Monday, May 27, 2013

Libera-cheeze

Watched Behind the Candelabra on HBO last night with Dean. I was really looking forward to this movie, especially with all the top actors involved, Matt Damon playing the young lover Scott Thorson (from whose POV the story is told), Michael Douglas playing Liberace, Debbie Reynolds as his mother, Rob Lowe as their very stoned plastic surgeon, Dan Akroyd as the manager, Scott Bakula as the hunky gay friend who originally introduces them. It had some decent reviews in the local paper. But oh my, this was not a very good movie at all. Not only was the story lame, and superficial, and full of gay clichés, the acting was pretty awful. No wonder it never had a theatrical release and went straight to cable TV. Yikes. I mean, how many times can you have the same scene of Douglas and Damon sipping champagne in the hot tub having a fight? It could have been so much more.

Sunday, May 05, 2013

I love this poem from the current issue of Poetry.  The "boom" is so understated, and it all takes on a new urgency with the recent Marathon Bombing in Boston.

Bye-bye

BY DEREK SHEFFIELD
The animal of winter is dying,
its white body everywhere
in collapse and stabbed at
by straws of   light, a leaving
to believe in as the air
slowly fills with darkness
and water drains from the tub
where my daughter, watching it
lower around her, feeling it
go, says about the only thing
she can as if it were a long-
kept breath going with her
blessing of dribble and fleck.
Down it swirls a living drill
vanishing toward a land
where tomorrow already
fixes its bright eye on a man
muttering his way into a crowd,
saying about the only thing
he can before his body
goes boom. And tomorrow,
I will count more dark shapes
tumbling from the sky, birds
returning to scarcity, offering
in their seesawing songs
a kind of   liquidity.