My first museum: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y.
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Ballad on the Streets of Buenos Aires And a man waits in the street and meets a woman precise and beautiful as the clock on the wall of her room and sad and white as the wall that holds it And she doesn’t show him her teeth And she doesn’t show him her belly but she shows him her time, precise and beautiful And she lives on the ground floor next to the pipes and the water that rises begins there in her wall and he has decided on tenderness And she knows the reasons for weeping and she knows the reasons for holding back and he begins to be like her, like her And his hair will grow long and soft, like her hair and the hard words of his language dissolve in her mouth and his eyes will be filled with tears, like her eyes And the traffic lights are reflected in her face and she stands there amid the permitted and the forbidden and he has decided on tenderness And they walk in the streets that will soon appear in his dreams and the rain weeps into them silently, as into a pi...
I have been enjoying Shakespeare Uncovered on PBS. The Measure for Measure episode was excellent, with brilliant connection made to the #MeToo movement! Less so the Julius Caesar episode, if only for some sloppy scholarship. Discussing John Wilkes Booth's motives for assassinating Lincoln, they left out his avowed admiration for the Confederacy. They then stated that during the act "He quoted Brutus, in Latin, 'Death to all tyrants.'" What he said, in Latin, was 'Sic Semper Tyrannis.' "Thus always to tyrants." Picky? Damn right.
In 1983, a television biopic about Rita Hayworth was made, starring Lynda Carter. The role of Aly Khan's chauffeur was played by Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey! (Also in 1983, a TV biopic of Grace Kelly, starring Cheryl Ladd came out. Alejandro Rey was in both the Hayworth and the Kelly biopics. In the Kelly, he played Oleg Cassini!) You're welcome.
In 1954, Samuel Beckett received a letter from an inmate in Luttringhausen Prison: "You will be surprised to be receiving a letter about your play Waiting for Godot , from a prison where so many thieves , forgers , toughs , homos , crazy men and killers spend this bitch of a life waiting ... and waiting ... and waiting. Waiting for what? Godot? Perhaps." Years later, Becket became good friends with former San Quentin inmate Rick Cluchey, who became a playwright and an actor. Beckett actually supported Cluchey financially as he began his career. That's Cluchey above in Krapp's Last Tape.
Some time ago, I mentioned that when I suddenly get a fragment of a pop song stuck in my head, but am unable to identify the source, it almost always turns out to a song by Supertramp! Don't know why. That's just how my brain 'works.' I have recently come to realize, similarly, that if a shard of poetry asserts itself in my memory and I am otherwise unable to identify its' source -- not Shakespeare, not Yeats, not Swinburne, not Eliot, etc. etc. -- it is almost invariably Tennyson. A poet I don't read much. And apparently I don't need to.
