Stanley Kauffmann is 90

Actually, he's 90 and a couple of weeks, having been born on the 24th of April, 1916. Many years ago I wrote to him, I think it was in early '87, and he sent me back a nice, warm-spirited note on New Republic stationery. If I install my printer/combo machine this week, I suppose I could scan it and show you a GIF of it. I wonder how he would feel about that, and why TNR didn't make a big fuss about his birthday and invite me. Ok, I don't really wonder about them not inviting me, and they may have, in fact, made something of a fuss-- since I stopped subscribing to TNR in 2002, I really haven't kept up that much. But I do know that Kauffmann is still cranking out one column a week, 48 times a year.

Anyway, apropo of my paying homage to the dean of American film criticism and teaching myself more about photo-editing, I thought I'd put up this pixilated 2-D monument up to him. (It's also a sort of inside joke, insofar as an old friend of mine from the late 80s used to tease me for being excessively enamored with Kauffmann's writing style and sensibility, and often joked about how he meant to sneak into my dwelling and but up a similar monument to SK while I was away. That was back in the day when I had all sorts of foolish dreams of being the next Stanley Kubrick and so forth...)


finally-- I will be away for 2 or 3 days. I actually note this not because I have a vast readership-- clearly I don't-- but to see what effect it has on my visits, since I'm curious how many people come here (semi-)regularly, as opposed to because a web search somehow paired two or more words that happended to appear in one of my posts, like the guy(?) who visited HZ a couple of years ago looking for "gay+vampire+trilateral+comission"...........???


(of course, I'll admit that having once been the no. 1 googled source for "giant+robots+run+amuck" gave me a nice warm feeling inside. Be seeing you.)