A guy. A cat. A bed. A camera.

Kate is in Vermont visiting her best friend, so this week it's just me and Cleo at home. Cleo splits most of her time between her two favorite high perches atop the refrigerator and Kate's wardrobe, and I split most of my time in my favorite perches in front of my computer and on the couch. But sometimes we hang out together...and that's when magic happens.

This afternoon Cleo and I reenacted her favorite scene from Indecent Proposal.

"This dress is for sale. I'm not."

Creative Activity

Kate gave me a new mp3 player for Christmas. Clearly the people who named it decided they would take the opposite stance on nomenclature from their counterparts at Apple because in contrast to the succinct and hip "Ipod," my new player is called the "Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra" or the "Zen Xtra" for short. Two awesome triple-letter Scrabble words that don't really roll off the tongue in a hip, shadow dancer kind of way. By which I mean, Bono will not be counting wrong about this little piece of hardware.

Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra Catorce!

I've spent the better part of the last three days uploading music to fill its 40gb of hard drive space and I'm still not even close. It's mind-numbing work, but after I transferred all the music from my old 20gb player, I decided to go ahead and upload every single other CD I could get my hands on - the beginning of a boring adventure that I will see to its end.

The most interesting part (read: only interesting part) is pushing the magical button that looks up the track names of the CDs on the Internet and automatically populates the album info. It's fascinating the "genres" that some albums fall into. For instance, I never would have classified Led Zeppelin as "Power Pop."

I scrolled through some of the other available genres, genres for which I do not own music, and it made me really want to go out and buy some "Electronica Blues" or some "Techno Industrial Tribal Trip-Hop." The saddest and most ironic genre, of which I apparently own a lot: "General Alternative."

I finished uploading my own music library about an hour ago and have now moved on to Kate's. At this point, I will upload practically any bit of audio onto this thing. I came this close to uploading the audio driving tour CD I have from the battlefield at Vicksburg. That's how much space it has!!

And yet somehow I don't think I'd ever really listen to a track called "Stop #15: Hovey's Approach."

Kate does have Whitney Houston's "My Love Is Your Love: The Remixes" though. I probably need that, right? I mean, that's the whole point of a 40gb mp3 player - so I never have to be somewhere and say, "Damn! Right now I really wish I had Whitney Houston's "My Love Is Your Love: The Thunderpuss Radio Mix!!"

By the way, the surrender at Vicksburg happened on July Catorce, 1863.

In The Line of Fire

The reviews are out for Million Dollar Baby. I'll give you a little sample:

USA TODAY:
"Better than last year's Mystic River, which may have been mildly overrated, Million Dollar Baby is as good as Unforgiven. Or, to put it another way, as good as any movie Eastwood has ever directed. (**** out of four)"

NY TIMES:
"Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" is the best movie released by a major Hollywood studio this year, and not because it is the grandest, the most ambitious or even the most original. On the contrary: it is a quiet, intimately scaled three-person drama directed in a patient, easygoing style, without any of the displays of allusive cleverness or formal gimmickry that so often masquerade as important filmmaking these days."

I haven't been this dumbfounded since the camera panned down to show Jaye Davidson's penis in The Crying Game. THIS MOVIE IS TERRIBLE. It's twists and surprises are unearned, its dialogue is hokey and unconvincing, its laden with cliches, and its filmed with faux artifice (read: moody lighting) spread thicker than jam in a jar of jam.

Even these reviews detail the mind-numbing list of overdone cliches running rampant in this film with seemingly no awareness of how ridiculous it all sounds.

From the NY Times review (cliches in bold):
"Mr. Eastwood...plays Frankie Dunn, the owner of a tidy, beat-up gym tucked away in a shabby corner of Los Angeles. His best friend, who supplies world-weary voiceover narration to help the plot through its occasional thickets, is Eddie Dupris, (Morgan Freeman) a former fighter (nicknamed Scrap) whom Frankie managed long ago.

"Both men carry some heavy frustration and regret - Frankie has lost a daughter, Scrap has lost an eye - but they bear the weight gracefully and with good-humored fatalism, reconciled to loneliness and the diminishing returns of age. Scrap spars with the young would-be tough guys who hang out in the gym and watches out for the slow-witted orphan [SLOW-WITTED ORPHAN!!!!!]who is both their mascot and their scapegoat. Frankie, meanwhile, reads Yeats, studies Gaelic and goes to Mass every day, mainly to annoy the prickly young priest with inane theological challenges."

Again, I'd like to point out that the cast of characters in this movie includes a SLOW-WITTED ORPHAN. A slow-witted orphan who, I shit you not, at one point has the very "comical business" of asking Scrap (his name is SCRAP!), "How do they get the ice into the bottled water? The hole is so small!"

And can I also point out that this review actually says with absolutely no negativity, "His best friend, who supplies world-weary voiceover narration to help the plot through its occasional thickets..."

First of all, let me tell you that the narration is so thick in the first 15 minutes of this film, I almost thought we were watching a book-on-tape with actors pantomiming to the narration. There's far more narration than dialogue, in fact at times you find yourself wishing Scrap would shut up because a person who's actually on the screen starts talking and you can't make out what they're saying because Scrap keeps on talking too. It's ridiculous.

Secondly - narration in a film used to "help the plot" is a sign that the film is BAD. Very, very BAD. If you can't get out of "thicket" after "thicket" without a character explaining everything to us outside of the dialogue of the film - then your film sucks.

Of course, A.O. Scott also loved Space Cowboys, an even worse Clint Eastwood movie, so maybe Scott and reviewers of his ilk are just overwhelmed by Eastwood's mystique, spinning his awful, cliche-ridden movies into nostalgia because they can't handle the idea that Dirty Harry might be a piece-of-shit director.

Or maybe this year's movie releases have really been such a weak skulk that anything reaching the heights of middling mediocrity is hailed as auteur theory, just to keep from writing off 2004 as a complete waste of celluloid and light.

Or maybe George W. Bush's reelection and the subsequent battle over values has already led us down the dark path of rewarding bland hackwork over anything truly thrilling because its familiarity and geniality gives us a nice, warm feeling in our tummies without ever engaging our brains.

Either way, the only review I've found so far to actually speak the truth about this film comes from Salon.com (unadulterated truth in bold):

"Is Clint Eastwood the Manchurian Candidate? He must be. Brainwashing seems the only plausible explanation for the extraordinary praise given his drab, plodding movies. The overdeliberate, humorless revenge drama "Mystic River" was directed and hailed as if it were Greek tragedy -- and next to Eastwood's new "Million Dollar Baby," it is.

"Million Dollar Baby" is generating astonishing critical word of mouth, figuring prominently in the year-end voting for critics awards and winning Eastwood best-directing honors from the New York Film Critics Circle.

Have any of the critics praising "Million Dollar Baby" actually ever seen another movie -- any movie?

A compendium of every cliche from every bad boxing melodrama ever made, "Million Dollar Baby" (written by Paul Haggis from stories by F.X. Toole) tries to transcend its cornball overfamiliarity with the qualities that have long characterized Eastwood's direction -- it's solemn, inflated and dull.

As GWB himself might say, "Amen, Salon.com. Amen."

The No Spin The Dreidel Zone

Andrew Sullivan already blogged about this, but this quote from Bill O'Reilly is so ridiculous it's worth reposting.

Background: O'Reilly is being criticized because he recently told a Jewish guy on one of his shows who complained about Christmas in the schools that "if you are really offended, you gotta go to Israel."

His defense?

"You criticize anybody, you challenge anybody, then you are a bigot. And that's the -- that's why nobody does it. That's why nobody sticks up for Christmas except me. Did Peter Jennings stick up for Christmas last night? I don't believe he did. How about Brian Williams, did he? Did Rather stick up for Christmas? How about Jim Lehrer -- did he? Did Larry King -- hello -- I love Christmas -- did he? No." - Bill O'Reilly

See, he wasn't being a bigot! He was defending Christmas! The much-maligned and endangered holiday of Christmas.

Peter Jennings - Por que odia usted la navidad?

You can read the whole story here. It's so good. And he's such a lying douche.

It's Called a Hospital, Not a Hospitable

This past Tuesday night I woke up at like 4am and thought I was literally freezing to death. My temperature was 94.5 and I was fully dressed lying under 3 blankets with two hot water bottles, shivering so hard my teeth were chattering. I was pretty sure I had the flu, but I had never felt anything like this and I was lying there in my bed thinking, "If I die tonight, I'm going to be one of those cautionary tales they tell to scare kids in health class."

I also remembered when I was in high school, there was a dude in my church who up and died from spinal meningitis. He thought he had the flu, got up to go to the bathroom, and fell on the floor dead.

I also thought I read somewhere (or created in my delirium) the fact that if your body temperature gets too low for too long your testicles shrivel up and you can never make babies (also your pee comes out for the rest of your life in a fine mist).

All of these thoughts led me to the emergency room. Kate (who is perfect) hailed a cab and took me to St. Vincents. There was no one in the waiting room - no one. There was a security guard in the doorway, and he had to actually find someone to help us.

When the triage nurse finally came out front to deal with us, she had all the warmth and charm of a Denny's waitress who you just asked to take your eggs back because you asked for scrambled and the eggs she gave you are sunny-side up. So immediately I felt stupid for being there (stupid but horribly sick).

She made me sit in a hallway while she talked to the attending physician about me (in a horribly sarcastic tone, I'm sure - "Asshole wants his eggs scrambled!). There wasn't a lot going on, but in the room directly across from where we were sitting, there was a doctor with a patient. We couldn't see into the room, but we could hear them.

DOCTOR: Do you want me to fix the huge gash on your face?

DRUNK CREEPY MAN: *whimper*

DOCTOR: Don't cry. Don't cry. Sir...don't cry.

DCM: *crying*

DOCTOR: Okay, I'm going to suture your wound.

DCM: *more crying*

DOCTOR: You have to hold still.

DCM: *tussling*

DOCTOR: (angrily) Stop moving or I'm going to hurt you.

So I was ready to leave. But then I had the overwhelming sensation that I was going to throw up. Kate (still perfect) asked where I might find a toilet to vomit within, and I shuffled towards it. Luckily it was a single, so I stood over it and dry heaved three times until my body suddenly switched directions and signaled it was time to shit.

By the time I got back to my seat, the DCM was getting a tetanus shot (knife fight?) and the doctor was ready to see me. Well, not the doctor - a doctoral student. Clearly my shivering was not worthy of an actual doctor's attention.

The doctoral student was also bored to tears by my story of woe ("Maybe you should just eat the eggs we gave you."), and after about 30 seconds of staring at me, her bottom lip poking out in a mock pouty face, she told me, "You're a strong boy, go home and sleep it off."

Then she left me to go laugh with the triage nurse about what a pussy I am. About that time, an asian guy in a purple hospital gown wandered by. A few minutes later, an orderly came over and said to no one in particular (certainly not to me), "Oh shit, where'd he go?"

Then a guy, who I think might have been the janitor, came over with a broom and said, "Whoa! That asian guy's gone!"

I suddenly started worrying that even though I dragged Kate (wonderfully perfect) out of bed in the middle of the night to the emergency room, we had somehow entered the most incompetent emergency room on the planet and I was still going to end up a cautionary tale ("Distracted by a bleeding creepy guy and a wandering asian, the staff of this emergency room somehow overlooked the rapid onset of both spinal bifida and Aarskog syndrome in a patient complaining of chills, nausea, and sudden explosive defecation. They sent him home...to die.")

The asian returned under his own sock-footed power at which point the orderly and the bitchy triage nurse had this exchange:

ORDERLY: Who is this guy anyway?

BITCHY NURSE: He's got a hat with his ID in it.

ORDERLY: Oh right, I threw that in the trash.

How did he put his ID in a hat? The doctoral student returned, gave me a prescription for some flu medicine and said, "I'm giving you a prescription because we're all pretty sure you're a huge pussy, so if you want to regain any dignity at all, I suggest throwing this prescription in the trash and toughing it out like a real man."

So I went home, buried myself under my blankets in my clothes and laid there until I developed an actual fever of about 101 and sweat through it all. Then I sat at home for two days and toughed it out...like a real man.

Lesson learned: I will never volunatrily go to the ER again. If I ever go back there, I will be gushing blood, unconscious, already dead, or shitting water.

Oh, and I hope I breathed on that triage nurse and doctoral student just enough to get them both sick as fuck.

Nuthing Ta F' Wit

Perusing Dailykos as I do...daily, I came across this post.

Sure, it's just another in a long line of conservative, supposedly Christian men who preach a pretty good sermon while their dicks are secretly buried in mayonaise jar filled with semen and pain killers. But what are the odds that some dude quoted in an AP article about tax cuts, who took advantage of his fifteen minutes to go off about moral values, would get fired for statutory rape the NEXT DAY? It's almost enough to make you believe in God.

JESUS: Hey Dad, what we gonna watch today?

GOD: Hmmm, I don't know, son. Looks like Mike Hintz down there is getting interviewed for sum'n. Let's watch that.

MIKE HINTZ: Where we are in this world, with not just the war on terror, but with the war with our culture that's going on, I think we need a man that is going to be in the White House like President Bush, that's going to stand by what he believes.

GOD: Oh no he din't.

JESUS: Daaaamn.

GOD: No he din't!!

JESUS: That's a cold muthafucka!

GOD: I know he din't jus' say he was fighting a culture war when he's busy screwin' that insecure little fat girl at the church.

JESUS: Chump is fucked up!

GOD: Git your gat, son. We're taking this muthafucka to the ditch.

And it was so.

Rope Burns

I was at the newly renovated MOMA last night, drinking a vodka tonic and nibbling on a tiny bleu cheese sirloin burger brought to me by a servant in a rented suit, when I glanced over my left shoulder to see Kevin Bacon standing behind me.

"I'm only one degree away from Kevin Bacon!"

I know. Hilarious.

Scott had to see Hillary Swank's new movie (he's writing a profile on her this week), so I tagged along. Just so happened this viewing was also the NY premiere which meant I was rubbing elbows (metaphorically!) with quite a few celebs and pseudo-celebs.

Clint Eastwood was there. He directed the movie and also stars in it with Swank. I was actually able to fit my index finger all the way up to the first knuckle into one of the crags on his face.

Morgan Freeman plays a wise, old, one-eyed black man in the movie (quite the stretch), but he had to leave the party early to catch a plane to Dubai. (Du sigh!) He was the only non-white person there except for this dude , Richard Parsons, the Chairman and CEO of Time Warner. He's one of the richest people in the world, so the situation was ripe for a farcical mix-up in which a plastic-faced wife from the Upper East Side who's had two too many glasses of white wine tries to foist her empty wine glass on him for a refill. But alas, reality is not an episode of Frasier. (I wish it was! That dog they have is so funny!)

Andy Garcia was also there. Alone.

Oh, and did I mention the girl who played Tony Soprano's russian girlfriend, Oksana Lada, was there? Yeah. She's pretty.

But eventually it weirded me out being so close to someone I had never met whose bare breasts I had already seen, so Scott and I decided to take our seats in the theater.

Andy Garcia was already seated. Alone.

The movie is called Million Dollar Baby (or MDB to the boot leggers). It's a darkly-lit film with a bad title about a girl from White Trash Land who moves to Somewhereville to become a boxer. Cranky old Clint Eastwood doesn't want to train a girl!! But eventually he breaks down (at the behest of our sagacious narrator Morgan Freeman), and they quickly realize they are the father-daughter combo both of them never realized they needed so badly.

Or as the IMDB blandly states it: "A hardened fighter-cum-trainer works with a determined woman in her attempt to establish herself as a boxer."

Only, there's a horrifying twist! I won't give it away here, but to give you a hint while quoting from another, far superior film, let me just say, "Stool Boom." Or to give you a hint while referencing a now-cancelled cartoon series, "Chair Face." Or if you want a hint you can read in a mirror: ".seod eh dna reh llik ot tnilC sksa ehs neht ,dezylarap steg dna loots a no daeh reh stih ehS"

At the end of the movie, the ridiculously over-perfumed woman sitting beside me was sobbing uncontrollably. As the first credits appeared on the screen, she let out an audible gasp and leapt to her feet, clapping as wildly as she could while still remaining socially acceptable. I'm sure, three rows behind us, Hillary Swank noticed and had her hubby, Chad, run down and invite that woman over for petit fours and limoncello.

I was much more calm. As the lights came up, I just turned around, made eye contact with Hillary, and said, "Hey, I always thought you kind of had a horse face, but you really don't."

She smiled.

Chad wept. He wept.

Spam Wacks Poetics

Today, I received what I can only describe as a BRILLIANT POEM. Brilliant in the same way e.e. cummings was brilliant in that poem about the balloon man who had goat feet, or Edgar Allan Poe was brilliant when he told us what that bird was saying, or Johnny Depp in that movie where he acted like that guy from the Rolling Stones (also he was brilliant when he had scissors instead of hands).

I don't know the poem's genesis. I can't even say I really know what the poem means. But as I read it, it makes me cry inside, then laugh, then scratch my head in wonder, then cry a little more, laugh again, look out at the horizon in awe, snap my head back to the left like someone might have just snuck up on me, chuckle to myself, furrow my brow in mock anger, wish I was eating meat, cry on the outside, hum a recognizable tune, actually eat meat, cry again, then go out and check the mail.

The poem was sent to me in an e-mail from someone named Lori Ellis, yet the e-mail address was listed as deven.melville2000@virtual-mail.com. I don't know anyone named Lori Ellis or Deven Melville. So why would they be sending a BRILLIANT POEM to me?

Then I saw who the e-mail was addressed to:
Marigold Clayton [antny@mindspring.com]

Marigold Clayton? I had to leave my computer, eat most of an ice cream cone, and think really hard about this. Who is Marigold Clayton? Had I, Anthony King, ever been given the nickname of Marigold Clayton?

No.

Kwamee Wetpants? Yes. Hank McFaggyFag? Of course. Shirley Smellsofpee? For sure. Ace? No, although I really wanted people to call me that. But I had never been called Marigold Clayton.

So I sat in my bathtub with no water in it for a few hours and I figured it out. This is poetry! The author is trying to say that names are superficial. They're meaningless labels thrust upon us by people who don't really know us. Our parents name us before we're even born! How can our given names ever reflect our true personalities? I'm no more Marigold Clayton than I am Anthony King.

See, I told you. BRILLIANT.

I continued on! The title of the e-mail (and presumably the poem itself) was "last notice." Very provocative. Could this poem be about death? About looking back at our superficial and meaningless lives at the very moment of our passing?

The beginning of the poem was almost as perplexing as the names and title. It was a listing of prices for various drugs:

VIAGRA - $0.95
CIALIS - $1.95
AMBIEN - $1.29
SOMA - $1.18

But as I read the list and pondered whether or not Ambien for $1.29 was just too good a deal to pass up, it hit me. What a journey this list describes! The journey of life? I think so. From erectile dysfunction medication to more erectile dysfunction medication, to sleeping pills, and finally to muscle relaxers.

Life is short. We fuck and fuck, then sleep and die.

What a BRILLIANT first stanza to this BRILLIANT POEM. Having cast aside the superficialities of this world through the use of multiple authorial pseudonyms, the title informs us that the words we are about to read serve as a "last notice," a final warning about this life. Then the author encapsulates the baseness of life's journey succinctly and provocatively in, of all things, a list of cheap drugs meant to prevent our mortal coil from making a true connection with the whimsy and fortitude of nature.

And now, on the edge of death, incredibly cheap dosages of Soma coursing through his/her veins, our author uses the final stanza of the poem to share his/her actual final thoughts, the titular "last notice."

tougher remuneration lightnings
immovable forked ajar
pare petri shinbone factorizations enclosing
lisped suffixed multibyte vagina
edible klaxon enquires hovered
appropriateness magnolia Coventry sickroom disastrous
behaved Noah spelled dipper autobiographies
Tananarive bending Lutheranize examines
reversal predictably bastes teared

That last line makes me absolutely shudder. There can be no reversal of death. Yet its predictability does not protect us from the overwhelming sadness death brings as we are metaphorically "basted with tears." So true.

Thank you Lori Ellis or Deven Melville or whomever you are who sent me this poem. You've made me think. You've made me reconsider. You've made me decide that maybe its time to actually use a toilet for the first time in my life.

And because I dissected the poem so much in the preceding paragraphs, I want to list the poem in its uninterrupted BRILLIANT entirety:

--------------------------------

last notice
by Lori Ellis or Deven Melville
for Marigold Clayton or YOU

VIAGRA - $0.95
CIALIS - $1.95
AMBIEN - $1.29
SOMA - $1.18

tougher remuneration lightnings
immovable forked ajar
pare petri shinbone factorizations enclosing
lisped suffixed multibyte vagina
edible klaxon enquires hovered
appropriateness magnolia Coventry sickroom disastrous
behaved Noah spelled dipper autobiographies
Tananarive bending Lutheranize examines
reversal predictably bastes teared