WhimsyLand

It was Providence that the first televised poker tournament I shared with Junie was the WPT Bad Boy competition.  Perfect.  The completely insufferable Tony G was crowing in all of his Aussieness about how many other players he'd knocked out.  Mike "The Mouth" Matusow was positively taciturn in comparison.  Phil "The Brat" Hellmuth couldn't get a word in edgewise.  Junie dutifully asked about what beat what and where was The River.  Wonderful stuff, but then we started the Memoirs of a Geisha DVD.  We had inadvertently chosen one Academy Award nominee after another:  Crash, Capote, Walk The Line and then this.  And now you're expecting an edgy, unexpected take from left field on each of them, like I was some kind of Silliman.  Better you should just look up The Filthy Critic, who is a hell of a lot funnier and actually watches the whole movie without taking more-wine-from-the-fridge breaks.  OK, you want a sampler?  Capote was engaging and I enjoyed the undercurrents of comparison between the amoral behavior of Truman and his killer buddy.  I loved Walk The Line pretty much all the way through.  Phoenix deserved two Oscars for a channeling of The Man In Black so convincing that, even with a so-so voice, I swear I was watching Johnny all over again.  Which is not to say that Reese was chopped liver.  She did a terrific job, but as Junie noted, Carter had bigger boobs and sounded less like an Emory sorority girl.  Geisha was pretty and I liked seeing Ziyi Zhang and Michelle Yeoh again, as I've seen Crouching Tiger about ten times (it ties the lead with Amelie as the film I've watched most with subtitles). OK, it was hard to follow the plot, and why were more than half the actors Chinese and a few other problems, but what do expect from a movie rendition of a Asian romance novel?  Which brings me to Crash.  You know, the movie that won the Academy Award for Best F*cking Picture?  I could stand it for exactly 23 minutes.  Junie was apparently timing me.  What was wrong with it?  Well, in the first 23 minutes, everything.  And I knew if I watched more of it, somebody would actually act or one of the characters would step out of a 2-dimensional world, or the Hollywood version of the L.A. race problem would transcend some hack writer's version for the fly-over people, or every single single opportunity to engage in visual preachiness would be avoided.  Or something.  But, I wasn't waiting, we drove back to Blockbusters.

Which for no particular reason brings me to the recent Peotry issue.  Sure, many of the blogmates whom I have put into suspended animation are now standing on their wobbly wooden desk chairs and booing.  But you know what?  It's goddam funny.  I mean to me.  Goldbarth blew their cover by actually inserting into his poem their solicitation of funny poets (he ends up bemoaning the line-rate, given all the bucks they have).  Dean Young.  Bob Hicok.  Billy Collins.  Daisy Fried.  These are very funny people, even when they're dealing from the top of the deck.  I'm only going to give you a sampler, then more in my next installment, so you still have time to run over to Borders and sit in one of their "I'm only browing" chairs by the magazine rack and read for yourself.  BC does a good job of skewering Irish poets from pick-someone to Heaney:  "Then, I hear the ghost-clink of milk bottle / on the rough threshold".  Young doesn't have to stretch much to contribute three poems, including "Poem On A Theme By Tony Hoagland":  "I have a big erection.  /  Most of the mythology goes into it."  There's a Charles Atlas knockoff cartoon on page 285, where the skinny guy who's getting sand kicked into his face gets an MFA and studies up and comes back to the workshop all buff and "Wanna wanna gringa toon lee's way bend a gog!"  Updike on colonscopies.  Muldoon and half the others trying to find rhymes for sex positions.  Joan Murray with the only poem that made me LOL:

We Old Dudes

We old dudes.  We
White shoes.  We

Golf ball.  We
Eat mall.  We

Soak teeth.  We
Palm Beach.  We

Vote Red.  We
Soon Dead.

I will be instantly sued by a zillion Poetry lawyers for the umbrage, but there it is.  David Mason does a Disturbed Paradelle, that curious and fictional form invented by BC.  Andrew Hudgins does good, and Rebecca Hoogs is very funny in Another Plot Cliché ("My dear, you are the high-speed car chase, and I, / I am the sheet of glass being carefully carried / across the street by two employees of Acme Moving/ ...") even if it does remind me of BC's Litany.  BH with If wishing made it so:  "I am the tallest sprinkler of parabolic flow. / I keep a fist in each of my fingers."  Then the reviews, the want ads, the contributors' notes (Maira Kalman / Loves her mailman / But not too much.).  I'll give you some more next time.  Meanwhile, steal this book.  It will make you happy.  If it doesn't make you happy, you probably aren't ready to be happy.