Paris Hilton And The Kennedy Assassination — 1

Hayden Panettiere And The Kennedy Assassination

Alchemical Suspicions Of Beauty Without Terror

Tom Stallard, of the University of Leicester, said: “It’s not just a ring of aurora like those we’ve seen at Jupiter or Earth. This one covers an enormous area across the pole. “Our current ideas on what forms Saturn’s aurora predict that this region should be empty, so finding such a bright one here is a fantastic surprise.” The image shown on the left is a composite displaying the aurora, illustrated in blue, the planet’s hot interior, rendered in red, and clouds, which appear as black silhouettes. [Saturn’s polar light show mystifies scientists]

I’ve read scientists have observed
inexplicable aurora
over the north pole of Saturn.
Strange lights in someone else’s sky.

We have aurora here on Earth.
They’re just particles from the Sun
glowing, trapped by magnetism
at the fringe of the atmosphere.

Theories account for certain types
of auroral displays. Sometimes
theories need revising. Sometimes
big theories need revising, too.

Saturn according to theory
lacks mass for fusion reactions.
The planet can’t burn hydrogen,
can’t ignite, can’t become a star.

But I wonder if the strange lights
glowing above Saturn’s north pole
might foreshadow other strange things,
might foreshadow strange lights for us.

Saturn is in Leo. Some say
the Sphinx was once a huge lion
later generations re-carved
to the image of a pharaoh.

Many thousands of years ago
when Saturn was in Leo then
did ancient people see strange lights
in their sky? Did Saturn ignite?

Saturn is dim in our sky now
but if you look very closely
the planet is still beautiful,
still ringed and still mysterious.

Saturn according to theory
doesn’t periodically blaze,
ignite into a second Sun
then dim again to a planet.

But there are many ancient myths,
tales of battles among the ‘gods’
and Saturn, though dim in our sky,
was a god to ancient people.

If Saturn somehow did ignite
our evenings would become as bright
as heavy overcast sunlight.
‘Lucifer’ means ‘Bringer of Light.’

Only a couple of letters,
one phonetic transformation,
differentiate the two words,
the word ‘Saturn,’ the word ‘Satan.’

Saturn according to theory
is the sixth planet from the Sun
and just a planet, not too strange.
And even strange auroral lights

are just particles from the Sun
trapped by Saturn’s magnetic field
high up in Saturn’s atmosphere.
There are aurora on Earth, too.

But I will reveal a secret:
In casual conversations,
in emails that don’t get posted,
professional astronomers

are just as intrigued by the thought
of a low-mass star igniting
among the outer gas giants
as are fans of science fiction.

And, of course, alchemists suspect
we’ve never stopped walking among
shadows of ancient myths still here,
still lit by strange lights in the sky.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


Through Trees And Clouds, Beauty Without Terror

Defying Nature In The Parking Lot

A storm of cars blows into the parking lot.
One car like lightning arcs to ground down through me.
Afterward when the cars blow past I’m black ash,
a shape on the pavement, run through, burned out, fried,
never having gotten inside. I need maps,
forecasts, parking lot meteorology.

I need a geosynchronous satellite
dedicated to sending telemetry
for driving a supercomputer model
that generates predictions of when it’s safe
for me to make it through certain parking lots.

It’s tempting just to stay out of parking lots.

But sometimes sunlight refracting through the cars
creates pretty rainbows. And, you know, sometimes
I need to buy new pencils from the craft store
or check out an old book from the library.

Parking lot weather can be terrifying
but I’m hoping the tools of modern science
can get me through these expeditions alive.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


Parking Lots


Parking Lots At Night #1: The Morning Fashion Shoot

Parking Lots At Night #2: Dinner With Shelby

Parking Lots At Night #3: The Parking Lot At Night

Parking Lots At Night #4: The Next Day


Expeditions

Boys And Girls And David Hockney

I don’t want to move away (for now) from the topic of paintings based on pop media frames without mentioning David Hockney’s extraordinary book, “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.” This is a large format, beautifully illustrated history of photorealism in the fine art world, from before the invention of oil painting into the present. There are also many interesting discussions of the epistemology of images in general. (Apparently four hundred years ago some high Vatican officials enjoyed very detailed paintings of naked young men for the same reasons some high Vatican officials today probably get their porn on Blu-ray.)

It’s a great book. I read through the book, cover to cover, once or twice every year. It’s as interesting the third or fourth time through as it was the first.

*

The most recent Hockney book I’ve read was a retrospective of his drawings.

My favorite works in the book are his colorful pencil and crayon [crayons!] drawings of Celia Birtwell.

When I first read through the book, I just looked at the pictures. Then I went back and read the text. Apparently, I’m guessing, if Hockney were to pick his own favorite images from the book he might not pick images of Celia . . .

“It was incredible to meet in California a young, very sexy, attractive boy who was also curious and intelligent. In California you can meet curious and intelligent people, but generally they’re not the sexy boy of your fantasy as well. To me this was incredible; it was more real. The fantasy part disappeared because it was the real person you could talk to.” — David Hockney

Many have argued that Hockney, in love, captures the intimacy of his relationship with Schlesinger in his drawings. However, as with Hockney’s paintings of him, the drawings should not be confused or conflated with Schlesinger since, in a very real sense, they are not about him. As Peter, Albergo la Flora, Rome (1967) and Peter (1968) make explicit, what the drawings register is Hockney’s active looking at, and possession of, the younger man who is reconstructed in his image. Vision, within this context, achieves the status of an act. Not for Hockney was the benign reciprocity of lovers’ glances.

Ulrich Luckhardt and Paul Melia
writing in “David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective”

Comics And Movies: Thoughts From Art Spiegelman

In today’s post I’m going to follow-up a little on what I talked about yesterday, specifically how I’m trying to figure out some esthetic theory for thinking about art and entertainment images based on frames from the pop media.

I don’t even have a start, however, so I’m just going to be mentioning some of the kinds of things I’m trying to keep in mind as I attempt to get my thinking in order. After I jot down two or three things I use to get perspective in my thinking, I’m going to put up a quote from Art Spiegelman that provides something like a general framework for how I approach thinking of still images versus moving images (or still images versus extracts from moving images).

(One Art Spiegelman note: There are a couple of conceptual points about “Maus” that I find troubling. I wrote a novel—as yet, of course, damn it, unpublished—that touches on dealing with the Holocaust. Although Spiegelman made some choices that I wouldn’t have made, I have a lot of respect for him as an artist. I wouldn’t have crafted “Maus” the way he did, but there is sincerity in his work that is profoundly moving. It is what art and entertainment should be. By comparison, I would single out, say, Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” as being something else entirely.)


*

When I first posted about paintings based on media frames, I called the post, “The Abandonment Of Meaning.” One of the things I meant by that title was that when an artist or entertainer recycles an image that was composed by a cinematographer or cameraman, takes the image out of context and creates a new context, a great deal of the meaning of the image is lost and very little new meaning is created. The artist or entertainer selects exactly what frame to reproduce, what part of the frame to reproduce, what manner of interpretation to use for the reproduction. These are very real choices that create artistic input. But they are almost trivial compared to the original process of the first composition.

I once posted Will Barnet describing how much thought went into his painting ‘Soft Boiled Eggs.’

Much of my thinking about the issue of images based on media frames is built around the notion that an artist or entertainer should be the source of meaning, rather than simply [simply?] a commentator. An artist or entertainer should be creating pop culture rather than simply looking around and and singling out what other people do to create pop culture.

This may seem counter-intuitive. It is second nature—even for me when I think about these things—to tend to see movies and television as “primary” sources of culture and entertainment, while just about everything else seems derivative in one way or another. Even when novels or comics come first and serve as the source of a movie or TV production people seem to remember the movie or TV production as much more lasting—for better or for worse—than the source material.

I believe this is an illusion. It is a seductive and persuasive illusion, but I believe it is just an illusion nonetheless.

It is still imagery—carefully crafted by real artists and entertainers—that generates “lasting” art and entertainment. Pop culture pretends this isn’t so. Many artists and entertainers accept the pop culture illusion and devote themselves to creating derivative productions. But a reasonable esthetic theory on this topic should provide a framework for thinking about these things which puts everything in its proper place.

I don’t have such a theory, but this is a general statement on how I’m starting to think of the issue.

*

Here is Art Spiegelman commenting on comics versus the movies:

Unlike many artists, Spiegelman doesn’t see his stories in his head as though they’re movies which he’s capturing on paper. In fact, he says he’s never seen it this way.

“I like movies, but I don’t think they have much to do with comics except that the language is similar, like wide-angle-shot or overhead-shot or close-up. But I don’t see these things as moving pictures, but accretions of pictures. They’re still pictures that never had any other life in my mind. I can see how you can look at a comic and see how it’s like a storyboard for a film. But the more it’s a storyboard for a film, the less it’s a successful comic. Comics are a very specific organization of still images. They suggest time and motion, but they exist as still images. A character on the left of the frame in one panel can, in the next panel, be in the middle and in the third panel be over on the right creating the illusion of a person moving from left to right. But I never saw that as a person walking or tried to figure out how to divide the panels like the frames of a film. I see a kind of patterning, as if you kept the so-called ‘camera’ still with the figure moving across the background. You’d create a pattern that would attract your eye to a certain part of the page and hold it there.

“When I think about comics I always think of full pages and divide them into panels later. And try to find the individual moment that accumulates the full page.”

“There’s so many other factors operating, such as what size and shape panel to use, which is a problem no filmmaker ever deals with because they always have the same ratio of rectangle to work in. And no filmmaker has to think of one frame from five minutes ago still being present in the eye because a film is based on retention from a fraction of a second to a fraction of a second. Comics are based on seeing all those things at once because peripherally you’re always going to see what happens next and what happened before. It’s interesting that Rudolphe Topffer was doing comics that used cross-cutting a good seventy years before the invention of cinema. A lot of cinematic language is actually comics language.

“I find myself influenced by literature and painting. They all play their part. It’s what makes comics an exciting medium, to synthesize and be able to use little bits and parts from other disciplines. So I’m not discounting the influence of film, I just think it’s overrated.”

Art Spiegelman
quoted in “How To Draw Art For Comic Books”

“Kari Loses An Underwire From Her Bra...”

“Movies, and particularly frame-enlargements, have been in my work what engravings and such were for artists in the distant past, what printed illustrations were for painters like Manet and Van Gogh, what photographs were for Degas and Cézanne and later for Sickert and Bacon. No more and no less.”

R. B. Kitaj
quoted in “Pop Art”

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about this kind of thing:

I’m not talking about politics and I’m not talking about conspiracy theories.

I talking about art and entertainment images based on frames from the pop media. That is an Audrey Flack oil painting based on a frame from one of the famous film sequences of Kennedy from that day in Dallas. (This isn’t from the Zapruder film. This is from earlier, at the airport, when Kennedy just arrived in Dallas.)

I’ve posted paintings based on media frames before. I’m very intrigued by this stuff.

I’ve posted Karen Kilimnik’s painting based on an old horror film.

Kilimnik does a lot of these things. It was seeing one of her paintings from a frame of the old TV show “The Avengers” that first got me thinking about this. I had never seen such work before, but I gather it has been going on for quite some time in the fine arts world.

And I’ve posted McDermott & McGough’s odd double painting based on a couple of old melodrama films.

Lots of “real” artists do this kind of work.

I don’t really know what to think about paintings like this. I haven’t read or figured out any kind of esthetic theory for images copied from media frames. But, subjectively, every time I’ve seen one of these things from Karen Kilimnik it’s made me smile. And similar stuff by other artists always catches my eye. Even though I can’t put my finger on why I like this stuff, I suspect there is something special going on, something worth thinking about further.

The quote from Kitaj is interesting but not particularly thoughtful. He just passes off the process of using media frames as the contemporary version of artists responding to the culture around them. But everything an artist creates is a response to the culture around him—in one way or another. That doesn’t address why frame-based paintings are so intriguing.

So, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought.

And over the weekend I decided to give it a try.

Instead of doing a normal cartoon, I decided to try my hand at creating a more comprehensive image based on a frame from an obscure bit of video. I was going to do a painting, but I simply can’t handle a brush. I did color, but I stayed with stick-based color.

If I were a cool, contemporary artist doing the whole fine arts thing—if I were spending the quiet hours sipping vodka-and-tonics with Karen Kilimnik—I would be doing images like this. If I were a real artist I’d be doing this better than I did over the weekend, but this was still fun to play at. I’m sure I won’t be stealing sales away from the real artists, but I might be trying something like this again and trying to get better. Just for the fun of it.

This even has a long, Karen Kilimnik-type title: “Kari loses an underwire from her bra in the DVD edit of ‘Killer Brace Position’”

Here is my first ever attempt at the fine arts:

A Few Moments With Owen And Dodger

DODGER: I’m so sorry for everything. I didn’t mean to hurt you. You have to believe me.

OWEN: It’s okay.

DODGER: I wish I could make it up to you.

OWEN: I know.

DODGER: If I’d known Rich was involved with that girl I wouldn’t have played this stupid joke.

OWEN: What did you say?

DODGER: If I had known Rich was screwing that girl I wouldn’t have talked the others into this.

OWEN: You’re right. You’re absolutely right.

DODGER: I don’t understand.

OWEN: You wouldn’t play some game if you knew Rich was cheating on you.

DODGER: That’s what I just said.

OWEN: You would get back at him.

DODGER: Owen, I’m confused. I don’t—

OWEN: No, you’re not. That’s what you want me to believe. Just like you wanted me to believe that you were off campus when the first IM went out.

DODGER: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

OWEN: Yes, you do. In the chapel you said you ended it with Rich. I don’t think that’s what happened. I think you were still in love with him. I think you knew that girl. And you knew she was still sleeping with Rich. You murdered her. Then you planted the gun. And told me where to find it. I was your guy. From the moment we met. You planned it. The whole thing. You knew I’d shoot him.

DODGER: Owen, that’s crazy.

OWEN: Really? I thought it was the object of the game.

DODGER: Honestly, Owen, even if that were true, who would believe you?

Through Trees And Clouds, Beauty Without Terror

Right this second as I think up these words
and write them down clouds are getting thicker.

When I woke up and walked to the back yard
there were patches of black between the clouds.
Stars glittered in the sky between the clouds.
Aldebaran in Taurus to the west.
Betelgeuse in Orion to the south.
Regulus in Leo to the southeast.
And in the east through the sparse top branches
of the tall tree right across the alley
the planet Saturn, also in Leo.

Saturn’s dimmer than I’ve ever seen it.
Saturn now seems about the same brightness
as Regulus. And you wouldn’t look twice
at either star through clouds or through clear sky
if you didn’t know the star to the left
was Saturn, the most beautiful planet.

Last night just after sundown, in the west
Venus was the brightest star in the sky.
To the left of Venus was Jupiter,
largest planet in the solar system,
second brightest star in the evening sky.

In the morning sky, now, all the bright stars
are south or west. Nothing catches your eye
to the east. Unless you know what is there.
Regulus in Leo to the southeast
and to the left of Regulus, Saturn.

As I write this dawn is breaking behind
the clouds and the sky between them is blue.
The stars are gone. But before, in the dark,
I took my telescope into the yard.
Through the top branches across the alley
Saturn’s still the most beautiful planet.
The planet’s rings are almost edge-on now.
Almost no light’s reflecting off the rings.
But Saturn, the second largest planet,
still glows a gem-like golden ochre glow.
It’s not deep, rich like topaz, but more like
bright sunlight shining on a lion’s fur.

Saturn in Leo, a lion-like gem . . .

It’s a mixed metaphor kind of beauty
but maybe all real beauty is like that.

Through trees. Through clouds. Dim. Just anonymous.
But when you single out Saturn and look—
carry a telescope outside and look—
Saturn’s still the most beautiful planet.

And sometimes beautiful things—singled out,
looked at carefully—aren’t beautiful.
If you single them out and look closely
beautiful things can be terrifying.

But Saturn is a pure kind of beauty.
Even if it takes a mixed metaphor
kind of attempt to describe the beauty.

Nothing at all there is terrifying.

If you know where to look it’s worth looking.

Browsing Election Day

I spent part of yesterday afternoon
browsing a nearby suburb’s library.
The library was a place for voting
in that suburb next to my own suburb.

I’d voted early at our city hall.
People I’ve talked to said turnout was low
both at my suburb and the one next door.

When I was browsing the library shelves
some guy tried to vote at a voting booth
and managed to knock down the voting booth.
The noise echoed throughout the library
as the voting booth banged against the floor
and banged again collapsing on itself.
The middle-age guy, the would be voter,
stood by the collapsed booth, pen in his hand.
He looked at everyone looking at him.
He blushed, hapless, suddenly embarrassed.
He stammered, apologizing. Workers
hurried to get the voting booth back up.

I sighed and said to a guy next to me,
“He can’t even vote without knocking down
the voting booth and this guy’s vote will help
put the next president into office.”

The guy next to me was excited and
told me nobody’s vote counted because
he had heard there was so much voter fraud
all around the country that the Army
tomorrow was declaring martial law.
He said he’d learned that browsing on the ’net.

I sighed, again, didn’t say anything
and walked away from the voter fraud guy.

That’s election day in America.

I went home and ate two pints of ice cream
even though I’m cutting back on sugar.
I woke up in the middle of the night
with a stomach ache but I think I’ll live.

Dead Butterfly Flapping

The neighborhood video store
near my house is closing up shop.
The last few days they’ve been selling
their entire stock, ten bucks per film.
Though I sometimes rented from them
I couldn’t bring myself to spend
ten dollars to own anything,
not a comedy, no thriller,
not even a monster movie.

The whole motion picture business
has metamorphosized but not
into a butterfly, instead
they’ve emerged from the chrysalis
of high-tech filmmaking combined
with modern business practices
as a junk shop—with junk shop wings,
junk shop abdomen, junk shop legs . . .

Hollywood has crafted itself
into an ugly butterfly.
I don’t want to buy their junk and
when I see them in my garden
I shoo them away from the flowers.

Motor cars, handle bars,
Bicycles for two.
Broken hearted jubilee.

Parachutes, army boots,
Sleeping bags for two.
Sentimental jamboree.

“Buy! Buy!”
Says the sign in the shop window.
“Why? Why?”
Says the junk in the yard.

Candlesticks, building bricks,
Something old and new.
Memories for you and me.

“Buy! Buy!”
Says the sign in the shop window.
“Why? Why?”
Says the junk in the yard.

This Is Lisa Randall. Not Lisa Randall

Halloween On An Inclined Plane

On an inclined plane
a perfectly formed marble
accelerates down.

Frankenstein’s monster,
zombies, werewolves, vampires and
Frankenstein himself

stand at the table
watching the marble roll down.
The Loch Ness monster

submerges outside.
A UFO flashes past.
On a far plateau

a Triceratops
fights a Tyrannosaurus.
The marble rolls down.

It feels like it takes
forever to reach bottom
as the creatures watch.

The Darkness Inside The Wolf

“Right away the huntsman guessed what had happened. ... So he took out his knife and quickly killed the wolf while he lay sleeping. Then he carefully cut open the wolf’s stomach.

“At the first cut, he saw the red velvet cloak, and after a few more slashes a little girl jumped out and cried, ‘Oh, thank you! I was very frightened! It was so dark inside the wolf!’”

Little Red Riding Hood
as retold and illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman

Hmmm. Many modern versions of the Little Red Riding Hood mythos don’t include the hunter actually cutting open the wolf. However, I suspect this version touches on a particularly ancient tradition.

And I suspect this version and the ancient tradition say a lot about what is really happening in this story. I think most people kind of/sort of have a feeling that fairy tales are about much more than just the superficial events narrated in the story.

I suspect this business about cutting open the wolf is the narrative clue that in the Old Times people intuitively understood that the darkness inside the wolf, along with the warmth and digestive juices, would activate deeply encoded genetic programs inside the cells of the Little Red Riding Hood creature. The cells of the Little Red Riding Hood creature would then start to grow and multiply, furiously dividing and reproducing the Little Red Riding Hood creature. Soon two Little Red Riding Hood creatures would burst out through the wolf’s abdomen, just like those creatures in the movie “Alien.”

(The movie “Alien” and its rip-offs are all contemporary incarnations of the Little Red Riding Hood mythos. That’s why there is almost always a young woman as the protagonist. I suspect there is also a large content of something like genetic memory, what people used to call ‘race memory,’ at work in these films which feature creatures that, in the course of their feeding and reproducing, rip their way through a person’s abdomen. Of course, in the original “Alien” the character played by Sigourney Weaver, “Ripley,” [that is, Rip-ley] rips apart the creature’s life cycle, killing it, even though she has no intention of eating the creature or using it to reproduce herself. In this kind of thing there is always more going on than meets the eye.)

This reading of the Little Red Riding Hood mythos preserves the “happy ending” consistent with a traditional fairy tale format. The Little Red Riding Hood creature is prevented from reproducing. The wolf is killed, but the wolf’s death is in service to what philosophers characterize as the ‘greater good’ of preventing the spread of Little Red Riding Hoods.

And, also consistent with a traditional fairy tale format, this reading maintains a strong moral. A real moral. Of course, the actual moral of the Little Red Riding Hood mythos is not targeted only at young girls and has nothing to do with ‘staying on the path’ or ‘avoiding strangers.’ The real moral of the Little Red Riding Hood mythos is much more primal.

The real moral of the Little Red Riding Hood mythos is: Just because something looks good that doesn’t mean you should eat it.




I hope everybody has a happy Halloween!

Leptons, Quarks, Gauge Bosons And Britney Spears

If Britney Spears were a bar of soap
she would have broken in half by now.
We’d have been forced to buy a new bar.

But Britney Spears is a bar of soap
in a complex, string theory cosmos
and when she breaks in half we observe
the two halves are just different edges—
imaginary edges at that—
of a bar of soap manifesting
itself across many dimensions
and the imaginary edges
are just theoretical constructs,
mathematical explorations
of a conceptual fantasy
no different than, say, imagining
a Britney-Beethoven love affair.

Britney Spears will never break in half
just as she’ll never kiss Beethoven.

I strongly suspect that when results
come from the Large Hadron Collider
they’ll confirm my shower experiments
and this interpretation of them.

Sharks From Beyond Space: Sky As Shoreline

I wonder what goes on behind the sky?

Fishermen in boats study the shoreline
because what they see above the water
is sometimes an indication, a clue
to the unseen terrain underwater.

I wonder if the sky, the stars and all,
is just a shoreline, the visible part
of a larger, unseen reality?

Fishermen aren’t the only people
dealing with the shoreline and unseen depths.
There, by that sandy stretch, a boy and girl
are in up to their necks, laughing, splashing.
Their clothing is in two piles on the sand.

I’d like to go swimming among the stars,
skinny-dipping, laughing, splashing out there
between this world we see and what we don’t.

Of course I remind myself, however,
freshwater lake metaphors are safe but
if the unseen is like saltwater depths
then the oceans have riptides and big sharks . . .

I think I’d risk it. Sharks from beyond space
sound scary. But swimming among the stars,
skinny-dipping, laughing, splashing out there
between this world we see and what we don’t,
sounds fun. I’d risk it. Life is a gamble.

The Hortense Lament

When We Meet Monsters

I saw a pheasant
at the end of the alley
but never an owl.

I saw a beaver
in the next alley over
but never a fox.

In a dream last night
I watched a chimera play
with the squirrels out back.

They were all chasing
along the telephone wires
above the alley,

two or three squirrels and
a half-squirrel, half-owl hybrid.
In my dream I thought

it is surprising
the chimera—partly owl—
doesn’t eat the squirrels.

But I guess monsters
get behavior encoding
that is mixed up, too.

I can’t stop thinking,
wondering what I would do
if a chimera—

say, fox and something—
came to my alley wanting
to have fun with me.

The squirrels in my dream
looked like they were having fun
with the chimera.

But even dreaming
I thought the chimera soon
would eat all the squirrels.

When we meet monsters
should we play with them? Or run?
Or play carefully?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



I suspect
about half
of today’s post
was inspired
by this AP story
I read yesterday:

British plans to allow scientists
to use hybrid animal-human embryos
for stem cell research
won final approval
from lawmakers Wednesday...

[11/10/09 - AP removed the original link,
this links to the same story, different source]

Monster Snakes And Sexy Tee Shirts

I haven’t seen a movie worth talking about for some time. Amazingly, Tuesday a new monster snake movie (with David Hasselhoff!) came out on DVD and it wasn’t awful! In fact, I really enjoyed it.

It is “Anaconda 3: Offspring.” Now, the first “Anaconda” was a genuinely good movie. The second, “Anacondas - The Hunt for the Blood Orchid” was a genuinely bad movie, nothing worth seeing at all. This one stakes out a kind of middle ground—it doesn’t try to be good good, it just tries to be a fun, enjoyable monster flick. And it does okay.

First of all, Hasselhoff gets top billing, but he really doesn’t have a big part, thankfully.

Second of all, the special effects aren’t all that great. A few months back I wrote about my two favorite monster snake movies and they both had better special effects than this one.

However, the director here, Don E. FauntLeRoy, is a cinematographer (ASC and everything!) and when camera guys or editors get to be directors there is almost always something worth seeing in their work. (With the exception of Peter Hyams, of course, who is always just wretched and unwatchable.) And in this film the director seems to lavish something like Hitchcockian attention to his leading lady’s wardrobe.

And it makes the film worth watching!

The real star of this film is an actress I know nothing about named Crystal Allen. I’ve never seen her act before, but she is a big step up from the Tara Reid lab coat/glasses/clipboard approach to being a woman scientist. Crystal Allen is reasonably convincing as a herpetologist [!] in charge of keeping a couple of monster snakes alive for a dubious scientist working for a dubious rich guy. (John Rhys-Davies plays the dubious rich guy, essentially the same role he played in “Sabretooth.”)

It’s good that Crystal Allen is a reasonably good actress because the best thing about this movie is watching her . . . very closely.

In the opening scenes, the setup, Allen wears a sexy black tee shirt over some kind of yoga/jogging pants.

When the film gets into the plot-plot-plot scenes, with businessmen talking to scientists and everyone walking around going golly-gee at the high tech lab, Allen wears random working-around-the-lab clothes.

But when the snakes wreck the lab and escape and everyone has to team up and go hunt the snakes, Allen changes into her basic herpetologist outfit: tight blue jeans and sexy white tee shirt.

Now, during the first couple of chase scenes she wears some kind of floppy army vest on top of her sexy tee shirt. But when the snake chomps down on the guy next to her, it splashes blood on the vest, so, of course, she has to take off the vest . . .

Then, after the first couple of chases and snake fights, there is a quiet scene that sets up big climactic chase and snake fight. During that quiet scene, Allen washes off the mud and puts on a clean pair of tight blue jeans and an even skimpier sexy white tee shirt.

So, she is looking very good in the final scenes where there are pleasant, slow motion shots of her walking toward the camera, away from the abandoned building and waiting for the Big Explosion.

It’s not great stuff, you know, it’s not cinema. But it’s a lot of fun. Everything’s adequate and Crystal Allen is an actual actress. And she’s very pretty.

So, it’s a fun monster snake movie.

And, I see at IMDB that “Anaconda 4: Trail of Blood” will be out soon, with the same director and Crystal Allen will reprise her role as Amanda, the sexy herpetologist. I’ll be watching!

Broken Windows From A Day In The Life

Last year a friend and I drove to a nearby suburb to visit their library. They have a cool aquarium there. I wrote about that visit here: Goldfish And Sea Monsters #1 of 3 and Goldfish and Sea Monsters #2 of 3 and Goldfish And Sea Monsters #3 of 3

That afternoon we stopped at a convenience store near the library. I bought a lottery ticket. The numbers I had worked out weren’t very good, however, and I didn’t win anything. But I’ll have more to say about this convenience store in just a bit.


That was last year.


Now, just a few months back I was by myself at that library with the aquarium when a kind of junior high gang war broke out. Some of the kids fighting threw a decorative boulder through the library’s front window, completely shattering the glass. I wrote about that here: Let’s Go To The Library And Scare Ourselves


That was a few months ago.


Now, just a few days ago—actually, just a few nights ago—a vendor was delivering supplies to that convenience store near the library with the cool aquarium and when the driver tried to park his truck he screwed up and drove the truck through the convenience store’s front window, completely shattering the glass.


I really don’t see a lot of shattered big windows, of boarded up big windows. But that makes two, recently, and both shattered and boarded up windows looked back to a particular day in my life.


I’m not exactly sure what to make of that.


I’m not exactly sure what to make of that, but since I got close looks at both shattered and boarded up windows from that day in the life, I suspect I am now just a little bit closer to figuring out how many holes it really takes to fill the Albert Hall.

And when I work out those numbers, everything will change.

Look out.

I’m working hard at it.

I read the news today, oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well, I just had to laugh
I saw the photograph
He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They’d seen his face before
Nobody was really sure
If he was from the House of Lords

I saw a film today, oh boy
The English Army had just won the war
A crowd of people turned away
But I just had to look
Having read the book

I’d love to turn you on

Woke up, got out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up I noticed I was late
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke
Somebody spoke and I went into a dream

Ah—

I read the news today, oh boy
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes
It takes to fill the Albert Hall

I’d love to turn you on