| Caffè |
[Jan. 8th, 2012|12:17 pm] |
Today, a momentous affirmation. I can say without doubt that Lavazza espresso is superior to Medaglia d'Oro. |
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| 16mm projector |
[Apr. 24th, 2011|12:25 pm] |
Yesterday I took out my old Bell & Howell 2585 16mm film projector. After twelve years in storage, it still works fine, though it sounds like a sewing machine. Now I am back to the days when films were actually on film. I still own a pile of reels and I plan to supplement my DVD viewing with the real (reel?) thing. Films on 16mm are bulky, heavy, cumbersome, but they have some indispensable nostalgia for me. |
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| Raiders and Fassbinder |
[Apr. 4th, 2011|10:14 pm] |
A film-exhibition-history researcher contacted me today asking where I might have seen Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981. I e-mailed him back:
"I first saw Raiders of the Lost Ark on June 18, 1981 at the Lincoln Mall Cinemas in Lincoln, RI. I saw it again a month later on August 26 at the Imperial Theatre in Montreal. I noted that it was shown there in 70mm and Dolby sound. I was in Montreal for the World Film Festival and squeezed that in as well, primarily to take advantage of the high-quality presentation.
"Now this next bit is not useful to your research, but at the Festival, that evening of August 26 around midnight, I caught a special showing in its North American premiere of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film Lola. The director was on hand to introduce it. He had brought his newly-finished film in his luggage.
"The print of this German-language movie had no subtitles. The festival staff distributed headphones for simultaneous translation in French or English. It was a privileged event. Less than a year later, the following June, Fassbinder would die from heart failure brought on by heavy use of sleeping pills and cocaine." |
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| The deer in the yard. |
[Feb. 11th, 2011|07:33 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | animals | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | The Sound of Music | ] |
For more than a month a deer has been living in my large back yard and that of my sister next door. It forages among the twigs, fir branches, dried foliage, as it quietly tracks through the long-standing snow. It is a female deer or doe. (♫ Doe, a deer, a female deer. Re, a drop of golden sun! ♫) She really is so beautiful and so magical, that I stare out the window, in a trance, and just look at her. One morning this week, as I was washing the dishes at my basement sink, I looked up and she was right there outside, foraging, eating, unfazed by my suds. She can almost always be spotted. I don't know where she spends the night, perhaps amid some bushes. I have no intention of interfering with her. She needs no help. She is perfectly capable of surviving without any assistance. Heck, she doesn't have to spend tons of money at the supermarket, buy expensive heating oil, pay income taxes, need health insurance. My dear deer, my magical doe, you have the life! I do hope no gun-toting neighbor decides to pick you off for sport. That would be a cruelty I would never recover from. I want you here, rent-free, as long as you care to stay. |
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| "Pasca', o' mare" |
[Oct. 21st, 2010|12:26 pm] |
In the electrifying final minutes of Vittorio De Sica's 1948 Italian film masterpiece Sciuscià (Shoe Shine), the Neapolitan Raffaele and the other boys trapped in the Roman reformatory are watching a newsreel of the war in the Pacific. Raffaele (Aniello Mele) looks up at the screen with glowing eyes. He sees not the war scenes but the sea of his beloved Naples. "Pasca', o' mare!" he says in demi-ecstasy to a friend. "Pasquale, the sea!" Within minutes Raffaele shall have died, victim of his TB amid a crush of frenzied kids attempting escape.
"Pasca', o' mare!"
"Pasquale, the sea!" |
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| Macadamosis |
[Jun. 10th, 2010|12:23 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | nuts | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | Crunchy | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Tchaikowsky: The Nutcracker | ] |
Macadamia nuts. Love them. But perhaps in excess. They have become more than an obsession. A psychosis, really. Unrelenting. Overwhelming. I chomp. I crunch them. They are crunching me.
Macadamia,
macadamia,
che infamia,
che infamia! |
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| The plastic lady. |
[Feb. 18th, 2010|12:51 pm] |
This woman often rides the bus I take. She does some food shopping and carries her two or three loaded paper shopping bags with some effort. The paper bags are covered in plastic ones and knotted shut to avoid contamination.
She herself wears sterile Latex gloves so she won't touch anything contaminated. To pay her fare, she will insert coins or bills that have been wrapped in a piece of plastic so as not to touch them. Before she sits on the bus seat, she ritualistically spreads another sheet of plastic over it.
I looked at her feet today. I could spot the edges of the protective plastic layer she had placed beween her feet and the insides of her shoes.
She is really a very pleasant person and always says hello. But I thought to myself that this kind of extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder must make the ordinary tasks of daily living so arduous. And that thought diminished the severity of any problems of my own. |
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| Renée |
[Feb. 14th, 2010|09:42 am] |
Saturday night at Symphony Hall soprano Renée Fleming sang the Strauss Four Last Songs and the final movement of the Mahler Fourth, James Levine conducting the BSO. I went. Not surprisingly, she was spectacular. The house was packed to the rafters. Afterwards there was free wine and food, and free Renée. That is, she autographed her CDs. I had bought her Grammy-winning "Verismo" collection.
Later I took her for drinks at the Oak Room at the Copley Plaza and we chatted for hours...um...then I was awakened by the conductor on the train transporting me back to Providence.
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| Yes, Marnier is grand. |
[Feb. 3rd, 2010|06:10 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | liquor | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Richard Strauss: Four Last Songs | ] |
I'm not a big drinker. No, honest, really, I'm not. I have an occasional glass of wine with a meal, an occasional vodka martini (with smoked salmon or oysters), and an occasional snifter of Grand Marnier after a meal or apart from a meal in classy surroundings such as at the intermission lounge of Symphony Hall in Boston between the Strauss and the Mahler.
I ask for a Grand Marnier in a snifter, about $8, sit for fifteen minutes with it as its orange-essence fumes waft up and I drift into a state of orange nirvana. I once ordered, for about $25, a snifter of the liquid from a 150-year old bottle of the stuff called Cuvée Speciale Cent Cinquantenaire. Its even more potent gases could have turned me into a hot-air balloon and sent me into an airborne state.
There are times when only Grand Marnier will do to keep the madness of this world at a distance. No Petit Marnier, no So-So Marnier will work. Well, then of course there's Green Chartreuse! Those Carthusian monks were in on some great secret, and it wasn't prayer. |
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gallianoparfait's journal