Dear San Francisco, I recently heard that your mayor is going to declare Aug. 16, 2003, Home Movie Day. Not to be outdone, I uncovered the following item, a proclamation scrawled on and bleeding through two consecutive napkins on the men's room floor of my new Times Square Red Lobster. Let it be known that the drafter had just sliced into his fried calamari with his ribbon-cutting scissors and was on his fifth Rheingold.

Whereas home movies and amateur films are the true orphans of the Cinematic Industrial Complex, having rolled off the Kodak, Agfa, or Fuji assembly lines just as surely as the celluloid that carried Peeping Tom, Mean Streets, Capturing the Friedmans, or other "big" feature movies that exploit the unabashed vitality, intimacy, or emotive value of substandard (especially regular 8mm, Super 8mm, or 16mm) motion picture gauges;

Whereas home movies, especially the ones shot in and around our amazing two islands and three land masses (That's five boroughs, people! Five!), have frozen in emulsion a singular, often poetic, window into the lives of nigh-extinct New Yorkers like the young boys skinny-dipping in the East River, or a polio-felled bard watching his bride dance with his brother while penning immortal lyrics;

Whereas a great many home VIDEO consumers, imagining they have saved their FILMS by transferring them onto video, may actually chuck the originals, thus losing the far more permanent record of the event and earning the title of "chucklehead";

Whereas amateur-size film stock can hold, among other things, a repository of dreams mingling with memory and history and all issue-tissues that postgraduate students bank careers on, including, in the words of author Patricia Zimmerman, "nature, beauty, feeling, family, emotion, higher metaphysical truths"; and

Whereass [sic] the New York Home Movie Day event, as part of a worldwide (well, alright, the United States plus Mexico and Japan) Home Movie Day effort, will create a forum at Anthology Film Archives for scholars and archivists to share important information about protecting and preserving home movies as part of our cultural heritage and will afford an opportunity for people to view and share their home movies and to rediscover their inherent appeal and value;

Now, therefore I, Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of the City of New York and Dapper Ruler of All Media I Survey, do hereby declare the 16th of August 2003 as "New York Home Movie Day."

So, there it is. Whether this be ratified, or whether the declaration is panting for a rewrite, is impossible for me to say. I am, after all, a city embracing many huddled masses and pidgin viewpoints, and, yes, a great deal of terrible prose rolls out of here every second of every hour. The point is, I don't think the mayor's for real with this stuff. After Red Lobster, what? As my proud skyscrapers wilt into the steel canyons, into what will they dip?

One of my better, and hairier, citizens, Andy Lampert tells me that, despite the lack of support from the mayor's office, the event will hobble along in two parts. First is an open screening at which anyone who brings a film (no video, sorry) will get to screen it, from the more celebrated "Man Getting Hit in Groin with Football" to the relatively mysterious "New Year's 1962," in which adults in iridescent clothes guzzle cocktails and tie brooms like tails to their waists to sweep a ball across a basement finish line; contributors will be actively encouraged to talk over their images, providing amplified karaoke-box commentary. Then, the "professional" amateurs (read: career avant-gardists) get their shot with the medium, including the late Stan Brakhage, natterer and compulsive micro/macro chronicler of our sensual world, who offers his cat's fur for your delectation.

It's my understanding that you peninsulates have your own version going on the same day at the San Francisco Media Archive (275 Capp, S.F. 415-558-8117), with the charge being led by archivist Stephen Parr. From noon until 6 p.m. the Media Archive will examine, clean, and screen films brought in by the public, and from 6 until 8 p.m. it will host a reception. Then the evening program begins: 8 p.m. features movies by amateur cinema clubs; 9 p.m. spotlights the efforts of amazing '40s- and '50s-era "filmers," culled by the medium's irradiator, Scott Stark; at 10 p.m. the festivities conclude with rare selections from the Media Archive.

As you can see, the sensations surrounding said event run on and on. There is so much beauty here, so much to fixate on, even if it's only the flash of a lava-licious flare in the middle of a double 8mm reel, a melt-mark result of bisecting 16mm and rejoining the halves. Can't see it in your mind right now? Then see it with your eyes on Saturday.

With love, filling the days,

New York City (Edward E. Crouse)

Le divorce?

Until I saw Lainie Kazan's bare ass – pants yanked down to mid-thong so one mottled cheek could be kissed by an insulin-packed syringe – I don't think I realized how much 21st-century cinema owes to Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas. Sitting in a nearly empty theater on opening weekend is surreal enough (never has the Kabuki Theater felt more like a personal screening room), but Gigli's lessons in "heterolingus" are truly a tongue trip through the looking glass. Hollywood grandeur leads to Hollywood Babylon, in this case a land of glorious cameltoe close-ups and such delicious extras as the she-Bennifer extolling labia (her own) and the he-Bennifer beating up a "retarded" youth whose penis "sneezes" when he thinks of "the Baywatch."