In fact, I spent much of yesterday assisting at a tree surgery: my father fired up the Sawzall and cut dead branches out of the trees in my parents' side and back yard and I dragged them off and threw them into the small ravine behind the house, which since the nor'easters has begun to resemble a tree graveyard. The rowan was the worst hit, being three-quarters heart-rotted deadwood, full of fungus and—unwelcomely discovered in the process of pruning—ants' nests; I apologized to the branches as I took them away, telling them that we were doing our best to keep the tree itself alive. It is now thin and off-kilter, but all green. We are hoping. Having a rowan die on you just feels like a poor omen. Rosabella the late-blooming dogwood lost a couple of small, snapped branches, but otherwise retains most of her low-curling, nearly thirty-year-old reach and crown. Two of the lilacs required somewhat more extensive pruning, but they are bushes and can take it; the pussy willow sacrificed a few stalks and continues to fuzz up with catkins for the season. Otherwise I carried boxes of books and boxes of slides up and down stairs and stacked them on shelves and in the storage space under a bed and finally framed the signals diagram from 1905 that I have owned for six years now. It was a very manual day.
I finished it up by watching the very Torontonian The Silent Partner (1978) with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and some friends; directed by Daryl Duke from a screenplay by Curtis Hanson and originally the Danish novel Think of a Number (Tænk på et tal, 1968) by Anders Bodelson, it's an ingenious neo-noir starring Elliott Gould as a mild-mannered bank teller at the Eaton Centre who makes the impulsive, dissatisfied decision to scoop the armed robbery he's correctly guessed will hit his branch and almost at once finds himself playing cat-and-mouse for his $48,300 pains with criminals, cops, and coworkers, like you do. In that sense it could be a period piece, as simply noir as 1948 as Gould changes shape even to himself, discovering and then cultivating his capacity for deception and double-cross while the danger of the world deepens around him; because it was shot in the late '70's, while I don't say it as a complaint, I was not expecting this plot to contain nearly as much bisexual, crossdressing, psychopathic Christopher Plummer as it did. (I was going to write that Anthony Perkins must have been busy that year, but actually he made Remember My Name with Geraldine Chaplin and Berry Berenson and I love that movie too much to use it as a punch line; it does even better things with the misdirection of the femme fatale.) He's beautiful and the film uses it to unsettle, because male beauty is so often untrustworthy in this genre, long lashes and chain-link jewelry, polished nails and a predator's smile. I guess he got typed from playing Commodus after all. The movie is actually sparing with its violence, but the one big scene is nasty enough to have been spliced in from a slasher film. Don't have a fish tank if you're in a crime movie, is all I can say; it's bad for everyone's health.
I am delighted to know that there is an exhibit at the Center for Jewish History in New York called Jews in Space.
I finished it up by watching the very Torontonian The Silent Partner (1978) with
spatch and some friends; directed by Daryl Duke from a screenplay by Curtis Hanson and originally the Danish novel Think of a Number (Tænk på et tal, 1968) by Anders Bodelson, it's an ingenious neo-noir starring Elliott Gould as a mild-mannered bank teller at the Eaton Centre who makes the impulsive, dissatisfied decision to scoop the armed robbery he's correctly guessed will hit his branch and almost at once finds himself playing cat-and-mouse for his $48,300 pains with criminals, cops, and coworkers, like you do. In that sense it could be a period piece, as simply noir as 1948 as Gould changes shape even to himself, discovering and then cultivating his capacity for deception and double-cross while the danger of the world deepens around him; because it was shot in the late '70's, while I don't say it as a complaint, I was not expecting this plot to contain nearly as much bisexual, crossdressing, psychopathic Christopher Plummer as it did. (I was going to write that Anthony Perkins must have been busy that year, but actually he made Remember My Name with Geraldine Chaplin and Berry Berenson and I love that movie too much to use it as a punch line; it does even better things with the misdirection of the femme fatale.) He's beautiful and the film uses it to unsettle, because male beauty is so often untrustworthy in this genre, long lashes and chain-link jewelry, polished nails and a predator's smile. I guess he got typed from playing Commodus after all. The movie is actually sparing with its violence, but the one big scene is nasty enough to have been spliced in from a slasher film. Don't have a fish tank if you're in a crime movie, is all I can say; it's bad for everyone's health.I am delighted to know that there is an exhibit at the Center for Jewish History in New York called Jews in Space.
