Everyone sucked last night, except for Melissa. Even Mandisa sucked, which was surprising. But it's real tough to sing Chaka Khan and do it better than Chaka can. And Simon was way off his game. He thought Melissa was awful, when she was the only decent act on the show.

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Here's a really wonderful debut work by Publicola. It's meter is very musical. Guess I'll have to start calling him the "Bard of Ballistics" now. Or maybe Mr. "Terror Dactyl."

The Post

Even through the glove I felt it seeping from the metal till my bones ache
Just slightly
The cold is on the metal; the wood, then on my cheek
The almost perfect roundness close to my eye is lost
The bite of the leather in my flesh disappears
Forgotten
As is the cold on my skin and in my bones
Only a tiny column imposing itself on the object I desire to reach has focus
The cold doesn't matter
The feel of the wood doesn't matter
Metal doesnÂ’t matter
The weight of the lever I'm pushing towards myself means nothing
Only the column
The rectangle I know, the rectangle I need
The pillar that my will rests upon
It alone is my world at the same time it isn't alone
Breathe
Stop
The lever lightens, yet becomes the hardest part of my world
Still I only know the rectangle
Nothing else matters 'cept for seeing that little stanchion where I will it to be seen
I don't even notice the break, like a rod
Not like a glass rod but still a distinct and noticeable breaking happens
Yet I don't notice
I only see the rectangle
I know the wood is pushing me back
I hear the muffled boom through my heart as well as my ears
But I only see the rectangle
Rising slightly, lifting itself momentarily above my desire only to settle back down to it again
The metallic shucking of the mechanism tells me it's ready again; that I'm ready again
But there's only that rectangle standing between me and my desire
Bridging the distance between me and my desire
I know the device; I've cleaned it, repaired it, cared for it
I've broken it so that I could build it again
It will not fail me
I can only fail myself
But that rectangle holds my faith, my confidence, my certainty that I won't
It rises again as the boom rolls over me
The boom that I hear but pay no mind to
My heart races, my breath begs for release
I only know the rectangle
Six more times metal slides across metal
Wood heats; expands
Gasses slave to my design; working for me more than against me
Then I heed something other than the rectangle
A ping
A cold metallic sound to others, to me a thing of beauty and sadness at the same time
Whether to fuel the tool or not? Whether to enable the tool to function again or let it rest?
Those are not the questions I would answer here; they are for another time, another tale
Here I speak of the rectangle
What was beyond it? Paper or flesh? Food or enemy?
It did not matter
What I wished it to guide me to was decided long before I gazed upon its sharp lines and flat top
The rectangle will guide me as it always has
A rectangle on a tool made before I was born
Made the same year my father drew breath, years before my mother cried for the first time
A rectangle viewed through a circle; a post through an aperture
Sitting atop a tool made to control burning gas; expanding gas
To direct metal to repeat the task while the wood cradles it; gives it comfort
With leather to bind it to me
Me to it
To make us one
Odes cannot describe it and I when united
Words fail in their vulgarity and barbarism
A rectangle sitting on top of a cylinder made to spew smaller cylinders to affect my will?
How crass that sounds? How empty?
All my eloquence is inadequate to tell of how my eye links with that rectangle
Of how my heart beats inside the wood
How my breath hardens with the metal
How my mind burns the hole that the tool will make real
It is not a mere rifle of which I speak but a Garand
And not a mere Garand, but Mine

I think the best explanation of this poem was from USCitizen, who said: "The Post captures the focus, the essence, the gestalt of the aimed shot. The mental focus that erases the physical, that casts away all peripheral considerations and concentrates all effort on the only thing that matters: the rectangle through the ghost ring."

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When will it end?

From The Wesleyan Argus:

'Death to the infidels who have committed this blasphemy against Allah!' shouted Lebanese Imam Rahim al-Safaar to a teeming crowd of enraged supporters. 'How dare they challenge the unrivaled supremacy of Jack and Ennis's torturous and passionate love! And that Ryan Phillipe, what a bi-yatch! Maybe you can put Reese's Oscar between your legs and pretend you've got a johnson! Seriously, did you guys see Cruel Intentions? He is so gay! But in that creepy ambiguous manipulative way, not in the repressed-cowboy way. Die, blasphemous scum!'

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A mean old bull.

Runner up: Shar Jackson covers Brittany's "Toxic." I love the ending; Shar gets the last word.

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Safeway Select's Tuscan Style Basil. And it made WebMD's list of approved "light" dressings. So you can drink it right out of the bottle.

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Crash wins.

...

Okay, now that that's over with, on to March Madness. You gotta like Duke again this year. Villanova too. Arizona and Gonzaga will disappoint, as they do every time. And Geo. Washington is overrated. Keep an eye on Alabama. If they make the tourney, they're worth at least one upset.

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The Robotic Mule.

Wanna bet the second generation will kick back?

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From The American Princess:

Were it not for Hollywood, these people would be serving your food, cleaning your homes and parking your cars, which is a main reason that we give thanks, every year, that someone has the intestinal fortitude to organize a meeting, serve them free booze and award them prizes for going three full months not wearing makeup, and working opposite Billy Bob Thornton.

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The next two films in our retrospective contain very strong performances by Ms. Studlendgehawn. I hadn't seen either until they came in the mail this week. I love Netflix.

Butterflies Are Free, 1972

In Butterflies, Goldie plays yet another young waif with more modern sexual mores. Like her first two films, this one is also based on a stage play. The screenplay was written by the original playwright, which is probably the reason why it's so chatty and the action takes place almost completely inside an apartment. Writing for the screen and writing for the stage are two different animals, a fact that is often lost on theater people.

Butterflies is about a blind guy who is trying to gain some independence from his overprotective mother and make it on his own. It's the kind of simple PC message movie that Hollywood made a lot more of in those days: "Blind people are people too." Goldie plays the free-spirited next door neighbor who is afraid of commitment. The conflict arises when Goldie meets the mother (played by veteran TV actress Eileen Heckart, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this role).

Goldie again demonstrates a surprising dramatic ability in addition to her already established comic talent. As usual, she lights up the screen. Blocking was important in this movie because of the limitations of the apartment set. But Goldie seems to glide effortlessly from couch to floor to kitchen to table to bed. She handles the emotional transitions with the same ease. The drama seems to slow down in the middle of the movie, but things pick up at the end with the addition of Paul Michael Glaser (pre-Starsky, of course) in a bit role as a sleazy director of experimental (i.e. nude) plays.

The blind dude is played by Edward Albert, the son of Green Acres' Eddie Albert. He's an interesting guy. Half Colombian, educated at Oxford, he has an IQ of 157 according to IMDb, and he speaks Spanish, French, Portugese and Mandarin. Unfortunately, I found his constant wisecracking throughout Butterflies to be a distraction. He delivers his sarcastic lines with a deadpan affect that is too annoying for my taste. The mom character is just as sarcastic, but much more appealing.

As is my wont, I paid special attention to the costuming. Goldie had three outfits in this film. In the first act, she wore a cute peasant blouse and flirty ankle length skirt, which was her best look. She spends the middle third of the movie in a bra and panties only. I thought Goldie looked a little thick in There's A Girl In My Soup, but I must say, she was in awesome shape for Butterflies. Finally, during the third act she wore a dreary green floral dress, which was nothing to write home about.

As for ratings, I gave Butterflies three stars (liked it). The final act, with it's romantic suspense, saved the movie for me. Yes, I had a few tears. But I cry at the drop of a hat with these kinds of movies. In the end, all three main characters learn something from each other. Personal growth is always a good thing in a romantic comedy, if not in life.

The Sugarland Express, 1974

If Butterflies Are Free sounds like too much of a chick-flick for you, definitely check out The Sugarland Express. Not only was it Goldie Hawn's best role to date, it was Steven Spielberg's debut as a feature film director. And what a debut!

Long time visitors may have guessed that I'm a scholar of the 70's action movie. I mean I'm really a scholar; I wrote a paper on them in undergrad, when I toyed with the idea of being a film studies major. However, I can't claim to have been much of a scholar if I hadn't seen Sugarland Express up 'til now. I was truly missing out.

Sugarland was Universal's attempt to cash in on the anti-hero chase movie craze of the early 70's. Like another favorite of mine, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, the main character is a skinny blonde who's as dumb as she is cute. But in Sugarland, the anti-heroes are more loveable than usual. You don't have to sympathize with them in spite of their badness, because they aren't really all that bad.

Goldie plays the wife of a small time crook who has just four months left on his sentence for petty crimes. Their kid just got taken away from her and given to a foster home. Goldie breaks her man out of jail and they take off on a comic journey across southeastern Texas to get thier little boy back. Along for the ride is a kidnapped Texas highway patrolman with a slight case of Stockholm syndrome.

The name Sugarland Express is meant to be ironic, because the pursuit is anything but an express. It's more like a 1970s version of OJ's "slow speed chase," complete with cheering throngs of roadside fans. Goldie's character insists on stopping to pee, or to get some fried chicken, or to pick up some trading stamps.

From the first reel on, you can tell that this is not your ordinary Goldie Hawn vehicle. She puts on a pretty convincing Texas drawl (to my Californian ears at least). And her character is grittier than the previous three hippie-chick roles she played. Consequently, It just might be her best performance. She still shows off her comic skills, but thanks to Spielberg's direction and the Barwood/Robbins script (Corvette Summer, Close Encounters) we get to see much more of her considerable dramatic range. With Sugarland, Goldie Hawn gave notice that she was indeed a star.

Goldie's husband is played by William Atherton, better known to me as the slimy reporter from Die Hard, and the meddling EPA dude from Ghostbusters. He does a nice job in Sugarland and it's a shame he became so typecast in his later work.

Although Spielberg had already made Duel as a made-for-TV film in 1971, he really showed the maturity of his talent in Sugarland. It's no wonder that Universal let him do Jaws the very next year. Their faith in the 29 year old director paid off. Say what you want about Munich ― I'm disappointed in that choice too ― but the guy has always known how to put together a great movie. To say that Sugarland Express is underrated is to underrate the word underrated. I gave it five stars (loved it), and I think you'd enjoy it too.

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It's the first time I've ever said this about a contestant, but if Chris were to take Randy up on his offer to make a record right now, I'd probably buy it.

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Now that Mardi Gras is over, let's have some New Orleans poetry. Gina Ferrara is a poet who was displaced by hurricane Katrina. She evacuated to Jackson, Mississippi, leaving everything behind, including her computer with all her work. She thought she had taken a CD containing all her poetry, but when she arrived in Jackson she realized that she had grabbed the wrong CD. In the interim, Ferrara had to re-learn an old technology.

I bought a red notebook and some mechanical lead pencils, and I began writing poems by hand. . . . I found that this was a totally different process [from] using the computer. Writing poems by hand is slower, and it seems to be more of a permanent process. The page looks like grafitti, with arrows pointing in up and down directions, scratch outs, and edits done in different colored inks.

Close to Zenith

Hearts do not bleed,
there, up in the sky
at the other end of twine.
We are flying a kite
admist rubble
from a demolition
we cannot remember,
past birthdays and ruins
higher than the slipping sun
when we run out of twine.
The blurred kite
with hearts ablaze on gauze,
escapes from our fingers
a curious flag of surrender.

* Poets & Writers Magazine, January/February 2006, p. 59.

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