Six Degrees of Everything

Last night, I saw one of the most enchanting (in the fullest sense of that word) and enigmatic films ever, Wojciech Has' The Saragossa Manuscript (1965). It's playing this week at BAM--I can't recommend it highly enough, even thought it's three hours long and has an utterly puzzling ending. It's at once more accessible and more mysterious than Last Year in Marienbad (which was the last movie I saw before this... all I need now is another viewing of Memento and I'll be fully Meta).

Thursday night, my friend Jennie invited me to the NYC Ukulele Festival to see her beau's band Dreamboat. They were delightful (in the fullest sense of that word, too): sort of what Combustible Edison would have sounded like in a pile-up with The Squirrel Nut Zippers and The Style Council.

Wednesday night, I was reading David Halberstam's fairly brilliant and densely textured history of the Korean War, The Coldest Winter. In 1967 Halberstam, working as a foreign correspondant, was kicked out of Poland after writing an article criticizing the first secretary of the Polish Communist Party, Wladyslaw Gomulka. He took his Polish wife of two years with him, the utterly gorgeous actress Elzbieta Czyzewska... who just happens to be one of the stars of The Saragossa Manuscript.

A sleep trance, a dream dance,
A shared romance,
Synchronicity...

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