EISENSTEIN'S "POTEMKIN" ON THE FRYING PAN

Play Eisenstein's "Potemkin" on a Saturday when it's real hot, and just sit there in your room exhaling air conditioning freon and possibly making margaritas with a surgical-steel blender.

The film looks so old that it sputters on certain cells and almost becomes like landscape. I have decided that there is something elusive in this old Russian movie about an uprising on what appears to be a Russian battleship (shit, hence the name right?).

I was reading a book of interviews on Francis Bacon and they talk quite a bit about how one scene in this movie haunted Francis Bacon while he was a card sharp in Monte Carlo (really, more like a casino lizard). And there is no sound, which is the weirdest thing nowadays: to have no score. I mean, the Cohen brothers mostly dazzled me in "No Country..." by managing to not need a score.

The thing turns out to be quite soothing, like a sequence of postcards or procession of action painting. Soothing was sitting under the crow's nest on the adjoining barge of the Frying Pan. That, and being remote from the barge, somehow there at the humongous restaurant and yet part of the Hudson landscape, the heliport, the water taxi, and low slung buildings on the Jersey side.