Oh God . . . painting painting painting. Today I worked on the ceiling. After I lay down half a coat I went all around the room with damp paper towels, scrubbing at the little dribs of paint that fell from the brush and went splat against my perfect white walls. Soon I began to feel like Gene Hackman at the end of THE CONVERSATION, or E.G. Marshall in the cockroach sequence from CREEPSHOW. Scraping, wiping at every little teardrop of blue paint on my glorious fresh walls. The flesh of my fingertips soaked and tearing slightly from the work. How dare this paint splatter upon my beautiful walls! Why didn’t I paint the ceiling before priming the rest of the room? Oh woe! Oh misery! The delivery of a goat-cheese calzone soothes my ire, delays it for another day.

A Day at the Races

I caught this Marx Bros. flick last night on PBS and it was great fun. It’s been years since I’ve seen one of these, and I need to watch some more. What amazed me about the film was the extent to which utter and preposterous chaos erupts out of the most mundane situations. It isn’t even just the spectacle of clumsiness you see with Laurel & Hardy, or the sentimental but brilliant fumblings of Chaplin. This is white-hot-nuclear-blast, core-of-the-sun, black-hole-event-horizon chaos, blasting forth with such force that it takes your breath away. You lose the capacity to even understand or explain what you’re watching; the mind simply reels in tumultuous, cackling agony at the display of primal ruin. These guys were the shit.

Used DVD purchases of the day: BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY. Got them both for $25.