I'm not really sure why these photo props are everywhere all over the world, as it's not like the image ever works, even with pots and pots of imagination roiling around in the brain like so much of our bold friend Gentleman Jack when he has a feather in his cap and is playing fast and loose with our other friends The Synapse Sisters. I mean, while I am not the sharpest of observers, even I cannot help but notice that when the face of a body is flesh-colored and, more importantly, 3-D, while the rest of the body is dully board-colored and 2-D, either we're talking about Michael Jackson or something fishy is going on. Now I realize that the point of these things is not realism, but providing a free way for parents to make their kids feel like they have done something fun without actually having done so, but still I think they lack any real incentive to put the effort forward to pretend that Your Child Is a Kung-Fu Squirrel or whatever. I think they should have ones like Your Child Is Hitler or Your Child Is Doing Intravenous Drugs, which give big payoffs in the Whimsy Department.
I finally got around to watching Apocalypse Now, but rather than the Prole Version for poor people and the intellectually bankrupt, I watched the Special Redux Extraordinaire version, which can only be seen by people with magical decoder rings, 3-D glasses and color-change cups with pictures of Cinderella on the side. As far as I can tell, the primary goal of the redux was to take an already very long movie and then push it to the X-treme, slowing down the plot progression to speeds so slow that one begins to see the individual frames of film as they tick off the eons. That is to say, the movie is about 3 hours and fifteen minutes long, and at least an hour of that is moody silence and an unnecessarily long scene with some angry French men and a sexy French lady who smokes a cigar. Nonetheless, it is an extremely good movie if one can possibly bear up under three hours of Wagner, the Doors, 70s-synthesizer and Martin Sheen's chest hair. The movie uses basically none of the plot of Heart of Darkness, but steals a fair amount of the imagery, a tactic which has the surprisingly successful effect of recalling all the goodness, atmosphere and meaning of that book while remaining far enough removed from it to be immune from charges of being unfaithful to its plot and themes. It's a cheap trick, but it works.
We did fun stuff today, but now it's 2 A.M and I'm tired. I'm also too tired to spell-check, so get ready for a Misspelling Attack coming at you from all directions at once, like some kind of multivariable calculus problem gone very wrong indeed.
- Gyaa! I'm give up
Naka-ku, Hiroshima
730-0803
JAPAN