Visual Diary #26

RIP Bud Cort, bird deity, William Holden's Stupid Death, seashells

Hi friends. My brain is very crowded at the moment. Every day I wake up from spectacularly complicated technicolour dreams with a hundred different directions, pursuits, possibilities, resolutions. Is it the moon? Or the shifting season? This last week I have tried to do things to stop time: watching movies, swimming in the sea, painting. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. Hope you are doing okay!

RIP Bud Cort, who was so charming in Harold and Maude, and was the voice of Edgar the computer in Electric Dreams (time for a rewatch!)

This is a copy of a picture seen on Jenny Mendes Ceramics Facebook page - they post beautiful imagery- mostly ancient art and ceramics - very myth-y. Link.

This is William Holden in Sunset Boulevard - one of my favourite films. William Holden - so handsome, so trapped! (W called him basic and said he had no emotional core which made it hard for him to care.) Gloria Swanson - the scene where she emarks on her elaborate beauty treatments! The dead monkey! William O. Jenkins House - 641 South Irving Boulevard! Gone now. Here’s a picture of it being demolished.

William Holden died age 61 in his home. He was drunk and he tripped over a rug, landing on the corner of a coffee table, an ignominious way to go. He’d lost his looks by then, to alcohol, and his girlfriend at the time was Stefanie Powers, 1970/80s guest spot stalwart and from another fave Hart to Hart (just got chills watching the opening credits ) Meanwhile here is a documentary on the fabulous Billy Wilder for later.

Found a really nice first edition of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea, and then went to the sea myself (although not for long enough to write a book on solitude, patterns of living and the new feminism) and brought home some bits of shell.

“For a full day and two nights I have been alone. I lay on the beach under the stars at night alone. I made my breakfast alone. Alone I watched the gulls at the end of the pier, dip and wheel and dive for the scraps I threw them. A morning’s work at y desk, and then, a late picnic lunch alone on the beach. And it seemed to me, separated from my own species, that i was nearer to others: the shy willet, nesting in the ragged tide-wash behind me; the sand-piper running in little unfrightened steps down the shining beach rim ahead of me; the slowly flapping pelicans over my head, casting down wind; the old gull, hunched up, grouchy, surveying the horizon ….”