This po-mo stuff is nice, but it's irrelevant to the way I feel right now
The close to eleven hours I slept last night may have exceeded the sum total of the week that preceded it which did not even have the decency to be hallucinatory as opposed to just blurringly strung out. I feel as though the sole things of value I accomplished were reading a new novel and writing about a movie. One night we walked for ice cream to CB Scoops.
Razing the ecosystem of our back yard seems to have produced a monoculture of black swallow-wort.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I planted a medley of butterfly-supporting wildflowers while the yard was still a burnt-brown wasteland and I just hope any of them can survive the invasive cuckoo. I am not sure there is anyone we could even call to extirpate it. I still miss the rose and the mulberry trees.
Last night I showed him Portrait of Jennie (1948), which I had not seen since high school when my mother showed it to me. I had not understood then that it was so much stranger about ghosthood and time than any of its Hollywood contemporaries to the point where it would have been much more normal as a venture into the Twilight Zone or an ITV production in the '70's. It doesn't even look like its decade: its cinematographer shot it with lenses of the silent era for that extra shimmer of time-slip and died before it reached the screen. I just don't see that many films out of classical Hollywood I would call Sapphire and Steel in on. I can't remember if the 1940 Robert Nathan novella struck me as so formally as well as tonally weird. On a more mundane note, I love that the production picked up David Wayne because it was shooting in New York in 1947 and Finian's Rainbow was on Broadway. I had remembered an uncharacteristically quiet shot of his face screened through harp strings when I had forgotten the tidal crash of the Graves Light, tinted in luciferin-green as if the very film stock and not just its characters have washed back into 1925.
If Alexander Knox did introduce Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, I can blame him in a partial, positive way for the first film I ever saw in theaters, which was *batteries not included (1987).
Razing the ecosystem of our back yard seems to have produced a monoculture of black swallow-wort.
spatch and I planted a medley of butterfly-supporting wildflowers while the yard was still a burnt-brown wasteland and I just hope any of them can survive the invasive cuckoo. I am not sure there is anyone we could even call to extirpate it. I still miss the rose and the mulberry trees.Last night I showed him Portrait of Jennie (1948), which I had not seen since high school when my mother showed it to me. I had not understood then that it was so much stranger about ghosthood and time than any of its Hollywood contemporaries to the point where it would have been much more normal as a venture into the Twilight Zone or an ITV production in the '70's. It doesn't even look like its decade: its cinematographer shot it with lenses of the silent era for that extra shimmer of time-slip and died before it reached the screen. I just don't see that many films out of classical Hollywood I would call Sapphire and Steel in on. I can't remember if the 1940 Robert Nathan novella struck me as so formally as well as tonally weird. On a more mundane note, I love that the production picked up David Wayne because it was shooting in New York in 1947 and Finian's Rainbow was on Broadway. I had remembered an uncharacteristically quiet shot of his face screened through harp strings when I had forgotten the tidal crash of the Graves Light, tinted in luciferin-green as if the very film stock and not just its characters have washed back into 1925.
If Alexander Knox did introduce Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, I can blame him in a partial, positive way for the first film I ever saw in theaters, which was *batteries not included (1987).
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I'm pretty sure my grandparents owned that one, which means I could just borrow it from my mother.
The Iliad Bookstore had a whole shelf of Nathan last time I looked, but I couldn't figure out which one(s) to choose.
I think you should do potluck and report back! I will see what I can make of The Sea-Gull Cry.