Today: a keeper. I slept about four hours last night, which left me with the feeling that I did not have the brain cells to interact even over the internet; nonetheless, I met eredien in Porter Square for weird pizza and roti, and we spent the rest of the afternoon at the Gore Place Sheepshearing Festival, to be known from now on as Sheepfest. It was fantastic. There were alpacas. There was a guard llama. There were baby goats, nine days old, three black and one brown as nutmeg, tiny and fearless, with slot eyes like octopi. And sheep, already shorn by the time we got there, and in this heat I imagine grateful for it. We watched one of the sheepdog demonstrations, carried around cups of fresh lemonade and looked at crafts like honey soap and lost-wax coelacanth pendants. There was a small regiment of the Continental Army, whose drummer had a face like a dry stone wall. We missed the Morris dancing, but that's what next year is for; ditto the maypole. And afterward I was briefly introduced to two awesome friends of eredien's whose livejournal names I do not know, but someone should please tell me. My plans for the rest of the day mostly involve not moving very much, although I may watch Bride of Frankenstein once the sun goes down. Two days ago it was raw spring, today even the air is alive with summer. The light is lingering the right way in the sky. I want to make ice cream floats.

Last night, for that matter: also a keeper. I saw Costa-Gavras' Z (1969) at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. I found it brilliant for many reasons, including its ability to sculpt characters in three dimensions out of a remarkably terse script and the almost allegorical weight it gains from deliberately not identifying its mise-en-scène (while reproducing in almost documentary detail the events surrounding the death of Gregoris Lambrakis in Thessaloniki in 1963), but on reflection what I really love is the handling of the character who eventually emerges as the film's hero, although its adherence to the realities of its source material will not provide him with a victory so much as a very bitter proof. He is a nameless functionary, the magistrate brought in to investigate and close the case—we have glimpsed him before, but indifferently. He is young, but not charismatically so; he wears a conservative suit and heavy tinted glasses, which render him nearly faceless; all we know of him is what we observe. He is neither prepossessing nor nebbishy; he might be anyone. A cog in the system. What he is, however, is honest. And not stupid. And therefore the nightmare of a corrupt government. But the audience is never sure, even in the film's final act, which way he is going to jump; or even if he will jump, or remain, as his superiors urge him, prudently motionless. This is fascinating. It's not like a film noir, where we are unsure of a character because of what we know about them—compromise, coercion, habit. The magistrate is a blank, so all we can do is hope or be even more afraid. I was delighted to come home to IMDb and discover he was played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, who voiced Uncle Irvin, the migraine-prone brain in a tank in Jeunet and Caro's La cité des enfants perdus (1995); it's perfectly reasonable that I recognized his name and not his face. I would now like to see him in more roles where he actually has a body. And probably something else by Costa-Gavras.

"Phersu" has been accepted by Not One of Us.

And as I composed this entry, I saw in the Globe that Bea Arthur has died. I never saw Golden Girls; I knew her from the original cast recordings of The Threepenny Opera, Fiddler on the Roof, Mame. The depth of her voice sometimes reminded me of my grandmother. Who else but a bosom buddy?