mlr

I was off work from Christmas Day to January 5th. I had been plagued with a skin disorder for a little over two months. A dermatologist put me on Prednisone three days before Christmas Eve, and it was a relief! to get back to normal. I spent Christmas day and most of the weekend in Fort Worth, then flew back home to quickly play a service, then packed & flew to San Francisco for a week of just walking around. I implored Israel to come with me but he was determined to use the time (re)photographing New Mexico. My guess is that I walked about 12 - 15 miles a day. I only used the rental car on two days. I used the transit system intermittently. I tried to see a movie every day. Lots of art. Good food. Nice drafts all over town in San Francisco. I even managed to have a little fun.

Museums: Hopper in Dallas, the new Piano Pavilion @ the Kimbell, the vapid Mexican show @ the Modern in Fort Worth, the charming Lobel show @ the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Anders Zorn and Matisse @ the Legion of Honor, and most spectacularly - the Hockney and Bulgari shows @ the de Young. If you have a chance to see them, you should not pass it up!

Movies:
Dallas: American Hustle, Inside Llewyn Davis. Fort Worth: The Wolf of Wall Street. San Francisco: Reaching for the Moon, Her, Breakfast at Tiffany's (@ the Castro), The Past, Raising Arizona (@ the Castro), Blue is the warmest color.

A flickr set.

I enjoyed a couple of the movies I saw on TCM this weekend more than any of the Hollywood releases I saw this summer in the cinema. I had never heard of either of them before. Elvis on Tour, from 1972, was amazing. And yes, I'm surprised I thoroughly enjoyed a movie about Elvis Presley. Loving, from 1970, which I caught in the wee hours of the morning is a dark little comedy of manners. It seems like a forerunner of The Ice Storm - one of my favorite movies.

I even watched Captains Courageous on Saturday night, and for the umpteenth time, North by Northwest. Though not one of my favorite Hitchcock movies, I particularly enjoy one of the actors: Adam Williams. I don't think he even has a line, but appears throughout as one of the stooges. He looks exactly like the men I was attracted to when I was a boy.

I watched all of these in the kitchen, except Loving. So not completely a couch potato.

startled awake by hideous dreams.

other than updating LJ, the last thing i did in the day was watch the girl with the dragon tattoo. what an age we live in.

i didn't give it much thought, but in retrospect, it was quite lurid. i wish i could reverse the experience of having seen it.

( dream... )

Earlier in the day, these lines from Schneepart struck my fancy:

	– auch du	– you too
	hättest ein Recht auf Paris,	would have a right to Paris
	würdest du deiner	could you know yourself
	bitterer inne –,	more bitterly –,

About ten 'til 5:00 this afternoon I looked up the local offerings on Fandango. I noticed the new Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris, was starting in twenty minutes, so I got myself together and headed out.

I knew nothing about it at all - and that was a good thing. Though maybe not at the level of Hannah & her sisters, it's a fairly good Woody movie, and entirely delightful. And like many of the good Woody movies it's a whimsical fantasy. It has some of the usual ingredients: a self-doubting writer as hero/narrator, a relationship on the verge of collapse, an amazing cast (Marion Cotillard, Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson for starters), and an even more amazing set of characters.

You should go.

So uncomfortable - I guess he wasn't thinking.

I saw Biutiful tonight - for me, by far the best movie that I saw in the past year. It makes things like The King's Speech and Black Swan seem like trifles. González Iñárritu must be one of the few directors today who has the gifts of someone like Kubrick.

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.

chaplin ∴ webern