one thing today

I've stopped into Saint Francis a few times lately. It's beautiful inside - with good lighting and high lavishly plastered cream colored walls, a lot of gold stuff, old wood, stations of the cross. And I am amazed at how many men are in the church. When I was a kid, there was just a very small, old, stooped lady of course in black who spent most of her days cleaning the candle stands where people lit candles for the faithfully departed and those people of theirs who are still breathing and need some kind of physical or mental uplift. But from what I notice now, there are more men in attendance than women. And they are not old, which is just as much a surprise as the fact that they are men.  This afternoon, I was sitting in a pew reading Portnoys Complaint for the second time - the first in college - writing a paper on it and receiving an A but only unusual outrage from my father who was paying the tab for my getting him good.  So I am in church today and in walk two of the mos...

... downright deplorable - the thing they  have in common. My mother was a stickler for good grammar. She drilled it into her half dozen kids for more than a dozen years. It took. And now when people say me and Mary instead of Mary and I - nails on a blackboard .    I'm officially an old nutty who-cares-what-I-think man with too much time on my paws.  but Richard Hell ... aka Richard Hell and the Voidoids and a great book lover/ writer who wrote the best sex scene I ever read in his novel Go Now ...  and Al Pacino , a great actor and lover of words and language ... and Michelle O Bama , well, she's Michelle O Bama ...  and Robin Roberts mega millionaire anchor of a national news show ...  I've recently heard them fuck up with the me and Mary thing and its hard to believe these achieved people do it and I think its a shame and indicative of the overall fall of American civilization right word.  just writin'. have a good day.

  A small but obviously dedicated group of realists has forged artistry, anger and some horrible truths into "On the Waterfront," as violent and indelible a film record of man's inhumanity to man as has come to light this year. And, while the explosive indictment of the vultures and the meek prey of the docksides, which was unveiled at the Astor yesterday, occasionally is only surface dramatization and an oversimplification of the personalities and evils of our waterfront, it is, nevertheless, an uncommonly powerful, exciting and imaginative use of the screen by gifted professionals. Although journalism and television already have made the brutal feudalism of the wharves a part of current history, "On the Waterfront" adds a graphic dimension to these sordid pages. Credit for this achievement cannot be relegated to a specific few. Scenarist Budd Schulberg, who, since 1949, has lived with the story stemming from Malcolm Johnson's crusading newspaper articles; ...

Life is and: the accidental and the immutable, the elusive and the graspable, the bizarre and the predictable, the actual and the potential, all the multiplying realities, entangled, overlapping, colliding, conjoined - plus the multiplying illusions. This time this time this time this ... Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?                                                   -Philip Roth, The Counterlife

  I wish I could tell my dad I changed my mind about John Wayne. He was his favorite actor and I told him he was horrible. In Stagecoach he's as beautiful as Claire Trevor/Stella Dallas, the proverbial hooker with the heart of gold who takes care of the newborn baby and has a great updo and tailored plaid dress and gives Wayne a rifle when he most needs it. The music is great, Monument Valley is great ... those things - I have to look up what they're called - those mountains with flat tops ***   - they're beautiful, too. I saw them in person when my friends and I drove from Flagstaff to Telluride for the film festival. We did it a few times - the last - in 1995. I love Andy Devines raspy, screechy voice. And all the fab closeups of fab faces. What a great movie. Watch it. You'll see. * ** Buttes are isolated, steep-sided, flat-topped towers of rock formed by the erosion of mesas or plateaus . They are taller than they are wide. They're protected by a hard top layer...

Maybe it was the time of day, the light, my mood ... but so many people in the park yesterday looked cool and wonderful and so very much their very only stylin' selves.