� the Narrator (David Byrne) to Mayor Culver (Spalding Gray) in "True Stories"

I don�t like Matt and Ted Lee on account of their slavish devotion to the second-person plural and apparent disinterest in cultivating separate personalities � I know what they look like but I prefer to imagine them as the Polish brothers in "Twin Falls Idaho" � and because they are such brownnosers. In today�s edition of Us and Our NYT Expense Account and Our Hipster Friends, they make sure you know they consulted "several" books on how best to cook kalua pig in a conventional oven; in fact, their "several books we consulted" implies that there may have been others that dissented from the consensus course they finally, bravely took (or forces us to notice that implication, anyway). Note also "recent trips to Oahu," plural, lest we suspect for a moment that MattandTed are mere tourists and lack the pedagogical chops to be informing us about Hawaiian cuisine. Oh no, of poi and poke the Lee unit are like Lewis and Clark, and don�t you forget it, you over there remembering a good joke you once made about pu pu platter. Also who I don�t like, more even than I used to not like him � have mercy on our souls, sportscasters, can the American public please be done with hearing about the literally-and-figuratively prodigious size of his heart? � is Lance Armstrong, who in an interview after the crash that took Beloki out and almost sidelined him too attributed his own performance to "the reflexes of a champion." Congratulations, Lance � you�ve joined the Costner Society!

If you want my review of "Cremaster 3," well then I am sorry if this shatters your image of me as a medium thinker but the "True Stories" quote just about covers it. Actually the quote is my review of the first hour and a half of the film only, because at intermission I cut my losses and left. "It was that bad?" asked Steve eagerly when I gave him my report later. Not *bad* exactly, no. What happened is that I was already upset, in fact I�d left home without having grabbed clothes for the next day and today I am wearing khakis and a t-shirt and my weekend sandals, and I wasn�t looking forward to the movie as much as I had been during the day, and then when I first got to the theater some arts tard ahead of me in line corrected my pronunciation � "It�s CRIM-isster," she huffed, as if I�d offended her � and then to my surprise the theater was jam packed with Seattle�s entire arts tard population, which on the one hand is good because maybe this suggests that the denizens of my city are not as complacent as they often appear but on the other hand was bad because I�d brought my falafel in with me expecting to eat during the show and since I had to sit between two other people, that would not have been polite. I sat and watched the first hour and a half of the movie, I viddied and studied the images, and yes it was a spectacle, it was like nothing I had ever seen. And maybe the fact that its beauty and singularity were still not enough to absorb my attention says something about a hard-wired orientation, in me, to linear narrative. I could not stop wanting to know, OK, so what is going on here? What�s this all about? When, if ever, is this business with the potatoes going to make sense? (Aimee Mullins sure is pretty though.) I got the representational aspect, art and the artist and the drive to create, that drive as being inseparable from the artist, commerce and industry, yada yada yada. It was interesting to me and maybe a little dismaying to learn that this kind of conceptual art leaves me unsated. It was thematically overiterative and seemed only to want to make the acquaintance of one side of my brain, and this left the snubbed hemisphere free to its own time-passing devices, which mostly amounted to cataloguing the props and sets and costumes in a taxonomy of design porn � how much did those riding silks cost to have made, how much for the potato shoes and how many forged and welded design prototypes had been constructed before the ones that appeared in the film, where were the cars purchased from, what kind of influence do you have to have to rent these sets, etc. In this sense the film can be seen as an argument for its own themes, n�est-ce pas? It also did not dispel my personal externalities, My legs are cold, that guy behind me needs to cut way down on the aftershave, dammit I�m hungry, with all the previews I�m not going to get out of here until 11:30 and then I�ll have to go more or less right to sleep and I had wanted to read some of my book � and then when the lights came up everyone around me was making the Home Alone face at each other, talking about how badly they needed coffee, saying Oh my god I cannot even believe there�s another hour and a half of this to go, and that attitude irritated me, their unwillingness to leave because if they did then they�d be outing themselves as philistines, so I grabbed my purse and my bag and I showed the arts tards how it�s done. I knew that all of the greatest grossest images and the Donkey Kong part were in the second half, and I knew that some people I know would make fun of me for copping out, and I felt bad for not being able to live up to a bargain that I believed I�d all but made with Barney, but I also wanted to eat my falafel and read my book. There are a lot of movies for which I would gladly have put those things on hold for another measly hour and a half, and there are more than a few in which I would have become so caught up that the externalities would have ceased to matter � I remember feeling like that at "Talk To Her" � and, sorry, "Cremaster 3" was not one of them.

Here is my review of the falafel: I got it from a place a few storefronts north of 45th, across the street from the Varsity. It has a yellow awning, and I tell you this because you should go, my sandwich was first rate. Lots more falafel than you usually get, and also feta cheese. Unlike the Lees I can report no recent trips to the casbah to shore up my credibility, so you�re just going to have to trust me on this one.

Matthew Barney and David Lynch. I want to go back to college so I can write a bright-eyed-college-girl term paper on them. The emphasis on the visual and personal, the sound design, the orientation to narrative, the concessions to an audience or the idea of an audience: compare and contrast. Oh, the postmodernism of it all. Shortly after "Mulholland Drive" came out I read that Lynch had been asked to explain and unravel the movie and he allowed that yes, it was possible, but that doing so would take longer than the movie had taken him to make. Would Barney say the same of "Cremaster 3"? Is Lynch serious?

Oh, and I know who my free pass is, duh. Why didn�t I think of him first thing? Not Olbermann, not Bierko � it�s Schreiber all the way.