okay, so I'm like, here it is, another part of Captain Element

we saw Borat last night. lots of fun, bring the whole family. indeed it was pretty funny. the matter of taste and the appropriate does come up. I'm probably pretty fuzzy on that topic. I don't think good comes of touchiness, but I also believe in a moral or ethical rigour. when I saw Michael Richards pop his cork, I saw flop sweat. he desperately grasped the possibility of street edginess to save him, if that's how you want to quantify it, and it played unnaturally. Borat certainly locates right in the mess of things. Borat is comfortable in the midst of that risk. it is interesting to see when Borat goes over the edge for his victims. at the rodeo, it wasn't when he said Bush should drink the blood of every Iraqi, it was when he sang how Kazakhstan is the number one country, with the best potash in the world. and the party at Secession Drive doesn't get ugly until the black prostitute that Borat invited showed up. but others, like the sweet Jewish couple (from whom Borat and his producer cower in terror) or the auto school teacher, are pretty accepting. as a movie it gets normative a few times, like the tender moments with the prostitute and his boring dark night of the soul after his producer leaves. the scene in which he and his producer fight nude rides on an exceeded sense of slapstick. do I want to see Borat and his hairy and obese producer wrestle sloppily in the nude? can I look away? the movie goes awry because of lack of movie making vision. those normative moments, for one. and is it supposed to be cinema verite or not? supposedly he's being filmed but there are moments when apparently there is no person manning the camera. Comedy Central had a promo show a while ago for the movie, which I saw. not long movie, so it turns out I saw a goodly portion of the flick beforehand. I never saw Ali G, so I'll be letting Youtube fulfill that necessity. I've caught, so far, Ali G interview Dr Norman Chomsky, in which Chomsky doesn't have the footwork to keep up with the joke. Andy Kaufman should be getting some residuals from Sacha Baron Cohen.

I have some reviews at Galatea Resurrects. read reviews of Mainstream by Michael Magee and Musee Mechanique by Rodney Koenecke here.

read a review of Post~Twyla by Jack Kimball here. Jesse Crockett also reviews Twyla, here. I like the idea of multiple reviewers. my reviews aren't intended to be comprehensive, that's your job. I just want to say the water's fine, and indicate a few features of the various works.

I use Google's home page (personalized!!!), because I believe in giving the gang at Mountain View as much opportunity to glean personal info as possible (yes, I did visit Ron Silliman's blog). so naturally I have People.com at the ready there. as in: one click for all that info I need. this naturally led me to a story about K-Fed (Federline, Kevin: amazing dancer, rapper, hubby and dad). (can you imagine your dad as a fantastic rapper who had sex with Britney? awesome!). and his entourage holing up at some club. did the italics create the right tone there? accent the last syllable to indicate the extreme awesome wonder of K-Fed and entourage as a semantic unit. they all sat at a VIP booth or throne or nave or whatever, as befits their status as K-Fed and entourage. K-Fed, goes the report by someone there, drank Jack Daniels and sent text messages to the galaxy in which K-Fed is the head star. he didn't pay much attention to his entourage. wow you gotta believe it was an interesting entourage, because figure: would K-Fed have an uninteresting one? high school grads, every one, no doubt. BUT WHO DID HE TEXT MESSAGE?? here's where Google could finally be of help. pull that info together guys and make it available!!!. K-Fed refused interviews but he told reporters: "I'm good." he's good! losing Britney, the love of his life, mom of his kids, that's gotta be painful, and yet, bravely, he can stand there in his pinstriped suit and say he's good. worry not, the healing process has begun. tho it must be tough with Brit having lesbo sex with Paris Hilton, or maybe it was at the Paris Hilton. the amazing thing is that the DJ at the fantastic club played a Britney song. I mean, his entourage stops dancing and they're like, what's with that, man??? and K-Fed waves his hand to indicate that things Britney are non-negotiably like totally anathema. yeah, it was a complicated wave. and the DJ stops the Britney fest and was like, okay, my bad, bring on the thumb screws. and he says, it's Kevin's night and all. which it sure was. I live on this information, how it shapes my world.

yes, the Times has some great hints for book giftgiving. yo, check out this new guy Allen Ginsberg! okay, so here's a sentence from the blurb for Ishmael Reed: "Poetry of politics and diversity, suffused with humor." tell me that the word diversity isn't a giveaway. make that the pair of politics and diversity. I'm guessing it is those terms that make poetry comestible for Times thinking.

we saw Syriana last night. I liked it but have far from a complete picture of it. it has that Le Carre undercurrent of not quite clear motives, which is hard to keep straight. and I had a few wait a sec who's this guy moments. I needed a score card. neither George Clooney or Matt Damon outshined the movie, which is a good thing. I would posit that what the movie wanted to accomplish can't be done in the allotted time. it was engrossing, tho, and I'd watch it again. its conspiracy theory was much more reasonable than JFK, which went from wacky (which is okay) to just plain stupid. I really disliked how Stone jammed the camera up everyone's nose except Costner's. the twining of plots in Syriana worked pretty well, and appropriate to the twisted situation. the culminating gathering of George Clooney, Matt Damon and Dr Bashir from Deep Space 9, or whatever show that was, was almost deflating. not that there's any reason to expect hopefulness. I just hope our next president is tied to the oil business so that we won't have to endure any sort of ameliorating change.

once again a ramble thru the mall yesterday. what's this got to do with poetry, writing, what not? everything or nothing. we had some things we sought, but we also just wanted to 'do' the mall, plus Beth was making a surveying of stores re how's business. we checked out the Apple store once again. that place was jumping. I would never let colour or styling top price and working features for a computer or mp3 player yet I still feel the lure of the glitz in that store. I got a half gig Shuffler last year and really it fills my needs. yet I ogle. the new Shuffler doesn't actually satisfy any necessity by being half the size of my present one. the rapt excitement evident in the store is remarkable, as in, buy Apple stock. there was a low, circular table for children, and each station had an intent child checking out a computer. get 'em early. and just think, an iPhone is coming omigod omigod omigod. one store had live models in the window. I really couldn't look, it hit a weird note for me. they weren't static, at least. there was a sort of semi-pro quality to the models, as if they had a mild fear that their friends might see them. I just can't imagine the view from the window. it was a store aimed at young women. another store had three staff people waiting anxiously at the entrance with no one in the store. on the other hand, Abercrombie and Fitch. the pulsing dance music, the darkness... slats covered the store front so that you can't see in or out. it's your own little youth world. business was okay there. the excitement was more manufactured than at Apple, tho. Beth pulled me into Coach, home of the upper class handbag. Beth was given one from her aunt. they have a lifetime guarantee, and grow in value. I assumed the target audience was middle aged women but that's not what I saw. we were greeted by a Kirsten Dunstish woman and most of the staff was on the young side. plenty of staff too. and most of the women poking around were tweens. so Coach I guess adapted to the market. the style of the bags doesn't say youth market to me, nor does the price range of the goods, so the adaptation that Coach made was in the relateable youth of its staff. it's fascinating looking at the economy this way. I think there should be a warning sign near Yankee Candle, because those shops have such a powerful aroma. I won't say stench but... the aromatics they use can't be natural, kind of an industrial attack on the olfactory bulb. I somehow lost my camera's battery charger a while back. last time at the mall I got a new one. this time I got the right (I forgot what brand of camera I have, duh). also got the cable to send iPod thru a radio. more later.