Random pop cultural updates:

1. Last night I caught a screening of As Tears Go By, Wong Kar-Wai's first movie, at BAM's two-week retrospective. It's a messy, cheap riff on Mean Streets, filtered through John Woo sunglasses, but irresistably watchable, even in a print where subtitles occasionally disappear for reels at a time or assume Dadaist levels of incomprehensibility: "I go to hospital." "Stomach-washing again?" And there are a few hints of Wong's greatness to come, especially in a long fatal love chase scored to a Cantonese-language version of Berlin's "Take My Breath Away," which is exactly the sort of thing that makes this sentimental critic quiver with delight.

2. The first volume of The Complete Peanuts, spanning the years 1950-1952, is even more delectable a pop cultural object than I'd hoped. The humor isn't nearly as developed as it would soon become, but the graphics, if anything, are even more luscious: Schulz fell into a sort of happy minimalism in the strip's golden period, but in these early strips, especially the Sunday funnies, the backyards and suburban landscapes are lovingly rendered, the perfect place for a kid to play. I have a hunch that one of these twenty-four fat little volumes (maybe the 1966-1967 edition?) will eventually make it onto my desert island list, right there along with Dante and Borges.

3. Finally, the first disc of Disney's On the Front Lines has finally arrived from Netflix. Many of the cartoons in this collection of World War II-era shorts are a bit of a bore ("Donald Gets Drafted" isn't nearly as fun as it sounds), but the educational shorts about war bonds and kitchen grease are great, and works like "Education for Death" and "Der Fuerher's Face" (aka "Donald Duck in Nutziland") haven't lost any of their fascination. The most revealing of the shorts is "Chicken Little." I remember seeing this cartoon on the Disney Channel when I was growing up, and its grim conclusion makes a lot more sense when you realize that Foxy Loxy was originally reading from Mein Kampf.