I should be shooting pictures in the San Francisco Castro district this evening, but I'm tired and I've just bought an authorized biography of Robert Capa's life, trust me, a photojournalist who's pictures you've seen at some time in your life even if the name isn't particularly familiar. No reason it should. Nice to curl up with a book, but from the reading I've done so far Capa would be out shooting. "Best Party on the West Coast" says today's Examiner headline. I'm sure it's a non biased assessment.

I went to see The Fight Club last night. I'd heard it described by one of the people at Newsweek as a clear indicator in the ongoing decline in the moral fiber of the body politic, in other words "us", a movie they'd spent $70 million to make and promote. He was upset with the violence and quite honestly, violence without something else: intelligence, snappy patter, gratuitous sex, is not going to get me to buy a ticket. Still, a $70 million milestone in the decline and fall of the culture..., what can I say? Maybe I should check it out. So I did.

A strange movie in the sense that the writers and director pushed a little at the limits of what might be considered conventional in a mass marketed film. (What am I saying? I take it back.) I kept having little questions about motivation degenerating into questions of what in the hell is going on here, all of them tied up nicely at the finish. "You've met me at a particularly unsettling moment in my life." Well, yes. There were bare knuckled fist fights with lots of blood, but not the stomach churning kind. Or, at least, my stomach churning kind. A skitterish dance across intersecting lines of black humor, love, mail order furniture and madness, not necessarily in that order. I would say it's worth seeing, particularly as a milestone of some sort, but not of the sort suggested by the joker from Newsweek. You might try it when it's released on tape. No need for the big screen treatment. Everything happens inside.