Movie: Curious Case of Benjamin Button

kind of hooey. a kernel of feeling that comes of a dramatizing a
genuinely intriguing thought/emotion experiment, but gimmicky
stereotyped and lacquered over and neither the screenwriter nor Brad
Pitt up to the task. and criminal the way they made up Cate Blanchett
to within an inch of her life, like a china doll for the young ballet
dancer period in her life, and like a suppurating turd on her
deathbed. and who the hell was it who played her daughter, the
quintessence of mod-gal, "i'm all about the information" television-
style acting. this film had a soul, but beleaguered by phony easy
solutions. and yet it may well net the oscars.

25 things - for facebook

1. is strongly ambivalent about living in either the country or the
city, but is decidedly against living in the suburbs. Is reminded of
his father's favorite questions: "Is it warmer in the summer or the
country?" and "Do you bring your lunch or drive to work?"

2. would love to have been a champion swimmer but when he tried out
for the team had to be rescued by the coach for displaying all the
fortitude of a waterlogged rat skimmed from the pool filter.

3. remembers his French teacher in high school as perhaps his favorite
mentor, albeit brief, and unknown to said teacher.

4. thinks back fondly and often on his very topsy-turvy year spent in
France 80-81.

5. still counts Badlands as his favorite film.

6. got lost in Paris streets for 2 hours age 13 in search of abrigots.

7. lived for a long time on the phrase "faire, et en faisant, se
faire" (Voltaire) but distanced himself from this after having done
several regrettable things.

8. thinks it a cruel indignity that Louis Kahn died in the men's room
at Penn Station.

9. still finds major inspiration in Mike Leigh, along with Cassavetes,
Herzog, Fellini and some others.

10. spent all summer 1985 reading plays nonstop in coffeehouses in
Seattle while living off his brother who worked briefly for an
accounting firm and quit after waking from his keyboard to see his
finger had filled the screen with zzzzs.

11. loves his wife and children with a greedy selfish chimpanzee
tribal love, and others too.

12. romantically challenged, came close to purposefully walking out
into traffic, age 22, and now thinks how very dumb that would have
been, especially for precluding #11 ever coming to pass.

13. thinks periodically about that thing Thoreau said about planning
mansions and building shacks.

14. steeped myself in the poem "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" to the
point where it felt like home for a good long while, then got cabin
fever.

15. loves Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda.

16. considers the Adirondack Mountains the most sacred place in the
universe, yet would put wind turbines all over them if necessary
because I find these embody a necessary and beautiful idea. Can't
suffer the fools objecting to Cape Wind off Martha's Vineyard...

17. took a courier flight to Santiago Chile on a day's notice ~13 yrs
ago, joined by a friend. A week later nearly lost my life on Class 4
rapids on the Trancura River - felt like god's biggest fool til I
lived to tell about it.

18. loves Wendell Berry.

19. thinks often about what someone once described to me as the
"fertility fallacy", that you just can't keep ploughing the same field
and expect the spectacular yield you first got.

20. can't believe America was hoodwinked into buying petroleum waste
to fuel its cars when alcohol fuel ran Ford's first cars fine, was
plentiful, cheap and clean. Rockefeller bought Congress to pass
Prohbition to put Ford's ethanol preference out of business. It's
coming back, but not from made from corn, possibly the worst crop for
it. Its cycle of production and consumption nets negative C02, making
it cleaner than solar or wind, and no dang threat to food production!
Check out David Blume's work on this for the past 30 years. We're
starting an Ethanol Coop in Bklyn to ultimately support Community
Supported Energy and local farmers, and we have 2 million people lined
up for it. Ok, from ethanol back to the ethereal...

21. thinks often of Hart Crane's quote "There is the world dimensional
for those untwisted by the love of things irreconciliable."

22. thinks nearly as often of James Merrill's disquieting quote "That
least thing your self-love longs for, others instinctively withhold."

23. is a filmmaker. Thinks today that's about as differentiating as
saying "I love gold", or "I sweat when it's hot." Wonders about
someone who may have really loved gold, say in the Gold Rush, couldn't
part with it, not for love or money. like to think of myself as that
kind.

24. misses his sister Undine, gone at age 43 in 2001. loves his 3
nieces.

25. will send this on to 25 people because he feels bound to those who
sent it to him... and furthermore,

26. thinks 26 is more alive than 25, half a year, half a card deck,
all the letters, date of my birth. Mellifluous Greek against Roman/
Latin counting fingers base 10, demarcated and all contemplated up.
rather, the eyes create the world.

story about a weight loss program

fat sister and slim sister twins - before and after - making mtns of
$. have to get rid of the fat sister who threatens to blow the whistle.

Bway musical

is the apotheosis of that local thing. stay away from galaxies,
celebrate your own. only they go too far. cloying sticky goo for the
brain and senses ultimately. nice place to visit, don't live it.

Learning

Trying to own a piece of the universe, a kind of greed

Sent from Wide Iris cell:
646.620.5704

cosmology

after reading a lot of this staggering stuff about the universe in
Ferris' "The Whole Shebang" wondering if it doesn't make good sense
for people to simply bite off what they can chew, be parochial,
believe in local gods...