Question of the Day

Does any of us here in the USA really have a clue as to what is actually happening in Egypt right now?

Public Submitted Poem For The Day

If Jesus has nine faces then I am sure one of them turns limp like a nugget in the dark.
One of them asks, "How do you know the Lions need a better front-office and a new quarterback?"
(Nobody knew what he meant. Not until two thousand years later).
One of them smiles.
One of them counts backward in an ancient language lost for a millenia eyes flickering as if in a seizure.
One of them says please stop counting the faces.
And so we stopped at five.

 -Linda Zapruder,  Lakeland Falls, Michigan

What I Ate Today

I did not eat any breakfast and so my first feeding wasn't until about 1:45 pm. I ate three simple beef soft tacos using leftover beef from the night before which was itself 1lb ground beef bought at Key Foods(from some run-of-the-mill corporate slaughter house I'm sure) cooked in a frying pan until brown, drained of its grease, with then the brand name Ortega seasoning and 3/4 cup water into the sizzle and stirred and poked at-- and the concoction thickened up--which was last night---and so today I ate the left overs wrapped in the tortilla shells that come in the vacuumed sealed bags near the butter on aisle one at Key Foods and I am not feeling proud of what I eat 'cause see,
For dinner I ate Elio's frozen pepperoni pizza bought in the frozen section of you guessed it, Key Foods. Throw it in the oven right on the rack at 425 degrees. Just when it's about ready I add some extra mozzarela cheese and stick it back in. The pepperoni could have been made out of a cow's asshole for all I know.
How terribly mundane and baffling in an uninteresting kinda way you might say.
Oh, but to wash it all down in a dreamy bliss--the true nectar of the gods, Minute Maid's 'Tropical Punch'
to make it all feel better; at least for a little longer and until that Hershey's Dark Chocolate Bar at the end of the night.

The Color of the Day

How about a darker shade of yellow, not quite gold and though it's a strong color, it's not as bright and sunny as your normal yellow. Dimmer. Autumal. One of my favorites.

Chewbacca's Head at The Museum of the Moving Image

                                                        Yes, it's come to this. Recently I witnessed behind a glass show-case at The Museum of the Moving Image, the head of the one and only Chewbacca from Star Wars. That is to say, Star Wars 1977. It took me awhile but I started to dwell on this odd spectacle--this heroic figure to so many, enclosed by glass as though he were an artifact at the Smithsonian. I don't think it was until after I returned home that I thought to myself, "My beautiful mythological creature from childhood, what have they done to you?"
There's nothing in my childhood as nostalgic as Star Wars is for me. And please don't mix up Star Wars with Star Trek or I will have to kill you.
Before I left the Museum I took a picture of the decapitated good-guy, frozen in time, on my cell phone and sent it to my cousin back in Ohio who may love Star Wars more than I do. I guess it was kinda cool, right? (And the little placard at the base behind the glass read something about it containing 'Yak hair'.) Yak Hair?! No, that's Chewbacca's hair damn you unnameable villain!
Naw, I like the world better when we believed in the make believe and mysteries were preserved. There's just something wholly unnatural about seeing Chewbacca like this.
Having said that; I really had a good time at newly renovated (spaceship interiored) Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens and highly recomend it. In fact, give MoMA a break on Free Fridays, (the Pollacks do little for the young kids these days anyways.) Go instead to the Museum of the Moving Image and if the force is strong with you, use stealth and Jedi mind tricks and bust out Chewbacca so he can recieve a proper buriel in that place where he lives on forever in those first three sacraments of cinema.

NYC Observations

Why do the man-hole coverings that cover the holes going to the sewers, on the steets of NYC read, 'MADE IN INDIA' ?

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

So last night I had the pleasure of seeing a film at 'The Museum of the Moving Image' called, 'Valerie And Her Week of Wonders'.  I am not going to write a movie review because I don't want to but I will say that the film is a Baroque, Byzantine, spooky fever dream fairy-tale.  It would do no good to compare it to other films as there is no easily identifiable narrative plotline yet it's far from boring abstraction.
The movie revolves around a thirteen-year old girl who is on the precipice of womanhood. We see everything from her perspective. Her name, well in English, you guessed it, is Valerie. Some weird guy steals her earings while she sleeps and off we go. The colors are gorgeous, the music is enchanting in a 19th century hooligan circus kinda way and also at time with it's twinkling eerie classical piano.  We have witchcraft, vampires who look like Nosferatu, virgins bathing each other in a river and marching bands with melacholy threads of old age and the lust for youth running throughout the movie. There's a sadness here. A sadness for growing old. Filmed in 1970 by the Czech director Jaromil Jires. If you're a cinema lover, I'd check it out. When it's all over, you might be tempted to want to tie up things in a neat understandable package and you'll ask yourself, just as Valerie does, "Was it all just a dream?"  But that answer won't matter.