A few days ago I called up Tim. We shared rooms on Biltmore Street for five years, in Washington's Adams-Morgan district near Dupont Circle, but now he's married ^* to Cecelia and living in Detroit. I've been meaning to call him since last summer when I saw "Out Of Sight," where there's a brief establishing montage which included a shot of a piece of that city's civic art I wanted more info about - Tim called it "that Joe Louis thing;" the body part and totalitarian scale reminds me of the Celebration Arch in Baghdad, built after their war with Iran. The hands holding the swords were modeled after Saddam Hussein's own.

Watched "The Doors" last night - what a rich picture! Crispin Glover's Warhol was great. The story got gruesome, like Elvis's, as it spiraled down to its historically inevitable conclusion, but the first half-hour was really good. I wonder how accurate the Ed Sullivan sequence was - that smoke coming out of the stage seemed a little too progressive, too radical an effect. The only time I saw 'em was a year later, on the Smothers Brothers show, when they did "People Are Strange" and "Love Me Two Times" - they tried something experimental with double exposures - cameras at right angles to Morrison's head, tinting one signal purple and the other green. Pretty groovy looking for back then. Oliver Stone used tasteful time-lapse to make things psychedelic in his movie. As for its late-sixties verisimilitude, I was convinced - Venice looked wonderful. I may get this new (1996) Doors greatest hits CD, even though it's missing a few essentials ("Wishful Sunful," "The Crystal Ship" and "Strange Days") because I only have a few stray tunes on tape (although I acquired nearly all of their singles as they came out), and I'm curious about what they've done visually with this CD-ROM "enhanced" track, "the Ghost Song."

The visit to the endontist yesterday was brief and inconclusive. His tests indicated that a root canal wasn't necessary; but he says my #14 and #15 molars are cracked, which means they need crowns. And although I no longer feel feverish-sick, the congestion and dry bronchial cough are lingering.

The Fist & the Arch

* I was Best Man at the wedding, in 1994.
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