Hello.

- Anthony Burgess said that "the possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it." Mother Mercy, that's so true. I've noticed that many folks who claim to love books and be all about certain (canonized) authors don't really read or read much. They're all bark and no book, pseudo-literates. Unliterates. I applaud those whose homes are void of books. At least they're honest: they don't give a shit, and they don't give a shit that they don't give a shit. The fake readers, the unliterates? They give a shit that they don't give a shit, so they hope that others will judge them by their covers.

- It's a dismal day when I wear my brand-new Converse All-Stars outside of the house for the first time. They lose their innocence, though they glow on for some time. Then there's the first walk into a public bathroom. My Chucks have been debauched in the gutter.

- Many years ago, I wouldn't have been caught dead in a Bath & Body Works store. Now you can catch me dead just about anywhere.

- History is a repetitive spiral. Compare these days to the fall of Judea in Year 63. After their popular rise to power, the Maccabees eventually became a dictatorship in all but name. Their wars were numerous and protracted, and understandable anti-government sentiment increased among the Pharisees. Then Rome stepped in via Pompey, taxed the Sheol out of the Jews, and regulated corrupt High Priests.

Better yet, compare these days to the death-rattling Weimar Republic. We now live in Weimarica.

- Whenever I dare to look around at the cluster-F that is our nation, I think of the lyrics to "When You Gonna Wake Up" from Bob Dylan's Slow Train Coming (1979):

Counterfeited philosophies have polluted all of your thoughts
Karl Marx has got ya by the throat, Henry Kissinger's got you tied up in knots...
...Adulterers in churches and pornography in the schools,
You got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making rules.

- I just can't plug my mind into these newfangled gadgets. First of all, I'm the only adult male on the planet without a cell phone. Heck, Dalai Lama 14 probably has a Cricket (close enough to a grasshopper) under his robe. And these Kindles? I like to turn pages with my digits, thank you. I like the smell of books; I like to underline passages. I like that I can read my book during a power outage without batteries. And don't get me started on Wii. Or "woot."

- Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere fascinates me. It's the deep end of a swimming pool for the eyes. The inscrutable barmaid as central subject, the way her hands rest on the counter, her figure echoed in the bottles and the fruit bowl and the glass and the chandelier, the offset (impossible?) mirror perspective in the background, the man who is talking to her, how he seems close to her in the mirror and nowhere in the foreground. Do her clothes conceal the brazen odalisque flesh of Olympia, or the substantial booty of Nana? Is the man muttering a proposal for a menage a trois picnic?

Though it's much, much, much less morose, sinister and frustratingly obscure than Walter Sickert's work, the bothersome man in the mirror brings it to mind. This is probably due to my association of the mustachioed gentleman and our lovely miss with Sickert's direct and indirect evocation of Jack the Ripper and his lower-class victims.

Pick my poison? What's your poison, darling? Who is that man talking to you? Is he poison or passion? Is he friend or fiend? Is he figment - or me?

- If there are lessons in a deadly accident or natural disaster, it's that dangerous situations raise the chances of doom and Earth likes to shrug us off into oblivion once in a while. The recent Iceland volcano? Shows how futile our scramble for order and security is, the ultra-contingent reliability of our vaunted airlines, and the magnificent carbon footprints the planet itself leaves. The Haiti and China earthquakes? Earth has the biggest, hungriest mouth. The West Virginia and Sago mine deaths? Earth breathes deadly breath, and lightning can ignite it.

Don't puff your chests too much, fellow humans. In one way or another, your day is coming. And if it's not Earth that batters, shatters or swallows you, it'll be some suicide-switch disease inside you, or another human turned Reaper who will steal your life in a single orgiastic moment.

If you have a dangerous job or live in a dangerous area (on a fault line, near a volcano, along an ocean coast), don't be surprised if the job retires you early, if the ground snaps at you with its jaws, if magma and ash ejaculate from the angry crater, if the ocean decides to swim in you. There's no need to address the requisite expectation of instant death of the soldier, because we're all conscripted at birth into this lifelong corps that's always in a state of emergency.

Baudelaire wrote in "Further Notes on Edgar Poe": "Nature can only produce monsters...Civilized man has invented the doctrine of Progress to console himself for his surrender and decay."

- There's been much talk and action in response to the horrible Haiti earthquake that killed thousands and thousands of people, but I haven't seen as much outrage about the cycle of mass slaughter in the hellhole of Nigeria. The latest Muslim-on-Christian butchery claimed 500 lives, most of them women and children. Clip from a Times Online article: "One toddler appeared fixed in the protective but hopeless embrace of an older child, possibly his brother. Another had been scalped. Most had severed hands and feet."

I mourn this type of devastation more than ones involving the earth tossing masses off of its back or raining lava down on them. Though I reject the reprehensible term "manmade disaster" that the current administration uses to describe terrorist murders, humanity's inhumanity is the worst horror we can face. If it can be done, it is done, I always say. Imagine the most grisly torture, mutilation, or aberrance, and you can bet your life that it has been and will be done again and again. Conrad's Kurtz saw the horror in the heart of darkness. And the darkness of the human heart tends to be darker than dark. The cold calculation of the Iago, the demonic bliss of the Dennis Rader outweigh Vesuvius or the Influenza Pandemic of 1918. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pol Pot and Che Guevera upstage the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that made Voltaire pissed that the God who never interferes never interfered. Atrocity belongs to Humankind alone. The massacre of the Tates and the LaBiancas, corpse-skin-clad Ed Gein, the raped or "honor-killed", the child sold into sexual slavery: these "small" victims outrage me more than the Katrina drowned.

Forget the numbers. The popular focus on quantity is problematic, because it's related to the "greatest good for the greatest number" justification of decisions. Consider the scenario put forth by Dostoyevsky: Who would dare to torture an innocent creature, such as a baby, to death in order to guarantee world peace? The world be damned. Flush the billions for the sake of that little one.

Sorry. To be perfectly honest, I must admit that I didn't get hit in the gut with the Haiti earthquake news. There's something about mass natural erasures that leaves me tepid. But what happened in Nigeria appalls me more than a million natural-disaster deaths ever could. Humankind, for you I weep. My soul is sick with you.

- A local crime brought my wife to tears recently. A stepfather raped a 2-year-old girl then left her out in the snow to freeze to death. Thankfully, William Page, the savage, was found guilty. Now, I can spiel about the problems with state-run executions and re-watch The Life of David Gayle a hundred times, but I honestly feel rage and vengefulness toward this piece of garbage. And there's our conundrum of crime and punishment: the paradox of punishing violence with violence and so-called righteous vengeance. I can't help but look at a sub-beast like William Page and echo the words of Emilia in Othello: "A halter to pardon him, and Hell gnaw his bones."

- In "Approaching the Unconscious" Jung wrote that "it is to [primitive] characteristics that the symbols of dreams constantly refer, as if the unconscious sought to bring back all the old things from which the mind free itself as it evolved - illusions, fantasies, archaic thought forms, fundamental instincts, and so on" and that "our present lives are dominated by the goddess Reason, who is our greatest and most tragic illusion."

This reminds me of the extensive analysis of cinema as a bridge between subconsciousness and consciousness, dream and reality. Surrealists such as Andre Breton sensed this potential in film early on. It seemed an extension of the goal of jarring spectators out of the static amber of everyday living via the images in their paintings. Besides Man Ray's The Starfish, Bunuel's An Chien Andalou was a moving bunch of symbols that the Surrealists saw as analogous to subliminal narratives.

Breton wrote in "As In A Wood": "We saw in the cinema then, such as it was, a lyrical substance simply begging to be hauled in en masse, with the aid of chance. I think that what we valued most in it...was its power to disorient...The marvel...resides in the devolved faculty of the first-comer to abstract himself from his own life when he feels like it, at least in the cities, as soon as he passes through one of the muffled doors that give on to the blackness. From the instant he takes his seat to the moment he slips into the fiction evolving before his eyes, he passes through a critical point as captivating and imperceptible as that uniting waking and sleeping (the book and even the play are incomparably slower in producing this release)...The temptation is so great to make this disorientation last and to increase it to an impossible degree..."

Laura Mulvey, whatever you may think of her, had some curious things to say - especially about scopophilia and the pleasure of gazing and being gazed at that burgeons in cinema. I interpret her view of film as less of a bridge between dream and reality but more of a formulation or definition of dream and reality (or suggestion that the defined dream is real): namely, the Lacanian "mirror-moment" of pre-language self-recognition in the reflection of the apparently ideal self that goes hand-in-hand with the "male gaze" and its control of "film phantasy," reducing the female to gaze-object, something that exists only in relation to the male actor (who is the ideal self in the mirror). No wonder there seems to be a lesbian bedrock under females' assessment, admiration and resentment of other females, especially celebrities and models. Far from being a largely gay male extravaganza, high fashion is Sapphic.

The cinema is "a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy," writes Mulvey in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1973). "[T]he darkness in the auditorium" provides "an illusion of looking in on a private world" and "satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking." Cinema allows the viewer to both lose and reinforce his ego. Its heightened and exotic perspective allows loss of the familiar ego but produces "ego ideals" themselves. "Identification with the image seen" happens, for both men and women. Since, for Mulvey, the cinema is for the male eye, females see through that eye as well.

Of course, if I had a million years, we could get into de Beauvoir's notion of the male as subject and the female as willing object who tries "to seduce others into allowing [them] to alienate [her] in their gaze." de Beauvoir points to a mirror-moment of males' recognition of themselves in females' adoring, affirming eyes. Women seem to be perfect for cinema. They are the key to its seemingly omnipotent allure. Who can resist the attractive horror of the castrating femme fatale, the uncontrollable bondage of the aggressive/submissive slut, the Madonna-next-door, the manifested (man-feasted) feminine sculpture, the transformation of the ugly duckling?

The ultimate power lies in the eye. The blind are spared the lion's share of lust and its prison sentence. How could the Golden Age of Radio with its aural limitation competed? Can a man "gaze" at a voice, at a sound effect of high heels clicking across the wooden floor of a gumshoe's office? No, the eye holds the power. We are all scopophiles. And cinema is our popcorn peep show.

Though you'd think that he'd praise the influential might of the medium he mastered, cinematic Atlas Orson Welles seemed to favor the still-new television medium as more pervasive than cinema, however: curiously emphasizing television's aural power and its relation to the former electric entertainment king, radio. "[A]bove all, you are speaking to the ear," he said in a 1958 interview for Cahiers du Cinema. "For the first time, in television, the cinema takes on a real value, finds its real function, because it talks, because the most important is what is said and not what is shown. Words are thus no longer the enemies of the film: the film only helps the words, because television is in fact only illustrated radio...[The public is] more attentive [to television], because it listens rather than looks. Television viewers listen or don't listen, but no matter how little they listen they are more attentive than in the cinema, because the brain is more engaged by hearing than by seeing. To listen, you need to think; looking is a sensory experience, more beautiful and more poetic, but where attention plays a smaller part."

- 3-D movies are dumb, dumb, dumb. (Hey, three Ds!) Hollywood seems to have run out of cool ideas, so it relies on sensationalism and gimmickry. Avatar? Avatarded. Alice in Wonderland? NEXT. Until Kendra Wilkinson is cast as Alice, I'm not interested. And I'm tired of Depp playing the disturbing loon. A remake of George Romero's The Crazies? Man, that's risking my devastating rejection. But I could watch Timothy Olyphant in a remake of Ishtar, so...

- For the most part, so-called reformers are meddlesome egomaniacs and McNamaraesque academician wonks that try to build Towers of Babel with the weak mortar of good intentions and/or play humanity like chess or a mathematical equation. Hubris and folly are sisters. Like Joseph Conrad, I can love Humanity while disbelieving in its perfectibility, while rejecting H.G. Well's hatred of Humanity and his belief in its capacity for perfection. Whatever the stripe, most "progressive" or revolutionary praxis enthusiasts reach too far. Their grand designs manifest into, to use popular Internet parlance, epic fails.

I find some pertinence in something Finnish film director Aki Kaurismaki said about his decision to adapt Crime and Punishment into a film: "Hitchcock said he would never be able to touch that book, and I thought, 'OK, I'll show you, old man.' Later I realized that he was right. It was not my style, but I had no style then - it came later." (Incidentally, a worthy Don Quixote film seems to be another Bermuda Triangle for grasping directors. Ask both Welles and Terry Gilliam.)

- Here are some quick takes on past and current TV shows I've watched or peeked at. Despite its nauseating white guilt, CBS' "The Good Wife" is a worthy show. Julianna Margulies is a vision these days. And newcomer Archie Panjabi plays a plucky, brainy treat. "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant": Yeah, riiiight. "16 and Pregnant": They knew they were pregnant! A lot of these teens are troopers, and they don't take the easy way out. "Undercover Boss": This show's a tear jerker because we tend to melt for the bowing king or the manifest god. I love when the underpaid and overworked folks get some recognition for their efforts. Still. This stuff is still geared toward bolstering the basically insane cult of work we're born into. David Milch's "John From Cincinnati" from a few years ago. David Lynch meets Frank Kapra. Though it's nowhere near the level of "Deadwood," I found the show to be poetic and gorgeously outrageous. Bravo, Milch. "Project Runway": What can I say? I love this show. Love female models and crazy clothing. "Kendra": You're a total fox. Please don't talk.

- Things I will never wear willingly for the rest of my life: a red or tie-dye shirt, Dr. Martens or Vans shoes, Birkenstocks, a leather jacket of any kind, Fendi cologne, and a Halloween costume.

- Three things that always happen in movies or TV shows and never (or shouldn't) happen in real life: People make out all tonguey with morning breath. People poke at or stir their food when they're depressed or worried. People go through days-long adventures without peeing or taking a dump.

- I've a Swiftian mortification of the human body. It nauseates me, for the most part. It's appetizing only within that hour or two after bathing and that quarter hour after brushing one's teeth. And mouths make me sick. The sexiness of food is a sick fetish; the social ritual of chewing and swallowing in groups is nightmarish. I wouldn't kiss Brigitte Bardot circa 1960s right after she'd eaten a steak. How people talk to each other so closely in the morning - without chewing gum or sucking mints at least - is beyond me.

And the body's waste system? I'll never get used to it, never accept it as normal process. It appalls me every time. Nabokov put it best from the grave, in a sense. From his posthumously published The Original of Laura, D 10, page 129: "I loathe my belly, that trunkful of bowels, which I have to carry around, and everything connected with it - the wrong food, heartburn, constipation's leaden load, or else indigestion with a first installment of hot filth pouring out of me in a public toilet three minutes before a punctual engagement."

- I prefer comic back issues over current ones. Too much manga style, juvenalia, and overly "relevant," agendized plots. Back issues that I've been enjoying lately: Milestone's Shadow Cabinet and Blood Syndicate, Renegade Press' Ms. Tree (one of the few bi-color comics I can tolerate visually, along with Dave Sim - and unlike anything by the likes of Clowes and Scott McCloud), Messner-Loebs' Wonder Woman, and Moench's and Gulacy's Six From Sirius (despite my general dislike for sci-fi comics).

- Now that Lady Gaga has made Madonna seem as tame as Judge Judy, the ante needs to be upped. You watch. Female performers will compete until videos are just gang-bang sessions set to music.

- After Carlos Franqui broke with Castro's Cuba in 1968, his image was doctored out of a photo in true Statist fashion. See the before and after here. Franqui wrote a humorous poem about it:

I discover my photographic death.
Do I exist?
I am a little black,
I am a little white,
I am a little shit,
On Fidel's vest.

- Joseph Goebbels: "The stupidity of democracy. It will always remain one of democracy's best jokes that it provided its deadly enemies with the means by which it was destroyed...One can make superb capital from democratic stupidity. The members of the NSDAP [Nazis] grasped that right away and took enormous pleasure in it."

Richard J. Evans: "Democracies that are under threat of destruction face the impossible dilemma of either yielding to that threat by insisting on preserving the democratic niceties, or violating their own principles by curtailing democratic rights."

- Oh, the audacity of audacity. I won't bother joining the chorus of dismay over our ever-metastasizing and bankrupting government, but I'll let the Tao speak: