Well, dear readers, I am sitting here like so much fish, happy yesterday is done, as the irritants were irritating, and now listening to a little Milhaud music. One simply cannot go for too long without some Milhaud music, simply because he’s a delightful, weird, and wonderful French composer from France. He was incredibly prolific and I’ve loved his music ever since discovering Suite Provencal and Le Boeuf sur la Toit. And now I’m going through his symphonies, starting with his delightful and tuneful first. He wrote twelve in total and thankfully all twelve were recorded by CPO with conductor Alun Francis. I don’t love his conducting (I much prefer Milhaud’s conducting of the first – a radio broadcast in mono but it’s great). There’s also a radio broadcast with Stokowski, who races through it like a bat out of HELL, a full six minutes faster than Milhaud. Not good. I’m seriously thinking about doing a Kritzerland Milhaud disc as I have three rare pieces that I’m not sure have ever been released on CD. Anyway, if you want to check him out, try Suite Provencal as conducted by Charles Munch – I’m sure it’s on the Tube of You. Earlier, I did watch a documentary, but after posting yesterday’s notes, I ended up watching a rather long motion picture I’d never seen, entitled Sleepers, starring Robert De Niro, Kevin Bacon, Brad Pitt, Vittorio Gassman, and other good actors, both young and old. It was adapted from a book whose author said it was all true but apparently that’s in question and majorly so. It’s about a group of four young friends who do a prank that results in someone almost dying. They are sentenced to over a year in a juvenile detention jernt. De Niro plays their priest. It takes an awful long time to get to that point (the film runs two and a half hours), but that’s when the drama kicks in – the boys are abused, both violently and sexually be a cabal of prison guards, led by Kevin Bacon. Many years after their release they take revenge on the guards and the film basically becomes a convoluted court room revenge drama. I found it interesting and I liked the actors and it has a nice score by John Williams, but the problem, for me, is the writer of the screenplay and the director, both of whom are named Barry Levinson. He’s never been a favorite, and he makes several grave errors with the film, which is why it was poorly reviewed, I think. It’s too long, it never really engages emotionally by the end, and there’s simply too much narration that’s basically telling you what you’re about to see. It really hurts the entire film. It’s amazing to me how many filmmakers and writers don’t understand narration. Most will point to Billy Wilder’s brilliant use of it in Double Indemnity and Sunset Blvd. without understanding the why of why it works so beautifully in those films. In Double Indemnity, it’s not some character’s voice telling us the audience the story, it’s Walter Neff talking into a dictation machine explaining everything to another character played by Edward G. Robinson. So, it makes perfect sense. In the case of Sunset Blvd., Wilder had the brilliant idea of having the film narrated by a dead man. But in modern films, there’s just usually no good reason to have it, at least in my opinion. Anyway, I didn’t hate it.
And then earlier, I watched a documentary about the Michelle Carter case, where a judge found her guilty of causing her “boyfriend” to commit suicide. I’d seen something about this a while ago, but not this documentary, a standard issue HBO thing filled with images of trees and lapping waves and other stupid stuff. It’s a really fascinating case about two teens who are simply, as one of the defense’s mental health experts says, out of their minds, feeding on each other’s issues. Their thousands of texts are sickening to read, and her continual goading of him to finally do it, to commit suicide, which he does. The biggest damning thing is him getting out of his truck to escape the carbon monoxide and her telling him to get back in. Everyone thinks she said that in a text or phone call, but that isn’t so – she said it a year later in a text. So, who knows if it was true or not? She was allowed to be free until the appeals process was played out, and if she wasn’t jailed by 2022 she’d have to serve no time at all. However, they lost the appeal in 2020 and she served her fifteen months. There was a film about it with Elle Fanning and I think I’ll watch that.
Yesterday was kind of irritating. I woke up to a notice that a domain name I haven’t used since 2009 auto-renewed for three years – sixty bucks – and that was just infuriating and I thought the only two auto-renews were this site and Kritzerland. Anyway, I just got more and more irritated and finally picked up the phone and called them and I must say they were very helpful and immediately refunded the money, although it took six hours to show up in the PayPal account. And there was a similar not as easy thing with Amazon, trying to get a refund on a package that never arrived. The hoops you now have to go through if it’s a third-party seller are outrageous and I won’t be seeing this refund for a week, most likely. I rarely check third-party seller’s feedback but after this I certainly will. This seller has 55% feedback, which may as well be zero – hundreds of one-star reviews about products never arriving and no contact from the seller EVER. I kept pointing this out to the many people I talked to and I said how can you even allow this company to sell? They had/have no answer, of course. Anyway, that took about about ninety minutes of my day, which began late anyway, at noon-thirty after eight hours of sleep. I answered e-mails, wrote another e-mail and copied everyone I know at the publishers about the ongoing missing hardcover at Amazon for Preview Harvey – hopefully one of them will actually go kick some butt and solve the problem. Then I just had to get out of the house for a few minutes, so I ended up going to the nearby Panda Express and getting some rice, orange chicken, and string bean chicken. I came right home and ate that all up and it was pretty okay. Then I had a couple of telephonic conversations, then watched the documentary, which thankfully was only in two parts.
Today, I’ll be up when I’m up, I’ll do whatever needs doing, I’ll hopefully hear about the hardcover Amazon thing, I’ll hope more reviews show up, we have some Sami stuff to do, I’ll eat something good, and then at some point I can watch, listen, and relax.
The rest of the week is more of the same and we’re almost finally cast for the workshop (just one role to go), and I have to figure out the other two singers for the Kritzerland show. I’ve asked several names, but everyone seems busy on our date, which is a shame. I’ll keep trying and have to settle on it by tomorrow. Tickets go on sale tomorrow. And then, we’ll see what else comes up.
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, do whatever needs doing, hopefully hear about the hardcover, hope more reviews show up, do some Sami stuff, have a nice meal of some sort, and then watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: What was the most famous murder case that captured your attention and that you followed? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy to be hearing a little Milhaud music.