This is a new post to work with labels.

Labels: Labels

It seems to be baffling and confusing, but it was Karl Rove who blew the cover of a CIA agent, just to cause trouble. How incredibly incomprehensible and enigmatic. What a bizarre, curious, never-to-be-guessed-at conclusion to the whole affair. Who would have thought the man capable of anything remotely similar, etc.

Labels: Labels

A man with a pony tail and rustic clothing comes into the library, checks out the women, and then goes up to the reference desk. "Can I get this report, uh: Conference on Kinetics, Equilibria, and Performance of High Temperature Systems?"

"H'm. Let me see - you mean," gesturing to his screen, the clerk says diffidently, "Conference on Performance of High Temperature Systems. Performance of high temperature systems. Proceedings? Would that be it?"

The other man peers at the radiant text from beneath excessively bushy eyebrows. The clerk watches him as he reads, thinking, Three children could play hookey in those eyebrows. Finally the man blinks ten or fifteen times and says:

"Yeah, that's it. How do I find it?"

"Well, the number you see there — "

"That where it is? ISSN 0589123X?"

"No, it's this number here, 'TL 784 C6 C6', but you have to — "

"Where do I find that?"

"It's in the — "

"C'mon, get with it! No time for monkeying around, this is rocket science! Let me remind you, your VCR wouldn't work if it weren't for we scientists, so — !"

"Yes, I know. But you have to go to the 'Science Library' for this book, which is — "

"No time for monkeying around!"

"I see. I see. This is not the 'Science Library'. Let me tell you something, no goddam self-respecting physicist in the goddam postwar period has been helped, even a little bit, by goddam poets or movie star sons-of-bitches", says the man. "Not even — this much," he adds, holding thumb and forefinger minimally apart to demonstrate the paucity. "So why can't I get this book right here, right now?"

The clerk says, after a moment's reflection, "You sound a bit like Patton, if you don't mind my saying so. I think he was a great general, in any case."

The man starts doing a slow rain dance in the space before the desk. Raising his fists, knees bent, head back, turning around in giant steps, as if wearing leaden boots. Sometimes he leans his upper torso forward, sometimes back. He adds to the performance a facial expression of ultimate agony, of one who is in the very throes of death: the very effective silent scream. All this lasts for probably no more than a quarter of a minute.

"Actually," says the clerk, "the 'Science Library' is right next door. You'll need to go to the third floor, turning left as you leave the elevator. Five minutes. Just out that way. There's also a sign, a map, actually. Just behind you."

The man looks at the clerk blankly, and then slaps himself hard on the forehead and goes back to doing his rain dance, this time making little wheezing noises. The clerk watches him, and soon other people stop what they are doing and come to watch as well. Several people sit down on the floor at a judicious distance from the dancer. Others watch from behind some waist-high shelving units, where binders containing a complete (and, as far as possible, current) list of periodicals may be consulted. After a while someone comes up to the reference desk and whispers:

"Is there anywhere you can get, like, popcorn?"

"No," says the clerk. "Sorry about that."

I had the TV on the other evening and saw out of the corner of my eye what appeared to be Norwegian fishermen fighting with aliens. It turned out to be Norwegian fishermen landing enormous crabs of some kind, legs at least two feet long. I don't think I would care to eat something that looked that much like an alien.

Next: a movie about religious monkeyshines. During a numinous thunderstorm, a priest is giving last rites to a child in the hospital. The child is brain dead, but suddenly she starts whispering something. "It's Latin", says the priest, and begins to translate. No time to get the doctor in there, because first things first, you know.Then he says "It's scripture!" Who would have thought? I was thinking Statius, maybe? You know. Therupon a nun hurries onto the scene from Mexico, breathless, she has a tape of a miracle. No way this is going to turn out well, because we know from watching movies that Catholicism enjoys special access to pure evil.

The power of cinema is considerable. Borges is thought to have written his first story after seeing a gangster film, probably Underworld (1927), directed by Josef von Sternberg and written by Ben Hecht.

I feel embarrassed at having previously claimed familiarity with the stupidest films ever made. In my overweening arrogance, I pretended to know the worst. Last night I glimpsed something that showed how little I knew, how sheltered I've been. It was Deeply, a Canadian-German movie made in Nova Scotia in 2000. Some drip of a girl who has a German accent wanders around her picturesque, remote, isolated fishing village, far far away from the big city. It's actually Hubbards, just down the road from Halifax. She mopes. She's angry. She tips a kerosene lamp over and burns the house down. She has a bad dream that makes her toss and turn and breathe hard. She considers jumping to her death, but there are too many seagulls. She's surrounded by locals who insist on talking like pirates all the time. Meanwhile, she talks to some old woman o' wisdom who smokes a pipe, except she obviously doesn't know how to smoke a pipe. (I think the problem is that most actors are familiar with hash but not tobacco.) Somehow the heroine finds out about a woman who lived in the village in the 1940's and had some sort of improper love affair. We go back in time and see the 19th-century villagers enjoying a traditional shindig or hoedown. We hear melancholy Japanese music. Or maybe it's Irish. As for the young woman, who has a southern accent, well she and her elfin little lover rush down to the beach, brilliantly lit up by night as usual, and they are pursued by angry villagers with torches, who are really looking for Dr Frankenstein. The two get into a boat and sail off into the bay. There the boyfriend decides to go for a bathe, so we know he's insane. Then it starts to rain really hard! Naturally, that causes him to drown. He plummets to the bottom like an old fridge.The girlfriend cries really hard. Next we return to the present, where the girl we met earlier is reading this story and starts crying really hard. She's crying way more than the other girl.

She's beside herself as she remembers falling off a motorcycle driven by her boyfriend while they were both drunk and stoned, and the boyfriend was killed.THE END. Now comes the most exciting part, because the closing credits roll by really fast. Kirsten Dunst Alfred E. Newman Unfunny Newfoundland Comedian Best gaffer Third grip from the sun Thanks to Telefilm Canada Alliance/Deadbeat.

Well, how bad was it, compared to similar efforts? Such as The Shipping News and the other two movies set in the Atlantic Provinces?

I think it's unfair to set one bad film against another, and ask "Which is the worst?" It's not a competition, you know. There's no quote worst unquote. Each is bad in its own way. Sure, there were five agreeable minutes in The Shipping News, as everyone knows, but look at the dull work Kevin Spacey did. I think he approaches Gordon Pinsent here.

All right, smart guy, how would you improve it?

Well, that's easy. Just revise the script a little so it has some point—you might have to introduce some new main characters and come up with an interesting plot—and then reshoot every scene, but with really good actors instead of really bad ones. Is that so hard?

Let's see what happens if I change the template ... It seems to be all right! too bad I've nothing interesting to add.

There was a guy on TV the other night saying "Make no mistake", bla bla bla. Something about the enemy coming to burn our fields and sell our children into slavery. But what he was saying was fairly contentious, not an assertion of some fact. You can only say "make no mistake" if it's something like how many volts are going through something, and what will happen if you put your tongue on it. What he meant was more like "Whatever you do, just don't disagree with me, because I know I'm right, I just do." He looked like he would make a big scene if anyone said anything. So the other people just sat there embarrassed.