While I waited for the show to go on I noticed the discreet atmospheric light on the wall of the movie theater flickering and I thought it’d make a good little video and I imagined an employee scolding and forbidding me but of course that wasn’t going to happen and I was about to press the button when I noticed the light wasn’t flickering through my phone and I thought maybe it’s one of those things, the light registers a different way, the frequencies or something, and in my disappointment I lowered the phone and looked back at the light and saw it wasn’t flickering in real life and I thought something’s wrong with my eyes or maybe my mind.

The planes look slow and lumbering as they take off and land, almost like you could catch up to them by foot, grab hold of the fuselage.

I love the names on the planes. Like Kalitta on the 747s, a familiar-sounding name, I thought maybe just from every other airport I’ve been to in my life. I looked it up and saw it’s Connie Kalitta, drag racer, Beau Bridges in “Heart Like a Wheel.”

Thanks

I accidentally titled this post Thanks so there it is. Thanks and praises.

I saw a bridge in ruins in a Japanese anime and it reminded me of the rope bridge over those river falls in Jamaica. It was just scary enough to be a little rite of passage for all the tourists, at the beginning of the climb, something to make us feel brave. It was exposed on either side between the lines you held onto and the base of bundled bamboo canes a couple feet wide. It wobbled a little—just enough. Really you couldn’t fall unless you wanted to.

In Birthday Room #3 there was pizza and soda for the kids, pizza and water for the parents.

As their photos played on the screen on the wall they all shouted “Me!” when it wasn’t them and “Not me!” when it was. Like they’d all just discovered irony. Like the apes at the beginning of 2001, using a bone for a weapon. Evolving.

You look on the internet a minute and you find that the guy in the ape suit from that movie was a friend of John and Yoko’s and he wrote a book about his years hanging out with them except now he’s battling with Yoko about can he ever put it out, and anyway now is 2008, so who knows anything, really? For the love of God.

I almost had a good time today at the sad people’s store, wandering the aisles in search of spaghetti and tonic. In from the cold rain for just a minute or two.

As I did the dishes two great movies were on at the same time: “Office Space” and “School of Rock.” Each one a sparkling affirmation of humanity, a blow against the forces of evil and oppression. I’d watch one until it broke for commercials, switch to the other, switch back. Then they were both on commercials at the same time, pills, dish soap, whatever. Got to serve the man I guess.

Every time I peel potatoes I think about the Holocaust. In the comfort of my well-appointed kitchen. Why is that? Is it some movie, “Sophie’s Choice” or “Schindler’s List”? Is there a potato-peeling scene in one of them? In both? Of an attractive Jewess who’s been adopted by the sadistic camp commander and who, in the midst of horror, has the chance to peel and fuck her way to survival? Such a European food, potatoes. So plain and dumb and useful. Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, fry ‘em. The food of kings and pawns and Nazis. I think I also read that the peels were desperately coveted by starving prisoners. Forced to grovel for scraps, like dogs. I think about them with each flick of my wrist.

Came home last night with that kind of lucid drunk, where you notice the faces across from you on the train, of young women resting on each other's shoulders, nearly asleep after a night out on the town.

It was past 2 and the pizza place was open, just like it always is, like it was 9 o'clock, or 2 in the afternoon. Same type of people inside, too. I got two slices to go, taking great care to enunciate the word “regular.”

At home I watched the beginning of “Blade Runner,” set in 2019, with replicants who’d been activated in 2016. I considered whether there was anything prescient in the film. Maybe the ubiquity of commercials, the grimy mix of cultures. I guess we are awaiting the singularity sometime soon. But not the flying cars. Always the flying cars.

A History of FIlm

They’re alive! Alive! Alive, I tell you! They’re alive! Through smoke and steam; through windows, windshields and fog—and the hole in the bedroom door—we thought we projected our ideals. In the end we were just projecting our selves.

If I’m lucky I get a clear view north out the F train window in the morning, riding high above Gowanus. I love the rows of low buildings, utilitarian, industrial. Warehouses for obscure manufacturing concerns, signs faded by the decades, graffiti all over their corrugated gates. Kentile Floors.

There’s a hot dog place down there, in the middle. Must be Ninth Street. “Hot Dogs,” it says in big, blue, glorious letters.

There are vast, weedy fields ringed by fences, elaborately tagged. Some kind of gravel factory. Conveyor belts and cherry pickers. Earth movers. Terrifying metal towers from a nightmare for no apparent reason, with narrow ladders going nowhere.

Then the train dips down and plunges underground to Carroll Gardens. You get a glimpse of whatever’s happening on the street before it does. The other day I spied a scene being shot. A man stood at the open door of a parked car, streetside. He seemed to be holding a phone to his face. A few yards away the camera rolled, the director of photography squinted into the viewfinder, the director peered over his shoulder, and along the periphery were huddled the rest of the cast and crew.

A conversation I overheard between a man and a woman in their thirties, walking down Seventh Street in the Slope:

Woman: "'Singin' in the Rain' was in 'A Clockwork Orange'?"

Man: "Yes it was."

Woman: "I had no idea!"

I thought I'd hate "Avatar" but I liked it slightly better than that. Sure it was hokey and stupid and formulaic. But I appreciated the savagery of its attack on American militarism and imperialism, the notion that we're essentially entitled to the world's riches and we can run roughshod over other countries, races and species to feed our greedy maws.

Hey Joe

While watching "The Future Is Unwritten," Julian Temple's documentary about Joe Strummer, it struck me to what degree rebellion, expressions of anomie and so-called countercultural movements are actually collaborations between the oppressive and the oppressed, between tyranny and freedom, between the mainstream and the margins. To think of these forces as antagonistic is almost absurd. They rely on each other, they desire each other. They need each other.

Hey Joe: Those dilapidated council flats - they weren't boarded up to keep you out, they were boarded up to invite you in. Society's inequities beg for the cleansing fire of scorn and ridicule, and society created you for just that purpose. The bourgeois in their cozy little homes, they know they're in for it. They wouldn't open up the paper if they didn't, dontcha know. They'd hardly recognize themselves but for you. They're grateful, though this little game does not permit them to admit it. Look how vital and alive the dreary city seems when a clutch of punks animates its ghastly, concrete paths. The cars, the cops, the buildings. The money and the food. They're not your antagonists in this play, they're your props. Downpressor man? He invented you to kill him. It's the ugliness in the world that lets you make it beautiful, the horror that lets you be the hero, the evil that lets you do good. This world was made for you, and you make it whole. But I think you knew that anyway. I think you found it out. I think you thought it was a bad thing, and that's why you ran away. But maybe it wasn't a bad thing.

We sat outside at some Mexican place on Columbus before the movie and it smelled of dirty dishes, mold and rot. That particular odor that busy, bad bars get; that chain restaurants get. Places where the busing station's always burdened by a tub of dirty dishes.

I drank salty-syrup margaritas until it was time to go and I had a good old-fashioned headache. We crisscrossed the IMAX room, dim, steep and infernal, in search of empty seats. Finally I clambered over to a single space in the middle, near the front of the balcony.

It was "The Dark Knight," and I could barely for the life of me understand what was going on. Seemed like a deliberately nasty movie, bleak, unfunny. People crashing about and you can't focus on a body part. Dehumanizing. Antihumanizing. And Heath Ledger's performance nagged me throughout: Who had he imitated to form his version of the Joker? The voice, I was certain, is Tom Waits. But where does the flickering tongue come from? He gives the impression that he has to remember not to bite it every time he speaks. There seemed to be aspects of Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, Truman Capote. Maybe some old-time comic, some contemporary of Milton Berle's? Something about his twisted-lispy voice, the way his smile would collapse into a grimace. I don't know. Reminded me of someone in particular and I still can't tell exactly. I have a feeling that once I do his performance will be demystified and seem empty to me, but until then I suppose I have to hand it to him. If he's created a character everyone recognizes but nobody knows, more power to him still.

The other night I tossed and turned with ideas for a dubious business swimming in my mind. I pawed around for my bedside pocket notebook and wrote in it in the dark, not knowing whether I was overwriting some previous thought, some great inspiration perhaps, and pausing to think and then not remembering what letter I was at in the word I was in.

We'd seen "Get Smart" at our local megaplex, the AMC Theater near Lincoln Center, which has a casino-like decor and quality - big fake plants, a perilous escalator, textured walls and tesselated carpets. The faint, not readily explainable stench of chlorine. The theater was warm - don't people see these movies in the summer just to be refrigerated for awhile? - and completely packed. I was thirsty and foul-tempered at first. I wondered if it would be OK to get up and get something to drink. I decided fuck it. People get up from movies, don't they? I made my way gingerly down the row but failed to avoid a woman's toes - I didn't step down on them but brushed them with my heel.

"Toes!" she said.

When I returned - with my Diet Coke, like some sad, fat fuck - I tried again my best to wind my way between the chair backs and the knees.

"Again with the toes!" the woman said.

I peered at her sinisterly - but uselessly, in the faint and inconsistent glow - as I sat back down. I muttered "damn you" and I don't know if she heard. But I felt much better and had a pretty good time after all.

Right as Rain

A while back I was flat on my back flipping through the channels on the teevee. I came upon an absolutely enchanting documentary on the Travel Network or Discovery or some shit. One of them, you know. It was filmed on that rich and glorious celluloid, the type they'd always use in the sixties and seventies I guess. Technicolor. I'm not too retro, nor am I sentimental much, but they really should bring that shit back. The reds are enraging, the blues like some kinda narcotic. And the sunlight, never mind the sunlight.

The title was "The Man Who Skied Down Mount Everest." It's about this Japanese guy who climbs Mount Everest, and I only knew it 'cause of the title at first, but I guess he was gonna ski back down. Lots of shots of the entire expedition trudging through Nepalese villages, sherpas with their burdens, prayer flags flitting in the wind outside misshapen stone monasteries, meals eaten around the Coleman stove. You know the drill. And the guy, he's the focus of the whole thing, everyone gives him a little extra elbow room. Little mountain urchins run up to him in wonder. The narration is from his diaries of the whole experience and its syntax is mesmerizing. He's got a sort of modesty in the shadow of the mountain's majesty, and of the audacity of what he's proposed to do. But there's always a sense of the tragic, futile beauty of his whole endeavor, sometimes crossing into narcissism, sometimes into nearly despairing self-doubt. Lots of deep scrutiny into the enterprise.

Eight people die at one point.

I was astounded and enraptured. And there was something about the whole experience of watching and listening that was really turning me on, pushing some button in me that was queerly familiar, pleasurable and terrifying all at once. The narration was in this absurd, stentorian accent, British but not really, the sort of voice that might emanate from some rich, perverted recluse, some fallen noble who's never left his Xanadu. At some point I realized, of course, that this was not the actual voice of the Japanese guy - though it did seem strangely appropriate to his exploit and persona. Then, in a second, I realized. It was Hal from "2001: A Space Odyssey." I looked it up on IMDB and in fact it was the voice of the very same person, Douglas Rain.

He does ski down but I won't tell you exactly how it ends, except to say it's beautiful.

I just saw the FUNNIEST movie! It's called "The Passion of the Christ."

It's about some dude who gets laughed at and whipped and shit because he says he's like, the king or something, and there is already another king. Or two. Or maybe three, it's confusing. It happens in olden days so I don't know. The whole time you're like, dude! Drop it! Don't be a dick.

Except I spose there wouldn't really be a movie if he did.

He's like covered in blood and they make him carry his own thing that they hang him on, his own scaffold or whatever, all the way up the hill. And the whole way, they're all like making fun of him! He's almost naked.

I think it's supposed to happen in the medieval ages.

It looks like some other dude might save him but that guy gets his ass kicked too. The soldiers really know how to kick some ass. They are badass! Don't fuck with them, motherfucker!

Then he dies and it's like, wow. So much blood dude!!!

I don't know if I totally recommend it because the action was like, kinda boring. But it was pretty awesome for the amount of blood.

I went out with Shelah for a rushed meal at that dangerously precious Flatiron foodie joint, Craftbar. Fennel pollen and sweetbreads in vanilla. We had the foie gras and the scallops and the sturgeon and would you believe it was very, very good. We went to the new Bill Murray which is also the new Jim Jarmusch. Murray is now so deeply entrenched in his aloof and recondite persona that he acts – and here I mean acts the way a protein catalyst acts upon the body, not the way a player acts upon the stage – as a black hole upon all surrounding narrative, feeling, context.

Arbitrary Ambiguous Film Noir Scene

"I don't think I can."

"You don't think?"

"Get the money."

"You are looking at a man who doesn't care."

"What?"

"Hey."

"I'm what?"

"You're looking," he walks closer. "At a man."

"Who what?"

"Care."

"What?!"

"Doesn't care."

Thought about theater disasters tonight, of fires urgently disturbing our most civilized sanctuary, the stage. Was watching the decorous performance scenes in "Topsy-Turvy," where things are in fact in their place; it seemed unconscionable that anything should disrupt the pristine suspension of reality among the crowd. There goes the bellowing Mikado, there's the Lord High Executioner. Why yes.

And if there were a fire? There'd be an awful moment when the actor abandoned the line. Fans clattered to the floor and the baton was stilled, and fell.

The human drama supersedes.