Last night Ereck and I went with Josh and Travis to see Far From Heaven, the new Todd Haynes film that's a remake of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, which I haven't seen. Nor have I seen any other Sirk, and it seems like I oughta.

I enjoyed the movie. Julianne Moore is terrific, and so is Dennis Quaid, who I always liked. (I seem to recall that my first Dennis Quaid experience was 1984's messy Dreamscape, a forgettable movie notable only perhaps for its being one of the earliest PG13 releases.) Set in Hartford, Connecticut in 1957, Far From Heaven is a lavishly designed period film that has something or other to say about injustice, and constricting social mores, and dishonesty in relationships, and some other things. I found its racial politics a little heavy-handed, and I groaned inwardly when the Julianne Moore character said of her romantic interest, "He makes me feel alive." Pauline Kael once wrote something about the sort of moment in films that makes audience want to throw jujubes at the screen. This was one of those moments.

But apart from that, there was a lot--a lot--I liked about Far From Heaven. As a matter of fact, the 1950s have been something of a pet topic of mine for a little while, roughly since Ereck and I went to see Kubrick's Lolita at the late, unlamented Majestic. On the basis of the Kubrick film I suspect that not everything we believe about the 1950s is true, that it was an entirely constricted, repressed time--or, more importantly, that now is somehow an unconstricted, unrepressed time. I may blog more about this later.

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Before the show we went to Sa Bai Thong, which disappointed me, again. Give me one good reason we can't have a decent Thai restaurant in Madison--or, if we're stuck with mediocre ones, why there can't be some Thai in the $7-a-dish range, rather than the $10-a-dish range. Just tell me that. Please. It's depressing.

Since we became Willy Street denizens we often stroll over to Jamerica for dinner. Like many Madison restaurants it's a tad overpriced, and I probably wouldn't go all the time if it weren't so close. But it's the closest eatery to our little house (not counting the hot-dog-stand freakout in front of the thrift store), and it's pretty tasty. They jerk pork, they jerk salmon, they jerk scrambled eggs--let's face it, they jerk everything.

We like the wall of effluvia. There seems to be an infinite number of pictures of Bob Marley, and one or two of Haile Selassie. There are lots of bikini girls, and children's scrawled essays, and guys smoking spliffs. There's John and Yoko in Maoist drag, and the Jamaican soccer team (named, somewhat disappointingly, the Reggae Boys). There's a promo shot of Madison scenester Ken Fitzsimmons from his Little Blue Crunchy Things days. There's also a promo shot of music legend and Velvet Undergrounder John Cale. There's a poster of a dog wearing sunglasses and saying, "Yah Mon."

The place always seems a little grungy, and the silverware is cheerfully mixed. Ereck got a fork last night that looked like something a Viking would eat with. The young chap who seats us is attractive and gracious and always seems a little uncomfortable. We like him, too.

We like the pulsing dancehall music and the ginger beer, and we like the esoteric Carribean groceries, including an item behind the cash register that always makes me laugh: soup mix that is, to quote the label, Cock Flavoured.

Drove to Wawautosa with Tag last night to see the big Richard Buckner shew. What we saw was mesmerizing if not dazzling, which is to say that Richard Buckner is not so into the hard sell. Granted, I was largely unfamiliar with the material and might have been more engaged, otherwise, but Richard's songwriting is more meditative than hooky. Supposedly his sound-system specifications (the rider, as they say in the business) got lost somewhere, so because there weren't enough mics and stuff, he didn't get to use all the equipment he brought--including, tantalizingly, a pump organ. Instead he switched between steel-string and classical guitars. Richard wins plaudits for his original capo usage: I've never before seen a man put two capos on a guitar at the same time. But his songs are unrelentingly ethereal and bleak: the only line that stays with me today went something like, "My death will be my revenge." After the show, in the theatre office, Richard seemed a little sad. About half the audience had left by the time he finished--in part because it was freezing in the theatre--and he didn't play an encore. I hope he's okay.

Opening was Wisconsin's own Jeffrey Foucault, a folkie with altogether less gravitas than Buckner, but a little more stage presence. He endlessly retuned his Martin between numbers, which I found very boring. (I'm all for alternative guitar tunings, except maybe I'm not.) And he told anecdotes that were not altogether fascinating, one of which began on this perhaps accidentally hilarious note: "With the money I made from my last tour, I put a new muffler on my truck." Mostly his stories provided insight into what it must be like to sing and tour the mid-level folkie circuit: a lot of house concerts in the Downers Grove, Illinoises of the world, a lot of crashing on friends' floors.

I bought a new computer.

I got one of those $200 computers from Wal-Mart with the defiantly anti-Microsoft operating system Linux on it--or more precisely, Lindows.

I promptly erased Lindows and replaced it with a Microsoft operating system. So sue me.

This is like a year-2000 era computer at best, maybe 1999. It has 128 megabytes of RAM and an 800 MHz processor. (The processor was manufactured not by industry titan Intel or even also-ran AMD, but rather: Via. Via?) On the other hand, it cost $200. And, appealingly, it has Ethernet built in.

It came with no modem, no floppy drive, and no CD burner. But I just all but retired my old computer, which is called, affectionately, Hank (this is not just frivolity: our computers here at the house are networked and each one has to be named something). So I took the modem, floppy drive, and CD burner out of Hank and put them into the new computer, called, even more affectionately, Faron. Faron also came with only a 10-gigabyte hard drive, but soon the old drive will come out of Hank, and then Faron will have two hard drives.

Things already seem much faster and better. Hank has a lowly, 90 MHz Pentium chip, with 40 megabytes of RAM. Slow. Reliable, but slow.

Show-Business Rivalries

There's nothing like a show-business rivalry to generate publicity for the combatants.

Often show-business rivalries are good-natured. One of the most famous ones took place between radio stars Jack Benny and Fred Allen. This consisted largely of the comedians' issuing friendly gibes at one another over the air. The rivalry culminated in their appearing on one another's shows. Ratings were through the roof.

Another radio rivalry was between honkytonkers Marty Robbins and Ernest Tubb: Robbins traditionally hosted the final segment of the Grand Ole Opry on WSM-AM, and often he would delay ending the broadcast in order to tweak Tubb, who, at his record store across the street in downtown Nashville, was waiting to start his Midnite Jamboree broadcast on WSM.

Unfortunately, show-business rivalries are not always so friendly. Particularly distressing was the dispute between East Coast and West Coast rappers, which climaxed in the untimely deaths of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G.

As for me: it has been suggested that the Junkers pick a (friendly) show-business rivalry with Lil' Kim. I say, bring her on.

The anime feature Spirited Away is still playing at the Point, you Madisonians. Go see it. I loved it.

Movies I also want to see before they go away, and why:

Auto Focus. I'm a "Hogan's Heroes" fan from way back. My favorite moment in that curious series's run comes when Hogan and the Richard Dawson character and another POW are chatting in the camp, and up walks Colonel Klink. Hogan says to Klink (I paraphrase), "Mein Commandant, we were just trying to decide, who's the most perfect Aryan, Hitler, Himmler, or Goebbels?" Klink's immediate reply: "Hitler? Himmler? Goebbels? They're all perfect!"

Femme Fatale. I'm also a big Brian de Palma fan from way back. I could talk for a long time about The Fury, Phantom of the Paradise, Raising Cain, Carlito's Way, Blow Out and other relatively obscure de Palma releases, to say nothing of his more prominent releases, like Carrie, The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible, and Mission to Mars, each of which I also liked. I'm the only person I've met who enjoyed his film of Bonfire of the Vanities; the key is to read it not as a retelling of the Tom Wolfe book, but as a satire of same. Anyway, Femme Fatale looks to have all the hallmarks of a juicy Brian de Palma sex thriller, and what's better than that?

8 Mile. I loved Wonder Boys, another film by Curtis Hanson, the director of 8 Mile. Plus, that Eminem's all right with me. "Controversy" was a terrific single last summer, and I'm glad all the hooha has died down. If I were taken to task for everything that came out of my show business persona's mouth, I'd be in no end of trouble.

Frida. Good word of mouth. Oo la la.

Plus, some films not out yet, but that I'm excited about.

Die Another Day. I've blogged elsewhere about James Bond, but suffice it to say that this franchise's theatrical releases had been uninteresting to me my entire adult life until the last one, The World Is Not Enough. Since then, I've made substantial reforms of my understanding of James Bond movies, and I'm looking forward to this one. I may even go back and watch a Timothy Dalton one.

Solaris. I've been excited about this ever since I saw a creepy preview for it before Minority Report. I can't say I'm intimately familiar with the Tarkovsky ouevre, but I have seen the 1972 Solaris, and it's a terrific film. It made me wonder what other brilliant art came out of the Brezhnev-era USSR; someone tell me. At any rate, I've been a fan of many Steven Soderbergh movies (sex, lies and videotape, Out Of Sight, Erin Brokovich), and I've come around to George Clooney.

In Chicago I used to go to what seemed like a movie a week. Since moving to Madison I have curtailed this diet considerably: the choices usually are lousy, and good films seem to stay around for only a week or so. Which is to say, I can't think of the last time there has been a comparative wealth of first-run movies I'm eager to see. Mazel tov.

There probably are good reasons not to give out your phone number on your blog, but I did want to share just now that ours spells GHB-Gigi. Thank heaven for little girls.