The Black Isle

Courtesy of my highfalutin festival director friend Rachel Rosen:

Live TV : Ustream

Quick Recap of great US releases of 2008 (a highly, highly mutable list):

My Winnipeg
The Last Mistress
Reprise
Let The Right One In
Synecdoche New York

Festival greats:
Gomorrah (Italy)
The Headless Woman (Argentina)
Captain Ahab (France)

Admired for restraint, did not love:
Ballast
Wendy & Lucy

Have not seen, cannot comment:
Momma’s Man
Slumdog Millionaire
High School Musical 3

Today’s excursion down Atlantic Blvd, East Los Angeles, yielded these sights: 

Oct 9, 2008

Wow, this guy freezes old movie sets! You could call his blog the diary of a sets addict. (From thingsmagazine.)

Stills:

from Pabst’s Threepenny Opera

from Grand Hotel

Today, by reading this, I learned two new text/net acronyms, IYKWIMAITYD and TFDS.

This morning I also came up with my own new descriptive term: Bacalao mouth, as in
“After jetting back from Boston to LAX and returning to the dry desert air of the San Gabriel Valley, I was Bacalao-mouthed for two straight days. I was so dehydrated my lips were shriveled and encrusted in flaky dead skin that looked to me like salt clusters. Yeech!”

Taken two days ago at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, one of my favorite old-school museums in the world:

We looked for Nabokov’s butterfly collection but it appeared to be in storage.