Lousy night - was supposed to see WOLF EYES at the Elbow Room, but instead I'm home laid up with a cold. You know how some kids bring home dead brids or stray animals? My kid brings home virii...
Anyway TV is awful - nothing's on. My wife made "beer butt chicken" which is too strong for my weak stomach. I'm gonna read and try to sleep. I'm reading a really good book about the first decades of German cinema by Thomas Elasaesser called "A Second Life"- it's so good I'm afraid to finish it.
You may wonder what would make a fellow read a book about a lot of archival films that you can only see in an archive. Well, when I was 13 I read Siegfried Kracauer's book "From Caligari to Hitler" back when most of those movies were considered "lost". By now (I'm 42) I've seen probably 75 per cent of them here or there. You've got to have knowledge about something to make it come to you. Too many people want the good stuff to just drop in their lap. So they're just satisfied with what comes along, and then they complain that it's no good. You really gotta work at it to be well-rounded. Before TV that's what people used to believe, in fact.
Two films in Kracauer's book I still haven't seen - "Die Strasse" (1923) and "Secrets of a Soul" (1926). But I know that both are available, where they are, and when I'm ready for them I'll have 'em to watch. The only film I have seen that's in this book is Stellan Rye's "Der Student von Prag" (1913) and that only very recently.
Correction: The new Tom Berenger show with Amy Carlson airs on Wednesdays at 10pm on USA, it's called "Peacemakers". It looks like a cross between "Law and Order" (the current netwrok show, not the classic 1935 Western) and "Gunsmoke". Amy plays the town mortician, Tom's the sherriff and there's a dandy who is a Pinkerton type detective.
Ohhhhhhhh -- Kayyy! (said in Monty Hall voice)
Uncle Dave Lewis