she’s got that thing: kerry washington

i saw ‘i think i love my wife’ last weekend and i can’t remember having laughed so hard during one film.  chris rock plays a highly successful manhattan accountant who is engulfed in a rather humdrum dulled out marriage only until he meets the ultimate temptress played by kerry washington.  the film raises serious question and exposes serious reality when it comes to the troubling epidemic that kills most marriages/couples/crushes/daydreams, etc. <and believe me, i hate using “etc”

but firstly, you should know that i am obsessed with film and i’ve always been.  and this very well allows me to spend more than time should be spent conversing, meditating and writing about film, movies, and the actors, directors, and even the production assistants who make them.  

and so, i’ve successfully danced from the mental musings about ryan phillippe’s dynamic lips (and i’ve calmed down a bit) to kerry washington, not her lips but her body, and not her body (even though it is doubly self-accented in this new film) but this is about her body of work.  she’s young, she’s gorgeous and she plays the hell out of all of the roles i’ve seen her in.  

the last film i had seen kerry washington in was ‘ray.’  the cast in and of itself is dynamic.  washington included.  the first film i saw her in was ‘save the last dance’ a film about an interracial romance that withstands critique by everybody inside and outside of the couple, starring julia stiles and sean patrick thomas.  a very relevant film that happened to have a banging soundtrack. 

but this kerry washington.  hmmm, there is something about this girl that doesn’t scream mega-hollywood star but promises a craftsmanship that mega-hollywood stars would die for and seldom have it, that gift.  every time i see her, she seems to somehow stick on the brain.  this grad from george washington university, born in the bronx is a talent quite refreshing.  i am excited to see where her career takes her.  she’s not just another pretty face that can carry her lines out a bit, but she brings something else to the table.  a kinda tough grit / ultra cool feminine intelligence that is killer.  she’s real and if she’s playing a young slighly immature teenager or the stronger half of a legendary american music icon, she simply has the stellar ability to do it.  and do it well.  her range is broad and i’m excited about her.

other fine notables….and their break out roles (2 me)

ryan gosling…full nelson
rosario dawson…this revolution
natalie portman…v for vendetta
aunjunue ellis…ray and girlstown
columbus short…stomp the yard
nicole ari parker…dancing in september
anna grace (where have you gone to?)…girlstown
fairuza balk…gas, food lodging
eva mendes…out of time
jennifer esposito…crash

kerry washington

 

i like the way

i like blogs because they magnify our human experience no matter what room of the universe we happen to reside in. we are all connected like our ecosystem through words and emotion and experience.

for somewhere in here you may find the pieces of you that i cherish

i like the pauses between your words
i’m mesmerized by your hands
i like how when you speak in frustrations you take your right hand to push all of your short dark, closely cropped hair forward
that you laugh in staccato
how you hold me back from moving traffic
that you are both soft and hard
i like the way you eat as if you haven’t eaten in years
that you are genuine and that you glow
that you make me feel like i matter
and you like me for me
i like it how you touch the end of my elbow when you’re saying something you really want me to hear
and that if it wasn’t for time and responsibilities, eating, sleeping and work, we’d never stop talking
i like how you have a tag phrase when you run out of things to say
how you make me double over in laughter most days
the fact that you said i intimidate you
and you make me nervous
i like that you never drink soda
you drive way too slow
you know way too much
you giggle when you’re nervous
and you discredit your most beautiful asset
you’ve glued magazine pages onto paper for me
i look awkward in your clothes
i like how you can tell i’m trying too hard

“i’ve seen the cops and the robbers and they all dance the same”

crazy

it’s crazy how mishaps create pleasure

it’s crazy how colors in the morning seem brighter to me

it’s crazy how mesmerizing candle flame can be

and it’s so crazy…how the more i talk sh*t, the more people know it’s sh*t, but there’s something uniquely human about it…and we’ve come to that agreement.  we accept it, we do it and we love it.

la vida loca.

this is for you

Populist Manifesto No. 1
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poets, come out of your closets,
Open your windows, open your doors,
You have been holed-up too long
in your closed worlds.
Come down, come down
from your Russian Hills and Telegraph Hills,
your Beacon Hills and your Chapel Hills,
your Mount Analogues and Montparnasses,
down from your foothills and mountains,
out of your teepees and domes.
The trees are still falling
and we’ll to the woods no more.
No time now for sitting in them
As man burns down his own house
to roast his pig
No more chanting Hare Krishna
while Rome burns.
San Francisco’s burning,
Mayakovsky’s Moscow’s burning
the fossil-fuels of life.
Night & the Horse approaches
eating light, heat & power,
and the clouds have trousers.
No time now for the artist to hide
above, beyond, behind the scenes,
indifferent, paring his fingernails,
refining himself out of existence.
No time now for our little literary games,
no time now for our paranoias & hypochondrias,
no time now for fear & loathing,
time now only for light & love.
We have seen the best minds of our generation
destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
Poetry isn’t a secret society,
It isn’t a temple either.
Secret words & chants won’t do any longer.
The hour of oming is over,
the time of keening come,
a time for keening & rejoicing
over the coming end
of industrial civilization
which is bad for earth & Man.
Time now to face outward
in the full lotus position
with eyes wide open,
Time now to open your mouths
with a new open speech,
time now to communicate with all sentient beings,
All you ‘Poets of the Cities’
hung in museums including myself,
All you poet’s poets writing poetry
about poetry,
All you poetry workshop poets
in the boondock heart of America,
All you housebroken Ezra Pounds,
All you far-out freaked-out cut-up poets,
All you pre-stressed Concrete poets,
All you cunnilingual poets,
All you pay-toilet poets groaning with graffiti,
All you A-train swingers who never swing on birches,
All you masters of the sawmill haiku in the Siberias of America,
All you eyeless unrealists,
All you self-occulting supersurrealists,
All you bedroom visionaries and closet agitpropagators,
All you Groucho Marxist poets
and leisure-class Comrades
who lie around all day and talk about the workingclass proletariat,
All you Catholic anarchists of poetry,
All you Black Mountaineers of poetry,
All you Boston Brahims and Bolinas bucolics,
All you den mothers of poetry,
All you zen brothers of poetry,
All you suicide lovers of poetry,
All you hairy professors of poesie,
All you poetry reviewers
drinking the blood of the poet,
All you Poetry Police -
Where are Whitman’s wild children,
where the great voices speaking out
with a sense of sweetness and sublimity,
where the great’new vision,
the great world-view,
the high prophetic song
of the immense earth
and all that sings in it
And our relations to it -
Poets, descend
to the street of the world once more
And open your minds & eyes
with the old visual delight,
Clear your throat and speak up,
Poetry is dead, long live poetry
with terrible eyes and buffalo strength.
Don’t wait for the Revolution
or it’ll happen without you,
Stop mumbling and speak out
with a new wide-open poetry
with a new commonsensual ‘public surface’
with other subjective levels
or other subversive levels,
a tuning fork in the inner ear
to strike below the surface.
Of your own sweet Self still sing
yet utter ‘the word en-masse -
Poetry the common carrier
for the transportation of the public
to higher places
than other wheels can carry it.
Poetry still falls from the skies
into our streets still open.
They haven’t put up the barricades, yet,
the streets still alive with faces,
lovely men & women still walking there,
still lovely creatures everywhere,
in the eyes of all the secret of all
still buried there,
Whitman’s wild children still sleeping there,
Awake and walk in the open air.

the beats…poets

Wild Dreams of a New Beginning
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

There’s a breathless hush on the freeway tonight
Beyond the ledges of concrete
restaurants fall into dreams
with candlelight couples
Lost Alexandria still burns
in a billion lightbulbs
Lives cross lives
idling at stoplights
Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs
‘Souls eat souls in the general emptiness’
A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window
A yogi speaks at Ojai
‘It’s all taking pace in one mind’
On the lawn among the trees
lovers are listening
for the master to tell them they are one
with the universe
Eyes smell flowers and become them
There’s a deathless hush
on the freeway tonight
as a Pacific tidal wave a mile high
sweeps in
Los Angeles breathes its last gas
and sinks into the sea like the Titanic all lights lit
Nine minutes later Willa Cather’s Nebraska
sinks with it
The sea comes over in Utah
Mormon tabernacles washed away like barnacles
Coyotes are confounded & swim nowhere
An orchestra onstage in Omaha
keeps on playing Handel’s Water Music
Horns fill with water
ans bass players float away on their instruments
clutching them like lovers horizontal
Chicago’s Loop becomes a rollercoaster
Skyscrapers filled like water glasses
Great Lakes mixed with Buddhist brine
Great Books watered down in Evanston
Milwaukee beer topped with sea foam
Beau Fleuve of Buffalo suddenly become salt
Manhatten Island swept clean in sixteen seconds
buried masts of Amsterdam arise
as the great wave sweeps on Eastward
to wash away over-age Camembert Europe
manhatta steaming in sea-vines
the washed land awakes again to wilderness
the only sound a vast thrumming of crickets
a cry of seabirds high over
in empty eternity
as the Hudson retakes its thickets
and Indians reclaim their canoes