Shorts From The Underground (2002)
By Ken Jacobs
Our daughter's name. Something to wrap up this obsession with homes, finding and making homes... their ephemeral quality, the believlng-makes-it-so pathos of them, the crazy landslide terrain we desperate creatures stick them on for want of bedrock; bedrock! Flo and me used to go to a theater on Second Avenue that showed old Yiddish films with stage shows in which old Yiddish vaudeville cadavers romped with all the electric energy they once displayed to Kafka. One Polish movie, Without a Home, had a subsidiary character, a ne'er-do-well amiable scholar named Fedel. One scene showed him at his breakfast table in his sunny old-world poverty digs, cracking open his soft-boiled breakfast eggÃÂthis said everythingÃÂwith a tuning fork, to which he then listened. Anyway, the film: We see both Flo and pet cat China pregnant. Expecting. Then a brief pause in darkness, for the movie magic to work, and there's the kid, and kittens. Not so easy to fix on film a picture of the little adventurer. No happier ending than our kitten in its catbox. Home movies are my favorite. - Ken Jacobs
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