial cables to the television and the HD Homerun.

Huzzah! Both devices were picking up 73 channels, including the off-axis channel 44 broadcasting on UHF 28 from 63 miles away. Only seven of the 73 channels, from the low-power KUOC, a far-off-axis transmitter 42 miles away at Chandler Park in west Tulsa, were too weak to lock in reliably.

Watching OETA in high-definition on my Mac with the HD Homerun app

I deleted the seven weak channels along with twenty religious channels. (Can you tell we live in the Bible belt?) That left me with 46 channels, nine of those being high-definition. For those who love details: we get 1920 by 1080 interlaced signals for KJRH 2 (NBC), OETA 11 (PBS), KOTV 6 (CBS), KQCW 19 (CW), and KRSU 35 (RSU); 1280 by 720 progressive signals for KTUL 8 (ABC), KOKI 23 (FOX), KMYT 41 (MyN), and KTPX 44 (ION); and either 640 by 480 or 720 by 480 interlaced for the remaining 37 channels. Rabbit Ears has all the details.

Linear Limitations

All of those signals use the original ATSC broadcast standard for free over-the-air digital television. There is a newer ATSC 3 standard, but the Tulsa market doesn’t yet have any such transmissions. ATSC 3 is a mess since it includes digital rights management that could require an internet connection and even pay-to-view. The oligarchs running our corrupted federal government might eventually change the FCC rules and no longer require broadcasters to provide free over-the-air signals, but for now I can access more linear television options, with no subscription fees, than I had years ago with my first basic cable offering, and we can also stream them to our tablets, phones, and computers.

I paid the $35 annual subscription for the HD Homerun DVR feature, configuring it to record shows on my Mac Mini. I tested it by having it record an episode of the 1950s Adventures of Superman show broadcast on the MeTV network affiliate. That worked fine, but it also reminded me of its two major turnoffs for me: advertising and editing for time.

The episode I watched was only interrupted by advertising a couple of times, but they were long strings of commercials, much longer than what I experienced watching reruns in my youth a half-century ago. My DVR recording allowed me to skip past them, but their length led me to expect that some of the original episode would have been cut for time, something that also plagued the original Star Trek series when its reruns were syndicated in the 1970s.

This ending scene was cut from the MeTV transmission

The rather formulaic Adventures of Superman show typically had a closing scene in the offices of the Daily Planet, much like the original Star Trek series a decade later often featured a coda on the starship’s bridge. Those wrap-ups were used to tie up any lose plot threads and usually ended on a humorous note. The episode I watched on MeTV lacked such a coda and left a major plot thread hanging.

To confirm my suspicion, I bought that episode on Amazon Prime for $2. The print quality wasn’t great, but it did include the expected final scene. For research purposes, I also bought that episode for $3 from Apple TV. Same lousy print, but also the expected coda.

That sort of thing limits the value of linear television for me, although I don’t expect that to impact the high-definition versions of PBS programming. Linear TV will continue to contract as the Silent and Baby Boomer generations age out and as cable TV becomes increasingly expensive. I expect some cable companies will eventually discontinue their linear TV operations and just offer internet access. However, thanks to our new antenna, linear television lives again at Meador Manor.

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Tangent A5: The Invention of Morel

Posted on January 27, 2026 by Granger Meador

This is the fifth and final of five snowed-in posts, illustrating the pathways I sometimes pursue due to my avid curiosity. This Tangent began with a video remix of an old song by Duran Duran, which had inserts from the French New Wave film Last Year at Marienbad. The film was heavily influenced by an Argentine science fiction novella of 1940.

Adolfo Bioy Casares was an Argentine fiction writer, journalist, diarist, and translator. He authored ten novels and novellas, including the 126-page novella La invención de Morel or The Invention of Morel, which included an introduction by his countryman and prize-winning writer Jorge Luis Borges.

The novella won the First Municipal Prize for Literature of the City of Buenos Aires in 1941, and although it was his seventh work, Bioy Casares thought it launched his writing career.

The writer of the 1961 French New Wave film Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Robbe-Grillet, wrote an admiring but mixed review of it in Critique magazine in 1953. The first drafts of the screenplay had Hispanic names, but it eventually evolved into characters named X, A, and M in the script but never named in the bewildering film. While Robbe-Grillet denied the connection, the connections are obvious, so I suspect he was trying to avoid copyright claims. As Kirby Ferguson would say, “Everything is a remix.“

The Invention of Morel was translated into English and published by the University of Texas Press in 1964, but went out of print until reissued as a paperback in 2003 by New York Review Books Classics. There is a Kindle edition, but it is reportedly a bad scan full of errors, so I bought the paperback, which interestingly has the silent film actress Louise Brooks on the cover with her distinctive bob.

That’s because Bioy Casares was fascinated by Brooks and disillusioned by the decline of her career. She had disappeared from the screens of Buenos Aires after three or four movies, and he modeled the character of Faustine in the novel after her. Hence the desire of the director of Last Year at Marienbad to have his lead actress resemble Brooks.

The novel not only served as inspiration for Last Year at Marienbad, but also influenced the science fiction television series Lost, which featured a mysterious island and was broadcast from 2004 to 2010. In season four, a lead character is seen reading Bioy Casares’ novel.

The novel begins, in translation, with, “Today, on this island, a miracle has happened: summer came ahead of time.”

Illustration of tourists strolling past the “museum” in *The Invention of Morel*

Ann Manov summarized: “A group of elegant French tourists arrive in 1920s dress, like summer tourists at ‘Los Teques or Marienbad.’ Lounging around the hotel and the garden, they have the same banal conversations over and over again. One of them is an enigmatic, Gypsy-like woman sporting a bob and a headscarf. Her name is Faustine, and the fugitive follows her around the island, desperately in love. But she simply does not notice him.”

There are other mysteries, such as two suns or moons in the sky, and the tourists shivering under a hot sun, dancing in a storm, and swimming in a pool filled with rotting fish. Some of the weirdness reminded me of the children’s science fiction television series The Land of the Lost from 1974-1976.

The book explains these mysteries as effects from the titular recording and reproducing machine of Morel, who may be in love with Faustine.

One of the most memorable images from Last Year at Marienbad features a different sort of disquieting wrongness in the environment. Tourists in the formal garden stand and cast shadows, but the statues and conical shrubbery do not. This was achieved by shooting the scene at high noon with false shadows painted onto the ground.

In other scenes, the garden decorations do cast obvious shadows, heightening the dissonance.

There are also repeated changes in a hotel bedroom through the film which reflect a man’s repeated remoldings of a woman’s memories/reality into preferred forms.

The book was interesting, although I would disagree with Jorge Luis Borges’ claim that it is perfect. I liked a throwaway line in which the narrator shared his plan to write a book to enshrine the memory of a man who had assisted him, declaring that the memory of men is the probable location of heaven. I liked that concept: after all, a fellow had just been “resurrected” in my mind 80 years onward, thanks to the novella.

And with that, I close out this first series of Tangents. A music video of an old English pop song to a French New Wave movie to an acerbic Kansan actress in German silent films to an ancient mathematical game to an 85-year-old Argentine novella. What am I going to do when I retire? You have a partial answer.

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Tangent A4: Nim

Posted on January 26, 2026 by Granger Meador

This is the fourth of five snowed-in posts, illustrating the pathways I sometimes pursue due to my avid curiosity. This Tangent began with a video remix of an old song by Duran Duran, which had inserts from the French New Wave film Last Year at Marienbad. That film featured the two male protagonists repeatedly playing the ancient game of Nim.

True to form, the obscure film did not provide the name of the game, but the principles were clear enough:

The game might have originated in China and some say it resembles 捡石子 or “picking stones” while the earliest European references are reportedly from five centuries ago. Charles L. Bouton of Harvard gave it the name of Nim, and he developed the complete theory of the game in 1901. In the film, it is played as a misère game where the player with the last game piece loses, but many variants are possible.

Throughout the movie, Nim is played with cards, matchsticks, chips, dominos, and at least set up for play with photographs. You can play it here.

Martin Gardner wrote about Nim in his Mathematical Games column in the February 1958 issue of Scientific American, illustrating how binary math could determine how to play a perfect game. Edward Condon, who later would be better known for his leadership of a committee explaining away UFOs, co-invented an electromechanical machine consisting of 116 relays, over two miles of copper wire, weighing over 2,200 pounds, that could play Nim: the Nimatron.

Westinghouse Electric built the device, which played 100,000 games at the New York World’s Fair in 1940, winning 90,000 of them. Condon deliberately introduced delays in its computations to avoid discouraging human players, and it was only programmed with a certain number of predetermined games to allow humans a chance to beat it. Most of the losses were to attendants who had learned how to beat the machine in order to discredit complaints that the machine was unbeatable.

Condon designed the Nimatron merely for amusement, failing to recognize the potential of his patent for it that described an internal representation of numbers, a concept that would be critical in the forthcoming computer revolution.

Roland Sprague in 1935 and Patrick Michael Grundy in 1939 independently developed the theorem that all impartial two-player games can be equivalent to a game of Nim.

Here’s a video on how to win at Nim:

I earned straight A’s in all of my math classes, making it through all the semesters of calculus and ordinary and partial differential equations in college and only narrowly avoiding a minor in mathematics. However, math was anything but my easiest or favorite subject. For me, it was always a means to an end, and I can’t feign enough interest in Nim to master its theory.

Similarly, I’m not motivated to try to “solve” Last Year at Marienbad, which was deliberately left open to multiple solutions. In the film, the “husband” of the female lead instigates the game plays, and he always wins. It is clear that his various opponents, including the man gaslighting the woman, do not know the winning strategy. They fumble around, while he knows all the outcomes in advance.

The ending of the movie leaves you wondering if he did not also already know the predetermined loss of the woman. Is the hotel purgatory and the “husband” a representation of death? Perhaps his inherent inevitability explains his remark, “Oh, I can lose, but I always win.”

Or is his apparent loss at the end actually a win? Is he playing a misère game with the woman as the final game piece? There are no solutions, no answers. As Roger Ebert said, “Answers are a form of defeat.”

Another aspect of the film that aroused my curiosity was what influenced its writing and execution. The homage to Louise Brooks is explained by the revival of interest in her silent film career among French critics in the mid-1950s. However, that is purely surface. A greater literary influence, something one should always look for in a Left Bank film, was an Argentine science fiction novella of 1940, the final Tangent in this series.

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Tangent A3: Louise Brooks

Posted on January 25, 2026 by Granger Meador

This is the third of five snowed-in posts, illustrating the pathways I sometimes pursue due to my avid curiosity. This Tangent began with a video remix of an old song by Duran Duran, which had inserts from a French New Wave film from 1961, which had echoes of a failed star of the silent screen who grew up just 40 miles from our home in Bartlesville.

In Last Year at Marienbad, director Alain Resnais wanted Delphine Seyrig’s appearance to resemble that of Louise Brooks in 1929’s Pandora’s Box. Alas, Delphine showed up for filming with a haircut that would not allow for the recreation of Brooks’ Lulu bob. A wedge cut was utilized instead, and that became a phenomenon as well.

Louise Brooks

I’ve never seen Brooks’ films, but her look is iconic, and she eventually became a powerful essayist on Old Hollywood. She memorably shared, “If I ever bore you, it’ll be with a knife.”

Louise was born in 1906 in Cherryvale, Kansas, just 40 miles from my home in Bartlesville. Her father was a lawyer and her mother was cultured, participating in Chautauquas and playing Debussy and Ravel on the piano for her children.

However, Louise was sexually abused by a neighbor when she was nine years old. She shared, “We were Midwesterners born in the Bible Belt of Anglo-Saxon farmers, who prayed in the parlor and practiced incest in the barn.”

The family moved to Independence when she was 13, and then on to Wichita. She regularly performed as a dancer across southeastern Kansas and left for New York, and at age 18 she was signed to a five-year film contract with Paramount. Although she only appeared in a couple dozen movies between 1925 and 1938, starring in only three of them, her bobbed black helmet of hair was a style icon, and I already knew of her sharp wit.

If I ever bore you, it’ll be with a knife.
Louise Brooks

Brooks led a wild existence with plenty of drinking and sex. After two highly regarded German films, she returned to Hollywood in 1930, where her independent spirit, rebellious nature, and outspokenness clashed with studio executives. Her career faded, and she eventually returned to Kansas, where “the citizens of Wichita either resented me having been a success or despised me for being a failure”. She then fled to New York to star as a radio actor in soap operas and failed. She became a gossip columnist and was fired. She became a salesgirl at Saks, and finally fell into prostitution from 1948 to 1953.

She began an autobiography, Naked on My Goat. The title was from a young witch’s lines in Goethe’s Faust, who displays her youthful beauty and confidence while another witch warns that eventually she is bound to rot. However, after working on it for three years, she threw the manuscript into an incinerator. Her drinking increased and she considered suicide. Brooks would later share that despite two marriages and numerous affairs, she had never loved anyone.

The French saved Louise. Henri Langlois and others rediscovered her films and, at age 51, she was the subject of a film festival. The curator of film at the George Eastman House in Rochester learned how the former film star was living as a recluse in NYC and persuaded her to move into a tiny apartment nearby. She agreed to watch films, including some of her own which she had never seen, and launched a new career writing essays for film magazines.

Once derided as a brainy showgirl, Brooks proved to be an articulate and acerbic writer. Her revived notoriety helped inspire director Resnais to model his 1961 film’s star after her classic appearance, all the more since the movie was influenced by a 1940 novella whose author had Brooks in mind for its main female character.

Sight and Sound shared, “If Brooks has an Achilles heel, it is her own intelligence: she tends to attribute to others as much self-awareness and analytical power as she has herself.”

Film Comment‘s take on her work was, “It is also an exhilarating display of the sort of diamond-hard prose whose beauty is inseparable from its precision.”

All that led me to order her only book, Lulu in Hollywood, with eight of her essays. It wasn’t available electronically, so I ordered a splendid print version that the University of Minnesota Press published in 2000 which included a famous profile of her by Kenneth Tynan.

In one of her last essays, Brooks explained why she had not written her full memoir: “I am unwilling to write the sexual truth that would make my life worth reading. I cannot unbuckle the Bible Belt.”

Louise died at age 78 in Rochester, having always thought of herself as a failure. Late in her life, she wrote to her brother: “I have been taking stock of my 50 years since I left Wichita in 1922 at the age of 15 to become a dancer with Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. How I have existed fills me with horror. For I have failed in everything — spelling, arithmetic, riding, swimming, tennis, golf, dancing, singing, acting, wife, mistress, whore, friend. Even cooking. And I do not excuse myself with the usual escape of ‘not trying.’ I tried with all my heart.”

Last Year at Marienbad birthed multiple Tangents, including the ancient game of Nim, which I shall explore in Tangent A4.

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Tangent A2: Last Year at Marienbad

Posted on January 24, 2026 by Granger Meador

This is the second of five snowed-in posts, illustrating the pathways I sometimes pursue due to my avid curiosity. This Tangent began with a video remix of an old song by Duran Duran, which had inserts from a French New Wave film from 1961.

Here’s the video that instigated this Tangent:

French New Wave

One of the original posters highlights the disturbing

In my younger days, I would occasionally skim issues of the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma at public libraries, although my French was limited to a few weeks in fifth grade and its descent from Latin, which I studied for a few years in high school and college. Thus I thought of the magazine’s title as Cashiers rather than Cahiers since I was unfamiliar with the French word for notebooks. I enjoyed seeing retrospectives on the work of auteurs like Truffaut, Godard, and Demy, and I have seen Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 of 1966, Godard’s Alphaville of 1965, and I have a Blu-Ray of Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg of 1964 that I’m saving as a post-retirement treat. The sumptuous yet strange visuals in the music video reminded me of that era when French directors rejected traditional filmmaking conventions.

Cahiers promoted the work of “Right Bank” filmmakers, who were primarily film critics with cinephile backgrounds. However, there were also slightly older “Left Bank” filmmakers who often came from literary, documentary, or other arts backgrounds. While Godard and Truffaut might focus on formal experimentation like jump cuts, the Left Bank integrated other art forms and had more overtly political, literary, and intellectual themes. The latter were associated with the intellectual and bohemian “Rive Gauche” or “Left Bank” of Paris.

Last Year at Marienbad

A Google Lens search identified the female protagonist as actress Delphine Seyrig in director Alain Resnais’ 1961 film L’Année dernière à Marienbad or Last Year at Marienbad. So the video was remixing with a Left Bank film. I was familiar with that group’s La Jetée by Chris Marker, which inspired one of my favorite films, 12 Monkeys, but I’d never heard of Marienbad.

Coco Chanel

The beautiful gowns that Seyrig wore in the film were immediately arresting. I presumed they were by a French designer, but I was surprised to learn that Coco Chanel was responsible, albeit uncredited in the film. You see, Chanel had met Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn at Monte Carlo way back in 1931, and he had paid her a million dollars to come to Hollywood a couple of times per year to design costumes for his films. Chanel came to dislike the culture of the film world and only worked on a few films there, declaring, “Hollywood is the capital of bad taste … and it is vulgar.”

Hence I didn’t expect to see her designing costumes for a Left Bank film decades later. However, Director Alain Resnais admired Chanel’s timeless style and asked her to do the film’s costumes when she was 77 years old. Resnais and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet wanted 1920s glamour blended with 1960s modernity, and Chanel’s clean lines, little black dresses, and use of chiffon and tulle were well-suited to the film’s black-and-white cinematography.

“*I should have shown you set among white feathers…a sea of white feathers about your body.”*

I should note that Coco Chanel, like many influencers, had her flaws, as documented by YouTube fashion historian Nicole Rudoolph, MA.

The Alains

Writer Alain Robbe-Grillet and director Alain Resnais collaborated on the film, with Robbe-Grillet writing a detailed screenplay that went beyond dialogue, gestures, and décor to include the placement and movement of the camera and the sequencing of shots.

Robbe-Grillet’s preface to the story shared: “The whole film is in fact the story of a persuasion, what is involved is a reality that the hero creates by his own vision, through his own words. [. . .] It all takes place in a luxury hotel, a sort of international palace.[. . .] An unnamed man goes from room to room [. . .], walks down interminable corridors. [. . .] His glance moves from one nameless face to another nameless face. But it always comes back to one face, that of a certain young woman. [. . .] To her, then, he offers [. . .] a past, a future, freedom. He tells her that they have already met, a year ago, that they became lovers, that he has returned now to this rendezvous which she herself had made, and that he will take her away with him.”

“She does not wish to leave the other man [. . .] who watches over her and who is perhaps her husband. But the story told by the stranger becomes more and more real; irresistibly, it becomes more and more true. The present and the past have, besides, finally become fused, while the growing tension among the three protagonists creates in the mind of the heroine tragic phantasms: rape, murder, suicide. . . .”

Resnais filmed that script with great fidelity, although there are inevitable differences. The most notable of those is that Resnais was not interested in filming the rape, instead emphasizing the hero’s rejection of that scenario, agitatedly reformulating it into a willing and welcome embrace. However, in the repeated overexposed tracking shots moving toward the smiling woman of that reformulation, her strange smile and the tilting of her head are simultaneously comical and disturbing — deliberate off-putting choices.

The conclusion is a sudden linear narrative of the woman accepting the hero’s narrative, finally being willing to “go away with him, toward something […], love, poetry, freedom … or, perhaps, death.”

The Critics

I resisted watching Last Year at Marienbad for some time, even though it was clearly gorgeous, because I fully expected it to be difficult, obscurantist, and pretentious given its Left Bank origin. I dislike and often disagree with New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, but her caustic take on the film no doubt has elements of truth:

Here we are, back at the no-fun party with non-people, in what is described to us as an “enormous, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hotel — where corridors succeed endless corridors.” I can scarcely quote even that much of the thick malted prose without wanting to interject — “Oh, come off it.” The mood is set by climaxes of organ music and this distended narration; it’s all solemn and expectant — like High Mass. But then you hear the heroine’s thin little voice, and the reiterated questions and answers, and you feel you shouldn’t giggle at High Mass, even if it’s turning into a game of Idiot’s Delight.

However, my tastes often aligned with Roger Ebert, and he recalled standing in the rain in college to see the film, and remembered it more fondly.

Yes, it’s easy to smile at Alain Resnais’ 1961 film, which inspired so much satire and yet made such a lasting impression. Incredible to think that students actually did stand in the rain to be baffled by it, and then to argue for hours about its meaning–even though the director claimed it had none.

…

Viewing the film again, I expected to have a cerebral experience, to see a film more fun to talk about than to watch. What I was not prepared for was the voluptuous quality of “Marienbad,” its command of tone and mood, its hypnotic way of drawing us into its puzzle, its austere visual beauty. Yes, it involves a story that remains a mystery, even to the characters themselves. But one would not want to know the answer to this mystery. Storybooks with happy endings are for children. Adults know that stories keep on unfolding, repeating, turning back on themselves, on and on until that end that no story can evade.

Ebert recalled sitting over coffee in the student union with Gunther Marx, a professor of German, after seeing the film for the first time. Marx told him, “It is a working out of the anthropological archetypes of Claude Levi-Strauss. You have the lover, the loved one, and the authority figure. The movie proposes that the lovers had an affair, that they didn’t, that they met before, that they didn’t, that the authority figure knew it, that he didn’t, that he killed her, that he didn’t. Any questions?”

I could hug Roger for his addition: “I sipped my coffee and nodded thoughtfully. This was deep. I never subsequently read a single word by Levi-Strauss, but you see I have not forgotten the name. I have no idea if Marx was right. The idea, I think, is that life is like this movie: No matter how many theories you apply to it, life presses on indifferently toward its own inscrutable ends. The fun is in asking questions. Answers are a form of defeat.”

You are so difficult!

Difficult films are hit-and-miss for me. I like much of David Lynch’s work, including the nonlinear Lost Highway and the puzzle box of Mulholland Drive, but I couldn’t make it through Inland Empire. I tried to watch Terence Malick’s Tree of Life, but it desperately needed pruning.

There are meta-narrative films, however, that I adore, such as Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Stranger than Fiction. For me, French New Wave films are not in their league and can be particularly tiresome. I suspect they might be more enjoyable with RiffTrax comedic commentaries than in their original forms.

The Amazon Prime Kino Film thumbnail that caught my eye

So, given my reluctance, how did I come to watch Last Year at Marienbad? Well, several months ago I purchased a new 4K HDR release of Danger: Diabolik from Kino Lorber, which had been the subject of an episode of the Perf Damage podcast with Charlotte Barker, Paramount’s Director of Film Restoration, and her husband, Adam. I might guess that influenced the algorithms crafting my online experiences to promote Kino Lorber’s products on Amazon Prime. Thus, when I opened the Prime Video app on my iPad to seek entertainment, it offered up the Kino Film Collection. A bit of idle side-scrolling then brought the thumbnail of the film into view. I could watch it for free, so long as I remembered to cancel a 7-day free trial of the sub-service. Hmmm…why not?

So I watched this difficult and beautiful film in bed on a little 10.9″ screen at about 2K resolution while wearing a bone conduction headset with mediocre sound quality. How fitting for these times, and thank goodness for subtitles.

The film was indeed exasperating, fascinating, foolish, disturbing. There was obviously intercutting in the editing between multiple scenes, without clear signals of past versus present except occasional revealing dialogue. Deliberate mismatches of dialogue and visual descriptions accompanied shifting, inconsistent realities that reminded me of several of David Lynch’s later films. I didn’t find the film profound, as it seemed mostly only surviving surfaces of a plot that had been eviscerated, but it tickled my curiosity in multiple ways.

Firstly, what was so familiar about Delphine Seyrig’s appearance? The film’s obvious choices to have many characters arranged in motionless and stilted tableaus, the dated play-within-the-film, and the cinematography all seemed to pay homage to silent films. Sure enough, director Resnais had unsuccessfully tried to get Kodak to supply old-fashioned film stock that would bloom and halo like in the old silents, and he wanted Seyrig’s appearance and manner to resemble that of Louise Brooks in 1929’s Pandora’s Box. Thus we turn to follow Tangent A3.