The pleasant situation in my life, to which I alluded a couple of weeks ago, no longer exists. To be sure, it was an ephemeral thing from the start, but no less sweet in the duration or painful at the end (with nobody, really, to blame, which has its own set of blessings and curses) as a result. While I consider my present ache inevitable, if silly, I regret nothing, wish her the best and am glad to count her my friend regardless.

Still, as one might imagine, the weekend was shit (even if some sort of reverse tension meant I had an unexpectedly mellow time at work--not enough energy to be pissed off, perhaps), and I've had to troll around for things to cheer me up.

Scream and Scream Again (1969): One of only a couple of films to feature the three horror icons of Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing at once, Gordon Hessler's wacko masterpiece for AIP (if you ask me) is marvelously (as always) reviewed here and also by yours truly for Darrell Buxton's upcoming anthology of 1960s British horror reviews.

Lindisfarne--"No Time To Lose": I don't remember where I first heard of Lindisfarne, a folk-rock band from the north of England (Newcastle to be exact, hence the name), but I fund their 1971 album Fog On The Tyne at poor old Schoolkids' in Exile shortly before it departed this world and decided to give it a go (as I did with Pentangle's 1970 Cruel Sister, which is good but not nearly as much as Fog On The Tyne). Their big hit was the title song, but my personal favorite came at the end of the CD bonus tracks. With a muffled, jokey intro, a cheeky mandolin whisks into gear a militantly peppy and enchanting little song, all about the joys of getting out into the country and washing out your cares with pumice (not necessarily pumice, but there's a hard edge to the song that gives me that impression). It's especially good for those undeniably nice days that yet seem a little too brisk and overcast, with a hint of rain coming your way, and those are the very best days of all.

Sergei Prokofiev--"Kije's Funeral" from the Lieutenant Kije Suite: Kije had a can't-miss premise, from the novel by Yuri Tynyanov. A bureaucratic error in military dispatches to the Czar's court results in the creation of a fictional hero by terrified pen-pushers, one whose exploits become more imaginative and unbelievable as the snowball of mendacity gains momentum. The piece is probably best known for the rousing "Troika," the theme music to Woody Allen's 1975 classic Love and Death, but I love the last bit, where Kije's jaunty introduction at the beginning plays essentially side by side with the mournful "Love Song," illustrating both the impossibility of Kije's existence and the fundamental ambiguity of every single life, filled as they are with joys and sorrows. Any time things seem too out of hand either way, "Kije's Funeral" will do.

Barry Lyndon (1975): The Michigan Theater showed this as part of its ongoing Kubrick series; I tried to get a few people to go see this, but with little success. A friend of mine met me for coffee beforehand, which was nice, as I hadn't really had a good talk with her in a while. I was also terribly pleased to run into the good John Fossum during the intermission, and as always had a good chat with him about movies and music (he's backing Tim Monger at Leopold Brothers' on the 24th, happily the same day I was going to do something for my birthday at that very location). Kubrick isn't exactly one of my passions; while I love many of his movies, the authoritarian, control-freak way in which he puts them together so violently clashes with my own worldview that I'm surprised I can watch them at all. Fortunately, he's perfectly matched with Barry Lyndon. I'd seen it before on video, but never in a theater, which concerned me a little going in, but it was really the perfect thing for me to watch in my present mood. William Thackeray was an eighteenth-century guy--wry, cynical, and knowing--in an early Victorian literary world that prized youth, romance and sentimental cant above all things. In much the same way as he would Vanity Fair a few years later, he presented his 1844 work, The Luck of Barry Lyndon, about an Irish rascal trying to make it in the Georgian English aristocracy through a variety of picaresque adventures, as a "novel without a hero" (I think; it fits, anyway). Kubrick's three-hour film isn't so much one without a hero as it is one with a hero who's also a feckless, self-destructive goon, almost a more conscientious, better-heeled equivalent of Alex in A Clockwork Orange (1971). He goes through most of the movie acting like a complete and utter douche, commits one honorable action towards the end, and as a result loses pretty much everything. I ragged on Ryan O'Neal in the message I sent to people describing the movie, but he's actually well-cast in the way I described. What he does with his casting, though, one must judge for oneself. Moments in the first half of the movie when he has to cry are almost criminally hilarious. The supporting cast is to die for, honors going to the great Leonard Rossiter as Captain Quin, Patrick Magee as the stylish Chevalier, and the ever-swish Murray Melvin as the Reverend Runt. Its visual splendor's become cinematic legend, as Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott patterned the look after painters of the period like Watteau and Gainsborough, probably the main reason I wanted to see it on the big screen (as with Kubrick's 2001, it makes so much more sense after seeing it that way). The music matches the visuals, Handel's grim Sarabande as the main theme and Schubert's Piano Trio anachronistically repeated throughout the movie, with traditional Irish music by the early Chieftains thrown in towards the beginning. In happier times, Kubrick's intensely cynical take on life--particularly love and desire--can seem cartoonishly corrosive, but at moments like these, it can feel so right.