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Melting outward like a movie burning on the screen
Rabbit, rabbit! After my family had banged the new year in with pots and wooden spoons and I had blown the conch, my niece asked if our neighbors were still talking to us. I could say truthfully if not causally that some of them had moved away.
It snowed all morning, a postcard mantling of soft-spiraled white over shriveled leaves and evergreen spikes while the occasional crow called out of sight. I would be fine with a little ice age if we could get one without the jet stream falling to pieces or some other climatic monkey's paw.
My movie-watching abilities have been on the fritz for some weeks, but I was so surprised by the internet existence of the 1965 RADA Romeo and Juliet that I watched it immediately. If it was the autumn term, Clive Francis was nineteen years old and his blond prettiness looked it and his voice is instantly recognizable for its dry and slightly harsh, easily sardonic timbre that he would learn to make even more of. It's better than some of his line readings; it should have made him a natural Mercutio on the John McEnery model, but his inarguable good looks evidently fixed him for Romeo. He must have worked overtime against them in order to accumulate his next decade's catalogue of trash fires: it's a little unfairly funny how much more familiarly he flashes out with humor or distress than when falling archetypally in Elizabethan Liebestod. I would love to know more about his student roles, how fast anyone identified his gifts for cynicism or sympathetic weakness that played so well against a sensitive face and diamond-cut diction to produce some spellbinding fuck-ups. (I can find the information for Gareth Thomas, who was the same production's Benvolio.) It's such an odd record to have in the first place, 16 mm, intermittently cinematic and abridged. Were there others made and this just the one that escaped containment? If not, what made this particular production of a play which must have been in constant rotation at a drama school worth memorializing? It is exactly the sort of thing I would have expected to need a time machine for and some very tolerant friends.
We are eating Chinese food with my brother for New Year's Day. I am in happy receipt of a late-arriving birthday CD of Torchwood: Sigil (2023) and a twelve-days-of-Christmas present of my very own paperback of Kate Dunn's Exit Through the Fireplace (1998).
It snowed all morning, a postcard mantling of soft-spiraled white over shriveled leaves and evergreen spikes while the occasional crow called out of sight. I would be fine with a little ice age if we could get one without the jet stream falling to pieces or some other climatic monkey's paw.
My movie-watching abilities have been on the fritz for some weeks, but I was so surprised by the internet existence of the 1965 RADA Romeo and Juliet that I watched it immediately. If it was the autumn term, Clive Francis was nineteen years old and his blond prettiness looked it and his voice is instantly recognizable for its dry and slightly harsh, easily sardonic timbre that he would learn to make even more of. It's better than some of his line readings; it should have made him a natural Mercutio on the John McEnery model, but his inarguable good looks evidently fixed him for Romeo. He must have worked overtime against them in order to accumulate his next decade's catalogue of trash fires: it's a little unfairly funny how much more familiarly he flashes out with humor or distress than when falling archetypally in Elizabethan Liebestod. I would love to know more about his student roles, how fast anyone identified his gifts for cynicism or sympathetic weakness that played so well against a sensitive face and diamond-cut diction to produce some spellbinding fuck-ups. (I can find the information for Gareth Thomas, who was the same production's Benvolio.) It's such an odd record to have in the first place, 16 mm, intermittently cinematic and abridged. Were there others made and this just the one that escaped containment? If not, what made this particular production of a play which must have been in constant rotation at a drama school worth memorializing? It is exactly the sort of thing I would have expected to need a time machine for and some very tolerant friends.
We are eating Chinese food with my brother for New Year's Day. I am in happy receipt of a late-arriving birthday CD of Torchwood: Sigil (2023) and a twelve-days-of-Christmas present of my very own paperback of Kate Dunn's Exit Through the Fireplace (1998).