david mamet. is really great. he wrote the play "glengarry glen ross" and the untouchables and house of games and state and main and the winslow boy and ronin and heist, coming soon. could be good. he's strangely.. very good. he's apparently this underground film god that i had never heard of before i saw state and main, which i'm claiming to be the greatest movie ever. he is this revered being. i think the term "mametism" is even being used. a lesser known shakespeare? i'm not sure.. i'm very intrigued. he directs too, of course. but i think he's primarily a writer. is he who i might be one day? less revered, of course, but maybe not, like in my wildest dreams. hm. and his wife, a rebecca pigeon, is in every single movie i've seen of his so far, with the exception of glengarry glen ross, of course he didn't direct that.. who did? james foley, who also did Fear and the tv show-turned-david-lynch-film "twin peaks". i retrieved all that there from imdb.com, a place i visit usually two or three times a day because i'm always thinking about movies and i have these random moments where i want to know who wrote this or who starred or directed in that and it's all at my fingertips at the glorious imdb.com. good gracious, it's a good friend. i mean imagine a place where you're humming a song or singing one line and can't think of who did it or what it's called, and then you have this place where you can just type it in and click "search" and it all shows up for you and you can then find out the album title and who else appeared on it and what other songs are there and what other albums by said artist and who said artist has worked with and on and on. that's the beauty of imdb.com in my life. i'm a little obsessed right now, i know. i woke up at 2 pm today and i'm displeased and would much rather see morning hours and go to bed much earlier so i'm trying to be quick so i can go read some more of Deadeye Dick (probably finish it) and go to bed earlier than four for a change and wake up before 12 for a second change. my real intention here was to write about deadeye dick because i'm loving it so.

but first i have to get this out here or i'll forget it years down the line and i'll never do this, but i had an idea for a cute little movie i want to make one day about a simple middle-aged woman looking for meaning in her life who then decides to become a mary kay salesman and reach the climactic point of owning her very own pink cadillac. i think that could be a wonderful film, if made correctly. woo

alright. deadeye dick. oh one more thing

on my errand run today i went to that amazingly great little used bookstore, legible leftovers/the cat's meow and got in a book daze (imagine those scenes in movies where you see dollar signs in a person's eyes, only this time you see books in mine) and i decided i needed a big book on adolf hitler. because it's always good to have a big book on hitler. and it's this clumsy 1000+ page paperback for only like $3 with pictures and everything.. little hitler, big hitler. i don't think i'll ever really read the whole thing, but if i ever get curious i can look through and find out little things. i'm sure it'll be interesting. i wanted mein kampf, but i couldn't find it. then i of course wanted something on ghandi. evens out, i think. i particularly wanted some of his works, instead of a bio, since i'd seen the movie and all, but i got a big bio anyway, i'm sure it'll give me some new information. and after finding an entirely other section of this incredible store, full of movies and records and cookbooks and books on different countries and selfhelp books and books on sex and love and feminism and whateveryoucanthinkof, i really wanted to find a book on the history of haiti, since deadeye dick is mentioning it and saying "haiti as a nation was born out of the only successful slave revolt in all of human history. Imagine that. In no other instance have slaves overwhelmed their masters, begun to govern themselves and to deal on their own with other nations, and repelling foreigners who felt that natural law required them to be slaves again." and i found that very interesting. but i couldn't find a book on haiti. so i went to the next best thing and, since i've been meaning to become a gourmet cook, bought a creole cookbook titled just that: "the creole cookbook". so i will become a creole cook. i'm looking forward to it. one of the funny little ridiculous items in this book is that vonnegut states that creole is a language that only deals with the present tense, which actually isn't true, but he gave a funny example which was some time after his father had died and he was talking to someone in creole and the conversation was
"he is dead?" he said in creole.
"he is dead" i agreed. there could be no argument about that.
"what does he do?" he said.
"he paints" i said.
"i like him" he said.

i wanted to include a couple of other little amusing things from this book to maybe tempt you to read any of them, or anything at all i guess. in the book, the main character, rudy, his father was once close friends with hitler (most of these books are set around ww2) back when hitler was a PAINTER, yes, that's right. he only became this nasty politician because the art community rejected him. so in deadeye dick rudy's father comes across him in an art class in vienna i think where the professor calls his art terrible and then hitler's art terrible and hitler storms out and rudy's father storms after him and to show the prof what an ass he was, buys hitler's painting right there. only an hour before, hitler, who was living on the streets, incredibly poor, had just sold his coat for food in the middle of winter, so.. "there is a chance that, if it weren't for my father, hitler might have died of pneumonia or malnutrition in 1910."

one more:
it doesn't matter if i give away some of the plot, btw, you'd have to read some of his books to understand.. he often talks about the big events casually before they happen. such as, in the fourth chapter, without notice "little did i suspect back then that i myself, rudy waltz, would become a notorious murderer known as 'deadeye dick'." so basically when he's 12 he fires a shot over the rooftops of his little town in midland city, ohio and it happens to hit a pregnant housewife, vacuuming, right between the eyes. well then. her name is mrs. metzger. mr. metzger hires bernard ketchum to sue the waltzes, and here's the funny story about that:
"ketchum was ruthless on metzger's behalf, just as he would have been ruthless with metzger, if father had hired him. he certainly never let the jury forget that mrs. metzger had been pregnant. he made the embryo a leading personality in town. it was always "she", since it was known to have been a female. and, although ketchum himself had never seen her, he spoke familiarly of her perfectly formed little fingers and toes.
years later, felix and i would have reason to hire ketchum, to sue the nuclear regulatory commission and the maritimo brothers construction company and the ohio valley ornamental concrete company for killing our mother with a radioactive mantelpiece.
that is how felix and i got the money to buy this hotel, and old ketchum is also a partner.
my instructions to ketchum were these: 'don't forget to tell the jury about mother's perfectly formed little fingers and toes.'"

there's the humor that is solely his. ok i'm done for now. go read it.

gosh it's hard going to bed early.. too much to do. there are 24 usable hours in every day. quick, alan, what's that from?!

lovemelo