Last night, the local PBS affiliate, KQED, showed a Joe Mankiewicz flick I'd never seen or heard of: People Will Talk. Had Cary Grant and Finlay Currie in it and it was rather funny in a strange kind of way. 1951: a woman who's pregnant and unmarried, and -- contra Hayes Office -- she's unpunished at the end of the film, too. A hilarious send-up of HUAC style witch hunts with Hume Cronyn as a creepy medical professor. After that was How the West Was Won in letterboxed widescreen. The two Cinerama seams plainly visible throughout, though they were usually hidden by conveniently placed vertical objects like fence posts or trees. Just an artifact of a silly technological anti-TV innovation like all the stuff thrown at the camera in 3D movies from the fifties. Weird, end of the western as a genre blockbluster flick.

This morning, though, there was an article on Bob Crane. Col. Hogan and his weird amateur porn collection. Paul Schrader's made a biopic on Crane, and now the two half-brother sons of Bob Crane are duelling with one another about paternal penis size and whether Crane was a lonely guy or one heck of a swinger. They're both named Robert Scott Crane, too. The younger one, Scotty, was a shock jock in Seattle. "Cranes in Seattle? Moo." The story of the making of Auto Focus is probably going to be more interesting than the flick itself. Hogan's Heros itself was one strange trip. Robert Clary, who played Corporal LeBeau, was actually in a concentration camp during the war. Werner Klemperer (Col. Klink) and John Banner (Sgt. Schultz) were both Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria respectively.

Finished the second volume of Boyd's Nabokov and am now beginning the first. I am reading them in their order of acquisition. Also, picked up at the library a biography of Véra Nabokov. I see where my friend Dean picked up his teaching style -- I had always assumed from Socrates. Some questions from VN: "Name King Lear's three dogs" or "What was the design on Anna Karenina's bedroom wall?" His assumption was that he could never make critics of most of his students, but he could at least make them close readers. Two other nabokovian traits that Dean shares (or acquired): color synaesthesia and entomology. Oh well, they also look similar, too. I think Dean may have read too many 19th century Russian novels in his formative period. Or, I may not have read enough. Not from lack of trying. The latest was my final, incomplete assault on The Idiot during why humid fortnight in Tamilnadu. Come to think of it, Crime and Punishment is the only one I've ever completed, and I needed to be sick, sick, sick and out of sorts in Kathmandu. I also read Ada during that illness. The third book of my Nepalese dysentary trilogy was The Great Railway Bazaar. I picked those books up (and still have them) in that strange hotel on Freak St called the Blue Angel. Out of a closetfull of books. The rules were simple: leave one book for each one you take. I don't remember the books I left, but I think two of them were Portnoy's Complaint and All the President's Men, picked up in New Delhi.

Digital bowdlerization is the latest from the Mrs Grundies of the world. I guess it was inevitable since Star Wars: The Phantom Edit. Why am I not surprized that it started in Utah? From the digital silhouettes in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut to the orange rectangle in Todd Solondz's Storytelling, but I guess it all really goes back to Ted Turner trying to get copyrights for his colorized versions of movies.

Well, yesterday I finished the first, rough draft of the German translation of Sub Pontio Pilato and sent it off to Ches Themann who'll be directing it in Wels in December. To celebrate, Viki and I went to Nizza la Bella which we haven't been to in quite a while. Delicious food, hmm. Afterwards we rented Monsters, Inc.: cute in-reference to the Hidden City Cafe (which has always been a favorite of ours). I guess Emeryville references will start replacing Point Richmond ones in the new movies from here on out. Also, I'm meeting with Mary Kimoto Tomita on Wednesday. She wrote the book my new libretto is based on. Our working title of Kibei won't work: Mary's a nisei and not a kibei, because, though she came back to the states, she has always considered herself an American and not a Japanese national.

"On Pushkin's 'beefsteaks,' [Nabokov] observes: 'The European beefsteak used to be a small, thick, dark, ruddy, juicy, soft, special cut of tenderloin steak, with a generous edge of amber fat on the knife-side. It has little, if anything, in common with our American "steaks" -- the tasteless meat of restless cattle. The nearest approach to it is a filet mignon.'" [V. Nabokov. Eugene Onegin, 1964, 2:149; quoted in Brian Boyd's Vladimir Nabokov: the American Years.]

On Tuesday, I picked up some 78 RPM records from 1943: Russian, Pidgin, Chinese, and spoken Japanese, amongst other languages. Got them free from a FOAF. "Excuse me, Ma'am, but your water buffalo is standing on an anti-personal mine."

Well, I've almost finished the first draft of the German translation of Sub Pontio Pilato. Looks like the Austrian production is going to go through. Now, I'mgoing to get started on my second libretto, Kibei, based on the book by Mary Kimoto Tomita, Dear Miye. I'm thinking of using both Noh and benshi.

Well, I finally bit the bullet and got a DVD player. Now, I've been looking into the whole DirecTV and TiVo situation, but today I ran across something a lot more interesting: a Video Disk Recorder.

Well, the benshi performance was sold out last night when we got there an hour and a half early. We stood in the rush line and lucked out on some tickets. Japanese TV was there lensing all the gaijin standing in lines to see Midori Sawato narrate a silent movie. The film was about 90 minutes out of an original four hours and in pretty rough shape, but it was an interesting experience none the less.

I'd forgotten how much fun the PFA was to go to. People were polite in line, having little conversations about films and were quiet throughout the performance. So unlike going to the movies these days. Not a single beeper or cell phone went off during the two hours of lecture, film, and Q&A. I really think TV and video have destroyed how we watch a movie in public.

Got a call from Jesse (who's in film school at SFSU) last night about going to the PFA and seeing a Japanese silent film with live benshi performance (by Midori Sawato). Sounds like fun to me. I don't get out often enough on the weekends, and my film viewing has dropped off the charts. Too much TV and whatever videos can be rented at the local mom and pop's video store. All that should change as soon as the DVD player arrives. I'll either join Netflix or Cine Green, and start watching more foreign flicks.

The film is called A Diary of Chuji's Travels by Daisuke Ito and was made in 1927. I've never seen a prewar Japanese film. The benshi performer is supposed to be one of the last living ones. Benshi were "interpreters" who told the audience what was going on in the movie being shown. They allegedly slowed down the introduction of sound to the Japanese movie industry.

Been doing some reading over at the original Wiki Wiki web at C2: the home of the Portland Pattern Repository's Wiki. Fantastic place with a distributed conversation about all things design patternish.

Mainly interested in patterns having to do with distributed computing as it pertains to a small multi-user distributed object adventure game (mudoag) I'm toying with. Right now, I'm just looking into a lot of background stuff (earlier simulation protocols from the US armed forces, UDP and TCP/IP, and distributed objects in general). Also, there's that PDA, I bought that I want to write a program for.

We'll see. Probably harder than trying to keep a daily blog.

Slug a bed. Yep, been slacking on the blog thang. A contract from hell was consuming my elan vitale, but, that's done and gone. It takes discipline writing a blog, day in and day out. (I never really kept a diary or a journal, so I don't have that to fall back on.)

My opera is in the midst of being translated into German (the international language of love). Sub Pontio Pilato will have its world premiere in Wels, Austria, sometime in the middle of December. More later.

Erling just got back from Brühl, Germany, where his previous chamber opera, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, based on a Max Ernst book of the same name. My friends Ralf and Angelika translated the original French text into German for an earlier performance in Klagenfurt, Austria, last year. We were going to have lunch at Juan's Place in Berkeley nearby to Musclefish, but first we had to stop off at a place just around the corner called Garden Architecture to drop off some pictures from the Little Girl set designer in Germany. Turns out, an employee was leaving, and they were having a goodbye barbeque. We stayed and ate and looked at pictures of work they'd done. Rather cool stuff: high end.

Ah, yes, I notice that today's my father's birthday; he would've been 82.