Brief Nitpick

Before Sunset blew me away emotionally enough- there's about fifteen minutes that's about as emotionally raw as I think a film can be that I haven't really composed a response as yet, but I just want to note that J. Hoberman in his positive review of the film refers to Hawke as :

The movie opens with Jesse[Ethan Hawke], no longer goateed

Not only is Ethan Hawke still goateed (it's the exact same kind of meticulously scruffy Fu Manchu that he had in the first film), but he's goateed in the still from the film accompanying the article- hard to see from the angle his face is at, but still definitely there.

No excuses for the long absence of substantial posts here. It hasn't been from lack of material- over the past three weeks I've seen or reseen Orpheus, Blood of A Poet, Spiderman 2, Before Sunrise (preparation for Before Sunset), The Seventh Seal, Juliet of the Springs, Bound, a third of Andrei Rublev and Blow Up, and have felt no urge to really say anything about them. I read David Hadju's excellent biography of Billy Strayhorn, Lush Life and Steve Hicken's Air Guitar, and I've been procrastinating on a piece for the High Hat (yes, a new issue will come out someday) on Alice Flaherty's book "The Midnight Disease. " I also had a fourth of July trip to Chicago, My writing habits are sadly based on opportunity, or rather lack of opportunity to do anything else- right now I'm sitting in a Starbucks in Time Square, killing some time before seeing Before Sunset.

The blog itself is going thrugh a bit of an identity crisis, I can never decide if it will a personal log of day to day crisises, a shocking expose of our worsening workplace karaoke crisis, art and movie reviews, or a random collection of ephemera from the neighborhood etc.- for the 0 of you interested, I have made no progress on the mystery of Bob Stern. At any rate, more soon.

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