And listen for the old melody as it comes to me

[sovay]

1. Today, lesser_celery and I made reservations for lunch at The Salty Pig and ate a lot of exactly what the name implies. He had a plate of charcuterie, I had a sandwich with mortadella and soppressata and a cheese whose name I should have written down. It was delightful, even if I got badly rained on negotiating public transportation home afterward. We found it through a review in the Globe. Later tonight, we'll pick up Season Two of Millennium.

2. I know the Marvell Rep does not really exist to gratify my theatrical desires, but since their upcoming season includes The Threepenny Opera (1928), Arthur Schnitzler's The Bernhardi Affair (1912), Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance (1907), and Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening (1891), I am having a hard time arguing this point to myself. Man, why do I not live in New York?

3. In all other respects that do not involve webcomics, unfortunately, this week is not working out so well.

[edited] time_shark signal-boosts A Mayse-Bikhl! Which you already know about if you read this journal, but you should still listen to him anyway.

Comments

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

I know, right? The hell of it is that I'm probably the perfect audience for the Eugene O'Neill send-up--I'm a fan who's read a lot of his plays but not seen many. The stage directions for, say, Long Day's Journey Into Night run on for pages, devoting paragraphs to the shape of a character's nose, or to other things that you could never reproduce with real actors. (I find it easy to forgive in that one, because he never necessarily meant it to be produced. It's his memoir, it's OK for it to be novelistic.)

Stage direction from The Emperor Jones:

"Smithers is a tall, stoop-shouldered man about forty. His bald head, perched on a long neck with an enormous Adam's apple, looks like an egg. The tropics have tanned his naturally pasty face with its small, sharp features to a sickly yellow, and native rum has painted his pointed nose to a startling red. His little, washy-blue eyes are red-rimmed and dart about him like a ferret's. His expression is one of unscrupulous meanness, cowardly and dangerous."

There are eyeballs, I tell you! Eyeballs in the sky!

The book was Caitlin R. Kiernan's From Weird and Distant Shores. And then they let me take it home in exchange for leaving a different book next time. I could live with more of that sort of luck.

[sovay]

I'm a fan who's read a lot of his plays but not seen many.

I will show you The Long Voyage Home (1940). I've written about it before; I don't know if I've recommended it to you specifically. It's the film of his Glencairn cycle—four one-act plays set aboard a tramp steamer, Bound East for Cardiff (1914), In the Zone (1917), The Long Voyage Home (1917), and Moon of the Caribbees (1918)—with the action updated from the first world war to the second, an ensemble cast of character actors, and some of the most complex black-and-white cinematography going in the years before Citizen Kane which, look at that, Gregg Toland also photographed. It's one of my favorite movies. It's a better piece of theater than the original plays; it has exactly one misplaced directorial choice; it's the only film of his work that O'Neill actually liked. And it is tremendously of the sea. I think you will like it.

The book was Caitlin R. Kiernan's From Weird and Distant Shores. And then they let me take it home in exchange for leaving a different book next time.

Nice!

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

It is a deal. I don't think you've ever mentioned it before, and I like all his work so far set aboard tramp steamers.