Stayed home today with a migraine. Luckily it cleared out by about 11:30, but since my sweetie-wife had the car that meant I still was stuck at home.
Anyway I found this video over at Andrew Sullivan’s blog and it certainly cheered me up. (A little down due to the migraine and the knowledge I need to do a line edit on all 400 pages of Love and Loyalty.)
Before Citizen Kane, and before the Mercury Theater’s radio production of War Of The Worlds, Orson Welles was the wonderkid for his stage productions. He gained fame and notoriety for fresh and inventive productions of classic theater. Most notably among these was his production of Macbeth.
Using an all black cast he staged Macbeth on a Jamaican plantation with a cast that was inexperienced on the stage. The production was a smash hit, propelling the young Welles on his way to stardom.
After the trouble Welles found with the studio system and his bruising combat with William Randolph Hurst over Welles’ first film, Citizen Kane, perhaps it was natural that Welles returned to Shakespeare looking for his cinematic redemption. Welles convinces second tier studio Republic, best known for westerns, to support his Macbeth.
The version I watched last night is a version that Republic did not release. It was part of Welles’ that ‘the Scottish Play’ be done with Scott accents. The studio rebelled when it heard the final version and order all the dialog redubbed with the actors playing the parts in their native accents. This version is not currently available in the United States on DVD. The image above is from a Korean import which I purchased a few months ago.
Today was a fairly low-key Sunday for the sweetie-wife and myself. We visited a married couple who are good friend but do to the hustle and bustle of life we had not seen recently. It was a very good visit and time flew by more rapidly than we had anticipated. Afterward we drive to Pacific Beach had lunch at The Broken Yolk, (because the Sweetie-wife had seen a bumpersticker and had misread it as The DrunkenYak what a great name for a D&D tavern.) I had chili as I still need to avoid food that require me to tear with my front teeth. (Until my permeant crowns are in place I have a limited diet with lots of cut up food plans.)
She shopped at Trader Joe’s and I played gamed on my iPhone, then it was back home to finish watching the pilot episode of the BBC’s series SHERLOCK. Man I really really like that show. I think they have nailed the Sherlock Holmes character rather well. I hope that they do not lose as the series progresses.
TTYA
Well this afternoon my friend Bear is coming over and we’re doing another round of Federation Commander. Todays battle will be a Federation vs Romulan battle. For those who care it is a Federation Battle Cruiser (185 pts) vs A Romulan Snip (75 pts) & a Romulan War Eagle (103 pts) for a total of 185 vs 178.
This will be our first game with the Feration and it’s photon torpedos and also the first game withe the Romulans and their cloaking device.
Should be fun.
Recovering nicely from my time in the dentist’s chair. (It was safe.) Planning on Board and Card gaming tonight for friends.
I had a visit to my dentist today. A better than 4 hours in the chair. Luckily my kind and very talented dentists has a video monitor in the ceiling for his patients. I brought a copy of LOTR THe TWo Tower- extended cut, and that kept my mind off the drilling and filing going in my mouth.
After the pain killers had worn off a terrible headache – tension type not migraine — decended upon me and that has been the state of my day.
I have deliberately waited several days before commenting on the events last Friday in Tucson Arizona. My reasons for waiting were manifestly simple; I wanted to have more information. The earliest reports are always the most sketchy and the least reliable. Eye witness testimony is notoriously untrustworthy. (Consider that for decades we though the RMS Titanic was one piece because eye-witness testimony said is did not break up and sink, but merely sank.) Continue reading
Today I suffered with a headache that orbited close to the event horizon of migraine status, only to sling-shot away at the last moment into dull low level pain before heading back in for another pass at the pain.
I got zero pages written as I could barely think much less create.
On the plus side my pal has been released from the hospital and is now back home recovering from his stroke. We’re all pulling for him.
Well, yesterday I got the email that After more than 18 months my novel ‘love and loyalty’ wad rejected by a publisher. I can take the rejection, but the wait was awful. Now I have to decide if I want to revise or send it right out.
This is truly one of my favorite films. The Maltese Falcon is the film that launched the genre of Film Noir and in many ways it has never been equalled.
I first saw the film in my Introduction to Cinematography class back in my old college days. That was a grand course. Every Tuesday and Thursday we’d sit though about 25 minuets of lecture, then watch a film. (Films started on Tuesday and we completed them on the Thursday session.) It was done chronologically, starting with silent films and working our ways through the decades of film production. (Mostly we saw American films, but there were a few foreign movies.) Many movies I would have never sought out I watched there and I truly learned to love all sorts of film.
The Maltese Falcon is movie that made Bogart as start, it launched the directing career of John Houston, and it forever stamped on our collective psyche what a hard-boiled detective is like.
Curiously this is the third adaptation of the novel into film. The first was made ten years earlier and did modest box office, the second was made in 1936 and strangely titled, “Satan Met a Lady.” It starred Betty Davis in the femme Fatale roole, but the film was played more for laughs than serious crime fiction and it failed with audiences and critics alike.