Like the churn of the sea in your wake

The snow that was falling this morning did not stick, but I loved seeing it drift through the streetlight. I would like more. We had a quiet day and took the car out in the evening to collect a conveyor-belt quantity of sashimi and maki from Mr. Sushi in Arlington Center.

( Like the burn of a ghost cathode ray. )

I had not eaten so much sushi in literally years. There was much eel and avocado and yellowtail and salmon and tuna which I like only when I can get it raw and because the restaurant had run out of red bean mochi, we got mango mochi for dessert which I had not enjoyed recently, either. spatch observed after dinner that our liquor cabinet was celebrating its own first anniversary, having started with his last year's gift to me of Medford rum, and mixed me a nameless cocktail with some of the last of said rum and cranberry liqueur and traces of apple brandy and orange bitters, which we should name after something rustically Massachusetts. Death on the Diamond (1934) is such an early post-Code that the first thing that comes up onscreen is a certificate advertising its approval by the Production Code Administration of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, but it is otherwise indistinguishable from any of the charmingly rackety B-pictures of earlier in its year when it crowbars a murder plot into the age-old race to the pennant to save the home team, which in this case is the real-life St. Louis Cardinals with an assortment of Hollywood ringers. I believe it to mark the youngest I have seen Robert Young, here the rookie star pitcher who in one of his cutest scenes is very seriously trying to work out a quirk in his windup caught by a profile photo. I am so accustomed to Paul Kelly as a noir silver fox, I was delighted by him as the classically brash redheaded reporter who always has to get the last word. Hestia napped on me as we watched Torn Curtain (1966), speaking of deliberately unromanticized violence. I am tired of so much exhaustion. The days are real and we are real in them.

Than the crossties in the railway or the stars in the skies

On leaving the house this afternoon to drive spatch to work, I discovered that our block on both sides of the street has been flyered with no-parking signs on account of impending construction. Considering that I have pulled through this week on irregular nights of very little sleep to none at all, I am seriously considering just dynamiting the road to render it impassable and spending the next week in bed.

Meanwhile our normally uneventful upstairs neighbors spent the middle of the day audibly singing along to the entirety of Wicked (2024) and then switched to something with heavy bass, which put napping out of the question. I'm not upset at them per se, I would just have been more braced for it in the evening. (Not everyone's from Boston, John.)

I sincerely thought I had learned the uncensored lyrics of "Gee, Officer Krupke" from the original 1957 Broadway cast recording of West Side Story which I grew up listening to, but I just played the song again and the verse in question, while not as badly bowdlerized as in the 1961 film, has in fact been slightly cleaned up for Columbia Records: Dear kindly social worker / They say go earn some dough / Like be a soda jerker / Which means like be a schmo. I must have heard the original rhyme of earn a buck with be a schmuck in the high school stage production I saw in 1996. In any case it seems to have permanently fossilized the phrase soda jerker with schmuck in my mind, since every time I read it on the page I get the Jets stuck in my head. This does not happen with soda jerk, presumably because of the difference in scansion.

I am entertained that after I finally went to the trouble this spring of tracking down a secondhand first edition of Theodore Strauss' Moonrise (1946) because it was dead out of print, it was just reprinted for the first time in decades. I should obviously complain about the unavailability of more film noir source novels. Maybe I can call the nonexistent original of Eric Ambler's The October Man (1947) into being.

The slope of our street puts it out too soon, but the sunset was fuchsia and gold.