Monthly Archives: August 2005

Spam Poem No. 1: “Here we come!”

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In recent months I’ve noticed my spam becom­ing increas­ingly bizarre. Some sub­ject lines are so truly absurd that I can­not imag­ine their ori­gin. Are they sim­ply really bad trans­la­tions of, say, Russ­ian or Por­tuguese? Are they ran­dom machine gen­er­a­tions meant to foil spam fil­ters? It’s a mystery.

It has, how­ever, made my daily batch of spam less of a nui­sance and more a source of amuse­ment. In a way, I feel lucky for my email address to have been cap­tured on some par­tic­u­larly strange mail­ing lists.

Some­times, a line is strangely poignant: “He worry in unabridged vol­umes.” Per­haps this unnamed pro­tag­o­nist sim­ply needs more Via­gara or a new Niger­ian Ponzi scheme in which to invest, but doesn’t it just break your heart that he wor­ries that much?

Which brings me to what may be the first in a series of found Spam Poems. I’ve started com­pil­ing these some­times gib­ber­ish, some­times evoca­tive lines into verse. Each line is a com­plete spam sub­ject line, com­pletely unedited. The only thing I’ve done is arrange them in stan­zas with an ABAB rhyming scheme.

This first poem launches with a strong dec­la­ra­tion and call to action, explores his­toric strife and exis­ten­tial­ism in the sec­ond stanza, and then looks deep into the soul’s inse­cu­ri­ties in the third. I hope you like it.

Here We Come!

here we come! stop decon­vo­lu­tion
That organ­ise go ban­tamweight
Be open he loon afflic­tion
Have buy as evaporate

Be want do holo­caust galaxy
ded­i­cated to you occi­dent inflater
My travel on min­strelsy
Which rules are in effect here? dev­il­ish calorimeter

A speak my scared fixedly
my wife oner­ous carmine
you tell do exer­cise vil­lainies
As turnon an vine

Alexander

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Alexander movie poster

 

Ugh. I should have lis­tened to the myr­iad crit­ics and friends who warned me off this one… it is indeed quite bad. Every­thing you’ve heard is true: impos­si­bly long, unin­tel­li­gi­bly edited (can any­one explain to me Alexander’s sup­pos­edly bril­liant scheme in the first bat­tle? Run­ning away and com­ing back will allow greater access to strike the enemy king exactly how?), and schiz­o­phrenic with regards to its sex­ual pol­i­tics. So Alexan­der was bisex­ual, fine. But in this day and age, doing any­thing to avoid show­ing an onscreen kiss just calls atten­tion to itself. Two pretty men gaz­ing at each other and say­ing things like “By Zeus’ beard, you are indeed a great man” is just comical.

And most amus­ingly: if accents are to be judged, Angelina Jolie’s char­ac­ter hails from Tran­syl­va­nia, and Alexan­der and his father came to Greece by way of down the pub. In fact, the kid who plays the young Alexan­der sounds more Irish than Colin Far­rel himself!

I rented the director’s cut, which bucks the trend in actu­ally being shorter than the the­atri­cal ver­sion (the only other direc­tor I know of to do this is Stan­ley Kubrick, who would often con­tinue to abridge films even dur­ing release). At 3 hours, 55 min­utes, I am quite glad I didn’t decide to go with the the­atri­cal version.

What was good about it? Angelina Jolie is always a plea­sure to watch — an old-school movie star in the sense that her pres­ence and beauty are so over­pow­er­ing that she might as well be from another planet. I’ve always thought Val Kilmer was a fine actor (espe­cially in the under­rated Spar­tan). And in a supris­ingly plain-looking movie for Stone, it’s a great relief when he finally cuts loose in the sur­real, lit­er­ally blood-soaked sequence of Alexander’s near-fatal wound­ing in India.