Up 6:30. YouTube crap. Listened to a few more tracks on Code Girl (which I’m beginning to follow) and 1/2 of a long 5049 episode w/ flautist Robert Dick.
Gave up on falling back asleep at 8:30.
Helped Bree get her costume down, read a couple of blog posts about the analytic/continental split.
Left at 10, read 1/2 of Latouche quota on train. I’m really going to have to dig out Ballet Ballads.
53st St. Library, worked on Pop Con talk, 11-1.
Went across the street to see The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (H.C. Potter, 1939) - the most obscure Astaire/Rogers movie, b/c it’s a a straight, ultimately tragic biopic (of the 1910s ballroom dancing pioneers; he dies as a flight instructor in WWI). Nice comic relief from Walter Brennan and Enda Mae Oliver. The songs are period - reminded that I should look up a couple, esp. “On Moonlight Bay” to confirm (or not) my contentions about the rarity of AABA from before the late 1910s. I guess this isn’t why everyone goes to see movies.
Lunch, went back to library.
Read this Taylor remembrance.
Worked, a little desultorily, 4:30-7. Draft is already longer than I can read, but important points are missing. Will start to have cutting soon.
Checked out Oliver Assayas, A Post-May Adolescence.
Finished Latouche quota on train downtown.
Judson Church for a monthly show of “discarded” material called Dead Darlings. Wrote in poetry daybook and finished Rodney’s book while waiting for it to start. Poems that jump out include “schottische” and “mazurka,” which I guess tell you were I’m at, though perhaps my favorite lines are in from earlier in the book (“his first time in ankara”):
[…] we
will not speak in content’s
tenements, a sparrow
who flies and is cheerful
is a poem for all people,
a form to lift the district,
the district’s formal friend.
Elsewhere: “I find it so amazing/that work is too constricting/for poets to be read with full attention/attention in the love from other minds.” You and me both.
Show itself: host and one guest read memoir pieces about their partners’ infidelity; David Cale, who was in Marat/Sade w/ Bree, read a piece on his therapists’ death; Mark Eitzel played a failed song called “Gay Jesus” and 2 others. Said hi to Mark; glimpsed David Nagler but he left before I could find him.
Started the Assayas on the train home - ostensibly a letter to Alice Debora about the author’s way into Situationism. Reads fast; lots of background on the internecine French left, post-’68.
Home about 10:30. Watched an episode of Honey West for a change from Mason.
Lights out 12.