{For Mallroy Batman*}

I was thinking about you yesterday and drew this. Not to say I don't think about you everyday. I just don't draw a picture every time. Because what would I do with all those pictures? You know? I guess I could hang them up around my house. I could even make a movie with all the pictures, starring Joseph Gordon Levitt, call it 500 Days of Pictures of Mallory.

I really hope your cats do decide to renew the lease, by the way. I have always had a dream like that. 

Hey, some people dream about changing the world; I dream about an apartment owned by cats as the basis of a really bitchin' reality show. 

I got so sunburned the other day and my face is peeling and I really wish you had been here to sigh exasperatedly and tell me to reapply sunscreen.

*I changed your name so your landlord doesn't find this and kill your cats.

{Fifteen Movies}

This will be a treat, 15 of my favorite movies in no particular order. Think you can guess them all?

1. Treasure of the Sierra Madre: If you don't like this movie you can go to hell. "Badges, we don't need no stinking badges!"**

2. Lawrence of Arabia.

3. Before Sunset: Glad Mallory forced me to see this. Short, sweet and what movie making should revolve around: an excellent story and script. No special effects; no gimmicks. Just Ethan Hawke and a French chick talking for 2 hours. Sound boring? It is. But still, terrific. Just kidding. But seriously.

4. Up: A direction.

5. Wall-E: When you love a Robot you tell it

that it's really wanted
When you love a Robot you tell it that it's the one
it needs somebody to tell it

that it's gonna last forever
So tell me have you ever really
- really really ever loved a Robot?

6. Clueless: If you have seen this movie in the past and didn't understand it was a parody then see it again. The 90s were like the 70s in the sense that everyone would like to forget the entire decade. This movie is the exception.

7. All the President's Men: Woodward and/or Bernstein.

8. The Departed: My dad says this is Scorsese's "worst movie". Fine. 

9. Let the Right One In: A great vampire fairytale. Foreign. All the little boys look like little girls.

10. Vicky Cristina Barcelona: Woody Allen made a movie with Penelope Cruz!

11. Raging Bull: Scorsese's epic drama about boxer Jake La Motta's struggle to come to terms with his own success and inability to identify any feelings outside of jealousy toward women. Dr. Barlow once asked me, "How does a person ever really grapple with the idea of being important or successful?" and added, "It's like riding a motorcycle for the first time, even a tiny Honda can leave you struggling to compensate for the overwhelming power." True.

12. Annie Hall: Before Diane Keaton starred in all those awful movies she starred in this!

13. Wet Hot American Summer: Michael Ian Black and Paul Rudd. Plus, I was a camp counselor back East for a summer. This is basically biographical but not autobiographical.

14. Strictly Ballroom: Baz Luhrmann's movie about ballroom dancing and extreme makeovers (like the makeover in She's All That). I never saw Moulin Rouge and have no intention of doing so, so this will have to suffice. This movie was titled "Dancing Hero" in Japan. 

15. Anchorman: Before Will Ferrell got too stupid for words. "We have a saying in my country - the coyote of the desert likes to eat the heart of the young and the blood drips down to his children for breakfast, lunch and dinner and only the ribs will be broken.." What more could you ask for?

Of course, these are not all of my favorite movies. This is only a smattering, a sampler platter if you will. What do you think? Are these some of the best or some of the worst? Which movies am I missing? If you absolutely had to choose 15 movies as the only in your home collection, which would you choose?

**this is not the actual quote from the movie but I couldn't resist.
Happy Trails.

{For Natalie, a few days late}

Oklahoma City-Stephen Dunn, Different Hours


The accused chose to plead innocent
because he was guilty. We allowed such a thing;
it was one of our greatnesses, nutty, protective.
On the car radio a survivor's ordeal, her leg
amputated without anesthesia while trapped


under a steel girder. Simply, no big words -- 
that's how people tell their horror stories.
I was elsewhere, on my way to a party.
On arrival, everyone was sure to be carrying
a piece of the awful world with him.


Not one of us wouldn't be smiling.
There'd be drinks, irony, hidden animosities.
Something larger would be missing.
But most of us would understand
something large always would be missing.


Oklahoma City was America reduced
to McVeigh's half-thought-out thoughts.
Did he know anything about suffering?
It's the naive among us who are guilty
of wondering if we're moral agents or madmen


or merely, as one scientist said, 
a fortuitous collocation of atoms.
Some mysteries can be solved by ampersands.
Ands not ors; that was my latest answer.
At the party two women were talking


about how strange it is that they still like men.
They were young and unavailable, and their lovely faces
evoked a world not wholly incongruent
with the world I know. I had no illusions, not even hopes,
that their beauty had anything to do with goodness. 

{Miles from truth's more demanding realm}

Story by Stephen Dunn

A woman's taking her late-afternoon walk

on Chestnut where no sidewalk exists

and houses with gravel driveways

sit back among the pines. Only the house

with the vicious dog is close to the road.

An electric fence keeps him in check.

When she comes to the house, the woman 

always crosses to the other side.

I'm the woman's husband. It's a problem

loving your protagonist too much.

Soon the dog is going to break through

that fence, teeth bared, and go for my wife.

She will be helpless. I'm out of town,

helpless too. Here comes the dog.

What kind of dog? A mad dog, a dog

like one of those teenagers who just loses it

on the playground, kills a teacher

Somethings going to happen that can't happen

in a good story: out of nowhere a car

comes and kills the dog. The dog flies

in the air, lands in a patch of delphiniums.

My wife is crying now. The woman who hit 

the dog has gotten out of her car. She holds

both hands to her face. The woman who owns

the dog has run out of her house. Three women

crying in the street, each for different reasons.

All of this is son unlikely; it's as if 

I've found myself in a country of pure fact, 

miles from truth's more demanding realm.

When I listened to my wife's story on the phone

I knew I'd take it from her, tell it

every which way until it had an order

and a deceptive period at the end. That's what

I always do in the face of helplessness

make some arrangements if I can

Praise the odd, serendipitous world.

Nothing I'd be inclined to think of

would have stopped that dog.

Only the facts saved her.