Quoth the Herzog.

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail." Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You cant legislate stupidity."

9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesnt call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And dont you listen to the Song of Life.

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

13. Myspace is vice, not virtue, nor value. Interact at the risk of endless, bug-eyed, four-walled solitude, and never convince yourself a cube can scratch it's own back; a cube can't tell its front from back.

For the love of escarpments.

SEMESTER 2 > HOLIDAYS

For Woof, who did not solicit that Rottweiler; it was absolutely non-consensual.

From an interactive script involving re-incarnation over, um, 7 or so centuries. Please do not underestimate the canine, m'friends, no matter how flaccid its tongue. You may end up lapping fluorified water from a petri dish someday. Here's hoping that your master isn't a pet- pamperer, though: brushed teeth, bow ties, roll over and pout for a thimble of lemon rice, dearest Dixon. Just throw me a motherfucking bone, I say.

EXT. TSETSERLEG, MONGOLIA - DUSK

On the fringes of Tsetserleg town. All is snow-blanketed, thicker by the minute. A pack of husky dogs mill around a brethren who bleeds from his neck; the snow below is pink. Meet RA. His eyes are shut. The dogs’ barks are subtitled.

DOF (BIGGEST DOG)

We go food, Ra. We go food.

Dof nuzzles Ra, but Ra is impassive.

SOW (GREY DOG)

Ra no strength. Ra cold. We bring
Ra food, Ra get strength back.

NUG (3-LEGGED DOG)

No. Too cold. We lose strength.

Nug sidles away in the direction of town.

NUG

Nug need warmth. Feel not good.
Nug go home now. We all go home.

All the dogs turn to Nug, who is now five metres off.

DOF

But Ra?

Nug holds their gaze for a bit. Then: he turns, limps off.

DOF (CONT’D)

Ra same us. Us and Ra. All us same!

Nug halts and turns.

NUG

(motions to missing leg)

Nug lose leg in too long cold. Same
now. Us stay, us lose leg. Nug lose
leg again, Nug finish.

(beat)

We all go now.

Two of the five dogs capitulate. They sniff Ra a final, rueful time, crying a hgh-pitched lament. It is over; they leave in arms with Nug. Tsetserleg town is aglow far ahead.

DOF

If you ever no strength, Ra help you!

Nug turns around one last time.

NUG

Nug sorry. Nug choose not.

They hasten off, Nug limping. Dof, Sow and Ra remain. With the pack diffused, it becomes clear that a trail of bloody footprints lead off in the other direction, toward a copse. And therien lie the perpetrators: wolves.

**Maybe this makes nada sense torn out of context as it is. Oh well. You lose some. I just wanted dogs on a blog named after windmills. For Woof.

Born 8.6.1930, for starters.

We are outside Manna House – a popular soup kitchen. It is 5pm and the light is a surreal orange. Smatters of homeless people trickle through the barbwire gates. They are a motley bunch: ponytails, suspenders, Wellington boots, sailor caps, et al. Some familiar faces patter through: Salty, Delia, pram-bound Zeus, Max, Reg, Cowboy. Everyone is inside. We are left to stare at brick walls as voices from within trail out to us.

Night-hours at E.J. Oval. Lights cast an artificial halo over the gardens. We see a figure in the relative darkness -- she is young, scantily clad, wears preposterously high heels. As the odd car approaches, she moves roadside and pouts, flaunts leg, feigns sultriness. Meet Lee. Her voice filters over the top of it all: she tells us how repugnant most of her clients are. Old. Stringy. Such deathly breath. One regular john insists she role-play the persona of a schoolgirl. Whatever; she badly needs the money.

Via-a-vis with Lee. She sits on a park bench, coat bound tightly around her. She continues: none of these people are her friends. The bench she is sitting on knows her better than any john. This is her mode of survival. And she’s damn good at it. The great mystery is how she went from graduating high school to being here. A sudden cavalcade of cars emerges in the distance; she sheds her coat and hustles to the road. No cars stop.

Back outside Manna House. Stars twinkle in the crystalline sky. The brick walls present as nothing more than thick, upstanding shadows. From inside the kitchen emerges the faint tinkle of a piano. It stops-starts-stops a few stutters, finding its key. And then a familiar rhythm is hit upon; over the top emerges an ear-bleedingly atonal male voice, diluted by the wall:

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me....
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see.

A chorus of voices accrete in the rest of a stirring rendition of Amazing Grace. Upon reaching the final verse, we cut to Hyde Park all over again -- “I once was blind, but now am found” -- and Lee’s park bench is vacant. Cars cruise by but there is no vestige of her.

Manna House. People trickle out, some drinking from polystyrene cups, others clinging to containers bearing food. The camera yields brief assessments of the meal: a pre-adolescent boy, sugar lining his lips, raves about the after-dinner sweets; his cock-eyed mother shakes her head, gently suggests the chicken was too spicy; a balding old man lets a flurry of burps do the speaking; Salty tells us it was Godly -- he had 4 servings.