I’m still processing The Magnificent Ambersons and Mr. Arkadin, which I watched again on DVR. I was shocked at how much I like Arkadian this time… infact in some way omEGG seems born of it, but I didn’t much remember it before. The great costume sequence of Goya masks is right out of Fasnacht and Arkadin in general seems M. Tristan’s great grandfather. In an interesting joke for those of you familier with the Institute for the Future of the Book, Sophie is the “Rosebud” of this story. So I’ve been drawing and dreaming and chewing the cud of these films.
This weekend they are throwing some sort of shin-dig for Grand Army Plaza. The nice thing is fireworks over the whole area and Star Wars on the Long Meadow in Prospect Park. For some time I’ve been thinking there ought to be a web site, or better yet and e-mail service that would tell you when people are launching firworks in NYC. I can’t tell you how many times I have to run to the roof or out in the street to catch the magic. It seems that they go off every week or so in the summer, but how do you know where and when? Fortuneately I got tipped off at the Green Market this morning.
We went to markets sweet and sour today. The lovely, charming, community flavored, expensive farmers market and the horrible, viscious, ugly, cheap, supersized Cost Co. It is nearly impossible to get through a Cost Co shop without a viscious knock down drag out fight before during or after. The place is just about the ninth circle of retail hell… where your food is bigger than you are, but Alice-like, you eat it and grow and grow and grow. Look at this kid eating from a barrell of cheese puffs bigger than her. When she’s finished, you can stick her in it and float her downstream.
Escalator to shopping heaven, or hell? It is facinating to see the immigrants from China and the former Soviet Union and India and The Middle East all gathering enormous amounts of STUFF into their giant sized carts. But then… then… well most of them have never driven a car, let alone a shopping cart, let alone the U.S.S. Normandie Ocean Liner of shopping carts. People are a menace with these things… running over small children – stopping short, swerving… Its like a drunken fromula one race running in slow motion. The enertia of all the coke and forzen meat and deep fired wombat takes yards to pull to a stop. I’m always amazed to walk out without a major leg injury. God bless America… but maybe just a little less next time.
Is America so much under attack, as it is falling to its knees under the great weight of its greed and avarice? I see us as an enraged monster, perhaps frightened by a mouse, proceading to tear the whole city to pieces Godzilla-like as the mouse skirts around its feet… waiting for us to finish off what he could never do himself. That little fucker will be eating a barrel of cheese puffs in the rubble if we let him… maybe you can take consolation in the fact that he will then grow the same size and repeat the mistakes, but that doesn’t give me much consolation. I like my city. I like democracy and I don’t see how you beat religious fundamentalists with religious fundamentalism. I suppose that its the viral innoculation theory of government, but I saw some scary stuff today about how our efforts to innoculate people against polio may have caused aids by mistake. So what if that “protein gets out protein” idea is a dumb one… then what? Rubble and death… “I cut off my nose, because I hate my face.” And now a video metaphor:
