SQUID OR OCTOPUS? The New Yorker recently announced the latest incarnation of its annual Cartoon Caption Contest. The press release says that "This is the contest's sixth year; readers are asked to make up a caption to accompany an Alex Gregory drawing that depicts a sushi counter complete with chef, customer, and a large octopus wearing an enormous chef's hat."

The fact checkers must've been AWOL on that one. The sea creature depicted in the cartoon looks like a squid, not an octopus.

For that matter, it also looks more like a cartoon squid than a cartoon octopus.

Yeah, yeah, yeah--we know they all look alike.

FUNKY SHOW ON ST. NICHOLAS. In 1971, Melvin Van Peebles laid groundwork for the blaxploitation film craze with his violent and sexually explicit Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song, rated X and dedicated to "Brothers and sisters who have had enough of the Man." Could he have guessed that decades later (on October 24, actually) he would receive the DaimlerChrysler "Behind the Lens Award"?

A musician as well as a filmmaker, Peebles also created musicals that were produced on Broadway and nominated for Tony Awards. One of them, Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death: Tunes from Blackness (1971), is a set of musicalized poetic vignettes about characters including beggars, a pimp, a transvestite, a death-row inmate, and a Black Muslim. Sure, the work deals in stereotypes--but ingeniously. Van Peebles won a Grammy and a Drama Desk Award for his work.

Ain't Supposed to Die... is scheduled to wrap up a very rare revival at The Classical Theatre of Harlem, Inc.
on Sunday, November 21. Catch it if you can--especially if you have a jones for gospel-funk music. (The closest musical parallel that comes to mind is the album Conjure: Music for the Texts of Ishmael Reed, featuring Reed and Taj Mahal.)

Reserve your tickets--it's playing to packed houses. If you get there by taking the A train to 145th Street and heading south, be sure to check out the view of the tower to the southwest. It looked marvelous Wednesday night under the crescent moon.

Here's a rave Village Voice review by David Finkle. And here's some trivia: Garrett Morris was in the original Broadway cast of the show.

FILMS FOR THE FALL. It's an awesome autumn at New York's Film Forum. The revival of the 1974 Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds may be long gone, but there's still time to catch Tarnation, the most impressive new film I've seen this year. (But beware if you have problems with film memoirs about very dysfunctional families.) Also playing is the newly restored version of Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One. (But beware if you have problems with long, jarring, autobiographical war movies.)

Coming up is an excellent "Essential Noir" festival. Some of my favorites are missing (where's The Big Combo?), but it's still a great opportunity to choose among 17 double features representing a world populated by tough guys, tougher gals, and screeching getaways, all captured with snappy black-and-white photography (and often conceived by top-notch writers). Some recommendations follow. (If you plan to see a lot of these movies, consider Film Forum membership.)

November 26-28
MILDRED PIERCE. James Cain's sordid soaper, featuring a devastating performance by Joan Crawford, shares a double bill with another James Cain story: DOUBLE INDEMNITY.

December 1
GUN CRAZY. Crafty B-movie director Joseph H. Lewis paired Peggy Cummins and John Dall in this still-fresh Bonnie and Clyde prototype, on the same bill as THEY LIVE BY NIGHT.

December 7-8
PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET. Samuel Fuller's crackling Cold War crime drama stars Richard Widmark, who made his debut six years earlier in KISS OF DEATH.

December 8
THE MALTESE FALCON. Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, and Sidney Greenstreet made noir history in this version of the Dashiell Hammett story, programmed with THIS GUN FOR HIRE, based on a Graham Greene story.

December 10-11
THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE. Another James Cain adaptation, paired with the stunningly shot LADY FROM SHANGHAI.

December 12-13
GILDA. Probably the best tungsten-related movie ever, it stars a radiant Rita Hayworth. Then comes Ava Gardner in the Ernest Hemingway adaptation THE KILLERS.

December 14
THE BIG SLEEP and MURDER, MY SWEET. A great Raymond Chandler double-feature. Go ahead and try to figure out who's a better Philip Marlowe: hard-boiled Bogart or former choirboy Dick Powell. (Just don't sprain your brain trying to figure out The Big Sleep!)

December 17-18
SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS and TOUCH OF EVIL. Noir hits the PR world in Sweet Smell (starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis), then travels to the Tex-Mex border for the creepy corruption drama Touch of Evil (featuring Welles, Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Marlene Dietrich, and Akim Tamiroff plus Scopitone queen Joi Lansing).

December 19-20
SHADOW OF A DOUBT and OUT OF THE PAST. Shadow is one of Alfred Hitchcock's best; Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum go chin-to-chin and chest-to-chest in Past.

Also coming to the Film Forum (on December 22) is In the Realms of the Unreal, Jessica Yu's new documentary about outsider artist Henry Darger.

On the lighter side of repertory cinema, the American Museum of the Moving Image (AMMI) in Astoria will run a Preston Sturges festival in December, screening eight great American comedies. All are worth seeing, but if you had to pick just one double feature, consider traveling to AMMI on the early winter afternoon of Sunday, December 28 to see The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story. (If you can take three movies in one day, stay for Il Posto, one of the best first-job movies ever.) If you think you'll return to AMMI several times over the coming year, membership may be advisable.

THOMAS TOONTOWN. The Voice of Thomas Pynchon voice made an impressive, expressive debut on The Simpsons last January. (Amy's Robot has excellent coverage of that epochal event.)

But wait--there's more! On November 14, the Voice returns for the opening episode of the new Simpsons season. (Fox doesn't consider last weekend's new "Treehouse of Horrors" episode to be the official opening episode.) If you want to catch it, make sure you don't get some football game instead--this is the time of year when The Simpsons is often delayed by sports coverage.

Elsewhere in Toontown, Roz Chast cartoons in The New Yorker have now referred to the publicity-shy Pynchon at least twice: once in the November 8, 2004 issue ("Thomas Pynchon's Evil Twin") and once in the December 25, 1995 issue ("Happy-Go-Lucky-Father-of-Two-Avid-Golfer-Longtime-Magnetic-Tape-Salesmen-Kiwanis-Member or Thomas Pynchon"). You can check out the cartoons at Cartoonbank.com, where one can order New Yorker cartoons on shirts, coffee mugs, greeting cards, and frameable artwork.

Besides being a cartoon figure, Pynchon is also an author of some repute. According to this German website devoted to Pynchon, 2004 Nobel Prize recipient Elfriede Jelinek recently remarked that "It's a joke that he hasn't got the Nobel Prize and I've got it." Jelinek, a translator of Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, went on to say, "I cannot get the Nobel Prize if Pynchon hasn't got it. That's against the laws of nature."

So what else is going on Pynchon-wise? The prevailing rumor on the Pynchon mailing list is that he's putting final touches on a novel having to do with mathematicians in Europe during the early twentieth century.

Meanwhile, in cyberspace, Pynchon turned up at AmIAnnoying.com. So far he has been voted Not Annoying by a 2-to-1 margin!

WHAT NEXT? Now that the election is over, leaders of both parties say that it's time to unify the country. So let's start by giving full Congressional representation to citizens of Washington, DC.

The population of the District of Columbia (about 563,000) is greater than that of Wyoming. Yet DC citizens, who pay federal taxes, have no voting representation in the national Congress, which can exert final say over much of their local legislation.

This ongoing disgrace is very well-known to politicians in the DC area, where license plates sport slogans decrying "Taxation Without Representation."

The conventional wisdom has been that Republican legislators and Republican-led states would never cede more power to heavily Democratic DC. Some whisper that racism is behind the reluctance to give representation to the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who live in the nation's capital.

But surely the Party of Lincoln would not want another day to pass without bridging the representational divide that has long separated the tax-paying citizens of Washington, DC from the rest of the country. Giving them full representation is simply the right thing to do--and now, after the latest election, the Republicans should be able to do so without reversing the balance of power in Congress.

Here's DC Vote on various solutions to the DC identity crisis--including statehood, treatment as a state in Congress, and retrocession back into Maryland. And here's a source for this entry--the website of Paul Strauss, Senator of the District of Columbia.

IT'S ELECTION DAY! I've been hearing reports about how crowded the polls are today. Don't let that keep you from voting.

Here in Manhattan, the healthy turnout is reported to be record-breaking, but the time it took me to vote this morning wasn't bad--only about 15 minutes. I'm pretty sure that was shorter than my wait to buy fruits and vegetables a couple of weeks ago. And this time no crazy person pushed ahead of me!

Really, the wait today was nothing after the four long years I've looked forward to this opportunity. I passed the minutes by chatting with a poll worker. Our conversation rambled from the game of Monopoly to gambling at Atlantic City.

When it was time for me to enter the voting booth, the poll worker advised me to begin by pulling the red lever. Instead of responding with a naughty quip, I remembered the one-armed bandits at Atlantic City casinos and joked with her about what the jackpot might be.

You can't win a jackpot from the Gotham Gazette's Voting Arcade , but the games are fun--and educational, too!

And if you are still "undecided" after all this time, Bush clearly hasn't earned your vote.