THE JO-TEL … where long-form blogging comes to die

“My Car Turns Over When I Crash”
The slick of removed viscera
underfoot, while
all around
clay from the plain grows
into the air
My spear pierces above the left nipple
and
through the breast plate; the force of it
lifts him
The hoards, before the evening
take on red
sunset tones
My car turns over when I crash
one hand to the sky and
one hand to your flowering [...]

Despite the title, the main reason for this post is not to write about the rightfully derided late-80’s drama Heartburn, in which respectable performances by Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep fail to resurrect banal, somewhat emotionally solipsistic material– no, the main point of this post is to talk about the song “Coming Around Again” by [...]

Lear addresses Cordelia in one of the early shots from the 1914 American film version of King Lear:

In my opinion, the key to performing Lear, the character, is to refrain from histrionics for as long as possible. The reason is that, for a majority of the play (except for portions of the opening scene [...]

From what you remembered, the streets of San Francisco were filed with people on Saturday morning. The shops were open and everywhere there were people. Modern-day rulers– their gazes redolent with the scent of booze and orgy, their strides bridged with green apples– are perfectly aligned with the sidewalk. Before even the [...]

10. “If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world but I am sure we’d be getting reports from hell before breakfast.” –General Sherman
We like to think of our newspapers today as objective, fact reporting entities, except of course for the editorial pages and the god damned liberal media.  But in [...]

PATSY (waking up from a nap): I just had a dream that you got arrested and, as you were being taken away and put into the police car, you told me to call your lawyer. You yelled, “Call Mark Spitzer!” Do you know who Mark Spitzer is?
SHARK: No.
-Shark

Before I begin, let me first tell you how inspiring Achilles’ shield is.
It’s kind of like that scene from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation that I can’t find on youtube. You know, when the wife catches Clark coming back upstairs with a chainsaw and a small tree from the front yard? “Clark!” she says. [...]

“Outbound Atreid”
When I’m onto something like
My Atreid I
Wish I could just color the landscape,
Make the Mycenaean era something to remember like
Oranges or In the
Aeroplane Over the Sea.
“Cadmus, Your Local Hero”
Into unending multitudes because,
If so,
Then when your family was sown like
Dragon’s teeth
You would have finally learned what it was like to
Be a dragon.
“Never-ending Pathways”
Ordered passageway through [...]

No F.W. Murnau’s City Girl (1930) …

… no Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1971)

-Shark

There was a segment on the Neil Conan’s NPR show [FN1] this afternoon that featured two doctors discussing how bad it is to drink alcohol in the way that I and many of my friends drink alcohol. I found the show interesting, but was irked with the overall tone, which was markedly and pervasively [...]