Avram's journal

Went up to the Hoboken Historical Museum today, for some shorts from the Hudson County film festival. I walked, which almost was a mistake, since Hoboken’s north-south numbered blocks are two or three times as long as the Manhattan blocks I use as internal calibration when judging how long it’ll take to walk some number of blocks. I got there about 15 minutes late, which turned out not to be a problem, since they were 15 minutes late in starting, almost as if they’d been waiting for me.

The two shorts I’d gone to see were Sparks — a short romantic comedy billed as involving the World Trade Center, when actually it was set in Jersey City and just had shots of the WTC to establish setting at the beginning and end, and it turned out I’d seen all but the first few seconds at 111 Open Studios last fall — and Popaganda, which I’d thought was a documentary about Ron English, but which turned out to be an eight-minute music-video-like trailer for the full 82-minute documentary. (There’s a one-minute QuickTime trailer hosted on English’s website, and “Read Between the Lies”, another video which uses footage from the short I saw, though it leaves out the naked woman splattering fake blood on a billboard of a giant coat-hanger.)

Among the other films they showed was one from 1906, a silent “Boy Detective” short (in which the protagonist appeared to be played by a woman) filmed a few blocks from the museum. I made a point of walking down that block on the way home, and it was still recognizable a century later.

I stopped at a Starbucks and finished off Mason & Dixon, which was becoming a bit of a chore towards the end. And I ate far, far too much junk over the course of the day. Y’know those new guacamole-flavored Doritos? Well, they taste a whole lot like Doritos, and not much like anything related to an avocado, but afterwards they leave a somewhat guacamolic aftertaste. I am ashamed to know this.