If this is Wednesday it must be Nostrum

Continuing through the Epistles of St. Jules to the Forensicians, just thumbing through a few weeks' worth, there's the Nostrumite's rant about people not respecting film history, brought on by the death of Akira Kurasawa: "Who nowadays actually watches The Seven Samurai?” the Mite grumbles. “Just because it’s in black-and-white, and it has subtitles. It might as well have scabies!”

His approach to literature: "For a class this Monday he was supposed to be reading Middlemarch, which originally attracted him because he thought the author was a transvestite until he read the introduction more carefully."

Then there was  his unrequited love affair with Claire Danes, who studied at Yale for a while. "He went down to Yale this weekend to pick up the odd piece of mazuma for judging, and apparently he ran into Ms. Danes about eight times, and not once did she collapse into his arms in the realization that he was just the man to make a dent in her so-called life." 

Then there was the end of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the demise of the Isaac Mizrahi's fashion company, and most of all, the death of Alicia Parla who, according to the NY Times, "showed the world how to rumba." Walter Winchell called her "that lovely Havana torso tosser." And, if I'm not mistaken, we finally met up with the Falutin sisters for the first time. 

All of this goes back to 1998. Makes you wish you lived back then, doesn't it? Makes me wish I lived back then, until I remember that, in fact, I did, and that I actually wrote all this stuff down. Life was simpler then. Way simpler.