Sunny and cold today. It's 47˚F, but the wind chill is at 41˚F. We could have snow showers tonight. Yesterday I did precisely 1,000 words on the third chapter of Cherry Bomb . --- Here on this day, marked as it is as an observance, I have this thought: America has now reached a point where there are thirteen-year-old children who have not ever known their country when it was not at war. Thirteen years, going on fourteen. --- Last night we finally got to see Neil Jordan's Byzantium (2012). It had such a very limited release, we were never able to see it at a theatre. It's an extraordinary film, certainly deserving of far more attention than its received. I wish my head were clearer at the moment, so that I could perhaps articulate why I found Byzantium so sublime. An island of raw stone jutting up from the Irish Sea. Red waterfalls cascading down black rocks. A decrepit amusement park by the ocean, aging boats on the sand. A dead hotel, surely filled with ghosts and gone bitter in its solitude, forced back to life as a brothel. A mother and a daughter. A tiny wooden box with a secret inside. A storm of black birds whirling against a stormy sky. And all of this captured by the camera's eye. As I said last night on Facebook, Byzantium makes for a nice companion, tonally, to Jordan's Ondine (2009). See it. And if you've not seen Ondine , see it, as well. I've spent the last two nights watching Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). It's been the better part of a year since I'd seen it. What a truly stupendous achievement. But seeing it again only underscores my disappointment in the first third of The Hobbit . Will I see the second installment? Sadly, yes. I know I will. December 11th will roll around, and it won't matter how much I've bemoaned brain-rattling 48fps and cheap 3D tricks that, together, made the first film almost impossible to sit through. I actually had to spend minutes at a time looking away from the screen. Still, I'll be there. Ought To Know Better, Aunt Beast