It was a lot calmer after those thunderstorms battled it out over our heads the other evening -- they knocked out a lot of people's electricity. We still have a thick low clouds and intermittent rain. I was supposed to videotape up at beautiful Bibler Gardens today, but we rescheduled. Medium-sized Ducklings were waddling around our back yard as I got ready for work this morning.

Sax Legend Maceo Parker at: Theater X-Net

Starring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Read more about Ida in Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley

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Charity Alert: Keep that resolution as Summer approaches! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

Sitemeter Sez: Two more visitors from New York State; Vanves, Ile-de-France in Paris read my little blog entry about Rock 'n Roll being only ONE form of Pop music, as if that was ever real news;

Media Watch: He Walked by Night (1948) on TCM -- part of a series of black and white potboilers by journeyman director Anthony Mann. The best thing about this movie, and about it's only real claim to fame, is that it was beautifully photographed by John Alton, the great cinematographer and author of Painting With Light.
There are other things to like about this film, however -- it is chock-full of actors who had long careers on television, like Jack Webb, Richard Basehart, Whitt Bissel, and many others who were seen in big and small parts over the years. The cavernous, then-new Los Angeles storm drains were used to great effect -- I think some of those scenes were used as stock footage in other flicks for more than a decade.
I tend to agree with critics who like Mann's gritty westerns and film noir crime movies, but I can't say that his turgid spectacles like El Cid or Fall of the Roman Empire offered much more than extravagance -- the viewer learned almost nothing from them. Maybe it was the fault of the writers and producers, but they were more fantasy than history, and crushingly dull.


Academy Award-winning actress Sophia Loren in Fall of the Roman Empire, Anthony Mann's predecessor to Ridley Scott's Gladiator. Both films are modern takes on the depraved Nero-like Emperor Commodus (180 - 192 A.D.), son of Marcus Aureleus, who unfortunately for Rome was the last of it's "Five Good Emperors." (A very relative term.) By the time Diocletian and Constantine re-forged something of an Imperial entity a century later, the cultures of Europe and the Mediterranean had irreparably decayed. Classic Mediterranean beauty Ms. Loren, modelling in the roses at the right, is here to lighten things up.