Well, dear readers, now that the foolishness of April Fool’s Day is done, I am sitting here like so much fish, listening to some delightfully delightful flute concertos – currently playing is a recent one by Jonathan Dove that is very sweet and melodic, written in 2000. He’s an British composer from Britain and I’d be interested in hearing other works – he’s written several operas and other orchestral music – don’t know if anything else has been recorded, thought. Let’s look – well, several CDs of choral music, one opera that is selling for over 100 bucks so, no deal, but then two other operas that are cheap, so took a chance on those. One is on Chandos and the other is a Blu-ray of an Opera North production of Dove’s The Adventures of Pinocchio and that one gets raves. The other concertos on this album are by favorite composers, William Alwyn, Francois Poulenc, and Lennox Berkeley. But this Dove concerto is really excellent and beautifully performed in great sound. Other than that, I watched one motion picture and slept through one motion picture. The slept-through motion picture was a TV movie entitled The House on Garibaldi Street, about the hunt for and capture of Adolph Eichmann in Argentina. I’m sure it was a good TV movie but I really did sleep through all but ten minutes of it. Topol was the star, along with Martin Balsam. The movie I stayed away through (surprisingly so, given what a bore it was) was entitled The End of Violence, a two-hour Wim Wenders oddball – visually very pleasing, but muddled, confused, weird, pedantic, artsy, and, well, you get the idea. It’s about a film producer who’s sent a secret FBI file. Or that’s what it’s supposed to be about, but then it’s just a mish-mash from there, following several stories all at once and never tying them together in any kind of meaningful way, after which it just ends. Bill Pullman stars with Andie MacDowell and Gabriel Byrne, who I find to be one of the most somnambulistic actors ever. Wenders does have an interesting style, but it’s not enough. The saddest thing in the movie is Sam Fuller as Byrne’s father. Shot at Fuller’s house, Fuller sadly just babbles incoherently, mostly due to a recent stroke. It’s nice that Wenders gave him a job, but for me it was just not a wonderful thing seeing Sam Fuller like that. He looked like he was in his mid-90s but was eighty-five after he passed, not long after making this film. Anyway, I can’t say I enjoyed it because, well, it’s terrible, but I did appreciate the visuals.
Yesterday was brief because I slept until one-thirty, getting nine hours of needed sleep. I had some VERY weird dreams and a doozy of a weird dream whilst sleeping through the first movie, where I was attending a garage sale at my childhood home. Go know. Once I was up, I answered e-mails, which took about ten seconds since I didn’t have many and for the rest of the day and evening I think I had three – not even any spam, which is very unusual. I went to the mail place and picked up the second important envelope, then went up the street and got two chicken breasts from Popeye’s, came home and ate them and the biscuits they came with, and they were really good and what I’d been craving. After that, I did a few things on the computer and then it was movie and nap time.
After that, I finally got the dust jacket components, had a couple of minor text fixes for the front flap, so once those are done, that will be ready to go.
Today, I’ll be up when I’m up, and it will be a ME day from start to finish. Since I still have rye bread from Langer’s, I may go and buy some turkey and roast beef from Gelson’s and make sandwiches here. Why not? Mostly, I’ll watch, listen, and relax.
This week is all book and Sami stuff, and hopefully we’ll hear from Amazon or we’ll be forced to go to a Plan B, which I have several ideas for. The Amazon process is supposed to move faster than this but having to redo episode one and submit again and then Karen having to submit that episodes close-captions one additional time, really through us into some kind of loop – but she wrote them and they finally got back to her and said they’d look into it and try and move it along. I have a lunch on Monday, Tuesday I’m doing a Zoom podcast thing about Laurie Beechman – I’ll let you know the time and place – and then there are more meetings and meals and whatnot.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up when I’m up, have a ME day, eat, and mostly watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, still hoping that April will bring some bounties and that we’re done with the foolish part.