I like Austin Powers all right, I generally like Mike Myers. Unlike other SNL alumni, he can keep a straight face, or a crooked face, or any sort of weird grin, under any circumstances, he's good, and I think a real humorist. I tend to like certain short bits better than the extended movies. Guess I like short comedy pieces. I'll have to look for the Live Python, I've never heard of it.

I really didn't like David Lynch's Wild At Heart, but even that had a few okay things--like Harry Dean Stanton sympathetically growling with a pack of wolves on the nature channel--like a Far Side cartoon of a guy watching sports. Aaaahg! and, YES!

   Another great line in Blue Velvet when Kyle McLaughlin was standing with the nude and battered Rosellini on the front lawn. Couple of guys from school in a car on the street stop and throw out a comment. Who's that--your mom?

   Been trying to think of a teen movie I could defend. Um. Anyway. The documentary Dogtown and Z Boys fascinated me, although I've never skateboarded, and don't care anything about it. Ghostworld is the closest I can get. The art class was my favorite part. A friend of mine saw it with a Japanese audience, and they didn't laugh at the any of the instructor's remarks, but howled over the students' drawings. Go figure.

   Sometimes offensive comedy is like when Jerry Seinfeld went to talk to a priest about the dentist who became Jewish for the jokes. The priest says And that offends you as a Jew? Jerry says It offends me as a comedian. I get offended by movies that make hard things seem easy. I don't mean over-the-top musicals in which everything glides effortlessly in a frictionless world, but things that portend to relate to real lives. We're all handicapped people, is what I think. So I like things like Raging Bull, and Camille Claudel--things that consider what it costs you sometimes to try really hard. I liked Jerry Seinfeld's "Comedian" documentary, for that humility.