i was writing a blip about an old receipt today when i remembered how movies are populated with splotches in the corner of the screen, usually at the end of a scene, signalling the projector operator to fire up the next projector with the next reel of film, for to seamlessly continue the movie. i thought of htis whence trying to describe the streak of color that appears at the end of a roll of receipt paper. that streak or streaks of color tell the cashier that the receipt paper is nearly run out, and that a new roll of paper should be prepared for to seamlessly continue the money-making transaction whilst providing receipts to customers. in my mind these two signals are similar. the spots seen in movies are called “cigarette burns” or else they are more prosaically called “change-overs”. i always looked for those cigarette burns at hte movies, and i remember pointing them out and explaining their purpose to people from grade school and high school. no one believed me. everyone to whom i pointed out the secret signals dismissed my account as bullshit, inspiring me to just make shit up, since no one believed me when i told them truthful things. i think this might have inspired my brief interest in hoaxes and in planting false historical documents and “evidence” in old library books and research volumes. i imagined crafting a one-page piece of piano music allegedly by Stravinsky, writing it on already-aged paper found at a thrift shop, and skillfully inserting Stravinsky-isms in ways that would pique the scholars and pianists alike. i never did, and i doubt if i woiuld ever have had access to the types of research archives into which i might slip such a document. i did not want to just stuff it into any old library book at the open shelves of hte new york public library for the performing arts. i wanted to stuff it into the Horowitz papers or the Ives papers, or even the Richard Nixon papers at Whittier College. I had vague plans for all this and more, but the spark dimmed quickly.it seemed like a long way to go wh
en i had no real point to make, no statement. today these tiny hoaxes are easily perpetuated through online encyclopedias, from which thousands of blips of erroneous information seep into the whirlwind of human thought every single minute. i do not know if these streaks of color at the end of receipts rolls have a real name. but they are the cashier’s equivalent to the cigarette burns of the movie theater projector operator.
…..
i watched “The Omen” last night. i guess i never watched that film, or else i never watched it all the way through. i had no idea of the ending, which was bizarre and shocking to th elapsed catholic in me. and Gregory Peck in that role had me re-thinking my impressions of Atticus Finch, the stately, stolid lawyer he played in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” i see that role differently now, in the same sense that one can not watch “My Three Sons” with the appropriate level of vacuousness after seeing Fred Macmurray in “Double Indemnity.” “The Omen” appealed to my religiosities, and the cemetery scene in particular got my imagination.
