A highly cultured weekend

• Friday evening I watched The Big Sleep at a friend's apartment.  We read it the novel a couple months ago in a book club, and I guess she was curious about the movie.  I liked the novel a lot, partly for itself and partly because it was interesting seeing an early example of a hardboiled detective novel - basically, what the stuff I filched from my father's bookshelf as a kid was based on.  The movie was less interesting to me - I'm not much for classic films, and they cut out some of the highly-controversial-at-the-time plot elements and made Marlowe's character much more of a ladies' man than he seemed in the novel.  But I'm glad I saw it - I'd been envisioning the story as if it were a Kinsey Millhone novel set in the 1980's and this really helped put it in context.
• Saturday morning I painted at a Boys' Club in Alphabet City.  On the way there, I walked past a new restaurant that caught my eye because its name was similar to the Thai restaurant we'd ordered takeout from the night before.  It was in a location that used to house a diner called Rockin' Robin, which I went to frequently for brunch the first winter I lived in New York, with my East-Village-dwelling then-boyfriend.  We were both sad when it closed suddenly, in part because it was one of the few places we both liked.  I've never lived anywhere long enough to be nostalgic for things that used to be in it, and I haven't been in New York that long; Meg Ryan's character in You've Got Mail notes that New York changes quickly, and derides the type of people who like that, of which she knows she is one - but then, her bookstore has just gone out of business and she fears it will be replaced by something "really depressing, like a Baby Gap".  One of the odd and constantly surprising things about living here is how much my life looks,visually, like the movies.
• Saturday evening I saw the American Ballet Theater production of Lady of the Camellias.  It was a really unusual ballet, I thought (although I'm getting the sense that ABT productions are more varied than and in general very different from NYCB productions, which come in only two major flavors).  The plot was very intricate - which makes sense because it is derived not from a fairy tale but from an actual play - and the choreography was unusual and very good.  I thought the pas de deux in the first act was completely amazing - most slow, romantic dances just look like the man is moving the woman around, but this one looked as if they were actually in love.  And I loved the pieces with Manon and her lover, and especially when they interacted with Marguerite and Armand.  The structure of the ballet was also unusual - instead of opening with an overture, it began with a character walking onto an already-lit stage, and the audience only gradually realize that the show was beginning, and the house lights going down a few minutes later.  It was also a memory play, but not solely in the memory of one character.  And I have never seen copulation simulated with such flagrancy in anything remotely this highbrow.  On the whole - well, it could have been a bit shorter, but I definitely liked it.
• Today I saw Jerusalem.  Apparently the play is likely to win a Tony, which it will not deserve, and the actor playing the main character is likely to win another Tony, which he also will not deserve.  It's not a bad play; actually it's a good play.  It's funny and well-acted and the dramatic structure is very tidy and it makes some interesting allegoric references to Shakespeare.  But it wants to be a great play, to make alarming, trenchant observations about the dehumanizing effects of modern society, and it fails at that, which makes it less good than it could be.  I was not sorry that I saw it, because I enjoyed the first two-thirds of it and because it was interesting, but (unlike Lady of the Camellias) if it is still around, or around again, in five years, I will not go and see it a second time.