Arty flea market shots

I managed to leave the Antiques By The Bay flea market with only photos. (I do have more dental work coming up, and plane tickets to pay for!)



Spent the afternoon in the dark with a very young Toshiro Mifune and Takeshi Shimura. "Stray Dog," and "Drunken Angel" are two very early Kurosawa films which I had not previously seen. "Dog" is about a rookie cop (Mifune) whose pistol gets lifted while he's on a crowded train and the hunt to find the gun and the "stray dog" who's got his hands on it.  In "Drunken Angel," Mifune plays a yakuza with TB. Shimura is his curmudgeonly doctor who drinks too much.  Both well worth a look.

Writer's Block: Best book ever!

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I used to do this a lot when I was a kid. Mary Stewart's "The Crystal Cave" was just one of many favorites I could pick up and enjoy again and again. A few years ago, however, I realized that there were more books out there than I can ever read in a lifetime and I decided it was better to read things I hadn't read before, 'cause life is too short. I took a crack at some Jane Austen novels, explored the worlds of Salman Rushdie, had a look at some wrist-slittingly elegaic Yukio Mishima. Currently I try to mix things up. If I've just finished a novel - and novel can be a bestselling paperback or a literary classic - I try to read a nonfiction book next: usually biography, history or something. I'm about midway through Neil Stephenson & Frederick George's The Cobweb, with the Diary of Samuel Pepys on deck in the bullpen, because if Helene Hanff ranted about being sold an abridged Pepys in "84 Charing Cross Road," I figure I should check it out.

I do go back and look at art and history titles related to my SCA interests and I do frequently find things I hadn't noticed previously.