Well, tomorrow I'm off to Portland for Potlatch.

Tina has been making wild promises about single-malt Scotch, trips to Powell's and other visions of decadent fun.

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In other news, last night I finally got around to seeing Pan's Labyrinth, which I'd been vaguely meaning to see since, I don't know, forever, but never quite gotten around to. I was on my way back from teaching at Miami-Dade, and I'd been thinking of stopping over at the MartiniBar in Sunset Place. Realizing that I didn't have any cash, I stopped upstairs (where the movie theatre is) to use the ATM machine, and, on a whim, checked. Sure enough, they were still playing it there.

So, no no martini, but two hours of nearly aesthetically perfect cinema, that lovely and ocassionally nauseating juxtaposition of the political, personal and fantastical in the form of fascist Spain, family trauma and a dark and vividly realized magical world. Amazing.

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On a less conventionally beautiful note, the day before I finally got around to watching "Videodrome," which in it's own way I also loved. If Philip K. Dick, Larry Flynt and Stephen King took a couple of drops of acid and, as they were coming down, collaborated on a script together, it might look a bit like Videodrome.

"Long live the new flesh!"

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In the Business Ethics class I've been teaching at Miami-Dade, I just showed the students "Roger & Me." Seemed, however non-standard, highly appropriate for the subject of the class. (And of course it's nice to finally be able to show a movie in class. During the two years that I taught Logic at Western Michigan, I was never able find a symbolic logic movie.) I hadn't actually watched it in several years, and I was delighted how well it held up (and how closely it mirrored a lot of what we'd been talking about in class. One student said that the stuff the GM spokesmen Moore interviewed was saying sounded "straight out of the textbook" from the descriptions of the views of libertarian moral philosopher Robert Nozick.) In many ways, I think it was far better than Moore's later films. Though of course the film-making techniques got better over the years, there's a "just let the camera roll and let people embarass themselves" quality to "Roger & Me" that gets lost in the later movies as Moore succumbs the temptation to, to paraphrase Paul Park, "try to control the viewer's reactions."

Which is a difference that, I think, makes "Roger & Me" much more effective as a vehicle for Moore's message.

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Two interesting things, btw, about showing that movie at Miami-Dade.

The first being that while, of course, lots of students were as disgusted by the rabbit-skinning scene as students anywhere would be, a certain number had kind of a a reaction to students in the former category like, "What's the big deal? I saw people killing rabbits like that all the time in the town I grew up in in Cuba."

The second thing that struck me, a lot, was the scenes cross-cutting between poor black families being evicted from their homes and Flint's wealthiest citizens playing golf and having dinner parties. They were effective scenes, but my God, you could do a *much* more dramatic version of that sequence in Miami, which is statistically one of the poorest cities in the country overall, but where the lifestyles of the South Beach-dwelling rich are, shall we say, a tad more glamorous than those of their Flint equivalents.