Red Blood, Blue Bruise

Anarchy:  oppression through self-determined, unsanctioned force alone.

Nihilism:  oppression through paradoxically reified Anarchy.

Galileo Accidento

Going out of your way to be wrong.

With that perversity of testing tradition, you lose a nose --

or build a new mind.


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Higher Ed

Unnamed college student: 

Just think of all the bad things on a daily basis because people do stupid things while drunk, you could wake up next to some fat chick.  Heaven forbid she gets pregnant.

Unnamed prof:

Aphrodite or dog, grunting, screaming, grackling, or hitting a 'high C', all waking bodies -- on the morrow -- do smell.  Oh, and one's own breath?  Please revise accordingly.

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Guest Body Failure

In assuming sleep, I dreamed about a tour of Hollywood's ranked restaurants, overhearing a gal coming back for a second crack at the andouille, whose best morsels she lost to great regret in a bout with colitis before.

Woke with a hand that wouldn't move, folded at the wrist like a limp glove.  If it's asleep, it tingles; now there's none.  The thought went: stroke? And with clinician's distance, I lifted the right with the left.  Gravity flopped it down.  Twice that failed, but -- miracle! -- with the third, it rose.

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Six Workmen And A Wedding

Thursday:  Phone Guy

Friday:  Fence Guys

Saturday:  Wedding In The Distant Sticks

Tuesday: Deck Wash Guy

Wednesday: Gas-Equipment Swap-Out Guys

Thursday:  Garage Door Guy

Friday: Deck Stain Guy

Full Counsel

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Intellect should be only one advisor of many


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Layers Of Meal

Night is a black coat to wear against an alley wall

Night is a black coal to blow on and get orange

 Night is a black cheese to get one's teeth around

Sleep is meant to be scraped up like shaved cheese off a cutting board

Sleep is meant to be strained through cheese cloth and rinse for impurity

Sleep is meant to be sold in squares like cut-rate cheese with bad crackers

More coffee to toast the consciousness

More coffee to assuage the conscience

More coffee to ignite the conspiracy


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Real Road

Il Sorpasso (The Easy Life = USA title)

wherein  Jean-Louis Trintignant, the studious law candidate, gets annoyed out of his apartment and led into 'action' by the charming, irresponsible playboy Vittorio Gassman.

. . . Cuando ti mirandola/Cuando ti mirandola/Ay, ay, ay! . . .

How much life can one absorb in a weekend?

How much should one?


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Artistic Visions

Film Directors

'Indie' Style -- Late 20th Century Americans

Alpha Selection

P.T. Anderson (Punch Drunk Love)

Abel Ferrara (The Addiction)

Todd Haines (Safe)

Whit Stillman (The Last Days Of Disco)

Formative Forces

Film Directors

Last Third 20th Century -- The American Connection

1) Stanley Kubrick

2) Roman Polanski

3) Woody Allen

4) Mike Nichols

5) John Cassavetes

6) James Ivory

7) Martin Scorsese

8) Robert Altman

9) Francis Ford Coppola

10) Sidney Lumet


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Gnosis

Morning light through branches, through frosted bathroom windows, through to me, in me.

Hi-Ho, Steverino!

My name is Gordon Hathaway, and I'm from Manhattan.

Assorted Bon-Bons

1)  Hindsight:  regret at former wonder, the wonder of regret.

2)  Churches silence.

3)  If I hear woulda, shoulda, coulda one more time . . . !

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Rage Road

Intersection, a major one.

Two left turn lanes, my car in the more widely-arched one, second car back.

To my left, other cars, one at the crosswalk, another just pulled up, a pick-up with a large plastic children's slide set tied down in the truck bed.

The pick-up driver gets out.  He walks up to the car in front, the one at the crosswalk.

Heavy traffic is flowing through the intersection.

These guys are traveling in a caravan, I casually think.

The pick-up driver, now right at the other car, starts shouting clearly Get off the fucking phone.

It's clear that they're not traveling in caravan, and that he's angry,

Get off the fucking phone.

He slams the flat of his hand against the window of the driver whose face is not visible from this lane.

The pick-up driver, a man in his 30s, closely-cropped hair, wearing work shirt, goes back to his truck.

The pick-up truck is idling next to my Toyota.

When both our lanes turn left on the green arrow, I make sure to leave space, since the pick-up may very well want to scoot alongside the driver accused -- I've concluded -- of driving while using a cellphone.

Yes.

The pick-up veers in front of me and ducks into a supermarket village.

The cellphone guy, more precipitously, lunges ahead of me, as well, and cuts into the next supermarket entry.

Testosterone hangs in the air like the smell of burnt fireworks in the early a.m. following Independence Day.

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Teeter-Totter

Let me keep my illusions until the end


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