January 31st;
Today is - or would have been - mother's birthday.
John K & his mother drive over for a rather jolly lunch. Mrs K tells me of life
in Cyprus, where she spends about 2/3 of each year these days. Afterwards, she
buys some bread so we can feed ducks on the canal. I do more rasping of the
frustratingly swollen front door, and more furniture into the skip. In the
evening, my internet connection goes down for four hours, and after rummaging
in the few boxes of my mother's books left in the downstairs room, I find
'The
Franchise Affair' by Josephine Tey, a
soothingly dated detective story set in a mythical sleepy English town in the late
1940s where a teenage girl accuses a woman in her 40s and her mother in her 70s
of keeping her prisoner in an attic and beating her for several weeks.
The central character is a country solicitor in his forties
already settled in his ways who is clearly destined to fall in love with the
younger but still middle-aged of the two spinsterish "witches" in their strange,
isolated house. He is not entirely convincing, although the pair of weird women with
their acidic humour and their refusal to be weak or feel sorry for themselves
are striking. In fact, as fits a book written by a woman, all the
best-drawn characters in the book are women. Much of the story is like Colin
Watson's Flaxborough with drier, gaunter humour lit by occasional flashes of wit
or memorable imagery. The book's mood is placid, but verges on something
haunting, even eerie. The poetic younger colleague of the male lawyer describes
marrying the 40-something Miss Sharpe as being like trying to marry wind or
clouds. Though the plotting is plain & simple, perhaps intentionally so, there
are moments of character surprise. Half a page of speech by one woman
married to a charming philanderer brings to life a vivid cameo character who
offhandedly describes her wayward husband as "fun and a good provider". Some of
the violence in the book is startling, and shows that whipping up a
lynch mob was just as easy before television or internet chat networks, if not
easier than now. The male characters tend to be earnest stalwarts or devious
charmers, but as a cartoon of the English market-town murder mystery with its
odd nostalgia always for some gentler yet darker time further back, this has
some powerful moments and clever observation.
January 30th;
Ed pops over, we chat of this & that, read some
Geoffrey
Hill together.
January 29th;
Village electrical appliance shop is open this morning.
Yesterday I bought a heavy-duty vacuum cleaner. Today a small radio to replace
the one that got fused by the water burst. At the supermarket, the woman behind
me asks the sales girl how her dog is doing. "Very well, thanks. He's a star!" says
the sales girl happily. "Mine's a little git." says the shopper firmly.
"He eats all my vegetables!" she shouts, and they both explode with
laughter. Merry England continues. Back in The House, continue picking &
hoovering the kitchen ceiling off the kitchen floor.
Skip
waits outside. I start to dump furniture into it. By night the two radiators at
the top of the house start to gurgle oddly every few minutes. It feels as if the
house has a digestive system, and its tummy is rumbling as I drift off to sleep.
January 28th;
The gas-pipe man from the village arrives, snorting when I ask if
he will make sure to instal only
Baxi
fuses. "Fuses are fuses" he mutters, asking me if it was a woman on the
phone who came out with that instruction.
He meticulously begins to trace problems through the boiler, component
by component, until he has established that the external pump is broken. After
replacing this, he warns me the boiler is still broken. Then amazingly, it
restarts. The gas-pipe man has two radiators working, but warns me that the other
four will be another visit to get working again, since the valves seem broken.
Not longer after he leaves I rejoice in my first hot bath in over a week.
January 27th;
Gloomy day. Realise that I have no hot water, still, and no tradesmen are booked
today. The not particularly enthusiastic
boiler
people cannot come again until
Monday, though they grudgingly agree that their 350 pound charge entitles me to
a free follow-up visit. Since the gas-pipe man is coming tomorrow, Friday,
I nervously
ask their permission to have him check the boiler's fuses without voiding my
guarantee. They say yes if he only instals proprietory Baxi
fuses.
January 26th;
Plumber turns up first and gets straight down to work. When the boiler technician
comes next, the plumber calls him "feller" and the boiler man seems to not like this.
Plumber goes off to buy parts and the boiler man says he cannot test the boiler
since the water is still turned off, so he's finished. He leaves. Electrician
arrives, and plumber returns with his parts. He discovers a third burst pipe,
changes a washer, and he stands by watchfully as I turn on the water to feed back
into the central-heating system as the now absent boiler technician instructed.
The pressure gauge doesn't go up, and we hear shouts from the electrician
downstairs. Water is pouring out of the radiator in the sitting room, which has
burst a valve. Of course, the boiler technician repaired the boiler and was
careful to say his firm was not responsible for the heating pipes. Yet legal
controls stop the plumber from repairing the radiators, though he kindly caps off
a fourth burst pipe he finds in the heating system. He and the boiler technician
talk by phone and the
boiler technician refuses to come back to help with pipes
awkwardly positioned behind the boiler. The electrician has
solved an old wiring problem and he leaves. The plumber caps off my radiators so I
can heat the water and as they all go I get ready for a hot bath at last. I run
the tap and see that the boiler is not working as it was before, and that water
is cold. Return to spongeing water out of my soaking wet
sitting room carpet.
January 25th;
Say farewell to Ralph and his remarkable house after a wonderful breakfast of
lots of toast and marmalade, and set off for train. On bus meet a young mother
with a three-year-old who is a school teacher of Latin, Spanish, and French.
Get across town and arrive at King's Cross where an announcement is playing on loop:
"Will Inspector Sands please report to the London end of platform 10." This
message goes on for about half an hour, and I get on the train twenty minutes
early just to stop hearing it. Ride train up north. Several
hours later, reach Village house to find front door so swollen with damp I almost
have to break it down. Once in, I cannot close it, so I begin rasping down the wood
along the edge of the door. The kitchen ceiling paper hangs down in big sheets,
as if the ceiling is an open wound in one of those Catholic paintings of a saint
being tortured to death. After two hours of shaving wood and unscrewing both latch
and lock cover plate, I can just about close and
reopen the front door semi-normally without breaking it, and Ed arrives to help me
buy a replacement door for the back of the house. We drive out to Halifax in the
dark after 6pm, find a B & Q, and look at the doors. None come with locks or with
a service that inserts locks if you pay, so I must get a carpenter. Searching for
coloured chalk to help me shave down the swollen damp front door to fit we find an
empty late-night warehouse store where a very bouncy teenage girl is extremely
excited at the thought I want to buy coloured chalk at 8 o' clock at night. I get,
for less than a pound, ten very fat chalks in five colours in a Jumbo Box. Ed & I
have a curry buffet in Bradford to celebrate buying Jumbo Chalks. We dine in a
large empty restaurant with a stage and an indoor stream with fish swimming in
it past our table. I burble a bit about my renewed interest in
Spenser's
'Faerie Queen' and Ed tells me Neil Finer
is a doctor now and has a baby daughter of about two. It turns out that Ed was in
the Penn Club on Sunday night just like me, but on a different floor.
January 24th;
I move my bags to Ralph's home, even more crowded with engine
parts than before. A car wheel blocks the front hall. We drink some beers and chat,
then I set off Saffron Walden to meet Roger the Wizard. Getting there eventually,
Roger says I now seem like a high-definition 1200-line-per-screen television screen,
not a 625-line or 360-line screen. Get train back to London, and on the Tube
am near a group of dressed-up office girls out for the night. The pretty brunette
opposite in the lace-up boots is mistress of ceremonies leading the discussion, and
she emphatically states no more Chinese food for her. "They eat dog, inay?
Int you hear bout that? Someone found a microchip in their chow mein down Brick Lane.
Tastes like labrador sometimes anyway." I point out she shouldn't really admit to
knowing what labrador tastes like and they grudgingly chuckle. Someone else says
something, and the brunette says in a thoughtful way, "Well, we're in a recession."
and they all laugh. Find Piera in an
event at the Royal Geographical Society where a blonde with curly hair is showing
us highlights from the forthcoming
BBC
TV series about spices she is presenting.
In the empty bar afterwards Piera & I find Ralph, we look at some Mapplethorpe-ish
photographs of spice plants and a blonde comes over proprietorially and greets us.
I write in her visitors' book that we enjoyed her lecture, slightly embarrassing
when I realise she is not the lecturer but a taller blonde photographer girl with
straight hair. Ralph, Piera & I eat in the Polish Club over the road, which is
empty, and has a trembling chandelier because there is a dance class upstairs as
we dine. I go back to Ralph's and drift off into a rich deep night
of sleep on the sofa to the sound of scratching & chewing by the
mouse that lives somewhere behind all the boxes in his downstairs room.
January 23rd;
Travel out to Croydon to meet Psychic 1. In her cosy sitting room she tells me
that I must listen to my intuition more, that I am essentially a blue type, and
defines white magic as strengthening the will of others and black magic as
weakening the will of others. I compare it to Kant's idea of never treating others
as means, but as ends in themselves. On her shelf I see a book with the wonderful
title 'Practical Time Travel' by someone called Colin Bennett, who might or might
not be the Colin Bennett who wrote the equally superbly named
'The Infantryman's Fear of Open
Country'. By night I return to the Penn Club.
January 22nd;
Fly to London Luton. Uneventful journey. Last night watched a film borrowed from the
French Institute: 'Ascenseur
pour l'echafaud' {'Elevator to the Gallows'}, directed by Louis Malle
with a soundtrack by Miles Davis. A curious but quite compelling 1958 drama of
a man trapped in a lift overnight in an office building and the two teenagers who
steal his car in the meantime, this works at moments but mostly feels like a set
of independent stories not quite linked together. Nicely observed black-and-white
photography with some lovely performances, particularly the man in the lift and
the teenage boy's utterly adorable shopgirl lover.
January 21st;
I meet Mystery Friend 2, who has flown in from London, and we do some bureaucracy
together. It doesn't go well. He says crossly that the
Wekerle Housing
Estate's street plan of concentric squares sounds like a "dazzle pattern of
town planning, populated by people who drone and bump into each other" and that
Hungarian is a "garden-gnome language".
With his help, I get two boxes of books from the printer back to my
flat, leaving five boxes there bound for America. One day.
January 20th;
Big day at Ilan's. I film him cutting cardboard for
his website, and he talks me
through exporting books to the USA. We grapple with the requirement to obtain a
"customs bond" in order to send stock to Amazon. In the middle of the day his
masseuse turns up and I go out to buy sausages while they get on with it.
January 19th;
Ilan
helps me understand my options for the fiendishly bureaucratic freighting to
America task, and we join his Chinese herbalist for dinner at a restaurant near
the railway station afterwards. Wei & her Chinese friends explain it is soon new
year, when the Year of the Rabbit begins.
January 18th;
I buy a set of boxes as open sheets of cardboard {the right size this time} from
the back door of the post office. Of course, each of their range of differently
sized boxes are printed with the logo of the Hungarian Post Office logistics,
its website, and its phone
number. What it doesn't occur to the logistics experts to do is print the sizes
on the range of boxes, which are quite similar-looking when opened out as sheets.
They could use inches, centimetres,
bee
spaces, any agreed measure of size. Even just calling the boxes "small",
"smaller-medium", "medium" etc, or even just A, B, C, D, but no. The boxes are
completely unlabelled as regards their size. Never mind. This time I get the right
size, and struggle back into the front of the post office holding seven large sheets
of cardboard taped together, actually cutting my chin on the edge of card stumbling
on the steps. As I curse Hungary and everyone in it, people around me immediately begin
to be really friendly and sweet. The counter staff are jollier than I have ever seen
them, and as I waddle to the tram stop a woman appears beside me and insists on
helping me carry the cardboard sheets. It dawns on me that she is the lady who comes
to my flat every few months to read the water meter. I get to the printers, where
Eva is wearing a Macskafogo
t-shirt and insists on helping me pack the parcels of books into the seven boxes,
once I fold them into shape.
January 17th;
Interesting day. At the pastry shop I walk in to find the evangelical blonde in a
lively but friendly debate with a soft, pleasant-looking lad. The blonde is in a
severe navy-blue pinafore dress with a smooth white pullover underneath and this
shows off her shoulder-length hair she has brushed straight, making her look crisp
and radiant. As I walk into the tiny shop, she is saying loudly with happy pride
"No! It's not going to be like that with me. First comes God.
Second will come my husband. After that then will come my children. This is
how many marriages go wrong - the children arrive and the proper order of priorities
gets upturned." She seems to have it all worked out.
She turns to me beaming, I apologise for interrupting the theological debate, and
they both laugh. As she wraps a couple of scones and gets an energy drink out of the
fridge for me {this is the girl who reproached me for drinking the 'Hell' brand of
ceffeine drink, and asked me if I knew what the strange foreign English word "hell"
meant in case I was making an innocent mistake in buying it}, the soft lad exchanges
a meaningful glance with me. It's a look many Hungarian and other Continental men
give other men at moments like this. It roughly translates as "Isn't she lovely,
eh? I can't blame you for fancying her too, but - no offence mate - I'm doing my
best to chat her up here." It's a sort of may-the-best-man-win expression with an
extra nuance of apologetic wistfulness. I go to the French Institute to return two
films on DVD. I find that the mediatheque {their fancy word for a library that
lends music and films too} is closed on Mondays, so I use the loo, and wander round
an exhibition upstairs, called 'Skies',
a
set of photographs by someone called
Akos Czigany. The room lined with his black-and-white photographic prints is empty
of people, and his snaps are empty of people too. All the pictures have one
clever-clever idea, and he goes through lots of permutations. Each photograph is
taken by a camera looking straight up at the sky from inside the courtyard of a
building {many of them in Budapest by the look of them}. So each picture looks odd
initially until you see that it, and all the others, are vertical shots of white
sky, all sun or cloud detail deliberately contrasted out. The pictures are therefore
as empty as most contemporary art, since each one is a centred blank white rectangle
framed by the grey inner walls of the building whose courtyard it is. A few seconds
after the first surprise you see an exhibition-generating gimmick, done 30-odd times.
Dutifully I look at a couple more of them, and after some moments the gimmick fades
away and some of the surprise comes back. I start again to see the boxy grey
courtyard sides as short horizontal oblong tunnels leading out into whiteness,
nothingness. Though details like railings and plants from the walkways round the
sides demand to be seen as human and remind you the camera is pointing straight up,
I find myself returning to seeing the sky as horizontally there, straight ahead,
as if the photographer is about to launch sideways out of the bowels of some baroque
spaceship itself hovering or flying through white cloud. A mild vertigo returns.
Back downstairs out of the building in, after just 15 minutes, thick fog has
descended on the Danube. Thicker than I ever recall seeing it. The French Institute
is on the river bank, but now it might as well be on the shore of a lake or a sea.
Soft, blank whiteness blurs everything past the railings of the embankment. Staring
hard, I see the very faint, blurred ghost of a low, two-storey building across the
river, but then I remember there are no low buildings at that point, and I notice
that the ghostly building is moving. It's a cargo ship chugging upriver. Amazed, I
move two tramstops down the Gellert Bridge, and see a stray sunbeam picking out the
upper flanks of the university building across the river. I go back upriver on
another tram and at Margit Bridge the fog again has made Pest totally vanish.
Crossing Margit Bridge, the fog is so thick that even the island in the river has
gone, and only as the tram passes do the grey silhouettes of three or four trees
show on one side where the island is. At one point both the island and Pest are
shrouded in fog and the tram is just moving steadily through empty whiteness. In the
evening I finish 'Les
Hommes et leurs genes' {Humans and their genes} by sprightly
grand man of French genetics, Albert Jacquard. Perhaps I read something else by
him a few years ago. This agreeably slim book is a quick tour of genetics for the
general reader, and he takes care to explain how genes persist in populations, why
eugenic plans to eradicate certain genes are inhuman and impractical, what precise
sense can be given to terms like 'race', and why the simplified idea that evolution
spreads genes that favour the individual creature's chances of surviving or
procreating often isn't quite right.
January 16th;
Sunday. Some time between 7am and 10am the dog must have decided to sleep at last,
because I wake up on the sofa with my mobile phone buzzing repeatedly at me. Maud
has arrived in the
pawprint van and is waiting for me downstairs in the van to pick up Samuel.
Though he seems amiable enough in the morning as I take him down in the lift {he
refuses to ever use stairs but also is angry and snarls if I try to carry him}
with the same bags of food,
bedding, bowls and medicines Maud gave me about eighteen hours ago, I have never
been so glad to see a dog leave. However cruelly he was treated in the past, I
have limited reserves of energy of my own. The other five dogs I looked after were
fine. Not this one - or perhaps he's fine, but only with women.
January 15th;
Saturday. The Norwegian
girls ask me urgently to look after one of their dogs, a half-Puli called Samuel
who had apparently been horribly abused by his owner, a man. They warn
me he smells bad and needs to be taken for a wash & clip which - generous to a fault
- they offer to pay for. Maud, now blonde, turns up in the pawprint van after dark
and hands over the grumbling dog. I promise to wash him myself, since all the
pet-grooming places are closed. I take him up into my flat. He wears a leather harness
Maud fits to him in front of me {finding that just while in the van he has chewed
through his leash} and a new leash.
The poor little thing absolutely reeks like some homeless people.
He hasn't had a bath in years. Maud also I said I shouldn't try to wash him for an
hour {saying something a bit puzzling at first about Samuel disliking men's voices},
so I wait while Samuel snuffles round my flat. He is filled with a curious kind of
stubborn energy. He is repeatedly intrigued by his reflection in the glass of Robin's
abstract painting. He is puzzled by my glass doors onto the balcony and several
times over the course of the evening bangs his nose into the glass, seemingly not
learning that something solid is there the way other dogs do. After about an hour
of waiting and a two hours of coaxing, I manage to get him into the bath and
shower him with soap. He growls at me throughout, but there is no biting. I rub
him dry with a towel and he seems to take this well enough. The stench lightens.
Trouble starts when I try to get his harness back on half an hour later to take
him for a walk. He grabs part of the leather, starts chewing, and snarls and attacks
me when I try to stop him. Following Maud and Anouska's advice I back off,
and use only a high voice with him. Over the next hour or so I watch him
eat the entirety of his six-strap harness, leaving
only three shiny metal loops on my floor, all the while obstinately snarling at
me if I approach. I start to get the feeling this dog is going to have to be watched
and managed full time. He starts absent-mindedly roaming around the flat attacking
various bits of furniture. Somehow I get his single collar and the leash onto him
without being bitten, and he briefly calms again. We go out for a walk. On the way
out of the building he bangs his nose trying to walk through another sheet of
glass. On the street he pulls back and forward the whole time in a way I've never
seen in another dog. We see other sheets of glass in the lobbies of other
buildings. He stares at each one thoughtfully for a second, then
tries to walk through each one, and bangs his nose each time. We get back to my
building and he bangs his nose on the same sheet of glass in the lobby during his
journey back in. In my flat, he shows no sign of wanting to sleep. About 3am, I
lock him in my bathroom with his bedding and a bowl of water and he begins to
scratch the door frantically and howl enough to wake the neighbours. I let him out
and collapse on the sofa. He then roams around the flat, doing something loud
roughly every five minutes. For the next two hours he wakes me every five
minutes, just as I am falling asleep each time. I lock him in the bathroom again,
he makes grumbling noises but does not howl this time. It is now 5.30am. I send an
e-mail and a phone text to the Norwegian girls asking them to take him away again
as soon as possible. It has dawned on me that - like some children badly beaten by
their parents - Samuel actually wants me to hit him. It's probably the only
form of affection he knows, and he has been winding me up all night so as to get
some physical closeness of the only type he understands - at least from a man.
January 14th;
Sleep 15 hours. Extraordinary rich, intense dreams. At my last waking, I have just
begun learning the piano and some woodwind instrument {one lesson each} and
am hanging to the top edge of a high brick wall, my head in shrubbery and tree
blossom, having a conversation with a small old lady down below in a walled garden
of, I think, a church. Ilan cooks a delicious breakfast at his flat, where
he plays me several violinists performing the same piece, insisting that
Nathan Milstein takes a quite
different approach to the melody to the other performers. Then we go to the OBI
hardware warehouse. While I spend five minutes buying the cheapest hand saw,
Ilan
tests out and shows me lots of power tools for 3/4 of an hour.
January 13th;
Finish Ilan's copy of
'DMSO',
a book about dimethyl suphoxide and its alleged medicinal benefits by Morton
Walker. Apparently it is a small molecule that quickly penetrates
living tissues very quickly, leaving behind a vague smell of seafood, sometimes
carrying other medicines into the body effectively. Seemingly very unrisky, the
story is that FDA recognition of the drug in the United States has been slowed by
the difficulty in doing double-blind tests {because the patients smell so
distinctive, a smell that has proved hard to fake in the placebo} and in
motivating pharmaceutical research into a substance that sells cheaply and is hard
to patent. Slightly heavy-going as a read, but an intriguing cautionary tale.
January 12th;
Peculiar unsolved bank heist
story about a very elaborate robbery almost eight years ago by a man
with a time bomb fixed round his neck.
January 11th;
My postcards
arrive at last.
January 10th;
Bold
article suggests starting the internet all over again.
January 9th;
Wash & scrub down balcony. Bump into the exotic Michal at
restaurant.
January 8th;
I wake out of a dream in which I am reading aloud from a book to several
people in a sitting room, and
saying in surprise "Who'd have thought that Manchester has not one, but two Sorcerors'
Cemeteries?" Leisurely afternoon with
Ilan,
Silvia, and an alarmingly large pizza.
January 7th;
Buy some seven-foot sticks of wood. Preparing next book already, though
The Royal Mail
seem to be sitting on two parcels from two weeks ago,
one of which matters.
January 6th;
Back at the
gym changing room with the ridiculous L-shaped locker doors that doubtless
won someone a design award. Miracle one of the sharp, head-height metal
corners hasn't crowned me yet. Strange scene as I shower and dress to leave
after dark. A bulky but muscular man with a shaved head in his coat
sitting with a small boy, perhaps 7 or 8, wrapped only in a towel. The shaved
man looks sensitive rather than thuggish. They sit in complete silence for
about ten minutes straight gazing ahead at the locker doors facing them.
The man sits with one arm casually round the boy's shoulders, the boy
seemingly unworried by the silence of, I assume, his father. Neither
are at all bothered by what would have been any woman's concern, that the boy
would "catch his death of cold". Find myself wondering if the man is divorced
or separated and is treasuring a last few moments alone with his son in the one
room where the mother, perhaps hovering outside, cannot march in and retake custody
of the child.
January 5th;
Woman does software trick on Van
Gogh paintings to make them look like cardboard cut-outs.
January 4th;
Tuesday. Intriguingly high-minded
American website.
January 3rd;
Monday. Finish the little book Rob kindly gave me last week, one of those darling
volumes that nestle next to tills,
'In
the Cards' by Nancy Arnott is a good quick
overview, with some nice ideas for spreads based on the Major Arcana plus one
suit. Adorable illustrations drawing from about five packs.
January 2nd;
Sunday. Very strange dreams these days. Today or yesterday I wake
out of a dream about
Bournville and
Port
Sunlight with tears in my eyes. Startling.
January 1st;
Quiet day alone at home, doing papier mache. Since Robin & I were a bit baffled
by the French in the black and white 1965
'Alphaville' that
we were allowed to watch 2/3 of at Christmas, I watch it right through by myself on the
laptop, followed by 'Le
Cinquieme Element' (The Fifth Element) from the late 1990s, the other DVD I borrowed
from the French Institute. All
while pasting bits of newspaper together. I chose the two fairly at random {I really
had no idea what Alphaville was about}, but it turns out to be quite curious to watch
them back to back and compare them. Apart from both being by film directors called
Jean Luc {Godard & Besson}, they both turn out to be fantasy films about the future,
both play games with the conventions of the sci-fi genre, and both are about a gruff
American on a crucial mission meeting a pretty French girl with a shoulder-length
haircut. Alphaville ends with the girl telling the man she loves him. Le Cinquieme
Element ends with the man telling the gamine he loves her. Both statements have metaphysical
implications: the first that the rescued lass has discovered emotion and is freed from
the soulless, computer-controlled technopolis that is Alphaville, the second statement
of love fulfils an ancient prophecy and literally rescues the world from a fireball.
While Besson's red-haired alien girl clearly reprises the wild chick who kills
stylishly but still needs love from his earlier film 'Nikita', it was how much other
film-makers have copied Alphaville that was most startling. For one thing, the future
with a casual mix of modernistic and historic interiors influences 'Bladerunner' 17 years
later, and the role of the dark-haired "replicant" who saves the hero's life clearly
comes straight from Godard's Anna Karina character. The Bladerunner android even
looks like Godard's heroine. One woman interviewed in the documentary part of the
DVD chuckles as holds her two hands horizontally, edgeways, in front of her own face to
show the dramatic letterbox impact of Karina's straight dark fringe.
The trope of baffling the supercomputer with an illogical remark has been reused
since by imitators ad nauseam, as has the disturbing voice of a man with no larynx.
Both films have as their central character an American from New York, both actors
replaying a cliched role they have played in other films, a role that gets gently mocked
both times. There is also the poignant sight of, three decades apart, two earnest
declarations of love from French cinema to American culture, requited on film but
not in life.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith at yahoo.com