Here's a first. At line in Circuit City last night, the man behind me was actually buying a DVD of Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo- a movie that I've never seen, but I'm so familiar with the title from jokes (basically taking the title to another movie, and adding 2: Electric Boogaloo to the title. Yes, I'm easily amused. Try it today with Gosford Park.)

Much amusing office politcs coming soon....

Hey New York: Meet the creepily smooth faced Dr. Zizmor and his wife- you know, from the subway ads. The article does not explain why in the most recent ad, she has a huge ad covering the upper third of her face- I can't be the only who thinks because he uses her forehead as a sketch pad.

Comments are up and down right now. Soon I'll be switching over to blogger pro, and a more stable comment structure should be implemented.

Haven't had much about office politics, lately, I'll grant you. That's mostly because I've been boring myself everytime I think about what's going on here- the reality is I wrote about stuff around the office less because it outraged me than because it amused me, and at present, nothing at work really entertains me- all of it, good and bad is part of the same general slog as before. I suppose I have been witness to Brent's vain's dadaist attempts at double entendres- he gave the least convincing ogle possible to Sparky's cheesecake photo on his office wall, and said "This is inappropriate, Mr. Sparky. It is inappropriate that there are not more of these." and then smirked contendedly, while I studied a different wall. Generally, I stay out of his way.

Went to see a Lubitsch double feature at Film Forum last night- The Shop Around the Corner, and To Be or Not To Be (the 1942 version, not the Mel Brooks remake). To Be or Not to Be was regarded as incredibly tasteless at the time, and the audience still inhales sharply when, Jack Benny, as the ham actor Joseph Tura, pretending to be the Nazi Col. Ehrhardt, says of concentration camps, "We do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping." The movie is a broad farce, and a brilliant one, but what's really radical about it is that unlike most farces, it feels like it takes place in a recognizable universe. At no point do they sugarcoat what's going on in Poland at the time, and they trust the audience to keep laughing at a joke about a detachable beard even when torturers are in the background. Through the movie, I found that Polanski's The Pianist kept flashing back into my mind- while wildly different in tone, the two movies are grounded both in reality and the awareness of the absurdity of their situations. The chief joke and tragedy at the core of The Pianist is that Szpilman survives primarily not through his cunning, passion, or intelligence (his brother has all these things and disappeared to the camps without a trace), but through sheer luck and a kind of tenacious passivity. His real life struggle is different than the farcical troubles of the theater troupe in To Be, but you could see them going past each other on the bombed out streets of Warsaw.