2001-06-12 - 11:42 a.m.

Believe it or not, in my infinite ennui, I think I have stumbled on a couple of ideas for essays. So forgive me if I begin to sound ultra-academic in the coming entries - you gotta do what you gotta do.

If I could begin this essay any way I wanted to do, I would insert a video clip from the end of the film "Manhattan." I would show the glorious black and white of Ike Davis' reunion with his teenage lover, Tracy, the only sensible human being in the entire film, his plea for her to take him back, and the sad news that she was going away to study abroad. I would show (because, really, there is no way to describe in words) the way Woody Allen's visage trembles onscreen like an underfed insect wriggling beneath a microscpe, the way his horn-rimmed glasses dwarf his features, but prove not large enough to allow him to clearly perceive the reality of his relationship. I would show the very ends of his sparse, wiry hair becoming heavy with sadness as his learns he will have to wait for her, the luminous Mariel Hemingway, who, stars in this film as the redeeming factor to end all redeeming factors, as Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue swells around them witht he force of - well, Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, I guess. I would show his desperate expression, barely alive, and yet revealing every effort of the fissures of his brain to crank out an idea of what to do next, as she asserts the final, infinitely brilliant last line of the film: "You've got to have a little faith in people."

What I'm wearing:

What I'm reading:

What I'm doing after this: