Without Lifting A Finger

Something from Speak :      During the beginning of that summer and all through the previous one, Tamara's name had kept cropping up (with the feigned naivete so typical of Fate, when meaning business) here and there on our estate (Entry Forbidden) and on my uncle's land (Entry Strictly Forbidden) on the opposite bank of Oredezh. I would find it written with a stick on the reddish sand of a park avenue, or penciled on a whitewashed wicket, or freshly carved (but not completed) in the wood of some ancient bench, as if Mother Nature were giving me mysterious advance notices of Tamara's existence. That hushed July afternoon, when I discovered her standing still (only her eyes were moving) in a birch grove, she seemed to have been spontaneously generated there, among watchful trees, with the silent completeness of a mythological manifestation.

Penned in red (turning to black), spent cartridges of IN-N-OUT ketchup beyond the frame of the shot, I took it as a sign... 

Not sure why he didn't see these before... 



[Photo from Flickr] Haven't seen it in years. My wife mentioned the muted colors. She also said: So what do you think Kieslowski's trying to say? Dunno. I've always been haunted more by the music and Irene's beauty.

      Polish Sudety       Gorlitz       Lubeck       Potsdam       Wroclaw (Lover's Bridge)   [All photos taken from Wikimedia Commons] 

Finished Cosmos , sparingly dipping into Dziennik (kind of saving it for my trip to Germany/Poland this summer), and am re-reading Nabokov's Speak, Memory  (third time, first time via Kindle). * From Speak : My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the émigré who "hates the Reds" because they "stole" his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.      And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:           ... Beneath the sky           Of my America to sigh                  For one locality in                        Russia.       

    



Finished Trans-Atlantyk (boombang) and am now splitting time (like an atom) between his Dziennik (Diary) and Cosmos (his last, and IMHO his best, novel). * From his Diary :      Upon meeting the young painter Eichler at the Grodzickis', I said: I don't believe in painting! (To musicians I say, I don't believe in music!) Then I found out from Zygmunt Grocholski that Eichler asked him if I make up these paradoxes for the hell of it. They can't imagine how much truth there is in them, truth that is probably truer than the truths that nourish their slavish "attachment" to art. From Cosmos : I was particularly astonished by the fact that both their mouths were now, in my imagination, in my memory, more closely linked together than then, at the table, I tried to clear my head by shaking it, but that made the connection of Lena's lips with Katasia's lips even more clear-cut, so I smirked, because truly, Katasia's twirled-up lasciviousness, he

Saw the few gulls and thought more gulls. Then I saw their unusual beaks (from a distance) and their black backs and thought: No, something else. I love birds but I'm not much with names. What are names anyway. I thought maybe some sort of tern but wasn't sure. After googling a bit (and comparing online pics with my very bad pics), I'm pretty sure (ex post facto) these were Black Skimmers. ***         ***       Wikimedia Commons [Attribution: Terry Foote at English Wikipedia]    

[Photo from Flickr: Photo by Barka Fabianova ]

The movie ( Only Lovers Left Alive ) was just so-so (though the plot and cultural illusions tittered on kitsch, it was still a better watch than most of what Hollywood spews), but Swinton is always something to see and hear, there were other notables in the cast (e.g., Tangier), and IMHO Yasmine Hamdan (I had to look her up) stole the show. *** Yasmine Hamdan is a Lebanese singer, songwriter and actress, now based in Paris . She became known with Soapkills, the duo she founded with Zeid Hamdan (no relation) while she was still living in Beirut . The first album released by Soapkills was Bater (1999). [1] Soapkills was one of the very first independent electronic bands in the Middle East , and its innovative approach exerted a lasting influence. To this day, Yasmine Hamdan is considered an icon of underground music across the Arab world . [2] [3] After moving to Paris, Yasmine collaborated with CocoRosie . She teamed up with Mirwais (who was part of French electronic new wave