If you’re living in one of these soulless, pencil-thin glass towers on Central Park South, you are definitely suffering from a serious aesthetic deficiency — a condition some would call the wealthy Shallow Hal syndrome.

In other words, during filming of The Hustler director Robert Rossen developed the hots for female lead Piper Laurie, unaware that she’d been “seeing” critic Joe Morgenstern (aka “JoMo”). Just before filming ended Rossen offered Laurie a significant role (presumably the sensuous, mentally disturbed temptress that Jean Seberg eventually played) in Lilith, but the blood drained from Rossen’s face when Laurie said she was about to marry Morgenstern…gaahhh!

Eight or nine days ago I listened to a newly released version of Joni Mitchell‘s “See You Sometime” from “Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. 3: The Asylum Years (1972-1975).”

And it won’t let me go. I’m hearing it over and over…car, shower, writing, walking, shopping. The only way to discharge a pernicious ear bug is to simply tough it out through dozens of listenings….eventually it’ll run out of gas.

This song is not one of Mitchell’s all-time greatest, but I can tell you one thing: There’s no way Taylor Swift will ever write or perform a song anywhere near as gentle, complex, delicate, intimate, poetic and melodically moody as “See You Sometime.”

Swift does what she does very well or least very successfully, but Mitchell’s eclectic mode of expression (or a facsimile) just isn’t in her. She’ll never get there. Mitchell’s stuff is alluring, sexy, sophisticated, nectary, lasting — Swift songs are candy.

Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest has been shorn of explicitness while humming with implication. That’s the basic idea, and either this approach knocks you flat or it doesn’t. It’s a “brilliant” film as far as its austere design allows it to go, but the only thing that really got me was the opening overture — intense “oh, shit” music played over a black background before light invades and the film begins.

In the wake of all those non-convictions, Kevin Spacey has delivered a riveting, commanding performance.