Through the use of the TiVo (as George Michael might say, though not this one or this one), I’ve been watching the six-part series Long Way Round on Bravo over the past few months, leading up to the final episode last night. After treacherous roads and impassable rivers across Europe and Asia for five episodes, the final installment brought Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman from the airport in Anchorage, all the way across Canada and the U.S. to their final destination, the Sheraton in New York. Talk about an anti-climax.

Now, Anchorage doesn’t usually get much play on tv, unless you count that time “Insomniac” with Dave Attell visited, or “Cops” went to Spenard, so it was exciting to see some Alaska air time. Ewan and Charley stopped at a motorcycle shop to have their bikes fixed after they were damaged in the flight from Magadan to Anchorage, and they had breakfast at Snow City (not mentioned by name, but clear from the plates and mugs, as well as the Ship Creek Benedict that Ewan ordered, one of my favorites). They also hit Brooks Lodge and went kayaking in Prince William Sound, so while they might not have been able to see Denali because of the smoke, they did get to see some other nice bits of the state.

The show was a lot of fun to watch, a mix of travelogue and monologue, I guess, that was made bearable by the fact that Ewan and Charley seem to be normal, even charming, people, rather than fragile celebrity/actor-types. Throughout the show, Ewan manages to find ways to credit Scotland with the invention of pretty much everything great in the world. I love the place, too; it’s a shame they’re eating themselves to death on fried pizzas and beans on toast. The soundtrack to the show is remarkable; Blur, Radiohead, and Coldplay are heard throughout, as are just about every Stereophonics song every written, including one written especially for the show. Perhaps I’ll check it out on dvd to get the skinny on just how they crossed those Siberian rivers in six-wheeled ex-Soviet military trucks.

Fresh off a screening of Murder by Death as part of the Brattle’s Peter Sellers retrospective, I’m well aware of the duds in his career, in among the gems. But the Pink Panther series, for whatever reason, seems to have taken on an afterlife of its own, slowly deteriorating and becoming more absurd (in a sad, pathetic way, rather than a brilliant, driving a Citröen into a swimming pool kind of way).

The Pink Panther series, has, throughout its life, been a series of exploitations and rip-offs, which in no way contradicts the fact that it’s one of my favorite series of films, period. A Shot in the Dark was hastily made to capitalize on the success of Sellers’ scene-stealing turn as Clouseau in The Pink Panther. Years later, looking for a shot in the arm, Sellers returned to the character for, what else, The Return of the Pink Panther in 1974, followed by Strikes Again (1976) and Revenge (1978).

Then the real junk began, which, of course, Scott and I still ate up when we were kids, not really knowing any better. Trail of the Pink Panther (1983), made after Sellers’ death, was essentially an outtakes compilation strung together with new footage of other cast members, flashback sequences, and Rich Little doing his best Clouseau impressions.

Ted Wass, better known as the dad from “Blossom,” then stepped in to play the world’s second worst detective in The Curse of the Pink Panther (1983), sent by the Sureté to find the “lost” Clouseau. Tired yet?

Never content to let a dead franchise lie, Blake Edwards and UA resurrected the Panther once again with Roberto Benigni in the role of Clouseau’s son in Son of the Pink Panther (1995), which featured Panther regulars Herbert Lom, Bert Kwouk, Graham Stark, and Claudia Cardinale, in full-on ‘last hurrah’ mode.

All of this leads us to the fast-approaching 147th installment in the series (ok, so it’s only the ninth, but…), this time blissfully free of any meddling by Blake Edwards, Chief Inspector Dreyfus, Kato, Auguste Balls, Hercule LeJoy, or anyone else associated with the original series. Instead, we have Steve Martin, Beyoncé, Jean Reno, Emily Mortimer, Roger Rees, and Kevin Kline. All of them fine in their own worlds, I guess, but a recipe for disaster in a remake/prequel about a bumbling French detective. I can’t wait to be proven wrong, but I’m afraid I might not even make it to the theater.

We’re getting to know the finger food at Symphony Hall; the chicken skewers are the best, and the salmon pat? was also very good Friday night when Aimee and I attended another “Repartee” night with the BSO, courtesy of Mr. Brown. Our musical introduction was provided this time by orchestra bass trombonist Douglas Yeo, certainly the first musician who has spoken at a Repartee event we’ve attended who has his own website, plays the serpent, and sells his own floaty pen. Wow. He gave a great introduction to the evening’s piece, Berlioz’s Rom?o et Juliette. The concert was amazing, the most engaging one we’ve been to so far with the BSO, most likely because we were about ten feet from the feet of maestro James Levine, in his first season as the BSO’s new musical director (and their first American-born one, at that, out of 14 of them since the BSO’s founding in 1881, no less). The orchestra, the soloists (including the incredible Lorraine Hunt Lieberson), and the Tanglewood Chorus were terrific.

We capped off the weekend, after getting our real, live Christmas tree (a first for me), with another concert, the University Chorale of Boston College in their holiday concert, also good, in a very different way. The musical selection was very nice, from the traditional to the unexpected. Now that the tree is up and the music is in the air, all we need is a little snow. Is that too much to ask?

Thursday was a busy night in the Boston film community. The choices ranged from a theatrical screening of the upcoming HBO Peter Sellers film, a preview of Mike Nichols’ Closer at the Harvard Loews, a preview of The Sea Inside with a q & a with Javier Bardem at the Boston Loews, and finally, a screening and q & a with screenwriter and novelist (and, umm…legend) Budd Schulberg at B.U. I was tempted by all of the choices, but opted for the most unique and least likely to repeat itself, a chance to hear the author of What Makes Sammy Run? and the screenwriter behind On the Waterfront discuss his work.

The evening began with a screening of the second Schulberg script directed by Elia Kazan, A Face in the Crowd. I’d barely heard of it before last week, but I’m glad I caught it; it was scary, smart, and remarkably ahead of its time. It starred a pre-“Andy Griffith Show” Andy Griffith, a pre-everything Lee Remick, and a young Walter Matthau, among others. Budd Schulberg is ninety years old, still a sharp, spry man, and has known just about everyone, it seems, in film and literature over the last eighty years. He’s worked with directors like Kazan, John Ford, and Nicholas Ray; actors like Marlon Brando and Humphrey Bogart; bigwigs like Louis Mayer and Jack Warner; and as a child of Hollywood, it seems he knew just about everyone else. When names like Dorothy Parker, Sinclair Lewis, and F. Scott Fitzgerald are dropped, though, things get weird; when he was asked in 1939 to work with Fitzgerald, even Schulberg apparently said “I thought he was dead.” Schulberg graduated from Dartmouth in the class of 1936, and he and Fitzgerald worked together on the flop Winter Carnival there (though Fitzgerald was in Hanover for a weekend and disappeared, drunk, and was fired in front of the Hanover Inn).

Schulberg talked about his close relationship with Elia Kazan, whom he called “Gadge,” Marlon Brando, with whom he connected on political and social issues, and his father, B. P. Schulberg, a studio head in Hollywood. He seems like the last of a breed of people who are intertwined in the worlds of film and literature, as comfortable seeking out the curmudgeonly Sinclair Lewis and spending a weekend drinking highballs and talking about writing with him as they are working with people like Brando and Bogart. It was a real privilege to hear him speak and to listen to stories of some of his incredible experiences.

Channel 2, the NBC affiliate in Anchorage, was always my favorite station growing up; I think it was mostly because it looked the best, crisp and clear compared to the soft, fuzzy look of ABC on Channel 13 and the weak static of Channel 11’s CBS. Tom Brokaw was my favorite of the Big Three anchormen, who have all been there as long as I can really remember. It didn’t hurt that Brokaw and I share a birthday; I always preferred him to Ronald Reagan among those of us born that day.

I haven’t consistently watched the evening news since going tv-less in college ten years ago, and the four years of pessimism since the election of 2000 haven’t increased my viewing habits either. For the first time in ages, I watched the entire NBC Nightly News last night, Tom Brokaw’s last broadcast as an anchor. I like Brian Williams, and I’m sure he’ll do a fine job, but it won’t be the same without Brokaw’s authoritative voice and kindly Midwestern smile. Jim Miklaszewski and Andrea Mitchell delivered reports, members of the old guard I remember watching in the ’80s; Robert Hager and Robert Bazell must have had the night off (though if you were wondering, MSNBC’s is still the worst-designed major website around).

I don’t know what history will write for the Pixies after 2004… Maybe they’ll put out an album, not quite as good as their old stuff, and fade into uncomfortable oblivion. Or perhaps they’ll never play again. Whatever happens, I’m happy I’ll be able to look back on this tour and say I got my fill. Before this year, my hopes for seeing this weirdly great band, whose music I don’t even know if I would like if I hadn’t started listening to it at age 15, were slim to none. A year later, I’ve been lucky enough to catch them once on their international tour, once in the midwest, and now last night, for their first gig in Massachusetts since opening for U2 in 1992, their homecoming show at UMass in Amherst. And I have to say, I think this show might have been the best one of all. Seeing the Pixies in Iceland still takes the cake for most memorable; it was the first time I’d seen them, it was small and loud, and I was in the middle of an energetic crowd. But last night’s show had a lot going for it – a blistering set list, the weight of history, and great energy. And to top it all off, someone actually talked in between songs, just once. Kim asked Joey, as Frank went to get a different guitar, which hall he’d been in while he and Frank attended UMass. “Sylvan,” he replied. Frank then came to the mic and said “308B…our suite had a mural of Che Guevara outside. We thought it was Jimi Hendrix for a long time.” And that was it ? but that was a lot more onstage banter than we’d heard at either of the other shows. It also helped that I had my earplugs, I’m not ashamed to admit; Frank Black still has an insanely powerful scream that he used to great effect last night. They managed to cram 29 songs in a set that lasted almost exactly 90 minutes, and if you take into account time for applause plus Joey’s long, goofy theremin feedback show during “Vamos,” that’s a lot less than three minutes a song. They hardly finished one song before going into the next, and with each song, I was reminded how great they were: “Oh, yeah, they wrote this song too!” I couldn’t be happier with the way this improbable reunion turned out, and I’ll be interested to see where they go from here.

Add to that some Bueno y Sano before the show and Antonio’s for the drive home, plus the excellent company of friends in the car, and it doesn’t get much better.

So it probably doesn’t have anything to do with my expos? on the subject from three months ago, but the strange street sign reading “Antrim At” has been changed to the more traditional “Antrim St.,” as of this weekend. I don’t know if the city stopped working with the company that made the sign in the first place, but they managed to get the typeface wrong in the new sign. It’s ugly, for one, and looks like it’s got a case of the dreaded horizontal scaling. The abbreviation, while correct, has been changed to “St” instead of the expected “ST,” the convention most other Cambridge street signs follow. So it’s better now, but still kind of wrong, I guess that’s my point. Oh, and in other news, looks like they chopped down a tree, too, but that’s probably unrelated.

Aimee and I enjoyed a nice holiday weekend with her family in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York, plus a little road trip detour through Connecticut on the way back home. The weekend started with a frantic last-minute effort to get the calendar done at work, which I think pretty much happened. I then caught the commuter rail for the first time, out to Aimee in Needham, feeling like a downtown 9-5’er heading out to the wife in the ‘burbs. We spent Wednesday evening with the Little Browns in Medway, which provided some great one-on-one time with Jack, who took the chance to show off his phenomenal Thomas the Tank Engine recall skills. He’s just starting to talk, and can definitely identify twenty or thirty different “Friends” of Thomas from their color and facial expression. It was pretty fun to hear him say “Toby! Clarabel! Darcy!” and all the other very British names for the various engines and machines. It all made me think of Shining Time Station, with Ringo Starr as “Mr. Condooktor,” who was then replaced by George Carlin, if I recall correctly…

We spent the next two days in Newport, where family and more re-convened for the official Thanksgiving dinner, an all-day affair which was a lot of fun and thankfully free of any fireworks. We also spent a little time wandering downtown Newport, window shopping and checking out prospective rehearsal dinner spots. What, pray tell, is the Protective Club? And how can I get a membership?



We also saw Ray at the local multiplex, which had its platter system visible from the lobby, convenient for my lesson on why it’s bad for film prints.

Saturday was spent in the lovely confines of Westchester County, near my old stomping ground in Greenwich. We attended the two-years-after-the-fact wedding reception of a cousin of Aimee’s, or the son of a cousin of Aimee’s mom, I should say, which still makes him a cousin, anyway. It was fun, if a little surreal, as I met a lot of Aimee’s relatives, who all seemed to know who I was, and who all kindly expressed their excitement at our upcoming nups. Needless to say, our reception will not be held in 2007, I hope.

After the party, the real adventure began, as we took what might be considered “the long way” back home, from Mt. Kisco to Cambridge via Litchfield, Connecticut. We didn’t have a whole lot of daylight left to enjoy the scenery with, but what we saw, we liked.



Our road atlas got less useful as we tried to use roads that were on the map but had no numbers, which coincided with the onset of darkness. We ended up doing the old family vacation movie trick of unwittingly driving in an actual circle, our hearts sinking as we recognized the uniquely-shaped church we’d driven by fifteen minutes before. We eventually made it to Litchfield, after miraculously popping out of the woods and onto a numbered road only a few miles away from our goal. I reminisced about my first trip to Litchfield in search of Carl Kallgren and his antique postcards, many of which I bought out of the shoe boxes in his garage in 1997. We dined at the delicious West Street Grill, and then headed back on the road home.

Of course, once I got home, I remembered the panorama picture frame Dad had left at my house this summer, which I’d planned to use for a collage of photo booth photos, and the fact that it had fallen on the floor and smashed into pieces on Wednesday morning. Oh well.

Is there any way I can reserve a new 2004 Jetta now, and pay for it in a few years, when I get the money and need a new car? Because by the time I’m ready to buy a new Jetta, it certainly won’t look anything like I remember.

VW released photos of the fifth-generation Jetta this week, and I’ve got to say, it’s really disappointing. Coming from a family that has owned Jettas from the first three generations, I think it’s a great car, and has gotten better-looking (with maybe the exception of the third gen, sorry Scott) with each new model. I love the look of the current model, and I feel like they’ve reached a design peak, if this new one is what’s next. The new model has zero distinguishing features, and looks like it’s being sucked into a vortex of design similarity where it will slowly blend in with the Honda Accord, the Toyota Corolla, and various other somewhat big, somewhat smooth four-door sedans. VW always had a certain look, and now that the Jetta is getting bigger and smoother, that look is lost. I’ll take an ’04 GLI in platinum gray, thanks.

Eight of the last ten years since moving east for college, George and his family have invited me to their home to celebrate Thanksgiving in the Poconos, since I wasn’t about to trek to Alaska for a four-day weekend a month before going home for Christmas. It’s time to move on, though, and this year, I’ll be growing up and spending the holiday with Aimee and her family in Newport. It was a year ago that I first talked to George about proposing to Aimee, and since then, he’s turned 30 (sorry, man), I’ve gotten engaged, and judging from last week’s “Last Call with Carson Daly” appearance, where he serenaded “The Boss” with “Hold me closer, Tony Danza…” Marty is a full-fledged rock star. So it’s time to move on. This is not meant to sound as though I’m unhappy to be joining Aimee’s family, but more like an appreciation for a wonderful tradition of kindness that I’ve been happy to be a part of.

As Thanksgiving in the Poconos became a tradition (and by the way, who’s the astute webmaster who nabbed “thisweek.net” for a site about the Poconos? Nice work!), I even began to become one of the familiar faces each year for George’s extended family. I could act as a buffer between conversations, or a go-to guy to avoid a generational political “discussion” by telling a funny anecdote about the children of the wealthy or life in the dot-com world. I saw new people join the family, I hung out with exchange students and high school friends, watched George sell clothes at the outlet mall, and got to know the back roads of the Poconos well enough to find my way around at night. We’d sleep in, watch football, go out to lunch with George Sr. at the Barley Creek Brewing Company, and of course, watch the worst movie we could find at the Foxmoor or the Stroud Mall theaters. Past gems from this holiday tradition include Star Trek: Generations (“Time is the fire in which we burn!”), The World is Not Enough (“I’ve always wanted to have Christmas in Turkey”), Enemy of the State (“In guerrilla warfare they taught us to use our weaknesses as strengths”), Spy Game (“Don’t ever risk your life for an asset. If it comes down to you or them… send flowers”), and Timeline (“There’s one thing worse than dying here, and that’s living here”). That’s perhaps the part I’ll miss the most; George and I will have to trade notes on just how absurd National Treasure is next week.

I just finished watching the first season of the BBC tv series “Spooks,” or, as it’s known in the US, “MI-5.” What, I ask, is wrong with “Spooks”? American audiences are too literal? It sounds too much like a horror film? Whatever you call it, it’s a good show, a full 59:00 of drama, with all of the requisite gadgets, sting operations, undercover agents, and technological trickery you’d expect from a British spy show. In watching all of the extras on the dvds, you get the sense the producers were going for an American-feeling show, as they all seem to be obsessed with American dramas like “ER.” The show features a lot of quick cutting, split-screens, and some dialogue that probably verges on the corny. Its foreign-ness buys it some freedom to be slightly over-dramatic, and besides, I’m really hooked in now.

The second season (or second “series” as they call it in the UK) is out on dvd in January, so I’ll have to wait until then to see whether or not Tom’s girlfriend Ellie and her daughter Maisy survive the cliff-hanger ending involving the semtex in the laptop and the security lock that won’t let them out because Maisy covered the keycard with chocolate. So that sounds a lot more silly than it was; Aimee, having never seen an episode and paying minimal attention to this one, had to go online immediately and find out how season two began to see if they survived. I prefer my perch on the cliff for another few months.

It’s been at least a year or so since I’d been to the Avalon, and it had somehow grown in size in my mind, into a venue too big to see a decent small show. I was pleased, then, when it was announced that Badly Drawn Boy’s planned Avalon show had been moved down the street to the Axis; not only would it be a more intimate venue, but it meant that this talent was still not a household name, at least not enough to fill the Avalon. I was impressed on two fronts, then, when we got to Landsdowne Street and followed the crowd into the Avalon, where the show had been re-re-scheduled. The move followed good ticket sales, I suppose, and Damon later expressed his sincere thanks for our support; I was even more pleasantly surprised that the place really isn’t that big. It’s no Roseland Ballroom, for example, which I always feel like it is.



The one drawback to the Avalon is their “having and eating, too” attitude toward their cake: they have a full crowd pay $20 to see a show, and then they manage to squeeze in a lucrative night of clubbers dancing to guest djs the same night. I think that means Badly Drawn Boy’s opening act went on at around 3:45; by the time we got there at 7:30, Damon had already gone on.

It’s funny to think back to the bizarro first tour he made in the states, that night four years ago at the Paradise when the beautiful folk-pop melodies of “Hour of Bewilderbeast” were nearly totally effaced by a slew of electronic gizmos, envelope-pushing interpretations, and Prince-like seductive crooning. He talked of his Bruce Springsteen obsession that night, and it seemed so out of place, so un-cool, and so ill-fitting for a guy like him. Fast-forward four years, and he’s recorded a stunning cover of “Thunder Road,” his Bruce adoration is well-known, and he got to tell us the story of meeting the Boss in Manchester last year before his show at the Lancaster Country Cricket Ground. The gist of his story: Damon named his son Oscar Bruce (as Bruce is too rubbish a name to be your first name, but ok for a middle name), and Springsteen dedicated that night’s “Thunder Road” to Oscar Bruce. “Then I went out and bought the bootleg to prove it happened.” Damon has an amazing, untarnished sincerity to him that took awhile to become real in my eyes. Just beneath that gruff, beared, be-hatted (?) exterior that says “Indie Busker, leave me alone,” there’s a warm, sensitive, sweet guy who writes some of the most amazing pop songs I’ve ever heard.



When we got in, he was playing tunes from “1 + 1 = 1,” his newest album, and as the show went on, I realized they were playing the entire album, in order, instrumentals and all. In the era of the almighty single and shuffling iPods (I should know, it’s pretty much the only way I use it), he’s one of the few artists I know of who really pays attention to an album as a whole, peppering instrumentals through the tracklisting, reprising a melody from one song in the chorus of another, and making musical transitions between songs to hold it all together. It was a pleasure to hear the album, which grows on me with every listen, come together with a full band, including cello, violin, guitar, piano, bass, drums, and flute. And think more “Flute Loop,” less Jethro Tull.



All of that said, it was a real treat of another kind to hear some of the other songs we know and love in the second set, a singles box-set, if you will, of material from his other three albums, including the better-than-most-people’s-real-albums soundtrack album to About a Boy. It became evident just how often he uses a flute in his songs, as well as how nicely the string section fits in when you can re-interpret the songs any way you like. Some of the highlights of the second half were the “Like a Virgin” intro to “Silent Sigh,” and the slow and easy rendition of “40 Days & 40 Fights,” as though it were an Elton John song, and if Elton John were good, and were into women. Damon got down on his knees and did his best heartthrob imitation to sell the point.



They had to be off stage by the hilarious hour of 9:30 – I wonder what they thought of us? – but packed in a great two hours of music. An excellent show, and home by ten, a perfect recipe for those of us who felt older than the rest of the crowd by a good five or ten years.

A busy day in both Boston and Cambridge ended with a great evening spent with Tim and Mari, as we enjoyed the “exotically hip atmosphere” at Pho Republique (and it’s ‘fuh,’ not ‘foh,’ by the way…) in their new ‘hood, the South End. We couldn’t make their wedding last month, but we got the scoop, the stories, the photos, the slight fiascos and larger joys and surprises of the experience over dinner and at their amazing apartment. Some elements of the Putnam Ave. Experience were still present, like the sweet vertical turntable (like this “late ’80s scene-setter” only with more wood), but others, such as the gigantic “Horses Crying Over Spilled Milk” painting and the Olsen Twins poster, were sadly things of the past. It was, of course, great to see both of them, and we had an abundance of things to talk about, if I may say so. Their apartment and neighborhood are so inviting we’ll definitely be back soon.



The day began in Boston, as I commuted in with Aimee as far as Cambridge, and then headed in to work. After about three hours there, I caught the bus over to Boston again, to catch a preview screening of Jean Pierre Jeunet‘s new film, A Very Long Engagement, at the MFA. Jeunet, one of my favorite directors since I first saw Delicatessen at the Capri in Anchorage twelve years ago, was in attendance, and answered questions for about 45 minutes after the film. The film was a pretty amazing piece of work, an engrossing story, both emotionally and viscerally, though I’m still sorting through it. I’ve been trying to reconcile the playful, observant eye of the master choreographer, Jeunet as capturer of moments of serendipitous wonder, with the unceasing, bone-crushing horror of the rain-soaked trenches of the First World War. He does it better than most would, I suppose, but it’s still a tough gap to bridge. Imagine the heart and imagination of Am?lie, the storyline of Rashomon, and the combat scenes from Saving Private Ryan, and you begin to get the picture. The best part about the film for me is that it also stars the butcher, the ex-clown, and “Rufus” from Delicatessen – he likes to work with the same stock company of actors from film to film, adding new ones along the way. I’ll be interested to see how this big-budget Warner Bros. film does over here, all blood-and-subtitles (is that a new niche market, maybe?).

It may not seem an obvious destination this time of year, but how else would I be able to learn the true value of the Minneapolis skywalk network? Minneapolis was host to the 14th annual Association of Moving Image Archivists conference: three days of seminars, presentations, and discussions on the history of film preservation, techniques and technologies, and thoughts on the future, as well as screenings at two terrific theaters, The Riverview and The Heights.

I had to do this trip on the cheap, as I didn’t get any support from work, so in addition to my free frequent flier mile ticket, I cast myself upon the hospitality of one of my oldest friends, who lives with her husband in Minneapolis, and whom Aimee and I had stayed with two summers ago on our baseball park tour. As luck would have it, they were going to see the Pixies the night I got in, so we all headed to the RiverCentre for a fun show, although from the balcony, it was a bit more tame than the last time I saw them. Perhaps the most notable thing about the show was their unorthodox encore technique: they stopped playing, put down their instruments, and gathered at the front of the stage, smoked some cigarettes, and generally soaked in the applause as the house lights came up a bit. It was actually kind of nice; they got a break, they got to enjoy the applause, but we didn’t have to stand by as they went through the motion of going off stage, only to come back a minute later. As though in response to the Globe‘s debate on the value of the encore, they came up with a new middle ground.



The conference took up all day Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and was both informative and completely exhausting. I met some people I’d met at the previous conference I’d been to, in 2002 in Boston, and got to know others, some stars of the archive world (every world has ’em) whom I knew by reputation. I also met up with the Alaska contingent, and went out for drinks to discuss Carrs, Alaskan politics, and the upcoming 2006 AMIA Conference to be held in Anchorage. Can’t wait to be the local there.

In between sessions, I wandered the downtown, as well as the University campus, Dinkytown, Eat Street, and the maze of skybridges, skywalks, or skyways, whichever you prefer.



And yes, that is a statue of Mary Tyler Moore on the left; you’d be surprised how many grown men I saw mimic her pose for a photograph. At the Turf Club in St. Paul, the Kitty Cat Klub in Dinkytown, and the Kmart in Minneapolis, I found photobooths, two out of three of which worked. The Gehry-designed Weisman Art Museum was a sight to see, as well.



The conference gave me a lot of food for thought, and if nothing else, confirmed my desire to stay in this field, to become a film archivist, more than just someone who works in a film archive, which is what I feel like I’m doing now. It also confirmed my desire not to travel for awhile; I’ve been to Chicago, New York, Florida, and Minneapolis in the past month, and it’s time for a break.

Every time I see this sign, I wonder what it’s doing here, on the corner of Arlington and Newbury, at the edge of the Public Garden in Boston. It’s straight out of an English motorway, with that distinctive typeface, the bird’s-eye representation of the street layout, and the mysterious “C-28, C-9” indicators. It’s a dead ringer. This sign is the only one I’ve seen like it in Boston, much less anywhere else in the US, and I can’t figure out why it’s designed that way, or why it’s there. Maybe it’s a question for Mac at Starts & Stops.