Week of nothing to do - Day 4

[mlr]

I met my old friend Jay this morning at the gay-bucks in the Montrose neighborhood. He was at a table with a big, beefy, muscly, friendly man - a police officer for the city of Houston. The conversation turned to vacations. He said the mayor (Annise Parker) was going to be out of town in the next couple of weeks and might approve a few days vacation. I said "So the mayor personally manages your schedule?" Slight faux pas - it turned out his only assignment was the mayor's small security force.

Through the years I've tried to catch most of the movies about poets. The ones I can recall: Total Eclipse (Rimbaud), Little Ashes (Garcia Lorca), Bright Star (Keats). I managed to miss the ones about Stevie Smith and Sylvia Plath. All of these were of course bio-pics - a genre easily prone to problems. Tonight I caught Howl - the most interesting of these films I've seen. Mainly because it was about the poem itself and not per se about Ginsberg's life. The words in the script are solely from an interview Ginsberg made about the poem, the obscenity trial that followed its publication, and the poem itself - which is recited throughout by James Franco. You should check it out.

I didn't know until today - the Menil currently has a Kurt Schwitters exhibition. To my knowledge it's been several decades since the last Schwitters exhibition. So Excited! - he's one of my favorites.