Wong Kar-wai: In the Mood for Love (2000)

With Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love / 花樣年華 (2000), one is bestowed a vision of a way of life in 1962-1963 Hong Kong -- sort of like a miniature Hong Kong Mad Men. Luxuriate in excellent attire, slow-moving scenes, morsels of food, smoking and social mores played out in mostly tight spaces. It's a gorgeous film.  And it's a sort of homage in the use of color and camera to a Jean-Luc Godard film of the actual 1962-1963 time frame -- such as Godard's Le Mépris (1963). The marriage of music, camera movement and scene approaches perfection.   

In the Mood for Love focuses on the strange friendship and understated romance of Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) and Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung). We hear but never see in full Mrs. Chow or Mr. Chan -- they in turn are too busy "seeing" each other offscreen. We do see, partly for comic relief, co-workers and fellow apartment dwellers ranging from Mrs. Suen (Rebecca Pan) and Mr. Koo (Chan Man-Lei), who is often drunk, to Mr. Ho (Lai Chen), who has a wife and a girlfriend competing for his time away from work.  

Today's Rune: Journey. 

Federico Fellini: Le notti di Cabiria / Nights of Cabiria (1957)

Back to one of Federico Fellini's masterworks in black and white, Le notti di Cabiria / Nights of Cabiria (1957), starring Giulietta Masina in the lead role as an Italian prostitute in crisis. Fantastic.  

In Nights of Cabiria, Fellini is able to make trenchant observations about class, poverty, celebrity, wealth, the complexities of the Catholic Church, gender, money issues and the post-World War II Italian social milieu.

Cabiria has fights, dreams, hopes and fears, heightened by the dangers of her profession. Here she finds a "lucky interlude" with a movie star.   

Nights of Cabiria is another film for the ages.  And oh, yeah: it's also highly entertaining. 

Today's Rune: Protection. 

Wong Kar-Wai: Chungking Express (Take II)

Wong Kar-Wai's 重慶森林  / Chungking Express (1994) has, I can see now, the same elements as many of his later films. There's a keen sense of space and time and opportunity, missed, found or brushing lightly. Everything depends on velocity, or state of mind. Two ships pass at night, sending signals. Or, one ship signals and the other doesn't either receive or understand the messaging until time passes. It's got the stuff of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu / In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927). It's got the subversive pizzaz of Jean-Luc Godard. It reminds of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, which also came out in 1994, though without the more grotesque elements (i.e. no "bring out the gimp" here). Turns out that Tarantino helped showcase Chungking Express in a video/DVD release. Everything really is connected when it comes down to it.

A month passes; a year passes. How will people communicate down the road? What are tomorrow's possibilities, after yesterday's are finally understood?

Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed).
    

Wong Kar-Wai: Chungking Express (Take I)

Wong Kar-Wai's 重慶森林 / Chungking Express (1994) tells two obliquely related tales of contemporary Hong Kong. Its style is the quintessence of hip and genuine cool.

Chungking Express stars Brigitte Lynn, Valerie Chow, Takeshi Teneshiro, Faye Wong, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and the Chungking Mansions.    

Every scene in Chungking Express has colorful and memorable imagery.

Today's Rune: Journey. 
   

Wong Kar-Wei: Days of Being Wild

Wong Kar-Wei: Days of Being Wild (1990). Retro (1960-1961). Atmosphere. People. Lonely. Lost. Pining. Wet Streets.

Wong Kar-Wei: Days of Being Wild. Interior Spaces. Smoking. She wants this, he wants that. Telephones and clocks. 

Wong Kar-Wei: Days of Being Wild. Image. Music. Groovy style. I dig. Can you?

Today's Rune: Harvest.

Tar Heel Nation 2: Edward R. Murrow

"If none of us ever read a book that was 'dangerous,' had a friend who was 'different,' or joined an organization that advocated 'change,' we would all be just the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants. (Edward R. Murrow, March 9, 1954). 

For nearly the first two decades of his life, Edward R. Murrow's name was Egbert "Egg" Roscoe Murrow. One can easily understand why he tweaked it for adulthood. 

Murrow's family background included Quakers (Society of Friends), a Cherokee ancestor, anti-slavery ancestors and also a Confederate officer from the Lamb side of the family. Murrow was born in an eighteenth century house on Polecat Creek to the south of Greensboro, North Carolina, off NC Highway 62. 

"The woods to either side abounded in deer, otter, wild turkey, and all kinds of small game. There was a sense of history all around, the old clapboard Center [alt. Centre] Meeting House just a few steps from the property, the windows of the farmhouse looking out on one side toward the cemetery where Andrew Murrow's generation lay buried. . ." (A.M. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and Times. New York: Fordham University Press, 1998, page 11). 

Born in 1908 -- the year of Greensboro's centennial (as Sperber points out) -- in 1913 Murrow migrated by train with his family to Washington State. But memories of North Carolina stuck with him, as did the family legacy.  

Edward R. Murrow seated on an airplane, 1957 (See below for credit).

As an adult reporter and journalist, Edward R. Murrow relocated to Europe in the late 1930s. He covered the London Blitz and other events and facets of the Second World War. When Murrow reached Germany with American troops near the end of it, he described what they found at Buchenwald concentration camp. He then ended his report sharply: "If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry." (April 15, 1945 radio broadcast from Konzentrationslager Buchenwald).

Murrow moved into TV broadcasting, too, where he was instrumental as a defender of democracy and civil society during the period of McCarthyism and anti-communist "witch hunts" in the 1950s. He continued hard at it until his death in 1965. One of the great journalists and reporters.  

Photo: Edward R. Murrow seated on an airplane, 1957. Edward R. Murrow Papers, 1927-1965. Tufts University. Digital Collections and Archives. Medford, MA. Accessed September 12, 2013. Link here.

Today's Rune: Partnership.  

Jean-Pierre Melville: Le Samouraï (Take II)

Man, the Criterion Collection has got to be a fun place to work. What a job they do preserving films for posterity! I try to see as many Criterion DVDs as I can, while juggling a host of other things on the ceaseless agenda. Worth the effort every time. 

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï (1967) sticks in mind for a number of reasons. It's cool as in cool jazz, hip as in hepcat, beautiful as in Paris, nifty-fifty as in Alain Delon working with Melville both in top form, and glidingly graceful as in zen. What's not to love, dreamers? I should point out that Delon's Costello character is not a superhero and is not imbued with magical powers. He's a bit more along the lines of the early Sean Connery Bond, not as unstoppable as a Sergio Leone-Clint Eastwood "Man With No Name" character. I find this interesting -- and a refreshing rejoinder to many of the more dingbatty action films of recent years.

Today's Rune: Fertility. 

Personal Vaporizer

Atomizer, personal vaporizer, e-segar: call it what you will, I'm trying it. The stars seem to have aligned, the energies are converging, and so far, it's nifty-fifty. Basically, if you smoke or have smoked, these gadgets provide a non-smoke alternative, with a little shot of nicotine, giving off a slight theatrical vapor that looks like smoke but has no lingering smoke-tale signs, and tastes like whatever you want it to taste like. I'm trying Cuban segar / cigar and pipe tobacco. It's weird, and will change habits considerably, opening up new possibilities and freedoms for time-space usage. So far, so good. A workable alternative to hot-smoke-inhaling, it would appear.



Source: Provapeo Cafe. WikiCommons. They come in a variety of shapes and designs
.

Anyone else out there trying these yet? I wonder what new customs and laws are developing? Can these be used in "non-smoking" areas, for instance?

Today's Rune: Fertility.

In the Port of Amsterdam -- or Copenhagen

If cameras serve as visual "recording angels," here's a mystery along the lines of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup / aka Blow-Up (1966). It imprints the possibilities of a story or some sort of reconstructed memory. 

Resurrecting images from a scanned negative, even though I snapped this picture there's only a twin-trickster memory of such an interior -- Amsterdam and Copenhagen / København. 1980s. An intense examination would yield results -- there's lettering visible in this cropped blowup, for example. But for now, it remains a mystery of sorts. More will be revealed -- or not.

Here the setup looks sort of like the final scene in The Sopranos.

And here we pull back to the beginning image. What is this place?

In corresponding textual memory of Amsterdam and Copenhagen, I remember locales such as the Melkweg / Milky Way, Zorba the Buddha, Musikcaféen and the Texas Saloon, plus certain international hostels. Could this be a small antechamber attached to one of them?  

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.   

Butterfly Kiss

Butterfly Kiss is the ninth Michael Winterbottom film noted on this site and was his first theatrical release (1995). It's a creepy independent tale set mostly along "motorways" and "carriageways" and in and around "petrol stations" in northern England. Eunice (Amanda Plummer, who happens to be Christopher Plummer's daughter), a sort of Pied Piper of secretive mayhem, draws a neophytic devotee (Miriam, played by Saskia Reeves) into her orbit. Interesting film, particularly its psychological and quasi-religious dimensions. Also, Plummer and Reeves together are compelling.

Today's Rune: Gateway.    

     

Walter Salles: On the Road (Take II)

Now's a good time for a little something about the characters and actors in Walter Salles' 2012 movie version of Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel On the Road, set in the late 1940s in the US and Mexico.

To me, Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) is sort of like Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's The Doors (1991). Moriarty (which happens to be one of my family names back in the mists of time) is a sort of prototype for tens of thousands of Americans living in the early 21st century -- careless, reckless, chaotic and driven. One of the best details about him -- which is not the case with his spiritual descendents, I'm guessing, is his holding onto a copy of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way throughout most of the frenetic journeys depicted in On the Road. In Swann's Way (the first part of Proust's massive novel À la recherche du temps perdu / In Search of Lost Time), Swann's obsession with Odette is a powerful thread that ties everything together; in On the Road, obsession runs through Moriarty's psyche (obsessions with fast driving, drugs and sex -- seeking and escaping) and ties him in knots. Several other characters, men and women, are equally obsessed with Moriarty, who serves as a fast-moving Pied Piper for their scurrying activities. Dean Moriarty has some ambition to be a writer himself, so when he hands Swann's Way off, we get the idea that he's finished with that notion.

Kristen Stewart as Marylou has a damaged, mischievous Chloë Sevigny vibe. As for the other women characters, well, let's face it: Jack Kerouac's On the Road is a far cry from a feminist manifesto. Though Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe / The Second Sex was published in 1949, this is not Sur la route in France, but rather North America, and second wave feminism was not yet manifest here. In any case, there are brief interludes that include Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men), Alice Braga, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams and Marie-Ginette Guay, among others.

Viggo Mortensen is a hoot as Old Bull Lee (William S. Burroughs) -- right on.

The hardest role is that of Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac). Sam Riley does a superb job with it -- despite sometimes over-the-top corny vocal delivery (this is really how Kerouac wrote and spoke). Who is this guy, this actor? It finally hit me afterward -- my God, he's the British dude who played Joy Division vocalist Ian Curtis in Control (the 2007 film directed by Anton Corbijn)!  Ian Curtis -- Mr. Gloom himself -- committed suicide while (or was it right after?) listening to Iggy Pop's The Idiot, while also watching Werner Herzog's Stroszek, the offbeat film that ends in the mountains of North Carolina with a Cherokee tribal deputy on the radio to a dispatcher: "We have a 10-80 out here, a truck on fire, we have a man on the lift. We are unable to find the switch to turn the lift off, can't stop the dancing chickens. Send an electrician, we're standing by." It's those damn dancing chickens again, from Chagall to Pop and Fellini . . . worth noting repeatedly because yes, Virginia, everything really does connect to every other thing, plus the effort to make these crazy connections manifest keeps the synapses lively and dementia at bay -- maybe. But back to Sam Riley in On the Road -- he gets an A for his performance.

Today's Rune: Protection.  
  
 

On the Road to Catch On the Road On the Big Screen

Much to yak about when it comes to Walter Salles' On the Road (2012), the movie version of Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) as augmented by the raunchier, sadder "scroll" draft.

In the USA at this juncture in 2013, you have to pretty much take sail to find On the Road on the silver screen. I don't know what happened to distribution, but I do know this: the box office proceeds for On the Road are sixteen times more outside the US than inside it. I mean, I know On the Road doesn't have the widespread appeal of Operation Dumbo Drop or March of the Ten Penguins or whatnot, but come on, peoples -- American fiction writers and poets don't get no respect in their own country. Support your local sheriff! 

Seriously, there may be prodigious amounts of marijuana, Benzedrine and alcohol in On the Road, as well as a lot of sexual talk and innuendo (no particularly graphic sex, or not much), but why not give it a whirl anyway?  Because it really is worth seeing on the big screen -- a much more pleasant experience than seeing Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master (2012) -- even though Amy Adams is in both (and has a bigger role in The Master), even though both The Master and On the Road have a migrant worker section and even though The Master and On the Road are set in the relatively near past -- mostly in the wake of the Second World War, with a Korean War soon to come.

More about On the Road in the near future, I suspect, dig or no dig. 

Today's Rune: Signals.    
    

Michelangelo Antonioni: Il Grido (Take III)

Now for the basic set-up of Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Grido (1957). In the small Italian village where Aldo (Steve Cochran) works as a mechanic at the local mill less than a dozen years after the end of the Second World War, Irma, his seven-year paramour, learns that her absentee husband has died overseas. Turns out she has another man, too, Luigi (though we never see him). With her husband dead, she breaks things off with Aldo, despite the fact that they have a young daughter (Rosina).

Aldo freaks out, and after trying to change Irma's mind, quits his steady job and heads out for a vagabond trip with Rosina to parts unknown. Along the way, they have adventures involving an ex-paramour and a new one (Virginia -played by Dorian Gray aka Maria Mangini, pictured above), before he decides to send Rosina back. Aldo then vaguely hooks up with a freelance prostitute (Adreina -- Lynn Shaw) who is struggling to survive. 

My favorite section is Aldo and Rosina's stay with Virginia and her boozing father Guerrino. Here we learn more of representative socioeconomic changes already noticeable in earlier parts of the film. Guerrino is losing his farm to development, and Virginia has taken him to a house/petrol station on a pre-superhighway transportation route where she can eek out a living and give him a place to stay. Virginia's husband is dead (possibly as a result of the war), as well as her mother. Aldo helps out -- for a while. We come to understand all of them better from this experience. Poor drunken Guerrino tries to throw rocks at developers as they are cutting down some of his trees. This "Myth of Sisyphus" moment is repeated on a grander scale in the final section of the movie. 

Even though from the retelling Il Grido may seem like a pitiful tale, it has a stark beauty to it, almost like a mix of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and a Thomas Hardy novel. It contains both tragedy and straight realism. Too, Aldo at times appears almost comic in his brooding, which adds another dimension to the film. All five of the major women characters seem to "get" him better than he understands himself. Aldo and Irma's daughter Rosina adds urgency and poignancy to the story, raising the stakes. The way she sees things (including many strange people) is made clear, drawing one's attention to various additional social details.

Poor Aldo. But in the end, my favorite characters are Virginia, Guerrino, Rosina and Adreina. This inspires a question: what makes certain characters more appealing than others? 

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.     
    

Michelangelo Antonioni: Il Grido (Take II)

And now it's time to delve into the title of Antonioni's absorbing film Il grido (1957).

The raw English translation ("The Cry") doesn't do it justice, doesn't convey the necessary gravitas. Nowadays in English, a "cry" sounds almost feeble, or baby-like. Something more like jeremiad or lamentation is suggested.

Most readers will have seen some kind of representation or reproduction of Edvard Munch's 1893 painting called in English The Scream and in Norwegian Skrik (and in German, as part of a set, Der Schrei der Natur), yes? 

Check out the Italian variations for Skrik: L'urlo o Il grido. Now we're getting somewhere that's not lost in the translation. Consider Il Grido more like The Scream than The Cry. Despair in the face of change and instability. Aldo, the main protagonist (played convincingly by Steve Cochran, an American), despairs to such a degree that one can easily imagine his inner psyche reflected by the Munch painting.

Today's Rune: Signals.     

Michelangelo Antonioni: Il Grido (Take I)

Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Grido (1957) spotlights a fleeting period in modern life. Here, the setting is along the Po River valley in northern Italy less than twelve years after the end of the Second World War. A lot is going on in the background. There's painful recovery from the mass destruction and dislocation of war. And there's new mechanization, encroaching corporate development, evident transition from agrarian ecology to industrialization. Displacement. Wandering people, and people attached to villages and farms even as they are being upstaged by petrol stations, trucks moving up and down the main pre-superhighway transporation routes, speedboats racing in the river, airplanes droning overhead. The poor, for the most part, remain poor, scrounging from day to day and week to week.

Traditional delivery continues apace. We see a woman come by a house and sell a handful of fresh eggs from a basket, and a man delivers fresh milk, ladles it into a pot for heating up. Men work at a local sugar refinery in the first town we see, a transitional industry not yet fully automated. Food is hand-picked at the local market, in small towns that have one. A raised handmade flag on a stick signals for a passing doctor to stop and make a housecall. "It's just malaria," he says. It's a world away from today's "West," these black and white scenes from Italy in the 1950s, and it's astonishing to see.

Today's Rune: Protection.         

Michelangelo Antonioni: The Passenger (Take I)

Another absorbing (and strange) film by Antonioni is The Passenger (1975), starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider. In English and in color. Locations are as wide-ranging as in a Bond film, starting with Francophone Chad, the African nation just south of Libya. It's largely about identity, or social contructs if you prefer. And, preconceived notions of what makes people tick. The setup if this: Locke (Nicholson) is a BBC reporter covering Africa; he's made friends out in the field (at a desert inn, to be specific) with Roberston, a man with a heart condition, secret arms dealer by trade. When Locke finds Roberston dead of "natural causes," his immediate instinct is to switch identities. And then off he goes back into the world, leaving his wife in London a "widow." Much happens as a result of this decision.

Usually in movies, such identity swaps are played for laughs, but a similar dramatic switch forms the backdrop for Don Draper (Jon Hamm) in the AMC series Mad Men. 

Today's Rune: Possessions.  

Three Films: 'Smashed,' 'Albatross' and 'Rampart'

Three indie-type films, all worthwhile in an offbeat kind of way: James Ponsoldt's Smashed (2012), Niall MacCormick's Albatross (2011) and Oren Moverman's Rampart (2011). Besides having one word titles, each flick showcases a major character effectively portrayed by a strong actor, and in each, the main actor is backed by a strong ensemble cast. I liked them all about equally.

In Smashed, Albatross and Rampart, family systems inform character development. At the outset of Smashed, Kate (North Carolina native Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is an alcoholic grade school teacher, married to a fellow drinker (Aaron Paul, Breaking Bad), daughter of a reclusive alcoholic (Mary Kay Place). With Albatross, Emelia Conan Doyle (Jessica Brown Findlay, Downton Abbey) is the hero (or heroine if you prefer). When the film begins, she is caring for her ailing grandparents, her mother committed suicide a while back, and she's an aspiring writer. The main collision comes when Emelia begins working for a nuclear family at their Bed and Breakfast, befriends a daughter her age (late teens), offends the "shrew" of the house and dallies with the father (a stalled out middle-aged writer), not necessarily in that order. In Rampart, LAPD cop Dave (Woody Harrelson as anti-hero) has extended family, work and personal problems. A cagey US-Vietnam War veteran, he's quite messed up and in dire need of psychiatric rehab, though he thinks he's the greatest "soldier cop" in the world. Imagine if Lance Armstrong joined the LAPD . . . The backdrop is the late 1990s as the Rampart Scandal begins to unfold. Sort of like Magnum Force, if Dirty Harry had taken a darker turn and had family around town. Smashed, Albatross and Rampart each has a certain quotient of alcohol and drugs, come to think of it.

     
Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.  

Four Banana, Three Banana, Two Banana, One

Just finished checking out "Electrical Bananas," a chapter in John McMillian's Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford University Press, 2011).

McMillian starts off the chapter with Sara Davidson's observant coverage of New York City in mid-1967: " . . . especially noteworthy for Davidson was the sight of a young hippie in a wizard hat selling bananas on an East Village corner. They were going for ten cents each, with a three-cent deposit on the skins" (page 66).

Reports were circulating at the time, describing the hallucinatory effects of smoking dried banana peels. . .

As in: Gone fishing, gone bananas . . .  

McMillian follows various leads as to the origin of the idea of smoking banana peels, and looks at contributions ranging from a 1963 article through Country Joe & the Fish, and Donovan, with even a footnote about The Velvet Underground and Nico (including Andy Warhol's banana cover), all circa 1966-1967. 

But how did this notion spread from there? The subtitle for "Electrical Bananas" suggests an answer with "The Underground Press and the Great Banana Hoax of 1967."

Beyond that, semiotic bananas must have been part of the Zeitgeist, the spirit-ghost of the high-time. Because there are other examples, even beyond the main scope of McMillian's study, moving from 1967 into 1968 (The Banana Splits TV series, Juanita Banana) right into 1971 (Woody Allen's Bananas) and probably right into the
21st century . . . 

If this theme song for The Banana Splits doesn't sound trippy, I'm not sure what does:

Tra la la, la la la la.

Four banana, three banana, two banana, one.
All bananas playing in the bright blue sun.
Flippin' like a pancake, poppin' like a cork
Fleagle, Bingo, Drooper and Snork. . .

Today's Rune: Signals.     

Run Like a Villain to the Sugar Bowl!

Given the Super Bowl and its New Orleans setting, here are a few photos snapped during a not-too-distant voltigeur sortie into the Vieux Carré, the French and Spanish old city with its most excellent architecture and landscape design.
























For the record, the Baltimore Ravens defeated the San Francisco 49ers 34-31, barely, after a strange power outage in the third quarter.  

From a cherished courtyard at the Place d'Armes.

Today's Rune: Joy.  

Dreaming in French, Part III: Susan Sontag's Way

The main Susan Sontag (1933-2004) part of Alice Kaplan's Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis (The University of Chicago Press, 2012) provides a substantial backdrop to her life, covers her intense 1957-1958 Parisian residency, then looks at her life and career afterwards, though not detailing much about her many years (1989-2004) with Annie Leibovitz, her last partner.

Because Kaplan was able to go through voluminous notebooks and other manuscripts, this thick middle section is sometimes dizzying to keep up with on a first read-though. One thing is certain: born in New York, having lost her father as a small child, and relocated to Arizona presumably due to her asthma, Sontag had a strong desire to escape her circumstances. Which she did -- inspired by French literature, among other things.

I was happily surprised to learn from Dreaming in French that another Francophile, my old buddy Wallace Fowlie (1908-1988), helped her clear a significant academic hurdle at the University of Chicago in praising and passing her junior paper on Djuna Barnes' 1936 novel Nightwood.  Fowlie was her fourth reader, brought in by her principal advisor, Kenneth Burke, to save the day.

It was also gratifying to read Kaplan's comparison of Susan Sontag's married, with child life to that of the Jeanne Moreau character in Louise Malle's Les Amants / The Lovers (1958). Beyond that even, everything being connected -- especially everything French -- it turns out that the screenplay for Les Amants was "written by the same Louise de Vilmorin whose blue salon at Verrières-le-Buisson had welcomed Jacqueline Bouvier in 1949" (pages 111-112).

After her 1957-1958 Paris residency, Sontag emerged as a leading proponent of French culture back in the USA, abetted by a durable friendship with poet-translator Richard Howard. "The two were leaders in the conversation that was bringing that thing called French Theory to the United States, made of equal parts Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida" (page 127).

Which reminds me that I was lucky enough to hear Richard Howard give a reading in Chapel Hill, North Carolina at UNC, and bought a couple of his books then and there. Now, thanks to Alice Kaplan's alluring account, I wish I'd have met Susan Sontag, too.

Today's Rune: Signals.