Things have been active in the Auburn trailer park where I live. The corn we planted is half a foot high, and the squash has blossoms on it. My older cousin brought a load of steer manure to feed the plants with. That should help.

Speaking of steer manure you are the last person I expected to be spouting off about great culture. Isn't that to binary? Great culture - bad culture? Your editor has a brother who lectures about the high-low culture dialectic and how South Park is the same as Moliere. I believe the point is in a hundred years we'll think Seinfeld is better than Voltaire.

As a devout Hegelist - the Lutheran Christian philosopher you love to quote - you'd better steer clear of claiming one kind of music is higher than another. Hot-cold, light-darkness are just tensions within monism, the Being resolving itself.

Being an ingnorant gay cracker, I'd say Josephine Baker could outperform any HipHop artist we've got today, and do it in French, without putting down gay people in her lyrics.

Any dumbass knows that American Jazz music will be around a century after every HipHop CD is rotting in a landfill. But remember the highly educated believe all hierarchy is white oppression, so Josephine Baker=The Simpsons=Thighmaster Infomercial.

Ooops my older cousin just got home from swing shift and wants a beer.

P.S. If you do want to construct hierarchies, compare Seattle Library with The Library of Alexandria, it'll put things in another perspective.

Oppression is a subtle mofo, resist the binary, human freedom is always evolving.

I'd say this is also true of literature and art. For every Toni Morrison, there are a hundred hack writers.

There was enough of Stolen Kisses and La Salamandre in there to register how much contemporary cinema lacks of its last golden age, la Nouvelle Vague, how minor a talent Gondry is compared to Truffaut or Tanner.

By the end, the love story (such as it was) just ended up being creepy, the philosophical ruminations trite.

Yet I had to admit, it was better than most films I see these days, and managed a certain surrealist charm almost its own.

Maybe if we spent more time creating art, and not just critiquing it - like Truffaut did to start the wave going - things would improve.

I thought I caught a glimpse of you at the afterparty, Charles, heading towards the bar for a free drink.

How come no review here?

figures

You are a righteous scholar Charles, but I wonder if your insistence of a lack of black greatness post Coltrane betrays a bit of the old fogie in you.