My thanks to everyone who dropped by at my Facebook page today to wish me a happy birthday. I was as delighted as shown here, over sixty years ago.

Confucius says: “Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters?” Is it not, indeed!

¶ Matins: Mark my words: this is the beginning of something good: Web/House calls by physicians in Hawaii.

¶ Lauds: When I was growing up, art was something that fruity, suspect men couldn’t help producing — the  byproduct of diseased minds. The people around me wished that art would just stop. Even I can hardly believe how unleavened the world was in those days. How nice it would have been to have Denis Dutton’s new book come to the rescue: The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.  

¶ Prime: My friend Jean Ruaud, who happens to be the best photographer I know, spent the holidays in Houston, the city where I lived for almost a decade but haven’t visted in seventeen years. Even though most of the pictures — all of the ones that don’t feature Downtown — are completely unfamiliar, they’re also distinctly More of the Same.  

¶ Tierce: It’s official.

For those New Yorkers who wondered what the Manhattan real estate market might be like without the ever-rising bonuses of Wall Street’s elite, the answer is now emerging: an abrupt decline in transactions, tottering prices and buyers who are still looking but unwilling to sign a contract.

Josh Barbanel reports.

¶ Sext: The reported discovery of a circle of standing stones forty feet below the surface of Lake Michigan is more than a little intriguing. Quite aside from what the site tells us about prehistoric society, there’s the matter of protecting the site. How do you restrict access to an underwater location? (via kottke.org)

¶ Nones: “Activists” have become “gunmen” in Greece. Anthee Carassava reports.

¶ Vespers: At Maud Newton, Chad Risen mourns the shuttering of the Nashville Scene book page. Hang-wringing news, certainly. I can’t say, though, that I agree with this:

Blogs are great, and in some ways better than book sections, but there’s nothing like a book page in a local, general-interest publication to “cross-pollinate” interest among people who might otherwise never come across serious discussions of the printed word.

This sounds like a paper fetish to me.

¶ Compline:There are two items about the Catholic Church in today’s Times, and although they seem to tell very different stories, I’m not so sure that they do. The first is Abby Goodnough’s report on “rebellious” parishioners who have occupied their church in order to keep the Boston diocese from selling it off. From Spain, meanwhile, Rachel Donadio writes about an impending showdown between observant Catholics and government secularists.

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Last Chance Harvey is a “small” film that is going to have a very large number of very intense fans.

¶ Matins: What an upside-down world we are in, when Congressional Democrats bashfully support the Israeli attacks at Gaza but the Times dismisses them as “a dismal coda to the Bush administration’s second-term push for Middle East peace.”

¶ Lauds: Ever since Ghost Town, I’ve been a huge fan of Kristen Wiig. Knocked Up was the movie that ought to have taught me, but her role in that film — as the infamously snarky production assistant — struck me as just another Hollywood bitch. As a colonoscopist, however — well! Regular readers will know why I sat up and paid attention.

¶ Prime: Muscato strikes gold — or perhaps, since he always strikes gold, we ought to call it vermeil — with a collection of TV ads for Konsum, the konsumer emporium of the DDR. Who can resist ein tausend kleine Dinge? Don’t tune out before that starts. It could have been called New York Confidential.

¶ Tierce: How do you spell “Idiocracy”? A-r-p-a-i-o. David Carr writes about the showboating Arizona sheriff who may, one hopes, find his true calling as a reality-show fixture — and put a stop to his travesty of public service.

¶ Sext: The nice thing about the juggling LaSalle Brothers, currently wowing audiences at the Big Apple Circus, is that they give credit where credit is due.

According to Jake, the act is more about genetics than balance. “Juggling is such a difficult discipline to perfect,” he said. “You have to be so precise. There are very few good team juggling acts out there now. I think everyone has an individual internal rhythm.

“There’s a difference in internal rhythms,” he added. “With my brother, we’re exactly on the same page. When I watch other professional teams perform, it seems much more forced. There’s a fluency from our luck in being twins.”

¶ Nones: The post-mortem will be interesting, and resurrection oughtn’t to be ruled out; but Waterford Wedgwood has gone into “administration” — receivership. Among the many causes, there is a sad truth:

Waterford Wedgwood has suffered from falling demand for its high-quality crystal, china and other tableware, and has recorded a loss for the last five years.

¶ Vespers: Just when my bibliotechnical energy was failing, I encountered an encouraging entry at Anecdotal Evidence, where Patrick Kurp shares a poem by David Slavett.

“What will I re-read, or even consult?
Let us admit that, for all their heft on the shelves,
books are flighty, become souvenirs of themselves,
appealing no longer to intellect and taste
but playing to sentiment. Why else keep on hand
Look Homeward, Angel, except in the in the hope that the schoolboy
who turned its pages may show up some afternoon?”

¶ Compline: A proper dinner at our house ends not with dessert but with a reading from Harold McGee’s On Food And Cooking. One or the other of us wants to know why such-and-such a thing happens in the kitchen. Our curiosities — Kathleen’s and mine — have very different motivations. I usually want to know What Went Wrong. Kathleen, in contrast, wants to know How Things Work. These are two sides of the same coin, the flip being whether or not you actually spend any time in the kitchen making meals. Tonight, in a rare congruence, we both wanted to the skinny on how something works: the substance known, very unscientifically, as “cream of tartar.”

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Having rung in yet another New Year — on New Year’s Day, for a change, not the night before — I thought I’d better get back on track with a Friday movie. I made a date on Thursday night to see Last Chance Harvey with LXIV, at a theatre just round the corner from his house. After tea and dolce with Kathleen, I got myself onto the IRT in plenty of time. On the ride downtown, I read about half of a terrific essay on video games by the English man of letters, John Lanchester, in the London Review of Books. Mr Lanchester points out (not in the same sentence) that the popular games combine all the tedium and effort of the workaday world with fantasy violence. I endeavor to bear in mind that my remarkable inaptitude at games — I have barely enough hand-eye coordination to operate an iPod — is no excuse for taking a condescending attitude toward Grand Theft Auto IV, but it’s no use.

I climbed out of the subway fifteen minutes before the appointed time. What to do? I could cross Union Square and browse at Barnes & Noble. Or — what’s this? A big Virgin sign hung at a corner a block away. A record store! I couldn’t believe that such a thing still existed. In fifteen minutes I could check the place out.

Like most stores that I’ve been in since Christmas, Virgin was close to empty, which only made its spotlighted lampblack interior look like a horror movie that nobody wanted to see. There were the usual undistinguished beats and jags of crashingly tedious noise, presumably intended to signify a locus of Dionysiac release even at this midday hour. It didn’t take long to find the serious music, downstairs. Jazz and the classics are collected in a large space beneath the entrance. Unless there was a pop-music department hidden away somewhere, I’d have to say that the days when serious music was shoehorned into the odd corner appear to be over. If I’d had more time, I’d have tested my theory that serious music will keep the CD manufacturers in business. Once again, I might add. I picked up Renée Fleming’s new-looking album of Schubert lieder, actually over ten years old. And “The Best of Cal Tjader/Live at the Monterey Jazz Festival 1958-1980.” Why not.

The Virgin store happens to sit beneath the Regal Union Square Theatre, which is where LXIV and I were to see Last Chance Harvey. Twenty yards from door to door. But because LXIV would be waiting at his apartment for my buzz, my route A to B took me in a clockwise direction, round the other way, down Fourth Avenue, across Thirteenth Street and up Broadway. We New Yorkers love walking so much that we don’t mind strolling around the block just to get back into the same building.

I will have more to say about Last Chance Harvey presently, but I can report that LXIV and I liked it very much. There were some rather shattering moments of muted humiliation for Dustin Hoffman’s character, and at first it seemed that Emma Thompson’s character was going to find him as annoying as everyone else did. Instead, Ms Thompson turned Last Chance Harvey into the first true romantic adventure story, one that asks if two dented, middle-aged people who know even less about one another than we know about them (not much!) crazy to give love a try?

Kathleen had been asked to join us for the movie, but she would commit only to lunch at the Knickerbocker Bar & Grill. It was her first visit to this University Place landmark, which I didn’t even know about until late last summer. Kathleen put her finger on why I’m crazy about it: the Knickerbocker is “like Schrafft’s.”

After lunch, Kathleen and I caught a taxi, and, as we drove uptown, Kathleen asked about University Place. Where does it start and where does it end? I could have thought about this a minute and essayed an answer, but it would probably have been wrong, so I reached for Manhattan Block By Block, which I carry everywhere, and established that University Place runs from the northeast corner of Washington Square (continuing from Washington Square East) to the southwest corner of Union Square, where it runs into Broadway. Unfortunately, trying to read the map in the back of the cramped taxi not only made me carsick but unleashed the hangover that had, until now, hung fire. I was not to feel entirely well for the rest of the day.

In the evening, Ms NOLA and M le Neveu stopped by, on their way to see Milk, up in our part of town. Kathleen was napping, so they came back after the movie, and we all had a good chat. Our talk came round to Broadway shows. Kathleen proposed getting tickets for the four of us to see the revival of Guys and Dolls, starring, among others, Lauren Graham — as Miss Adelaide! How counterintuitive is that? And wasn’t the show revived just a few years ago? With Nathan Lane and Faith Prince?

How about 1992? No! We couldn’t believe it. Sixteen years ago? But Ms NOLA remembered: in Manhattan Murder Mystery, somebody goes to see Guys and Dolls, and a bit of Googling confirmed her recollection. It seems like only — well, not yesterday, exactly. But 2002, say. In 2002, however Mr Lane was enjoying the Broadway triumph of The Producers. Strangely, that seems to have happened longer ago. As Alan Rich wrote of Le Nozze di Figaro about a million years ago, in New York Magazine, Guys and Dolls, like the Catholic Mass, ought to be celebrated somewhere around the world at every moment.

(Speaking of Nathan Lane, we often say, of an actor whom we particularly like, “Oh, I’d go to see her in anything! I’d pay to see her read the phone book!” Our bluff is about to be called. Mr Lane, together with Bill Irwin, David Strathairn, and John Goodman, will be giving a revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot in the spring.)

I may be back on track, but, as is the case every January, there is more of me to get up to speed.

The new year has begun brilliantly at this end, with the first piece of misdirected email since I don’t know when. To a very nice guy whom I see at parties on Claremont Avenue, and who was kind enough to write a proper note after we connected at Facebook, I wrote,

Blah blah blah. Tell me something I don’t know.

XOXO (short for “toxic gas”)

rjk

Ooops! As anybody can tell, my message was meant for Fossil Darling, who had just insulted me (instead of thanking me for providing his useless and unloved existence with a warm and loving home-like atmosphere on New Year’s Day) by calling me a “vile and miserable being.” (Not even human being!) I don’t know if all the ‘splainin’ in the world is going to get me out of this one.

After Fossil and LXIV headed home last night, Kathleen and I hunkered down to watch The King and I closely — very closely. No elephant prod!

I’ll explain later. Happy New Year!

This is an odd choice for a New Year’s image, I know; but there’s a warmth in the bogus colours that gives me the feeling that I’m about to be really well fed. 

I’m not a scholar of English country houses, but, with the passage of time, even Buck House seems less peculiar than Blenheim. Blenheim is beyond the English-country-house thing. It’s a (mini) Versailles waiting to be appreciated as such. Only a Queen (Anne) would have tolerated its construction. All the other Great Houses are the country seats of Whigs, but Blenheim, as the postcard says, is a “palace.” In that, it exceeds its original.