(no subject)

Dear Democratic Party,

Please please please please please please please make immigration a platform issue and push it as hard as your weak selves can go, not because I think you currently have anything viable to say or do on the matter, but because it will split the conservatives in half, separating out the white elitist panicky racist xenophobes from the white elitist corporations who honestly know on whose backs the flow of their money relies, and frankly, this is a road I would love for them to go down.

OR, um, see comments.

It's not for me to say, cause I change my mind from day to day.

I Remember by Joe Brainard

Brainard is one of those gay male writer/artists in NYC in 1960s that I seem drawn to lately. (Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, John Wieners, no wait, he's Bay Area....ummmmm, I thought there was more. Ray Johnson to a certain extent, though I think he was a bit older. Have I talked about watching "How To Draw A Bunny"? Ok, sorry, tangent.) Brainard's book is a mix of memoir and poetry and incantation and trivia and pop culture and lists. Essentially it is small 170 page book where every line starts with "I remember". Usually the lines are one sentences long, occasionally they meander a bit into a short paragraph. They are not chronologically arranged, they are sometimes thematically group, but more in the way a train of thought will have a certain logic and familiarity as it moves along and circles back, and most of them seem to be about childhood confusions and discovery and confessions. It's a book that's so extremely accessible, it feels impossible to think someone didn't do it before 1975. The repetition works, I never got sick of it, never entirely forgot it, much like a chant. Occasionally I would only stop, get briefly stuck, when his observations were uncomfortable or if they pulled up an idea from my own experience I had long since forgotten. However, it was always easy to re-enter and continue. I think it took me a total of 90 minutes to read the whole book and I'm a medium-paced reader.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon (Directed by Bryan Forbes, 1964)

Today was a wet afternoon, so what better movie to watch? Recommended to me by Miss Rook and now that I'm sitting down to write about it, I realize that when it comes to movies I hate, I can write a book of essays that cover everything from narrative gaps to misogynist characterizations to the seeing the boom mic appear at the 47 minute mark. But with a good movie, I'm just "omg!!! love it!!!!" Ok, here we go specifics: a beatifully shot black and white movie that I actually ended up watching on the computer in the office, because our television has a permanent green tint that distracted me. A married couple (who you figure out right from the first scenes that their dynamic is a little conflicted) decides to abduct the daughter of a wealthy family and the wife, who fancies herself a medium, will help them rescue both the child and the ransom and then her powers will be recognized and they will be famous and rich themselves. The plan unravels, mostly because the woman unravels -- Kim Stanley was amazing. I kinda dug the old-fashioned heist aspects, where people used to be able to run a little ink through their hair and take off the glasses, or covering up their mouths with a piece of paper, when committing criminal acts and trust that it would obscure them enough to confuse the police about their identity. No worry about leaving being epilthelials at the scenes of the crime.

I like that I did work in the morning, non-work in the afternoon, and now that it's 10 o'clock at night, time to do some teaching work before bedtime.