Ballad in Plain D

Dream (from April 26, 2006):

I was looking up guitar/ukulele chords on the internet, and came across "chords" for hip-hop songs. The instructions at the top of the page said:

Yo can blaze these daggaz in D
Except where indicated (in A)

"Daggaz," of course, being the proper term for an intense song.

Later I was looking at the East River. They were trying to make New York into the new Venice, to the extent that on each of the small islands in the river, they put up enormous white models of John Berendt's latest book, Canals of Venice. These gigantic books were propped up against old buildings.

Next I was privy to machinations at a Roosevelt Island news gazette. I was apparently reading said gazette, which kept using the obscure legal term "Ehf Chz." The latter word was pronounced "chez," for those in the know.

My notes get less clear at this point—something about hearing Park instead of Mark, and a sort of spot-quote pop quiz that a high school English teacher used to give, reading aloud a quote, then randomly selecting someone to identify where it came from.

* * *

In real news: Bong Joon-ho's The Host is getting loads of great attention at Cannes (see this Times piece). I've heard that it already has a distributor, and I can't wait to see it. Here's a short bit I wrote on Memories of Murder in the Voice; a longer consideration, on that film and Bong's stellar Barking Dogs Never Bite, was published in CinemaScope a while back. (I'd reproduce it here, but will maybe dangle it as incentive to pick up Michael Atkinson's forthcoming anthology Exile Cinema, where it appears again.)