Today is the first day for Envisage365 and I’ve submitted my first photo and it’s a lu-lu. Since I live alone, most the photos I’ll be submitting will become an ordinary record of an ordinary life. Good God. I didn’t realize my face had become a moonscape of age spots. I think I spotted a facial version of the Sea of Tranquility. *sigh* I never wear make-up unless… well hardly ever. I might reconsider my morning toilette, otherwise it’s gonna be a very long year.

Have any of you ever seen the movie Smoke? It’s a gem. A small movie that should’ve been big. I guess it wasn’t *commercial* enough. Bleh on the pudding brains that dominate our entertainments. Anyway, the following are excerpts from reviews I found. The writers amongst us will really, really appreciate the reviews.

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A Brooklyn smoke shop is the center of neighborhood activity, and the stories of its customers. It's refreshing to see a film in which the writer receives equal credit with the director, showing that the dialogue actually means something. So it is with Smoke, a film about a New York quilt of contemporary characters who cross paths in a corner smoke shop, told in straightforward way by a talented acting group. The characters include Paul (William Hurt, in a good role again), a grief-stricken novelist; Auggie (Harvey Keitel), the shop's owner with a secret passion; Ruby (Stockard Channing), Auggie's long-ago girlfriend; and Rashid (Harold Perrineau Jr.), a teenager who is befriended by Paul and seeks his estranged father (Forest Whitaker). All the characters are great storytellers, whether it’s out of loneliness, necessity, or just nature. The movie has accomplished an amazing feat: it makes us feel as if we are reading a serious novel, not watching a movie.

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Additionally…
The dialogue, written by Paul Auster, sparkles. Each conversation has at least one memorable line, and it's always delivered in such a casual manner that it blends right in. Auster's creations speak and act like real people, and that helps us identify with them. The script has not "dumbed up" what the characters say simply to appeal to a wider audience.
One of the most fascinating moments of SMOKE occurs when Auggie talks about a project that has consumed him for the last eleven years: every morning at the same hour, he goes across the street from his shop and takes a single picture with his 35 mm camera. Over time, he has accumulated more than 4000 photographs, each of which tells a story. The power of an image -- any image -- is reinforced…

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Anyway, that’s why Envisage365 has grabbed my attention. I saw Smoke in 1995, which was 13 years ago. I still consider it one of my favorite movies because it was so well-crafted and the performances still haunt me in a nice way. Again, I can't believe I'm mentioning this two days in a row, but I have a mild OCD thingy about repetition - I like the visuals of repetition in art & words. This pleasure of mine is usually not discernible to anyone besides me. :) But Smoke reinforced in me the power of repetition... and that sometimes the ordinary is really quite extraordinary.

Speaking of haunting: My debut photo will haunt me forever too! Ya know I coulda gotten all glammed up, but this is the real me.