1~24~00 (Yesterday's column Today)
A multiplicity of houseguests continues.  Kirsten's parents have flown in from Maine, a former bandmate is down from Oakland and temporarily moving in until  job and money is firmly underfoot and later this week a visitor from Wisconsin comes flying into the LAX for ten day visit. 
The clouds blotted out the sun for the weekend  in a fashion all to common for weekday laborers.  Spend all week tied to a cubicle, lashed to a thunderous crap spewing machine, or chained to a cash register knowing the sun shines outdoors, children laugh and play and fight in its rays and that soon you too will be able to enjoy the basking warmth because after all that's why you live in this festering neon-snot desert anyway, right?  Right?  Isn't it?  Is their any other reason?  Maybe you want to be famous?  Maybe you want to make it?  Well, for now you're slinging hash and you get the weekend off and it's L.A. and it's goddamn raining!  Your mood can do nothing but sour.  And mine did. 
We went to see the new Mike Leigh film "Topsy Turvy."  In Mike Leigh's first period piece he embraces an attention to detail more fine and delicate than most any other director would even be willing to, and to this he deserves credit, from the items cluttering up Sullivan's desktop to the incredible costuming of the performers' of the Mikado.  I say this so I can say something nice about the film.  I respect Leigh's pictures with their examinations of class struggle, personal odysseys of spirit and the laborer's struggle.  All these elements are present in "Topsy Turvy," and it seems apparent that Leigh wants to plunge their depths in his characters, but instead this overly long film is littered with extended sequences of Gilbert and Sullivan Operettas.  Leigh does a good job staging it all, but the dramatic emphasis placed upon the characters is nowhere to be found in this the loose unnecessary sojourns onto the stage. 
There is more that can be said about this foppish mess of a film but I don't feel the need to say shit out of respect for Leigh's other works.  Also it's lunchtime.  Time to meet Kirsten out in the hellish land that is Burnbank: foul, miserable, crowded land where assholism is mistaken for courtesy. 

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