That's the one I had in mind, or rather, had in mind as a backup in case another one couldn't be found. I thought there might be something in Saturday Night or Forum or Gypsy. I was sick of using "guarantee" as a target word.

tenderness (Need to get Otis Redding out of my mind)

Apparently Manual Cinema's Future Feeling (and not just its trailer) has been up on Vimeo since last April:



It's possible that it was originally posted as "private" or hidden (perhaps still undergoing a final round of editing or polishing) and only later made publicly viewable.  As it is, I had to look up their Vimeo page to find it, since the complete short doesn't seem to be directly embedded anywhere on their own website — only the trailer (which does now list the full piece as a related-content nudge afterward).  Both on the Vimeo page and especially in the related-content prompt, the 40-second "official trailer" and the full 8-minute film are less easily distinguishable-at-a-glance than they might be, since both use the exact same image as their thumbnail/"poster frame".

But it's a beautiful watch, as visually inventive and poetically concise as anything they've done, with a level of cinematic subtlety and polish that place it immediately among MC's best work.  If part of me wants to linger in director Ben Kaufman's gorgeously haunted Nantucket time-loop for longer than eight minutes, it should be said that not a frame here is wasted, and that Future Feeling's particular mix of eerie ambiguity and lean to-the-bone precision likely wouldn't be served by a longer runtime.  It's exactly what it needs to be, like a haiku, and if it leaves us wanting more — all the more reason to hit "replay" and give what's there an even closer look.

Coming up for them, on the live-performance front: The 4th Witch, a "bold and imaginative inversion of Macbeth" premiering this June at the Spoleto Festival.

NYT:  David Edward Byrd, Whose Posters Captured Rock's Energy, Dies at 83
                              His designs for Jimi Hendrix, the Who and others embodied the spirit of the psychedelic era.
                                                       He also created images for stage shows like Godspell.

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I actually had to google that one — "gross" immediately struck me as challenging because by far the most common modern conversational sense of the word (repulsive, disgusting) seemed to me just a skosh ahead of SJS's time.  Jenny's use of it in Company, below, may represent relatively early adoption by someone her age: originating in the 1960s as teen slang usage, she would have had a decade at most (not in her own teens, but rather her mid-twenties to mid-thirties) to pick it up by 1970, perhaps from her kids.  Or she could be using it here with a slightly more old-fashioned shading, less "icky, nauseating" and more "coarse, lacking refinement".  (Obviously, legal, medical or financial terminology is its own thing, but apart from "gross percent of the billing clause" I couldn't think of any other such usages in SJS's oeuvre; ditto phrases like "grossly mistaken" or "gross injustice").  In any case, I suspect Sondheim himself would have been solidly into middle age (and much further into, if not entirely past, the 1970s) by the time "gross-disgusting" had spread across demographics to become anywhere near as ubiquitous, covering all kinds and degrees of distaste, as it is today — which is why it's hard to imagine almost any of his characters using the word casually.   Little Red, in Into The Woods, perhaps.  Or, I suppose, most of the characters in Here We Are, his first contemporary-set show since Merrily in 1981, although I couldn't find any instances of it on the ITW or HWA OCRs.  Let me know if you had a different one in mind than this:


—She's tall enough to be your mother!
—She seems so dead.
—And cheap and gross and...
—She's very weird.
—Depressing and...
—And immature?
—Goliath!

Poor baby, all alone!
Throw a lonely dog a bone, it's still a bone.
We're the only tenderness he's ever known,
Poor baby.

New cast addition:  Hannah Cruz (Suffs) as Gussie.

Also Mallory Bechtel in "an undisclosed role" — I'd guess Beth, but I don't know why they'd be keeping that undisclosed for (thus far) almost a year after originally announcing that Bechtel had joined the cast.  [Ed. 3/8/25:  Sometime over the 3½ weeks since I first posted this, the IMDb and Wikipedia pages for both Bechtel and the film were updated to confirm that she is indeed playing "Beth Spencer"].

So I think "Okay"
And I start a play,
And he somehow knows,
Cause right away,
It's Drrrring!

"Hiya, buddy,
Wanna write a show?
Got a great idea,
We'll own all the rights
With a two-week out
And a turnaround
On the guarantee
Plus a gross percent
Of the billing clause—"

As the Green Bay Packers were not playing I had very little interest in watching "the game" last night and so, I didn't.      Instead I watched the 2006 movie "Stranger Than Fiction" staring Emma Thompson and Will Ferrell.  From IMBD: I.R.S. auditor Harold Crick suddenly finds his mundane Chicago life to be the subject of narration only he can hear: narration that begins to affect his entire existence, from his work to his love life to his death.
The narration is coming from prolific author, Karen Eiffel (Thompson), as she writes her current novel.  It was a very cute, easy to watch film; just what I needed on a Sunday night.  

I also made some progress reading "Persepolis Rising" book #7 in the Expanse series.  

I love All Creatures Great and Small, but since I donated to my local PBS station and got a Passport subscription last fall, the entire new season became available as soon as the first episode aired.  We tried not to binge the whole thing at once, but still ended up finishing S5 before the end of January.

Still, aside from being distilled from pure coziness, it also stands up to rewatching.  We'll probably go through this whole season again (and maybe even rewatch some past seasons for good measure) at some point before S6 drops next January, as we did this past year.

We also started rewatching the first season of Funny Woman tonight, not having seen it since last February, and will then continue through S2.  That should last us this coming week at least.

Or, since I didn't get explicit permission from the National Football League to use the term, it should probably be "Big Game Sunday." I am craving wings. I suppose I can go across the street and get chicken wings as an appetizer from the Chinese place.

I am most likely going to start by watching the game, and then switch to All Creatures Great and Small around halftime. As a Broncos supporter, I really dislike the Chiefs.