Janet snapped this picture the other evening when we were out for our nightly passegiata. Normally, I do my best to eliminate every picture that she takes of me, but I couldn't find any reason to complain about this one.
The other day I was on my daily walk and was surprised to find La Sirenetta was closed for the day (I stop there every morning - so expect a lot of La Sirenetta stories as I get caught up). Consequently, I decided to try a place that I walk by every morning. I always refer to it as the posh place, although that's not it's official name. Seriously, is this a beautiful place to have your morning coffee and cornetto or what?
This is another one of those films that I would have never seen without the good graces of the Criterion Channel: Kyoshi Kurosawa's 2012 Penance. I'm not a huge Kurosawa fan, or maybe it would be better to say that I like his films although I don't like them as much as I think I should. It's not that I want to say I like Kyoshi Kurosawa films because I want people to think that I'm a sophisticated consumer of films, but rather that in some ways I like the idea of Kyoshi Kurosawa more than the reality of his films. They are always creepy and unique, but they're also awfully slow moving (which is almost never a problem for me, obviously). In this case it is especially true because Penance is a series of five interrelated films, each a little over an hour long, which tells the story of a group of girls who witness the disappearance of another young girl, although none of them can remember the face of the man who took her. The murdered girl's mother blames them and curses them all to do penance for their crime in not remembering. I'm in the middle of the five films, so I suppose I should have waited until the end, but I'm so far behind in my posts that I took the opportunity to mention Penance, although it's more of a placeholder at this point. At this point I'd say it's worth checking out, although I don't know if I would give it a glowing recommendation yet. More later.
Happily, the weather has broken here a bit. In fact, it has even rained three times this week, which is apparently the first rain that Terrasini had received since a sprinkling on 9 May. We're at the stage now where the high is in the low 80s, although the temperature difference between high and low is astonishingly small (often as little as seven degrees). When we arrived in middle August we suffered through a series of 98 degree days, with a heat index routinely around 110. That alone doesn't begin to explain how routinely miserable it was, mainly because the sun, in a cloudless sky, was simply unrelenting. Just brutal.
This odd picture reminds me, in an appropriately strange way, of the United Arab Emirates. I sometimes will try to explain to my friends that in the truly posh Emirati malls there were vending machines where you could buy small gold ingots; you know, for those days when you're shopping and you really feel you should bring home some gold. I'm not certain that my friends believe me, although I've shown them pictures (and, for that matter, it's celebrated somewhere on the pages of this blog, infirm with years and creaking under the weight of over three-thousand posts). In this case the vending machine wasn't dispersing gold ingots, but instead bread. I haven't tried it yet, but I'll let you know if it's good.
Here's one of those movies that I had always heard about, but never actually taken the opportunity to watch: Lou Adler's 1982 Ladies and Gentlemen, the Famous Stains. I mainly associate Adler with the music industry, so I guess it's not that strange that he would have directed this effort. It didn't receive much initial love, although critics have been kinder in their criticism over the decades. Mainly, today, it's odd to see how Diane Lane and Laura Dern haven't aged, and how Ray Winstone has aged (although he's, typically very good in this movie). It's the story of Lane's band as she, chameleon-like, searches for the right persona to make it big. I don't think I would recommend it heartily, but there are some nice peculiar moments, and you could do worse things with your time.
Here's a picture of Janet not stealing an orange on the walk home the other day. We're still trying to adjust to a very different climate, one that features palm trees and oranges and prickly pears (I'll tell that story soon) - as compared to evergreen and tons of snow.
