Archives for February 2007

It’s come to my attention (thanks, Dad) that I’ve let my OGIC mailbox fill to overflowing again, and this in a week when I threw out a question to the webosphere. I’ve cleared some space now and long to hear from you, so if you wrote and had your message bounce back, please, please send again!

From The House Next Door comes word that Charles Burnett’s wondrous 1977 shoestring-budget film Killer of Sheep will be distributed to theaters for the first time ever this spring. It’s been seven or eight years since I was lucky enough to see Burnett’s haunting masterpiece, which was selected for the National Film Registry in 1990, part of its second crop of inducted titles. The film’s distributor, Milestone Films, describes it this way:

Charles Burnett

Courtesy of Our Girl, who is managing the blog in my absence, here

Now I shall speak of evil as none has

Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;

The white-hosed moron torturing a black

Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;

Primitivist folk masks, progressive schools;

Music in supermarkets, swimming pools;

Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,

Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Two matching takes on spring, which seems in this city, this week, impossible

This post begins identically to almost every non-business email I write lately: “Long time no talk to. My fault entirely.”

Oh, I’m bad, here and there. And believe me, I do suffer for my sins. I miss the heady days when email was new and almost exclusively a mode of diarizing and dishing to friends both far and near (sometimes across the very room) and I had oodles of energy for long, sprawling, lovingly composed e-epistles. Terry and I, cementing over the internet what was still a nascent friendship, wrote to each other what seem, in retrospect, like chapters of autobiographies. Doubtless those few years are the best documented of my life, even if the documentation now exists only in files on Zip disks, and me without a working Zip drive.

Back to the less thoroughly chronicled here and now, however. I owe you some blogging, big time. And I plan on honoring my debt this evening and tomorrow. In the meantime, I couldn

Today is my fifty-first birthday, an occasion I didn