My darling, I fantasize about renewing my passport so that you can take me bicycling and buy me crocuses, while I a different day, will organize ourselves to visit a museum to take in The Old Masters. And at the end of each excursion, we'll return to the S.B. Hotel and compare notes - & etc. - between the sheets. I do hope (with or without me) you make it into that nearby burg and check out the main museum there. I know, it'll be rough on your own, and you might not even necessarily get much out of the very moment that you're there contemplating a Rembrandt or Vermeer. But I encourage you to go through the motions anyway, check them out, the little handpainted miracles, the externalized - thus eternalized (otherwise vanished) - moments of dailiness of a time past - on the wall. You'll return to where you stay, you may shrug, busy yourself with a day's exigencies (ablutions, a bite to eat), sleep on it, mention it to colleagues the next day maybe - it may not seem like much. But I am quite, quite sure that in some future moment, when you are far far away, in the Far East or the Midwest, back on these shores or some other place - having seen those iconic images - they will come back to you. You will think of them again, you will return to those images, some time when you're enjoying an afternoon slant of light coming through a window, or you see a woman illuminated, mending a sock (unlikely - that), or holding a tiny balance, or reading a love letter, or conferring with her maid - you'll think - oh, it's just like a beautiful image I saw hanging on the museum wall that afternoon when it was too rainy to go bicycling... Those images - or some moment from your museum afternoon - will detonate later - in the best possible way. Think of it as laying away a tiny investment, whose rewards you are sure to reap in a small and assuredly unexpected and rich way later...

Ah, enough lecturing. Wait - no - I have one other little lecture in me - but not towards you, darling(s).

Mr. Aronofsky, you simply cannot end each of your movies (the two I've seen anyway, The Wrestler and Black Swan) the same way. Spoiler alert! But seriously, Mr. A - what kind of obsession is that, where the protagonist meets his or her end by taking a flying leap off a proscenium or mosh pit or ballet stage or skyscraper or river bank or whatever? Wasn't that done in Butch Cassidy, come to think of it?

Mixed feelings about The Black Swan. Mommie Dearest + Girl, Interrupted, filtered through The Wrestler, stirred with Turn of the Screw, maybe (as in, was she or wasn't she crazy, or were they out to get her? Tough to say in the ballet world - could well be both). That all said, I admired and enjoyed some of the directorial effects - in one scene, the swirling of the camera like an invisible partner as Natalie Portman dances, moments of exquisite attention to unexpected detail (Vermeerlike!) - such as the crunching of her toes as Natalie puts her feet on the floor as she wakes up in the morning -

I'm glad I went to see it. Also the theme of trying to balance - or break through - perfectionist tendencies and technique, and simply let go, get past one's ego in order to free one's self and express in an original way - that theme certainly spoke to me...

May I say to those few who seem to enter my blog via a Bonnard nude siesta image - I look just like her... Also, let me say that in most every respect I'm way more like the lusty, grinning, uninhibited Mila Kunis character than the ever controlled Natalie Portman one. In my own mind, at any rate. Because I can imagine people from my past saying - say what? Belle - grinning? uninhibited? she never said a word, seemed pissed off half the time...

What's that Lyle Lovett song - something about "my own mind - ain't nothin' but a good time?" Like that.

My darlings - I'm back to the plural - oh what a mess I am as I practice not to deceive, but simply to score a kiss or two sometime this millenium - ah they make it look so easy in the movies, Mila anyway, in the ballet world...

Where is everybody today, anyway? Bicycling I hope, or taking in old masters, or both

I am simply transpiring here all by myself between the sheets

XOXO, you(s)