highindustrial.

Margaret Atwood, Paul Bowles, Charlotte Brontë, Albert Camus, Joseph Conrad, Douglas Coupland, Roald Dahl, Joan Didion, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, William Gibson, Aldous Huxley, Harper Lee, Guy de Maupassant, George Orwell, Neal Stephenson, Edith Wharton.... + 22

I liked Minority Report. I liked its desaturated, denatured worldview. I liked its Philip K. Dick-edness (back-alley eye jobs? pulpy!). I liked its graphite-and-quartz production design and flinty cinematography.

I didn't love Minority Report. I didn't love its predictably stacked multiple climaxes; its Currier & Ives closing shot; its under-re-current of deus ex machina-tooled revenge and redemption; its occasional pacing and continuity issues.

Samantha Morton? Loved her.

I read somewhere that Minority Report is the best Paul Verhoeven movie ever-never. That's a fair characterization. It's a genre exercise. The lid may be off the cookie jar, but the cookies are still there. And I was hoping there wouldn't be any cookies. Even though they were pretty good cookies. + 14

I was about to write something about Cheaters being the most repulsive television show I'd ever seen. Then an herbal cock pill infomercial called Sex Talk with Ron Jeremy came on. And I recognized one of Ron's "guests" as this improbably bespectacled Laura Dern-ish Vegas trick Dave Attell interviewed on Insomnia last season. Now that's infotainment!

Anyway, if you're dying to have high penile blood pressure and, dog only knows, possibly a stroke, whip out that ... credit card and order now. + 2

We get older. We remember bustling city blocks through a haze of noons and song. We develop new tolerances and find old ones diminished. We discover that we are the same and not the same. We mourn and celebrate. Some Saturday mornings the collision of memory and music is a battering ram, a concussion, a bungee-corded recall-freefall through photographic plate glass.

Lather, rinse, the themes repeat. + 1

I opted for the evening nap because I needed it, even though I knew it would ruin my appetite for sleep later. So now I'm sitting here in my boxers, hopped up on Coke and M&M's, plugged into an old CD, watching an old DVD with the volume down, just to take in the shots—which is about as multi as media gets. In the movie, the protagonist is bald. When I slept, I dreamt that I was bald. (Not that there's any correlation. Eat more carrots. Because somebody has to.)

You know that Captain Morgan Gold commercial wherein various Dudes™ attempt to mimic the shit-eating grin and barrel-chested posture of the eponymous corporate-mascot-cum-rapist-pillager while engaging in low-grade pyromania and misogyny? Well, I could care less about the pyro and the miso, but that posture stuff gets under my skin. There's something off about it. Premium malt beverages shouldn't promote bad posture. It's just plain irresponsible. + 7

My friend H_____ gave me a laser pointer today, and while I haven't actually wanted a laser pointer since I was maybe six or seven, having one in my possession has all but abrogated the intervening maturation. For example: I've been dying to "point" it at my eyes. I know, I know how wrong and bad and totally verboten that is (H threatened to confiscate the little robot suppository-shaped thing as soon as I gave voice to the impulse), and I'm totally not gonna do it, but still.

Okay, okay, I did sorta flash it in my eyes, but really quickly, and my eyelids were closed ... but man was it bright. Anyway, don't try this it home. (I feel compelled to issue that warning because I know how many children read this site. It has a huge following among the K-3 set.)

For what it's worth, I was always the kid who used to stare directly into the sun for perilously protracted periods (literally till my vision started shimmering and my color perception lurched blue-ward like those faded gyro posters one sees in the windows of Greek restaurants), and yet I'm almost the only person I know who doesn't wear glasses. Not that there's any correlation. Eat carrots. + 9

The emails go out at night. I mean the longish epistolary ones, not the rat-a-tat Tracy-Hepburn zingers that paper-airplane-patrol the daylight hours because I'm too stubborn to "instant-message." (Forgive me, I'm partial to ~~laziness~~ latency.)

No, the spirit of these nocturnal emittances is more maritime than aerospace—little paper boats, verily, lit and set adrift in the darkness, encoded with the expectation that they will return once the sun has come round again, or perhaps some suns thence.

The easy gratification of these exchanges, of this mechanism, belies the geography and scale of the enterprise. In noting this I am reminded of a certain famous satellite composite of our blue-glow globe deepened to prevailing indigo, studs of electric light embroidered into the antique fabric of night. Nodal points, aggregations of information, grace notes of civilization, geopolitical hotspots, inverse inkblots: the flat-panel I face to compose myself and my thoughts is but a blinking pixel in the array.

When I was very, very young, and flying—and, in particular, nighttime flying—still held a certain fascination, I used to peer down from my cabin window during such excursions and imagine that any lights in my purview were the signature of monstrous metabolisms, of impossible serpents and slumbering fishes, electric eels, dragons. I accepted these self-generated flights of fancy as fact. Years later I marvel at what I took for granted then, and what I take for granted now. +

I'll listen to the song serially while I do other things, intermittently backtracking right in the middle of it because I wasn't really feeling it that time, wasn't bearing the weight of its melody the way it bears the weight of my thoughts. The song is a sponge: it grows more water-worldly with each repetition, till it is the world, the very sum of the world for the brief interval of its length. In this way the song will be all things and nothing, will lose meaning, become vapor and rock, babel and bones, a dull, beautiful roar.

Later I'll fling off my headphones the way some people remove their reading glasses, and that will be the end of that. + 18

"Little bread-and-butterflies kiss the tulips, and the sun is like a toy balloon. There are get-up-in-the-morning glories in the golden afternoon. There are dizzy daffodils on the hillside, strings of violets are all in tune. Tiger lilies love the dandy lions in the golden afternoon."

I think I may have to start smoking peyote just to get the ball rolling again on the Big Thoughts About Small Things in this newly gray-or-is-it-grey space. (But would you really want to read about napalm flowers and electric-acid skies?) Writing Small Things About Things Big and Small is easier and more addictive in this most contradictory and contraindicated of months, when all the clocks are full of jam and everyone's out chasing wabbits.

"You can learn a lot of things from the flowers, for especially in the month of June."

So they say. They who? Say what? Precisely. + 1