Why John Kerry will win in November:

KEN LAYNE lays out the facts.

This may well be the greatest blog post of all time.

No Sparky Songs today

Instead, we have an hour long concert of some guys pressing numbers
seeming at random into a very loud speakerphone down the hallway (door
left wide open) while trying to figure out whether to switch long
distance companies.

Stop smashing that window and you'll get 10% off Buffalo Wings at Applebee's

The New York Times: Just Keep It Peaceful Protesters> New York Is Offering Discounts

My main response to this is the same response I've had to every news item over the last month- Thank God I'll be in Phoenix on business during the convention.

My other reaction is that surely they've got the plays mixed up here:

The Republicans get "Rent," the people who oppose them get "Tony n' Tina's Wedding."

Not that anyone is really going to be seeing plays during prime time, but isn't Rent, aside from having a score that recalls the worst of Pat Benatar, a very gay, anti-republican musical that even goes to the trouble of namechecking Newt Gingrich's Republican sister (I wonder if they still preserve that line for the proper 1994 authenticity, or if they've updated it to Mary Cheney). And while I haven't seen Tony and Tina's Wedding, doesn't it affirm the traditional definition of the institution that's the cornerstone of American society?

Blurry photo of neighborhood clowns. Didn't realize stupid camera phone was on the lowest quality setting, which in terms of camera phones, means maybe 1 pixel.
Posted by Hello

The question marks at the end of the last three ramblings were not intended to pose some invisible challenge to the reader. Instead, it turns out to be an unadvertised demoware feature of some palm based blog software that I am now turning off. (And editting the posts themselves for good measure).

Last Sunday, as I walking down the street from my apartment to the corner drugstore, a young guy and an old woman approached me and put a Sprint cameraphone in my face.
The young man said,
"Have you seen this woman? She's my sister and she's missing."
The old woman started to say something in a broken mix of English and Greek, but the young man cut her off.
I answered with an honest "no", though I've got a typical Asperger's inability to remember faces outside of context. Once in college I introduced myself to a girl in my dorm as she sat in one of the of lounge chairs- we chatted it up for a few minutes- and then I returned, and because she had changed chairs, I went and introduced myself again.

"You live in that red building right," the man said, pointing to the two story brick building that I've been renting a one bedroom in for the last 4 years.
"Yes."
"We think that's where they're hiding her."
Now I know the apartment and I know the eccentricites of the family that owned it- in particular a long stream of close, contentious relationships with various neighborhood kids of indeterminate ethnicity who seemed to be perpetually on the stoop, hanging out at all hours. I don't exchange more than a few words with them, and both of us seem to like it that way- our main interaction is them protecting me from "Nana," the building's friendly, but perhaps too aggressively friendly pit bull that they are convinced I am deathly afraid of. I don't particularly like Nana (she's clumsy and ill-trained and strikes me as sort of the sort of dog that could do a lot of damage unintentionally- she has a habit of jumping up on people and landing on the wrong body parts), but I'm not afraid of her, and there's little more humiliating than being protected from canine attack by a twelve year old girl.
I'm sorry, I've lost the thread of the story- you must forgive my rambling. At any rate, my landlords were eccentric, but they didn't seem like kidnappers- and neither did the one other tenant in the building. Something about the statement bothered me, so I simply said I didn't know the woman and went on my way to the convenience store. When I came back, I found the old woman and the young guy staring at me and at the apartment from a stoop across the street.

I found the whole distressing, but a tad fishy. Why were they asking me? Were they trying to scam me in some way- I asked a few friends about the matter, and they remarked that I did the right thing by not getting involved (though it made me like one of Kitty Genoverse's neighbors)- it sounded vaguely similar to a scam to get into people's apartment buildings that I'd seen warnings about a year ago. Phil Nugent suggested that I show them how camera phones could also be used to call 911 if they felt she was in danger, something they implied but didn't say outright. I decided eventually to call the police myself, and after and a minute and thirty seconds of no response (cops don't respond quickly to non emergency calls on a Sunday Afternoon) I was connected with an officier who cut me off midway through my recounting of the events with an exact description of the young man and the old woman. They had been going around the neighborhood doing this for several weeks- and no they weren't part of any scam, but the girl had left her home voluntariliy, and didn't want to see them. They have apparently approached a number of buildings with similar accusations,but other than that are quite harmless, just distressed. I was glad that I stayed out of it- though it would be a great beginning for a cheap hitchockian thriller-there's a diviision between the heavily interconnected families who rent out the buildings in the neighborhood, and have deep roots here- (my landlord once bragged to one of the stoop girls that he could identify the location of any building in Astoria just by see the stoop- and proceeded to prove that on an array of camera phone pictures the girls produced.) and the various yuppies intruding and gentrifying the area.

Speaking of camera phones and intrigue- I finally have photographic proof of the clowns who show up occaisionally on my block. These are literal men in clown costumes, complete with big shoes, face paint, and brightly colored outfits, and they always look vaguely pissed off- like Bill Murray at the beginning of Quick Change. I don't know if they're professional party clowns, (in which case, why are their costumes so dirty?) or something else- but I at least can prove to people they exist. Photo will be posted by tonight.

The Lee Bonctreau retrospectve is at MOMA Queens, apparently to be the last exhibit before the museum scoots back to Manhattan, is really something to upset your sense of depth perception- her sculptures are full of what look from a distance like tricks of light and shading until you move closer and realize that the canvas really is jutting towards you. as the pamphlet says "the viewer's perceptual orientation goes back and forth between the 'image' and the concreteness imposed by the materiality of the sculpture." Neither of one of our descriptions really capture the work- so if you're in the city, try and bring yourself to her work. And the odd combination of found objects(zippers, soot, canvas bags) into quasi organic and natural objects have a tight, menacing quality- they seem similar to images of monster lairs from various cheapie horror films, and they keep pulling you back, trying to make sense of them.

Am reading Francis Davis's Afterglow right now- which is mostly one long last interview with Pauline Kael. In a way, it's odd that it took me this long to buy the book- Kael is the probably the first major outside influence on my thinking and development. I discovered her stuff on my father's bookshelf when I was twelve and looking for books with sex scenes in them, and naturally titles like "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" and "I Lost it at the Movies" appealed to me. I don't know what kept me reading-I doubt I understood a third of what she was saying, but it was her style-personal, chatty, and devoted to evoking the feelings of a movie rather than the more protean elements of plot or dialogue. She hated or didn't review most of what I was into at the time- I remember feeling horrified and liberated at once to hear her call Star Wars a lousy film when it was still a near sacred object among my age group. And I sought out the films she reccomended and tried to watch them and drag my family around them- and at that time in the late 80's things like Altman or Demme's work were almost unavailable for rental, so I had to picture them in my mind- and I'd try and squint at and make myself like Nashville or The Rules of the Games. But she seemed to have invented a new way to react to and write about film- a way of turning your own personalized reactions to a work into an imperial decree that I tried most to imitate- she made it seemed so easy. And so far away from the five paragraph essay structure I was having drilled into my head. I have somewhere on my computer some film reviews I wrote for the junior high school paper attempting to imitate her style- I'm afraid to look for them now. And I went around evangelizing her opinions, even about films that I hadn't seen, proclaiming to my social studies teacher that Steel Magnolias was "Chalk scratching against a blackboard for two hours,"(this is, roughly, Kael's complete review of the film) after she praised it- even though I hadn't seen it myself. I must have been insufferable to be around, and I can only conclude pity is the only thing that kept me from getting the snot beaten out of me on a regular basis.

Returning from the autobiographical recollections- Afterglow follows the form of the other post retirement Kael interviews- a smattering of personal anecodates, a few responses to her literary foes, recounting of her writing process and her battles with the New Yorker editors, some sketches of reviews of contemporary movies just enough to infuriate you that there's not more, and the repetition that no, she never watched any movie more than once. It's distressing to read her casually dismiss everything after the first season of the Sopranos, or that she speaks so highly of the West Wing (she does nail the show's saving grace- the cast), and it's encouraging to feel her respond to the sweetness of Galaxy Quest the way you did. (I just realized that my use of the imperial "you" in that sentence is one of my Kaelisms.) I got about 30 pages left to go and mainly I feel I never met her- I was at boarding school in the early 90's at what I didn't know at the time was her hometown of Great Barrington. There's a good possibility that I shushed her at the movie theater (I hate people who talk during movies, and to discover that she gossiped, snorted derisively, and laughed at the wrong moments during everything she saw was to me a bit like a devout Christian learning that Jesus picked his nose during the Sermon on the Mount.) I discovered that she lived close by in the publication of an anthology of her work in late 94, and while carrying it around in early 95, discovered that my much hated French teacher was a friend of Kael's, or at least claimed to be. She claimed a lot of things that were demonstratably false, not the least of which was a proficiency for teaching foreign languages. My teacher said she could set up a meeting between me and Kael, but I never pursued it too strongly- partly because being too into film was one of my issues that the school was trying to discourage in me, and trying to push a meeting might raise the ire of the administration. At any rate, she was in ill health at the time, and I was probably afraid that the meeting would end up something similar to Wes Anderson's when he arranged for her a personal screening of Rushmore.