no face
It always puts a bit of fear in you to see someone in their fifties still hopelessly searching for love, and it's even weirder when it's Billy Joel.
Since he sold his East Hampton mansion to Jerry Seinfeld, Joel has been living in a modest rented house nearby. But he tells me that he is trying to rent an apartment in Manhattan for the sole purpose of meeting women. ''I'm not going to meet anyone out here,'' he says. ''The happiest times in my life were when my relationships were going well—when I was in love with someone, and someone was loving me. But in my whole life, I haven't met the person I can sustain a relationship with yet. So I'm discontented about that. I'm angry with myself. I have regrets.''
Our conversation continues in this vein for most of the afternoon, and after a while I find myself in the peculiar position of trying to make Billy Joel feel better.
Kamala and Amala were discovered in a wolf lair by the Reverend J.A.L. Singh in 1920, and seem to be the inspiration for many stories of children raised by wolves. Amala died from dysentery after a year; Kamala survived several years longer and developed an idiosyncratic vocabulary of about thirty words that had little to do with English or Bengali.
Spirited Away (2001). This is the latest from Hayao Miyazaki, who previously brought us Princess Mononoke and My Neighbor Totoro, among many other animated films that we may never see, as they're impossible to find in the US. Nik somehow got hold of a Cantonese DVD with English subtitles and we watched that, as the film isn't due to hit theaters here for another week or two. Apparently there was this complicated lawsuit where Disney stole one of Miyazaki's plots for The Lion King, so now they're contractually obligated to distribute his films here, but they do a really half-assed job of it. At any rate, this one is wonderful—better than Mononoke. There are plenty of bits where you don't know whether to laugh or shiver, and a couple of moments that I found genuinely terrifying. I don't know that I've ever seen a better collection of oddball magical creatures, and the dragon is beyond beautiful. If it comes to your town, see it; if not, I have a VHS that I can lend to people via mail.
