Life is nothing but show business in 1994

Tonight is a blue moon: I saw it rising between ninety-year-old roofs in Belmont, copper-pink against the powdery evening sky. I had just finished helping my brother carry a structurally unsound desk down a steep, short, skinny flight of stairs, after which it was junked with not all that extreme, but justifiable prejudice on the curb. He and his wife are moving. Because the world is tiny, they are effectively moving a few blocks away from other people I am connected to: I wasn't really surprised. Tomorrow, I carry more stuff.

Yesterday was quiet. I slept late. In the late afternoon, derspatchel and I reconstructed our chipotle-pulled pork, sausage, and mushroom pizza at Sacco's Bowl Haven & Flatbread and then explored the West Somerville Branch Library, because I was still feeling bitter from Sunday's realization that the Minuteman libraries would be no no good to me on the weekends until the school year started again. They have lovely dark-paneled architecture and a great children's room: I came home with a haul of John Bellairs, most of which I re-read last night. The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn (1978) must be the only non-supernatural mystery he ever wrote. (It's not illustrated by Edward Gorey, either.) I had remembered The Eyes of the Killer Robot (1986) as one of the first instances where I was able to use mythology to predict a modern plot twist; it would serve me equally well in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. The face full of cobwebs in The Lamp from the Warlock's Tomb (1988) is still pretty freaky.

And Wednesday was rushthatspeaks' birthday, which was very sensibly subtitled "From the Sublime to the What Is This Even," because its invitees met at the Brattle Theatre for a showing of the long-lost color print of Georges Méliès' Le Voyage dans la lune (1902) along with a documentary about its discovery and restoration, repaired to the house for vegetarian char siu bao afterward, and then Rush showed us The Apple (1980). I would really like to be able to claim that it took me until now to post anything because my brain shut down in self-defense after the musical number with the vaudeville ballet in the office lobby, but the tragic persistence in my head of lines like "It's a natural, natural, natural desire / To meet an actual, actual, actual vampire" or "These are the children of the Sixties, commonly known as hippies" argues otherwise. It is not a good movie. You don't watch it expecting that it will be. I love Vladek Sheybal.

I am going to watch The Daily Show, read some more Bellairs, and go to sleep. The other thing that happens tomorrow is an all-night pre-Code marathon at the Harvard Film Archive. Rush found it on the calendar. I may be a wreck by Sunday, but yes, please.