A good line from a bad movie: "It's never the question that's indiscreet. It's only the answer."
Today's kick in the seat, courtesy my editor at Premiere, who shall remain nameless (Peter Kobel): "Raza, can I ask you to tone these reviews down a bit? They are, well, too clever, and while they show evidence of good writing and thoughtful criticism, they draw too much attention to themselves, which gets in the way of the reader's ability to decide whether to rent the video or not, which after all is the main point. If on a self-consciously clever scale of 1 to 10, we give these a rating of 9, can you bring them down to about a 6 or 7? Thanks." No, thank you.
More often than not, the uncommon sense of dreams doesn't survive the journey to wakefulness intact. This morning I woke up with a sentence fragment in my head: "The signature of lost time." I wrote it down, looked at it. I don't know what it means. It's meaningless.
The nights are cooling down; the rains have dampened the dust; the stars shine white and clear. The fractal flourish of autumn is working its way through the trees, the telltale design of some superior art. The promise of opulent festivity, slightly out of focus, beckons. Soon there will be music and children. Later, there will be snow. But first, the falling leaves and the full moon. High thin clouds, a hint of color in the darkness.
If I had a better brain, I think I could write a novel(la) about all the human artifacts that come at me like omens these days. Sensitized by the assault of heightened imagery on television, I sometimes feel as if I no longer see people and faces -- I see pouty lips lacquered with gloss the color of a day-old scab, women with their faces entombed in a vinyl mask of Max Factor's finest. Wizened monkey-children sassing their Teutonically terrible showbiz parents in adverts for cheese. And even more unsettling -- this SAG strike has turned the adscape into my own private Day of the Locust -- or is it Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Suddenly it's not Billy Crudup's voice telling me about the finer things MasterCard can buy, but some anonymous scab's. There's this one commercial for kitty litter wherein a twentysomething human female dances with her cat -- and there I am, sitting on the sofa, barfing up repressed memories of Puss 'n' Boots -- grimly remembered bedtime images of a cat dressed jauntily like a Middle European nobleman, standing on his hind legs. Have you ever read Animal Farm? Orwell was onto something -- there's nothing scarier than livestock walking around on hind legs. It's positively satanic. But I guess it moves kitty litter off the shelves.
Today's kick in the seat, courtesy my editor at Premiere, who shall remain nameless (Peter Kobel): "Raza, can I ask you to tone these reviews down a bit? They are, well, too clever, and while they show evidence of good writing and thoughtful criticism, they draw too much attention to themselves, which gets in the way of the reader's ability to decide whether to rent the video or not, which after all is the main point. If on a self-consciously clever scale of 1 to 10, we give these a rating of 9, can you bring them down to about a 6 or 7? Thanks." No, thank you.
More often than not, the uncommon sense of dreams doesn't survive the journey to wakefulness intact. This morning I woke up with a sentence fragment in my head: "The signature of lost time." I wrote it down, looked at it. I don't know what it means. It's meaningless.
The nights are cooling down; the rains have dampened the dust; the stars shine white and clear. The fractal flourish of autumn is working its way through the trees, the telltale design of some superior art. The promise of opulent festivity, slightly out of focus, beckons. Soon there will be music and children. Later, there will be snow. But first, the falling leaves and the full moon. High thin clouds, a hint of color in the darkness.
If I had a better brain, I think I could write a novel(la) about all the human artifacts that come at me like omens these days. Sensitized by the assault of heightened imagery on television, I sometimes feel as if I no longer see people and faces -- I see pouty lips lacquered with gloss the color of a day-old scab, women with their faces entombed in a vinyl mask of Max Factor's finest. Wizened monkey-children sassing their Teutonically terrible showbiz parents in adverts for cheese. And even more unsettling -- this SAG strike has turned the adscape into my own private Day of the Locust -- or is it Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Suddenly it's not Billy Crudup's voice telling me about the finer things MasterCard can buy, but some anonymous scab's. There's this one commercial for kitty litter wherein a twentysomething human female dances with her cat -- and there I am, sitting on the sofa, barfing up repressed memories of Puss 'n' Boots -- grimly remembered bedtime images of a cat dressed jauntily like a Middle European nobleman, standing on his hind legs. Have you ever read Animal Farm? Orwell was onto something -- there's nothing scarier than livestock walking around on hind legs. It's positively satanic. But I guess it moves kitty litter off the shelves.
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