Currently trying to have my blog redirect to the domain www.prestography.com which I have recently purchased. This has become more and more frustrating as I go along. I need a cookie.

Pictures Are Everywhere

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(the idea is to find phrases that do not exist on the internet and then posting them here, so that they finally have their day in the sun. the words are randomly generated in my head, well maybe random isn't the correct word, but I don't have a machine to do it for me so my brain will have to do. and it gets political near the end, sorry bout that.)

nimble trash cans

naked seismograph

obvious door jamb

nutritious backbeat

sameday eruption

red-headed piggy bank

invertebrate george w. bush

remorseful america

Just just watched Clean, a film by Alberto Assayas. The plot revolves around Emily, an ex-convict ex-druggie widow, who spends most of the movie's time trying to redeem herself in order to reconnect with her estranged son, who has been adopted by his grandparents. The dialogue jumps in and out of triteness, ranging the spectrum from at one end a high school drug awareness episode to actual speech. The plot is simple but endearing, however the ending seems like we've seen it before. Nick Nolte has a distinct style that you are immediately drawn to and the photography is crisp and colorful, the director falling in love with every city the narrative gets lost in. Maggie Cheung, though, is amazing.

The arresting performance of Maggie Cheung makes the movie worth watching and is what made In the Mood for Love such an unbelievable film. She has the quality of a great actress as well as the beauty of a star. We here at Prestography however are unabashedly smitten.

"Where's the context?!"

By Susan Cornwell and Kristin Roberts

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States could start withdrawing forces from Iraq this year if the additional troops being sent to Baghdad reduce violence significantly, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Friday.

"If these operations actually work you could begin to see a lightening of the U.S. footprint both in Baghdad and Iraq itself," Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

How many more times should we give Bush and his league the benefit of the doubt? Can they truly believe that 20,000 more troops would significantly decrease the amount of violence? It's like Boyle's law: Increase the mass of the gas (U.S. military involvement in Iraq) at a constant volume and an increase in pressure (violence and unrest) will result. And please someone call me on this if I'm wrong cause I really hope I am.

Boston from Brigham and Women's

"Cracks in the Pavement"

Rothko-esque 1 & 2

New favorite poets/poems

These guys were at the "Flarf" festival in Brooklyn last April. Flarf is a sort of movement in NYC of poets who are bent on creating the most un-poetic poems. Unfortunately what they end up writing is some pretty good stuff. (For more on Flarf check out the feature on JACKET)

Drew Gardner (BLOG) reads his most famous poem from his first book Petroleum Hat, called "Chicks Dig War" (it gets cut off in the very end, oh well). Sharon Mesmer (BLOG) reads four of hers, still haven't gotten her book, Half Angel, Half Lunch, but its at the top of my list. BTW these are posted on youtube by Jordan Davis, another favorite poet/blogger of mine, here's his BLOG.

Watched Bottle Rocket for maybe the third time last night and was finally convinced of the fact that it is Wes Anderson's best movie so far. This is a bold statement I know, considering he's created to other great films, Rushmore and The Royal Tennenbaums. But it seems that as Anderson continues to add to his personal canon, the narratives and characters become more and more absurd and sentimentalized. This fact no better expresses itself than with Steve Zissou the main character in The Life Aquatic, Wes's latest picture. Bill Murray is good in pretty much everything he does and this deflects the limitations of the character he portrays, deflects the fact that it is too comic, too much of a caricature of a real life Steve Zissou who has more subtle but more defining characteristics.

It is also painfully realized that Wes is still stuck in one mode of storytelling which however unique and personal it may be has gotten tired from overuse. I may just be too harsh of a critic but I wonder now whether there are any directors who were able to break out of their style and form a new version it. What comes to mind, though my cinema knowledge is fairly limited, is really no one. It's like a director is incapable of escaping his own mindset, incapable of looking back at the language he has used and then unlearning it. How do I unlearn English for that matter? Maybe I'm just fed up with the auteur mode of expression altogether. Perhaps some day a director will come along hell-bent on redesigning his voice with every movie, one trump after another. That'll be the day.

"I felt with full force all the essential contradictions of me in this new place, with its marble busts, its arcane traditions, its memories and its ghosts. I pondered the fact that, according to his own autobiography, Senator Byrd had received his first taste of leadership in his early twenties, as a member of the Raleigh County Ku Klux Klan, an association that he had long disavowed, an error he attributed—no doubt correctly—to the time and place in which he'd been raised, but which continued to surface as an issue throughout his career. I thought about how he had joined other giants of the Senate, like J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and Richard Russell of Georgia, in Southern resistance to civil rights legislation. I wondered if this would matter to the liberals who now lionized Senator Byrd for his principled opposition to the Iraq War resolution—the MoveOn.org crowd, the heirs of the political counterculture the senator had spent much of his career disdaining.

"I wondered if it should matter. Senator Byrd's life—like most of ours—has been the struggle of warring impulses, a twining of darkness and light. And in that sense I realized that he really was a proper emblem for the Senate, whose rules and design reflect the grand compromise of America's founding: the bargain between Northern states and Southern states, the Senate's role as a guardian against the passions of the moment, a defender of minority rights and state sovereignty, but also a tool to protect the wealthy from the rabble, and assure slaveholders of noninterference with their peculiar institution. Stamped into the very fiber of the Senate, within its genetic code, was the same contest between power and principle that characterized America as a whole, a lasting expression of that great debate among a few brilliant, flawed men that had concluded with the creation of a form of government unique in its genius—yet blind to the whip and the chain."

-excerpted from The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Barack Obama

here's a link to the review in NYROB

This is a White-throated Sparrow, the picture taken form my backyard. Though a very common bird, it should be on its way to Mexico by now.

Thursday, January 4, 2007
Difficult ways to publish poetry (13-- moby dick)

Convince whales to choreograph their position and blow hole blowing so that from the sky, their blowing water looks like words.

supplies

whales, whale persuasion techniques

-from odalisqued.blogspot.com

Backyard at night.

Was shot with a 15 second long shutter speed.