: a raised platform (as in a large room or hall)
A beautiful. hot, sunny Saturday in Georgia. Gabriel has been playing up in the guest bedroom for a good three and a half hours! I'm finishing up one book (David Goodis' The Burglar), starting another one (William Boyd's An Ice-Cream War). Julia's playing music games against Mary online, looking for job opportunities. Daisy's being a scoundrel. Kit's demanding lascivious pets.
I'm digging Major Crimes, TNT's spin-off of their cash cow The Closer. The cases are just as interesting. Although Kyra and J.K. Simmons are missed, Mary McDonnell is occupying the empty space with a unique performance, full of poise and an odd, watchful calm, with some very interesting line readings.
I just finished Harlan Coben's newest thriller, Stay Close (2012). Like his other New Jersey-set mysteries, it is fast-paced and breezy. He still can't write dialogue that well, but I like how he has toned down on the exorbitant twists. A suburban mom, Megan, is drawn back into her past; before she married her husband sixteen years ago, she was a dancer at a strip club, in love with an up-and-coming photographer, Ray, a man now reduced to eking out a living as a faux-celebrity paparazzo. Together these two, along with an obsessed detective, a couple of creepy Christians, and a dying bartender, are all in various ways involved with the disappearances of abusive men over the years. Not his best book, by any means, but it's a worthwhile read if you're into bestselling crime fiction.
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Here's a performance for my list of the 500 Greatest Performances of All Time:
John Huston
as Noah Cross in Chinatown (1974)
A fantastic director (Treasure of the Sierra Madre), Huston was also a wily, powerful actor in the right role. Here, as the man behind the complex water scheme in one of the all-time great movies, Huston is the rotting, jovial, looming figure of darkness. Huston needed to be overwhelming and memorable in order to carry out the screenplay's biblical malevolence (and to hold his own with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway) and he succeeds brilliantly. Remember: "Most never have to face the fact that at the right time, in the right place, they're capable of anything."
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Next up in Professional Photographer's list of the one hundred most influential photographers of all time is, checking in at #60, Philip Jones Griffiths (1936-2008).
The Welsh Griffiths is most remembered for his war photography. He studied pharmacy in Liverpool but he freelanced on the side until he was given a position as full-time freelancer for London's Observer. He covered the Algerian War, African conflicts in the 1960s, the Vietnam War, the Yom Kippur War, the Cambodian conflicts of the mid-1970s, and even the first Gulf War. His book Vietnam Inc. helped crystallize Western opinion on the fruitless horrors of the war - and the lack of necessity for American involvement in it.
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And finally, let's make my inaugural NFL predictions for week 1. So far, I'm 1-for-1. A goal of mine, week after week, will be to correctly predict two-thirds of the games. Crazy? Probably. But we'll see how it goes. Every Tuesday, I'll let you know how I did. Here we go:
Chicago over Indianapolis
Philadelphia over Cleveland (I foresee a long day for Weeden)
Detroit over St. Louis
Houston over Miami
Minnesota over Jacksonville
Atlanta over Kansas City
New Orleans over Washington
Buffalo over the New York Jets
New England over Tennessee
Seattle over Arizona (another year, another Arizona QB cluster-f...)
Green Bay over San Francisco (should be the day's best game)
Carolina over Tampa Bay
Denver over Pittsburgh (should be a doozy)
(Monday) Baltimore over Cincinnati
(Monday) San Diego over Oakland
Images:
http://fandomania.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/noahcross.jpg
http://www.12thpress.com/assets/images/uploads/2008/03/philip-jones-griffiths.jpg
http://www.12thpress.com/assets/images/uploads/2008/02/griffiths.jpg
http://blogs.gmanews.tv/sidetrip/blog/uploads/PhilipJonesGriffith.png
Information:
http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_9_VForm&ERID=24KL535HON
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