Heading back to New York on Thursday. I’m pretty excited — excited for hanging out with young city peoples and for a good dose of New York heat and frenzy and hot subways and cold beers in backyards and barbecues and some inspired picture-taking and a brand new really exciting job.

Last Saturday we drove down to beautiful wonderfully colorful and decaying Hudson and looked at antiques and lots of mid-century modern furniture that I oh-so-dearly coveted, especially some nice dressers and desks. Then, stopped in at a few galleries, ate sourdough pizza with prosciutto and figs at Baba Louie’s, and my mom got me a nice plum linen crinkle shawl-scarf at liliandloo. We also stopped at the market and got lots of peaches, plums, cinnamon sugar donuts, radishes, eggplant, and lots of other yummy things.

On Sunday we drove to Tanglewood over in Lenox, Massachusetts. The 80-year-old(!) Kurt Masur was conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a trio of Mozart’s symphonies. We packed a picnic with some wine and cheese and peaches and egg salad and the NYTimes and I took a nap on the picnic blanket on the big lawn with babies running around all over.

Otherwise: lots of sewing, watching movies, exercising, and working on the Modern Letter Project. Here is a list of the most recent movies. The recommended movies are *starred*:

Iris*: amazing, sad, and wonderful story about the English novelist Iris Murdoch who transforms from a young, vibrant, ever-enthusiastic and passionate lover and writer into an older woman overtaken by Alzheimer’s. With her faithful husband and life’s companion John by her ailing side, one observes that even the sharpest mind and wit becomes dependent and needs love the most at the very end.

Woman is the Future of Man: Bizarre “post-modern” Korean film in which two friends recount past tales with a woman they both dated. Many unnecessary and explicit sex scenes, and a generally hard-to-follow plot.

Breathless*: Jean-Luc Godard’s 1961 film about a charming young thief who kills a police officer and tries to convince an American woman in Paris to hide in Italy with him. Classic Godard full of existential crises and beautiful people suffering romantic woes.

Winter Solstice: Suburban drama! A widower and his two sons struggle with their own ways of moving on without their mother. The sons rebel, the father reluctantly but serendipitously seeks a new companion.

Yi Yi*: a Wonderful Taiwanese film about the struggles of a family — marriage, death, in-laws, puberty, childhood curiosity — but amazing writing, acting, humanity in the characters and their relationships to one another. The philosophizing 8 year old son Yang Yang (Jonathan Chang), who, upon being given a camera takes pictures of the backs of people’s heads to “help them see what they can’t know,” is extraordinary and endearing.

The King Of Masks*: A Chinese film about an old master known as the “king of masks” looking for an heir to his art. He soon discovers the little boy he adopts is much more than a little boy. Heartwarming and highly recommended.

Fear & Trembling*: a curious French-Japanese film about a Japanese-born Belgian woman played by Sylvie Testud who returns to Japan as an older woman trying to see if she can truly be Japanese. Clever, unnerving at times, and off-kilter.

Published Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 3:38 am. Filed under Movies, Upstate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.