Where the streets have no name, but they have history

My life is getting away from me again. This happens when I don't sleep. Last week, despite containing some excellent movies, was a bad patch. Last night, however, I crashed shortly after three in the morning and actually stayed asleep until my headache woke me at eleven-thirty. And it is cool out and sunny and I don't have anything to do except catch up on work, e-mail, and laundry, which is amazingly mundane. Have some links.

1. Minoan catering! I would eat the hell out of beer-simmered octopus.

Also courtesy of hawkwing_lb: "How a Prince Became a Princess." The gorgeous seventh-century aristocratic tomb discovered last month in Tarquinia still belongs to an Etruscan couple, but the ashes placed with the jewelry box are male and the complete skeleton with the iron lance is female. Please catch up, media reportage. Grave goods are buried with the ones to whom they mattered most.

2. Linked from the original 1976 Brimstone and Treacle, I found a 1974 BBC interview with Denholm Elliott. Right off The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), with most of the parts he's best known for—Marcus Brody, Mr. Emerson—still in future. It's an excerpt, but it's interesting. "I was very unhappy at school and was sent to the psychoanalyst, as a matter of fact, to try to sort my head out, and she suggested that some therapeutic—this is how my career started!—a good therapy would be the stage . . . Well, then I applied to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and managed to get in, but I only lasted one term, because they wrote my mother and said, you know, 'Much as we like the little fellow, he's wasting your money and our time. Take him away!' And that was it."

3. Yay, someone who isn't me is writing about Eric Portman: Andrew Spicer, "The Mark of Cain: Eric Portman and British stardom" (2009). Perhaps I can hope for a biography.

4. It's Poetry Challenge Week at Terri Windling's. I don't think I've ever written anything inspired by Little Red Riding Hood. (Just Lupercalia, which doesn't count outside of Tanith Lee's "Bloodmantle.") Maybe this afternoon. [edit] Okay, I remembered one. I posted it. I write a lot fewer fairytales than myths.

5. I know I've linked Charles W. Cushman's photos of New York in the 1940's before, but I like them so much. So does my friendlist, apparently.

My current music is from kate_nepveu, who referred to it as a "transformative work." It reminded me of Patti Smith's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," braiding original poetry through familiar lyrics. I've liked Smith ever since rushthatspeaks sent me "Gloria" and four other tracks from Horses (1975) one night in New Haven; I should look up more of K'naan.

Et cela dix fois dans un jour

Patrice Chéreau has died. His opera stagings were legendary. I knew him because he was a marvelous Camille Desmoulins in Andrzej Wajda's Danton (1983)—better-looking than the paintings, but just as snarky, mercurial, scared, and passionate as the contemporary accounts and decades of fandom since—and for that one role I miss him. I should see some of his movies. I hope his operas are on film.