Mr & Mrs Ryan O’Neill

¶ Matins: It’s a little late for research, but anyone who wants to follow along with this morning’s festive ceremony can read the manual. If you think I’m going to look at it, you’re crazy. I’d flip out over my own misinterpretation of a (to me) unexpected term, and I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the wedding breakfast.

¶ Vespers: What a lovely day! From breakfast at ten — meeting Ryan’s delightful parents was nicer than anything on Balthazar’s boffo menu — to getting married at, gee, I don’t know, about one in the afternoon? And then walking down Broadway on the most radiant spring afternoon and having a nice long lunch under umbrellas overlooking New York Harbor (Statue of Liberty included). Home just before seven!

Mr & Mrs Ryan O’Neill….

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¶ Matins: Ms Cornflower is not as lucky with her new dishwasher as I have been with the new computer. Even if it didn’t work — and it does, just fine — the new computer would not flood the blue room with suds. My heart do go out.

¶ Sext: Kathleen, expects to fly on American Airlines to North Carolina this weekend, to visit her parents. I wonder if she’ll be able to get there.

¶ Vespers: After a quiet day of reading and minding the domestic front (isn’t that a nicer way of referring to “paperwork”?), I’m going to try to finish watching Ha-Buah (The Bubble), an Israeli movie that I rented the other day. Whose idea was it to print the subtitles in yellow?

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¶ Matins: Good News! 81% of Americans think that We Have a Problem, Houston. Bad News: 100% of my new computer is dead.

¶ Vespers: As I thought, it was the power supply — and I didn’t break it. (Not that I’m going to put the waste-paper basket next to the CPU a second time.) Now maybe I should try to get into Momofuku Ko.

¶ Compline: A nice photo to look at, late on a Friday night — another one of JR’s super black-and-white shots of New York, taken on his visit here last fall (je crois). Kathleen used to work across the street, at 599 Lex.
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¶ Matins: James Wolcott isn’t feeling well. First he describes the symptoms. Then he evokes them, with descriptions of the bad movies that he has been watching from his sickbed.

¶ Tierce: The luxury branding crisis continues at the Ivies: “Elite Colleges Reporting Record Lows in Admission.” Catchy title, what? What they meant to say was “Record Highs in Rejection.”

¶ Nones: Grand & Brilliant Entertainment, starring (who else?) Nathan Lane: November, at Portico.

¶ Vespers: Off to Carnegie Hall this evening for Orpheus, with Felicity Lott.

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My favorite restaurant for lunch, Café d’Alsace. To the extreme right, a sign for Elaine’s, which I’m told is a truly awful restaurant. I’ve never set foot inside. So much for Famous Writers’ School.

¶ Matins: I’m thinking of Die Fälscher for this morning. Writing the movie up may be the last bit of sustained writing that I do for a short spell. And no, I’m not taking a vacation. Rather the reverse.

¶ Nones: One of these days, businessmen are going to have to learn to regard “redundancy” as a form of insurance — a legitimate and necessary cost of doing business. This story about a shortage of favorite Passover treats, “It’s ‘Hide the Matzo’ for Real: Tam Tams Are Scarce,” may be cute, but it’s also an object lesson.  

¶ Vespers: This week’s Friday Front visits another part of the subject that I raised two weeks ago. This time, Eric Alterman asks, who’s going to pay for the news that we think we need?

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¶ Matins: In this week’s Book Review, at Portico.

¶ Tierce: Whether it’s because I watched the 1994 BBC adaptation of Middlemarch last weekend, or because I just finished one of the more acutely unromantic chapters of The Red and the Black, the tortured account of a school trustees’ meeting at Outer Life, this morning, made me laugh as only the finest English social comedy can.

¶ Sext: Luc Sante offers an understated justification for the oversized library, at Pinakothek. Even though, having just moved house, he’s glad to have unloaded twenty-five boxes of books.

¶ Nones: My friend Yvonne has just tipped me off to an interesting site that she describes as “a Scottish lady’s ‘domestic blog’,” Cornflower. Book talk seems to be the principal interest here — bravo! — but the lady (a sometime lawyer) is also a knitter, and she has just knitted a pair of socks in the Blue Willow Pattern. Is this another message from the cosmos — re-read The Egoist, now! — or what?

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¶ Matins: Kathleen’s off to Flah-dah in the morning. She’s staying at 100 Chopin Plaza.

¶ Prime: I was so busy over the weekend that I still haven’t read the paper. I had to come across a link to this at kottke.org. In the Times, the article is entitled “A Guide to the French. Handle With Care.” My own title: When Seven out of Eight of the Following Propositions Hold True Here, New York Will Finally Be More Civilized Than Anglophone.”

¶ Tierce: Didn’t you love The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini? No? Meg Wolitzer may be able to tell you why.

¶ Sext: Father Tony agonizes over apostrophes. Is the plural of “CD” CD’s or CDs? I’m resolutely for the latter, but it makes my friend uncomfortable. He has found a link to “the rule,” which is correct so far as it goes.

¶ Nones: The Hong Kong of the Hudson? You’re joking! This is Gotham City, surely! Be sure to click through Gothamist to the Big Apple list of no fewer than ninety-eight nicknames for Old Nieuw Amsterdam. What’s this? “The Frog and Toe“?

¶ Vespers: The reviews appeared side-by-side in the Arts section of yesterday’s Times; how curious it was to have been to both evenings of chamber music. To give some idea of how different they were, in their wonderful ways, I’ve written them up together.  

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Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion (detail), by Nicolas Poussin (1648)

A few weeks ago, Édouard paid a visit to the Poussin and Nature show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he took a very good look at the picture from which I have extracted a detail, above, Poussin’s Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion. Who, Édouard asked, is that man in over on the right, holding on to a tree?

Pourquoi a-t-il une telle tête de fou ou de psychosé ? On ne sait pas.

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Jolly Bowery chef

¶ Matins: What a lot I’ve got to do today! Two pages to write, and at least five other significant items on the To Do list (kept in my head — and here, too, I guess), including making a recording of Mig’s text. I wonder if I still know how to use the equipment.

¶ Tierce: Mr Spitzer is still the governor; I may be losing friends faster than he is.

¶ Sext: A word or two about Lieutenant Governor David A Paterson, soon to be New York’s first African-American (and legally blind?) chief executive.

¶ Nones: Henrik Hertzberg leads off this week’s Talk with a surprising propostion.

¶ Vespers: William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba, at MTC — with the amazing Ms Merkerson.

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¶ Matins: This morning’s Friday Front, at Portico.

¶ Sext: Come Back, Little Sheba, for all its antiquity, was as fresh as paint and as strong as smelling salts. (Report on Tuesday) Now I’m off to the Angelika for In Bruges, and my first trip downtown since before the holidays. For the movies, at least.

¶ Vespers: After the movie, which was great, and lunch at Jacques Downtown, I screwed up my courage to Do Something New. Instead of heading home, I headed east — one block, to the new New Museum. It opened late last year, but was much too hot for the likes of me.

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Intimations of le printemps

¶ Matins: Finally, our tickets for Come Back, Little Sheba. Sooner or later, all the Off-Broadway supporting actors appear on Law & Order. In a twist, one of the Law & Order stars sppears on Broadway!

¶ Tierce: The lesson of 142,000 free parking passes: understanding the difference between a perquisite and a privilege.

¶ Sext: A new reader of Portico just wrote to me to comment on The Devils of Loudun, which is very nice indeed, but I mention it here because the writer happens to have a site that shares many of my ambitions, The Pequod.

¶ Vespers: At long last, a disgrace in the Bronx will be cleared up. The Bronx Borough Courthouse, a beaux-arts jewel that sits at the end of a long vista, will become a charter school in the fall. Read Timonthy Williams’s story in the Times, but be sure to click on the photo, the better to see the building and how it has been defaced over the years. 

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¶ Matins: The Book Review review.

¶ Tierce: In Seventeen-Hundred-and-Fifty-Two, Columbus sailed the Ocean …. WTF??

¶ Nones: The menu for Saturday’s family luncheon is set: onion soup, boeuf bourguignonne, and Dacquoise — made to recipes from one or the other of Julia Child’s Mastering treatises.

¶ Compline: What to do with old Christmas cards? Ten ideas.

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¶ Matins: I’ll be at Carnegie Hall this evening, where Thomas Meglioranza, whose wonderful voice I haven’t heard in well over a year, will be singing at the Weill.

¶ Nones: Who knew there was an Uncyclopedia? Why didn’t you tell me?

¶ Vespers: You ought to want to go to the movies. Here’s why…

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The windows are open today! Even though it’s still February, spring is undeniably in the air. No doubt my cold will get even worse.  

¶ Tierce: Josh Marshall wins the Polk; TPM ineligible for the Pulitzer.

¶ Sext: Another reason for taking an interest in the Oscars this year: reading Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution.

¶ Nones: Books on Monday: Breakable You, a third and, for the time being, final, novel by Brian Morton.

¶ Vespers: What to do with Swimming in a Sea of Death, by David Rieff?

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The tears are streaming down my cheeks. Vive le pays de Marion!

A bearded Paul Newman having the time of his life, playing a mad, pretentious artist, in What a Way to Go! Shirley MacLaine assists.

Reading Mark Harris’s amazing Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, I’ve been struck by more than a few ideas — and I’m only in the seventh chapter. What strikes me most acutely is that film history is as complex and arresting as military history, with the relative advantage of (a) few to no casualties and (b) plenty of beautiful women. The hugely collaborative filmmaking process is so bewilderingly vulnerable to contingency that it is astonishing that any movie is actually completed.

Pictures at a Revolution tells the story behind the making of the five Best Picture nominees of 1968. The narrative begins in 1963 — with, among other details, Warren Beatty thinking about producing and starring in an adaptation of Charles Webb’s new novel, The Graduate. Yes, you read that correctly.

At the same time, producer Arthur P Jacobs was struggling to secure the rights to the Dr Doolittle books. When I read that his most recent production at that time, What a Way to Go!, featured Margaret Dumont — still at work in 1963! — I picked up the phone and had the video sent round at once. I expect that I’ll be seeing a number of pictures in this spontaneous manner as my reading continues.

¶ What a Way to Go!

To take my mind off an Internet muddle yesterday — it was the day for them, as both Édouard and George Snyder reported — I went to the movies on Thursday night instead of Friday morning. This not only cleared up Friday morning for dealing with the muddle, but it got me out of the house on Thursday night, when all I’d have done at home was stew.

It was Valentine’s Day, which is probably why Universal opened Definitely, Maybe, but the theatre was packed not with couples but with twosomes, threesomes, and foursomes of women. The laughter was unusually free of a bass line. There was plenty of it, though.

My early feeling is that Ryan Reynolds, the star of Definitely, Maybe, is going to follow in the footsteps of such film greats as Clint Eastwood, Nick Nolte, and Harrison Ford, pretty boys all when they were in their twenties. Someday Mr Reynolds’ contribution to Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle will be as forgotten about as Mr Ford’s to Apocalypse Now and The Conversation. 

¶ Definitely, Maybe.

An old stairway at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — an outcrop of the buried original.

This afternoon, not having been in a while, I walked over to the museum. It was agreeably underpopulated for some reason, although there were still plenty of small knots of people stopping in the middle of the traffic, unaware that New York pedestrians follow rules of the road. If you want to stop and get your bearings, you pull over. Oy.

As I was on my way to see my favorite picture, only to find that it’s out on loan for a while, I reflected that, much as I love to meet people at the museum, I prefer to go through the galleries by myself, because that’s the only way to rule out talking. If it were up to me, the museum would be as silent as a church in a pentitential season. I have overheard a lot of claptrap at the museum, some of it uttered by myself, but never anything worth attending to.

The great name of Andre Meyer has been retired, it seems, and the galleries of Nineteenth-Century European art that used to bear his name have been tweaked, expanded, and partially renamed. The change is a great improvement, if for no other reason than the sensible incorporation of a great deal of American and Twentieth-Century art that belongs alongside the impressionist, pre-, and post- pictures that were already there. For example, Sargent’s Madame X, formerly rather hard to find, tucked away in the American Wing, now commands the best spot in the house, and can be seen for miles, which is just as it should be, since everybody wants to see her. Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein is very much at home a room or two away. I am not entirely sure about the installation of an Art-Nouveau dining room from a house near the Place de l’Étoile; it’s very handsome, but surely it belongs among the exhibits of decorative arts on the ground floor. A quibble.

There’s a nice little show of drawings and etchings in the Johnson Gallery (that corridor that connects the top of the grand staircase with the lobby of the old Andre Meyer galleries), a pendant to the soon-to-open Poussin and Nature. My favorite is a drawing by Donato Creti — no, I hadn’t heard of him, either — “Bathers in a Woodland Landscape.” You’d miss the bathers if it weren’t for the title; they’re lost among the tree trunks in the background. The only clear figure is that of a gentlemanly rustic drying himself off on a rock. The whole scene is shot with the bright peace — and even the fragrance — of a summer afternoon in the woods.

Two other nice works: an etching by Joseph Rebell (d 1826) that, with its pale, distant bluff, roundly prefigures the Hudson River School (which isn’t saying as much as that might sound, since the HRS is mightily retrospective); and an anonymous Seventeenth-Century French drawing of some architectural ruins that strongly suggest the Met in a makeover for one of those apocalyptic movies going round these days. I’d have bought the catalogue, but of course there wasn’t one; there never is for this sort of show, drawn entirely from the Museum’s collection.

Portrait of the author in despair, wondering what he will tell his wife about having watched further episodes of Lewis.

Over the weekend, George Snyder (1904) sent me the link to a video clip from Baisers Volés, François Truffaut’s 1968 continuation of the autobiography of Antoine Doinel. It’s a film that I hadn’t seen (oy). In the clip, Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) opens a letter, concerning the difference between politeness and tact, left at his doorstep, and we hear the voice of his boss’s wife (Delphine Seyrig) read it. After hazarding a reply (cunningly shown being posted via pneumatique), Antoine gets into bed (shown). Seyrig was a gorgeous blonde with a well-deployed whisper of a voice, and George was quite right to be bowled over by it.

So I rented the movie. Stolen Kisses to you, bub. I rented it on Sunday, after dinner at an ordinarily-packed restaurant denuded by the Super Bowl. 

Which meant that I had to watch it yesterday afternoon or pay extra. This is always happening with rented foreign films. I can never interest Kathleen in watching them because, at least at home, she doesn’t want to read subtitles. (Given the amount of time that she spends poring over legal boilerplate, I don’t blame her.) The days go by — and I find myself watching a movie when I’d rather be writing. “Roger, pay the two dollars.” But I can’t. I’ve got to watch the damned movie and get it back to the Video Room.

All of which is meant to console George for not finding Baisers Volés at Netflix. Life is rough even when the rental place is two doors down, and you just walk in and ask, and okay okay.

That ought to have been enough video for one day. But Kathleen was working late, so I ordered in. I might have read while I ate. But I wanted to watch something. There were lots of things to watch, including the newly-acquired video of A Dance to the Music of Time. But no.

You see, I’d been on a Morse jag, watching one Inspector Morse episode after another.

Isn’t it a pity, I said the other night, that they only made a pilot of Lewis — a continuation of Morse, sort of, in which it was now the North Country former-sergeant Lewis who had a Morse-like gent working for him. Isn’t it a pity, I said.

Yes! affirmed Kathleen. I like Lewis!

But we were wrong about their not proceeding beyond the pilot, and the box from Amazuke arrived today. Could I wait? More anon.

Jonathan Player for The New York Times

A friend asked me, at lunch on Thursday, if I was keen to see Atonement, and I said that I wasn’t. And that was true — until I discovered that Atonement would be showing across the street at ten the next morning.

I liked it better than I thought I would, but I understood the critics’ reservations. (The critics I had in mind are A O Scott of the Times and Anthony Lane of The New Yorker.) I also bore in mind something that an executive producer said of the adaptation: “The one thing movies don’t do particularly well is consciousness, and the book is largely about consciousness.” The EP in question was author Ian McEwan.

¶ Atonement.

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