"Civilization"

Watch an amazing QuickTime video that reminds me of a Hieronymus Bosch painting -- except it's animated.

sMiLe!

Check out these disturbing family photographs. You thought your family was weird?

(The family photos are G-rated, but the page includes ads that may not be safe for work.)

Fish Food for Thought

More clip art philosophy by me (and Dr. Seuss). Click here to catch the big fish.

Random Acts of Poetry

Scatterbrain

Tending to imagine,
at the post office, even,
he made a white dove
out of an envelope.

At home, the walnut mother
sat calmly in her bowl,
happy among framed pictures
until night fell.

His wringing hands
roiled the clouds,
made weather wetter
for chessboard royalty.

Nine-o'clock black
was the nothing of space,
or an empty mind
long erased by age.

Dropped matchsticks
formed broken crosses,
stick-figure portraits
of starving saints.

Later, he turned pages,
touched dead heron wings,
let his insides bleed
a comet tail of words.

Word of the Day: anodyne

anodyne (n or adj)

Something that lessens pain; something that isn't likely to disturb or annoy.

"Now, the anodyne had not produced the effect which it appeared to have done; instead of healthful sleep, it had brought on a kind of light-headed somnolence, in which the mind, preternaturally restless, wandered about its accustomed haunts, waking up its old familiar instincts and inclinations."
--Edward Bulwer Lytton, Zannoni

Last night, as part of the JC Fridays celebration, I stopped by the Fish with Braids gallery on Jersey Avenue. (In Jersey City in New Jersey -- everything was "Jersey" last night. I should have worn a jersey.) The "show" there included a display of living plants, dead mice and a dissected rat in various containers, along with a variety of tablets and pills (and dirt for the plants). It seemed to be an aesthetic and quasi-scientific examination of the effect of, say, Tylenol (anodyne!) or penicillin on philodendrons, rodent flesh, and such. Not an anodyne experience, but one I won't soon forget.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

A WTF moment: Saw a woman wheeling a stroller, and inside was a chihuahua dressed in a ... dress.... I'm currently "reading" The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. Feeling admiration, again, for Murakami's surreal take on daily living -- and puzzlement over his obsession with cats. Some of the book involves lucid dreaming, I understand, though I haven't reached that part yet. Someone on the radio last night said: "Lucid dreaming is the leading cause of accidental suicide. People think they're asleep." That struck me as extremely funny for some reason.... All these people trying to give me The Watchtower (you know, that Jehovah's Witnesses' magazine) give me the creeps. There seem to be more and more of them. They're always standing around at Newark Penn Station, smiling enigmatically. And this morning, on my way to Journal Square, I passed a woman on the Boulevard who asked, very politely, "Something to read this morning, sir?" as she held out that rag. "No thank you," I said. "Have a nice day," she said. I know what she was thinking, though: "You'll burn in eternal hell fire, you damn foolish sinner"....

Much Ado about NOTHING

General Motors declared bankruptcy today -- no surprise. I've been thinking about all the GM cars my father used to own. One of his insurance clients was a Chevrolet-Oldsmobile-Buick dealer, and he always felt he had to buy a GM product from him when it was time to get a new car.

He had a sporty Oldsmobile Cutlass at one time -- a two-door that became impractical as the family grew. We later had one of those enormous Chevy Caprice station wagons. I remember the Caprice was supposed to be a step up from the Impala. Funny how those micro-distinctions between Chevrolets, of all things, seemed to matter at one time.

My father did buy a Ford at one point, after agonizing over what his customer would think -- but the guy later said he really didn't care what kind of car we had. The last car my father owned was another GM product, though, a Buick Century that my mother still drives. It seems like a dinosaur to me, as different from my little Mazda as a wood-cabinet hi-fi is from an iPod.

(That's a picture I took at Graceland of one of Elvis's Cadillacs. Click it for the larger version if you're into bumper titties.)

Weekend Loew's Report: 'The Uninvited' and 'Rebecca'

The Uninvited (1944) and Rebecca (1940)

A double feature of 1940s suspensers on Saturday night at the The Landmark Loew's Jersey Theatre. I think of these as "women's pictures" (a popular 40s genre), because in each the character the audience is supposed to care about is a damsel in distress, either literally (The Uninvited) or emotionally (Rebecca).

The Univited is a haunted house/ghost story that seems tame and hokey by today's standards. Rebecca, the first American project by Hitchcock, is a much better film and features a far stronger cast (Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier), but it also creaks in a "they don't make 'em like that anymore" way. There's excellent acting and moments of both genuine eeriness and humor in both, but for me, the most interesting thing about watching Hollywood films from this repressed and heavily censored era is to look for subtexts. And both of these films have a strong -- brace yourself -- lesbian subtext!

Hitchcock was a well-known perv and obsessive, and his Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) character in Rebecca, with her maniacal obsession, to the point of both worship and suicide, with her deceased employer (Rebecca) is what fuels the suspense in the latter half of the film. Similarly, in The Univited, a creepy insane asylum administrator is homicidally obsessed with a "beautiful" dead woman, a woman she's named her establishment for.

You have to wonder what audiences at the time these films were released thought about all this. Was what seems obvious now completely missed back then? I'm guessing not. But nobody talked about it. You can easily imagine Hitchcock winking, though.

Graduation Day

Ordinary Weirdos

Starting Monday, DavidLynch.com and Absurda will present Interview Project, an online series of three-minute interviews with "ordinary people" -- so called. Is there such a thing as an "ordinary" person? Not in my experience. Not if you look deep enough. This is something Lynch understands, I think, so I'm looking forward to this. There will be a new interview every three days for an entire year.

"It's a strange world."

Word of the Day: gambrinous

gambrinous (adj)

Full of beer.

"Helmut was never able to leave a soiree until he was properly gambrinous, and usually suffered horribly the next morning as a result."
--Peter Novobatzky, Depraved and Insulting English

Beer at lunch with The Producer today. Me in the afternoon: Gambrinous? No. Slumberous? Yes.

Compare potvaliant. (No, it's not what you think -- quite.)

Fun with Haiku

Laughter haiku

Seek the giggle cure
Prozac without prescription
Stupid jokes cure blues

Salad haiku

Lettuce tomato
Diced green pepper in a toss
Here comes Paul Newman

Vitamin haiku

A, B, C, D, E
Should I buy all these tablets?
Real food has plenty

Writer haiku

A scrap of parchment
On the wind that passes by
Still writers seek fame