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May 17, 2004
TT: Consumables
I'm now into the sixth day of hewing to my "About Last Night"-related resolutions (no weekend blogging and no computer after eleven p.m.). Did you know that going to bed at a reasonable hour is refreshing? Or that it's fun to take a walk on a warm summer afternoon? Who knew? And weirdly enough, our traffic on Saturday and Sunday barely declined from its usual level, even though there were no new postings. Go figure....Be all this as it may, I did manage to consume a certain amount of art over the weekend:
- I saw a matinee of Sarah Jones' bridge & tunnel, about which I'll be writing in The Wall Street Journal.
- I watched a couple of DVR-recorded films harvested from Turner Classic Movies and put on ice for later viewing. Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross (ineptly remade by Steven Soderbergh as The Underneath) is a cherchez-la-femme-noir in which Burt Lancaster sticks his head into Yvonne De Carlo's mouth and gets it bitten off. Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie is a voodoo variation on Jane Eyre that packs an astonishing amount of romantic atmosphere into sixty-eight minutes' worth of low-budget B-movie footage. Both have superlative scores, Criss Cross by Miklós Rózsa and I Walked with a Zombie by Roy Webb, who in a better-regulated world would be at least as famous as Rózsa or Bernard Herrmann.
- I trolled the Web for modern American prints at auction and found a couple of potential bargains. I'm still frustrated from having lost out on that Hans Hofmann lithograph, so wish me luck this time.
- I read Sir John Gielgud: A Life in Letters, about which more in the Top Five module of the right-hand column (completely updated since last week--take a look).
- Now playing on iTunes: Roger Kellaway Cello Quartet, which I reviewed in yesterday's Washington Post (see the "Teachout Elsewhere" module of the right-hand column for a link to my piece). I can't get enough of it.
More as it happens....
Posted May 17, 2004 8:01 AM
